The Web Construction of European Identities among Young People: The EU Teachers’ Corner

One of the European Union’s (EU) main challenges is how to bridge the knowledge gap between institutions and citizens. By using different media, in particular, the Internet, the EU has been designing a lot of informative material addressed to laypeople in order to promote interaction to construct European identities. By browsing the EU’s website, you can find the Teachers’ Corner, a webpage that contains a wide range of teaching resources aimed at explaining the European Union’s main objectives and actions to students of different age groups. The analysis was conducted on a corpus collected from the Teachers’ Corner website, which includes different text types – booklets, comics, and brochures – targeted to both teachers and students. By following a Multimodal Discourse Analysis approach, this study aims at exploring the different discursive strategies used to develop European consciousness among the young and promote the development of a shared sense of European identity.