Career guidance refers to services and activities intended to assist individuals, of any age and at any point throughout their lives, to make educational, training and occupational choices and to manage their careers. Such services may be found in schools, universities and colleges, in training institutions, in public employment services, in the workplace, in the voluntary or community sector and in the private sector. The activities may take place on an individual or group basis, and may be face-to-face or at a distance (including help lines and web-based services).

Certification refers to a standardised process of formally validating knowledge, know-how, skills and/or competencies acquired by an individual or represented through a learning/service provider.

Diversity

Strictly speaking, the term diversity is simply another way of denoting ‘multiple difference’ or ‘variety’. However, it has come to acquire a socio-political connotation that specifies positive acceptance of heterogeneity, and in particular, of cultural heterogeneity. Most commonly, diversity implicates that such differences are to be accepted and respected equally, since no culture is intrinsically superior or inferior to another.

Within this framework, noticeable and identifiable differences between people, such as race, ethnicity, language, culture, religion, age, gender, socio-economic status, family status, sexual orientation, political views, disability status, etc. are considered to offer positive potential – diversity connotes the power of variety, that both exists and is to be valued and cultivated.

At European level, the notion of diversity is, on the one hand, one of the pillars of the EU for achieving the Union's strategic goals and for building a more inclusive community, and, on the other hand, central to the ideas of pluralism and multiculturalism underpinning the Council of Europe's strategy on education for democratic citizenship.

Challenges of the notion 'diversity' include the concern that it tends to reduce inequality to indifference, thus dissipating structural processes and deficits leading to and manifesting discrimination, exclusion, and marginalisation. In addition, the positive relativism inherent in the socio-political concept of diversity may raise questions about how to deal with what is not acceptable, for example certain kinds of political views or forms of cultural expression.

More information on the current discourses surrounding diversity can be found in Lentin, Alana and Titley, Gavan (Eds) (2008): The politics of diversity in Europe. Strasbourg : Council of Europe Publishing.

“Educational evaluation is a systematic and ongoing process which includes:

• Researching and collecting information, from different sources, about the learning process, the content, the methods, the context, the outcomes of an educational activity
• The organisation and analysis of that information
• The establishment of certain criteria (evaluation criteria)
• The discernment and judgement of the analysed information (according to the set evaluation criteria and at the light of the educational objectives).
• Drawing conclusions and recommendations which allow the re-orientation and eventual improvement of the educational activity”

Citizenship is traditionally perceived as a legal status, which involves certain rights and responsibilities. Usually, the status of citizen was solely granted in relation to a Nation-State. However, other forms of citizenship have recently emerged, notably at European level.

Within the European Union, the Treaty of Maastricht established the Citizenship of the Union (1993). The purpose of this new legal status was, among others, to strengthen and enhance the European identity.

According to the Treaty of Amsterdam (1997), “every person holding the nationality of a Member State shall be a citizen of the Union. Citizenship of the Union shall complement and not replace national citizenship.”

The «European Convention on Human Rights» sets forth a number of fundamental rights and freedoms (right to life, prohibition of torture, prohibition of slavery and forced labour, right to liberty and security, right to a fair trial, no punishment without law, right to respect for private and family life, freedom of thought, conscience and religion, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly and association, right to marry, right to an effective remedy, prohibition of discrimination). More rights are granted by additional protocols to the Convention. Parties undertake to secure these rights and freedoms to everyone within their jurisdiction.

The Convention also establishes an international enforcement mechanism. To ensure the observance of the engagements undertaken by the Parties, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg was set up. It deals with individual and inter-State petitions. At the request of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, the Court may also give advisory opinions concerning the interpretation of the Conventions and their protocols.

Human Rights Education

Human Rights Education refers to educational programmes and activities that focus on promoting equality in human dignity, in conjunction with other programmes such as those promoting intercultural learning, participation and empowerment of minorities"

Human rights education includes:

• Promoting awareness and understanding of human rights issues, in order that people recognise violations of human rights (learning about human rights)
• Developing the skills and abilities necessary for the defence of human rights (learning for human rights)
• Developing attitudes of respect for human rights, so that people do not willingly violate the rights of others (learning through human rights) 

Knowledge, skills and attitudes

1. Knowledge  : learning about human rights 

Key concepts such as: freedom, justice, equality, human dignity, non-discrimination, democracy, universality, rights, responsibilities, interdependence and solidarity.

• The idea that human rights provide a framework for negotiating and agreeing standards of behaviour in the family, in school, in the community, and in the wider world;
• The role of human rights and their past and future dimension in one's own life, in the life of communities, and in the lives of other people around the world.
• The distinction between civil/political and social/economic rights;
• Different ways of viewing and experiencing human rights in different societies, different groups within the same society, and the various sources of legitimacy - including religious, moral and legal sources;
• Main social changes, historical events and reasons leading to the recognition of human rights;
• Major international instruments that exist to implement the protection of human rights - such as the United Nations Declarations of Human Rights (UDHR), the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), the European Convention on the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR);
• Local, national, international bodies, non-governmental organisations, individuals working to support and protect human rights.

2. Skills : learning for human rights

• Active listening and communication: being able to listen to different points of view, to advocate one's own rights and those of other people;
• Critical thinking: finding relevant information, appraising evidence critically, being aware of preconceptions and biases, recognising forms of manipulation, and making decisions on the basis of reasoned judgement;
• The ability to work co-operatively and to address conflict positively;
• The ability to participate in and organise social groups;
• Acting to promote and safeguard human rights both locally and globally.

3. Attitudes and values  : learning through human rights

• A sense of responsibility for one's own actions, a commitment to personal development and social change;
• Curiosity, an open mind and an appreciation of diversity;
• Empathy and solidarity with others and a commitment to support those whose human rights are under threat;
• A sense of human dignity, of self-worth and of others' worth, irrespective of social, cultural, linguistic or religious differences;
• A sense of justice, the desire to work towards the ideals of freedom, equality and respect for diversity. 

REF: COMPASS, the manual on human rights education : www.coe.int/compass

Integration

Integration reconciles difference/s in the sense of a synthesis that creates a coherent entirety – ‘wholeness’. Well-achieved, integration is pleasing in that it constructs a genuine harmony – an equilibrium – between disparate elements. In everyday use, the term nowadays frequently connotes the social integration of foreigners or of persons living with disabilities on equal terms with the mainstream or majority.   Currently, European socio-political discourses on integration are focusing above all on linguistic and religious issues arising from immigration from third countries, especially (but by no means only) from world regions beyond Europe.

But what is the reference point for integration? How is it possible to ensure that everyone can make an equally valued contribution to the integrative synthesis? Will or should the synthesis be a ‘melting pot’ or a ‘mixed salad’?  Typically, those who do not ‘fit’ the mainstream or the majority have to assimilate, at least in part. This means they have to take on (some of) the values and practices of the mainstream or majority in order to be socially accepted. Depending on the circumstances, integration could become another word for assimilation. But integration is necessarily (at least) a two-way process, so minorities and majorities (whose composition shifts according to what is in the foreground) have to negotiate multiple reconciliations in order to create together a mutually pleasing synthesis. It would be difficult to argue that European societies are currently doing really well on this count, although most of them are making some sort of progress and some can reasonably claim to be well-established multi-ethnic and cosmopolitan polities.

®Minorities

Methodologies

In education and training, methodology is commonly understood to be the educational logic and philosophical rationale underlying a particular pedagogical approach. It can be used as a reference framework that enables an evaluation of whether a specific method is appropriate for given learning aims, contents and contexts. This means that methodologies are coherent sets of principles and relations that frame specific methods and their use. They ‘make sense’ of individual methods, and in so doing they provide a meta-orientation for planning training/teaching and learning processes.

Methods

In education and training, a method is a planned and (in principle) replicable activity providing a didactic framework for achieving specific learning aims in a defined time frame. In non-formal and informal learning contexts, the replication principle applies, in the main, to the capacity to reproduce the framing conditions for learning processes. Precisely how these processes take place, individually and collectively, is intentionally not subject to pre-specification (so that genuinely active and self-directed learning can take place). Learning aims are usually specified, but a range of individual and collective learning outcomes are possible and legitimate.In addition to its immediate purpose, a method also visualises and exemplifies the pedagogical philosophy, rationale and approach of an educational facilitator (trainer, teacher, …) or of an educational team working together. In non-formal education, methods usually seek congruence between values, contents and pedagogies.

In research, a method is a concrete technique for collecting or analysing information and data in a systematic way – and so ideally producing reliable and valid results. The technique may be designed for dealing with quantitative material (essentially, numbers or abstract symbols), such as questionnaires (data collection) or statistical significance tests (data analysis). Or it may be designed for dealing with qualitative material (for example in words, pictures or observational accounts), such as narrative interviews (data collection) or analytic induction (data analysis). Many kinds of information can be collected and analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively, so that different methods can be used to research the same phenomenon – but they might not all be equally useful or appropriate for doing so. Individual research methods are usually ultimately related to differing philosophical approaches to understanding and explaining the social world.

® Methodologies

Minorities

A minority group is defined on the basis of being different from a majority group. This may include minorities based on ascribed statuses such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and disability. It may also include groups with deeply held shared identities and practices, including religious or linguistic groups.

For all types of minority groups, it is typically true that the group is different in some way that is regarded as socially significant from those who hold the dominant influence in society, and on the basis of that difference the group is assigned to a subordinate or disadvantaged status.

Early approaches to minorities began from the assumption that such social groups are always smaller in number than those belonging to the mainstream or majority in a given society. By the 1970s, feminist analysis had shown that girls and women, though outnumbering boys and men in most societies of the world, share many of the social features of minority groups – not least in terms of prejudice and discrimination. Most, if not all, contemporary societies are androcentric, that is, values, beliefs, practices and institutional arrangements are predicated on the circumstances of men’s lives and on the tenets of masculinity as a set of social and cultural ideologies and practices. This in turn structures social power relations between women and men, generally to the disadvantage of the former, and tends to make such inequalities appear ‘ natural’. These insights revolutionised theoretical perspectives on majority-minority relations, so that today, the term ‘minority group’ refers to a complex set of features that together signify distinctiveness in relation to that which is perceived as ‘typical’ or ‘standard’ in a given historical time and social space.

On the whole, members of minority groups are prone to experience disadvantage of various kinds, but the attributes and life circumstances of some minorities instead lead to personal and social privilege – and in this case, such social groups are called ‘elites’.

In many policy areas, EU Member States set their own national policies rather than having an EU-wide policy laid down in law. The OMC provides a framework for co-operation between the Member States, whose national policies can thus be directed towards certain common objectives. Under this method, the Member States are evaluated by one another, with the European Commission's role limited to coordination and surveillance.
The OMC in the youth field.
The OMC is used to establish common objectives for the 4 priorities of the White Paper on Youth: “participation”, information”, “voluntary activities” and “a greater understanding and knowledge of youth”. Then the European Commission coordinates and monitors the implementation of the objectives in the Member States through the method. Consulting young people is part of the process.
Rolling Agenda.
After agreeing on common objectives in a Council Resolution, the Member states report back to the Commission on what they have done to implement them. Based on an analysis of the Member States' reports, the Commission makes proposals on how to advance the priorities further in a Communication to the Council. This leads to another Council Resolution, in which a follow up is proposed and new elements can be introduced. In the EU jargon this cycle is called the "rolling agenda".
More information about the Open Method of Coordination is available on the Youth portal of European Commission

Youth parliaments

Youth parliaments are meetings of young people taking on the roles of Members of Parliament. Such model parliaments are usually organised with the political ambition to increase young people's political participation and the educational ambition to raise awareness and increase understanding of political processes.

Furthermore, the role of youth parliaments is often described as encouragement of independent thinking and stimulation of socio-political initiative.

• National Youth Parliament – United Kingdom: http://www.ukyp.org.uk/
• International – European Youth Parliament: http://www.eypej.org/

Youth research

Youth research is a specialist area of social scientific inquiry that focuses on the life-phase ‘ youth’ in all its respects – including what counts as ‘youth’ in the first place. It has always been closely concerned with individual development, life-course analysis, cultural expression and social change – and so it is a multidisciplinary and multidimensional field of research rooted in numerous theoretical traditions, epistemological perspectives and methodological approaches. This also means that youth research is frequently viewed with incomprehension by those who are committed to a purely discipline-led scholarship. Life-course perspectives demand greater ‘lifewide’ integration and imply decidedly constructivist approaches to understanding youth as a cultural and social phenomenon.

In practice, youth research parallels other fields of social inquiry: it seeks to secure plausible truths through rigorous inquiry into accessible realities of young people, through methodical questioning of different accounts, and through systematic confrontation between different standpoints on those realities and accounts and their interpretation.

European youth research became a distinct specialist field in the early 1990s, defining itself as an intercultural and transnational coalition committed to supporting an organic (‘magic’) triangle between research, policy and practice. Both the Council of Europe and the European Commission have supported the development of this scientific community, not least through the Youth Partnership.

Adapted from Chisholm, Lynne (2006): Youth research and the youth sector in Europe: perspectives, partnerships and promise. In Milmeister & Williamson  (Eds): Dialogues and networks. Esch: Éditions Phi.

Youth welfare services

Youth welfare services are provisions designed [1] to guarantee and protect the basic and fundamental rights of young people, and (2) to assure the care and protection of young people deemed to be personally or socially at risk. By extension, youth welfare policies give special priority to bridge social and economic divisions by supporting young people from disadvantaged backgrounds to overcome the obstacles they face. In most countries, approaches of youth welfare services are meant to support and complement – not replace or (unless the rights of young people are violated) contradict – the educational and socialising function of the family and formal schooling.

All European countries have laws at national and/or federal level regulating the provision of welfare services, often providing an outline framework that local and regional authorities turn into specific measures. Child and youth welfare may be dealt with together or through distinct provisions and agencies. Today, the public sector is the mainstream service provider, but measures may be implemented by a mixture of governmental structures, quasi-governmental organisations and non-governmental associations. On the whole, services are staffed by formally qualified and salaried staff, but voluntary workers continue to make their contribution in NGO contexts.

Approaches of youth welfare services may be informing, supporting, advising, assisting, educating – but also protecting, controlling, intervening, limiting, excluding, and even patronising. Methods commonly cut across a large variety of fields, including but not limited to youth work, social work, social pedagogy, guidance, counselling, monitoring, and psychology.

[1] Vaknin, Sam: The definition of definitions http://samvak.tripod.com/define.html