Education for Responsible Democratic Citizenship

The EU is currently facing a major challenge (the Anthropocene crisis) and needs to find solutions to complex problems such as climate change, biodiversity loss, pandemics and increasing poverty and social inequalities. This scenario puts at increasing risk the EU model of pluralistic and liberal democracy, eroded over the last two decades as evidenced by the emergence of non-democratic and political extreme right-wing movements, growing mistrust in democratic institutions and scientific research, conspiracy beliefs and political disengagement. Some social groups are questioning whether liberal democracy is the best model to master current societal challenges. Education in general, and Education for Democracy (EfD) in particular, should contribute to defend, strengthen and deepen liberal democracy, which is the backbone of the European model of environmental and social sustainability and a prerequisite for a just transition to sustainable development. Democracy is the only political model that has to be learned, as citizens are the main change agents for the consolidation, strengthening and improvement of liberal democracies. EfD does not only refer to knowledge of the formal rules of the democratic political systems. Rather, it adopts a holistic and humanistic approach based on the core values of democracy and the centrality of citizens' agency. Both sophisticated design and authenticity are needed to support the development of citizens as democratic agents who can act in a meaningful and constructive way and with integrity, despite turbulences. This is why EfD focuses on competences (knowledge, skills and attitudes) to build Responsible Democratic Citizenship (RDC). DEMOCRAT will develop an EU multidisciplinary RDC Competence Framework, as a basis for establishing curricula for lifelong learning, to develop and assess knowledge, skills and attitudes for active and responsible democratic citizenship, while maintaining openness and flexibility for context-sensitive implementation in different national formal education systems and informal learning environments. The project will test curricula and learning approaches through a series of real, open, local innovative learning projects and propose a toolbox to enhance EfD in the EU. DEMOCRAT aims to strengthen liberal democracy by supporting its consolidation and sustainability through the participatory redesign and implementation of innovative and context-sensitive EfD curricula and learning methods in compulsory education, including formal and informal learning, as well as learning for teachers and social educators. This ambitious project is based on a participatory and co-creation approach. Cooperation with a wide range of actors is at the core of the project with public authorities, municipalities, schools, students, parents, teachers, social educators and NGOs. It sets up national living labs and a transnational living lab to promote exchange of experiences, mutual learning and co-development of practice within and across the national education networks.

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
International conferences

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

R+I WPs:

WP2: EfD vision & competence framework
Conceptual framework & vision
RDC Competence Framework
Establishment of national & international living labs
Agora platform (https://agora.democrat-horizon.eu/)

WP3: Education inequalities & political participation
Analysis relationship between formal education, socio-economic status & civic & political participation
Analysis European surveys
Analysis primary data: fake news & social biases in digital 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

WP5: EfD curricula in practice - design, testing and evaluation
Framework for local pilot project design, competence assessment & evaluation
Further tasks WP5 planned for 2nd period

WP6: Scaling up EfD: strategy, lessons learned and toolbox (not part of 1st period)

DEMOCRAT work (see WP2) allows to go beyond the state of the art on civic education or citizenship education. Current proposals of civic education or citizenship education are too broad and do not address democracy in an appropriate way. Citizenship education is the context in which the Education for Democracy (EfD) should be addressed in order to prevent anti-democratic tendences without taking position for a concrete partisan thought. Citizenship education has a broad focus and scope, while EfD focus on democracy as attitude and behaviour not only in formal political processes but also in everyday life. It places the citizens themselves as democratic agents at the centre of its concepts of EfD: pupils as active actors in the educational environment, but also in politics. It promotes the idea that democracy is not only a political system but a way of life as the basis of the European identity and as the foundation of the European model of sustainable society. The statistical analysis is a step forward on the relationship between democratic ideals and attitudes and political participation using the recent European data. 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. A step forward is the development of the European Curriculum based on the four key competences of responsible democratic citizenship, that we aim becomes a reference for the practice of democratic citizenship education beyond partisan ideologies.

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - DEMOCRAT (Education for Responsible Democratic Citizenship)

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