From 3 to 7 November 2025, the DebateCiti partnership held its first transnational training meeting in Belgium, hosted by ASO Spijker in Hoogstraten. For the first time, teachers and students from all four partner countries – Belgium, Italy, Lithuania, and Slovenia – worked side by side on the core aim of the project: helping young Europeans learn to distinguish what is true, what is false, and what is not yet verifiable.

The Belgian meeting opened the training pathway of DebateCiti – Debate as an Informed Citizenship Practice, an Erasmus+ KA210-SCH project coordinated by Hubruzzo – Fondazione Industria Responsabile. The Italian delegation included teachers from the Abruzzo section of the Italian National Debate Society (SNDI) and a teacher and two students from Liceo Classico “G. D’Annunzio” in Pescara.

A laboratory of European citizenship

The meeting was not a simple sequence of technical workshops. It functioned as a laboratory of European citizenship.

Mixed groups of teachers and students from the four countries worked on a set of essential habits for democratic life:

• Reading the signals that surround any piece of news before trusting it

• Pausing before sharing information online

• Justifying decisions with transparent, accountable reasoning

A shared operational rule guided all work: at least two independent pieces of evidence, or the judgement is suspended. This was treated not as a methodological quirk, but as a basic act of public responsibility.

Alongside verification techniques, participants focused on the form of public speech: how to refute without aggression, argue in a traceable way, and separate urgency from reliability. Debate was used as a disciplined framework rather than a competition of opinions.

Learning that stays in the classroom

The Belgian experience has already produced tools that can be used directly in schools across the partnership:

• Concise worksheets on information, manipulation, and bias

• An operational glossary to help students argue with precision

• Fact-checking templates that can be adapted to different subjects

• Shared materials stored in a common online repository

The group also tested work routines that the debate clubs will now replicate: simultaneous decisions, argued minority reports, short and verifiable summaries at the end of each activity. These routines form the backbone of the upcoming DebateCiti clubs: eight students and two teacher-coaches per school in the initial phase, with the objective of doubling participation within the first year.

The civic framework: institutions, memory, daily life

Outside the classroom, the programme connected media literacy to democratic institutions and local history.

In Brussels, visits to the European Parliament and the Parlamentarium highlighted the link between information, trust, and democratic legitimacy. Debates on misinformation and polarisation gained concrete reference points in the institutional spaces where European decisions are taken.

In Hoogstraten, a guided walk through the historic centre – including the UNESCO-listed Sites of the “Colony of Benevolence” and the Beguinage – anchored the project in the memory of the place and its social experiments in community life.

Host-family accommodation turned the mobility into an exercise in everyday citizenship: shared language, different habits, and mutual respect in practice rather than just in theory.

What changes from now on

Following the Belgian meeting, the partnership has set clear commitments:

• Launch of debate clubs in each partner school

• Monthly mentoring among teacher-coaches across countries

• Quarterly online workshops to align practices and measure progress

• Design and publication of a multilingual Ebook Toolkit for schools

The Toolkit will serve as a practical manual for integrating into curricula: online research, fact-checking, argumentation and rebuttal, and the organisation of debate clubs and tournaments. Hubruzzo Foundation, as coordinating organisation, oversees the overall work plan, the project website, the dissemination strategy, and the publication of outputs on Erasmus+ platforms.

Next steps

The training pathway will continue in:

• Slovenia – focus on argumentation

• Lithuania – focus on listening and rebuttal

• Italy – focus on debate assessment and a final tournament with local stakeholders

Materials developed in Belgium will feed directly into the Toolkit module on online research and the recognition of “recirculated” content, that is, the re-use of already existing news in new, potentially misleading contexts. The goal is to give teachers a lean, replicable didactic structure that can be adapted to different subjects.

A brief synthesis

DebateCiti does not offer quick recipes. It promotes intellectual discipline, cooperation, and care for public language.

The added value of the first transnational meeting lies here: it has shown that cautious, evidence-based argument is not a luxury, but a core component of citizenship – and that schools can train it with simple, shared, and measurable tools.