engleski

School Volunteering Programmes - contemporary approach in education in Croatian high schools

One of the key challenges of schools today is to answer the question of how to better educate students for their tomorrow's role of autonomous citizens who should have civic competences for active participation in the development of a democratic society. Many authors agree that active citizenship is an ideal to strive for in the contemporary society, but at the same time they emphasise that the concept of citizenship is abstract, incomprehensible, and insignificant if it is not taught. Beside being recognised as an important instrument in solving different social challenges, volunteering is perceived to have a great potential as a platform for educating future active and social responsible citizens. Such potential is reflected in the national context as well, and the concept of education for volunteering is set up as one of the principles in the Croatian Law on Volunteering (2013, 58/07, 22/13), expecting from educational institutions to focus on the holistic growth of students. In addition, the value and benefits of youth volunteering are recognised in numerous national policy documents (Law on Volunteering, National Strategy for the Creation of an Enabling Environment for the Civil Society Development 2012-2016) through encouraging schools to integrate volunteering in school curriculum. International research studies on school volunteering (Schultz, Ainley, Fraillon, Kerr i Losito, 2010 ; Schulz, Ainley, Fraillon, Losito i Agrusti, 2016) have been continuously reporting on multiple benefits for all participants – students, schools and (local) community. However, the phenomenon of school volunteering has been neglected in the national scientific discourse and the data is scarce. This paper aims to fill this gap by presenting some of the first (preliminary) research results on studying the school volunteer programmes in national high schools. A mixed- method approach was utilised to map the appearance, the structure, learning outcomes and activities of school volunteer programmes. An online questionnaire was developed and sent to 427 Croatian high schools and 128 responses have been received. As preliminary results indicate 87 have integrated school volunteer programmes into school curriculum, the qualitative content analysis was used in the second phase to analyse learning outcomes and activities of school volunteer programmes.

school volunteer programmes, high school, active citizenship

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