Deadline: 15 March 2020
For the 2020 Evens Education Prize the foundation is looking for inspiration and new ideas to foster the motivation and abilities to think critically about social questions.
The Evens Foundation aims to contribute to rethinking and building a European reality committed to the values of diversity, freedom, responsibility, and solidarity. They see critical thinking as a social practice that stimulates (young) people to think actively and deeply about an issue at hand in order to see and understand it from different perspectives before reaching a conclusion.
Critical thinking creates dialogical and shared learning experiences that are crucial in diverse contexts. Not only does it foster better understanding of one’s own thoughts and openness to new ideas and other viewpoints, it also helps them to understand how interpretation and knowledge are socially constructed, gives voice to people or groups who have been silent or silenced, and allows them to discuss complex issues.
Categories
To counteract the fact that practice and research are often two worlds apart, the new Evens Education Prize, Critical Thinking as a Practice of Freedom, invites applications in two categories:
- Embedded practices that support critical thinking about social questions
- Scholarly but practice-oriented work that furthers their understanding of practices, pedagogies, curricula or projects that foster critical thinking, and the conditions in which education for critical thinking can thrive
Funding Information
The prize money, €25,000 per category, will be awarded by an international expert jury and the Evens Foundation.
Eligibility Criteria
- The call is open to a broad variety of practices implemented in institutional and non-institutional spaces by teachers, scholars, students, educators, youth workers, artists, civil society organizations, citizen groups etc. This includes formal, non-formal and community-based education for youth as well as adults.
- Only applicants based and operating in Europe can participate.
- Only ongoing or recent (initiated in the past two years) practices and research are eligible.
- The laureates of the prize must be willing to take part in future projects of the Evens Foundation related to the focus of the prize, in particular regarding the dissemination of the winning practice or research.
Selection Criteria for Jury Deliberations
Ideally, the practice or research:
- understands diversity in its broadest sense, emphasizing differences not only between but also within groups;
- focuses on both the motivation and the development of intellectual dispositions and abilities to think critically and on the integration of imagination and emotional growth;
- values the process of thinking and learning together;
- reflects on the different and sometimes conflicting conceptions of critical thinking held by participants from diverse backgrounds;
- takes the particularity of each context into account while at the same time working towards the sustainable development of critical thinking ability and motivation across contexts.
How to Apply
Submissions should be made in English using the application form available on the given website.
For more information, visit http://www.evensfoundation.be/prizes/critical-education/evens-prize-for-education-2020