This summer, Mikki Maddox, an experienced high school social studies teacher at Necedah Area High School, attended the week-long 2024 Brussels-Lux Study Tour program, which is designed for American teachers to learn about the European Union–how it is organized, what it does, and how non-EU institutions work. Her trip included visits to European Union institutions and NATO.
Each summer, with funding from a U.S. Department of Education Title VI National Resource Center and a Jean Monnet EU Center of Excellence grant, the Center for European Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison supports the participation of one Wisconsin educator in the Brussels-Lux Study Tour, organized by the University of Pittsburgh.
Major themes of discussion in this year’s tour were the recent EU elections and voting in the EU, as well as the war in Ukraine and the EUs diplomatic missions in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Although Maddox had been through the Brussels airport before, she had never actually spent any time in Brussels or Luxembourg and had only a basic understanding of the EU. She knew that it was “an economic block and some of the countries shared a common currency, but as to how it operated or created and executed policy or worked with its member states, I really hadn’t a clue.”
After spending a week with other educators and staff, Maddox not only has a better understanding of how the EU works but also how the EU impacts everyday Europeans’ lives, saying of her experience,
“At the Court of Justice, we met with lawyers, judges, and translators and learned how EU legislation impacts not only the countries, but some of the people within the countries. We also met with representatives from a variety of agencies who really clarified how the states of the EU work together to form consensus on issues and how each state contributes to the whole of the EU. It was amazing to see the primary focus was to create consensus, which seems crazy considering the diversity in languages, cultures, and interests of 27 countries.”
Maddox was fortunate to have her week coincide with the end of EU elections:
“As we are coming up on an election year as well, this was a great opportunity to see the similarities and differences between our systems and be able to bring that into my classroom when students are most primed for it. It will also be a great way to widen the discussion more to systems of elections and governments and not always focus on the horse race between the candidates.”
To complete her professional development project for the study tour, Maddox developed a lesson plan related to how the countries of the EU work together to develop policies and practices to protect threatened wildlife, specifically Eurasian Cranes. She plans to pair this with a lesson on crane conservation that she is working on using resources from the International Crane Foundation. She also plans to use her experiences to provide more comparative government examples in her civics classes, especially related to the upcoming Presidential election.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for European Studies and Jean Monnet EU Center of Excellence are proud to foster transatlantic outreach activities that inspire teachers and promote a better understanding of European and international affairs. The Center for European Studies can support these activities through generous grants from the European Union Erasmus + program and the U.S. Department of Education. Educators can learn about similar opportunities to those described above by joining the European Studies K-12 outreach mailing list via europe@international.wisc.edu.