Education for Responsible Democratic Citizenship

Project Information

DEMOCRAT

Grant agreement ID: 101095106

DOI

10.3030/101095106

Project closed

EC signature date 9 December 2022

Start date 1 March 2023

End date 28 February 2026

Funded under

• Culture, creativity and inclusive society

Total cost

€ 2 951 910,00

EU contribution

€ 2 951 909,75

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITAT DE BARCELONA
Spain

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - DEMOCRAT (Education for Responsible Democratic Citizenship)

Reporting period: 2024-05-01 to 2026-02-28

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The EU democracy model is currently facing a major challenge and needs to find solutions to complex problems such as climate change, biodiversity loss, pandemics and increasing poverty and social inequalities. Education for Democracy (EfD) should contribute to defend, strengthen and deepen the European Democratic model as a prerequisite for a just transition to sustainable development.
Democracy is the only political model that needs to be learned, as citizens are the main agents of change for the consolidation, strengthening and improvement of liberal democracies. DEMOCRAT's EfD model adopts a holistic and humanistic approach, underpinned by the core values of democracy and the centrality of citizens' agency.
This ambitious project was based on a participatory and co-creation approach. It is founded on collaboration with a wide range of actors in Living Labs, including public authorities, municipalities, schools, students, parents, teachers, social educators and NGOs.
The DEMOCRAT has outlined a European Curriculum for EfD, based on the Competence Framework for Responsible Democratic Citizenship (RDC). The DEMOCRAT has also developed tools to assess the RDC competences. The prototypes of the instruments were tested in 42 pilot interventions.
DEMOCRAT has also provided new statistical insights into the relationship between formal education, socio-economic background and civic and political democratic participation at the EU level. In addition, it presents the results of an online experiment on misinformation and an analysis of gender bias using online learning tools.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Transversal WPs:

WP1: Project Management
Establishing & running management structure
Data management

WP7: Dissemination & Communication
Dissemination & Communication strategy
Building a strong network
Project website & Agora platform (https://agora.democrat-horizon.eu/)
International conferences
Defining open access strategy and preparing a open access peer reviewed publication

WP8: Ethics
Establishing Advisory/Ethic Board
Development ethics commitment & informed consents
Follow-up ethical approval procedures of partners
Updating ethics commitment following recommendation Ethics Board

R+I WPs:

WP2: EfD vision & competence framework
Conceptual framework & vision
RDC Competence Framework
Establishment of national & international Living Labs
Using the Agora platform as backbone of the Living Labs

WP3: Education inequalities & political participation
Analysis relationship between formal education, socio-economic status & civic & political participation
Analysis European surveys (European Social Survey and International Civic and Citizenship Education Study)
Analysis primary data: fake news & social biases in digital learning
Analysis Gender bias in online math learning
Comparative analysis

WP4 EfD curricula: towards responsible democratic citizenship
Analysis EfD-strategies, curricula, learning approaches & pedagogical materials
Debate EfD curricula in national & transnational living labs
Outline EfD curriculum including the competence assessment tools

WP5: EfD curricula in practice - design, testing and evaluation
Framework for local pilot project design, competence assessment & evaluation
Selection of pilot intervention
Conducting pilot intervention with novel pedagogical approaches to test the EfD-curriculum, the RDC-competence framework and the competence assessment tools
External assessment of the pilot intervention and additional external Living lab assessment
Elaboration of a Learning Unit: Learning Situation: Democracy

WP6: Scaling up EfD: strategy, lessons learned and toolbox
Defining a scaling strategy
Re-fining the EfD curriculum, the RDC competence framework and assessment tools
Collecting data and material for the toolbox
Designing and developing a tool box

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

DEMOCRAT has provided new knowledge on the domain of democratic citizenship education. Current proposals are too broad and do not adequately address democracy. For this reason, the focus of DEMOCRAT has been on democracy as an attitude and behaviour, not only in formal political processes but also in everyday life. A review of current democracy models facilitated the identification of four essential democratic competences: solidarity, participation, deliberation, critical judgement and democratic resilience.
The statistical analysis represents a significant step forward in understanding the relationship between democratic ideals and attitudes and political participation, using recent European data bases. This analysis provides highly relevant indicators for the design of EfD programmes to strengthen responsible democratic agency among young people and among all European citizens and non-citizens, with a focus on the social groups with low and medium political ideals.
The use of the participatory approach – three-year Living Labs – is an effective method of bridging the theory-practice gap. This approach, in conjunction with the 42 local interventions testing the European Curriculum, provides valuable insights into the social innovation processes in educational praxis and for methodological reflection on living labs in social innovation projects.
The collaboration with a wide range of stakeholders has enabled the development of robust and practical tools for innovative practitioners to use in order to improve EfD in primary and secondary schools. It provides teachers with the tools to assess their students' RDC competence development. The students' self-assessment tool empowered them to recognise their role as active agents in their own learning process. The collaboration with higher education institutions that provide teacher education has been instrumental in integrating innovative EfD into the teacher training curriculum.
The DEMOCRAT toolbox provides teachers and other relevant parties with data, learning materials and case studies about innovative EfD approaches. It also allows them to incorporate creative imitation in their own environment.