Discover the full list of DEMOCRACY TALKS, an initiative by EU-funded project DEMOCRAT bringing together top-notch experts to discuss democracy-related topics.

DEMOCRACY TALKS 1 – Introducing Project DEMOCRAT


VANINA:  Thank you so much, Steven. And welcome everybody. This week, we will have our very first democracy talk, and we have a special guest, Diana Trevino from EUCEN, and she will be talking to us a bit about the Democrat project, which is an education for Democracy Project with seven national teams, and that is big part of what we’re doing here. So without any more weight, I’ll turn it over to Diana to briefly introduce herself. And just before that, I wanted to introduce myself. I’m the online community coordinator who is working on the project, and I’m working through FOGGS the foundation of global governance and sustainability. So Diana, would you like to introduce yourself?

DIANA: Yeah, thank you very much, Vanina and also Stephen for this introduction. I’m Diana Trevino. I’m Project Officer of the European University Continuing Education Network, and we are also partners of the Democrat project. And I would like to introduce to you today, just briefly, the Democrat project. And I prepared some slides

And well in the beginning, before delving into the more content-related stuff, the full title of the project is Democrat education for Responsible democratic citizenship. And the project overall has a duration of 36 months. We started in March 2023, and will end in February 2026,

and the consortium consists of 10 partners and the coordinators is the University of Barcelona.

And to sum it up, the background of the Democrat project as well are the current challenges we’re facing in the EU and this is somehow a response to the threats we are facing right now, and the project is focusing on the area of education for democracy. And as we all know, threats are, for example, that there’s a strong increase of Democrat, non-democratic movements and distrust in European institutions. At the same time, we’re facing an Anthropocene crisis, digital innovation challenges, socio-economic gaps and geopolitical uncertainties, and there’s a strong need to strengthen the EU model of democratic sustainable of a democratic, sustainable society. And addressing this need to strengthen the democracy in the EU countries, the aims of the project are to Yes, to reshape education for Responsible democratic citizenship, and therefore we aim to involve education stakeholders and experts in different countries in the redesign of curricula, and therefore we use innovative teaching methods in six countries, which are represented by the universities in our world. And all tools we will develop in the project should align, of course, with the EU values, but also with the when 2030 agenda and the SDGs, and here in particular, Goal 4.7 and in relation to the outcomes of the Project, just briefly, we want to develop, or develop already, a responsible democratic citizenship framework for life and learning, and therefore integrate participatory methods and living labs in six countries. We aim to design education for democracy curriculum from the responsible democratic citizenship competence framework. We aim to develop a conceptual framework and tools for Responsible democratic citizenship, competence assessment. And all these tools will be tested via local pilot projects in six countries. And until now, what we’ve done is we have a European vision of education for democracy, we have developed the responsible

democratic citizenship framework for life and learning, the education for democracy curriculum from the framework and we are establishing.

Right now, the six national six national living labs pre-selected local pilot projects and are continuously improving the transnational and national Agoras that while should support the living labs in publishing and making public their results to the community.

So I think this is the most important about the project for now, and I’m now happy to start a conversation with you, Vanina, but also maybe with comments of the YouTube chat.

Thank you very much.

VANINA: Thank you so much. Diana, well, yeah, I think everything that we’re doing is incredibly important, and perhaps before I ask any questions, I could add in a little bit about the transnational Agora that we have on what we’re doing there, which is also quite a big part of the Democrat project. So on the transnational Agora, which actually this series is a part of, we’re trying to foster that conversation surrounding education for democracy, and we’re doing that through posting blogs from our partners themselves, also some brief interviews, and then also these democracy talks, which, in a way, will foster that conversation, first through this live stream, and then every other week after a live stream will also include some more questions that maybe we weren’t able to answer here in these talks. So yeah, but I do have some questions that I wanted to ask you, and I think perhaps this is the most important one.

I wanted to know why it’s so important to use these local pilot projects in order to test the tools that we’ve developed of Democrats, so the responsible democratic citizenship framework, for example.

DIANA: Well, I would say that the most important aspect is that by using living labs and pilots, we take care of the unique nature of educational practice in different countries. And so what we aim is to develop a broad, broader tools from a European, transnational perspective. But of course, we know that each country has a different educational context, and we cannot design something that should be used in this way in each country, because this what discrimination so to say. And the important point here is that what we will do by this, we will have different outcomes in the countries, and can thereby contextualize this in a broader sense what we developed. So, we will see common aspects that can be used in all countries, but we also will see differences and where we need, or need to provide space for adaption in the different countries.

VANINA : Yeah, I think that that’s very important. And actually in some of the conversations that I’ve had with some of the national teams, which you might also be able to find soon on the Agora, for anyone watching, I think that there are a few problems that are, you know, across all of the teams, but also they have their very specific cases that they have to address in their living labs. I think one of the, maybe not necessarily issues, but one of the challenge areas, is working with children who have different native languages from the country that they’re currently in due to their, you know, migrant background, or, you know, being from immigrant families. So

I guess my question is, what would you say are some of the current problems that we’ve seen in education systems in many of the EU countries. Maybe you know that I think is not necessarily a problem, but a challenge. And why are these curricula, the current curricula that we have, not suitable in addressing these contemporary challenges? And how can we, sort of, you know, push that in with the Democrat project?

DIANA: Well, I think this is a very complex question. And just to highlight what I think is crucial to mention is that what we know from different countries, and I can speak now only from Germany and Spain, these are the countries where I lived in, but that education models and educational curricula are very outdated, so this means that they are based on a traditional model of education and not suitable for for the challenges we’re facing, not suitable for the competences we need nowadays. And there has to be a change. And.

And also in relation to the problems we are facing, we need responsible citizens. We need critical thinking citizens. We need a sustainable mindset and in general, habitus. So this is something that is not practiced in schools. We are very subject-focused, and

we have different content we should learn, but this this more softer skills, but in the end, more important skills. We are not trained on that, and we don’t understand the importance of it, and subjects are not related to real-life context very often. And another point is, I would say that the part of experimental learning is missing a lot. So, when we speak about democratic values, we need to apply this in the way we teach and in the way we involve our students and like participating in decision-making or conflict resolution and these topics, and I think these are the biggest points mentioned,

STEVEN: got a comment in the discussion and the chat and YouTube comment says,

Believe it’s crucially important to train trainers and give them tools that they can use to integrate democracy and the importance of democracy in their day to day. Work with young people.

DIANA: Yes, of course. I think the teachers are the ones that have this, this responsibility to transmit this kind of values, and they need to learn how they can put this into practice with with this team.

STEVEN: Yeah, Alba Morris also says the democratic the Democrat competence of solidarity participation tries to cover the aspect of minorities who normally do not participate in the deliberation so that they’ll participate.

VANINA: Yeah, and I think also what Carme said about training, trainers is another part of the long term sustainability of the project. Of course, if you know, our project ends in 2026 but you want those effects to sort of last and to continue. And for these curricula, these newer curricula, and these newer ways of like education for democracy to, you know, stay on for years, and to hopefully, you know, improve current education systems in the national countries. And I’m wondering now, what other ways do you think there are that we can ensure the long term sustainability of the project outcomes that you’ve mentioned?

DIANA: I think in general, it’s often discussed the topic in relation to projects, how to commit to sustainability, and how can we assure that outcomes have a long term impact? Are What We Do or do we forget about what we develop in the end, and it’s crucial to have a very good sustainability strategy for each project, and to have included key aspects, such as, of course, all the kind of dissemination activities, to involve different stakeholders, to build synergies with other projects that work on their topic, but also to include long term impact papers, so to say, like scientific articles that will be published for academia, but also to publish policy papers that address the decision-making people that have the chance to revise legislation and everything and yes, I think these, these tools are very important in order to have long term impact, but also to build projects in a more interactive way. So in the end, what we are doing now to have a platform where we can share content, but a platform that is interactive, where we have live inside and yes and to keep this this platform updated continuously, projects, yes,

STEVEN: another comment from the chat, Shouldn’t a national push? Shouldn’t there be a national push for a more structured approach? Shouldn’t ministries of education ensure that democracy is part of the curricula?

DIANA: I totally agree with this comment. I think this should be not, not even a question, that this should be part of curriculum. And as we know from the project, there are single where examples of schools that they do democratic education, and there are schools that are already had the possibility to integrate this into public schools. But it should be important to have this accessible for everybody, and not only for selected students, but because we have to have in mind this is a personal opinion that parents that decide conscious about selecting school are already a type of profile of people. And so what do we do in the end that the privileged persons go to those kind of schools, but this should be something reachable for everybody, and therefore be embedded in the public education system.

VANINA: yeah, no, I definitely agree with that. Well, I am not sure if I have any other questions at the moment. I’m not sure, Stephen, if you may have any, or if there are any more coming up in the comments.

STEVEN: That’s all we’ve got in the comments. So far, we do have a number of viewers watching so right now they’re being quiet, though.

VANINA: Yeah, and I’m wondering if there’s anything you wanted to add Diana just generally about the project, or maybe about the progress so far of the project in different national contexts, or from your perspective as one of the partners,

DIANA: I think what is really important is now the implementation of the living labs, because this is now the real life testing in the end. And I think this will be a lot of work to contextualize the different outputs from the countries, but I think I’m very curious what is, what’s going to be the end result after that, and maybe I also would like to invite, really, to engage other persons interested in This topic, other projects that could be where we could build synergies in relation to education, for democracy, to to share this events, because we’ll have very interesting topics from experts, but also from project partners. And, yeah, I hope this will be successful.

VANINA: I completely agree. And also, you know, the same for any other projects to, you know, participate on our Agora and in our discussions that you will see very soon, we actually do have another, it seems, question or maybe just a statement.

STEVEN: Viryl says, should we should start thinking about the follow to democratic phase one. There’s a big push in changing the education system as a whole, which again, goes back to the earlier points that we were speaking about in the national pushes. I guess it sort of has to start from a national level to reach a larger, more transnational level. And okay, we have one more question, actually. So Carme is asking if you could tell us what are the immediate next steps that anyone could get involved in, and sort of how to get involved, if you want to speak about that Diana, and then I can speak a little about the Agora.

DIANA: Yes, I would say to get involved is or first of all, to join the sessions and to subscribe to the blog of the agora, because then you will get informed continuously. And if you would like to know more about the project, more in detail, you can get in touch with me, or also the coordinators. We are all very open to build synergies with others.

Yes, exactly. And then in terms of staying in touch and seeing when things are updated, I think it’s important for you to go to the Agora website, and there you can subscribe to our newsletter, where whenever anything is posted, whether it be an event or a blog. Or recorded interview with one of the project partners, you are able to, you know, see that and see the updates. And then, once we have concluded this first Democracy Talk today, next week, we will have a forum discussion where we will address, you know, all the questions I will be posting some more questions that we can sort of get into about, you know, the future of the project, and then the general future about education for democracy. As you can see, the links are shared. The first link is a link to the blogs, and then the second one is a link to the general transnational agora. In general, we have national Agoras for each of the country teams, which are just within those teams. And then we share some of that information publicly on the transnational Agora. And we also generate a lot of new information in, you know, blogs, as you can see in some video interviews. And then we also have a library with some of those, some research and some of those articles that Diana was talking about, you’ll see the listing of the events that we have coming up so the next few democracy talks. And yeah, it’s essentially your resource for everything about the project, and hopefully it will become sort of a hub for discussions about everything related to the project and related to education for democracy in general.

So please feel free to go to the website and subscribe, and you should be receiving updates. You should be able to read many of these articles, and that will inform a lot of our discussions as well, now and in the future.

DIANA: Yes, and before we end this session, I would like to also announce the upcoming presentation of Beatriz Toscano. This will be the end of May at three o’clock. And let me just commoment. A topic will be bridging the gap from concepts to competence in children’s democratic education. So I’m very sure that this will be also very interesting.

VANINA: and there’s actually an article by Beatrice, if anyone wants to read that is on our transnational Agora in the blogs. I believe that it is also on that general topic. So that could be very informative. You know, before the talk, and of course, next week, we will also be hosting a live discussion on the forum page, on the agora, where people can be informed about that.

So yeah, as Steven is showing, you can essentially go to Events page and add the calendar link to the next democracy talk. And I will also be posting a link to the discussion for next week.

Great. Well, I just want to thank both of you and then thank our audience here today for participating in our first democracy talk. It has been quite insightful and informative, and I’m glad that we were able to fully introduce the Democrat project to the public in a pretty concise way. Deanna, thank you so much for everything and for speaking with us today, Steven, thank you for all of the technical aspects.

STEVEN: and before we go, if you go to the blog page and scroll down to the bottom of the blog page, as you can see on your screen, you can subscribe to the newsletter, and that will send everything that we’re doing as we’re doing it to your email. And so, you don’t have to remember to come to the website. The website will come to you on the blogs, dot Democrat horizon.eu, website,

VANINA: yes, exactly. And maybe we will post that as a comment in the YouTube live stream as well, so that people have access to the link immediately.

But yes, it’s as soon as anything is posted, you will receive an email via the newsletter. So thanks to everyone. Thanks again, Diana, thank you again, Steven, for all of your help, and we’re looking forward to seeing hopefully, everyone that was on YouTube.

Today, and hopefully some new viewers on May 8th and next week. Also, please look out for the forum discussion, which will have questions similar to those that I spoke about, and maybe some more to keep this conversation going.

DIANA: Thanks Vanina and Steven also,

STEVEN: thanks everyone. It’s a great start to our series.

DEMOCRACY TALKS 2 – Bridging the Gap: From Concepts to Competence in Children’s Democratic Education


BEATRIZ 1: Well, thanks for having me. It really is a pleasure. If you can show the slides. There is some visuals to this talk. In one of them, I took this visual of the formula because the first thing that came to mind when preparing this talk is thinking whether there is a formula or some kind of some kind of equation to concuss democracy, and what the elements would be of that formula.

As a matter of fact, it has been the preoccupation of many theoreticians in the past that assessed what are the elements that are necessary in a society for that society to sort of to to be accomplished in in democratic terms. So the formula, as it turns, contains, if we do, we have the slides, the second slide, the formula for the for a good democracy, or for us healthy democracy, complies or comprehends three elements: control, equality and freedom.

I explain. I’ll give you some hints later on, of with regards to, you know, the precedence of these elements. But what I want to talk about is how these concepts or these factors that compound at democratic society, maybe at odds or aren’t resonant with the competences that we want to teach or that we want to instil in instil in children for them to to behave In a democratic manner. So the idea was on my side, assessing the discrepancies between the demands imposed on children regarding in terms of the learning the education for democracy, curricular demands, conceptual demands, practices that they have to learn. So the discrepancies between those learning demands and their behavioural patterns that these children are coming from as result of the paternal, parental styles that they have in their homes. I think it’s interesting to pay attention to how much the competences that we expect of those children, in terms of, you know, decision making, skills, conflict resolution, engagement, active participation, all these competencies that we were so hard working in defining them, how much these realities, these scholar realities, are at odds with the inner world And the inner experience of children as being children of parents, being the kids of parents that have specific parental styles. I’ll give you some notes of that later in the talk. So I believe I am convinced that it’s not enough for children to learn something on a more cognitive way. But things have to be learned in an emotional way. It’s not enough to interiorize those competences. To learn them. You have to lift and you have to feel them. So there, I think I presume some kind of dissonance, cognitive dissonance and disjunction between what children are told to learn, almost as imposed demands, curricular demands, and how they feel, how they feel themselves and how they treat other children.

And I think that also goes along with the idea that we are also contesting in this project that learning and, you know, learning styles, or our society, has mystified performance and output, performance and productivity. You have the example of PISA, for instance, where children are measured and scored according to, you know, continuous output performance as a result of the kind of society we live in. And in this project Democrat, we really want to subvert that and achieve, you know, attain a system of learning that is more alive and embodied, but for that system of embodied learning to succeed, I think we have to bridge the gap between the inner world, the inner emotional world of children, how they feel about themselves, and the things that they have to learn in schools.

So I want to just remind the fact that, according to the work that we were carrying about in the project of Democrat. It so happens that within the conceptual definition of the education for democracy, democracy as a learning subject was thought to be materializing in specific competences, things that children had to learn, things that had to be promoted, like I said before, decision making, engagement, active participation, conflict resolution, etc, and how those competences could be stifled or undermined by the negative responses or maladaptive responses to the different parental styles.

My observations have made me believe that no matter what efforts and resources we mobilize to teach children into practicing democracy, and children come with, I hate to use this word, but children come with their inner resistances and character logical, if you allow me, characterological deformities, product of those parental styles. I mentioned them in a minute, and we observe. I’ve been a teacher myself, but I also work in other, you know, teaching environments, the children abused children, abused children, you see, and we have bullies or children that feel, you know, that behave in certain ways, not because, of course, not because they are bad children, but people, but because they come with, you know, with wounds, with emotional wounds from their homes. So it’s very difficult to sort of compensate and teach children to do something that they are not learning on a more sort of intuitive way. But on that note, I really have to introduce the caveat that I think explains the title of this talk, that I have no formal training education. My research is in the crisis of democracy as a topic in the area of Urban Studies. And that’s why, you know, the the resources that I use in the literature that I was reading, you know, when preparing for this talk, was mostly in the area of political sciences, in that I wanted to find a correlation between that triad of elements I just mentioned, that elegant sort of shifter, dynamic shifters, control, equality and freedom that, for instance, Isaias Berlin in 1969 proposed as the main elements of a democratic society. That had to be interplay, like I said, in a sort of dynamic, shifting, sort of correlation for democracy to function properly, between these three elements and the different paternal styles.

Now onto the paternal styles and how this resonate in Isaias Berlin scheme, if you show them on screen, the paternal styles that that we have so far described, by the way, there is a very interesting study in 2022 By two scholars, some victories and Sanchez that deal precisely with the negative consequences of parental styles, and they define these are not the ones. These authors are not the only ones, of course, defining parental styles, but certainly the ones proposing the negative effects in relational situations among children, these styles are authoritarian, authoritative, permissive and uninvolved or disengaged. The authoritarian style is, you know, is deployed in a manner that communication goes in just one way. There are very slim margin for negotiations between parental figure and children. Errors are magnified or hardly punished, the negative consequence, or the maladaptive consequence of the authoritarian style is that children have very poor anger management. As a consequence of that poor anger management, they may bully other children, or on the other side, they tend to be very rebellious. And going back to esz Berlin, try it, they have very poor sense of boundaries, therefore self-regulation and control the I’m going to jump the authoritative because, as a matter of the fact, the authoritative style is the one that we want to achieve. The third style is the permissive style, where parents have a hard time encountering their own resistances, they always want to show as an angelical figure. Therefore, they’re always overtly or exaggerating warm and nurturing, and they have minimal expectations on children and plenty of freedom that are the consequence of a lack of.

Those structures or minimal expectations, those children tend to be very demanding, selfish and have imbalances in in their attempt to create order or to create their own structure. They are very dysregulated when it comes to structure. I think it’s interesting to see how the permissive parental style, the downsides of the permissive parental style, could be also creating a deformity in the, you know, the conceptualization of what freedom really means. There is no freedom without regulation. Or at least this is what we consider to be the European value, or the European, you know, definition of freedom. There are other definitions of freedom, and I think it’s also important to you know, to pay attention that we have freedom and liberty. Some people think that freedom is the absence of regulation. I want to think of freedom as something that, you know, that combines the right amount of structure and the right amount of fluidity, or of freedom. Too much structure turns a system into something rigid and, you know, stifles creativity. Too much fluidity turns the system chaotic and disregulate the system.

The fourth parental style is the so called uninvolved or disengaged, where the parent simply disregard the child. And it is as if parental figure and child exists in two different realms, or, you know, home realms, and each one the parent basically goes out of the way of the child’s activities, there is low discipline, very low communication, low nurturing and very low expectations. These children, according to the study that I just mentioned, tend to show attributes of a fake sense of self sufficiency that is totally age and appropriate impulsivity, very poor coping strategies as a consequence of, you know, the lack of a parental figure that is reflecting with the mimicking neurons and the mimicking behaviour that is reflecting the child and structuring the child. As a result, the child results into somebody with very poor coping strategies and very, you know, large difficulties in the setting of goals. I sort of saw a correlation between, you know, the the maladaptive consequences of the uninvolved parental style and children that have a very sort of, I would say, a sense of controlling and demand over other children that doesn’t come naturally from a healthy sense of boundaries, but from the need of being regulated back from other children. So they are controlling, so that they can be controlled back, as if we’re because they don’t have the inner compass to control, to regulate themselves.

The positive or the, you know, the one that we want to achieve is the so called authoritative parental style that go figure, is almost, I think this is the magic of it is almost the perfect, you know, the perfect translation of Isaia Berlin, elements that has clear guidelines that are embodied not just by the child. What is good for the what the child has to do, is also something that the parental figure also embodies and practices, where communication goes both sides, where you know, there is space for rejoining and answering, responding, making the point the parent is not afraid of being contested back by the child using appropriate language, where expectations and freedom and corrective discipline in case of error is always age appropriate and Tax appropriate, and that that, in turn, will result into a, you know, into a kind of education, that when once the child returns to school, will be a child that is well equipped in the four elements that I put in the third slide, what that will lead and feed into a proper self of a sense of self and empowerment and self-awareness on the side of the child.

So I think, in a nutshell, I think that democracy is not just something that you have to teach and the children have to learn or practice. It’s something that has to be breathed. It’s something that has to be, you know, grown from within children. And I think that if we examine the state of today’s democracies in the world, we see that we have bullies, that we have people with very poor sense of respect and boundaries, with excessive or very I don’t think.

A negatively informs of freedom that conceive freedom as a lack of, you know, regulation, etc, and that is really, you know, giving, or at least taking you back to how the, you know, democracies as children were educated and were, you know, supported.

So, like I said, I think a child intervention in the education for democracy as a conclusion may require a knowledge or some kind of assessment of the parental style that that child repeats, and that child, you know, brings back to school. So it’s just my suggestion is that this program would grow and would really take advantage of some kind of assessment of what education are children bringing from their homes?

So that’s more like it for today. Thank you very much. And Beatriz for your other slides,

I think what, what I would like to focus firstly is the aspect of emotional learning you mentioned in the beginning of your presentation, and how do you think this kind of emotional learning can be embraced.

BEATRIZ: I think there are two sides to this. I think the school has an important responsibility, and certainly has the skills and the resources to do this, because emotional learning, to my mind, comes about from filling your feels, and being able to name and conceptualize what you’re feeling. The school gives you the words, give you, gives you the concepts, and then you have to find you have to sort of bring words with feelings together, bridging these two realities of the self, and that has to be complemented by an environment at home that allows children to be allowed to feel children should be allowed to be angry if they have to be angry. Children should be allowed to feel sad if they have to feel sad so often. And I come from Spain, and I have really very much to my regret is a parental style that I have seen, you know, not back in the day. You know in the 70s, that whenever a child wanted to cry because, you know, hurt herself or whatever, no nothing happened. Nothing happened. It’s all everything is. Oh, okay. No, let the child feel how, how much okay or not okay is the wound and the hurt. Let the child, you know, vent it out, give the words, regulate the child, and then the child will come through the other side of the emotion in a sort of self relieved and self emancipated way. So I think that is a very psychological explanation I’m giving, but certainly the school has to provide enough platforms and knowledge platforms that help the child back to school to associate what happens in the emotional level, in this, in the level of self awareness and in the broader level of society.

And I have a question that I would like to take this to the end, because it’s the more general one, but maybe I’m focusing now a little bit on the parenting styles you presented.

How do you propose to evaluate the impact of parenting styles on the acquisition of democratic competencies of young students?

That’s a tough one. That’s a biggie because it’s very hard for parents that really put big efforts that are, you know, really thinking that they’re doing the best for the children to assess themselves and to reflect and to feel themselves, probably, you know, as the instigators of certain behaviors that are negative behaviors in children, we have to take them on board, certainly, and the studies that I have been reading so far make suggestions on how to assess parental styles at Homes, but it’s certainly so difficult as to tell somebody to go to a therapist, you have to be convinced that remaining the same is worse than considering some change. So how we do that? Well, I think that’s something that we can take over from our project Democrat, and certainly, I think it’s very positive the way we are organizing of living labs and project pilots, engaging parents associations. And, you know, parental figures, the realities that involve the life, the living realities of children that go between.

On the schools?

SPEAKER 2: Yes, I think this is a very crucial point that we focus on education. We always have to keep in mind that children are embedded in a broader social context and their family, and it takes one village.

BEATRIZ: Yes, yeah.Have a very big impact on them. Totally, totally, totally, yes. And also, there are also cultural differences. What comes as well educated or as a cultural value of a good education in one country might not be the same than in other country. In Spain, for instance, being engaging and upward, etc, comes as being well educated, it can be too much for other cultures. So I think it’s also very important and very much to celebrate that our schools are becoming increasingly multicultural, that children from different backgrounds and different, you know, nationalities come together so that we can really learn from each other, not to just embrace one natural culture or to achieve some kind of normality that is fictional, but to really respect that for certain cultures, touching is not correct. In Spain, we touch a lot, etc, etc. So yes, promoting and celebrating Multiculturality is certainly another aspect that I think should be reinforced.

SPEAKER 2: My next question is, what might be the teaching of democratic competences? How can they be enhanced by considering the familiar backgrounds of students?

BEATRIZ: I think this really from the top of my head. I think the teaching personal has to be sensitized in parental styles, to sort of guess back, to reconstruct what be disruptive, potentially disruptive or negative behaviour in a child can be explained by the downfalls of a parental style, and from there on, reinforce the child and really, basically to help the child learn to accept herself, to accept themselves. And that good behaviour comes from self acceptance most of the time, because we tend to extract, to project onto other people what we don’t accept in ourselves. So I think I would say that comes back to, you know, sensitizing our teaching, you know, the teaching body at school in recognizing the inner resistances of children as consequences of parental styles.

BEATRIZ: I would like to come to my last question, and this is a more critical one, what do you think? What are challenges or criticisms that might arise when we consider parenting styles in the development of democratic competencies.

BEATRIZ: Critical point I tell to my song that just as bad is a mother that doesn’t understand you than a mother that understands you too well. So we can be creating problems that are fake problems, and trying to find solutions start to problems that are not and I think the assessment of parental styles goes too much into detail that can be confusing towards you know, the construction and the structuring of the Democratic competences, sometimes the democratic competences a race. That’s, I think that’s main point in a relational setting, the parental status. Of course, you may suppose that children have siblings, so that they’re also because you also have the constellation, the group constellation, happening at home. But for the most part, the parental style has an effect on a child, on a youth, you know, dual sort of bipolar, sort of effect parent child, whereas in school, competences are learned more in a group setting, where the distances, the non-sibling distances, and the non-parental style, or the non-parental relationship that children keep with teachers certainly works in our favour. So, let’s say the parental styles are more sort of, yeah, they’re more sensitive realities schools take advantage of the distance that is created among the different pupils at school and towards the teaching figure, simply by conceiving authority as a symbolic sort of embodiment that takes place in the in the teaching environment of the classroom that is not present.

In at home, I hope that’s at home, the distance collapse somewhat, because you cannot, you cannot help not loving your parents. You are linked to your parents by connection of survival, so you are bound to love them in a way, and that puts you in a more vulnerable position. So I think that the the environment, the, you know, the educational environment of the home is more vulnerable in a way that at school.

STEVEN: We’ve got a comment from the chat. Alba Molas says the implication of parents in the schools is probably very different at the primary and the secondary level, with less implication at the secondary level?

BEATRIZ: That is a great question that I actually didn’t consider when, like I said, I don’t really have a training, but that really is a major point that I miss when you know, thinking of this topic, I don’t think that that’s good. I think that children in the primary school are taught in a more to develop more intuitive behaviours, or from an intuitive point of view, whereas the more abstract, conceptual learning comes in the secondary school match to the detriment of the emotional training of children. Certainly, I would really, I fully endorse that whatever is good at the primary level should continue in the secondary level. And that is, yeah, that’s even worse later. You know, when children go to grammar school and to higher educational system,

STEVEN: our best continues: without questioning the approach at the practical level, it seems very difficult to take into account the parental style, simply for not having knowledge about the concrete parental style.

BEATRIZ: So parental style is something that has to be present. I think precisely that’s the learning, the teaching, or at least the awareness of the parental styles and the consequences, almost as if having a therapeutical effect on families is something that has to breach the life at school and the life at home and the life in your community and the life everywhere around. Children are really abused sometimes in the neighbourhoods by, you know, other people, simply because excessive authority, and most of the time, arbitrary and authoritarian styles are used impinged upon children, just in the streets or, you know, in the public transportation so, yes, I see that as the gap bridging the different realities of of the child.

SPEAKER 2: Thank you very much. Beatriz, I think this is a very great ending of this session, because we are running out of time. But it’s, I think it’s a big, big topic to to find the balance in the end, between freedom and control a little bit how to involve the educational background and the parenting styles in the education system in the end.

BEATRIZ : one last word, if you allow excuse me that I interrupt you, I think going back from parental style, not only from the triad of healthy democracies to parental style, but all the way around from parental styles to our democracies. I think our democracies are very much in the need of therapeutical assessment and therapeutical support. Just I’m just saying.

SPEAKER 2: yes, yes, no, we all should think about this. But thank you very much, Beatrice, and I hope we can continue with this discussion in our in our blog, and I would like to end the session now.

DEMOCRACY TALKS 3 – Experiential Learning: Democratic Education Beyond Traditional Didactics


DIANA: Thank you, Steven, for introducing for opening this democracy talk, and I’m also very happy. Katerina Fauci said you joined us today and briefly to introduce myself. My name is Diana Trevino. I’m project officer at the European University Continuing Education Network, and we are partners of the Democrat project. I don’t know, Vanina, you want to introduce yourself briefly, sure.

VANINA: My name is Vanina Morrison, and I’m the online community organizer from the partners at fogs

Yes. And Katerina is from the University of Belgrade. She’s professor at the Department for of Andragogy, and she strongly contributes to adult education as a researcher, but also as an influencer on the political decision making in southeastern European countries. She’s also Secretary General of the International Council of adult education, but today we will focus and happy to listen to her about the topic of experiential learning, democratic education, beyond tradition.

I will pass over to you, Katarina, and I’m very interested in listening to you.

KATERINA: Thank you very much. And thank you for having me today with you and giving me the opportunity to share some thoughts and experiences about the topic that is not only my research topic, but also very close to my heart, and it’s based on my own experiential learning. For the last well, a few decades, I’ve been a part of various civic movements here in Serbia, and in the last 10-15 years, also globally. So what I will present a kind of a mixture of research study data, but also experiences. And let me start by sharing my screen, and you will see that I will briefly talk about, sorry, here it is about three most important aspects that I think we should talk today. But we when we talk about democracy and education for democracy, it’s been a topic for a long time. But if you would allow me to say it like that way, we have failed quite a lot, and we need to rethink our approach to democracy education. So these are a few ideas about how to rethink and what to change. So first one is about the content. Second one is about cross curricular approach, and third one is about the methods. So let’s start with the first one, with the content. So my thesis here is that we should move from this usual active citizenship, democratic citizenship, to more global citizenship, and what it means democracy at the global level. What I mean by that is that we should teach more in our teaching democracy, we should teach more about global issues, social, economic and political issues. It means also that we should include discussing the global challenges for like poverty, also in the European countries that do not have a big problem of poverty, although every country does have to a certain level, but then inequality within the countries, but also among the countries, about the things like climate change, sustainability, sustainable development and so on. But what is more important, some of those topics are included already, but what is more important is to show how the things are interconnected. So how this global world and those issues relate to each other, especially when we teach democracy in Europe. And I will give you immediate an example of what I think if you teach, for example,

climate change and poverty, or, let’s say, immigration, this is one of the topics that is usually part of this democracy, human rights,

interculturalism and so on, because of big number of immigrants in Europe in many of the European countries. So we teach about that, we teach the students, and we talk about interculturalism, openness, integration and so on. But my thesis is that we should also teach about the background of this whole movement. Why are people coming? What is going on in their countries and moreover, and that’s the critical point, what have we done to make them come? Or what have we missed to do to make them come? Meaning, what have our governments done? Or the companies, big international companies, most of them based in our own countries, in Europe or you see, and what are they doing in these other parts of the world, to destroy, for example, livelihood or environment in these countries. So people are for.

Forced to move and to emigrate and to come to our countries, so the background of the issues, or the deeper roots the causes of the issues. So not stay only on the surface and react to to what we see as a consequences, but going to the roots and causes of the phenomena. This will bring us also to these links between global goals and local actions. So okay, there are some global goals and global agendas, and we need to understand that. And I mean not only the sustainable development goals, but also all these global issues, especially inequality, this global power architecture relationship between the countries, and what can we do locally in order to contribute to change the thing that we are not satisfied with, to come back to this old old school, but still, I believe valid, like Paulo Freire and similar, changing the circumstances and changing things in the world For the better. So how can we contribute to solve these global problems? And then, of course, I mean about peace and poverty and violence, all the things that are serious threats to democracy and to the human rights. So it means also to inspire the feeling of a global responsibility of all citizens in all countries. And last, but of course, not least, teaching universal values, teaching human rights, teaching social justice, because these lacking to do this. This is the threat to the to the democracy. And democracy is not just political local political actions. It’s not just, oh, we go voting and we take care about our community. It also mean being aware of a human rights on a global scale, and social justice within the countries and among the countries. So that would be about the content my first thesis. Second one is about cross curricular approach. What does that mean? It means simply that every teacher and every subject can contribute to teaching democracy. That means that in each of the subject, or almost each, we can include some of the content relevant for democracy. Well, maybe not in mathematics or chemistry. Well, I’m not sure these are not my topics, but history, art, literature and so on. So there are many, many of the topics or sub topics in these fields that we can relate to, democracy and human rights and freedom and so on. Then further on, teachers in different subjects, they can integrate currency, event in their environment. What’s going on discussed is included as far as appropriate, but most important, they can incorporate some of the democratic principles in their classroom management or in the organizing their teaching and the educational process. There are many things that they can do they can and should use, activating method, participatory method, interactive methods here in the in my drawing, in my image, you can see this is probably something about digital skills. So people say, Well, we cannot teach democracy if we teach like Microsoft or something. Well, I would say, yes, you can teach democracy when you teach any subject, because you can use interactive methods, the way you communicate with your participant, how much you give them the voice, how much you interact with them, or how much you enable interaction among them, the atmosphere you create. Do you teach in authoritarian way or in democratic way? We know that every education is political. Let’s not be blind about that. And political in the best positive sense. It means every teaching and all aspects of the teaching, teaching styles, teaching method, communication, books and handbooks and so on, they are all based on a certain of a system of values, and they all express or reflect these values. So you have authoritarian style of teaching, no matter if it’s history or human rights or mathematics. So your participant your students, will feel that, and you will teach them either democratic style of communication or authoritarian style of communication. You can also use it to encourage them, to expose them to different perspectives, and in that way, encourage respectful dialog and, of course, critical thinking, no matter which topic, but also values like teamwork, respect, solidarity and so on. So this was my second thesis, and third one is the most important one that’s about experiential learning in a broader sense, and here I’m referring to three aspects of three levels of teaching. First one relates to the cognitive level information we are giving and we are sharing with our students. And this is very important. I mean, without.

Knowledge without information, we cannot create any opinion. It’s not really an opinion, but just some ideas. So first one is the cognitive and this is an this is the starting point. But second one is social, emotional learning. And we know people are not ready to be engaged and to try to change the things to be active if they are not emotionally moved. So it’s up to teacher trainers, facilitators, moderators, to inspire this social emotional learning, to create atmosphere where this will happen. And last but not least, embodied learning, which is especially in the digital era, not so much prominent, but I think it should be this. Mean going out, being acting, using your body, your movement, being there, participating in events, in public spaces and so on. Of course, experiential learning could be created, also in a concrete educational context. And here I’m referring to Jack mazero, but even more to Stephen Brookfield, who are showing, who were showing the examples of how you can create this kind of transformation that will trigger people, trigger their emotions and trigger also their agency. It’s about creating agency of the students and participants, and you can do it also in a in a traditional educational setting, in different methods, but additionally or Moreover, students should be also engaged in the real life situation, in events. So education shouldn’t be sitting in Ivory Tower and ignoring what’s going around, but included that into our teaching, or going out and engage in these concrete events and situations then, but not only creating and participate, not only participating and we engage, but also creating different local initiatives, community initiatives. That’s what we know under the term. Now. It’s this whole concept or ethereal public pedagogy going out. That’s why embodied learning is important. Being there occupy the public space. This is the sense, deep sense of democracy, showing people that they are citizens. They have the right to that space, urban or some other space, that’s their space, and that’s the act of democracy going out, occupying in a way, that space or using it for public purposes. It means organizing visit to public spaces or to governmental offices or go to different kind of events or exhibitions, but also organizing public discussions, public forums, taking part in different solidarity actions, different initiatives going to the margin, like groups doing something with them, organize something different type of solidarity actions, but also advocacy actions, advocating for well free education, human rights or minority rights. But it’s about going out and doing that. We have been doing it for quite a few years in different spaces. For example, at university where I’m teaching education for democracy and citizenship. That’s what I do with my student. There is no examination. It’s not like show me what you have learned by heart, which theory examination consists of the act, go out and do something or prepare a project. How what you are going to change in your environment? At our university, there are many things you’re not happy as a student, happy about at our university or in the community or with the local government, whatever. Do something, organize something, sometimes alone, but very often in a small groups, they get tasks. Of course, they choose the topic and the action, but the task is to plan this section and to show educational aspect. Basically, that’s what is in the title, called Learn democracy, beyond the traditional didactics. It’s not teaching and preaching about democracy, it’s doing democracy. The best way to learn about democracy is doing it, and that’s, of course, the basis of experiential learning.

That would be my short input. Thank you, and now I’m very open for your comments and questions.

DIANA: Thank you, Katarina, for this very well prepared and brief explanation of such a big, big, broad topic, and also the aspects you mentioned this somehow shift from citizenship education to global citizenship education, The cross curricular, the cross cultural curricula. And I think this is many of these aspects we try to include, also in the Democrat project. And I took note of some questions, and I was thinking about, what do you think? What implications do, or does it have if we.

And redefine curricula in relation to global citizenship education, as you explained it. And what would it mean for the redesign of curricula in schools, but also for the roles of teachers in schools in public?

You know, it’s redesigning curriculum and allowing teacher to shape it. It’s also an act of democracy. That’s why curricula is usually very fixed and predefined in the countries that do not have a long democratic transition, where education system is quite centralized and arranged in a more or less authoritarian way. So giving teacher a freedom to redefine curricula and to let it reflect what’s going on. I mean, in the local community, in the school, in the society, that’s an act of freedom, and in some countries, it’s almost impossible, but it’s also indicating of a level democracy. Still, I believe even in that these situations, there is some space for the teachers to do that. So I believe teacher training. And as you can see, I’m a big fan of teacher training. I believe this is the core of all our democracy teaching. So in the teacher training, I think it should be included this element or this task. How can I adapt curricula to the needs of the group and to the current setting, to the this is so called Emerging curricula. Things are happening and not curricula. Pre fixed curricula can can predict all of this. And of course, if possible, in the countries that would allow more freedom for a teacher, then I will definitely insist on including more of these global issues and things that I have mentioned, but also space to react to what’s currently going on. And just to add to this teacher training and the importance I’m giving to it, you can create a wonderful paper, amazing. You know, the best one in the world, if you don’t have a good teachers to implement it, good teachers. Well, what is a good teacher? Of course, it’s relative, but we can say in this context, teacher who are teaching in a democratic way, who are open minded, who are good in applying participatory methods, and so on, then none of the curriculum will help. On the other hand, even with the curricula, which is not perfect, and we can never have a perfect curricula, teachers who are well trained, who are sensitized for these different approaches and for these democratic methods, they will be able to adapt this curricula and to make the best out of it.

DIANA: This is more a general question. I always think also in relation to projects and also research. But this is now more related. How can we foster change? How can we what do you think? How can we engage the decision makers, the political decision makers, in order to reflect on the kind of education systems we have in many countries, and how can we engage them, to include more the global citizenship education or democratic education into the curricula. What do you think?

VANINA: And I’m also, I was wondering if I could just add on to that, because I’m wondering where you start with that in a less robust democratic system where there’s not even really room for that change. I know. I think in certain obviously EU countries, it would be a lot easier to introduce that. But then, you know, a lot of countries also looking towards a session into the EU. Where do you start with that? As well. Sorry about that. Didn’t mean to interrupt.

KATERINA: No, no, it’s okay. Well, I think we have to to be active on all levels, you know, from the micro level in the classroom up to the decision makers, parallel all the time. And of course, when it comes to decision makers, this is, well, advocacy. That’s what my organization. You can see here, my long International Council for and allocation. That’s what we do, basically, you know, advocating and making lobby among the policy makers. And just to share a bit of experience I recently had, there is, you know, high level political forum every year in July reviewing SDGs and peace, SDG 16 and peace and human rights and democracy this SDG is under the review this year. So there were plenty of the sessions already about peace and human rights and so on. Un and UNESCO, with various stakeholders and education, is very seldom mentioned, which is really disappointing. I mean.

How are we going to guarantee sustainable in a sustainable way, long term way, democracy, peace and human rights, if not through education? Of course, there are many actions, but I believe we know peace is in a changing it’s about changing mind of man and woman as it’s in the UN Charter.

STEVEN: we’ve got a comment from the chat from Carmel royal, who says, I feel Democratic groups are often too polite, and the voice of non Democratic groups shadow democratic views. Should we allow anyone to say anything, or should we be firm against certain approaches?

KATERINA: Yeah, that’s another tricky question, but let me combine with these, these two questions. So advocating policy makers is a tough task. They are very resistant. But on these events that I mentioned, they have been talking about measuring progress. How do we measure what are the indicators. And my only comment was, look around the globe. Look Europe. What’s going on with democracy in Europe, and look around globe, what’s happening with the peace? What kind of measures do you need? What kind of indicators look how the world looks like, what’s what’s going on in Europe? So let’s see how we can change it. So confronting them with a real life consequences of the current policies, including educational policy and the curricula. The other problem are those who are resistant. I mean, war is the best business, so how can we advocate for peace, democracy and human rights if there are big groups that are profiting from that? Well, another kind of advocacy is needed there. It’s not the moment to talk about it, but it’s difficult, but still, I would say very much needed, and which voices and who is loud? Well, my approach would be quite should I call it liberal, although this term is so misused today, but I will explain what I mean. I’m not for forbidding any talk or canceling, except in extreme situation. I think an open dialog is absolutely needed. And we, when I say we, I mean those who pledge and advocate for peace and democracy and human rights. We should be more loud. We should be more present. We should do more networking and more stronger advocacy and more pushing, and, you know, screaming and shouting for the values. When I say screaming and shouting, that’s what we sometimes really did in in un and UNESCO, and that’s very much needed. So not silencing everyone, but exactly the opposite. We should be more loud, work together and be loud on the local level, national level checking what our governments are doing, going to the global level checking, what’s UNESCO and UN are doing.

DIANA: I have also another comment. Well, this is something very you can enter very deep, but I think there’s always this kind of to find the balance between we’re living in a profit-oriented world on one side and on the other side we I don’t, I don’t want to say that it’s not that a combination is not possible, but it’s seems to be difficult sometimes that we have democratic values, humanistic values, and to find ways to combine both in little steps. I think this is really important.

KATERINA: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. And I believe some aspect of neoliberal democracy. Neoliberal economies are the biggest threats for the Democracy Now. Liberal economy has a capacity, really, to occupy all the spaces and to integrate different ideologies, democratic, but also very non-democratic, as long as the profit is there. So non-democratic practices are fine, so we have to fight on both fronts to use these terms. Yes, as you rightly said, this is sometimes really difficult, but we can do it even in a micro level, going to the schools, for example, not supporting, as I mentioned in my first thesis, not supporting competitiveness, but teamwork, solidarity, humanistic values. So this is not a big deal, but still, this is a kind of contribution. Of course, as a researchers, we can find this positivist paradigm, you know, measuring outcomes, performances, and going for more approaches, also methodologically, approaches that will support more humanistic paradigm, but in the classroom, with our students, in our advocacy, this is this is really slowly, but if everyone is contributing a little bit, I believe together, we can change the bigger picture, and not only change, but really transform. And I believe that’s the issue with the.

Is the word transformation is very much used, but I believe we don’t realize very often how deep it should go in order to be called transformation, not just, Oh, we did change a bit something.

DIANA: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. I think we’re running out of time. I don’t know. Vanina, do you have another question? Is there someone in the chat who wants to comment something?

VANINA: I had a slight comment that I think was kind of answered by Katarina, but I was sort of curious how we as educators can provide, you know, these learning opportunities on global issues like poverty, which, for example, in certain parts of the world are not as prevalent as in others. And I’m wondering if you know, integrating these humanistic values into that teaching is obviously a way to sort of go about, especially, I think, in issues where some people just cannot relate to what that is but yeah, that was the main thing,

KATERINA: absolutely important. And I always sit on that. I believe in Europe, we are a bit spoiled. I dare to say it’s like all the three, the difficulties we do experience and challenges we have, but compared to other parts of the world, we are and we should be aware that there are some costs of that, and there are some consequences, and bringing these issues to the classroom, to put it like this, but in a way that will be close to our students, close to their hearts, bringing information, bringing stories, going to the background of what’s going on in Africa and Middle East. So it’s not just something in the news, you know, in newspapers and the media, it does relate to us. We are connected to that, maybe not directly, but there is a connection. And we in a way, we contribute to that, but we can also oppose, and we can also make things change the things so I believe this is crucial, this global aspect, it’s really crucial, and again, the role of a teacher to do that

STEVEN: in the chat, we’ve got Georgios Kostackos asking, Is this discussion limited to education systems and initiatives in Western liberal democracies, or is there a really global element of global citizenship that would apply to all 193 plus Palestine states? Similarly, Carmen Royo says, Is democracy a compulsory part of the teaching training curricula internationally, transnationally, if not, why and how to change that? So two questions about internationalism, yes.

KATERINA: Well, I did talk very much about the global and I think it’s important the focus here, because we were talking about Europe, the focus is, what are we in Europe doing or not doing, and how is our behaviour or the lack of certain actions influencing international community? But of course, the topics, international topics and global relationships are also in the so-called Global South, very important. But then it would be also critical thinking, empowering them, also their agency. It’s not like, well, poverty, the relationship the governments and so on. We cannot change anything. As a matter of fact, there are plenty of the things that they could do. And when I teach in Africa, and I do quite a lot, these are also the issues. But of course, the needs are different. The context is different. So, the perspective is different, but there is also this international view very much.

DIANA: So, thank you. Thank you very much. Katarina, we are running out of time, but it was really a pleasure to speak to you, to listen to your opinion, to your research and to share your your insights with us.

DEMOCRACY TALKS 4 – IncludeMe+: Participation and Peacebuilding Through Mediation in Digital Media


AISHA: Thank you, Stephen for the introduction. First, let me introduce myself. I’m Aisha Kruger. I’m a Project Officer at the European University Continuing Education Network. Eusean is partner in the Democrat project, as well as in the Include me plus project, which Emmanuel will we will shortly be presenting after let me introduce you to Manuel. Emmanuel Aqua is a professor in the ABO Academy, University of Turku in Finland, and is coordinator of the Include me plus project. Emmanuel will give us a short introduction to the Include me plus project. So Emmanuel, when you want, you can start Thank you.

EMMANUEL: Thank you Stephen, and thank you Aisha for the introduction and for having me. It’s a real pleasure to be here to talk to you today about the project. In a few minutes, I’ll share my screen, but before that, whilst I do that, I wish to really thank the Finnish National Agency for and the European Commission for funding this project, which is really important and exciting for us, for us project members. Can you see my screen?

AISHA: Yeah,

EMMANUEL: I can put it in slide mode. Is is it okay like this?

STEPHEN: Yep, it’s perfect

EMMANUEL:okay? And because it’s an intellectual work, I also wish to thank our partner outside media, who took the lead in writing the proposal, and, for example, the slides that we’re sharing with you today. The nine designs were done by one other partner, momentum. So, we thank you for your work. The topic has been introduced already. So, the project is about participation and peace building through mediation and digital media, and I’ll briefly introduce to you the main aim is to actually see how digital media we can promote. We can can use non formal mediation to promote what you see there participation, peace building and inclusion. This is the end of the project. And let me put some more highlight to this. Why this project? We know that the media today is commonly accepted to be the fourth estate, or the fourth power. The media has a lot of power, as I say, in communication, and they do put out a lot of information. We feed off a lot of stuff from the media. So, it become really powerful to today in what information is put out there and what citizens feed off of this was one of the key things that we identify, which is based off of a project we that we had done. So, the idea is, if we can equip the media to be reasonable in the information they put out there, by using some of these tools, what we call non formal mediation, we go a long way to promote inclusion, participation and peace building, which is really crucial in our world today. So let me give an example being such a powerful tool today. I’m talking about the media here. They’re often seen as a two edged or a double-edged sword, right? So, it’s both negative and it has some positive aspect to it as well. For example, the media, through what they seek to achieve sensation or ratings, would put out information that really would trigger a lot of discussion, and through that, they get a lot of clicks and ratings. If that is the aim, they cannot what information they put out there. This perpetuates some stereotype. In fact, harmful stereotype can create discrimination, stigmatization, an example is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as we know, during the start of this project, we talked to some Ukrainian students who are resident currently in Finland, and they expressed some experiences about how the media have portrayed this whole invasion. Education, we do not get the picture and experience these young people had. So this is one clear example. So it can be really bad, depending on what the media decides to put out there. The positive side is that they have the real power, explicit power and capacity to be advocates. They can really advocate, and they have that platform and can use it powerfully. You also know that they can also influence political decision, so the media can choose whichever way they want to go, either positive or negative. Unfortunately, in the world today, I would argue that what we tend to see more is this sensation, and this the need for ratings and to to just put information out there which will really trigger clicking and going to read this. But human beings feed off of this information, so we aim in this project to really empower higher education institutions, precisely educators, media, civil society organizations, and, in fact, students, to become responsible and actively shaping the future of informing all information and reporting so that all together, we can contribute an inclusive, participatory and peace building within Europe, but globally, that is the goal of this project. How are we going to do that? We’ve identified three crucial web packages, or detailed action points, how to get this goal. The first one is what we call is merely research, and we’re using the participatory action research to achieve that participation, action research just means that we involve experts who have led the experience, were experienced in in the topic, in this case, media and peace building and non-formal mediation, expert people who have this knowledge and have experiences. We bring them together. We put together ideas that would promote or what they know and what works and what doesn’t work. This is basically what we are mapping out how non formal mediation can be used as an effective tool here, and we use the expert people who have experienced and know they know how to bring together this knowledge that we can then use, for example, in the second action plan, which is a training program, we are going to have an open educational resource that will be open to anyone on this planet, open access, anyone anywhere can have access to that. And by taking this training, you’ll be talked to some of how you can become a better person in terms of your reportage. How do you report? If you’re a media person, how do you report so that is more participatory, is more inclusive and reflective of the thinking that we can get it wrong, trigger conflict indirectly or directly, which are reported or really contribute to creating a peaceful and more inclusive society. Taking this course, you would learn that talking of higher education institutions, for example, at Oba Academy have a program in peace and mediation. Students can take this course as part of their studies to that they get the skill, or they accumulate the skill, of how to engage in some of these specific participation activities. And the last action point will be the Include me. Media. This will collect documented stories in the form of short videos, just like this project you’re doing here, and which will deposit on YouTube in a place where people can go to it will be a combination of good practices. Know how how to do it, so step by step, process of, how do I get it right, and how do I do it that, combined with the training program, we hope media, higher education, institutions and society at large can collect some information and knowledge base about how to promote society that aims to live coherently, peacefully and not create myths and information that really promote conflict or the ideation of conflict. This is what we aim to do in this process, and this is in a gist. Is what the project stands for, including me plus stand for we hope to do we are passionate about that, and we are looking forward to working with our partners. So some clear achievable

aims have listed here. We hope to boost participation and civic engagement, and again, by going through all of these three action points, our hope is that we would have proven through the research that participated action research, what is it that works? What do the experts say? What have they done themselves that worked or did not work. All that will be collected, put together, together with a lot of research, again, to create a training program. The training program will further educate all of us, and through that, together with this includement media, we hope that we’ll all be equipped well enough to really know that our actions matter, especially in media and how we communicate, can either really lead society on the wrong path or lead us on the right path, and that is to live peaceably happily knowing that this is achievable. It is achievable and very important. We also would raise awareness within Europe about the values and principles of unity and diversity. I do hear this a lot everywhere, that Europe is homogeneous. Historically, Europe has not been homogeneous. It’s been very diverse, and today, some of the importantness or the values of the EU is, of course, human dignity, human rights, democracy, equity and respect for others. This is diversity, and if we can all achieve this aim, the media plays a crucial role here and how they report, and the kind of narrative that they put out there to the public. Of course, an important aspect of it is to provide new methods of media, content, reason and creation, and this has come up clearly in my presentation. So how do I report? How do I write, if there is something happening here, for example, using the war in Ukraine. And I must say that one of our partners, the partners, are a Ukrainian university which speaks block to the goal to really tackle this problem of how we report the media and higher education institution, what we teach and how we teach about all of this, what is happening around us today in our society, right? So that is it. In brief, I’m happy to continue the conversation with you, and your questions are welcome, including people online. Thank you very much. Aisha, I bring it back to you.

AISHA: Thank you for the presentation. Emmanuel, it was really enlightening. As you said, the project is targeted to students. I believe they are mostly from higher education institutions. But do you think the outcomes of the including the plus project could be also useful for secondary school education?

EMMANUEL: Definitely, that’s a very good question. I’m a pedagogy teacher educator, and so we think more of higher education, that’s right. The idea is that is also how we teach who is going out, they have the most influence, right? But like I mentioned, we are working with schools and teachers in schools, and we are promoting this project and the outcome it can be used with student in fact, content and the knowledge that will put together here is not going to be very demanding in terms of understanding. We are collecting, basically what we know and simple language and what is happening in society, putting it together and sharing it. This is a point where we put knowledge together, make it accessible to society so it can be used. I would argue with school student, especially high school student, their content should be understandable at that level. And you you repeated that you take into account in this project, the Ukrainian War and its consequences. Do you in with? Include members project address other challenges to library liberal democracy, such as political polarization, right wing extremism and other challenges.

Definitely and we have expertise from the partners, not just that, and from the recent background. Of people, and this is important. We have one researcher who is looking to democracy and civic participation and and we know, including the country I’m coming from, Finland today, the political arena is charged right with this far right and the extremists and the discourse is not pleasant at all about how we talk about everything, the ideas inside citizens to really gain support by pouring out whatever we do not we want to pour out there, not thinking about the impact. So yes, this project to what we do our the target group is wide, and so this whole work package, and what we are aiming to do is to put together something that will feed into whether you’re in higher education, whether you’re a politician, local or national level, regardless of where you’re doing your work, you can get something out of this work, and it will be useful so the youth can learn from that that they can be active participant in politics, in the discourse, societal, disco and whatever is happening around them, by taking the role and acquiring knowledge about how we actually mediate conflict in our own circles by being responsible. So in media is all about being responsible here in what you write, and if you’re in a small group in the school, can we be responsible in the information, the content that we teach, and everything? So yes, we look into all of this, and we have different expertise in this project to tackle all of these aspects.

AISHA: Do you think that the the outcomes of the Include me, plus project, the educational program and the others can contribute to advance the human rights gender equality and foster up peaceful culture,

EMMANUEL : definitely, and we are excited about it because, like I said, we have done one project where we use mediation. It was called include me. This is include me too, or include me plus. So it’s a follow up on that it was such a success. This is why the consortium decided to start, did our continue and scale it up? Actually, we are excited, and as time wouldn’t permit me to really break it down. But what we are aiming to do here is to really collect, like a module, a study model with the Open Educational result, where you have, like a whole or there, if you call it so a step by step, walk through about this topic and how you can use mediation. Use it responsibility to promote inclusion, participation and civic participation and peace building. All these topics will be captured, and I’m not saying likely to be just these three topics broken into subunit. So by going through the whole program or the course, you will come up well educated, knowing what to do, of course, with databases, resources where you can go to to learn more, to enhance your practices. This will be unique in the sense that it’s not just for higher education, but if you’re a media person, there will be something for you. If you’re a politician, you would find modules and aspect content that will be useful for you. So yes, we are convinced, and we are in the process of doing the participatory action research, and the result are very revealing and very promising. So we are very confident that this project will make an impact. The output will be very useful and satisfactory to whoever would engage with it.

STEPHEN: We’ve got a question from Georgios, who’s watching online, asking whether media sensationalism due to individual journalists coverage? Is that Is it due to individual journalist coverage, or is it a matter of commercial or political goals or the media owners? And if it’s the latter, what is journalism training going to achieve?

EMMANUEL : Very interesting question. Very thank you, JoJo, for your question. I would say it’s all, or both. You outline about three, I would say it’s all you know. Why am I saying it’s all individual people do this to get promotion? You might not agree with me, but this is just like the university. We all do everything just to move on in the up in the ladder. So by being the most viewed news or the most clicked, whatever, you become popular in your work, there is a need, though, your employer will see a need to keep you This is one of the motivation to please your employer. Of. Course. So for me, it’s all of these, what are we doing about educating? Probably not the best person to answer that question, because I’m not a journalist, and I do not train journalists. I train teachers. But we have a program here, master’s program, which I work a lot with. I would say what I know is that we have to be responsible ourselves. This is why we are involved in higher education in this project. How we train journalists who and the content, we should start off there by being responsible, and if we can highlight that, we are training you to be responsible yourself, we are starting very well, and that should be the caveat here, that higher education institution, whoever trains media men, should that’s where we should start with, promoting the idea that we, since we can be sensational, we it’s, of course, part of humanity, But we have to be responsible and think about the implications for the larger society.

AISHA : Another question would be, in what ways do you think specifically the Include me plus project increases participation and the civic engagement of the target groups, or also the general public.

Thank you very much. For example, this research that we are doing, we are inviting media men, student, higher education student, high education teachers, civil society. We bring all of this group together in the room, or it can be online, like this one, where we brainstorm for several hours during sessions. What we do will have questions that will really help them to bring some around. What are the experiences? How have we tackled this in society. And remember, with all of these group media men present, or journalists present, higher education teachers, student present, the synergy will learn a lot, and this is what we are producing. We do not want here. We’ll meet this group quite a number of times, at least three times to go through this, and we are hopefully going to produce this. There is a lot of dissemination effort, and we are really doing that online, LinkedIn, Instagram, several places that we are trying to promote the outcome. And as a university, we have the ability, real ability, to make sell this as open access the OER that will produce so yes, the outreach will be big already from the previous project. We know that we hit over 20,000 visitors on our website. We hopefully will launch our website very soon, and if we start populating and with destination, we believe that we will hit a larger portion of the society. Remember, we have quite many countries in this project. So by involving at least six countries, the rich will be huge. That is our hope, and I believe is achievable.

STEPHEN : And we got another comment in from the chat, from Jan agreeing that young people must become involved as they are inheriting our complex, global problems. How else can we expand our involvement? Selecting the teachers you train is key, as they must be change agents at the same time. And how to do that. A couple of questions there, right?

EMMANUEL : Did I get to write how many questions? Sorry, Stephen, can you repeat? Is it just one question or two?

STEPHEN: It was two. First of all, how to expand, right, the involvement of young people. And second, how to train teachers as change agents.

Very good questions with the youth. This is why we include the Instagram. Aisha is very young. So thankfully we have people like here in the project that advise old and conservative guys like me, who is not sociable in terms of media at all. So, we hoped our reach. We even talk, let me mention, I don’t know you can correct me, Aisha, we we even talk about Tiktok and the fact that we’ll have these videos on YouTube. We would promote it in whatever way we believe we can get hold of the young community. They are the generation of net citizens, so we have to use that medium. People like me, we enjoy reading text, like articles and stuff, so we are not excluded. We’ll also be doing a lot of publications through other communication that like the university communication channels and even the media. We intend to reach people that way. And the last question about teacher education and media education, that is a very good question, and it’s very close to my heart, actually, that’s what I research into that we need to modify how we do that. Besides to answer your question is to modify the content and how we teach. Often, people like me who teach in university, we are glued to the content. We almost like worship the content we do exactly what the content tells us to do. Let’s remember this character has been created and they did not think of our world today. So, what we mean by modify your content or curriculum is to see that this curriculum was prepared some 20, 3050, years ago. Is it relevant today? Yes, but it doesn’t answer the questions we have today, including the invasion of Ukraine. So, if I’m a teacher, what I should do is to include these new things happening within society that are not written in the curriculum. It doesn’t take time. It’s just simple modification to reflect realities today. This is what we should do at universities, at schools, to really include students in the national discover, to be aware of what is happening in society and globally, to become global citizen and to stand for advocacy and Democrats

STEPHEN: yeah, and also comments human rights es cer play an important role in the project. Maybe as a common maybe as the common denominator for thinking of peaceful futures

EMMANUELE: exactly. I couldn’t agree with you more. And like I said, we have expertise in diverse thoughts here. So I’m just one of them. I should just one of them. We have expertise from technology to democracy and all this. That was a good comment. Thank you.

So if there is no more questions from the chat, and I would end the session here.

DEMOCRACY TALKS 5 – Glocally Transformative Project-based Learning – Transforming Teachers, Students and Communities


JANA TUVINO: Thank you very much for opening this fifth democracy talk. And my name is Jana tuvino. I’m project officer at the European University Continuing Education Network, and I’m very happy to introduce our guests, Maya Halik and Mary kaza. I think we’re still waiting for her, right?

MAYA HALIK: Yes, she is having some troubles with the internet, so she’s trying again. Hopefully she can join.

JANA: Okay, um, but I will start just introducing you a little bit and what we will speak about. So Maya is a junior researcher and PhD student from the Tallin University. And Mary kaza is a teacher and researcher who finished her PhD and in the area of Teacher, Teacher research, teaching research. And she also has developed an online tool for evaluating student engagement, and both will or Maya will see will present to us a project that makes use of project-based learning in combination with elements of education for sustainable development and Global Education. And in the end, we will then have some time to discuss about your presentation. So thank you, Maya, and I will hand over to you.

MAYA: Yes, thank you so much. So hopefully Mary can join us in a few minutes. You know, sometimes those technical issues just come at the last moment. But I am very happy to present you about project that me and Mary and another colleague started about four to five years ago. And our main question was, how can we create transformative learning experiences for young people and transformative, both in the sense of individual transformation, but also in the sense of the world around us than the communities around us. And I’m going to also share a few slides, just to have a bit more interesting background for this. What I’m going to say so just a moment. Okay, can you see, yeah, good. Okay, so we call this initiative proovikivi. It was called globally Transformative Learning Lab in the beginning, but we just wanted to have something that’s more native to our language. And the proovikiviactually means touch tone in English. And if you know touchdown is the is the rock that is used to test whether silver or gold are real, at least in Estonian that’s what it means. But it also means a challenge. We often use this word when we speak about something tough that needs to be overcome and and so we we named this proovikivi, and the logo also has this kind of line in between, which is about connection and cooperation, and it also reminds us of a heart. So it’s also about the soul or the heart of things. So that’s the that’s the background of our name and our logo. And I’m very glad, Mary, you were also able to join. We already introduced you very briefly, saying that you are a teacher, researcher and doing all sorts of great things and and so yeah, about four to five years ago, we came together, and the only reason, really was because my colleagues, Mary and Danu, believed in this. I wasn’t an active teacher, and I was all the time, told that the teachers want to listen to other teachers. So I’m very glad that they joined. And so in a nutshell, it’s an educational program that brings project-based learning to Estonian schools and helps students to contribute to their local community and more widely, to the society.

And I um and, and maybe just I mentioned earlier about transformative learning. So for four or five years ago, we were we were asking, what is transformative learning? And well, we we know now that when we develop. Develop civic competences. It’s good. It’s good to have a civic lesson. It’s good to learn the theory and to have the knowledge. But it’s not enough, and research shows that we need pedagogies that are more broadly student-centered, and that support students actively engaging and actively doing things by themselves. And we we basically ended up realizing that what we want to do is project-based learning, but I’m just going to jump over these slides and go back later, basically, we also realized that it has other elements mixed into it, like education for sustainable development and then global education and place based education. So as an educator, sometimes it’s hard to orient yourself in all these different methods that are sometimes quite similar to one another. I could add so many others to this list that that are quite similar. So we kind of stuck to calling it project-based learning. But it it has other elements and and we created this sort of visual where, where we kind of made sense of proovikivi as as a pyramid. And on the top of this pyramid we have different national and local and international goals, for example, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. And the idea of this was to show how the proovikivi challenges are connected to the goals that we all share, either locally or internationally, and and these are also connected to one another. And then the projects that the students do, they’re kind of under these challenges, or under these proovikivi and these again translate into actions which create change and which which are part of the learning experience. So this is, this is basically our theory of change. And we have a website where we have these challenges listed. And, of course, this is not an exhaustive list of challenges, but it is just to give some inspiration to the teachers and youth workers and the students participating in this sort of project-based learning and and, yeah, this is just a photo going back the memory lane. This is medica there and our other colleague, Anu. And we started with like five teachers, with sixth graders, eighth graders and 10th and 11th graders. And really, project-based learning is nothing new, but perhaps for some of the teachers, it was new in their context and in the context of their lessons. And as it happened, most of the teachers were English teachers, and yeah, so we kind of developed the model further. There’s just some steps that we developed, for example, tuning in and finding, first of all, finding the problem or challenge that one wants to work on, then the research phase, proposing solutions and so forth. And of course, emphasizing reflection, which is so important for learning. And the challenge for teachers was to figure out, how can they bring this into their subject lessons, and also whether they can collaborate with any other subject teachers. So we’ve, we’ve always encouraged sort of interdisciplinary learning and collaboration. And yeah, I’ll just show a few photos and and then I will allow Marica to share, and perhaps we have time to watch a video. I’m not sure if the sound will be good enough. We can try, um, but, but anyway, there’s just some some photos from the initial piloting, for example, here Anu, our colleague, is demonstrating the research that they did with students about their local community. Students went around, asked questions from other students and from their parents and people living in that area. And then they ended up doing statistics which was integrated with mathematics, and then having to report it then which was again into integrated with report writing in English. So lots of integration. And in the end, they were like change. To Change children, when at the beginning of the project, they were really shy. They didn’t really dare to speak with me when I was visited them, and group work didn’t come naturally for them, but at the end of the project, they were so much more confident. They were able to speak freely here in this photo, they are presenting their project at Helsinki University.And then there’s, this is the sixth graders and the 10th graders, or 11th graders, and yeah, basically, I did my master’s thesis on this, and we found that overall, we could say that the many general competencies which could be considered as competencies for democratic citizenship were developed and and they also started to think about learning in a different way. Yeah, and then we also try to scale it up with teacher innovation labs. And here Marika really had a important role in supporting the teachers. So maybe Merica, you would like to add something.

MARIKA: Well, yes, I work as a teacher and teacher trainer, so I’ve been now carrying out this project in our school for six years. As it appears so, every year in the month of February, from February to March, April, we try to involve our 10th graders in project-based learning in English classes. So they mostly do their project during their English classes. And of course, some of the things they have to do out of class as well as home assignments. And I was just looking for their feedback, and they say that they can improve, let’s say, vocabulary. So sometimes teachers ask that it’s a waste of time that students don’t learn the curriculum, but I would definitely say that actually, you can incorporate everything in the curriculum, and even more into project-based learning. So they learn vocabulary, they learn how to write reports, and then it’s not just some weird thing out of the nowhere, but they collect their own data. Because in order to understand whether this project is also meaningful to other people in the community, not only for them, they have to carry out the questionnaires. And so based on these questionnaires, they make presentations and elevator speeches to convince other people to join their team, and so they learn also how to report their findings. So we practice reported speech and other grammar and vocabulary related things. Then they have to present their elevator speeches, which improves their public speaking skills, then they have to describe their project, which then helps with their text production. And so there are so many aspects that you can use it and also, in addition to language learning, students say that they also learn, let’s say, editing skills, because quite often they make videos or add subtitles to them Record podcasts, also debating skills, because they have to discuss things. Group work becomes a very important part sharing roles so that not one or two people do everything, because they usually work in groups of four to five people, not more. And so there are lots of things they can learn as to the teachers. Maybe the most difficult thing at the beginning for teachers is to let go, because teachers want to be on in control. They want to know what’s going to happen. But with this project, we give our authority over to students. It’s their project, and during the brainstorming phase, any ideas are allowed, my students have suggested to build to install Sun…what are they? Solar panels on the roof, because the electricity bills were very high last winter, and then they have to realize that they need to narrow down the project, do something that they can do. It’s not something they say, let that be done, but they have to do it. They have to carry it out as well, find resources and within this time limit of two months. So then they realize that they need to adapt. Things and maybe showing other projects. But initially, as a teacher, you would want to tell them at once that, oh, this is not the suitable idea, but you can’t you have because you’re in brainstorming, you can’t say that this is not a good idea. So they have to realize it themselves. Then they also say that quite often it’s difficult to make sure that all the students contribute and that they can negotiate things. So we also teach group work phases. So what are they storming and norming, and yeah. So,

MAYA :yeah, it’s together. They first go through the confusion and finding the roles and Yeah.

MARIKA: And also we introduce them European sustainability goals, so they link all their projects to these global issues, but the issue in the communities up to them to this side. So our students topics vary from stress management to helping stray animals or sorting garbage or doing book exchanges or contributing or bringing their old things to school to give to the ones who need them. So all kind of different things. For example, this year, the project that our principal, and then they have to present it to their principal, school principal, and this year, the principal liked most the idea of an app where students could contribute with ideas how to improve school. So it wouldn’t be an app for complaints, but an app that students developed to collect student ideas on how to improve school life, which is a pretty nice idea in general. So yes, as for teachers, so you need to learn first how to now incorporate the project into your subject, so that you can still manage your curriculum, then also give the upper hand to your students, but keep them on track and just encourage them. I always say that for me personally, it’s the time when I’m less least busy, because the students are doing the work mostly, but they present in groups. They also write personal reports. They do reflection, so there is lots of language use in their in the process. And sometimes I remember Anu students asked, When do we learn English? And then they don’t even realize that when they are communicating in English, it is the process of learning. So these are the remarks. And so we have produced materials for teachers that help them.

MAYA : Yeah, these were some of the quotes that some students actually said about the learning. And when I interviewed, for example, Mary, as a students, they had completely forgotten that they got grades, which was very surprising, because usually they feel quite a lot of stress in school because of the grades, but in this kind of project-based learning, they even forgot that they got grades, which was very interesting and and one of the main things I wanted to find out was whether they would feel more empowered and and actually I could say that based on the Interviews, they did feel more empowered, because often they would say that I didn’t think I could really make any difference in my community, but then, because of this project, that they realized that they can actually do something. So if we want to develop active citizens who dare to try and who dare to contribute, then this sort of project-based learning, learning method is, I would say, very effective, because you don’t only include the most active students who naturally participate in the school council or in wherever, but it includes everyone who is in the class, even the so called. Weaker students academically. And therefore we think that this kind of experience is is a really good experience to have, and and not only in English lessons, but other teachers from other subjects have also done it and somehow managed so, yeah, this has been our experience, and we definitely want to continue building on it in the Democrat project. And yeah, I think I will just link the video. It’s in English that the students did on their project, and we can share with our viewers. But for now, I guess we can open up for questions and and other learnings. Yeah.

JANA:Thank you very much, Maya and also Marika. I just want to make a comment. I have technical problems, so I cannot see my screen, but I hear you, and I think you can hear me, so it should work. Well, I took note of some questions, thank you very much, first of all, for your presentation, and the first question I would have is, what kind of democratic competencies did you develop, or could you assess through the project-based learning approach in order to have more empowered students and to become globally active citizens.

MAYA: Okay, I’ll start so we did actually. We have had a couple of master’s thesis on this, and of course, there’s plenty of other research done, done by other people before us and after us. And the main competences, I would say, are related to teamwork, knowing how to solve conflicts, knowing how to communicate effectively, how to divide up roles and how to achieve what you want to achieve together

MARIKA: the project from start to end. This is something they say. Students say they would need in life,

MAYA: yeah, like to actually make a project, to actually create something. And then there are all sorts of other competencies which are related as well, and it depends a little bit on what is emphasized in the project and how the teacher guides it. But as we saw earlier, there’s the research base, for example, where they have to understand what the problem is, where does it come from, who it affects. Is it actually a real problem, what has been done to solve it? So this teaches all kinds of critical thinking and reading comprehension and and so forth. It can be very well connected to media literacy and ethics, and we have also connected it to design thinking. So the students learn how to problem solve effectively. There comes then the brainstorming and coming up with solutions. And then, how do you narrow it down? So, so they learn problem solving skills, but also taking initiative. They have to be quite courageous if they want to do something in their community, they might have to go and speak to somebody who they have never spoken with. They need to maybe make a call go to the principal. So this is very difficult

MARIKA: for students to go to a stranger and start the conversation with them. So this is really a challenge,

MAYA: yeah, but it puts them in the situation where they have to overcome this fear, and everyone has managed so far. And

MARIKA: they also develop their digital competencies a lot, because our projects usually involve also creating videos about their project and presenting it. And so there is filming and editing and all kinds of things. So loads of different skills they acquired during this,

MAYA: yes, having to present everything, managing, you know, the presentation being concise and clear. So many, many competences, many skills,

MARIKA: because before every presentation, before they write the reports, we also teach them. We watch other videos, or they learn from YouTube how to make a public speech or elevate the speech. So there is lots of learning, actually, and the learning of skills they would need in life in the future.

JANA: Okay, I don’t know if there are any questions in the chat. I cannot see my screen, so maybe Steven or someone could have a look. If not,

SPEAKER 4: I would like to ask something. If possible. Diana, I was just wondering, because I understand that this project has been developed because of the project Democrat, but I was just wondering if, because of the success and the results that you are having, if you are thinking about making it again next year or future years, and are you going to improve it in a way, in any way, or are you thinking of how to make it bigger with more people? Or what is your ideas now?

MAYA: Yeah, just to be clear, we started with it actually Marika, I think maybe already six years ago. Where does time go? Yeah, five, six years ago. But yes, we are planning to develop it further with Democrat. It actually me participating in Democrat gives us a chance to go deeper and really build on what we have already started. And we have a couple of different thoughts. First of all, we need we see that teachers need support, and we were not. I mean, we did those teacher innovation lab meetings which kind of coincided with COVID, so it made physical meetings difficult. So we mostly met in on Zoom. And we realized that every teacher moves at their own pace, and so it was a little bit difficult to pace everyone. But what we found was that we have, we actually have quite a lot of material, and we we are now in the process of putting it online into like an online learning space, and then the idea is to maybe combine it with Zoom meetings, where teachers can actually meet one another, because they said that meeting each other and hearing others ideas and Getting feedback to their own project idea was the most beneficial part, because sometimes they would get stuck, yeah, yes. They would Yeah. They need peers, so like a learning community. So that is our plan in relation to Democrat and also, because it’s not just individual projects that teachers do? We kind of want to bring them together under these proovikivi challenges. So developing further these challenges with partners and making connections to like local NGOs or companies is also our goal. It takes a lot of work. We don’t have all the resources, but we will try, step by step. But the idea is that we want to create like a sense of we are doing something together for the community and for the society, and to showcase that the children and youth can make a difference, and to also enable them to connect with other projects across schools or across regions. So that’s also one of the steps we want to take further.

SPEAKER 4: Yeah, and when America was talking and explaining the different projects that the different ideas and things that the kids were developing, and I was thinking that it actually helps them to be kind of innovative and have innovative thinking about different situations and about different opportunities. So it’s really so important, isn’t it, to be able to figure that wish of doing different things in a different way and exploring,

MARIKA: yeah, and I want to emphasize that some of the projects really go beyond the school communities and try to involve other partners. So especially when they do research on their topic. Nowadays, they go online and they get responses from over 200 responses for their service, which is really amazing, to be honest. Yeah, so 40 or 30 students working or in a group of four or five people, and they get over 200 responses. So you can see they are really doing things that they think are important to change life and and maybe the most important thing is that you sow the seed for them to think that they are the ones who need to initiate change and intervention. Excellent.

JANA: Yeah. So yes, I’m back and I can see you again. This is great. Um, I will. I would like also to ask another question. Um, what you might you have mentioned it already a little bit. From the teacher perspective, but what were some of the key challenges you faced when introducing the project-based learning approach in school settings from the teacher perspective, but also from the students perspective, because I guess, well, it’s more time consuming also this kind of but you can better answer this?

MARIKA: Yeah, I I should say that for me, maybe at the beginning, the first year, it was a bit more time consuming, as it is always with a new thing, because you have to consider carefully, how to start, where from, to get the students on board and really pass the project over to them, not to hold on to it yourself. So, this was the main challenge for the teachers, I guess, because I don’t work alone, I work with another colleague, and now that we’ve done it for five, six years, it’s not a problem. It’s not time consuming, because we developed our own tempo how much time we spend on different tasks. We have all the materials produced by proovikivi already so we can use their slides, videos, text for teachers, questionnaires for students. So different different things. And so, yes, first year, it’s difficult for a new teacher because they need to onboard themselves, but then actually it’s much easier. And nowadays we also have turned to more self-reflection by students, and also peer reflection, peer feedback, and this has reduced my workload again. Yeah, so from the students perspective, some people don’t like working in groups, and this even at university level. We also have university level groups sometimes, and they say that they are afraid of working in groups because their previous experience has been that one person has to do it for everyone, so but here they can’t do it because they also need to hand in individual assignments. So they do carry out research together, but then everyone has to write a report. They so they are genuinely involved in it. They can’t rely on anybody else, but they can help each other, because designing the questionnaire is a difficult thing. They have never done it before. So we first teach them what kind of questions to ask, how to format it, so we give, put, provide lots of input first, so they are supported. It’s not that go and do a questionnaire. No, we really teach and we have all the material available for teachers so they don’t have to invent it. And we even have teachers who go to schools to help teachers explain how to carry out the nice, small research project, or how to compile a questionnaire. Then how to interpret the data is another thing they learn to do, how to write a report, what it consists of. So all those things come together, but younger students sometimes it’s working together and listening to each other. So this is the huge learning point for students. Other than that, they have sometimes said that it might be too time consuming, because you see, some people want to excel, and they take a really, really big challenge. They don’t have to do that much, but then they want to do it, they get excited themselves, and then they might overdo it and put too much effort into it. So as a teacher, you also have to keep an eye on that that they don’t stress out because of the project.

JANA: Okay, thank you. Um, I would have a last question for both of you, Maya and America, America, um, in what ways do you believe that the project-based learning, um, contributes to the development of competencies that are crucial for democratic societies.

Well, as we mentioned that the different competencies already, I believe it helps us to become better citizens, because we can learn how to communicate, we can learn how to work together on problems, how to solve them and and I would say also, once I spoke to a student, and they said that even though their project didn’t succeed, exactly how they thought it would, um. And they said they gained a new kind of respect for anyone who is trying to do something in the society, because they realized how hard it is to change things. And you don’t know until you try yourself, it is easy to stay behind the screen and criticize and put nasty comments, but when you actually try to do things yourself, you realize the complexities and how much effort it takes. So I believe this sort of project-based learning, where students can can contribute to their community or the society, really teaches them what it means to be an active member and to take responsibility.

MARIKA: Maybe another thing is that, at least in Estonia, students are pretty good at theory, but not in practice. So this is another thing we want to improve. And to be honest, my tense formats have not always even heard about those European Sustainable Development Goals, and this is the first time they now can relate them to practical issues and understand what they are all about. Other than that, they are just theoretical constructs and not meaningful for the young.

MAYA: Yeah, and maybe, if I can add one last thing, because project, project-based learning as a method is it’s so like versatile. It allows different teachers to adapt it to their own subject, but it also allows to explore democracy in different ways, though, I would say that it really the context of the project is really important and how it is being framed, and we mentioned this kind of tuning in and the reflection part. So I would say it’s so important to take time to reflect and to also reflect on the said democratic skills and democratic society, because if we don’t bring students attention to these things, they might miss the learning, and that has happened many times before. So we I really want to emphasize how important it is to help the students to make those connections through reflection. And that’s all okay.

Thank you very much.

JANA: I think I, I must say, I personally totally agree with the learning approach, and I think this should be somehow implemented more commonly in public schools. But I don’t know if we have any further questions, maybe from from the chat. No. So then I am Yes, so I can just say thank you very much both to both of you for for giving us this insight.

DEMOCRACY TALKS 6 – COVIDEA the Covid Education Alliance


DIANA: So I would like to open this session now, and I’m very happy that we have today our zoom participants and also our YouTube audience. And today, this is our sixth democracy talk. And let me introduce myself. I’m Diana Trevino, Project Officer at UConn. And here in the session, we also have Democrat partners participating. And of course, our guest speaker, who is Georgios Kostakis, I’m very happy that you joined us today, and today we will listen about COVIDEA, the COVIDEA Education Alliance. And Georgios as together with Valle van der the executive team of the COVIDEA Education Alliance, and he’s also director of the foundation of our global governance and sustainability. So Georgis, I send you a very warm welcome, and I’m happy that you joined us today, and I would like to pass over to you. Maybe you want to introduce yourself just briefly, and then you can start with your presentation. Thank you very much.

GEORGIOS: Thank you very much, Diana for the invitation. It’s it’s really a pleasure to be here with colleagues and friends who care about these issues of education and citizenship and all that. And yeah, I have the honour to present also on behalf of verle van de ver the colleague from the UN we both have a un United Nations background. We did things in New York and verle also in Nairobi. She did with UNEP and UNDP, the UN Environment Program and development program. I worked with the political affairs department of the UN and the Office of the Secretary General, and we worked a lot on the sustainable development goals in the 2000s and the beginning of the 2000 and 10s to also the Paris Agreement. So we had in mind of these targets for the international community regarding the environment, society, the economy and the governance, how we can improve the conditions of life for everybody. So we are proud to have been part of this process that led to the sustainable development goals and the Paris Agreement, etc. What we saw in all this is, of course, the importance of learning and of bringing young world citizens to this so that they can really benefit from the new reality that’s emerging from the digital transition, the green transition, all these things that the world is facing, the challenges, but also the opportunities created through our response to those challenges. And COVIDEA was born from the foundation for global sustainability that I represent, and of which Vera is also a member. And here P 40 team, that was an organization that she had before during the COVID years, we felt that, you see, the transition now is forced on us, the digital transition. Are we ready to use it, especially for educating the younger generation. And is it that the proper way are we focusing on the right things, the priorities? And that’s how COVIDEA was born, during the COVID years, that’s why it’s a bunch of COVIDEA. And we have thought of changing the name, because it’s not a pleasant name, perhaps, but I’ll tell you more. May I start my presentation now?

DIANA Yes, please.

GEORGIOS: Great. So I’m going to share this and let me know if you can see it.

DIANA: Yes, we can see it. Great.

GEORGIOS: So you see also the name of early and the platform for transformative technologies, P, 40, T and folks, the two organizations that joined forces to create COVIDEA. COVIDEA was built on, as I said before, the understanding that during COVID, we saw that if 150 year old education system in the West, at least, we have the same way of teaching and organizing schools, etc, for more than a century, and it’s not geared towards the market economy or these transitions that we face, and we have to make opportunities out of them for the younger people in particular, so And for everybody, because we need retraining, upskilling and all that for also and lifelong learning for everybody with we see, therefore, that we need to change our way of teaching and learning, and how we do that ourselves as learners, and how the system, the education. System does it for everybody, lifelong learning. Learning is very important. And we started by saying, who are the main stakeholders in this? How can we really influence the system? By really talking to the right people? And we saw that we have, of course, the persons who are the students, the pupils of the right of course, the teachers educate them. The education ministries decide on the curriculum, often at a national or regional level or local level. Then we have education organizations like UNESCO and other establishments, professional associations of the teachers, of parents, of course, also have a saying these employers what they need for their workforce. All these people and organizations should come together to redefine the ways and means of doing education, would you sit on the left and the outcomes on the right? And for us, the important thing was to redefine even the purpose of education. Why do we want to educate people? Okay, building knowledge is always important, but in the past, it has been done like accumulating knowledge for people to become like encyclopedias. But can they build character out of this meaning? Can they understand who they are, and how can they be productive citizens and happy citizens themselves with agency to influence their environment. How can we build judgment in people? Can they tell between fake news and Real News? Can they tell when somebody is trying to see them online or in in person? That’s very important too, especially nowadays, with all the rumors and everything that is circulating around through social media, et cetera. Can we build resilience in people? Because there are shocks one after the other. There is climate change, there was the COVID 19 pandemic, there are financial crisis. Can people really see what is the essence of their living and where they can build these redundancies or the capacities of networks of contacts for their own psychological resilience, economic resilience, survival, even in terms of supply chain. So basic material, like it was for COVID, the protective material, and of course, always food and energy and all those things. And finally, how can we build social awareness and responsible citizenship in people so that they feel that they’re part of the community and they get engaged and they engage others. This for us, is the new purpose of education, which goes beyond building knowledge, which was in the past, the basic purpose of education, lifelong learning is really also very important for work, society and self-improvement. It’s not like we finished school 12 years or 15 years if we go to university 16 and that’s it. We have to learn all the time because things change every day, almost okay. So, we now see that we have new tools and pedagogies to do this, and we have to see how we can do it by changing the curriculum, the content of the studies. By changing the delivery tools, we can use virtual reality, augmented reality, gaming, Games for Learning and good purposes, not only for wasting time, sorry, learning support, also through AI can be good, it can be bad. The artificial intelligence, we can discuss assessment and verification. You can get micro credits doing a course online, which will strengthen your credentials for professional reasons. And, of course, how you can also manage education online, how you can really do courses online. And all those things, all these can be now are being transformed by the digital transition, but it’s good to be aware and improve them systematically. And the COVIDEA approach, of course, is connected to digital with purpose. It’s another initiative that both Verla and myself participate in a big site is coming up in Cascais in Portugal next week. Digital purpose brings together the ICT sector, the information communication technology companies who work which work on education, either making programs or. Services or equipment, and we try to encourage them to have in mind the sustainable development goals where they produce their things, meaning, if they produce a game, not to be just to spend time, but also to leave behind something positive about society, the economy, the environment, and we coordinate with the organizers of digital with purpose and this summit that’s coming up to encourage and give incentives to private sector partners to come on board for this effort to rethink education and repurpose education for the digital era, among the projects that we are pursuing with COVIDEA is to develop national roadmaps for transition into digital education. We are trying to see which countries are interested to align also their education with the SDGs, to build on the UN SDG road mapping program, which is something very much involved in, and we cooperate with UN agencies and other partners to see how these things can be done. We also thought of this COVIDEA agora as a meeting place, place where the stakeholders that I presented to you earlier meet to think about the education and the elements of education and the tools to improve education and civic engagement. So, we thought that this agora is a platform online, and you can see it more here, like it has a cafe in the middle where people come together to see their peers. Students can meet students, but they can also meet professors and others. It’s something in the making, and I’m glad that the Democrat project has taken up part of this concept of the Agora to create its own Democrat agora, which is along similar lines, bringing the stakeholders together for the Agora of COVIDEA. We had, we have a gateway here on the left. Then you get a colour. Your avatar gets a colour according to your group, if you are a parent, if you are a student, if you are a teacher, then you come to the cafe and find your peers. You can find people from other groups, and you can discuss issues and exchange ideas about good practices, ask questions and consult on the right, this library right the curated material on how to build resilience, how to build citizenship, how you can teach those things, but also you can do AI searches on these things and other things. You can have a digital which is where you can see videos on the use of various technologies. How can you use artificial intelligence, or let’s say virtual reality to teach something. And you can also play games in the game in Ali down here, again, games for good, games with a purpose. You can go to Company showrooms, where you can see what this company or the other here is developed in terms of products. And then you can also go to the stakeholder offices, and you can have the students again, having their offices, virtual offices there, the teachers, the parents, et cetera. So this was about it an overview, and we’re glad that the Democrat has taken on through the participation, also FOGGS in its partnership, some of the elements of COVIDEA. Thank you.

DIANA: Thank you Georgios very much for this presentation and to show what COVIDEA is doing, and I think it’s a really challenging topic also, how to promote digital technologies in a way that they are used in the right way, and that they are used for, for making things better in relation, for example, to develop democratic or humanistic competencies in students, but also in teachers. And I have some questions now for you, but I also would like to invite our zoom participants, but also the YouTube audience, to join in our dialog. Now, if you have comments or questions you would like to address to Georgios, I maybe start with my my first question, and what do you think Georgios is from, from your expertise and your point of view, what are the key challenges, but also opportunities in aligning policy makers goals with innovative educational practices?

GEORGIOS: Thank you, Diana, this is a crucial. Question, indeed, policymakers at the political, purely political level, and of course, at the Education Ministry, more, let’s say administrative level, of course, are set in their ways. They want to please their audiences, which can be voters, can be teachers, can be parents, so it is a challenge to really persuade them so they’re pushed, though they’re pushed from many directions, like for COVIDEA, they had to switch to digital teaching, right? Digital Learning, because if there was no other way, otherwise, the pandemic would spread even worse with the kids in schools. So they had to do it. Of course, they are also pressured by companies who want to sell their products, and they are pressured by the market and the economy who want people with certain skills which cannot be the classical things that we did in the past. So it is always a struggle. It is an understanding that there is resistance, and the speed is not as, let’s say, high as we would have liked, but and then all of this. And one good thing about the policy makers is that they have to think of stakeholders, because they are their various constituencies. So they may not move very fast, but once they really see that there is a mood in the right direction, they will do it eventually, if they get the right signals. And I think eventually they will do it and they are getting the signals I was talking today to somebody from Cisco, the company, you know, the big company. And she was telling me about the an agreement that they reached with the European Union, the European Commission and the Department of Commerce. I think of the US to do online training courses for people to get used to, AI and other things, free online courses, and those will be somehow they will you will get credits, and they’ll be recognized. That’s a big issue, right about the official systems withhold the credentials. They tell you, Oh, you did this online, but if you don’t go through certain steps, you won’t get a degree. It cannot be recognized, you cannot get a job, or you cannot work for the public sector. Now, these things are becoming a bit more flexible, right? We don’t want it to be completely flexible, perhaps because then whoever can claim that they did an online course and they know everything, and then they go and make a mess in the workplace. So there has to be a method of accreditation, but it may not be what we know always the exams the Certain Way, in schools, etc. So there is more opening, but I think there is hope there, but it is a challenge still combine the two. Thank you.

DIANA: Okay, thank you, Georgios. I don’t know. Do you have any further questions in our zoom? If not, I have more questions. I would like to focus now more, a little bit on the contribution COVIDEA data has on developing humanistic and democratic values and my question is, how can technologies like virtual reality and also artificial intelligence or gaming you mentioned, improve democratic education in Schools? Maybe you can give some examples or ideas if

GEORGIOS: yes, of course. That brings us closer to the Democrat project, of course, and its goals. And that’s fair enough. You can from virtual reality, for example, we had, we have a colleague on the COVIDEA broader group, who is from Finland. And in Finland, they do a lot of for forward looking studies, what would be the needs in 2030, years of the society and of education and all that. And but the he also likes to go back, for example, if you want to go back to the Athenian democracy and feel like you are together with Pericles and you talk about this, or you have the Peloponnesian War and the Spartans. I’m one of them. I come from Sparta. So, you can really feel history, and you can see their mistakes or lessons learned in a more experiential way, through artificial sorry, through virtual reality, than you would if you just read a history book. And there, you can really, perhaps learn better the mistakes about the mistakes of history and try not to repeat them or be aware of the problems. Another thing with artificial intelligence, of course, is indeed can use in more than one ways. It can. Replace research and the work of students, and they can just ask the machine to write their essays, or they can also get more research than broader sources and then compare and help it, help themselves, build their understanding, bringing together elements that they would not be able to find themselves, for example, right? So, they can cross check their own research and thinking with other broader things that the artificial intelligence can put together. There are good and bad ways of using technology always, and I think for education, for for democracy in particular, this active citizenship is very, very important for us too, because even gaming now, gaming games are often now collective. You’re not playing on your own, but you connect with others, and you create an online community of gamers, and then you play together, that is also an exercise in responsible citizenship. Of digital citizenship is almost as important now, because in the past, people thought I would go to the internet and Facebook, and we can put whatever we want, and we can be build another persona. But now, I mean, you have at least to have the same moral codes of not misbehaving in by abusing others or whatever, also in the digital realm, and that is something we have to be trained for. And that also increases, I think, the responsible democratic citizenship of people at all levels, not only for their country, but for the world, because these groups can be cross border groups, young people connect cross borders for some of these games.

DIANA: Thank you for giving the examples.

This is now. Now I’m coming to maybe more the critical questions, what do you think? What do you know? Does COVIDEA data also undertake steps to ensure that technology, technologies such as digital tools and artificial intelligence, that there is protection of privacy and of freedom of individuals, is there also a related work you focus on?

GEORGIOS : Yes, I have to say we’re not as developed in the sense of interventions. But of course, we were more like a niche project to conceptualize what needs to be done. And of course, privacy is a concern, and we have our primer, which is you can find it on the FOGGS website, if you saw my last slide, FOGGS.org if you go to COVIDEA, there is one of our projects. You can see in the primer how we approach things. And of course, especially for children, their privacy is very important, and schools and others try to protect it, and that is expanding to the digital realm, although it’s not as well organized there yet. So we do promote it, but we don’t have specific tools yet. But when we work with others, like digital with purpose, for example, and we work with companies there, and we try to create ways of ranking them and their products if they are according to standards of the SDGs, and also they respect the personality of the person and of the kid. We use also the UN Convention for the Rights of the Child, for example. And we have the colleagues from parents International, who are also members of COVIDEA data and of the Democratic project. And they insist a lot of the Rights of the Child, which goes beyond just privacy, is how you treat kids and how you reward and how you approach them.

DIANA: In general, judges, we have now a question in the chat from Karsten. He wrote, The big problem of all online activities is that the internet is dominated by economic interest, digital capitalism, which make it difficult to just segment to see how democratic and humanistic principles can be transmitted broadly.

GEORGIOS: Now I understand this question. Of course, the whole market economy, whether it’s digital or not, is based on profit. And for us at FOGGS, we want also to change the the narrative of globalization, to make it more human-centered and well-being centered, rather than profit-centered or power-centered. And that is a big struggle, and goes beyond the digital. But of course, it’s manifested in the digital realm too. That’s why we have to build the judgment and other elements of citizenship so that people can react and they have agency, which I think is a big thing for the Democrat project too, to feel empowered the learners, the young people, but even the older ones that we understand how the system works, not in all technical detail, but at least they can tell who’s trying to cheat them, who’s trying only to make money out of them. They all want to have a job, and there has to be an economy that works. But the purpose of the economy is really, yeah, it can be a better life for all humans like for the STDs, we say nobody left behind, no one left behind. Or it can be like the system mostly works now, a few individuals get super rich, also using the digital platforms that they create, or they pay to create, and then the others are left behind. That is a struggle that we have to continue and do with all means. And our democracies in the west at least, had that element in Europe of a social economy that put people at the center of it. I have a sense sometimes that we’re losing it, but we have to fight for it, otherwise nobody guarantees us our rights. Right?

DIANA:Yes,absolutely. Karsten’s comment is continuing. He says, we know from historical experience that at the beginning of the internet, there was a hype, thinking that Internet will contribute to deepen democracy, but this never happened, so we need to be very sceptical.

He’s right again. Because, yeah, of course we said we thought that the Internet would make instant decision making by everybody, almost. But that is also, I believe that is a false a false perception, or an idealistic but wrong approach that people have to decide all the time on everything altogether, and that is not possible, but also even not desirable. Not everybody is interested in everything all the time. Many people just want to have a secure environment within which to to live and to be consulted on consulting on questions that they care about, but we don’t all care about everything, and we cannot be all up to date with everything. So I mean this techno idealism created also techno disappointment, and we have to be aware of that in the next stages of digital evolution, we cannot expect everybody to be at the same level of interest and engagement and all these things. But at least, we should not break up too much in fragmented pockets where people talk only to people who care about the same things. That’s a danger, because you can create a group on one of those social media platforms and then talk to each other and reinforce sometimes wrong wrong ideas, right? So there has to be a way. We’re all. We all come together as communities, physically and digitally, but also at the same time, other partial engagement for our interest. I mean, I don’t expect everybody to like science fiction like me and talk about it, but if there is a group I would like to join, and you join me too if you like it. So anyway, we have to find the balance between the individual and the collective, and that’s always an issue. And also for digital means, I think, yeah, sorry,

DIANA: this is very good. And I would like to ask you maybe my last question, and this is you can answer this also personally, because I wonder sometimes if there shouldn’t be also a kind of recommendation or limitation in the use of digital technology, especially in school settings, because I am not a researcher in this field, but I can guess that there might be also a loss of competencies through an overuse of digital tools,

GEORGIOS: you’re absolutely right. And what we said in COVIDEA, what we have is resilience is very important. Because I see that for kids, if they lose the connection to the Internet, for example, or their parents or their own cell phones don’t work, they don’t know anything or they are lost. It’s good to do exercises of, let’s say internet free days, and see how you can think for yourself, multiply for yourself, and, you know, book for yourself and all these things. Resilience is very important, because if something goes down the Data Centers. Is get fried by solar radiation for some reason, etc, we will return to the stone age, because we will have forgotten all the in between stages of development. So, it is important for resilience to limit, of course, our dependence, or to have alternative ways that we test regularly of function in a society and individuals without so much reliance. Digital is a tool. Again, the ultimate purpose is to have individuals who are happy and interact happily with each other in peaceful societies, right? And you can develop, I mean, learn more, develop your skills play music or write whatever, do whatever you want, or create machines if you like, but yeah, not to be dependent on any one technology or any one supply chain. And I think that sometimes we ignore at our period, because we will see if something goes wrong, and it will inevitably go wrong at some point, like we saw for COVID Again, when trade stopped, or because or all protective equipment, like masks, were made only in a few countries. Then when those countries closed the borders, everybody else was lost. They didn’t know what to do or where vaccines are made if there isn’t in its content, the vaccines factories that can make those vaccines, you cannot rely on one of the factors in the US and one Europe to make vaccines for the whole world. So, resilience, including in the digital sphere, is very important. Has to be tested and practiced. And for that, the kids cannot be dependent on that. But of course, try to restrict your kids. I see my nephew from playing all the time and doing this. We have to make non digital things also interesting, again, like nature and then right talking about things, not only watching things on screens. It’s a challenge. I would say,

DIANA: thank you very much, Georgios. Well, I have no more questions to you, but maybe you in zoom, have any questions you would like to address to GEORGIOS in YouTube, also or not,

SPEAKER 3 thank you George for a great presentation and very inspiring talk on the way, how you approach education, especially in the context of citizenship and civic responsibilities. And we know that it is not only about resilience, but also about agency. And I wonder what that you could also talk how you approach within your project, the agency, especially of students, how you can use the tools you produce to increase the agency of students?

GEORGIOS: Yes, indeed, and it’s big for Democrat and speak for us in COVIDEA agency by bringing students together and making them work even online, about common interests, it’s also about influence that area of the common interest, for example, if it is about an artistic thing, or if it is about doing philanthropic things, or about, yeah, even playing together or including other kids that are Not the same the same social class or nationality, if you have these mixed groups, all these things are kinds of agency, but also creating leadership. And that is another big thing, because you need leaders at all levels, and that, I think we have to develop more meaning that people have to not to be afraid, to tell their opinion, and to be able us to stop, for example, the development of a vicious cycle of violence. That is something we’re working on with other projects too. There is an approach to violence that says that it is it spreads like a disease, like a pandemic, when people get infected by violence, infect others, because they create a tension in the society, and that really can be generalized into local conflicts or even a bigger war we want to create to enable people to feel that when they see Some people are sick with violence, that they can raise their voice in the right way, they can cool things down. And that’s a kind of agency. Also, we want people to feel comfortable to deploy that kind of agency. Another area, as I said before, is these groups of mixed people from around the world, digital citizens coming together to play games, but also to see compare in my country. This happens this way, the other way. Let me bring good practices here. Let me do that if you go to the cafe, if we make that agora, and partly it’s part of the Agora of Democrat so there are ways. But I think we need to work more of that, the agency and leadership. Yeah, thanks Marta.

CARME: that is always the venture to normalize things that shouldn’t be normalized, I suppose Georgia, because we get used to absolutely anything that is given to us, and unfortunately, there are so many bad examples that are around us that then when something is not that bad, we think, Well, we are not that bad because it could be worse. But that is not the the objective that we should be aiming to achieve, I suppose,

GEORGIOS: yes, of course, you’re right. And sometimes we have to go back to basics and think, as I said before, what are, what is the purpose of all this, that do we get really well being out of this? Or what do we get a society that is harmoniously working within itself and with the environment? We have to ask that question. And some people, I’m going back to events in Greece, which is my tradition, partly which Socrates was saying that he was like a fly on the body of Athens. Athens was like a cow, which tended to get sleepy if left alone. But he was like a fly or, you know, like a wasp, or something like biting the cow to wake it up and realize that, Oh, my God, if I continue to sleep, yeah, the society won’t work anymore, something like that we need. And I think the Democrat project or COVIDEA initiative, some individuals, also, we play that role. I’m trying to play it, even if it’s not popular, to remind people, in a good way, that there is something more to it than not what we’re used to.

DIANA: I agree, yeah. Thank you very much, Georgios. And offer also for you, Marta and Carme, for joining our conversation, I think this is a good moment to to end the session if we don’t have more comments now, I just can say thank you very much, judges, I think this was a very, very inspiring session, also to rethink how we use digital tools and what are the benefits, and how maybe that we must somehow use digital tools and use them in the right way. In the end, because we live in a world that is changing. Before I am close the session, I also would like to announce our next democracy talk. This will be on the 17th of July, and we will be listening to the University of the topic will be announced soon. And so thank you for all your participation, and especially to you judges for joining today.

GEORGIOS : Thank you for the invitation for your company and discussion together. Thank you.

DEMOCRACY TALKS 7 – Gender Inequalities: a Challenge for Inclusive Democracy


VANINA: Hello everyone, and thank you for joining us for our seventh democracy talk. My name is Vanina Morrison, I know last week we had Diana Tredino hosting from UK. This week I’ll be hosting. I’m part of the FOGGS team here at Democrat, and I’m the online community organizer for the agora. And you know, without further ado, I want to introduce our special guest for today. And our guest is Paulina Sekuwa, and she is from Jagiellonian University. She’s a professor there, and she will be talking about gender inequalities and how that is a challenge for an inclusive democracy. So I will go ahead and turn over to Paulina, she can introduce herself and then start her presentation. Thank you, Paulina, and welcome thank you

PAULINA: Vanina. Very much. Thank you Good Good afternoon to everyone. I’m very pleased to be with you today. Indeed, I’m part of the Jagiellonian University team of the Democrat project. And I’m a sociologist working at the Institute of Sociology and also at the Chair of the epidemiology and preventive medicine at the Medical College in the Jagiellonian University. But I will be talking today as as a representative of the Institute of Sociology, where, not only in the Democrat project, but also for a couple of years, taking part in in projects that deal with gender equality in mainly in research, research institutions, but also lately, in the in the energy transition. I will also speak a little bit about about this. So, without further ado, let me share my presentation. Yes, do you see the full screen or the presenter mode? Because I’m a bit confused again.

VANINA: No worries, it’s on presenter mode right now. I believe if you

PAULINA: I need to change again. Yes,

it’s hidden here. Okay, I have to get there. How about now?

PAULINA: Now it’s perfect.

VANINA: Thanks. Okay, okay, that’s great. So we changed again. Okay, so the topic of gender inequalities is very broad. So for today’s talk, I just choose a few, a few threads I would like to share with you, and I would like to very briefly discuss the interrelations between democracy and gender equality and gender inequalities also then move to the to gender in politics, because women’s participation in political Decision making is a indicator which very often is used as a as element assessed when the level of democracy is assessed. So within the complex democracy indices, sometimes gender in politics is taken into consideration. Then I will move to the to the concept of multi dimensionality of gender equality. So we will move beyond the political sphere to other spheres of social life. Then, very briefly, I will talk about current state of counteract counteracting gender inequality, or gender inequalities. And then, as I signaled before, I will for a moment, talked about one case study or one area of of inequalities and interventions, which is gender equality in energy transition. Okay, so gender equality, excuse me, and gender equality is a crucial feature of democratic societies, and this has been recognized by both international organizations and also in individual countries which have provisions in their constitutions and special legislations concerning gender equality and. I included here two citations. The first comes from the Beijing Declaration and Platform of action adopted at the word conference of women, organized by the United Nations in 1995 the second one, it comes from the current EU gender equality strategy, both documents acknowledge very strict interrelation between well-functioning democracy and gender equality and gender equality in a variety of aspects of social and political life. However, as I mentioned before, very often, this gender equality is reduced to one indicator, which is participation in political life. So, for that reason, now I would, I would like to speak a little bit about this. And they, there are no countries that formally discriminate. Between men and women regarding the right to vote and the majority of countries grand women the right to run election.

Yeah, but although the proportions of women in decision making positions systematically rises they I mean, women are still heavily underrepresented in those positions. Very few women make it to their country’s highest political office, to the chief executive, either the post of the head of the government or the head of the state in 2023 there was around 10 countries were run by by women as for legislative power. Globally, women currently constitute around 25% of the members of national parliaments. As you can see in the table, there are discrepancies with Nordic countries having the highest levels of women’s participation, in fact, reaching gender balance as far as this indicator is concerned. And also, there is a dosing of countries which have balanced gender representation in ministerial positions. So while this descriptive, I mean numerical representation of women in politics is slowly rising, there is still a big concern, or there are still disputes whether how this descriptive representation translates into what we call substantive representation. It refers to the impact of women in decision making positions on policy formulation and implementation. So the substantive representation asks whether issues raised by women are given the priority in the country or in the legislative process. And evidence is mixed so far, and there is still a strong voice that both politics and policies are biased, gender biased towards on or in favor of of men. But as we know, besides the political arena, there are other aspects that are important from the gender equality point of view, and those aspects also determine access to politics. So now I would like to move to this multi dimensional model of gender equality and share with you one measure which is which is used to assess the gender equality throughout a few different domains, yes and yeah this, this is one of the examples of such complex measures of gender equality. The one is gender equality index, calculated each year by the European Institute for Gender Equality at and it includes six different core domains, work, money, knowledge, time and also power and health. They are on next slide. I will be talking about them in a minute, and the core domains form the basis of the calculations of the scores between one and 100 both for the European Union. Here you can see a scores for the European Union and for individual member states, and as. Score of 100 would mean that the country had reached full equality between women and men. I don’t have to probably mention that EU average masks considerable variations between between member states. We don’t have time to discuss them, but I encourage you to explore the index, to look for the differences between different countries or regions within European Union. So going through domains, domain by domain, if we look at the at work domain, we still see gender inequalities in the workforce, and especially gender segregation in the labor market. It has been demonstrated that women continue to occupy jobs in sectors with lower remunerations level fewer career prospects and fewer options for upskilling. And as far as money is concerned, there are still large gender disparities in gross monthly earnings. As for the level of European Union women’s Earnings account to less than 70% of men’s earning going to knowledge from on one side, in most countries, women constitute the majority of students and graduates in tertiary education, but at the same time, there is gender segregation, which is considerable, with over representation of women In education, health and welfare and also humanities and arts and under representation of them in so called STEM disciplines. As far as time is concerned, there is still an enduring gender gap in time devoted to housework and also gender inequalities in social activities. I’m struggling with my mouse. Okay, the domain of power refers here, not only to political representation, but also, as you can see, leadership positions in economic and social life, including research funding organizations or publicly owned broadcasting organizations. And similarly, as in on the level of political power, there are big discrepancies, gender discrepancies. And finally, health, well, the domain of health scores the best the highest, so it stops the Gender Equality Index, at least for the for the last 2023 there is also an aim within the European Institute for Gender Equality to capture additionally gender based violence. However, the authors signal that data continues to be scarce and lacks comparability, comparability within the European Union, so we still have to wait for comparable data. This is this is this is future for for for this index, and also what is important is that the gender equality index allows for an intersectional analysis, so for capturing how gender is manifested when combined With other characteristics, such as age, disability, socio economic background, family situation and so on and so forth. So it is also possible to analyze the complexity of gender inequalities with with intersectional lens.

Okay, so as as we can see, the gender inequalities or and gender discrepancies remain in various domains, quite considerable. So the efforts to efforts continues to counteract gender inequalities. I also already signaled in at the beginning, the UN Agenda for Sustainable Development, with one of the Sustainable Development Goals, referring directly to gender equality, remains the we can say words roadmap for tackling inequalities, but also other international organizations and national executives adopt some legislation and policies aiming at fostering gender equality, also on various levels, both international, regional, national and organizational. So there are different measures and initiatives implemented to tackle gender inequalities in their different layers. And those measures on our initiatives include gender quotas, for example, gender quotas on electoral lists. Gender mainstreaming, which very briefly speaking, refers to integrating a gender perspective to the content of the different policies and also addressing the issue of representation of women and men in the given policy area. Then gender budgeting, which is incorporating a gender perspective at all levels of the budgetary process, within organizations or on national level or European level, and gender equality plans so strategic frameworks or documents which aim at structural and cultural change within an organization. And here we can, we can mention that there is an intensification of of adopting gender equality plans in the European research area within European Union. After, like two years ago, European Union introduced a Jep eligibility criterion for Horizon Europe. It means that all public bodies, research organizations and higher education institutions from member states and also from associated countries, if want to apply for funding from Horizon Europe program, have to have a gender equality plan. And finally, going to one of the area or case study, gender equality in energy transition, there is growing consensus that both climate change and the energy transition itself. So the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources gives unequal gender effects and also aggravates pre existing gender inequalities. So there is much evidence that women are underrepresented in the energy workforce, both in the conventional and renewable energy sectors, in research concerning energy and in energy related decision making. This means that women have less of a voice in shaping the green transition, which has impact on our lives, and due to pre existing gender gaps in the labor market, women are also less likely than men to be able to take advantage of the newly emerging jobs, because they are there is big potential in this new renewable energy sector, with new jobs to be to be taken. And also women are particularly affected by energy poverty, as they tend to have lower incomes due to both the gender gap we were talking before and the gender pension gap, which also in many countries, is quite huge. And finally, as primary home caretakers in most cultures, or in many cultures, women and also, girls are most impacted by household air pollution caused by cooking with inefficient and helpful harmful fuels, only those every this evidence shows that without well planned interventions, these low carbon energy systems that are emerging may not be any fairer, any more inclusive, or any more just that the conventional systems that they are supposed to displace, and one of the responses to this problem Is this horizon Europe, Project Genesis, which aims at better understanding of gender power relations and gender inequalities in energy transition, and also at demonstrating how to advance more women To participate in and influence the processes and outcomes of energy transition to integrate gender perspective into implementation of, for example, Sustainable Development Goals, especially the goal number seven, which is clean and affordable energy, which for. Now has no gender targets or gender indicators and in general, to show how applying gender lens to knowledge on energy transition can help achieve equitable, fair and just energy transition outcomes. The project just started one year ago, so we still have much to do. But the the analysis of existing, existing literature has been done so far, so we have also some some results from this analysis. But if you are interested, we can re turn to this during the discussion. Thank you very much for your attention, and I’m looking forward forward for your questions or comments.

VANINA: Yeah. Thank you so much. Paulina, that was incredibly enlightening, but also quite difficult to hear. Also as a woman, I know that women are also actually more at risk of climate change, so it’s not exactly the first world we live in where women can also make a difference in the energy transition due to inequalities that have already existed in our society for a while. You spoke a lot about many different aspects of gender inequality. And I mean, I have a few questions for you, and I’m sure others might as well, but I was wondering if I could probably start with one of my questions, and then if anyone on Zoom, or anyone in the on the YouTube stream has any questions YouTube, you can write them in the chat and zoom you can unmute and ask Paulina yourself. But before that, I guess so. In the beginning, you mentioned that Nordic countries are a bit more balanced in terms of their representation, and I guess in a way, in terms of substantive participation. And would you say that that is correlated to early education? And can you say that schools can help to promote this gender equality and substantive participation in politics and in democratic and political processes by encouraging this from an early age, and could you talk about any successful programs or policies that you know of?

PAULINA: Yes, it’s a very complex question and answer. I’m not sure if I’m an expert in this, but yeah, we, we all probably know that one of the underlying factors of gender inequalities are gender stereotypes or gender biases. For example, The World Values Survey and gender social norms index, which is based on the results of this survey, reveals that still many both men and women hold very fundamental biases against women along the different dimensions. For example, they believe that men make better political leaders than women, or that men make better business executives that than women do, or then that a child or a family suffers when a woman starts or continues her career. So from this point of view, I do believe that education may be a powerful tool that that can help break down or just challenge gender stereotypes that exist and create more inclusive environments, and through this, empower women and girls to reach their full full potentials, for example, gender responsive teaching and learning. So teaching that uses gender sensitive language and images, teaching that does not reproduce gender stereotypes, both in the methods, textbooks and curricula, might be a powerful tool. It has been found that portraying women only in traditional roles as only as caregivers, for example, can really undermine girls aspirations for leadership positions or careers which are traditionally dominated by men. And politics is one of of these areas with traditional men domination. So it is also important to focus on teacher teachers, pedagogical practices, which also is shaped by their assumptions and stereotypes about about gender. So. So this, this makes me think that education is and should be, a very, very powerful tool for for changing the situation. I’m not an expert in in Nordic countries. I not sure which aspects were most effective in in the changing the situation in those countries, but I do believe that that education is an important aspect also, also what education can do is providing role models for both men and boys and women. Girls in textbooks as women, teachers invited guests, some mentors who can be included in the in the educational processes. So, yeah, education is is really important. But this is also if we go beyond education. We also know from the political science literature that gender quotas work. If we we are talking about political participation of women, this gender quotas should be obligatory, and with some some rooms when non compliance is taking place, but in the countries where they are well designed, political scientists show evidence that it helps to increase at least descriptive, descriptive representation of women in politics.

VANINA: Thank you so much that that definitely helps a lot, and it’s good to hear that education can make a difference. Hopefully more and more policies are introduced to include sort of that gendered education in early childhood. Fabian, actually, you had a question in the chat. You can, if you don’t mind, you can unmute and ask Paulina directly. Yes.

FABIAN: Thank you. Thank you very much for the interesting presentation or the data. I was wondering if, beyond this binary construction of gender, are there any further information? Probably the numbers in total are too small, but I just if there’s some information about, let’s say trans people, or whatever, in regard to representation or inequality, that would be great.

PAULINA: Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Yes, this is very important, and we more and more look into into this aspect. But as far as I’m concerned, and as far as I know, no public data include this, this element that the trans transgender people within their statistics. We start doing this within our organizational practice when we construct surveys, for example, within our university, we did a big survey on working conditions and gender equality, and we use a question when a person did not have to choose between only two options, yeah, thank you.

VANINA: Thanks. Fabian, is there anyone else on zoom that has a question?

SPEAKER 4: Yes, Vanina and pradina. Thank you very much for your presentation, and you spoke a lot about, in the end, also about that we don’t have enough women in the area of green transition, so to say. And this is very often also revealed in the topic of digital transition, that we don’t have enough women represented, or that there is this strong imbalance between women and men, and so if I understand it right, and maybe you can answer it, do you think it’s necessary to include an education for Democracy also this kind of gender sensitiveness as a First step to become more inclusive, because education and primary education is one of the first areas where we can have influence on a broader perspective in order to have inclusive career paths for women and men and also transgender people.

PAULINA: Yes. Yeah. Thank. You for this question, yes, I’m sure that we should incorporate the theme of gender inequalities, both historical and current, into our discussion, because what I think it’s it’s happening now, at least in the Polish context, which I know best, we are trying to close our eyes and and pretend that everything is okay and all are equal and we are not even supposed to touch any any difficult topics and gender inequalities or ethnic inequalities, the status of minority groups are totally absent, at least in our education, which now More and more is challenged by those problems with the influx of people, the refugees from Ukraine, for example, yes, our our school classes are becoming more and more diverse, and we cannot omit the topics of inequalities. Yeah, yeah, and I think that sorry, that if we talk about this openly, when we talk also about both about gender equality and unhealthy relationships, the education system can help to reduce the risk of gender based violence. I I wasn’t speaking about this much because we don’t have data evidence on this, strong evidence, quantitative evidence, but more and more analysis show that this is a big barrier to both political participation of women, but also to the participation in other spheres of life And violence within private spheres also and an issue.

SPEAKER 4: Yeah, I absolutely agree. And just another comment, I think this time is now also an opportunity to face that we should use all our competencies, from each gender to to affront the circumstances we are we are living now, and so it’s good that we are aware of this topic again. Yeah,

PAULINA: yeah, including man is one of the one of the techniques or measures that should be incorporated. The work on gender equality should not be only the work of women, who are very often overwhelmed with this tasks. So we need allies, and men are there and yeah, we should cooperate on this, on these tasks,

SPEAKER 4: I was going to mention that for centuries, we had this kind of a story that being told that woman or certain groups, black people, or wherever they are not capable of doing certain roles or being in politics. But then when you look at the political politicians, they are very white and men and that are doing it so badly. We shouldn’t be so scared. I mean, the we if you have a views, and if you have the strength to stand for a job, for a position, we all should actually be able to to try and to do because there is no rule that woman could not do it well, or that trans should not do the job better than some people that already are in in those positions. So I think it’s a bit of educational thing and break all these traditional views that we had, especially in some of the traditional countries like Southern Europe, we are very traditional between with women and men. For example, some things are for men, some things are for women, and you cannot actually and some kind. Countries are trying to change that, and I’ve seen that Spain was in the in the in the positive side of of mini ministries told by women, that was a policy that the the current Prime Minister included. And I think it’s working, because it’s good that young generation see that this is a possibility,

DIANA: right? Yes, thank you for this comment. Yeah, it’s very important. And again, education is a very important for Yeah. In fact, in Poland, Poland is one of the countries with still quite traditional attitudes toward gender roles. Yeah, so we have much, much to do.

SPEAKER 4: Yeah. I think that the more you see in the world that things are changing, the easier would be for any other country to reflect and and see. Okay, maybe we don’t need to continue doing it the way we’ve done it, but it takes a lot of time and and also the woman who don’t feel they’re up to the job. So we have to also work with young generation of girls and other groups of vulnerable groups to make sure that they understand that if they want, they can do it. Yes, yes. But we also need to change the organizations themselves, because many, many programs, activities are directed towards girls or women, so towards the supply side, yes, that women should feel more confident or gain some, some qualities that are important in politics, in energy sector and so on and so forth. But we also know about gender discrimination within organizations, and I think school is not separate from this, schools, also the higher education institutions and also energy companies. So using this systemic tools like gender equality plans or diversity plans, also including these intersectional perspectives, as far as it is possible, it’s a very, very important area of intervention as well, alongside those mentoring programs and special, special design curricula,

VANINA: I was actually going, sorry, Carm, I was actually going on, how many of the policies that, if most of the policies now that address gender inequalities, particularly in the EU, are more intersectional and include, sort of, you know, that different range of you know, race, ethnicity, especially with what we’ve been discussing about immigration and how, I don’t Know, I’m guessing it’s been adopted very differently, obviously, in southern Europe versus Northern Europe, Eastern, Western but yeah,

PAULINA: yes, we are looking closer to intersectionality in one of The currently developing project, which is inspire project and the research shows that while intersectional perspective became became a central concept in academic research, the application of intersectionality in public policies is very difficult, difficult And so far not very much efficient or effective, and it’s mostly due to insufficient policy frameworks, also resistance. Lack of data is to be a big challenge, and also under underdeveloped practical guidelines. So in most cases, or in many cases, these policies focus on a single dimension of inequality, either on or gender or migration status or age, or sometimes, sometimes they provide a broader framework of, for example, diversity, but in both cases, they failed to recognize this intersection of multiply inequalities. So for example, within inspire project, one of the teams did scoping review on research concerning gender equality policies in academic context. Texts and they pointed to the almost total absence of an intersectional approach in those policies and some efforts are visible as we as we stay in within Europe and research organizations European Union introduced a special financing scheme or stream that supports research organizations in implementing inclusive gender equality plans. And this inclusive gender equality plans means they they incorporate this intersectional perspective, so hopefully we will have more and more practical examples of of implementing intersectionality in research area but also in other sectors. Yeah. Thank you for now. I can no share. I cannot share with you any successive successful example of of doing this.

VANINA: Yeah, yeah. I guess that there needs to be a more of a look into, you know, that data in terms of intersectionality and also including trans people, I think generally, in the EU that seems to be somewhere where we need to go, um. And does anyone else have any questions from, yeah, and I don’t think we have any from YouTube, because we’re coming to about the closing time for the talk. So I just wanted to see but Paulina, this was really great and a really interesting presentation, and we had a really good conversation, which I’m happy about. And to see any change, we need to keep talking and researching and being more inclusive in our day to day lives as well, especially when it comes to gender equality. So I wanted to just thank you and thank everyone here for asking some great questions and having a good conversation today. And for anyone viewing this, you can participate in, you know, chatting or just writing next week in our Democracy Forum, which will address basically what we’ve discussed here, if you have any additional views on what we’ve just spoken about. But other than that, thanks again for a lovely conversation, everyone, and have a great rest of your week and a great summer as well.

PAULINA: Thank you very much. Thank you again for this opportunity. Thank you.

VANINA: Bye. Thank you,

DEMOCRACY TALKS 8 – The Social and Political Conduct : Curricula in Primary and Secondary Education in Greece


DIANA: Hello and very warm welcome to our eighth democracy talk today. I’m very happy to introduce all of you to our session, and I’m especially happy to present to you our guest speaker, Manus from the again University. My name is Diana Trevino. I’m project officer at the European University Continuing Education Network, and we are also partners at the Democrat project. But Manus, thank you very much for joining us today, and he will speak about the topic today, the social and the political conduct, and how this concept is going to be integrated in curricula in primary and secondary education in Greece. So I’m very interested in your country perspective and what you are going to present in the end, we will then have some time for questions, but I would like to hand over to you right now, and if you want, you can also explain a little bit, just brief about your background, and then feel free to start your presentation. Thank you very much.

MANUS: Okay, thank you very much. Diana, thank you for having me. I’m very happy that we eventually made it happen. And yes, it’s your project is is very interesting and very intriguing, and I’m happy to contribute to this to the best of my abilities, myself. I’m a sociologist here in the University of the Aegean. I have been educated at McGill University in in Canada. I live for a while in in Ireland, and finally, I settled, at least for the moment in Lesbos Island, which is not bad, actually, and my topic is civility and citizenship in in Greece, in relation to Political culture in Greece, I have recently written a book on the Greek crisis and its cultural origins, and I’m very much interested in the way democracy is perceived by the people, and It’s it is much more complicated and much more confusing than we tend to believe of what democracy really means in Greece in particular, it’s the democracy is mostly understood in a collectivist manner or orientation, as the will of the people, as the way by which our desires are materialized and the ways by which our interest are best served. And there is not so much, let’s say the presence of democracy as civil society, at least as this pattern was developing in Western Europe, something that makes democracy here in Greece a very exciting if you like, way of doing things, but it’s also becomes very problematic in recent years when you have the development of more individualistic attitudes, especially in the European in the European context, where rights become much more important than responsibilities or duties. And this was my main, if you like, problematic of the subject when I was invited by the institution of educational policy a few years ago to become the coordinator of this effort of developing new curriculum for social and political Education, how to approach it and my concern is, what, how do you deal with a situation where democracy is considered to be in the DNA, let’s say, of the cultural genetic material of the P. People who believe that they are strongly democratic, but they find it very difficult to trust each other. They find it very difficult to create communities, real, substantive communities, especially in urban centers and where democracy is understood as reacting to governmental policies and as defined if you like standard behaviour rules and regulations and so on. And it is, it was a problematic because you do not want to alienate the people who read the material, the educators, because even if you’re right, if you alienate them, then you are you know, you have lost the game. Somehow you need to keep the balance you have to avoid, let’s say extreme scenario or predispositions, and welcome and allow them to see for themselves. What you want to say in, let’s say in a very indirect way through the activities that these new curricula are suggesting and inviting teachers to developing their classes. The curricula are not confronting. Let’s say the reader does not instruct they do not instruct the reader. They suggest ways and dynamics in the class. So the skills that are necessary to build a democratic profile, a substantive democratic profile will be cultivated in the class.

DIANA: Maybe we could have a look on the curriculum or in detail. I think you prepared it also a little bit. And yes,

I will. I will now start the presentations, and we will take it from there, just screen, and here we go. If you can see it,

DIANA: yes.

Okay. So can you see now as I move to the next slide?

DIANA: Yes,

MANUS: okay, so this is what was taken under consideration. And I say that because each and every country builds their curricula in different backgrounds and in on different basis. It’s It’s different if the curricula, let’s say, are developed in the UK, where my both my sons, have been educated, and I know of their curricula, and if they are, if they are developed in Italy or in Greece, in some other part of the world. So in in the Greek case, what we’re taking under consideration is, first of all, the multiplicity of value postulates. In Greek society, you cannot say that you have a value system, or at least an elaborated value system, which is shared by the vast majority of the people. Second, you have a multiplicity of political ideologies of the party system with a very strong left component, which makes things a bit more sensitive when you come to what is democratic and what is not democratic. Third, you have a widespread antinomian tendencies in the educational system, with many educators being very cautious or suspicious of the educational system. And last, lack of community spirit in urban centers. So you cannot take it for granted that there is a community there is a community spirit tradition on which to build. In other words, you have to start from scratch at school.

And last which is extremely important is that the ministry has allocated very few hours in this social and political educational module, one hour per week on the fifth and on the sixth grade of primary school, and two hours, three hours on the third grade of high school and two hours on the fourth grade of high school, and that’s it.

So this makes it. Uh,if not problematic, but it’s it restricted a lot our, our ability to expand and and dwell into into some of the matters that that needed so So what was our aim, me and my and my team. Our aim was the students to be able to distinguish between formal and institutional democracy, like, what are the rights and obligations of the citizen and as they are written in the Constitution, let’s say, from substantive democratic behaviour that is, duty, courtesy, trust, cooperation with other peers. We usually tend to allocate or to envision democracy as a set of rules, but we find it very difficult to, and I’m talking about here in Greece, very difficult to communicate with one another, trust one another, listen to one another, and come together in in trustworthy relations. The second was to value the Open, open underlying open national political community and the structures of the democratic polity as guarantors of liberties and equality for us, for citizens, but also for non-citizens, let’s say immigrants or refugees. And third, to develop skills towards responsible political and social engagement. Most of the curriculum is structure around development of skills, soft skills for how to act democratically in a constructed environment, institutional environment such as a school Now, having said that we have somehow to specify what is our vision of the citizen, how do We perceive the citizen? So, to build a series of activities, skills and so on and so forth, toward materializing that that role or that ideal. Shall we see them as consumers? Shall we see them as our collectivities in school or outside of schools? Shall we see them as individuals, or shall we see them as some kind of cosmic COVID, or European assemblages of of people that come and go in a fluid environment? And the the answer to this, or the choice, was to take as our model the Republican open community, or what Habermans would call constitutional patriotism, seeing that the Republican National Community is the only framework in Which rights, obligations and duties to others are balanced so yes, and what was the target? The target was to strengthen individual self-competence and skills, especially soft skills in group, trust, cooperative skills, and split the core in school so that they will not see school as as another facility or premise, but see as the basis of their political and social identity, especially now that family is actually under crisis and third tolerance of the multiple identities of modern Greek society. And when you say modern Greek society, we also include immigrants and refugees, and also ethnic minorities like the Muslim minority in Thrace, the Roma minority and so on and so forth. And our target was to have democracy as a lived experience, in other words, able to reflect, to cooperate, to create horizontal interactions and to see the group as a means for creativity. The power is not something given is not something out there, but power can be created by the school community, by communal action. So, it’s not a zero-sum game, but it is a positive sum game. So, What were the theoretical implicit assumptions into this into building this curriculum? The basic assumption is that society is not something homogenous as it were, let’s say, 50 years ago, but it is a multiple and overlapping, dynamic and fluid condition with blurred boundaries. So it takes us for for granted, and then we made specific assumptions about the curriculum, about school life, that correct socialization or proper socialization, or civil socialization, is directly linked to citizenship, that civility and moderation are the basic characteristics of a democratic citizen, that cooperation and skills create Functional democracies without skills and without cooperation, if we remain isolated individuals, democracy would be a formality, but when crisis arrive, then we will behave like a mob or Some kind of, I can say, a conglomeration of passions, rather than as proper rational citizens. That democracy, democracy is a complexity full of dilemmas, contradictions, self-restrictions and compromise. So, it’s not what was used to to pre present it as democracy as some kind of a triumph of the people that now we are free and we can do as we like no democracy is a difficult regime. Is the most difficult regime because all other regimes ask you to be obedient. This one asks you actually to train yourself to be restricted and to be rational and to be able to cooperate. So, it’s the most difficult one, and that democracy is not a way to materialize any need or want, which is actually quite widespread in in Greece at the moment, so I gather, let’s say the basic titles of of the three sets of curricula, the fifth and the sixth grade of primary school, are two curricula which are related to each other. One, in other words, is aware the sixth grade is aware of the material covered on the fifth grade, and then you have a second curricula and the third grade of high school, and then a fourth and the fourth grade of high school, and that’s it. There is one hour allocated on weekly basis on the fifth and sixth grade of primary school, three hours allocated the third grade of high school, and two hours on the fourth grade of high school. So, all of these things that need to be said and done and the skills to be acquired are actually restricted in the least timely module of the whole primary secondary curriculum of the Greek educational system, there are more hours allocated to teaching Latin rather than Social and political education. When I inquire into that, I was I was told that Latin and ancient Greek are the classic, are the basis of the classical education. And I, I said to them in response, but not for the Romans and the ancient Greeks. They were not so anyway, underneath these titles, you can see the people I worked with for the development of this of these modules, all of them are educators, with the exception of Panagoti Gabrimis, who was also a professor of sociology, professor of education. All the rest are MA or PhD holders and educators, and we work together as teams to produce this this curricula the fifth and sixth grade in.

Deal with very basic preliminary if you like concepts and skills on on the matter life at home and family, life, school life, life in the community in the wider world, the third grade in high school, the individual is a member of social groups, the individual as a citizen, the individual and the wider world, like, for example, the life the political life in the town, the political life in the periphery, the state, European Union and so on, and the fourth grade of the high school, that was a bit more detail, if you like. Here we deal with the citizen and citizenship decision making. Ways to do to come to decision making, the inclusion, individual society and the state, civil society, quality, state, attitudes and society, organization of the state and legal order, sustainability. There’s a model, economic and social development, immigration and the refugees and social problems. Now, these are just titles, but most of the of the material was covered and discovered in activities inside the class, so there is very little confrontal, if you like education telling people what it is, and there is more of discovering what it means by activities in the class. Key subjects that are covered in this curricula are types of families, different but equal, sexual roles and so on. Are mentioned here. Types and ways of cooperation. You pay a lot of attention of developing skills in the class of how you can cooperate. Different ways to cooperate. How you engage in productive argument? How do you listen to what the others say? How? What is the role? What is the purpose, actually, of argumentation? For example, it’s not to win the argument, but to find the truth of the matter, coming to terms with your with the other side, getting into his shoes, finding ways to cooperate or to combine your your approaches as to come out to positive conclusion of the of the argument. It’s not to win the argument. Decision Making. Ways of decision making, bullying and of course, anti bullying, engagement with internet, fake news and so on, prejudice and stereotypes. Active citizenship. How you can be an active citizen? Let’s say volunteering, action or protest or lobbying, things like this, protest and lobbying, yes, combating social ills. What can you do in your neighbourhood? What you can do in at school? What do you know about social ills and problems in your neighbourhood. And last but not least, principles and basic rules of the Greek and the EU polity, like the Constitution, like political structures and so on and so forth. The structure and the methods that are used in the curriculum, they are student centered because they are based around experiential and research activities in class, activities oriented as particular subjects are covered in class activities and projects, usually group projects, developed around specific and articulated access from the most tangible to the most abstract. The most tangible is the fifth grade of primary school. The more abstract is the fourth grade of high school. Use of primary sources and digital material. The ministry is particularly keen to develop a digital GT, digitalized version of the curricula and all the school activities. The assumption is that this will make it more attractive, it will make it more interesting and more engaging. I’m not sure about it, but this is something to be seen and in the next year, also cross cultural approaches. In other words, the activities in school activities take into account what happens in other classes in other modules, so that the. Will understand better, or they will appreciate the knowledge that they received in other classes, and last the strong emphasis on negotiation skills and collaborations inside and outside the classroom. So I will I will stop here, and depending on your questions, I will elaborate more.

DIANA: Yes, thank you.

Thank you. Thank you very much, Manus for your very interesting insights and the approach you you developed the redesign of curriculum. So to say, so, I have took note of many questions. Maybe I also would like to again invite all other participants in soon, but also in the YouTube channel to address your questions. But I would like to start with a more practical one. So to say is, there, was there a starting point to launch this initiative to redesign curricula with regard to this content, because as far as I understood, it’s it’s supposed to be done on a large scale. So maybe you can explain this.

MANUS: Yes, it was. It was four years ago that the ministry decided to to develop new curricula for all classes, for all modules of primary and secondary school. So one of these modules was the social and and political education. One, the idea was to make it less confrontal and and more activity oriented.

DIANA: Okay, okay. And this, this is, so to say, now a pilot project. So, you will launch this curriculum as soon as I understood. And is it piloted in various schools? And for how long is this going to take place, and what will happen after this pilot phase?

MANUS: Okay, good question. It was developed between 2020 and 22 and then we taught, or we presented the curricula to a sample of of of schools, of teachers, of what we call experimental schools, or schools which have an advanced, let’s say, curricula, visa vie, the the rest of the of the schools. These are schools that they first test new curricula before they are the new curricula are allocated to the rest of the school community. So, they were they that we train them, let’s say, of what this new curricula are, what are the subject matters, what kind of activities they will they will use, and they then became the trainees of the rest of the teachers who will teach this material. So we, we trained something like, If I’m right, 20 teachers, high skills teachers, and they became, then the trainers of the all the other teachers in schools around around Greece, this year, the new curricula will be used in all classes without any textbooks, because the textbooks are still in the process of being written, And the new textbooks that will be based on this new curriculum will be distributed in the schools and classes next year.

DIANA: Okay, thank you very much Manus. We have a question or some more questions in the chat from Karsten Kruger. He’s leading the Democrat project, and he asked, what is the understanding of rational, which you mentioned? And second, are there relations to our competencies? And our competencies include solitary, participation, deliberation, judgment and democratic. Resilience, and this last question is regarding the method, but maybe we come to this first one.

MANUS: so by rationality, I mean all those things that the question is mentioning participation, collaboration, skill development, reflection, I would add and responsibility. Responsibility is something that I haven’t mentioned, which actually extremely important, because responsible being means I am aware of the consequences of my actions, not only to me, but also to people around me, and I’m ready to take the responsibility of my actions. So this is what I would call rational, rational in the sense sober, reflective and also aware of the presence and the consequences of my action to the other people around me, to my community, especially my school community.

DIANA: And then there was another question from Karsten, and he asked regarding the method, and he wants to know if the curriculum also has some implications in the teaching method.

MANUS: Yes. The teaching methods are not confrontational. In other words, it’s not the teacher who will teach, who will tell the students, what is democracy, but it is activity oriented. So usually, for example, students are divided into groups. They are asked to discuss the subject, to find perhaps some information on on a line, to play different roles, to come to be aware of the of the of the different roles that they play in society, of of what, of the of the different elements, psychological elements, social elements, it it’s and every role incorporates and to and to distinguish between the role and the individual. This is not something that it’s confrontationally taught, but it’s something that we hope that this that the students and the teacher will become aware of as they play these games in class. It It is extremely important as and I’m talking as a sociologist to distinguish between a person her social background and also the different roles this person is asked to play in in A social setting, this is a way to distant ones, one from judging other people of who they are and what are his or or her identities, that we may have different identities according to the roles we are asked to play in a social setting, also to confront the fact that they also play different roles, which sometimes are confronting each other. For example, as a friend of, let’s say, Catherine, I want to do a as a student, I’m called to do something else. What do you do in this moment? We don’t tell them what to do. This is not the subject matter of the of the project or of the activity. Is just to to make them aware that this kind of of freedom or of liberties that they enjoy is full with dilemmas.

DIANA: Okay, this brings me also to my my question I took note because you mentioned the limited time of hours you have to introduce this, this topic in the curricula is this, will this be a single course, or will be is there also a chance To combine this with other subjects you with planning

MANUS: both, in other words, and this is where the educators were extremely helpful into into creating this this curricula is that this module takes into account. Uh, other classes, other modules that take place simultaneously During the same year. History could be history. It could be language. It could be what else are they? Religion and so on. And how you can they can bring these topics into this class, but under a different if you like denominator,

DIANA: yes, yeah. Because I think this might have to make this, this little amount of time most impactful, or more impactful in the end, I don’t know I I’m not sure if any of the soon participants has any more questions. If not, I would have more. No, I guess no. Um, hi, question.

VANINA: Sorry, sorry, I was just thinking about it a little bit. Um, thank you so much for your presentation. Manus, I guess my question has to do a bit with the multiplicity of value that you spoke about in Greek society, and I’m wondering how the curriculum will go about ensuring that all of these different and diverse perspectives are addressed equally, especially when you’re speaking on controversial or sensitive topics, such as, you know, immigration or social issues.

MANUS: We do we do not make statements that could create some kind of political let’s say upheaval, for example, on the fourth grade. We’re talking about the different types of regimes, and we talk about liberal democracies, illiberal democracies and authoritarian, totalitarian states. And I didn’t use any examples of illiberal democracies, because I know that at least 30% of the population in Greece does not consider Russia to be an illiberal democracy. Okay, so I use North Korea as a totalitarian which I think that not even North Korea will have any opposition to this. But other than this, we try to present the case. We don’t lie, we don’t keep information out of the class, but we try not to upset people by if we can avoid it. Now, if the if the teacher wants in the class to use examples, or to, let’s say, to bring forward and create an activity around it, she is free to do that. We have also included, for example, a few web pages, for example, for from the Economist, we say it’s with rates countries according to the degree of liberties. It’s there if the teacher feel comfortable with it, comfortable with developments, she can use it. If she disagrees with it, she can ignore it. This is what I mean, that we take into account we do. We do not tell them what is the right value. What we do try to do is to create cooperative environments and settings, horizontally cooperative settings where the students can act jointly to produce something inside the school or outside the School, and we leave the rest to the teacher. The teacher has a lot of liberties of how to use this one hour or two hours there is each and every each and every class come with something like five or six different activities. Not all of them will be used in the class, so the teacher will choose that activity that she feels more comfortable with.

VANINA: Thank you. That makes sense. I suppose that gives a lot of the intention and the sort of independence to the teachers, which I guess, can sort of invoke some bias in certain issues, but it’s, I think it’s also good to put the trust in the teachers, given that they have that training. So yeah,

MANUS: yeah, all of these activities are one way or another. Other productive, yeah, as long one of these takes place, we are happy.

VANINA: Thank you.

DIANA: I would like to focus maybe on a on a challenge that might arise when you implement this curriculum. What do you think? What kind of challenges might the teachers are also educators face when they implement this democracy-oriented curriculum and to include lived experiences such as reflection, what kind of challenges could be arise.

MANUS: As far as I know, very little, because this, these curricula were developed by me and educators who have a lot of experience in class. So they are aware, I’m not aware. They are aware of what is the conditions or the level of expertise of the teachers, and they feel very comfortable with it. So for the moment, I will feel very I feel very comfortable as well. In a couple of years time, we will know how it was actually implemented in in the class. But it’s, it’s straightforward, it’s it does not ask for any kind of elaborated or complex knowledge of the issues we are all equal. We need to learn how to cooperate and by cooperate, the more we cooperate, the more strong we are as a team. The only thing which is missing, but there was no way that could be developed in in this in the context of the curricula, is the school with an identity, with a symbolic identity that will really become a reference point for the life of the students. Some schools have a strong identity, a tradition identity, full with activities. Students feel proud of being members of this and that school. But this is not true for all schools, and what I would like as a next step is a project where schools will develop identities. Identities will be meaningful to the students.

DIANA: Okay, thank you very much. I would like to have my last question, because we’re running out of time, and this is more a general one, because I’m always thinking about this topic, how can we design competence frameworks from a cross-country perspective, taking into conscious consideration the uniqueness of every country, to like the cultural historical background. And I think this is some something challenging. So to say, what I would like to know your opinion about this is it, do you think it’s senseful and what? What do these overacting competence competence frameworks need to consider?

MANUS: Oh, what a question. Okay, well, this happens to an extent by these exchanges between schools on the European level. I mean they, and actually a few of my university students in the Master’s course, while teachers have actually done research on how productive and in a way, breakthrough are the experiences of seeing how other schools abroad operate. They they really enrich their perspective. But I would say that each and every school should consider how productive a certain focus will be for the students. In other words, not all students have the same needs or at the same level, or they have the same orientation. Some schools need to be more local. In other words, focused on the locality. Some other should be more cosmopolitan. Um. Should be more cosmopolitan in I don’t want to be biased, but yeah, you cannot expect each and every school to develop the same profile towards other curricula, or towards the abroad or and so on and forth. I think they should. They should have more autonomy of how they should develop and how the curriculum should be developed. It’s very tricky, because some of them will not do well. Some of them will lag behind, but I think it is, it will be very promising and and very productive in this way, especially the teachers, the educators will feel more in charge of themselves and more have a more meaningful if you like, life at school, when will be up to them To decide and to be leaders of their community. I don’t know if I have, if I have answered your question,

DIANA: yes, I think you answered it, maybe not everything what I was focusing on, but I think this is a question we cannot answer also so but what I hear very much is this part of autonomy that should be very much taken into account when you design curricula that it allows schools, and also when we speak about competence frameworks that are referring to different countries that allow to adapt to the uniqueness, to the unique needs of every school of every Country of every region and so on. So I think, um, I addressed all my questions. Thank you very much. I don’t know if we have any more questions. I guess no. And so I would like to close the session. Maybe you want to add something you think is relevant to mention in the end,

MANUS: I would say that your project is extremely important and and I hope that you will, you will expand and and deepen our understanding and bring us more in connection with one another. On a European level, there’s lots to be done.

Yes, we will contact you all the presenters here, also regarding the upcoming conference in 2025 and so that you are up to date, and we will inform you about everything. And thank you very much for joining. And I would like to mention in the end that this is our last session before our summer break, and then we will continue on the 18th of September. And Manus says you are always welcome to join our sessions again, and thanks a lot.

Thank you. Have a nice summer.

DEMOCRACY TALKS 9 – Challenging Fake News and Conspiracy Theories in Education


VANINA: Hello everyone, and welcome back from our summer break. This is our ninth democracy talk, and I’m very excited to be hosting alongside Diana Trevino from usen and with our presenter today, Fabian Virchow from Dusseldorf University. So I will just go ahead and pass it over to Fabian for him to introduce himself and get started on his presentation. Well, thank you for welcoming us. Thank you for joining us today.

FABIAN: Well, my name is Fabian Virchow from Germany. I’m a sociologist by training, and have a PhD in Political Science. And at our university, we are mainly educating social workers, and I’m also at this university, head of a research unit on right wing extremism, and of course, that’s closely linked to issues like conspiracy theories, Fake News, etc. So I’m sharing my presentation hopefully it will work. Okay,

can you see it?

VANINA: Yes, it’s good, perfect.

FABIAN: Thank you. So challenging fake news and conspiracy theories in education, I think that’s an important issue for many people who are working in the educational sector, and I’m trying to cover some aspects of this very broad field. You could, of course, address particular conspiracy theories in more detail, but I’m trying to give more a broader and conceptual overview. So this is the structure of my talk. I will briefly cover issues of conspiracy theories and fake news, the dimension of the problem, but also a bit on the structure of conspiracy theories, because I think it’s important to understand how they work, if you like. Then briefly on the impact fake news and conspiracy theories have on the democracy.

And finally, at least addressing some of the approaches that might be helpful to handle that in the field of education, I have to say it, of course, depends a lot on how old you the pupils, that the students are, what kind of issue you are teaching, if it’s, let’s say history, or if it’s more, let’s say scientific or technical issues. So this is just, I will not cover and go into detail of all these, these images, but it’s the aim here is to give you an impression how relevant that problem is.

And if you turn to the left image belief in conspiracy theories, that’s a comparison Canada and the United States, and you see that the statement that mainstream media manipulates the information it disseminates. There are 55% in Canada and 63% even more in the United States, that agree to this statement. And if another hot topic, of course, had been the COVID pandemic, where half of those asked in the United States agreed to that a statement that it was created as a biological weapon in a lab, and a third of those asked in Canada, at least so, of course, and this I’m Turning to the center of the slide, believing conspiracy theories. In this case, it’s about the COVID pandemic is not equally distributed amongst the population. There are groups, maybe according to income, to age or to gender, where there is difference in the level of believing or supporting a particular conspiracy theory. And to the right, to the right side of the slide, you see a couple of, let’s say, prominent conspiracy theories.

how many people think they are completely true or mostly true or explicitly wrong, etc. But of course, this also changes over time, and there are conspiracy theories which might be more attractive, if you like, to people because they are explaining or they are explaining issues that are much more closer to the day to day life and the situations people live in, and there might be others that are far away. So here just referring to the left side. This is the fraction of respondents indicating that the COVID pandemic had been a result of deliberate and concealed efforts of some government on organization, for example, the World Health Organization.

And you see across Europe, there are countries that where respondents, even a majority of those responding, agreed to this statement, and the countries our project is in war with Finland, 12% Ireland, 26 pretty high. Spain, nearly 30% so there’s a variety. And of course, if we would look deeper into it, we might find factors that explain why in certain countries it’s higher than in others. And we could also look at the age of those who were following the particular conspiracy theory,

briefly on the structure of conspiracy narratives or theories, depending a bit which term you would like to use as a extended debate in academic circles about what is a proper term. Is there really a theory behind behind this narrative of a conspiracy, or is it just a kind of ideology, etc, but I will neglect this discussion here. So I think it’s important to understand that every conspiracy narrative offers a kind of social map, a map explaining the society, and there are principal four groups that are addressed. One is the core group of the conspiracy is small. That’s, in a way natural, because the larger group is the more easy it is to detect that there is a conspiracy.

And in some cases, it’s just one person, like Bill Gates, who is, you know, with this conspiracy theory made responsible for the for negative impact of vaccination. The second group, which is a bit larger, that are people who are supporting the conspiracies, so maybe because they don’t know, or because they are hoping for looking to gain some profit from it. And if we take the COVID pandemic, it’s been personal from the medical sector, but also journalists who had been assigned to this group. The third group is a vast group, the biggest group in the society. And those who are have designed these the conspiracy narrative, argue they don’t know nothing, or they’ve just follow what the government is telling them, and they have to be educated by the fourth group, which are those people who are already understand, okay, there is a conspiracy, and this particular group is responsible, and this is how they do it, and they present themselves as educators and fighters for the truth, and doing so also gaining some risks and Yeah, well, doing this educational work, bringing themselves also in situations of danger because government or the conspiracies are behind them and trying to chase them. So this is basically the social map you find in every conspiracy narrative,

VANINA: sorry, Fabian, it has there’s these two gray boxes that are blocking the slides. I think that they might be zoom for you. I just wanted to see if there’s a way to get rid of them, because they blocked some of the content in some of your slides. I’m so sorry. I’m not sure if there’s a way to minimize them.

[…]

One of the important questions is, why do people believe in conspiracy narratives? Why are they attractive from this personal perspective, this is, of course, who, of course, also relevant for educators. And I think we first have to understand that conspiracy narratives are particularly attractive in times of crisis. And no doubt we are living in time of multiple crisis. And what they do is they offer a coherent explanation of a very, very complex issues.

And so they bring in order, into into a chaotic situation, into a situation where people feel unsecure. They also because when people believe in it, in them, they give a sense of being in control. I know what I have to do. I know what’s going on. So it’s reduced. Believing in them reduces a feeling of insecurity. And finally, as we could see from COVID 19, a COVID pandemic where believing in conspiracy narratives split families, or, you know, circle of friends. So if you, let’s say, turn to a conspiracy narrative in regard to the COVID pandemic, you could easily find a new circle of friends or enter into new social relations with others who were also believing in this. So you lost personal contacts, but you also got new ones, so you are not an isolated individuals when believing in those narratives.

And that’s important, too. And we could identify several situations where we could observe this, for example, at rallies in the German context. So turning a bit to the issue of fake news and misinformation and disinformation, I think it’s important to make a distinction between those three, because misinformation actually is is is for wrong information, but it’s spread without malicious intent. So people might send out information, but it’s not with the intention to harm something someone or to make someone intentionally believe in something that is wrong.

In contrast, disinformation is deliberately false information actually produced and disseminated to manipulate public opinion, and the fake news actually might be kind of sub group of disinformation, because fake news are masquerading as real news, and there are, particularly in the United States, with Donald Trump. But of course, also in other contexts, many examples of fake news, and they are also spread by, for example, influences or website that try to prevent itself as journalistic with a journalistic profile. So even on that level, it’s trying to create the impression that it’s professional journalism behind it.

If we turn to the issue of how the fake news and conspiracy theories have a negative impact on democracy, I think we should first acknowledge that. That disinformation, online or offline, has an impact on human rights because it’s making people more it makes it more difficult for people to make a distinction between what is correct information what is incorrect information, and that, of course, influences how they make up their mind on particular issues.

And making up your mind on issues also may have follow up effects, for example, in regard what for, what party you are voting for, or how you enter into public discussions in the more in the public realm, how you, let’s say, communicate with your neighbors or your and your family,

And often, fake news and disinformation is used to disqualify democratic institutions or the public media system, and it also creates situations or leads to situations in which there is a tendency or it’s it’s even exercised violence in social interactions. So and in this way, we could argue that a robust counter disinformation is needed to protect democracy, but, and that’s one of the dilemmas to do that can itself undercut human rights and democratic equality. So this is, on the one hand, countering disinformation, but on the other hand, protecting freedom of speech is, in a way, walking the tightrope, and we might later discuss how we can address this in schools or in educational settings.

This is again, three points that try to address the dangers coming from fake news and conspiracy theories. They are not related just to the example of the COVID pandemic, although it’s medical information mentioned at the third bullet point. But as you can see, it really might have a negative impact on different in different fears of democratic structures, processes and institutions. This is a bit older field survey from 2019, um, where people were asked, to what extent does fake news affect democracy? And you see the quarter of those asked agreed to the statement that it creates unnecessary tensions in the polity the second largest, it cripples the freedom of expression of others because they are, for example, intimidated, and with 12% it propels disinformation and misinformation which can create public Chaos. And there are, of course, many examples we could refer to here, like after the last elect

US elections, the widespread thesis and argument that there was a faked election and the upcoming public activities that turned into violent action at sixth of January in DC.

This is a an expert survey. And people from academia, business, government, etc, were asked in October last year where they think the fall into false information is supposing the biggest threat. And to my surprise, India is ranking first here, but and and others are coming next. Interestingly, also for me, at least Finland rank pretty high, which I don’t have an explanation for. Maybe it would be interesting to this, to discuss that.

But you see, there are larger parts of this map. Colored in yellow or in orange or even dark red. So it’s and those who are not covered, particularly, there are no data for so it doesn’t mean that there are no that there’s no false information being a threat to the democratic structures, maybe even the contrary, that in countries that are graymisinformation, the production and dissemination of misinformation and disinformation isrun by the state or state or agencies close to the state.

This is an overview where a huge group of respondents, 18 years plus, were asked where on which platform they find most difficult to identify trustworthy seniors, and as you can see, Tiktok and x are those, maybe also Facebook and Instagram, where people find it very or somewhat difficult, and Google search, maybe no surprise is the one where they find it most easy to find or to identify fake news the most easiest. So I think it’s here without going into too much detail, I think it’s also important to look at the particular platform people are using. And as we know, some platforms like Tiktok or also youtube today are very relevant for young people, where they are taking, looking for Information, where they are discussing and oops, sorry.

[…]

Let’s turn to the issue of, what can we do, and how can we make use of the education system to counter misinformation, fake news and conspiracy theories? First of all, I think this, it turns to teachers and educators. I think it’s necessary to educate oneself and look and trying to understand the structure of conspiracy theories, to get familiar with the content of the most important conspiracy theories. I think there are some who are more important than others, also to be aware of the material that is outside there on that particular conspiracy theory, and from most of them, I think there is really good material to work with and also to be aware of the most important actors who are out there and spreading, or disinfo disseminating fake news and conspiracy theories that are regularly bigger networks, but it may be also in local or national context, there are actives that are able to identify this very, Very briefly, I will not cover every aspect, but it’s also important to understand the tools that are available to spread this information, ranging from bots, but also astroturf campaigns, so campaigns where you think at least, if You look at it for the first time, it’s maybe an individual influencer or grassroots activist, but indeed, there are structures or actors behind that which have a lot of financial resources and just use this individual or This small group as a cover, we have micro targeting, or we have a growing danger, or deep fakes.

I just recently came across an article about South Korea where pupils and students are about to address this issue, because it’s deep fakes in the field of pornography, and they feel negatively affected on the second or third. I think it’s important to be clear and make a distinction between people who are exposed to concerns.

Conspiracy theories on a low level, on the one hand, or on a high level, that is really an important distinction. If people are very principled speaking already inclined deeply into conspiracy theories, and you have to act in a different way compared to those people who maybe have heard about them, but they don’t believe in it, right? Maybe I can explain that in detail later.

Then another important distinction is about the situation in the classroom. One situation might be that the conspiracy theory is brought up by by students or pupils, and you as a teacher are not prepared to deal with this. So first way to deal with it is, don’t, don’t put it aside. The issue is in class, and you can’t avoid that issue. Then, of course, you have to check yourself if you are able to address that particular conspiracy theory, and if not, you should at least.

So you shouldn’t deal with it because it opens up the space for speculations and for discussions you can’t limit, but you should nevertheless come back to the students and ask where they got it from, why it sounds attractive for them, or why they are curious on it, and then offer at least that you address this particular issue the next time you meet the students, one particular dimension may be that bringing forward that conspiracy series was meant as a provocation, and then you should you well, make a limitation on that. Second situation is that you yourself are preparing to teach on conspiracy theories, which, of course, also is a way of dealing with this challenge. And I would suggest that if you do so, don’t select conspiracy theory which is on the margins of discussion, but one where is there is sufficient sources and material to counter the basic idea of that narrative, and then it’s about to addressing basic questions and issues with the students. So what is it? Conspiracy Theory? How does it work? What are its aims, etc, etc. And it’s also about asking students, at least if there are case students who do so, why is it attractive for them to believe in it? What does it give to them? What are the feelings that are related to feeling sorry to believing in conspiracy theory? Does it give security? Does it? Is it a reaction to a feeling of fear or other strange emotions?

There is a lot of material out out there in in many languages, and I will come to an end with this, let’s say, poster, which gives a very brief line of action for dealing with fake news and how to recognize them, which I think can be used in class, In the way that you really exercise with your students, taking a fake news and, you know, presenting it to your students, and then in smaller groups, individually, they can figure out if this is fake news, et cetera, and then Come back with their experience.

What is the result they came to? How did they do the fact checking? What kind of sources did they use? Etc, etc. Maybe digital literacy is the buzzword of today when we are addressing the challenges by fake news and conspiracy series, but also in a broader sense, for students and pupils to become able to participate in democracy. Okay, I was rushing through that presentation, but I hope we have some time to discuss. Um, some details and further issues you are bringing up. Thank you for your intention. I stopped sharing the screen.

VANINA: Okay, thank you. Thank you so much. Fabian, that was very insightful, I think, for me, especially towards the end. And that was going to be, actually, one of my questions about how education can play a role in prevention or counter action of fake news. So I really appreciated those two scenarios that you brought up at the end of sort of how to bring that as a topic of conversation into the classroom, or, if it is brought up by pupils, how to deal with it.

I was hoping to ask a question first, and then I was going to turn it to the audience to see if we had any questions here from our internal members or also on YouTube. So in the meantime, those who are watching on YouTube, should you have any questions? You can comment on YouTube, and we will ask those to Fabian. So my question was sort of, I guess, a bit more difficult, but I was wondering, how are we able to sort of balance this need to counter disinformation and conspiracy theories in the classroom while also protecting the feed freedom of speech and critical thinking of students in educational settings?

FABIAN: Yeah, that’s really a difficult question. I think freedom of speech, of course, is very important for democracy. And I think first of all, we should encourage students and pupils to speak out and to tell us what they think about particular issues, and not starting with restrictions, you know, because we want to encourage them to talk and even to come up with issues that might be problematic from our perspective, but if they don’t talk, we can’t address these issues, right? So that’s a more practical perspective in it.

Theoretically. I think it’s, as I mentioned, walking the talk show, it’s really a balancing act, and we do know that, and this is, of course, handled differently in different countries, that there had been a deep platforming of particular platforms, you know, from at least in Germany, mostly from a jihadist or right wing extremist platforms, etc. And I think one one way to do it in class is actually to make it the subject in the classroom, to address this dilemma and to see what students and people think about it and how they would decide in a particular case, would they, let’s say, ban it or de platform it, or do they think that the protecting freedom of speech is the the highest value. And then what does it really mean? Does it? And I think so also then mean accepting that those who have contrary contrary different positions, or who are speaking out critically, they have the same right to do so, right? And in a broader sense, this how this is organized. Let’s say counter bring disinformation, on the one hand, and protecting freedom of speech that’s, in a way, a societal negotiation, negotiation process, you know, and pupils and students can be part of that, and should be part of that in a democratic society.

And it’s not that that someone from above can decide on it. Of course, yes, we have lawmakers, etc, and that’s part of that game. But yeah, I think one One approach would be to to make an issue in the classroom explicitly, you know, and this also means taking students serious with what they think about this question.

VANINA: Thank you very much. That was a great answer to a more difficult question.

So I wanted to turn it over to Georgios. I see that you have a question, and then we have a question from YouTube as well. Thank you, Vanina, and many thanks to Fabian for this very comprehensive presentation. I wanted to challenge you a bit, because we are talking about the conspiracy theories and that side of the problem. Of course, they were always gossipers in the past, the new media allows it to spread faster, perhaps, and to look more authoritative. But it’s not that in the past, the truth was the only thing that was circulating around. So I wanted to see also the weaknesses of.

Democracy and how we can correct them that allow for these conspiracy theories to take root. For example, as you said, we have to check the source. But when the source is not reliable, when the institutions have been undermined in their credibility, where do you get the truth from when, let’s say, the legitimate government or other parties, they choose also to use counter propaganda and not to establish the truth, then you have an overall erosion of the institutions. So I would say, for example, what happened to the North Stream pipeline, right? So one side says this, one side says the other thing. But the good side, or the side of democracy, said something wrong at the beginning, and then now we are getting to know there. So if you don’t know where to go to to get the truth, then there is a big problem of right of building conspiracy theories to have less insecurity and to explain the events that are happening. How can democracy be strengthened? And how can young people also demand for democratic institutions to be truthful and not just play propaganda games again? Thank you.

Yeah, thank you for that question. That’s really another challenge. I would say, I take your example with Nord Stream as an as you know, to go further with that, I was following that, of course, as someone who’s interested in what’s going on in the world, and I think part of what education and school should offer, is the idea and make strong is that we that there are situations where we don’t know the truth, and then we can, you know, at least we don’t know it immediately, you know. So if we take that example, there were many explanations out there. And people said, Okay, might have been the Russians or the ukraines or the US or the Swedes or Polish, whatever so. And of course, you can try to you can you should try to learn.

No, let me change. Let me start the other way. So one, one approach is always, who benefited from that? That’s also sometimes part of conspiracy theories. Because conspiracy series would argue, okay, they benefited from it, so they have organized it, or they are behind it, etc, which, of course, is sorry nonsense, because there are people are doing some things, and there are sometimes non intended effects, there are errors, etc. So it’s not always this linear causal relationship.

And so I think being aware, so for example, let’s North Stream I haven’t made, finally, my opinion on that, and I can live with that, you know, because we don’t really know, and we might never know, you know. So I can, I think that we can discuss about, okay, who benefited is, but that’s just one question, and it’s not the final answer. The um. And I think we can, and we should also encourage students that there in many, many questions. There’s an ambivalence in judging issues, you know, and there are some contradictions we can solve, you know, because we can, we don’t have the information that we need to have in order to answer that, so to to accept that, There are, I don’t know, many, in many situations, we we don’t know the truth at that particular moment. I think that’s also important to accept.

And the the next issue would be that, well, we are academics, but even in academia, finding the truth is a process, you know, so there’s research on a particular issue we have, let’s say, knowledge or a position or empirical evidence for a certain perspective, but it’s not 100% you know, it can be that 10 years later, we see, okay, that was wrong. And I think to to teach that without coming to a situation where, where students say, okay, okay. Then I. Can’t believe in anything. That’s a challenge, you know, and you sorry with the issue of sources. And I think one way is also to check sources across the spectrum of opinions, you know, and how this is discussed. That’s that’s not a simple way to do it. It needs time, and we all know time is one of the most important resources we have. But I think at least to teach students that there are ways to do it, and if they do it later on, that’s, of course, their decision, and on which questions they make use of. It not the perfect answer, I know.

VANINA: Thanks, Georges, thank you. Fabian. Georges, I don’t know if you had something to say to follow up. If not, we have quite a few questions. We’ll continue the discussion. Okay, we have quite a few questions lined up. The first one is from YouTube, from Maurice Edgar, and they ask, How can we create classroom activities that help students practice identifying fake news?

I think you have sort of answered that in a way, but if you want to expand on it,

FABIAN: well, yes, thank you for the question. I think one option of course could be to bring to to take examples of fake news you bring to the classroom as a teacher, and maybe some of them are fake news and some are real news. And then ask them, okay, how could you identify try out, you know, start Googling, start using social media, whatever you are as a Publius student, you are used to do, and you are using in your regular life, and then let them present not only the result, but also the way they did it. So their research process, if you like, because I think, to reflect on that and to make this a collective experience to share it with others, the pros and cons, the advantages and disadvantages of a particular way to do research would help everyone in the classroom to better understand and to be able to do it next time in A more sophisticated way. And of course, you can also ask students or pupils to bring their own examples and their own experiences. I think that’s always important to link to their personal experience.

And maybe it’s it’s it, of course, the particular example you take depends very much on the context you’re you’re working, you know, and if there is a hot topic currently discussed in your neighborhood or wherever you live or in Your national context,

VANINA: thank you for that. Danielle and Diana, I’m going to get to you in one second. Carme has asked me to ask this question to you, Fabian first, and she’s asking she’s wondering why fake news or false information is not more penalized or faster penalized. She’s wondering if those not interested in spreading false news are a bit passive and too permissive of it. It’s like because we know it’s fake news, we do not act to make it visible that that is the fact. So what do you think about that?

FABIAN: Thank you for that question. Well, I think if we look into into Who’s spreading fake news, I think one, one answer is they are powerful actors. Let’s take Alan Musk with X, okay, he’s spreading fake news every day. Or Donald Trump with or Trump social, or what’s the latest one here? He’s running, yeah, so and, and one one. So if you want to do that, and the European Union is trying, in to a certain extent, to do it, has to agree on, well, on on limitations that, at the same time are not having too much negative impact on freedom of speech. You know, that’s the issue we had before. So where do you put the limit? And I think that. Not easy. It’s and it’s handled. It depends also on national cultures. For example, Holocaust denying is much more penalized in Germany than in other countries, yeah, because of its history. And again, in a way, democracy and coming to joint decisions at the European level needs very much time, as we know from other political issues, and it’s even then, it’s not always effective, you know. So, yeah, powerful actors out there, I would say, thank you very much for that,

VANINA: Danielle. I believe your hand was up around the same time as Diana. So I will just go with you in alphabetical order first.

DIANA: Okay, so yeah, thank you Vanina, and thank you Fabien for the presentation. Really interesting. And as you know, we are, like within the Democrat project. We are at the University of Arizona doing a kind of, let’s say, experiment, survey, some empirical, empirical evidence regarding fake news. And it’s not a very question, it just maybe some, some something to think about together. Because, I mean, we are producing this as a part of the project. So all whenever we have, like, a first draft, we will share with you. So we are we will need also your inputs just to interpret what what we got. Now, but I wanted to say something like, at least for the for this experiment or this survey that we are running, what we find is like, like more or less people, and now I’m talking about all the other other people, not, not kids, right? They’re pretty good in in detecting fake news, right? And it seems that more or less people, people know what is like a fake news somehow, people is trained and but what is really interesting is like, like, the probability of sharing things. And this is related What jorgos were saying about spreading things. So when I mean that, this is something that maybe, if I mean I want to, I want to raise the fact that it’s it’s important, like, why people decide to share something, why people you know you you receive

something, a post news, whatever, and it’s not you don’t keep it for yourself that this is important, because, I mean, you can construct your political views, your voting behavior, your no day to day behavior due to that, that that piece of information, that that can be cannot be true. And this is important. But then there is something else that is why you decide to share and to spread that information, and even there is like another derivative, why you decide to share something that maybe you believe is fake. And this is like what George was saying about spreading things. So it’s, I mean, even even if now I tweet something that is like, is fake news. So it can be the impact, it can be very, you know, reduced if no one is, you know, retweeting that tweet that I’m doing, right? So I want just to pull to to bring into the discussion that it’s very important about, like, what is fake news, the impact of the news for individuals that receive the information that is not true. But it’s also important why individuals decide to share, retweet, you know, and send, spread information, and sometimes they know, or they perceive that maybe that information is not true, youk now, and that is somehow, you know, it’s a bit, it’s, it’s making me think about, you know, what’s going on with people that maybe you receive something you know that is not completely true, but come on, okay?

I share it with my with my network, and then things start to spread out, right? So, and this is what, more or less we are getting in our results. So our preliminary results on this, let’s say, sharp experiment that we have conducted in Poland, in Ireland, in Germany and Spain. I mean, what we obtain is like, like people is good detecting what is fake news and what is true news, right, and, and. But what is interesting is like, we get more result on the probability of resetting. And we have like some some interesting things about like people, like with more extreme opinions. Political opinions are those that decide to share more information on networks. And that is something that that is telling us that Be careful, that maybe this active, this activity by, you know, ideological people that is on the on they are on the extremes. These are maybe the ones that are like, you know, like sharing some information that, at the end, could be not completely true. So I just wanted to bring, it’s not a question fabiendo, it’s like, just more fit for thought on this topic that I think it’s really interesting and in the Democratic project we are working on this quite intensive.

Okay, thank you. Well, thank you for that thought. I think the the share of people, or the number of people who really believe fake news, et cetera, might be context sensitive, but okay, why do, why do they share? If I think another example, so if we go to school yards maybe a couple of years ago, I think many, a lot of students have seen jihadi videos on their on their mobile phone, and not because they they found it great or agree to the ideology because, but because it was really sensational, is, oh, look what I’ve got, right. So, and, and I think re, re sharing, retweeting, etc. It’s might also be motivated by this. Oh, look what I’ve seen. Yeah, what do you think about it? They don’t talk about what they themselves think about it, but they just share it and hopefully get some response, or they don’t get it, or the the it was so crazy, you know? And so I think there are many, there might be many dimensions why people do so, you know, they want to get, gain some credibility, because they have access to this kind of material or whatever.

And, and this might also be part of educational task in school, you know, to reflect on why I why I am retweeting, you know, and is it really necessary to do it, or could I stop it at a certain time in order to reduce negative impact, societal impact, Right?

VANINA: Thanks, Fabian, and thank you so much, Danielle, for your comments. Next we have Diana, and then we have Ben, and then I’m afraid that after that, we will probably have to end it would be up to an hour, but I will be publishing a blog from Fabian on the Agora where we can interact more with this topic in the following days.

Go ahead. Diana,

DANIELLE: yes. Thank you very much, Fabien and all of you for your contributions. I have many questions, but I would try to focus just on one you gave at the end of your presentation some examples how to deal with conspiracy theories in the classroom, so to say. And I was thinking, this is like a typical topic that is included in digital literacy, how to deal the ways to teach and but I always think, isn’t there not also the need to train students and pupils on psychological competences to make them more resilient to face problems of life in a better way? Because, as I understood, conspiracy theories are on on one side, a result of having fear of life because of the uncertainties. And if we train students to better deal with this, then this is like a first step, and should be, I think, included in digital literacy. I don’t know what do you think about this?

Well, thank you. Well, in principle, I agree, in a way, school, schools should prepare students for life, and that’s that should be part of it, how to deal with situation of of societal or personal crisis, but I also think that there are limitations for teachers can do. They are not trained psychologists, you know, to deal with individual crisis. In some schools, there are structures to students or teachers can make use of in such situations. And I think it’s, it’s really, it’s a huge task, if we take that serious, to make students resilient against crisis. But um, well, maybe there’s a middle way that that teachers can address particular questions and offer some ways to to deal with it, but to really practice or train.

Yeah, I think that that is too, a too heavy load for schools, in a way, but it might be different in different countries. So I’m, I wouldn’t say that. I’m an expert in that so, but it’s an interesting topic. We might take that as a question in further discussions, maybe when we talk to teachers and ask them if they think they can do it would be interesting to see the results. Thank you, Ben, you can go ahead.

BEN: Okay, thanks. Thanks so much. Tavina, it was really, really interesting. I was wondering, in terms of teachers, as you were speaking, I was wondering, how many teachers believe in conspiracy theories? To what extent are they engaged with some of those ideas and ways of thinking that are connected to conspiracy theory, and so that was on one side and on the other side, I suppose that if you know, if we’re asking teachers to to engage with conspiracy theories themselves in order to better understand the the issue and then to teach about it, is there a Need for teacher education to support and reflection on and, you know, critical thinking about those issues.

FABIAN: Yeah, well, thank you. Okay, if a teacher, him or herself is also following the conspiracy theory, okay, that makes it more difficult, and I think it’s a an issue for the group of teachers in a school to deal with that, to address the issue, to talk on a on an equal level to them, and also find out, okay, why is he or she following This idea? Why is it attractive? What’s behind it? Is there any help that can be offered and for teacher education? When, when the conspiracy theories around the pandemic came up in north Remus failure the Ministry of Education, they offered support and and teaching material on this issue,

if I remember that correctly, they even offer training classes short on shorthand. And I think in particular situations it’s necessary to do so. I don’t know if, at the moment, we have a very urgent conspiracy theory that is widespread, but with the pandemic, I think it was a good move to do that. That’s an issue of resources, of course, but as far as I know, it was really there were many teachers who used it and to to a certain extent, or some, of course, went deeper into it. But it was an offer really appreciated by teachers, actually. Thanks so much. That’s really interesting. Thank you.

VANINA: Thank you so much for everyone for joining. Today. We’ve had some really good participation. And most importantly, thank you, Fabian for such an incredible and insightful presentation that sparked such a great conversation and discussion.

We’re coming to the end of the ninth democracy talk. The 10th one will be taking place in October, and Diana will be hosting it. You can look out for the post on agora and to circulate that within your networks within the next week. In the meantime, Fabian will also be sharing a blog on the agora, so you can look out for that, and you’ll be able to comment and read more about this very important topic. Thank you to everyone for joining and thanks for a great return to the democracy talks. Thanks for having me. Bye, bye.

FABIAN Thank you. Bye, bye, bye.

DEMOCRACY TALKS 10 – Read Right, Read Rights: a School Project Using Children Rights to Develop Democratic Thinking in the Education Community


DIANA: Hello and a very warm welcome to our 10th democracy talk. My name is Diana Trevino. I will be moderating the session today, and we have the chance to listen today to Claudia solar, Susanna begerel Valentina Franco, you did busquet And Paul Quezada of the Catalan school, about the project Read Write. Read writes, which is a pilot project of the Democrat project also, and in the end, we will then have time for some questions we might have for a dialog. And so I warmly welcome you, Claudia, and also your team. And I’m very happy that you joined us today, and you are free to to turn on your camera so that we can see you.

SPEAKER 4: Diana, but you are here. You can hear us. Yes, yes. Okay, so let’s just start. Let’s continue. Okay, Paul and Juliet. Susana is a newcomer students, teacher and linguist, inclusive and COVID session coordinator. Valentina, Head of Studies, an English teacher too, and myself, Claudia, music teacher. And nowadays, head ministers. Today, we would like to share with you the collective school project, read write, read writes and provide some background to contextualize it. Okay, we are located in palace, a coastal municipality in Girona on the Costa Brava scholar is a state funded center with students age three to 12 years old. The low socio economic context of the municipality determines a lot our school as a maximum complexity, also, we host a very diverse range of cultures and languages, mainly from Africa, South America and Eastern Europe. In recent years, we have experienced. Experience a high degree of student mobility during the school year. Those elements are relevant as they greatly affect the question of success. The school’s official language is Catalan, and many students are not familiar with it, which makes learning more challenging for the reason, we have decided to focus on the basics. Additionally, two years ago, the Department, Department of Education implemented a new curriculum emphasizing the importance of transversal aspects known as vectors. One of these is the democracy vector. The Department also called for schools interested in participating in the Democrat program here, we are excited to keep learning and for forward, moving forward. Last year, while defining a project we designed Read Write. Read writes with a very clear goal to help improve learning and educational levels while promoting democratic values, we specify specifically focused on reading and children rights and responsibilities.

SPEAKER 5: Last June, we participated in the Dublin workshop, and we wanted to share this experience with the with the entire career led educational community, especially with the students and their families. For these two reasons, we thought it would, it would be interesting to to create a homemade video get giving a broad explanation of the project goals. Now we are sharing it to you. You’ll notice that it also reflects the small actions that has that have been happening at the school for Several years now, related to the democracy Vector.

You may have noticed that we try to include the students of all ages in the video, as we believe that respective participation and also reaching agreements are essential values to promote democracy. At the school, you’ve seen a three year old students learning to take speaking terms, to share, to learn about the world and their rights and also their duties to participate as environmental delegates or in the municipal children’s Council, no matter their age. We believe that all students have the opportunity to learn about democracy at our school.

SPEAKER 6: In the video, you have seen the proposal that we made last year, but now during this course, we are going to implement all the proposal. The main aim is to foster democratic values through the reading classroom and promoting democratic discussions, all the staff of the teacher staff is involved, and also all the students from all audiences, Paul said, are involved in the project. We will learn diverse attitudes, such how to request and respect to speaking terms, how to cultivate critical mindset and on other attitudes that make democracy possible, that make democracy possible, we’re going to integrate the implementation of read write, read writes project in the school reading plan. The reading plan is a document that we agreed upon all the teaching team, and we said the lines of how we read, how we teach to read in the school, and the modeling, the reading strategies that your teacher read, and all the strategies we Use in the different ages to foster reading skills. And this is the way we mix all together the democracy values into the reading plan. We understand education for democracy in a broad sense. In this case, we have chosen to focus on children’s rights and responsibilities as it is a topic close to the hearts of the children in our school, we will define different types of texts, comics, stories, posters, new articles and more and different formats, newspapers, magazines, social media, illustrated books and more for all levels within the reading plan, the selected readings will become part of the daily 15 minute reading time that all students have also we want to set the rules for a proper dialogical debate. This is difficult because we’re talking about kids from three years to 12, but the aim is to allow each class group to develop actions and reflections according to their needs and interests, and at the end of the process, maybe we have a proper dialogical debate. So. Some of the classes, maybe the the big ones, will even decide to implement a service learning project in our municipality, in our town, working with the local entities or NGOs, or associations that we are already collaborating with them to create connections with other schools to practice, to put in practice all this biological debate. Our goal is to progress from the democratic citizenship, competence of participation, solidarity and deliberation, to the competence of judgment, which involves comparing reliable information and interpreting it. Okay. This is our very high level goals. So we had to take into account evaluation and assessment during all the process. We’re going to take into account democratic competencies indicated in the Democrat program, but using coevaluation and self evaluation, but also aspects related to how we can implement the project. It means that we have the assessment. We are preparing the assessment for kids, but also we are preparing the assessment for us for two at the end of the project, have the feedback and maybe the improvements for the next years. We believe that also we have to give meaning to reading activities we already carried out in the school, and we also have already class assemblies. We have different practices to force reading like reading bodies, but we need to deepen. The difficult part is to deepen in democratic values and consolidate this as a school approach for us, we need to learn through cooperation and horizontal relationships among the students, and this is essential for us to build knowledge. So this is part also of the evaluation process. We also are proud to mention that this year, we have become part of the network of schools of the Department of Education in Catalonia that is breeding competence network, and it goes all together with our Democrat project.

SPEAKER 7: This project involves first that the teachers at our school need to clearly understand the project’s goals. When teachers know exactly what they want to achieve, they are not likely to succeed. That’s why we have set aside time, especially in this first term, to focus on this through discussions, agreement, agreements and training, and in January, we will start applying the project in the classroom. Second, we need to keep gathering and selecting books and materials on children’s rights and responsibilities, and we are reaching out to associations schools and other who have done similar projects so we can learn from their experiences. Lastly, it’s about building connections, raising awareness and creating a community. We have already started this at the beginning of the project. We got super from the conciliation of palace, and now we are working with pala fuj library, Jose Plan Foundation, Jose plaque Foundation, and known as you Bucha, all of which have previously worked with us on reading activities, and the last goal is to engage families and promote democratic awareness.

SPEAKER 4: Okay, well, we know we have very high expectations, like the school and the question on common community are really highly motivated, and we want to achieve the goals that set within the Read Write. Read Write project. We believe we can help raise students knowledge and make it clear that democracy requires effort. From our point of view, reading is a fundamental tool to work on it. In this sense, we fully agree with the quote from Margaret filler today, a reader tomorrow, a leader. We are currently organizing an exhibition also for the entire school year in the school hall. We have discussed the project also with radio palace, and we have an agreement with them to broadcast podcast and democratic readings that we do throughout the year, and articles and also articles for the fall of Fuji magazine now are being prepared. Moreover, soon at the school website, we will have a specific. Specific rear to our space for the project, and we are connected through the Agora of the Democrat program too. Okay, we are immensely grateful for the support and assistance we have recycled and continued to recite from the Democrat program, and very grateful also to entire using team. Thank you. Thank you very much.

DIANA: Yeah, thank you very much for your presentation, that you join us and that you share your experience with us. Is there any chance that you can turn on the camera? It would be so nice to see you, but if not, we just handle it in that way. We keep on trying. Okay, okay, so I would like to now open time or the floor for discussions or questions you might have. I took note of some questions, but I also invite you here in the zoom and also in the YouTube audience to address everything you would like to ask the team of carilette. I would like to start maybe with my first point, and I was wondering if you faced any challenges when implementing the project, because as far as I know, it’s, it’s you recently started to launch it, right?

SPEAKER 7: Yeah, the challenge lies in addressing such a job growth topic within the classroom. Teachers have the responsibility to select appropriate materials and clearly define the specific purpose behind their choices. We must also ensure that the students grab the message, understand the vocabulary and comprehend concepts like the right to peace and well being beyond that, we can see from news and mass medium for the reason, we believe that teachers I are key players, and time and training are essential to address this aspect.

DIANA: Yes, we have a question from Georgios and then Vanina, so Georgios feel free to start.

SPEAKER 5: And many thanks to the colleagues from the school. And I wanted to ask them, how long, how many hours per week do they dedicate to this, whether it’s part of the regular curriculum or it’s an addition, sorry if I missed it. If you said it, I didn’t register. And also, how do the kids respond in terms of being interested, staying on, or they see it as another obligation as part of the curriculum. Thank you.

SPEAKER 6: Okay, the project is so to be done during the reading plan time that it means that we have 30 minutes daily sessions. This is the reading plan. Also we have some actions that we can do during language workshops. And the connection within the curriculum is the reading skills, is to work on reading skills first, but then to work on democratic competence. So this is the connection with curriculum, but also to keep the students engaged the project once we have been preparing different materials, this is the way we choose different books with different kinds of formats and approaches to keep the students motivated. But also it’s important to take into account that we are in a socio economical background that makes the kids be aware of many, many, many social problematics. So this is important for us to as we say at the beginning, we are we have the label of maximum complexity school. This is because of our socioeconomic status, and it makes our students come from migration process, for example. And they know very well what is the what kind of difficulties that they can face during their lives. So this is a part that makes the project very, very at the end. And how do you say? I don’t know how to say, but it’s proper for us the project.

DIANA: Yes. Great. Thank you. Then Vanina, I think you you also have a question, and then karma, okay, yes, thank you.

SPEAKER 8:. And thank you so much for such a lovely presentation. When we were in Dublin, I remember I was in the room when you were presenting the project the first time, and it really caught my attention for the democracy talk. So, thanks again. I think, yeah. So, I guess my question is sort of coming off of the back of the other one. You said that a lot of these students, they come from backgrounds, you know, in Africa and Eastern Europe, so there’s obviously big linguistic and cultural differences, but everything is taught in Catalan, if I’m not mistaken, right? So I’m just wondering how you are able to surpass these challenges, or, like, where you’ve seen problems and how you aim to address them.

SPEAKER 6: Yes, we have different nationalities in our school, we have some 80% of of students that come from another countries, and then have a different language from Catalan. And this is the way we have the support, linguistic support classroom this and this year we have an improvement of this classroom. Susanna is the teacher of this classroom, and we introduce students of different ages to introduce them in a different way that they will join in in foreign language classes, we try to make all The teaching very meaningful for them, including topics of culture or Catalan culture or European culture too, because they come, as we said, most of them come from Africa. So they have a different culture, different traditions, or from South America, different culture, different tradition. They don’t come from, uh, see big cities or, or from schools with with high income. So we face all difficulties and we are used to the main thing is that here in our time, we are used to work with them. So we already have the strategies. Now, the thing with the project is that we find that we have to work on democratic values, because it’s a need for them, it’s a need for us.

SPEAKER 4: And in addition, you could explain also the network with other schools like ours that they have they share experience. And also talking, talking about the linguistic support,

SPEAKER 6: we said a newcomers, do you say we have the program specific program from newcomers, and they meet together. So you will have a project, a common project, with other schools with kids in the same situation. And they can share their experiences. They share their experiences as as they how they migrate to our countries, how the their customs from their countries, and they can share also their needs. So this is a background for us that is important to to make this project meaningful. Thank you. Okay, then, Carmen, your question.

SPEAKER 9: Thank you, Diana. I was well, Claudia and Tim, congratulations. I think you are doing something so nice, and it’s really nice. But I was wondering, because the project is very interesting, very useful. It helps at different levels the integration of migrant children, but also it also helps at democratic level and also at reading level, so many levels, I’m fascinated by the model you have. And I was just wondering, I know you’ve just said that you work with other schools. And I’m just wondering if you have started to tell schools in Catalonia and in other places what you are doing, how you are doing, and if you are actually giving tips to other schools to adopt or to. To adapt your experience to their own needs and realities. And I think that the model that you have developed is it can be very flexible. You are taking every single opportunity to do things, and it’s such an incredible project, Claudia, I really have to congratulate you.

SPEAKER 4: Thanks a lot. Karma for your support. Also, okay, we could explain about we are also imitated in potential. So I think Valentina could explain

SPEAKER 10: more in more confident English speaking.

SPEAKER 6: Yes, as we said, this year, we are participating in the reading competence network, and there we will have the opportunity to explain our project and also we are considering as a second step, because we are already working process, we are already implementing the strategies, and we need to review them with the Democratic team. We We are setting the indicators to assessment the product, to assist the project. And I think this is the second step. But now the first step, Strada says we will participate in in a form with breeding competence network.

SPEAKER 4: And also, also the zero step is nowadays, when we are sharing moments with families in common, community, education, COVID, school, no. And for that, we did the video last year, because if we want to set up a project, all the community has to know it. So it’s important that to share the goals and the strategies and the different activities or actions that we will take,taking into into account, and also as as

SPEAKER 6: a previous, previous step the school. And here in municipality, we have the children’s Council of the municipality, and there we have kids from other schools, and we have the kids and their teachers from other schools, so we can share our experience there too. This is a part of our democratic culture. And I think we have to boost this initiatives from the from our town, and I think this is a part where we can share to our experience.

SPEAKER 4: And in addition, also when we had meetings with and people, plan and Vito, tech, Public Library, all these entities, we had a fantastic meeting, and we agree that The importance of communicate this project to so we agree with some actions to have together. And okay, here at the school, we can do ABC, but there in other places, in pala Fauci, they will have also some other activities related with the project. For example, if you want to explain about the connection…

SPEAKER 5: things. Here in Brazil, we have thing called El Donald passport that consists of also, most of them are free activities, and this allows to children with and their families, also with very low economic capacity, to do lots of things and activities here in pala project and I don’t know, maybe some are for sports activities, other cultural or other in Jose PLA foundation or in the library, and it’s a very interesting thing that they have been doing this for a few years here.

SPEAKER 4: okay, in that sense, it’s an opportunity for all children, of all palafuje children, and for example, Joseph plus foundation said, Okay, we have some activities for this supported unota. So we can prepare some activities related to children, right? And we can also explain about your about your project. So it’s a collaboration that possibility that allows to bring us to know more about our project than here at the school.

SPEAKER 9: Are you keeping a memory log or whatever, and are you actually thinking about writing the experience and creating something like a report or a book, something

SPEAKER 4: secret, a secret goal, a secret telephone. Because, yes, after this meeting with the other entities, we agree, absolutely agree, that it’s important to write all the things we are doing okay, all the things we will be exposed in the hall at the school, but Also in the virtual space, in in the web, the website, the school website, because okay is a reading after a debate. But if the the classes want to go forward, to move forward, they could plan, organize, to do surveys, service learning project, service learning project with other entities or associations or within so we, we think that our project is there are some part, a fixed part, that is more academic, okay, But there’s another part that allows teachers and children to choose the path or the way, or they specific challenge. So we agree that it could be a project with a lot of different little activities. So all these things we we will write it for sure. And we have another idea that is too early to share with you now, because we are focused on on that also too, okay, we are doing things, and we want to share it with other schools and other communities. And also we want to know about previous experience, because there are a lot of previous experience in different places, here in here in Catalonia, for example, and now we focus in this subject, we have discovered a lot of things and places that we didn’t know that. So it’s it’s very interesting, and we want to integrate those experience also in our project. So for that, we, we said, Okay, the first term now, since now, since December, the implementation of the project is only focused on teachers, not in children’s because finally, if you want to have success with a project, teachers have. Have to know a lot what they want to achieve. So it’s a key to success of the project. for the success for the project. So for that, we said it’s important to take time to do it and have Esther learning, training, training, training assessments and different Yeah, and and connections and know about different experience, and now the moment we are here and going here, we have discovered a lot of interesting things. So it is a kind of hope, also no because we are not alone, share each other. Thank you very much.

DIANA: would have a comment in the chat from one of our participants, and it’s a comment and a question. I think it’s also very interesting. He mentions the video was amazing. This is one of the very few instances I have seen of small children understanding the values of democracy. But an issue is that happens is you can only truly appreciate democracy and the values behind it when you are exposed to other systems of autocracy. Is there some way the students are able to understand how non democratic systems are and see the problems in those

SPEAKER 6: the reality of our school and the background that we have in our town is important and allows us to make that possible. See, it’s important from them to take charge, to participate and say, I need to talk, I need to explain this, or I need to talk to somebody about my problem, my reality, and we are used to this. So the video reflects all these little moments that we have in our school that maybe are not common in other schools. In other schools, if I teach English, I arrive with my set of core curriculum work, and I said, Okay, today we’re going to work on to be there or actions, or sport actions, but no talking about the reality we have immigration process with most of them. We have problems with access to good nutrition. We have a program with milk and fruit for children. So we share these moments with them. Oh, today we have apples. Today we have cherries to chair at school, and these all are opportunities that make us work on on democracy in an implicit way. The thing with the project is to make all of these actions explicit, and also the value of

SPEAKER 4: of having a collective project for all the children in the school and also families, so Is is important for that the video data, when people want to record them, you could see the sense and and also They have seen each other on the screen after the video. So, okay, I have done something very important, because the school has has put my my face in a video and is in some subtitles, in English subtitles also. So it’s very important that so be awareness, awareness consensus, be aware about taking part in a collective project is is an. What way also to develop democratic values.

DIANA: Thank you. And I would, I don’t know if we have more questions from from our participants. If not, I would have my last question, and this is related to the long term sustainability of your project. Are you planning to implement this or integrate it in your school curriculum? Or what are you thinking of doing in order to keep this very important project you are running now, maybe for some years, or maybe also really, to integrate it in your curriculum, perhaps Valentina, you could explain about

SPEAKER 6: the yes, it’s a it’s a huge topic and a lot of work to do. And we have been doing a lot of work in this month. So it can be a single action. It can be, we don’t understand the project. That’s a single action this year, or this year, we are working on kids rights, and that’s all. And we are going to finish this now. Now the idea is to make this project the breeding plan project for all our school so we’re going to integrate. We are integrating now the reading reading about rights, kids rights, into the reading plan. So the reading plan goes from children from three to 12. So we had nine years of reading about kids rights, on democracy. They started with three years. They don’t read, they don’t but they can learn how to take terms, as you can see in the video, they can learn different words to talk about democracy. But it’s a huge process. You can do this during just one year. It has to be a long term project. And now maybe we started with a different idea to do just the project this year, but now the idea is to make the project to be the reading plan of our school.

DIANA: This is great. I really, totally support you. I must say, thanks a lot. No, well, this, these were my questions. I think we don’t have any questions more from from our participants. I really thank you very much that you joined us today, that you shared your experience in a very that we see a practical approach how democratic education can be implemented in school settings. And I wish you, and I think we all wish you all the best for the next month and also for the next years. And yeah, we will stay in touch, definitely. And before closing, I would like to announce our democracy talk the next one. Um, please feel free to join also if you can, and if you’re interested. This will take place on the 16th of October, and we will um, speak about the topic, citizens assemblies for children and young people. And this will be presented by um Democrat project partner, Benjamin Mellon of the Dublin City universe so but thanks a lot for joining us today, and all the best for you.

DEMOCRACY TALKS 11 – Citizen’s Assemblies for Children and Young People


DIANA: Hello and a very warm welcome to our 11th democracy talk. Well, my name is Diana Trevino. I’m project officer at the European University Continuing Education Network, and you can all turn on your cameras now if you want. And today, we invited Benjamin Mallon to present about citizens assemblies for children and young people and the implications for education for democracy. So Benjamin, I’m very happy that you joined us today, and yes, we will first see your presentation, and then afterwards, we will have a short conversation with you and address the questions we might have. So I think it’s a really nice topic that you will present to us today. So feel free to share your screen, Ben, and if you want, you can present yourself additionally. And yeah,

BENJAMIN: that’s great. Thanks so much. Dana, so it’s lovely to have this opportunity to to present so hopefully you can, you can all see the screen there. And so the piece of work that I’ll be talking about is a collaboration led by my colleague in Dublin City University, Derma torney, along with colleagues in DCU, Valerie Malay and colleagues in University College Cork, Katie Reed and cloda Harris, which has looked at children’s participation in citizens assemblies. And I’ll talk quite briefly about what those assemblies are and the piece of research that’s gone along alongside. And I’ll finish with some reflections on what that might mean for education, for democracy so I’ll begin just by showing just two minutes of a short video developed as part of an children’s and young person’s assembly that took part in Ireland in 2022 concerned with biodiversity loss. So I’ll show you two minutes of the video, and the video, and the longer version is available online for you to have a look at.

VIDEO

BENJAMIN: okay, so, like I said, the full version of the video and the website. I can share through the sort of democratic Democrat communications. But in short, the the piece of research that runs alongside the assembly is to explore the extent to which children and youth assemblies can support participation in deliberative democracy and also inclusion within wider democratic processes. We’re also interested in the role that education can play in terms of empowering and informing and empowering children and supporting their engagement with biodiversity loss, and the third part of it is around human rights, rights framework supporting transformation towards a healthy and just environment for children. So we undertook focus groups with two groups of children at the end of the assembly, and then we met again with them a year later. Conducted three focus groups with all of the children involved in the assembly, and focus groups with their parents and carers to find out more about their experiences have been involved within the assembly and their perspectives on sort of some of these wider democratic questions. So the presentation today is part of a paper which is currently under review in the in a journal, and it’s framed around the European Green Deal. So we were interested in how our children and this idea of citizenship conceptualized within the European Green Deal. So we recognize that there is this sort of space for citizen participation in the European Green Deal, and that runs alongside this idea of this child friend friendly culture in relation to EU policy making. And there are some questions around sort of the responsibilities of sort of individuals and groups within the European Green Deal, which does raise questions of where children might might fit in. And there is a small but increasing body of research which looks at the relationship between education and the European Green Deal, and then in terms of children’s assemblies themselves. So in the context of European Green Green Deal, they’re part of a climate pact. So there is this argument, or this suggestion, that the EGD will build on this ongoing series of citizen dialogs and citizens assemblies, which are taking place across the EU so the children’s assembly ran alongside an adult assembly that was taking place at the same time. And there have been a number of adult assemblies in Ireland in previous years. And the idea of citizens and youth assemblies is a relatively new idea. These citizens assemblies in their broadest form, seen as deliberative mini publics and seen as a central pillar of the European Green Deal. They’re recognized as being a space for vulnerable groups to engage with policies. But children are traditionally excluded. And we know from from research elsewhere, you know, children are traditionally excluded from lots of democratic spaces. So these assemblies, one took place in Scotland, children’s climate assembly four years ago now, and there have been another couple of examples globally. So from the findings, from the analysis of the the work that we did, we found and sort of two of the key things that I think are important in the context of this band discussion around the inclusion of children within decision making processes. So just got a couple of quotes from some of the children, young people that describe how they feel about this idea. So one of the participants said, adults just don’t want to listen to someone that’s younger than them, and they think that they’re more superior because they’re on the earth longer and added and kind of destroyed it while they were there. So this recognition that often participation and children’s voice is shut down in certain spaces from one of the other focus groups, we’re not really listened to. But here, within the context of the assembly, we are. We were here. We were given our opinions, and here we were given a space to actually voice what we think and what we want to see happen, and if children and young people aren’t going to be part of their own future, how can we possibly solve this? So there are these ideas of of inter general intergenerational justice, the importance of children’s voices in relation to the significant and complex sort of threat of biodiversity loss. And I suppose from the research, what we’re arguing is that such assemblies present a really important opportunity for involvement, which Laura lending has identified as really significant in terms of supporting article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, children’s right to participate. Children. To give their express opinions in terms

DIANA: of just a comment, the person who has turned on the camera, yeah, you can conclude.

BENJAMIN: So this sort of second of the themes that important in terms of the context of this paper, is around this deliberative process, and the purpose of this deliberative process leading to informed collective decision making. So recognizing the assembly and the deliberations that went on as part of that framework, recognizing the education component of it to support children’s understanding of complex issues, recognizing that the decision making wasn’t as individual, but was based on sort of collective understanding and collective ideas for action. So a couple of the quotes from one of the focus groups before we want to share our opinion, it’s really important to learn as much as we can and get educated. And this assembly was, I think, really well able to start this process in a really positive way. So also this recognition that this assembly was the start of the process. And I’ll talk to you shortly about some of the things that sort of kicked on from this process, from one of the other focus groups in the assembly. So this was actually the focus group with younger children. So the the age, I can’t remember that was mentioned in the video there, but was between seven to seven to 17 years of age. So the this was the younger group in the assembly. They take things that would like, usually be boring, like to learn about, and make it really fun to learn about and make like it’s easy to make new friends in it, and they just make it really fun to learn. So this idea around the importance of this, I suppose, active, participatory educational process underpinning that. And one thing that felt was very, really strong was this connection between learning and that being really fundamental to this informed collective decision making. So this final thing I was going to talk about, really, was then some of the actions that children had talked about and, and this was post the the assembly, so they talked about these actions. We felt like these were sort of different spheres of influence. And Laura Lendy, when she writes about sort of Article 12 and participation, talks about the importance of finding providing space for children and to express opinion, to support and scaffold their voice to provide an audience for those children and young people, and also to support that the influence for these views to be taken on board. And we felt like there were sort of four key spheres of influence. So in terms of the European Green Deal, mashing and tam talk about these sort of critical acts of citizenship, of critical acts of environmental citizenship. And we felt like these explanations from the children described these critical acts of citizenship. And Larkins talks about, you know, children maybe transgressing the boundaries by through their through their actions. So I suppose at the most local level, children talked about and actions within their families and within their immediate friendship groups. So one of the younger members of the assembly talking about going outside the house and put up a sign, save our planet. So I kind of protested a bit within schools, and there was some really important connections to schools as places where biodiversity learning had happened, but also where action and citizenship action could happen. So one of the members said, I was really lucky to be able to speak in front of my school and my peers, this is after the assembly, and spread the knowledge that was given here to educate more people on the work that we did, and the whole process of the assembly, others took this citizenship action further into community. So I kind of went to the leader of the tidy towns. So tidy towns is an organization that would do sort of litter picking and would be responsible for keeping a particular local areas tidy across Ireland. So this young person described going to the tidy towns and talking to them about the use of weed killer and describing the negative health impacts of this weed killer and how it can actually damage someone’s lungs. And also, it’s not just for biodiversity, it’s also for us. And then some of the older members talked about some, some of their sort of broader European and potentially, sort of global spheres that they were were thinking about and operating in. So they talking about engage. With biodiversity loss, this needs to be a global movement. It can’t happen in one country for global change to happen, this needs to be everywhere. This needs to be every child’s rights upheld, not just that in Ireland. It’s great that it’s here, but it needs to be everywhere, because there are some regions that are much more affected by biodiversity loss than ours. So finally, I suppose I was just thinking about, sort of reflecting on on that paper, on the research that we’ve undertaken, and in part on my sort of involvement within that children, young persons assembly on biodiversity loss, and thinking about what, essentially, some of the implications for education, for democracy, and potentially the Democrat project might be so in terms of, within the Democrat project, we have this framework for Responsible democratic competencies, so thinking about each of those in terms So starting with the idea about solidarity and participation and deliberation. I think the assembly provides maybe an important opportunity to make connections to some of the broader democratic processes that are happening and and potentially some of these broader European democratic processes. There’s also opportunities to think about what modeling of such an assembly might mean in a school context or in a broader school system, and it raises questions around inclusive deliberative models based on the these the randomized sample of children that were involved, there’s opportunities to engage with children’s multi level citizenship actions, thinking about how they take actions within their homes, within their schools, within their wider communities, and then national and regional, regional level, and maybe opportunities also to critique how citizenship and children’s participation is conceptualized in broader education policy. And then finally, just in terms of that, ideas of judgment and resilience and pinning this sort of competence framework for democracy, thinking about the opportunities for developing informed collective decision making in matters that are significantly affecting children, young people’s lives, and thinking about in terms of resilience, the huge challenge we face in terms of addressing biodiversity loss and recognizing the importance of having education for democracy as part of the response to biodiversity and the climate crisis. So I just have a there’s a series of different references there that were useful in terms of framing the paper and some of the stuff which I’ve, I’ve talked about there. framework for Responsible democratic competencies, so thinking about each of those in terms So starting with the idea about solidarity and participation and deliberation. I think the assembly provides maybe an important opportunity to make connections to some of the broader democratic processes that are happening and and potentially some of these broader European democratic processes. There’s also opportunities to think about what modeling of such an assembly might mean in a school context or in a broader school system, and it raises questions around inclusive deliberative models based on the these the randomized sample of children that were involved, there’s opportunities to engage with children’s multi level citizenship actions, thinking about how they take actions within their homes, within their schools, within their wider communities, and then national and regional, regional level, and maybe opportunities also to critique how citizenship and children’s participation is conceptualized in broader education policy. And then finally, just in terms of that, ideas of judgment and resilience and pinning this sort of competence framework for democracy, thinking about the opportunities for developing informed collective decision making in matters that are significantly affecting children, young people’s lives, and thinking about in terms of resilience, the huge challenge we face in terms of addressing biodiversity loss and recognizing the importance of having education for democracy as part of the response to biodiversity and the climate crisis. So I just have a there’s a series of different references there that were useful in terms of framing the paper and some of the stuff which I’ve, I’ve talked about there.

Within the Democrat project, we have this framework for Responsible democratic competencies, so thinking about each of those in terms So starting with the idea about solidarity and participation and deliberation. I think the assembly provides maybe an important opportunity to make connections to some of the broader democratic processes that are happening and and potentially some of these broader European democratic processes. There’s also opportunities to think about what modeling of such an assembly might mean in a school context or in a broader school system, and it raises questions around inclusive deliberative models based on the these the randomized sample of children that were involved, there’s opportunities to engage with children’s multi level citizenship actions, thinking about how they take actions within their homes, within their schools, within their wider communities, and then national and regional, regional level, and maybe opportunities also to critique how citizenship and children’s participation is conceptualized in broader education policy. And then finally, just in terms of that, ideas of judgment and resilience and pinning this sort of competence framework for democracy, thinking about the opportunities for developing informed collective decision making in matters that are significantly affecting children, young people’s lives, and thinking about in terms of resilience, the huge challenge we face in terms of addressing biodiversity loss and recognizing the importance of having education for democracy as part of the response to biodiversity and the climate crisis. So I just have a there’s a series of different references there that were useful in terms of framing the paper and some of the stuff which I’ve, I’ve talked about there. So I think I’ll leave it at that.

DIANA: I have some things I would like to address, but I also invite all of us here in zoom, but also in the YouTube channel to contribute any comment questions you might have, and we will discuss this here, but I would like to start Ben, and my first question, maybe it sounds a little bit basic, but I would like to hear your thoughts on this.

BENJAMIN: Yeah, thanks, Tanya. I mean, is there right to participate and have their views on on things that affect them taking into consideration? I mean, we, there are lots of examples of when children’s voice has been ignored or shut down, and the significant issues that have come with those silences. I think that at a broader level, with discussions around biodiversity loss, climate change and other global challenges, recognize the sort of intergenerational injustice within these issues. So the fact is that children, sort of born today are going to face the worst of these situations, having contributed least to the creation of the issues and the same for future generations. Now, you know, in some places there are increased attempts to engage with, you know, what future generations might face, but young people and younger children are in a similar situation and will be faced with. Things. So I think it’s of most urgency that their that perspective is considered, and then to go back to the rights they have a right to to be part of that discussion about how we address this. And in a way, ignoring their perspectives has sort of led us to this, the point that we’re in now. So there will be sort of two key things, I think Diana,

DIANA: I totally agree. I was also thinking about maybe possible challenges that would arise when you implement this type of school based assemblies, but also on a broader level, because you also mentioned this in one of the quotes of the children, that adults or older persons or decision making persons don’t take really serious what What young people or children have to say. And first of all, did you experience something of this happening? And the second question is, how can we affront this that? Well, that we face this because it’s, it’s, I think it’s a big problem.

BENJAMIN: Yeah, I mean, I suppose you know that there are, there are lots of you would hear lots of arguments around, you know what? Why children shouldn’t be included within decision making processes, which may be sort of lack of understanding, immaturity, the sort of emotional difficulty of dealing with discomforting information, I think that without sort of going into those in too much depth, I don’t think they they stand up to in terms of criticism. Because, you know, we have this question about whether adults understand biodiversity loss and therefore informed enough to make a decision around it. We have the fact that children are not oblivious to the fact that biodiversity loss and climate change are happening anyway. It’s part of their lives. We, we, we know from research that they can there’s implications to them already in terms of in terms of their health, in terms of their well being, and it’s not so much that I was aware of it, but the children spoke about not being listened to, and were very aware of that. I mean, I suppose the assembly is just one small, you know space where, you know, adults, through funding, have supported children to have this space. So there’s a delicate balance between, you know, supporting children within those spaces and allowing them that the supporting their agency to develop those spaces themselves, to find ways of having their voice heard, to develop their their own actions. You know, I know within heart Roger Hart within his ladder, sort of at the top of the ladder of participation, has this idea, if I’m thinking about it, right around this sort of adults and children working young people working alongside each other. I know there’s some critics, sometimes criticisms that maybe it should be children, young people working alone. But I think that the size of the issue and the significance of the issue requires a collective response, and often adults are in positions of power where they do have space to and opportunities to extend children’s influence and support that voice, but it’s delicate balance.

DIANA: we have a question from Karsten today

KARSTEN: surprise, surprise. So I only want to ask you if, if this is a sporadic event, or if, in Ireland, you have also used cow soils as a regular mechanism in cities

BENJAMIN: so that there are more and sort of formal stretches around, like a Don and oak, is it? And calling the know. So these children’s parliaments and bodies associated with that, the extent to which they’re sort of formally connected to the education system, you know that that probably is not, not so clear. And this particular assembly wasn’t connected formally to one of those mechanisms. So it was a broader, open call for participation, then around randomized stratified sample of children were were selected to be involved in the assembly, which follows the process by which adults assemblies work. So in an Irish context. If I get it right, I think 100 adults were randomly selected to be involved in the adults assembly. So I suppose maybe some of the the implications, I think, in terms of schooling, might be, you know, around things like student councils or representative bodies within schools. You know, how are they developed and structured? Who gets to be included, and what the mechanisms for that?

So it’s outside of that structure. And then I suppose, going forward, that there’s lots of potential that, you know the that such assemblies could run alongside adult assemblies. There’s potentially going to be an adult assembly around education. And for me, I think it would be really important that children and young people have a really clear space to contribute to that discussion considering the centrality of education for their lives. Now, the extent to what what to which it’s connected to the adult assembly or something different, or runs alongside. You know, I’m not sure it remains to be seen. Does that answer your question?

KARSTEN: only there is here in Catalonia, by law all the cities needs to create a use Council, but not none. All cities have done it. I want only to see if there’s a connection to this, this type of of mechanism, similar mechanism in Ireland, and

BENJAMIN: in terms of that sort of regional or city based, not that I know of, although I am aware of the some of the things that the children from the Assembly went to was engagement with local councils or city city councils to in Their in the locations that they came from. So there were those connections which came sort of through the assembly, but less of a of a sort of formal structure involving children, young people, although it’s increasingly that this particularly drawn on Laura Lundy’s model, that of space, voice, audience and influence. You know that’s within Irish policy around sort of children and young people now, so there’s a push for it. I know my colleague in geography education, Joe Eszter, does some really interesting stuff around children’s involvement in planning processes, which maybe isn’t sort of another connection to potentially sort of government government processes and the involvement of children within those processes,

KARSTEN: yeah, there’s also these, these UNICEF initiatives for children friendly cities where they promote also use councils in the cities, only to mention this at the end.

DIANA: Okay, Ben, we have another question in the chat from Vanina. She asks, first of all, she thanks a lot for your presentation, and she has asked, How can youth assemblies address complex issues such as gender and racial discrimination, and how do these intersect with climate change and biodiversity loss, ensuring that marginalized communities are included in environmental justice efforts?

BENJAMIN: Okay, thanks, Vanina. I’m glad that. I’m glad it was of use. It’s a really, really good question. I mean, I suppose I talked about the sort of the intergeneration, intergenerational injustice. And part of for me, around the the justice piece is that there are groups and groups of people which include children, but include people in lots of different spaces who must be included within decision making processes. I think that in terms of the assembly, so one of the we tried, we had this randomized, stratified sampling to try and give that broader, sort of representative approach to the assembly, which was, I suppose, a challenge, recognizing also that I suppose people, and particular groups of people, have been shut down over a long period of time, so traditionally excluded from places. So the extent to which they they’re going to want to engage, or even realize that they have the right to engage, whether it’s be through school or other mechanisms, is very difficult, so I don’t think one off process is and necessarily good enough to address those challenges. So there has to be ways of connecting to communities, of recognizing where there are disparities and inequities in relation to these issues. And, and I suppose that’s where I would see the the importance of schools. And I mean at the most basic level, you know, making sure that those places are inclusive, that children have access to schooling and are not excluded from schooling. And then when they’re in those places, that those places give them space to to to engage, and the teachers are, you know, recognize historical injustices and working to try and address them, and as part of a wider education system, which needs to address those, those things too. So I think that there’s potential in terms of this type of approach, but recognizing that it’s not enough to in terms of addressing, you know, long standing systemic issues.

DIANA: Okay, thank you. Just also has a question, thank you.

SPEAKER 8: Thank you very much, Ben for your presentation, and it’s good to see that there are similar things happening. Also here in Greece, there is a project funded by the EU called Arsinoe, and with the University of Athens, there, we work on having two young people’s assemblies every six months, or most, which is students of high school and then also university students who go around the area of Athens, and look for things that can be done need to be done for climate action that’s more specific. And then they put them together in a declaration or decision that they make a consulting among themselves, and they take the proposals to the municipal authorities or the regional authorities there. So I think it’s similar, and I don’t know if there will last longer, but it is part of this four year, I think, project. So for a while it’s happening, and it’s good to hear that in Catalonia, they’re doing it for in every school, something like like that. But so is there such a prospect in Ireland, or, you think, to be generalized in Europe, that’s one thing. And the second is, when you say that, okay, the children have the right to be part of decision making, of course, but is there also always a process of teaching them, because everybody wants to be part of decision making without researching first. You know, we’re learning first there without consulting with experts and all these things, if we encourage too early decision making instead of learning or thinking, we just we may encourage traits of human nature that are, yeah, disconnect decisions with with science and other things. So how do you deal with that, if you have thought about it in that project? Thank you.

BENJAMIN: Thanks, George, us. I mean, I would say that in relation to that we, I think we’re there in terms of the the attitudes to science, and, you know, we saw from the COVID pandemic, and we see from, you know, some responses to climate change, there is that disconnect already. I think that’s part of, you know, children’s lived experiences are there. They’re having to deal with misinformation, disinformation, you know, all of those things. I think that the there is an important role for education within it.

I suppose that that you have the challenge of that there’s the sort of formal education side of it, and the role that formal education can play. And I suppose there’s even in terms of biodiversity loss, it is contentious the types of actions that are proposed. You know, we can see that across Europe in terms of some of the farming protests and other things that have gone on. So there is a need for education around it, but I suppose there’s also a need for processes which are more democratic and participatory. So children, young people, have the experience of working together to recognize that when we make a decision, we’re not making it necessarily on what is going to benefit us most, but what we think would serve maybe the majority of people, or those people in most need or a situation or address a situation that is really significant and important. So there’s part of the there’s the process and and, yeah, the educational part, it needs to, yeah, to be at the center of it. But I would say that that’s the same for adults as well. And you know, then you got to move into the space where supporting through critical thinking to deal with how we deal with online sources. What information do we trust or do we not trust? How we deal with conspiracy theory and all the other stuff around you know, how people learn about an issue and and then also maybe some of the deeper questions around what we value and. And what type of future would we like, whose voices included in this process, and who, who isn’t, and who should we try and bring into this process? But for me, I mean, I’m biased, because I believe strongly in that the value of education, but I would say education at the center of it. Thank you,

DIANA: yeah, thank you. Ben, I would like, I don’t know, I think we don’t have more questions, but I would like to come to my last thought about your presentation. And I think, really, if we have global challenges, and if we want to be that people, and especially children, that will face these realities in the future. If we want them to to become aware, then the problem needs to be more reachable for for children. And I think what you presented the project makes this possible. And as I understood, there’s also a lot of learning involved about biodiversity in Ireland, yet in this, in this concrete example. And so I think this is the best way, in order to to train or to educate children in a way that they realize what is happening and to foster action of them. So this, these are my last thoughts. Maybe you want to have a last comment Ben, but I think, yeah, it was great.

BENJAMIN: Yeah, thanks, Dan, and thanks to everyone for listening. I mean, I suppose the maybe the final thought I had, and this maybe is connected to both cars and George’s point as well. A bit is around, you know? Well, what happens when the government isn’t listening? What happens when the government isn’t doing, you know? And I think that some of the stuff around justice does it consider, you know, legal approaches which children are taking, and, you know, to hold governments to account when, when their end of the bargain isn’t being upheld. So I think that’s part of the process as well. You know, it’s wonderful to have these calls to action, but I think then there’s a collective responsibility to to ensure that these things are done. And it goes wider, much wider than that, that group of children and young people,

DIANA: yes, thanks, America, yeah. And then there’s now a last question was, which is totally related to your comment. The question is, How could such assemblies be scaled up, you know, and, but I don’t know if you can answer this now. And money,

BENJAMIN: I think that, you know, this is, this was funded by a government department, so, and it was supported by a lot of, you know, committed people and and committed children and young people and the people who support them their families. So that, you know, I think there’s possibilities in terms of, you know, within an Irish context, there’s increasing sort of Student Councils and school based engagement with with these type of things, green committees, those type of spaces. So I think it might be more of a case of looking at where there’s really opportunities for connection between these assemblies and what’s already happening at grassroots level, and bringing together very, you know, teachers who are very committed, schools who are very committed, and young people who care deeply about this issue. So I think in different contexts, it would look, you know, look very different, but I think that there’s sort of lots of hope in terms of what, what is out there and already going on.

DIANA: Okay, thanks a lot for your presentation, for your thoughts, and now in our dialog, in the end, I hope that you also will join our next democracy talk on the 13th of October, and we will then have the chance to listen to Valeria Damiani of the Nusa University of Rome, and she will speak about the topic the school as a democratic learning environment on the example in Italy. So I think it will be also very interesting. But first of all, thanks a lot to all of you for joining, especially to you Ben for presenting, and I hope to see you soon on the 30th of October, again. Thank you, Mayor.

DEMOCRACY TALKS 12 – The School as a Democratic Learning Environment


VANINA: Hello everyone, and I’m so excited to welcome you to our 12th democracy talk with us. Today we have Valeria Damiani. She’s based at lumza University in Rome, and as you saw on the speaker card, Valeria will speak about the school as a democratic learning environment, promoting a whole school approach to civic and citizenship education in Italian primary and lower secondary schools. Valeria just briefly, and she can go on and introduce herself in more detail, she is the principal investigator of the prin 2022 project, which discusses schools as a democratic learning environment, promoting civic and citizenship education through the whole school approach, essentially what she will be talking about here today. And I’m very happy to welcome Valeria, who will join us in discussion with my co host here, Diana Trevino, welcome Valeria.

VALERIA: Thank you, Vanina, and thank you all for this invitation. I’m very happy to be here. I’m I teach research methods and education at lumsa University in Rome and as you said, I’m leading this group of researchers for this project financed by the Ministry of Education in in Italy. The print projects are those projects that the Minister, I mean, the ministry, considers projects of relevant interest at the national level. So I will share my screen now. Presentation, okay, so the goal of the project is to measure and work with schools on democratic learning environments for fostering civic and citizenship education. Before talking about the project itself, it is important to provide you with a picture of what civic and citizenship education is in Italy. We often call it in our country, Cinderella subject civic and citizenship education because it is a subject that usually has not, not a strong importance within the curriculum. Another aspect that did not help in providing civic and citizenship education with a strong relevance is that there were, there have been several different educational reforms that have been undertaken throughout the years, and these reforms unfortunately led to uncertain results in terms of efficacy in terms of teaching and assessing, assessment practices. So the scenario of civic leadership education in Italy is characterized by a wide range of guidelines that in the last 15 years have been released by the Ministry. This, of course, have caused a lot of work, and, let’s say, also have disturbed the work of the schools. And most of these guidelines, of course, are focused on several declaration of principles in relation to content areas, skills to be developed, competencies to be developed within the Civic and citizenship education curriculum that unfortunately have been unfulfilled in in school practice. So we observe a gap between the national regulations and this continuous release of national regulation on civic and citizenship education and what schools do in relation to this educational area. For example, we have the this project started within a legal frame, legal framework, which was low 92 released in 2019 that we introduced civic education as a separate subject within the Italian curriculum school curriculum. But now in September, we have other new guidelines and. Just released at the beginning of September 2024 that change the normative scenario and then forced us to rethink or reconsider the project within these new guidelines. So it took only less than five years for the law 92 to be established, and schools were just beginning to be to be acquainted with this new law. And then now for this new school year, they have to start all over again, planning, organizing and delivering civic and citizenship education. So what is the actual scenario at the moment in Italy, civic and citizenship education is a separate subject, but it is delivered cross curricularly. So it has its own mark in the report card. But basically all the teachers of a single class can be involved in delivering civic and citizenship education, so there is no dedicated teacher to it. The teachers that can be involved in the subject are usually the ones of Italian language, history and geography. But again, it’s up to the single class to decide what kind of teacher what kind of subjects to to involve the thematic areas that were included in law 92 where Italian Constitution sustainability. So the agenda 2030, and digital citizenship and this new law included additional areas pertaining to national aspects of citizenship. So within this complex scenario This project aims to is focused on the whole school approach for civic and citizenship education. So our reference framework are the studies conducted by the Council of Europe on the whole school approach and in general reference framework of competence for democratic culture, the IEA ICCs study, so the international comparative study on civic and citizenship Education, developed by the IEA, and, of course, all the reference related to citizenship competence, so the Lifelong Learning competences from the European Union. What is the idea, the rationale underlying the project? So, the school is intended as a democratic learning environment that can itself be a scenario, a place where students can experience and practice citizenship competence at different levels. And these levels, according to the literature, are basically three so the teaching and learning the classroom level, the school management to the possibility for students to be engaged in school activities, in school decisions, in establishing the school rules and the cooperation between the school and the local community. So these are the three main strengths that have been considered in in this in this project. So our goal, our general objective, is to promote democratic learning environments through the whole school approach. So we, of course, are interested in delivering with schools civic and citizenship education activities that are strongly related to the three dimension of the whole school approach. And at the same time, we are interested in considering the whole school approach as a tool for promoting civic and citizenship education itself, as in in schools. This is, this is, of course, very challenging within the national scenario I have just described, because the focus is on participation of an active engagement of students. And that is an aspect that that unfortunately is, let’s say, not explicitly, explicitly stated within our national guidelines, but it is itself a very important dimension of citizenship competence and citizenship education as a whole. So. The project is divided into two phases. In the first phase, we carried out an analysis, an in depth, qualitative analysis of the whole school approach in six Italian schools, two in Rome, two in Bologna and two in Verona, University of Bron looms and University of Bologna and University of Verona are the three university that form the the Consortium for this for this project. So the schools are eszterdi comprensiri in Italian. That means that our schools that comprehend both primary students and lower secondary students.

We so the first phase of the project, we conducted six multi perspective case studies that included interviews with the principal and the school had the person who is in charge of civic and citizenship education at the school level, which is called who’s called the referente, it is the person who has the responsibility for coordinating all the Civic and citizenship education activities at the school level and to organize the delivering of the cross curricular subject and focus group carried out with the teachers at primary and local lower secondary in primary and lower secondary school. In addition to this, we have also administered one questionnaire for primary school teachers and students, and one questionnaire for slower secondary teachers and students in order to go relevant aspect of the whole school approach across the school. So it was important for us to gather data at the general level on the perspective from students and teachers in relation to the three dimensions of the whole school approach. These multi perspective case studies will form the basis of the phase two of the project that is the school improvement plans. In this year, we have just started phase two. We will carry out in service teachers, professional development activities in the six schools that took that took part in phase one on promoting silicon citizenship education using a whole school approach. So on the basis of on the basis of the results from the multi perspective case studies, we will carry out these in service, teachers, professional development activities. What are the main results of the projects we are drafting at the moment, six research reports on the whole on the whole school approach. Each report will be focused on one school participating in the project. At the end of the project, we will draft the toolkit for schools that is intended as a self assessment tool on the whole school approach. So the idea is to promote the sustainability of the project through the realization of this toolkit for schools that are interested in measuring their degree, let’s say, of their kind of use of the whole school approach within their their institution, And then finally, the development of guidelines on school organization and the school design to enhance the whole school approach in the first cycle of its way of education, so a sort of document that can help policy makers in including this relevant Part of civic and citizenship education within our national guidelines, or more in general, when talking about civic and citizenship education in in our country. So this is the structure of the project in general. So we started from a desk review on the whole school approach, and we collected existing tools for measuring it at the school level. These tools are related to course, for example, ICCs, teacher and student questionnaires, questions and. Scales on school and classroom climate, for example. So we developed our theoretical framework, and then we carried out the multi perspective case studies in six first cycles schools, so primary schools and lower secondary schools. These schools were selected on a base considering their degree of involvement in silicon citizenship education activities. In particular, we have considered the number of projects that these schools carried out with external organization in the field of silicon citizenship education. So we considered the degree of openness to the school, of the school to the local community, which is one of the three dimension of the three dimensions of the whole school approach. But it was the the aspect that could be measured considered more easily as a rationale for the selection of the schools. So we have drafted the research tools and conducted the case studies, and we are now carrying out qualitative and quantitative analysis. So analyzing the interviews, the focus groups and the questionnaire data at the same time, once we have finalized the case studies, we will draft the research reports and start thinking of the toolkit for schools, and then we will present the results of these reports in an online seminar involving all the teachers of the six schools participating in the project. One of the outputs of the project is also the possibility for schools to stay in touch, so networking activities between schools that can help them in sharing best practice, but also challenges and points of view on silicon, citizenship education. And then the second phase, the creation of so the in service teacher trainings, we will create working groups at school levels so see they can citizenship education, as I said, is across a curricular subject. So it is crucial that teachers work in team, and then we will work closely with schools in you know, fine tuning the training activities in order to meet their needs and to be in line with the characteristic of the school and their curriculum and the organization and so on and so forth. Finally, at the end, we will drop the guideline. So as I said, we have developed the questionnaires for teachers, all teachers in primary and lower secondary schools. These questionnaires were addressed all teachers and then students. Questionnaires administered only to students at fourth and fifth grade and to students at sixth and eighth grade. This is because fourth and fifth grade are the last two grades in in primary school, and sixth grade is the first grade in in lower secondary school. So we also wanted to know what happened between, you know, the trend in the in the transition between primary school and lower secondary school. As I said, these two kind of schools are under the same organization, Institute of comprehensive in Italy. So there is one school principal, for example, for primary school and lower secondary school. So it was important to understand what happened, what happens in the transition. On the other hand, we decided to administer the questionnaire on the whole school approach and the Democratic learning environments to all teachers, because all teachers, independently from the fact that they teach civic and citizenship education, can contribute to the development of democratic learning experiments. The questionnaire included the section a separate section only for those teachers who are involved directly in the teaching of civic and citizenship education. And this section is related to teaching methodologies, assessment strategies and so on. But the. The main structure the of the questionnaire is, is was taught for for teachers, and then we carried out semi structured interviews with the school head and the referente, the person in charge of syndicated leadership education and the focus group protocols with teachers. We administered the questionnaires last spring, and also we conducted at the same the same time the interviews and the focus groups with teachers, primary and lower secondary. So what are the main topics? What were the main topics of the interviews. The interviews and the focus groups were organized across the same subject areas, let’s say the same topics, in order to have a sort of triangulation between the point of views of the school heads the different so the person in charge of silicon, citizenship education and the teachers, of course, when interviewing the school heads, the focus was on the school as a whole, on the composition of the school, on the organization of the curriculum, on the implementation of Syriac and citizenship education at the general level, and on the reflections and practices in relation to democratic learning environments, which is something that Italian, or at least the school heads we interviews were not very familiar With. And of course, we also asked them for interests and needs for the in service teacher training, the interview with the person in charge for civic and citizenship education at the school level, of course was mainly focused on the organization of the cross curricular implementation of civic and citizenship education. Whether they were teaching approaches and assessment strategies established at the school level, his or her role as a person in charge, that is not easy, since he or she has to cooperate and let the colleagues at the school level work together. And this is something Italian teachers are not, again, very familiar with, especially in secondary education. And again, we also asked this referente for learning needs, for the in service, teacher training. And finally, the focus groups we carried out with teachers were mainly related to classroom practices for civic and citizenship education. So the activities carried out at the at the classroom level, but also their perception of classroom climate and student participation at classroom at the classroom level, and the relationships at the classroom level and the student participation at the school level. We also asked questions in relation to formative assessment practices and strategies adopted by the teachers, because we thought, in line with what the council in line with the Council of Europe, research on this that democratic learning environments also pertain the dimension of teaching. So democratic teaching is teaching that, for example, considers the importance of sharing the learning objectives at the beginning of a lesson, provides feedback, relevant feedbacks to students, share the evaluation and the assessment criteria with students. So the dimension of democratic teaching was operationalized within the construct of formative assessment the questionnaire, finally, we have organized them in four sections work for students and teachers. The first section is related to background information on age and gender, but also, for example, for students, their discussion and interest in civic issues, their sense of civic self efficacy, for example, the participation in voluntary activities outside the school. Then there is a section, a session, a section related to a classroom level. So democratic learning environment at the classroom level. So in this session section, we asked for students in board meeting, classroom activities, the formative assessment, the classroom climate and classroom relation. Both from the students and the teacher point of view. Of course, the questions were differentiated on the basis of the the age of the school and the primary and lower secondary level. And then there is the school level section, which we asked about students involvement in school activities, school climate and relation, and the last one on civic and citizenship education, which kind of activities, the topics, the methodologies adopted and the assessment strategies for teachers, and the activities actually carried out for students, and the opportunities to learn they have. This is the number of respondents. We got about more than 200 teachers in primary and lower secondary schools and more than 1000 students in primary and lower secondary schools for the six schools involved in the project. And finally, our next steps, we will carry out next week webinar with the schools, with the for presenting the results. And then we are again planning the in service activity, the turning program with the for the teachers and these training activities will start in November, along with some online workshop and at the same time, we will continue carrying out the qualitative and quantitative analysis, mainly secondary analysis. And in october 2025, we will release the toolkit and the guidelines. So thank you for your attention.

VANINA: Thank you so much. Valeria, this was incredibly interesting, and I’m sure it was very useful to all of our participants here on Zoom, and hopefully to anyone that was watching on YouTube. I’m going to go ahead and ask the first question, as we usually do, and then I’ll open up the floor to anyone else who would like to ask Valeria any questions. So you have some time to write anything down if you’re interested in asking I was more so curious to hear if you can discuss about any measurable impacts on student engagement and performance in regards to the whole school approach, and if you’re able to discuss how those are generally measured,

VALERIA: we asked about students involvement in classroom activities, for example, the choice of textbook materials, the possibility to participate in establishing the classroom rules, be sharing the possibility of discussing with the Teacher about the assessment criteria, for example, at the classroom level and at the school level, we measured the extent to which students are involved in decision making processes, for example, whether they have their say in deciding about regular daily activities at schools, for example, how the break is run, or how the library is the opening hours of the library and whether students have the possibility to have their say In deciding which activities can be conducted outside the schools or school trips, and whether they find whether they feel their voice is heard for the most important matters at school, Preliminary results show that basically there is kind of a gap between what teachers teachers think about their students involvement and what their students perceive they actually so students, teachers, for example, are more willing to say that they the rules have been the school rules, Mostly the classroom rules are the result of a shared discussion with students, while, on the other hand, half of the students reported that they have they couldn’t. They haven’t been both in establishing the classroom goal. So this the perception of participation at classroom level differs from teachers and and students. The participation at the school level is instead more difficult to measure because basically in primary and lower secondary school in Italy, there is no participation. Been established in the guidelines, in the national guidelines, so it is something up to schools to implement. So we have schools that are interested in this topic that have autonomously decided to carry out activities in order to promote student engagement at the school level. But actually, they are not asked to do so by the national guidelines. So it is something extra, let’s say, more difficult to measure.

VANINA: Yeah, I was about to say, I’m sure it makes it more difficult to measure. Then thank you so much for answering that. It’s definitely enlightening, and I think it’s something that should help everyone, especially those in the Living Lab projects in the different countries. I wanted to open up the floor to anyone else that had any questions for Valeria, you can raise your Georges. You can go ahead.

DIANA: Thank you very much, Valeria, thank you, Nina. Also, Valeria. We met in Cyprus, where there was this right, good to see you again. And if you want to tell us more about this network that you convene, but, but I wanted to ask a question. In this case, we have our project, a Democrat project, which somehow it is complementary to what you’re doing. You’re focusing more, it seems, on creating a democratic environment for learning for children, and through that, you expect them also to learn democracy in practice, what we do also for we focus more on competencies, what the outcome of whatever methods are used can be reflected in the children that leave school, in terms of democratic competencies and whether they can really know how to participate, inclusively, including others also there they can judge, especially in a bit of fake news, and they receive different circumstances. So I think you are approaching from different ends, but we meet somewhere. And do you see any synergies? Of course, yeah, I could explain more the project and know how familiar with it. Thank you.

VALERIA: Yes, of course, our focus is also related to citizenship competence. So in order to implement or to design activities that deal with citizenship competence, we firstly need a scenario, so the experiences that can help students in deploying those knowledge, attitudes and skills that are related to citizenship, competence and our scenario Is the school itself. So how to exploit the school experience in a democratic way, in order to promote citizenship, civic citizenship, competence. So first of all, through participation and engagement inside the school, but also outside the school, but again, also in experiencing a teaching and learning that is democratic, so adopting those strategies that can help students in practicing and living democracy, also through the their learning. One of the aspects that was, let’s say, not, not central, but it is included again in the questionnaire, is self assessment, which is an aspect that is also present in the Council of Europe research. So when we talk about democratic learning environments, it we also talk about the responsibility that students take in order to accomplish a task and to take care of the school environment, but also of their learning, because their the learning is their first responsibility. So when we want to talk about, you know, developing young citizens, future citizens. The first thing is to make them responsible, and the first thing is, since we are in schools, to make them responsible in relation to their learning. So formative assessment and self assessment are two precious tools that can be used in in this in this view, and unfortunately, are not that used in in school, in school and classroom practices, and especially in in secondary, secondary schools. So. The Switch is to consider all the different school aspects that are implicitly addressed within the school experiences, across a perspective of civic and citizenship, education, development, the the the interviews and the focus groups highlighted that teachers and school heads have dealt with this aspect, with these topics, on a different, wide range of occasions, but never within you Know, an organized program or structure focused on citizenship education, so there is something that happens in schools, but implicitly and in an unstructured way.

VANINA: Thanks Valeria, and thank you, Georgios, for your question. Next up, I see that Carsten. You have a hand raised. You can go ahead. Yeah,

GEORGIOS: I have a more basic questions. Have you mentioned that you’re working with six schools? The questions comes up, how you selected the schools, or if they are participating voluntarily, and what? What what type of schools, if they have experience with democratic procedures or democratic environments and Civic Educations or not? Thank you. Yes,

VALERIA: as I said, we chose. We considered one aspect of the whole school approach in order to select the school that was the links with the community. So the schools that we selected are schools that have carried out several projects within the community. For example, the schools in northern Italy, in Bologna and Verona have carried out activities related to the student council with the municipality or the schools in Rome have been part of projects carried out at the city level, city level Rome. Live in Rome related to school that open to the local community, so schools that were open also in the afternoon for carrying out activities with the local community. So we selected schools that were, let’s say, engaged, already engaged, on one aspect of the whole school approach, which actually was the easiest aspect to consider for the selection. As you know, the school participation, the school management, as I said, it is very difficult to to measure, and it is something new for our school, so we couldn’t consider that dimension for the selection and the teaching and learning approaches. Of course, can be measured only once the school agreed to be part of the study, so for a general, you know, selection, we considered only one dimension of the whole school approach, that was the engagement of the school within the local community.

VANINA: Thank you for that, Karsten, and thanks for your answer. Valeria, I see next we have Diana with her hand raised, yes,

SPEAKER 5: hello, Valeria. And thank you very much for this very interesting project you presented. And as I understood, it’s still ongoing, but I was wondering, do you integrate any feedback from teachers or students, for example, regarding the assessment, if they feel this, these are the right questions to ask. And do you use any feedback to redefine your tools you you develop for assessing the competencies?

VALERIA: We carried out a small trial try out with some teachers and students in order to fine tune the the questions. We have especially difficulties in adapting the questions to primary school students, because most of the tools that we found were related to students in secondary schools or were related to context, for example, American contexts that are very different from our organization of our school system, so many of the topics that were addressed were not applicable in our in our country, so we we had the need to carry out this little trial, which was a thinking allow. But basically with the 10 or 15 teachers and the 10 or 15 students at primary, lower secondary level, in order to understand the the comprehension of the of the questions, and whether the question went in line with the with what happened in the school and can be understandable. So yes, we did it. Thank you.

VANINA: Thanks. Diana Ben, you can go ahead and ask your question.

SPEAKER 6: Thanks for Nina, and thanks so much, Valeria. Really, interesting. And the question I had, I wondered whether you’d come across any sort of competing commitments in terms of whole school approaches. So are there? Are there other, yeah, whole school focuses that schools are having in the context that you were researching it,

VALERIA: not quite sure I understood your question correctly, but the whole school approach is something, let’s say, new for teachers and school heads. So it is something, basically they have never heard about it, so we firstly try to explain it to them through the idea of democratic learning environments and citizenship confidence. Of course, this is something very challenging. Schools, as I said, in Italy, we have this plethora of national reforms, and teachers and schools are asked to implement different kind of citizenship education every five or seven years. So it is a Cinderella subject. It is something that schools are, let’s say, afraid of delivering, because it is something confused at the national level. It is something complicated, because I believe that citizenship education is indeed a cross curricular subject, and this itself makes it very difficult to implement in a school that is structured on it is based on disciplines, so at primary level less, but basically the school organization is organized through disciplines, so when you have to implement a cross curricular subject, schools are in trouble. So I don’t know if this could be a competing interest, but this is the feeling we got when we talked about this, this topic, and, yes, I don’t know if this answers your question, yeah,

SPEAKER 6: yeah, it did. I suppose, in the, in the Irish context, I’m involved in a project, and we’re looking at whole school approaches, and we’re, we’re finding that some schools are already doing whole school approaches in terms of intercultural education. Some some are doing whole school approaches in terms of sustainability. So we’re finding that it’s not that there are sort of challenges in terms of the amount of different whole school approaches some schools are doing.

VALERIA: But for us it was, you know, a new area, completely new area. The link that could be recognized by school was the competency then, because our national guidelines for Italian language, math and everything is strongly connected to the idea of the Lifelong Learning competencies of the European Union. So basically, all the teachers know what a competence is. The problem is that to deliver a competence oriented approach in a school, we need to work, you know, cross curricularly, and we need to work with task and situation. So the difficulties are the same, related to, you know, civic citizenship, competence, so that was the aspect that was most familiar to them, but basically, this is something new for for them. Thanks so much.

SPEAKER 5: Yes, I have maybe my my last question for you. Valeria and I addressed this already to other experts that presented projects. How do you plan to promote, so to say, your results when you finish your project? And how do you plan to communicate, maybe also, your results to policy? Acres in education in Italy.

VALERIA: Well, of course, through the traditional channels of dissemination, so seminars and, you know, the conferences at the national, international level. What we would like to see is the growing of a network. So we are working on this, on this aspect between the six school it’s a small qualitative study, but it goes in depth to analyze the school organization and, yes, and climate of these democratic environments, of this, of these schools. So what we would like to know is to put the schools in contact and check whether the the activities that we will carry it out with the through the teacher training will be will not end with the end of the project, but will continue to be implemented in schools, so a sort of follow up between the schools themselves, but also with us as as researchers, in order to carry out this research in the future, also when the project will be over, because this kind of topic and issues are so complicated, let’s say so complex that is quite let’s say naive to think that in six months, seven months of teach training, we will manage to reach some relevant results. So we will start building the community. We will start, you know, planting the seeds. So our hope is to continue working with the schools, also after the end of the project, in order to, you know, reach more like stronger results in terms of efficacy, in terms of impacts at the school level, because now we can work at the individual level, so the single teachers that who are willing to be part of the teacher training program, it is something free, open, so no one is forcing anyone, and neither the school head can force teachers to be to take part into the teacher training program. So this year will be a year when we will work with single individual teachers or classroom counseling, let’s say, but we would like to have stronger impact on the school, but this requires time. Thank you and go ahead.

SPEAKER 6: Yeah, there is a another question that come to mind, but Larry, it was around the teachers, and did you come across anything in relation to, you know, schools as democratic workplaces for teachers, you know, to what extent do they have a say in, in how schools run, or, you know, maybe connected to sort of leadership.

VALERIA: Again, this is something that happens in upper secondary schools, but not in lower secondary school, and in a very few cases in primary school. So our challenge was to involve teachers in thinking of their young pupils as citizens, although they are even if they are in primary in primary school. So civic and citizenship education in primary school in Italy is mainly related to the relations to knowing the others, and, you know, having a responsibility of your own environment, which is something okay for the first year the first grades of primary school, but then that’s why we focus on fourth and fifth grade. There is a possibility, there is a room for working on other aspects related to participation and engagement for for primary school students, and the same applies to lower secondary students. For example, we don’t have classroom representatives in lower secondary Italian schools. We only have them in upper secondary schools. So there is this gap. Let’s say, if you look at your EDC last report, which is kind old, 2017, you see that there are several school education systems in which also primary and lower secondary schools. There are possibilities and councils for students to participate in it. We don’t have this in our in our school system, so this project will also try to, you know, over shed a light on on this possibilities that can be implemented also for younger students.

VANINA: Thank you, Valeria, thank you to everyone who asked all of these questions and was so engaged with Valeria is very informative presentation. I’m glad it could offer some insight into what they’re doing in Italy with the whole school approach and with this project, I want to just thank you once again for joining this week. Thank you to Valeria. Thank you to Diana and to everyone. And I wanted to announce our next democracy talk will be on November 13, and we’ll have Maria Rosa, Bucha rice of the University of Barcelona as our guest speaker. And she will speak about how to educate in a plural, pluralistic and democratic society focusing on higher education. So Valeria, if you would like to join, you can if you’re free on November 13 at 3pm CET. And for anyone else watching, you can stay tuned for that. Thanks again for joining, and we look forward to seeing everyone soon. Thank you. Thank you. Bye, bye.

DEMOCRACY TALKS 13 – How to Educate in a Pluralistic and Democratic Society


DIANA: Hello and very warm welcome to our 13th democracy talk. My name is Diana Trevino. You may know me already. I will be moderating our session today, and I’m very happy that we could invite Maria Rosa buchares today of the University of Barcelona, and she will be speaking about how to educate in a pluralistic and democratic society with a focus on higher education and universities. Just in brief, Maria Rosa is the lead researcher in the research group of moral education of the University of Barcelona, and she’s very experienced in moral education research and research in educational and curriculum theory. So this is just a brief introduction. Introduction of you. Maria says, so I would like to hand over to you, and you can also feel free to introduce yourself and start sharing with your presentation. Thank you very much. Thank you.

MARIA ROSA: I am professor, as you say, from the University of Barcelona, and member of this research group. This research group. We we have been doing research from more or less 30 years, and when we began to do research, we did in schools first, first of all, with action research, more or less, in order to to to know what’s the schools and what’s the teacher wants to, wants to do in education for democracy. And then we work not only from the primary and secondary schools, but also we, think it’s very important to train teachers and beginning to train teachers at the university. Now we have a program that we only we not only train teachers in teachers, for example, for primary and secondary schools, we train teachers from University, University teachers, it’s more more difficult before we work with training teachers. We add another job that is designing materials and promoting these new strategies to to apply in schools and environments and different environments, I want to begin today delve into a pertinent question for contemporary higher education, is How to educate and in a pluralistic society as our society. And first of all, there is some social challenges that we should take in account. Because in order to change this kind of challenges, for example, this globalization and these technological advance advancements, intense competitions and growing individuals, crisis of meanings, or crisis of the meaning of life, for example, for the young People, we have ethical and social challenges too. And another thing, it’s this fragility of human relationships and socio economic inequalities and more cultural, culturally induced infantilization. This, this last one. It’s the last, the last observation of some authors that say that with all the media, with all the social networks, the others change, and the others became children, sometimes, and then before, before that, we should to analyze which are the values most, most promoted in this our democratic society, and which are the values less promoted, the ethical values involved. We think the now in that moment, we respect for individual freedom. We have passive tolerance of difference. And we think that there are ideological, religious and cultural pluralism, of course, and there is a great desire for personal self realization. And we can see this kind. Of ethical values in social networks and in media. Of course, he and maybe these are the best they. There is another one, but we consider the main important ethical values because then we work in that way with our professors or with our teachers, the ethical values in crisis now we we consider, for example, the the culture of effort every every time people has less less feeling to have things, to achieve things with effort. And then another value in crisis, we think it’s the sense of responsibility and the sense of belonging to the community and and, in my opinion, commitment. It’s i It’s one of the less values we and we should do something to promote it, because now it’s in crisis, solidarity and respect for authority. The same professors lose some authority in front of the their students, and we have preference for democracy, for democracy as form of government. And we can see, for example, the last elections in USA, that it’s, for me, it’s like a signal of this thing and another value in crisis, the sense of transcendence. And now we think that we can learn ethical values in different ways, and we should put together these four ways to to learn in order to be aware in the in our commitment in being a good professor, we we think people learns by tradition, by people who, who speaks about their daily life, for example, exemplars of some, there is another is by construction, this self development and self construction of the the values, scale, the values, the hierarchy of values, and then another is by observation and modeling. Of course, we is the best common way to to learn these ethical values. And then with by living experiences, living, living in the life, you practice and exercise some values, and you can with the interaction of others to have this these values. Then in our model, for example, we consider three areas, three areas that we should work in, it in a school and in universities too. And this, these three, the areas are, for example, the social, moral area dimension, the living together, or we say conventionality, but it’s not a good word in English. But is the social part, and then the this part of personal that is self construction. And we should work together, we should develop together, not not only one, I think the we should find the like coherence and equilibrium among the three, the three areas, and in each area we trying to Do some, some strategy in order to promote this area, for example, in social moral reflection, one of the strategy we use is the discussing moral dilemmas. And we can do some activities about media and be critical, doing some exercise of critical understanding, and then we can do another kind of strategies, for example, promoting social skills or promoting dial dialog. And now knowing how to dialog better, how to listen into people and trying to express better yourself. And another example could be the this part self constitution that you can learn about you, thinking of you, of your of your beliefs, your values. Use your your interactions and how you dialog with other people. And there is another thing that all of this area, all of this strategy, we have one objective, one different objective, but we try to to direct our strategies, for example, to acquire an adjusted self concept to it means that people know themselves every every day better in the interiority of themselves, and then to show judgment and action consistency, this capacity of dialog, the develop social skills and accept, for example, to build rules for this coexistence or living together, and to know information of moral relevance of with ethical issues, and this is learning involved in social and civic competencies in order to promote this education for for democracy. After that, we think the ethical competences are more or less. There are more than than. This is only a sample of of ethical competences we are working on, for example, to understand community as something specifically theirs, and to be aware of belonging to him. This. This be being aware to belong in a community is is like human need that we should we should cover, and another ethical competencies is to have the capacity for dialog, respect and tolerance, and we should learn some skills in order to finding information and enforcing one’s rights and sensitivity to the common good. This common good is another objective of our moral education strategies, because it’s easy, for example, to be in individualistic but it’s difficult to promote this common good in people. It’s, it’s one of the I say always, that it’s a challenge, a challenge of us to promote this common good, and another ethical competencies is to be able to judge critically the information we receive from the media, from the teachers, the families, social networks. To be critically is, as you say, as you know, one of the ethical competence important in a democratic society, and another one it’s to become involved, is in solving social problems, not only in the local community, but also at the national and global level as well. And now we have example here of young people in Valencia, the problem of the Ghana, some people goes there. And this is important to see, and it’s very we are happy to see that the people involved in this kind of social problems and in this kind of situations, that very, very terrible situation they have living in now well and these, we think that in higher education, we we should fix our our attention in the third dimension of ethical, ethical competencies. The third dimension is an ethical the ethical dimension link it to these values, the justice, the dignity and the human rights, the three values that are very important. We can also work in the of course, in the transmission of knowledge in different areas. And we also works in political and social dimension, linking to these democratic principles. But the last one is the third one is this dimension that is linked in another, in another, in another dimension that is this ethical commitment for us, the problem is to to do coherent what I think, what I. Am feeling what I am saying and what I am doing, and the doing is that is to have an ethical commitment. This ethical commitment is the first, the first objective in higher education, because we should train competent professionals at the University of course. But we want not only experts in a field, we want people who has this capacity for reflection, for be critical for participation in the society and doing something good for for the society. And why do we talk about this ethical commit money, higher education related to ethical competences, of course, is one of the ethical competences. And because you as you know, European University is an institution that creates this new economic and social and ethical order. And there are all the documents about University of the first 21st, century speaks about, about this, this question, the this ethical commitment. And as I previous said, there are some characteristics of the society that now force us to, or Eszter to speak about these, these things in in higher education and and how, how is a commitment matter this because, because we, we, not only we, not only wants professionals and technical, scientific train training people. We want people who has this ethical commitment in the in in the society, justice, equity, sustainability, gender equality, Multiculturality. There are all values that we should promote in in our in nowadays, because there are all important for create this democratic, democratic society, and is one ethical commitment is about having moral habits, not not every day thinking of doing something good if you you should have in every day life, this habit to be commitment in our every in every action we we do, and which is the our, our test In, in this kind of thing. We saw that ethical commitment and ethical competence, the two of them, has two characteristics. For example, students at the university, well, not only students, also professors, has lack of information about these terms, these concepts, what is this? What? What is ethical commitment, and what is ethical competencies and and not only this, they have only also lack of moral training in our university. Maybe we here because now I have a position in the university in order to organize training teachers of of university professors, and I have the opportunity to to give them some training teachers about moral but if not, there is few universities that promote this kind of training, and we thought that we can, we can do some few things in order to change The how the university works, for example, in methodologies, in in teaching methodologies, that is important to to to work with methodologies, where, where you can discuss, you can you can share your opinions, you can do Questions and answers, and you can even do research in how people are learning these moral values. For example, we should claim that it’s important to recover the classic text, the classic text, that means that we should read another time to. Aristotle to Socrates, this kind of authors that there are in the ancient Greek but the text of that they are saying, they are saying are now, nowadays the same. We can, we can reconstruct these classic text in in nowadays texts, and there is another kind of strategy we use. It’s service learning. Because service learning you you do some some action, very good for society, and then you can learn about your specialty or your your career. And then there is another and we can do more, problem based learning, of course and more maybe this, this strategy are related to strategies that you are active, not passive, not only listening to the professor, but also doing something that this, this doing this exercise promotes your knowledge about moral things, ethical values, critical comprehension and so on. And another thing, it’s evaluating the ethical commitment of the teachers in the University of the professors. For example, if the professors work together, sharing knowledge, sharing opinions and how they they are. They are doing a team themselves in order to to be exemplars to the students. Sometimes we we ask the students that works together, we works in a team, and then the first exemplar is that the professor, the professor, should have a team work in order to show the students what they are doing and they improve. You can share. You can share in the actions. And then there is another thing we do, and I present now briefly, it’s measuring ethical competences we create and scale, and then I speak about it. And the ability of solving ethical problems is another thing, and tutoring our students in trying to solve problems of social the society. And as I say, we create, some years ago, on a scale at the name of a scale is ethical, citizenship competencies. And in our research group, and this we we achieve this scale because we began, as I say, working in schools, and we have a school scale that we we can evaluate, we can assess the the profile of each student in order, which are the these dimensions. I previously said these dimensions, these three areas, for example, the personal area, the social moral area and social area, how they improve. These areas, how they develop. And we have this scale, and because we saw that, it’s important to use this scale in order to be aware how is your development, then we transform the items to do a higher education, environment, and we have this scale, we present, we trying, for example, these, these three dimensions I mentioned before, and this Scale is first first person statements, that not only helps you to know, what are you thinking about, which are your behaviors, but also then, if you do this, I can, you can have a profile, and this profile, it’s could be individual, it could be collective, in in one group of students. And then if you have a group and they they want to do this kind of exercise, then you can detect if, if they prefer to do some strategies in order to promote self construction, or. Or if they need, for example, to learn more about dialog. Or if they’re Lee, they need to have more skills on participation. This is the scale. And for example, here some examples in the self construction construction, there is a statement, I act impulsively. I assume my obligations as a student. Another is living together. It’s very difficult for me to put myself in the place of others. I show I show my disapproval in situations of discrimination and social moral reflection. I refrain from giving my opinion, on controversial issues in the event of conflict, I identify the situations that have given rise to it. This is examples that we have 3536 or this kind of statements, and at the end you can, you can show if a profile, and then you can show if which are the the areas you should improve more than others. Thank you. And now if, if you want ask me some questions, because it’s very brief. I am trying to express many years of research and many years in 20 minutes. It’s very difficult for me, but I’m trying to do my best. Thank you. Thank

DIANA: you very much. Marisa, Maria Rosa, because you provided us a very, very broad overview of your work and how you use different methods, which is the baseline for your training. So to say, your offer so I think this was very, very good. And thank you very much. I have took note of many questions, but I also invite our participants here in zoom and also in YouTube. If you have any questions you want to raise, please let me know. So but I would like to start with my first one, and this was a question which raised totally in the beginning, when you said that we have values that are in vogue and values that are less invoked. Do you have an idea why this shift has happened, or what could be the reasons for the focus on certain values but the rejection of other kind of values?

MARIA ROSA: Yes, I think values are dynamic every historic situation, or every historic every time you have different values that are more visible than others, and maybe now we have these visible values more than others, and maybe, I don’t know, about 30 years ago, effort is a very important value for people and for children. And now it’s not because the society change and the society change, and we have the technology that offer us very speed things in very short time. And sometimes this kind of movement of society change the priority of the values. And we should make research in that way, in which are the values now and which are and this, this classification of values i i provide from social sociologists that people who are thinking on these kind of values, what’s happened now different from the Other, but it is the values that I think don’t disappear. The problem is they are dynamic and changing by the moment the story the moment on society. Yes, yes, yes,

DIANA: yes. I would just a comment before I am let cast and speak. But I think this is interesting, because we are in Europe, at least, we have many countries that are Democrat democracies, that have democracies and that, like democratic competencies, like social commitment, etc, are shifting away. This should be the opposite. No, but yeah, so yeah, so yeah, okay, then cast in your question please,

SPEAKER 3: Yeah, hello, thank you for the presentation. I I really have two questions. One is regard to what you presented on there, with regard. The judgment of information, and you focused on critical thinking to judge information, we here with my colleague Daniel. Daniel has make a fake news experience experiment to see how the people identified fake news and how they share it, and if they share, and it seems the problem of sharing information is the main problem in regard to the split up of dissemination, they have misinformation and disinformation. So there comes in, then the ethical problem, how the user who identified misinformation will not share it. This is, I believe, an ethical problem. And the other one is, what we also see in the Democrat project, is that the main issue is the the preparation of the teachers for democratic teaching. So one question is, what you what you present at the end as a scaling of measurement of pupils ethical behavior? And the question comes up, if it not be an idea to make this also for the teachers and the university professors, because we know that many that not all university professors, have a very good ethical behavior. So probably it should be the first step when we go there to teaching ethics at university, to see if really the university professors have an ethical behavior. Thank you.

MARIA ROSA: I began for the the end, the last question, sure, we did some research on trying to to to realize that professors needs, for example, this kind of training more than the students, sometimes, because we should begin with the professors in order then professors promote this moral education, or this education for democracy. But the problem is sometimes professor thinks that they are good in that way, in that but they are good and they don’t see that it’s important for them to do this kind of of training. But despite this, we we do our research. We did the research five years ago, more or less in a group of professors of the Faculty of Education trying to see this, how they, they assess themselves in this kind of the three areas, and, and they, they have some lacks or some problems, but, But no, many, no, I think the people who say yes, I want to be assessed are the best professors that the professors that that they don’t need, maybe the this kind of training. And I think it’s the situation. And then now they ask us, Why do don’t do this in the with our students. And then we did with the students of these professors that say they are good professors in ethical commitment and ethical competencies. And we did with the students and students, yes, it’s like, like like, a tool that they use in order to know which kind of activities are better for doing with the students than in order to promote this critical dimension and related to these. For example, the this, we know that there are fake news, misinformation and and for this, we should do some activities at university in order they can, they they can try, or they can do a workshop in order to know or to Identify which are fake news or not, and which kind of information they should share or not, and and it’s not easy, because in that way, professors has less knowledge of this, these networks, The Social Network. Person and how to disseminate this misinformation. I think the problem is, then we should promote the digital, digital competences more than ethical competences. The two will be together, not only digital I not only ethical competence, also digital competence. Now, nowadays, in in professors of the university, I thought, I don’t know if i i asked, I answer the question, but more or less, is this the the professors are, some of them reluctant to do this kind of work in the in themselves, in themselves.

DIANA: Thank you very much. Mariano, now I see a question from Georgios, so please go ahead

SPEAKER 4: and many. Thanks to Maria Rosa. I wanted to to ask you, I understand that you’re trying to do research on basic things that were for granted, perhaps before there is ethics, that the society has to follow ethics, or whatever the context, whether it’s electronic or whatever, if we had strong ethics, it would it should work, I suppose. And if the whole of society, like Carsten said also teachers and parents were ethical models, it would work also in the cyber environment. But for me, I think perhaps the cause of all these problems is that democratic education in the past is focused on rights, always, rights of this group, rights of that other group, rights of everybody, but not on responsibilities, which is exactly the effort you have to make to deserve to be part of the society and to contribute, not just ask others to do things for you. And honestly, it’s very painful to see, but even in Valencia with the floods, when people were waiting for the government to save them. I mean, you can say that the government was useless, or whatever the local government, whoever was responsible, but once you see things coming, or when things happen, you cannot insist on your rights. You have to take the spade and do things yourself. And they eventually did that. I see it in Greece here the same. I mean, people wait for the municipality to clean up them bushes, which are dry before a fire starts. In the past, I used to go with my grandfather, my father to clean them up ourselves. I mean, there was also community arranged service for that, no money, no municipality officially, but things were done. So can you see, I mean, why? Where did we lose it, and how can we bring it back in an organic way, not necessarily to scientifically, but in practice? Thank you.

MARIA ROSA: Yeah, yes, it’s a good question, because I this, this lack, this part. I say culture promoting fertilization of adults. I think it’s, it’s this, this, sometimes others, uh, thought that, that you can do yourself things, but now it’s the government, the state, me, me, no, I asked for others to solve my problems and not doing something me myself in order to solve it. And I don’t know, but I think as we forget to focus in responsibilities, now we have people who has no response, who doesn’t feel responsible of everything they did or they or what’s happened in the society, you know, and and as you say, for example, we work now. Nowadays, I am working with families in in rural education and families has the same problem. They they left the education of their children to the school because they think that they are not experts in doing this, and these an excuse, because they say it’s, it’s easy to give the responsibility to others than to give the responsibility to educate for the parents. And I think it’s a characteristic of our society, this the responsibility outside of us. No, not, not. It’s, it’s not us, no. And is an easy excuse to is, like I mentioned, the common good. The common good is, is this is thinking, not not only in your needs or your beliefs, thinking in the common intercool. We are different people in a in a society, and different people with different needs, and sometimes we should sacrifice our own needs promoting that this common good. But people, I think they don’t think about this, mostly of the time, they don’t think that we are people from our society, from our society, and the societies for everyone, and each one of us can contribute in a minimum thing to do the society better. And I am sometimes well now, at that moment, I am pessimist, because working with families, I saw, for example, families who has, who has a good disposition, of course, to coming to the sessions we we organize. But then in they thought, yes, yes, we should educate our our children in society, in a democratic society, and we should do but when you ask them, What do you do in order, in order to promote this democratic society, and they stay in silence. They don’t want to say nothing at all, because what do you do? Which actions? What do you do, everyday life, in your everyday life, in order to promote your children be a better citizenship in the future? Well, well, in the future or now? No, but it’s, I think it’s very good question, but very difficult the the answer that question. Thank you. Thank you very much.

DIANA. Thank you. Maria, now Vanina, you also have a question.

VANINA: Thank you Diana. Thank you Maria Rosa. It was very interesting presentation. My question, I guess, comes from a perspective of someone who graduated like my masters about two years ago. And you know, we have to balance the development of ethical competencies, along with these pretty heavy demands of, you know, technical and professional training. And I’m wondering where, how can we balance that, especially in fields where ethical dilemmas often frequently arise.

MARIA ROSA: It’s a good question, because in for example, we did a research some years ago with professors from different faculties, from different from science, from humanities, from social science and we saw that there are some degrees or some careers that are more has a very good disposition, you know, in doing this kind of discussion of ethical issues and problems. But there is others that despite there are, there are ethical commitment, they prefer not to to treat. We don’t know if they prefer not to treat because they they don’t know how to do it, or they don’t want to treat because they think there are the other things are bad, are more necessary, or there are more important in the career? No. And a balance. I think they should be a balance for me, for my opinion, they should be a balance. It’s not you. Could be a good mathematician. But then, if a business of mathematics ask you to do something wrong in the in the way of ethical thinking, you then, what do you do? You can do better. Yes, better career. But I think in each profession, there are ethical matters to to think about it, and, and, and, and the problem is how to introduce in the different science problem about for, for this reason, we need training professors in how to introduce this in the contents, because it’s yes in the university, is not only the content, is also how to assess your students, how to do the teaching, how to improve these relationships with your. With your students. You respect your students. You listen to them when they have a need, one personal need which there are a variety of elements you can choose and you can choose different that all all together have ethical, ethical problems, ethical issues inside. But it’s difficult to do this job, very difficult.

DIANA: So I would like to come maybe to my last question. I know we could speak very much, much longer, but we are a little bit running out of time. So my last question is, do you receive any feedback of professors or also students that go through your ethical training? How do they feel afterwards? Do they perceive it as a benefit, also for them personally,

MARIA ROSA: yes, for them personally. The problem is this only for them personally. I would like is not only for them personally. More I prefer to have the the good for the the class, good for the university, good for the society. Not Yes, always in the in the training, they say, oh, for me, it’s very good, because I changed my mind. I I feel different, and I’m trying to do some strategic with my students, but then and with other colleagues, do you do something to change? Something to change, for example, the culture of the institution to be more collaborative, or to share your research, or not, there are many things to do in in the university, and I think that the training teachers don’t, don’t be stop to the individual benefits they they should Go more, more farther. Yeah. Yeah,

DIANA: absolutely. Okay, then I would say, thank you very much, Maria Rosa for joining us today, for sharing your broad expertise, also to giving us maybe today a little bit another focus, not only on the school context. And before closing the session, I would like to announce our upcoming democracy talk, and we will have our next session on the 27th of November. So in case you want to join us, Maria Rosa, you can, of course, also contribute, and we will have the time to listen to Hilmi tikoglu of the solidar Foundation, and he will be speaking about the ACA project, which aims to promote democratic participation and engagement so on the 27th of November. But again. Maria Rosa, thank you very much for your participation today and all the audience for your contribution to our discussion. Thank you, bye, bye, bye.

DEMOCRACY TALKS 14 – Promoting Democratic Participation and Engagement: the AKA project


VANINA: Hill. Hello everyone, and welcome to our 14th democracy talk. This is our second to last democracy talk of the year. I can’t believe the year has gone by so quickly. And for our 14th talk, we’re very happy to welcome Hilmi tekoalu of solidar foundation. Today, Hilmi will be discussing with us about promoting democratic participation and engagement by talking about the aka project. AKA stands for awareness, knowledge and action. And it’s a two year project which has been coordinated by the solidar foundation and carried out in a consortium of eight partners across Europe. So before speaking any more about the project, I’ll let Hilmi go ahead and introduce himself and everything that he’ll be talking about today. Welcome Hilmi.

HILMI: Thank you very much, franina for the very nice introduction and hello everyone. And thank you very much for this opportunity to be able to speak about the project that we’ve been implementing for two years. And at the end of this month, actually, the project will be finalized. So hello again. My name is him. It’s a colo I’m working at as a civic space policy officer at solidar, and my work mainly involves monitoring policy development related to shrinking civic space, democratic participation, and including advocacy. Just a bit on maybe for those who are interested to know about solidar and solidar Foundation is a European Network of civil society organizations with a global rich working to advance social justice through just transition in European Europe and worldwide. So what we do as solidar is to voice the concerns and of our members and partners to the EU and international institutions across the three main policy areas that are social affairs, international cooperation and lifelong learning. So as Vanina mentioned, I will share my screen to talk about the active citizenship project, ACA project. So for that, I will share some slides with you.

I hope everybody can view my screen now. Yes, yeah, great. Thank you. So to start with, I’m going to talk about the active citizenship project that is actually funded by a third program of the European Commission that run over the course of two years, started starting from 2022 and ending 2024 so mainly the project aim to promote the democratic participation and engagement at the EU level, young citizens with vulnerable backgrounds in eight countries through global citizenship education based activities implemented in community centers. I talked about community centers, but I will later explain it, what we actually try to achieve with community centers. So the project implemented in eight countries that are Spain, Portugal, Croatia, France, Belgium, Italy, Greece and Croatia, if I corrected all of them. Counted all of them. So in this eight different countries with different local realities, each partner tried to tackle different structural challenge in a society they live in, while aiming to achieve results for common methodology and addressing mainly the same target group. So to address these structural challenges, we used global citizenship methodologies and activities in community centers to empower youth and bridge the gap between their local realities and democratic processes. So for that at the beginning of the project, for all partners to have common definition of global citizenship, education and common approach at the beginning of of the project is to organize this initial training of trainers that actually and we want to ensure common understanding of this methodology and approach. So what does global citizenship education means to us? So it can be defined in different ways. But in solidar Foundation, we use the definition of global citizenship education. As political education on a global scale, which prepares learners to develop a sense of belonging to the global community and to their society, to get involved and to take active role in and the society to contribute a peaceful, just world in which ecological resources are preserved. And when it comes to the common approach, we use the GCE as an active pedagogical approach, with co creation in its core, inviting learners and educators to practice its principles. So following the initial trainings. At the beginning of the project, partners established community centers. What do we mean by community center is to actually have this meeting spaces, safe spaces, learning spaces, that is actually animated by value driven communities. It’s a space in which we aim for participants to feel welcomed and allowing them to express themselves and participate in the activities freely. So these community centers were establishing in which established in eight different countries by our partners, included also collaboration with other local organizations in different countries. In these eight different countries, such as youth centers in Belgium and Germany, educational centers in Spain and France, social and cultural centers in Greece, Croatia and Italy, and migrant centers in Portugal that our project partners actually cooperate regularly with, and where young people from vulnerable backgrounds feel safe to take collective action or or join the activities actively so the community centers, as I mentioned, based on initial training for trainers that involved project managers, educators and young participants. Each each project partner that supported the activities of a community center, and each center was co led by the youth and the project partners addressing minimum one structural challenges and adopting the methodologies that actually fit to address these challenges, the methodologies that found more suitable. So in this community centers, our project partners aim to raise awareness of different issues, just to name a few, understanding diversity, the social impact of the ecological transition, promoting tolerance, intergenerational solidarity, active citizenship, climate justice, sustainable economic models, gender equality, just to name a few. So when it comes to the activities run each run by the each center, each partners, to start with, adopted of a safety contract and ensured establishment of a safe team. Safety Team, this was crucially important to create safe space for Open dialog and for actually allowing participants to express their views freely. These activities also involved introduction to contextualize the activities for participants. This includes ensuring common understanding of the methodologies, approaches and activities when it comes to implementation of the identified methodologies, this also included sufficient time for participants to understand the methodologies as well. So the last activity of the each community center was to have dialog with local level policy makers. So each partner organized activities with local level policy makers and participants to have a dialog together, to exchange on the findings that actually for for participants to bring to the attention of the local level policy makers. So these specific activity aim to encourage and empower participants to exchange their views, to learn from each other, also from the policy makers as well. Now that we talk about the project also, I like to talk about the impact of this project a little bit as well. Is that so we had eight partners, project partners, in this project that implemented 24 different activities where we involved more than 500 young people directly in this. Activities, along with educators. So we also talked about dialog with policy makers. So we reached out 12 different more than 12 different policy makers in eight different countries. And when we talk about the project, communication activities plays a crucial role. So our comms activities reach beyond 5000 impressions. You may you may say impressions, likes and follows and so on and so forth. Most importantly, with this project, we wanted to have a tool to improve existing practices among our membership and support other organization who want to start using global citizenship education methodologies with a focus on learners with vulnerable backgrounds. On solidar level, solidarity foundation level, we would like this tool also to contribute to our ongoing work. This includes policy papers, good practices, campaigns and an alliance of the civil society organization joining forces to promote global citizenship education at all levels. Like I want to open the floor for questions now I talk about the project, and second part of my intervention will be talk about the output of this project, which is the booklet, but I’d like to open the floor and see if there’s any questions from the participants so far, if not, I can continue the presentation.

GEORGIOS: yes. Thank you very much. Hilmi, for this first part of the presentation. Could you tell us what is the underpinning, the theoretical value underpinning for each center? Is it the national context of institutions? Is it a Liberal Democracy Project? Is it a rule of law, what exactly democratic engagement means in this case, thank you.

HILMI: Thank you very much. Jurgis, for your question for me. So this project, what we aim is to try different methodologies in eight different countries, specifically focusing on the youth with vulnerable backgrounds. So it was more on the fact that to raise awareness of this youth, mainly this youth, to be aware of their social environment, politics, the political context in their realities, to feel connected to these realities, to take action by introducing different methodologies that used by the partners for them to vision what the what the democratic life it should be to feel part of it and why, by identifying these problems, how could they actually find solution to this, not only theoretically speaking, but also through these methodologies implemented to implement practically, by taking actions, and also to strengthen this a bit more, to bring them together with local level policy makers to present these findings. So this was the main idea of this project in terms of capacity building, raising awareness or strengthening the sense of belonging to a community and to be part of it active, to be part of the active citizens and to contribute to the society

SPEAKER 3: The context of each individual community, exactly. Thank you. Most welcome, Diana, please,

DIANA: yes. Thank you very much for for your presentation. So far, I am was thinking more about the maybe the specific competencies that young people gain when when they learn about global citizenship education, maybe you can give some examples on this.

HILMI: So when we talk about youth with vulnerable background, so there’s specific obstacle that writes that they don’t feel part of a community. They don’t sometimes language barriers. There is, there is this mistrust towards the community they live in, or the process existing processes, or local policy makers and so on and so forth. So in order to make them feel trusted, we collaborated with civil society organization that have connections with them. And coming back to your question, so through them, we involve in involved them into this workshops where we talked about, actually, what are the existing issues in their societies that should be addressed, and how could they actually be part of this problem? By. Actively involving, but actively taking steps to these problems. So maybe one of the examples I could give is, if I remember correctly, one, one of the activities we implemented in very small town, Ravenna in Italy, where we had young participants, where Ravenna was very, extremely impacted by the floods. So there was existing problem that actually affects everybody. But you know, in this cases, usually youth, it’s not the first to go with. So the youth could actually seeing this problem and would like to take an action. And our partners, first, theoretically speaking, talked about, what is just transition? What are climate changes, and what could we do, theoretically speaking, and then took this participants to explore what happened to the city, what’s the differences, what the urbanization of the part of the city? What are the green areas in the city? What happened throughout the history and what could be done by showing them what are the reasons to climate changes, maybe for the floods and so on and so forth. And when they come back, they ask to develop solutions to these problems. So here we see, not only theocratically, theoretically speaking, that they have been in those affected areas to observe, to understand the cause of the problem and also come up with the solutions. When they come up with the solutions, our partners brought them together with local level policy makers, because it’s normally speaking, it’s local ideally speaking, it’s local levels policy makers who would implement this challenge. This this challenges. So by bringing them with, with together with policy makers, they had the opportunity to raise these issues from their point of view and how actually, they could contribute to this issue that has an impact on everybody with regardless their background, where they come from, or their capabilities, and this was the main idea of in terms of encouraging them taking active role in the society they live in. If that answers your question, yes,

SPEAKER 4: and I think it’s very interesting, because when I understand it right, what do you do with your project? You confront young people with the problematic situation they’re living in, and based on this confrontation, they start to connect more to the issue and then develop solutions out of it. So, yeah,

HILMI: I wouldn’t say not necessarily problematic, but, like, you know, problematic situation. But also, you know, being an active citizens for every but every citizens needs to be active in order to come. You know, if you live in a democratic society, we want everybody to be active and contributing to this society. So, of course, everybody comes with the different backgrounds and so on, but we live in one society this way. With this project, we wanted to show this by implementing these methodologies that we may come from a different backgrounds and different understanding, but whatever the problem out there if it has different effects on all of us, but that’s why it’s very important to become active in the society we leave to be able to address these Challenges.

SPEAKER 3: to define agency, right? I mean, we have a problem with everybody in democracies, it seems nowadays that are not very active. So even special groups are even perhaps they have a tendency to be less active because they don’t feel they belong fully, or they are accepted by the society. So you work with them that may make them overtake the regular, let’s say people of a community, right in terms of agency. I don’t know if we can keep that in mind and how that will influence their their status, but it is important to keep in mind the agency, as Carson would say, or all of us from the Democratic project, the agency in terms of knowledge, judgment and taking your faith in your own hands, let’s say, by participating actively, and that’s what you want to do, right for these people to be actively engaged in their communities?

HILMI: Indeed, indeed. I mean, just to clarify, we as solar Foundation, we don’t directly work in the field. We work more European level, but our partners and member organizations, they are the ones working in the field and feeding us with this information,

SPEAKER 3: but you have in here a rules that agency is something that these people should get right to be able

HILMI: to Indeed, indeed. Okay, maybe I can continue to talk about a bit on the booklet that we come out after this activity is implemented in eight different countries. So the ACA booklets, the methodologies for fostering social action and democratic engagement. So why did we created this booklet for us? This booklet is practical resource to help educators and practitioners to promote transformative learning by providing accessible, effective methodologies for them to empower people, particularly youth, in times of growing inequalities and democratic disengagement. When we look at the key themes of this booklet, we took global citizenship education as a base, and we took it further to focus on social action, democratic participation and addressing structural discrimination, as I mentioned earlier. So by tackling these teams, we aim to help young people to develop these competencies, the skills to actively participate in the society and addressing these challenges like inequality, climate change and social exclusion. When it comes to the methodologies and tools for for engaging and inclusive space, the methodology is used through the project focuses on transformative learning and non formal education that were found engaging and inclusive, also allowing participants to actively co create, empowering them to think critically and to Take action in their communities, as I was mentioning earlier. So for this, interactive tools, methodologies, concepts such as artivism, World Cafe, urban mobility and accessibility, just just a name few and the more could be found in our booklets. Was used. So when we gathered all this input from the eight countries and implemented activities, we realized that there were common patterns and strengths that help creating engaging, inclusive and inclusive learning environment for participants that we thought it should have placed in this booklet, and what those strengths that we come up with is co creation and participants engagement. I know it’s self explanatory, but it was very important for us that involving participants in designing activities and selecting topics help actually to fostering ownership and relevance to the challenges that They actually face. Secondly, it was safe and inclusive environment. It was crucial for our partners to establish a supportive space where participants feel welcome, comfortable and comfortable enough to share their experience and ideas, which was the point of the workshops that we try to actually implement we implemented. And third one is peer learning and mentorship. I mean encouraging participants to learn from each other and fostering leadership skills through peer mentorship found to be successful as well. Action oriented pedagogical approaches. This is particularly found successful that enabling participants to apply practical tools concepts like I was mentioning earlier, activism is one of them to the issues they identified and help them to develop actionable solutions. Common understanding of complex concepts. When we talk about concepts like ecological transition, social justice, intergenerational solidarity, it’s It sounds nice, but when it comes. The definition of it we you may find yourself a bit lost. What does this mean? So it was important for us to ensure sufficient time is provided so the participants developed a common understanding around these concepts. So this found particularly effective when we adapt these concepts to the local context. And lastly, follow up and evaluation. So it was found very important that establishing a long term follow up mechanism to measure the impact and to improve further learning experience was important, not on the on the project lifespan, but to continuously, regularly being in touch with the youth, to continuously evaluate and follow up their understanding of this concept, and their their encouragement to take action in the society they live. Lastly, with this booklet, we come up with six steps, six progressive steps for global citizenship, education, implementation, so based on the diverse methodologies implemented in different contexts addressing various issues and topics, we have developed the following steps, hoping that these steps can be applied by practitioners and educators across various contexts for impactful outcomes. And step one goes with the needs assessment. So conducting surveys, interviews to understand your participants needs and to help tailoring the workshop content accordingly. It’s for us, it was the starting point to be able to organize your workshop, tailored workshops based on their needs. So second step is background and contextual research. This involves researching the local community or the area and understandings and political context to make the activities relevant and relatable to the participants and their real world experiences when it comes to the third step, comprehensive educators training like we did at the beginning of the project, before organizing The workshops, it is crucial to equip educators with the skills tools and the methodologies so they can actually engage with participants in an effective way. Step four, it comes with a workshop structure that is recommended. We recommended in this booklet to create a structured but flexible framework that promotes in your workshop, safety, co creation, direct engagement, ensuring common understanding of complex issues or terms and so on and so forth. When it comes to step five, follow up and sustainability, we realized that creating a peer learning networks that includes participants, educators and other relevant individuals, and also to organize regular meetings to ensure long term engagement, continuous learning and lasting impact of the activities found also a very crucial and Step six is more on the quality assurance sides, to evaluate your activities, receiving feedback from the participants, making necessary adjustments to your work based on the input received. I will stop my presentation here. And thank you very much all for your attention. I will now open the floor again for the questions.

VANINA: Thank you so much, Hilmi. And as ilmi said, we’ll open the floor for questions. I was hoping that I could possibly ask the first question, if that’s okay with everyone. So my question and probably could have been asked in the first part of the presentation, but I figured it would be okay to save it, since all the people had questions, I wanted to know a bit more about, how do you see the principles of global citizenship education being applied in context where structural discrimination is quite deeply entrenched, which is a bit more of a new concept in terms of a lot of migration going on in Europe, and I don’t know if you have any. Are more specific examples or challenges that you could share that you have encountered during the project as well.

HILMI: Yes, I think applying global citizenship education in context of rooted structural discrimination is challenging and but at the same time is incredibly rewarding, and one of the biggest difficulties shared by our project partners was actually reaching out to marginalized groups, learners, individuals, and to their communities, and most importantly, to gain their trust. So structural discrimination often creates this mistrust towards the society they live in and or the exit towards the existing systems or the formal institutions. So it creates this feeling that they left out or feeling excluded or overlooked. So I think here it’s very fair to say that where civil society organizations play a critical role. You know, unlike many formal institutions, civil society organizations have established connection with these communities, understand their needs and help to build bridges and open doors to more meaningful and active engagement, just to give in, maybe example from the project that we implemented in Croatia, our project partners, worked with young people from migrant communities, and they had difficulties reaching out to them to invite them to the to these workshops, So they identified challenges to establish even the first contacts and to involve this youth in the activities. So in order to, you know, remove this obstacle, they use their personal contacts or collaborated with other youth centers that actually directly work with migrant communities and and started explain what they what they want to do, and how we actually be benefits of them. So they with establishing also with this safe space in time they build their trust and kept them involved in the activities. If I am to give another instance, another example, we also face challenges engaging another like minority groups in other countries who had experienced systematic exclusion, and through this, what was good about this interactive workshops, there were needs identified, and by talking about their needs, they felt that they have a say in this, because it was speaking to them, these these challenges they they face on a daily, day basis. So it also helped them through these workshops to develop trust to these people, also the society they live in. But like I said, Here’s civil society organizations. Work is very crucial because the it’s civil society organization that actually has hands on experience work by working with this migrant communities or vulnerable groups or people with the vulnerable backgrounds, so that could actually help us to co Create this learning activities. Let’s say you may ask if you can get over this structural discrimination over project implementation period. Of course not, but this is why it’s also very important that we continue our efforts to organize such workshops, such activities, by involving marginalized communities, not from a top down, but bottom up approach. I’d say, if I answered your question.

VANINA: yeah, you did. I had a quick follow up question, how did you select in the different countries? What civil society organizations to work with? I don’t know if there was a selection process or how you went about that.

HILMI: So when I talked, when I talked about partners, project partners, and they’re also our project, our member organizations. So when we draft this project application, we gather everyone together and ask, what are the needs? So the. How we identify the needs in eight different countries, by collaborating with our partners, with our member organization, and then we drafted in the project proposal based on this input we receive our member organizations.

VANINA: Okay, thank you so much. I know as a question as well.

SPEAKER 4: Yes, I was thinking about this outreach topic. You mentioned that many institutions, formal education institutions, have difficulties to reach those marginalized adults. And I was thinking about, do you have any general recommendations? What can institutions to do in order to reach those people that have difficult backgrounds and are normally not engaging in education institutions and formal ones? Et cetera? No.

HILMI: Thank you very much. Jenna, this is very important questions. And in our work in solidar solar Foundation, we always, you know, advocate for that. There is civil society organizations working at European level, national level, local level, who you know, which they have hands on experience, as I was talking mentioning before that they, they know the need of this societies. They work in the field. They have hands on experience. They do gather this data. So for the institutions, what we try to achieve is to establish structural civil dialog with civil society organizations, meaning to systematize this collaboration between the institutions, you may say, to have saying in the public policy making, or to be equal partners in the public policy making, not only, you know, involving civil society organizations by or, you know, sending online consultations. It’s welcome, but we would like to have systematic dialog. We would like to be part of public policy making from the beginning, from agenda setting, budget matters, and also sharing this data that we collect through our members, the needs, the challenges that exist. So for us in that regard, it’s very important to actually establish structured, civil dialog with the institutions to be able to raise these concerns. Thank you.

VANINA: Thank you both. Does anyone else have any other questions. If not, I might have one more. Please just raise your hand, or you can start speaking.

SPEAKER 3: Go ahead. Georges, okay, if I overdo it, you let me know. Do you connect to the formal education systems at all. Let’s say schools, etc, or this is a civil society approach. And because we with Democrat we’re trying to rethink, in a ways, education for democracy in the broader school context. But in your case, it’s a society initiative, right?

HILMI: I would say it’s a broader context as well, not only school curricula, but we do have partners that actually work in education sector, that we collaborate with. But as you said, for us, it’s broader. It’s not only formal education, it’s also non formal education, informal education and digital education. It’s also includes that. So go ahead, Carme.

SPEAKER: go ahead, Carme, hi. Thank you very much, Hilmi for the presentation. Very interesting. What you are doing, actually, I was thinking, I don’t know. I was thinking that, unfortunately, the reality is that in our society, they are civil society, civil society organizations that are not really democratic. They are not really a good example, okay? And I was just wondering if, how do you face this kind of possibility that there are these kind of organizations? Have you encountered any of these NGOs that wanted to approach you or something? Or have you had any problem? I don’t know. I was just curious, because I know that, for example, in Spain, we have a few of these, yes, organizations that are supported by specific parties. And you know, I’m sure you know what I thought what I’m talking about. Yeah,

HILMI: I do, I do. Thank you very much. Premier for this question, and very nice to meet you. I’ve heard a lot about you from my colleagues. No in solidar, solidar Foundation, we have our values, we have our visions and we cons. We consider ourselves progressive, and we collaborate with progressive, like minded allies, and we don’t give a green light anyone beyond that goes beyond these terms and values and understanding. So there is no green light from our organization to any organizations, let’s say that doesn’t, you know, it doesn’t have to be in the same, like minded setting or but at least to have something in common, the values and the common understanding and so on and so forth. And for cellular foundation. It’s, it’s a red line. MSA, thank you. Yeah, I totally agree. But is it democratic? That is the question.

SPEAKER 5: Yeah, that’s, that’s, I think, opens another but yes, I totally agree with your point of view, and I totally understand why you do it, and I think that in our organization, probably we will react in the same way. But of course, it also when you are so critic with yourself and with things, it makes you wonder if what you are doing is a good approach or not even that. I think it is. Is the only approach if you want to advance that is that anyway, thank you very much. Only teaching,

HILMI: no, I also understand where you come from because considering the political landscape right now and what’s going on in EU level, it’s very considering, because then the allies that you actually collaborate, it’s getting less and less, and then your spectrum needs to be consider other, You know, partners that is actually closer to you. So there’s your answers. I think this change is very much on the political landscape. What’s the political reality? And it’s changeable regarding the political priorities political landscape. What are what we need to focus on in the next Monday, for example. So I think there is no specific one answer to this. I must say

VANINA: it’s good to have discussions like this on topics that are often complicated or harder to discuss. So it’s, it’s good to see that happening here on the talks. Um, I think we’re basically running out of time now. So unless someone might have another pressing question, I think we’ll close out. And if anyone does have questions, you can always ask those on the blogs that are posted on our agora. We have one after each of the democracy talks, usually the next week or the week after. So I wanted to just say thank you so much Hilmi, and thank you to solidar for this project, and for you for presenting this project. And thank you to everyone here for a great and lively discussion. Next week, on December 11, we’ll have our 15th, sorry the week after. Sorry about that. Though, in two weeks on December 11, we’ll have our 15th democracy talk at 3pm which is the last one for the year. So it’s a little bit of a Seasons Greetings talk, and we’ll be speaking with a representative from the University of Helsinki, so you can stay tuned for updates about that talk in the coming week. And Hilmi, if you would like to join in the conversation, you’re always free and welcome to join as well, and you can share it in your network. So thank you to everyone here. Thank you, Hilmi for the great presentation, and we look forward to seeing everyone again soon. Thank

HILMI: you very, very much for this opportunity, and I’ll be happy to join the following, democracy talks.

DEMOCRACY TALKS 15 – Transformation and Reflection in Education for Democracy

FRANCESCA: Good afternoon, and welcome to our 15th democracy talk, the series of conversations on the topic of democracy and democratic competencies, education organizing the framework of the Democrat horizon Europe project. My name is Francesca Uras. I work as project manager for UConn, which is one of the partners of this project, and today we have the pleasure to have with us the University of Helsinki, another one of the partners of the project. So I’m really happy to welcome Anne nevy, associate professor at the Department of Education of the University of Helsinki. We were expecting also Nicholas Sandstrom to join us. Is unfortunately not very well today, but he may join us later, so we will be happy to have it with us if he can join us. The topic of today, conversation is transformation and reflection in education for democracy. Now, just a quick note, after the presentation, we will have time for questions. So if you have any questions here in zoom, you can post them in the chat, or you will be able to open your camera and microphone and ask your question directly. If you are following us from YouTube, you can comment with your question, and we will take your question as well. So I will now give the floor to our presenter, Dr Anne, the floor is yours.

ANNE: So our topic is transformation and reflection in education for democracy. We have prepared to gather this with the DR Nicholas sanstrum, and we are from faculty of Educational Sciences. I am already retired, but I do still actively research work so, and I’m very happy to that you have invited me to participate for this. So when I was thinking about this topic, and then I was thinking reflecting myself, what I see that why in nowadays, democracy may be under threat. In democracies, we know that there are dictatorships and there are totalitarian regimes in a world, countries which are ruled by dictators. But this then we know that we have these democratic countries, which are ruled by the people who live in those countries by citizens, and citizens are voting to have their who are representing people in their government. But then, when we think about then we notice that their voting is exactly it is not exactly the same as actively participating in society’s decision making process. We see that in I have seen that there is a growing dissatisfaction concerning about these different election processes and how, how the members of parliament or how the government are elected in different countries and and it is maybe one reason is to to high polarizations, which I can see, for example, in United States, that they were electing their president, And it was very polarized in into that sense. And when I think about my country, Finland, if we have very polarized, that we have a far right, people are playing to be far right, or people are playing to be far left, and then we think about this, is that when you are voting, people are sometimes satis, not dissatisfied about why my vote has doesn’t have any impact on it’s the same same policy is continuing. Then there is also, then when we think about even reflecting this. I was thinking about critical thinking. And a critical thinking is sometimes misunderstood that you are criticizing other people about what kind of persons they are. But somehow it is not the same as you are blaming and naming your opponents who have different opinions than you have. And then you go, it’s at homonym. Blaming of people instead of arguing arguing, and instead of going with their arguments and discussing about facts, it is more and this is also one reason why we have this more polarized politics in Western countries, especially. And then, when we think about education for democracy, it is not the same as only learning about society, how society functions, or who how politics are, how the rulers are elected in the country, or who are the main decision makers. So that is also not the same, and we go continue in this idea why it is not the same. But then there was also, when I was thinking that these threats for democracy. I was thinking about this current, what has happened lately in our democratic countries, and I can see that free speech is under threat in democracies. For example, I follow a quite keenly policies in the UK, that is because reason I have many relatives and friends living in a UK, so that’s the one reason why I follow and there was something but that happened in it was in in August, and there were unfortunate terrorist attack that a young man under 1817, year old, killed three Girls in in a and three little girls and wounded other girls, children and also teachers. And then what happened after that situation in there was demonstrations going on in the UK, and then people were sending messages to social media. But, but the government in UK, that Labor government, decided to somehow to take control on this what was happening in the country, and they started very strict policy against people who were just discussing and demonstrating or presenting their opinion in social media, and these people were arrested and sentenced even to two or four years in prison for both they made in social media. And then it’s just recently, there was also another happening in Oxford Union. Oxford Union is a student union, and it was especially in a situation, and because they arranged, they favored that there is a free speech and that kind of there are people are invited to give on the current topics. There’s opinions speech, and there is invited to give some 20 minute speaks and speech. And then after that there will be discussion. And now there that the issue, that the topic of that city, was about current crisis in culture and Israel, and that what is happening there. And then there were some speakers who were speaking for Israel and the situation, giving their opinions and their facts, because seeing the things how from their perspective, and the students behaved very badly and rudely, and they shouted, and they wanted to stop that person, to speak freely. And then finally, even they were they couldn’t speak freely because students were so so agonized against those different opinions than their own. So they that they contrary to their own opinions. So they wanted to stop and they didn’t give the space for free speech to people who were presenting different opinions. And then something happened in our Independence Days, sixth of this December, in our main library in a university in Helsinki city, we have already library, and it’s quite a popular place where people come and gather together. And then a far right organization organized a reading circle in a Ori library, such to read a book and discuss about a book. And that was organized and but it aroused far left is to come to library to demonstrate with shouting and loud voices so that eventually they stopped the possibility of participating in the reading cycle. And the reading circle was stopped. And this far right organization went away. And what I could see from the people who were, for example, in ex post, people were praising if they were having. Their left, they were more leftist their ideas, and they were praising those far leftist people, and then, of course, those people who are more rightist politics and opinions. And they were then complaining, but then I was thinking that, what about if this had been a different opposite way, if far leftist would have arranged, organized reading circle, and far right, or people would have come to South there, and that would have been then again, different opinions were would have been presented. So these are some which I see as some threats and something, but we have what is going on in our current societies, in western democracies. So how can education be transformed to promote active citizenship in democracies? And so we have titled this transformation and reflection in education for democracy, and I continue with this idea. What we have is the about critical reflection, and when we think about critical reflection, then we need to think about that people. You cannot be critical if you are not aware about your own thoughts, your own attitudes, your own emotions. If you you cannot recognize what you are feeling, how you are behaving. So, so you can read here that even though it is about educational, education for democracy and civic education is traditionally aimed to preserve existing norms while facilitating new ideas. Contemporary democratic challenges underscore the need for change and lifelong learning. This is where transformative learning intersects with education for democracy, offering a bad way for individuals to become critically engaged citizens capable of fostering democratic agency. And this is from the draft and the review, which is written by Maya huti and Nicholas sanstrum. And you can see the same idea also from Eszter Parker and Fleming 2020 and Hogan glober et al, 2023

when we think about critical reflection and then we should distinguish some meaning perspectives. There is a meaning perspective means that it is an interpretation of the meaning of a present event, whatever it is that is based on a frame of reference or expectation from prior experiences, and we have three different perspectives. One is epistemic. What kind of knowledge we have about that? What kind of what is our knowledge base about the situation or the event, how we understand it? What is our understanding about the facts and realities. So it’s epistemic, and it’s about knowledge. Or then we have perspective meaning. Perspective is sociolinguistic meaning. Perspective that means that it’s based on our what kind of social norms and culture expectations we have, how we are socialized and become as a members of the society and our language, and how we deal with our language, and how we what is our culture, and what are our attitudes, cultural attitudes, what we think about. And then it is psychological meaning, perspective that is more personal perspective, because it is related to our self concept, what kind of person I am as a person, what I need, what anxieties and emotions I have, and what are my personality based preferences. So when you think about this, and then we go through thinking about a transformation in reflection and critical thinking and education for democracy. So transformation through reflection is possible if we are able to develop our capacity for metacognition, thinking about our own thinking, how I think and why I think in this way, what are my pre urges? How can I find out what kind of prejudices I have, and how I can link my personal experiences to broader social and cultural contexts, how my experience, for examples, what I was explaining to you about concerning for examples, what happened in a library of Ori, how it is, how I relate that to some broader social and cultural context of Finland. And then it’s transformation through critic. Thinking here. Emphasis is on our reasoning, how we evaluate evidence, and how are we able to identify our biases, that we may have some biased assumptions about things, how they are happening, and how we encourage intellectual openness and willingness to revise our views and how how we are open, also to discuss with other people, concerning about their views of the and their perspectives of life, and not focusing only our own views, but how we can be as open, also to discuss openly, and maybe we can argue with other people, but we were, we are, must also listen what they are saying, actively listening them. And that is, then comes by transformation is educational for democracy is that we need to promote dialog, we need to promote debate and but the same time, we should have mutual respect as a core democratic practice in our sense. So we need to respect another person and give, for example, 20 minutes time to speak and give a freely present opinion, what is, what is his or her perspective on some issue, and then we can start continuing discussing and debating, but we need to have also be quiet sometimes when the person is speaking, and not the South that I could see from that Oxford Union situation. For example, people were trying to shut down people who are giving different opinions. And we need to encourage participatory learning environments where guidance viewpoints are values. So and that is possible, for example, that in schools, we give from the very start, also we can think about, even from the kindergarten phase, that the children and pupils, students, teenagers, they have always have a chance to say, but what is their viewpoint and how they what they think about, for example, how to arrange a classroom, how to how they can participate in a decision making, slowly progressing and getting more responsibilities in decision making. So intersection of these dimensions, so only empowered individuals are capable of navigating complexity and contributing to such just society. So and to bring up empowered individuals means that, from childhood, you give children and in the school, you give children and pupils chance to say and actively participate in some decision making, concerning, for examples, about school environment or something small, this or when, how to organize some trips or so on, and see the same that cultivation of lifelong learners who are both self critical and socially intelligent. And we think about people who are self critical, we must think about people who are self aware about their own emotions, self aware about their own thinking. They have a meta cognitive skills. They can evaluate and assess their own thinking. They can evaluate their own reuses. They can become aware of their biases, and then they can become also socially engaged, because they feel that they are also valued. And they can they can act, become active citizens, engaging in decision making in in in the society and and this is also possible when if we develop inclusive, participatory frameworks that advance democratic values, and the participatory is framework means that we allow students to start From the very early on, to participate in decision making, in schools and in society. So and this my Finally, I will end just asking your thoughts because I said something, what I have had in my mind about which I saw as the biggest threats or obstacles in for democracy, but what do you consider is the biggest obstacle to education for democracy? Yeah, thank you for listening. I stopped my sharing.

FRANCESCA: Thank you very much, Anne for this presentation. I. Um, I think it raises a lot of interesting thoughts and questions. Well, I try to give a first contribution to your question. I think it’s one obstacle to education for democracy is that, I mean, you cannot limit education for democracy to schools. We need democratic processes and democratic behaviors all over in societies, in all institutions, in all contexts, starting from families and and this is how we can hope democratic competence to be really acquired and in a coherent way so well. That’s, that’s, that’s my immediate thought to your to your question, before giving the floor to participants for the questions i i start with one question of mine, because I think there is a recurring question that comes out and not only in democracy talks, but everywhere and every day, and it’s about how we can balance in democratic societies, freedom of speech with prevention of hate speech. Because sometimes, I think we all agree that most of us don’t like hate speech to be promoted or to be given space, but sometimes we observe that intolerant positions and intolerant behaviors are contested with untolerance methods, and tolerant methods. So we complain against intolerance, but sometimes we observe opponents to intolerance using intolerant behaviors. And think this is a tricky, tricky issue. And I was wondering whether you, you have a thought on that, because this is something that I think has been raised quite often during our conversations.

ANNE: Yes, I agree. It is very tricky question. It is very tricky problem. What we have in a because when we think we want to have free speech. And that means that people can present even what we may call as a hate speech, but otherwise it can be very simple one, like a blaming and naming other people, but it can be somehow also focusing on some other issues. And it can be focusing on some groups with a like that, but, but if we try to stop that free speech, Ninten, we are slowly coming, going towards the totalitarian and finally, by ending in a totalitarianism, there is no free speech. So that is really difficult how to because I’m very much for free speech, and very much for that people should be then corrected and argued against, and people should say, but then we have a product. But this is mainly the problem is made caused by social media. Because social media, it’s, maybe it’s quite new. Anyway, it has been existing social media about the 2020, 1520, years, maybe or or less, something, maybe 2010 progressing more. And when we have this Twitter, when they came Facebook, Twitter, and different kind of people could express freely what they were thinking. But then we have those trolls. We have also systematically some people producing hate speech. So then we have this problem again, how we, as a single, active citizen, I can when I’m find myself in the situation that when I’m giving my I’m posting something on x, and then there come some trolls, which are bits are trying to get take away, or then I’m sorry I tried. They are trying to silence me. And I have all right to say something, but this is something which is lots of discussion, and I have no solution for that, but I recognize this problem that how people, how we can have this, that we we still give space for free speech, and we defend the right for free speech, and still try to understand that sometimes there’s. Would be some regulation and limits.

FRANCESCA: Thank you very much. Anne, I see here two, three raised ends. I think the first one was Georgios. Georgios, yes.

GEORGIOS: Thank you, Francesca, and many thanks to our speaker. I agree with the question before, and of course, you were your question in how to do this, what are the limits of free speech? And but for me, even something more basic is, what are the basic principles on which all of these democratic edifice is constructed? And who is the guardian of those principles? Because we see that at some point democracy becomes an ideology. You’re either with us or against us, even in the democratic countries, as you noted in a way using different words. But if the basics is that we all share we respect the other human being. We respect their opinions. We try to persuade them through dialog and critical thinking in a positive way for all of us, then we can find common ground. If we want to shut them up whatever, and try to scare them or bully them in one way or another, then we have lost, I think, the whole concept of of democracy. So do you really see this, this trend of democracy becoming more like an ideology, and let’s say zero sum game, instead of going to the basics of, how can our society work better by respecting each other, etc? And that would explain also the extremes, I think, in behaviors from one and the other side. And is academia, or is education independent enough to come in and say, we establish the common ground, we give the right education, and we enable people to interact positively or productively? Are you in a position, or you feel free, enough, competent, enough, whatever, to do that. Thanks.

ANNE: Very difficult. Thank you. Very difficult. So because as an educator myself, I put a lot of hope in our educational systems. I put a lot of hope in that how we educate young people for democracy, and that’s why I was mentioning this, is that it is important to educate and support them to develop in critical thinking, so that they can themselves compare different arguments, and then they can themselves become active citizens, so that they can learn that they have A right to have their say in a society. So that’s the only way that we can have that our democratic democracy to continue to the future generations. It is, this is my only answer. Is mainly, I always find out this is that we should always focus on the young people and help them and support them.

FRANCESCA: Thank you, Anne, this is a very awful perspective. Thank you. I think Carmen has a question. Yes, well,

SPEAKER 5: it’s almost a comment more than a question. Because Anne, thanks for the presentation, because it was really very interesting, and it pointed out some very recent examples of situations that portray perfectly what is happening in any occasions. And I was wondering about the your first answer to to Francesca in the first question, and about this free speech that we all want value. And I was just thinking that really the big problem for me is not that, that we need, of course, we need to give option to everybody to express what they feel, even if we don’t like what they say. But there is a problem with respect, and that is something that it happens with people like trolls and things like that. They actually act in a way that we should not allow that to happen. That is my point of view. If you are actually contributing with your point of view, it’s completely against mine. But if you are respectful, it’s fine, but when you lack the respect and and You disqualify people and things, then is when we need to put a stop. I think that that is an important limit that we should all agree no, because at the end of the tolerance from Democratic people is very weak in front of the intolerance of the non democratic people, and that is the problem that we need to make sure that we control. I don’t know if it’s the. More control, but that we watch at least,

ANNE: yes, that’s interesting, because to be a tolerant and tolerant and be for that giving all people have their they can say and give a idea this for free speech. But then it is that, how can, how can I? How can we be tolerant to intolerant people. So whether there is some limits that where we should say that this, this will not go on, because then it is some for, as a humanity, we have for we have a developed for long, 1000 years, and we have in every society. We have some manners. We have some ways how we, for example, show our respect to other people, how we behave and how we know our position. So there at least also important ones, so that we should have a somehow understanding that we have some regulations, some rules. For example, when we have a this kind of situations where we have a discussion of politics, discussion of issues which are highly hot topics, which are which which dividing people to have very which people have very different, diverse perspectives. Because these diverse perspectives maybe come from because they have a different social background, they have a different cultural background, they have a different religious background, they have a maybe understand the different language. So there are many reasons why we people, we have a very different perspectives to situations, and we have a different opinions how to divide. And then maybe it’s just we need to, in democracies to develop these rules and regulations how we can participate actively and how we can provide that every person has also right to have their say freely. But then in the same time, we need to have somehow take care that we don’t allow roles like in a social media or we don’t allow that when there is some public occasion happening on where people are going to give their speech, Nintendo audience is not allowed to shout and stop that because that’s a rule that You have, you are you? You are allowed to have this 20 minutes, 10 minutes time, and then it’s the same as you would have started shouting there or not listening me. So then, then I my, I couldn’t have give to you my medicine or my what I’m thinking about. And if, if you are now asking me questions, and then I will just shut down my screen and will not listen. It is not polite. It’s impolite. So I think this is but how to educate. Then we go back to education, and then it is about education again. So and we know that in schools, we have a very good examples in schools when we they can have a very good how to help students to become more active and participate in in a school in different ways, how so that they can have something to and that’s the way that we can promote that They they’re thinking and critical thinking, and they’re also they empower pupils and students to become these active citizens when they become adults, and they have the they know that they can participate, they can have their say and and like that. But it is also that with same time, we may try to change our society towards more democratic.

FRANCESCA: Thank you. One I read the chat. So there’s a comment by Nicholas saying social media amplify many dimensions and perspectives in ways that can become overwhelming. Yes, exactly. And Georgios, asked, is the situation worse on social media? Because there are no established rules of behavior there, at least not yet, I would say definitely. So I don’t know if you, if you want to comment on this.

ANNE: Oh, yes, it’s a social media is different, especially it is recent phenomenon in in a perspective of human history, it has been very recent that we have been actually, it is very recent that people have their say. And this we can see also with this mass media. Mass media is somehow now feeling that they want to sat down. They don’t like to have the people having their say, because they have they used to have in a journalist and like them, they used to have power in their hands because they could control what what was discussed in the society. And now we have a social media which. Is somehow letting other people who have never been heard to say but also participate, also in a very good, very good, stupid comments and very idiotic ways. But that doesn’t matter. But they have a there is a now, somehow and we cannot, maybe we cannot close this social media that will continue, but we need to think about how to regulate it.

FRANCESCA: Thank you. Anne, I’m sorry Carsten had a question or a comment that he had to leave, so it’s in the chat. I will read it out. I address the question by chat, the analysis of communication in social media indicates that emotional information is more shared than rational based information. If this is the case, the critical thinking has its limit. Leads limits. If this does not include to manage well the only emotions, particularly in communication processes. Well, yes, that’s a yes. Oh, sorry

ANNE: that he had to leave. So I would have like to discuss with him about this, because this is that. This is especially what I can see, because this it is, it is very emotional. What is happening in social media. People are somehow thriving with their emotions. They act immediately. They see something in social media, and then they post immediately. Bucha thinking, and it was when I can’t remember those 30 years ago, when the email came and then we had this, that sometimes you were too quick to send an email that went to for whole group or whole department, and that was private email, actually, and then you were, oh, I didn’t mean that. And you may use some root words even so, even in those 30 years ago, we must learn that think first before you post anything. And this is the same with social media, because some people are very immediately becoming very angry, very aroused, and then they immediately type, and then they post their What are thinking, what they are saying, and that may become viral, and people, it may get a 10,000 likes or something like that, and it goes globally or everywhere, and suddenly you are in a in a people out knowing who you are. You have no more privacy, and people don’t realize these are quite dangerous in that sense that social media has and this is. And then, when we think about this future, our young generation how to help them to become enough wise in their thinking, in their critical thinking, and how to help them and support them to how to act in social media. Because we know that for young people, there are tick tocks and all, and this social media is very important for them. They have grown up with this social media. They are growing up with their these mobiles in their hands. I can see it so that this is that they are all the time in somewhere with the and this is that something, because now we come that how to support developing, becoming, controlling your emotions. It’s only possible. It’s not possible through online situations. It’s possible in face to face situations. We need to come back a little bit, come back towards give more emphasis on face to face meetings and face to face discussions, because, though we have tried to develop different ways of how to express our emotions, but when we express our emotions in face to face situations, we can read Another person’s emotions immediately, but in online we cannot, and we and you know, when we are posting in social media and we are not seeing the person as a person, we are just alone there. We are posting very angry or something, what we are posting there, but then it is what I have sometimes said. It was long ago, but I said to some who, who posted some what I had posted on Twitter those days, it was Twitter, and then she was very much against what I had said. And then she said very rude thing. So for me, then I said that. I said that when we could meet at face to face, you wouldn’t have never said that way to me. And then he she, of course, said that she would have said but then she became quiet, because she realized I understand, she realized she would have never said that to me, and that was because she was my academic colleague. We didn’t know very well, but far away. So by the name, we knew each other. That’s why I was this was so that then I was thinking that just knowing me by my name, and I knowing her by her name, different university, and then sending something very something, saying very rude Okay, to me. And she would have never said in that way. She would have maybe argued against my opinions, but set it more polite way, and then it would have not felt for me so hurting.

FRANCESCA: Thank you. Anne, there is a comment here by Georgios in the chat, can we create higher consciousness of the repercussions of social media posts and humanize those interactions too. It is people who are involved there too, except for the increasing use of AI. Of course, yes, absolutely.

ANNE: This is that, I must say, that social media is also that you learn when you are there and you in how you act in then it is that kind that social media is for you and for other people. It is it. But I think that we need to learn about this as to humanize these interactions. We need to learn about the thing that, and especially young people that there are always there is a person in when you are sending something in the social media, posting something there, and then you are posting something about to other people and who are reading your post, and who may they come to figure out what kind of person you are, the way, what kind of post you send to social media. So that’s this is very important one for, I think that is democracy for education, also, if you want to be active citizen in how do you can actively influence in the society is also that you need to learn how to actively get engaged in social media and how to how yourself to control your behavior in social media. So then you are always an example to others. As an older person. I’m saying because as an older person, you think always that you are always as you must be an example.

FRANCESCA: I think we could all benefit from some emotional intelligence training, especially when approaching social media and digital tools.

ANNE: Yes, I recommend Daniel Goldman social intelligence. It’s, it’s very good reading. It is,

FRANCESCA: I’m not sure whether there are any other questions from the audience. Otherwise, I wanted to ask you, Anne about what about the preparation of teachers? Because, I mean, no one can teach knowledge and skills that in principle she or he has not learned herself or himself. So I was wondering teachers to teach the education for democracy, they need to be well prepared. So my question is, are there specific provisions in place at your own institution or in the Finnish educational system in general to support the preparation of teachers and any professional development program for teachers in primary and secondary schools. For example,

ANNE: I’m sorry I don’t have so much so I don’t know better there is going on. And maybe Nicholas knows more better about this, but then. But what I think like from my perspective, what I think is important in teacher education is there is that we have this which are very important, that there we have this program which are supporting, that teachers are teaching in pairs or teachers are as a group, teachers teaching so that there is only, not only one teacher in a classroom, but there are two teachers or three teachers in a classroom. And there, there are many benefits, because then children can see also how the teachers are themselves, are collaborating and being there together, and Nicholas is sending there something also, but then it is also, there’s a social emotional learning approaches. I agreed what Nicholas said here is social and emotional learning approaches are being applied in at least some teacher education programs in Finland, and they are practiced systematically. Okay, so we have this, and what I think about myself is was thinking about this emotional intelligence, and it is very important in teacher educations also help becoming teachers to become aware of their their emotions in teaching and and how they influence their students. And of course, also that they to learn to use different kinds of participatory methods in teaching, so that in that sense, that that way to support pupils and students to become active citizens and to have their say.

FRANCESCA: Thank you very much, Anne, and also thanks Nicholas for contributing in the chat. any other question from from participants here? Okay, so I think it’s been a very inspiring conversation. Anne, thank you very much, and also thanks for Niklas for joining us and contributing actively through the chat. We hope you recover well soon, karma has raised hands. No, okay, so maybe this is less from from, okay, okay, so yes, before closing our session, I would like to invite you to the next democracy talk, because this is the last talk for this year, 2024 but the talks will go on in 2025 and the next one will be on the 15th of January, the usual time, 3pm Central European Time. We will have the pleasure to listen to Sonia Bucha of the University of Birmingham, who will be presented in inspire project, which is about CO designing more inclusive and embedded participation. It sounds already very interesting. So once again, I would like to thank you one and Niklas, very much for being with us today. I would like to thank all participants for joining here in zoom and on YouTube, and we really hope to have you with us next year in the next democracy talks.