Policy Recommendations on Citizenship Education for Sustainable European Democracy

POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS ON CITIZENSHIP EDUCATION FOR SUSTAINABLE EUROPEAN DEMOCRACY Deliverable D4.6 Project Title Grant Agreement No. Democracy meets arts: critical change labs for building democratic cultures through creative and narrative practices 101094217 Project Acronym EC Call Critical ChangeLab HORIZON-CL2-2022-DEMOCRACY-01-04 Work Package WP4: Sustain Work Package Leaders Alternatives Européennes (ALTEREURO) Deliverable Lead Beneficiary Alternatives Européennes (ALTEREURO) Contractual Delivery Date 30.9.2025 Actual Delivery Date 30.9.2025 Delayed NO Nature R - Document, report Dissemination Level PU - Public Partner(s) contributing to this deliverable Alternatives Européennes (ALTEREURO) Authors Niccolo Milanese (ALTEREURO) Contributors OULU, TCD, UB, AE, KERSNIKOVA, LATRA, TT, WAAG, ISRZ Acknowledgments None Reviewers Kristijan Tkalec (Kersnikova) Building Democratic Cultures Through Creative and Narrative Practice KEY CONCEPTS • Everyday Democracy • Critical Consciousness • Participative Democratic Health • Creative technological environments OPPORTUNITIES AND TRENDS • Greater awareness of the value and rights of non-human beings • Connection of green agenda to other topics of social justice • Move towards EU tech sovereignty • Increased public awareness of risks of undemocratic online media POLICY IMPLICATIONS EU • Relate everyday democratic experiences to democracy at large • Involve young people in creating EU technological sovereignty • Involve young people in assessing democratic health • Promote critical consciousness and agency, in addition to literacy • Embed civic education into participatory formats • Go beyond STEM to STEAM, including the arts NATIONAL POLICY MAKERS • Bring democracy education into every part of the curriculum • Train teachers across disciplines to teach democracy FOR SCHOOLS • Assess democratic health of own-organisations FOR EDUCATORS • Embrace co-creative approaches to civic education Critical ChangeLab is a Horizon Europe funded project that between 2022-2025 has been developing educational methodologies to build a resilient European democracy, in a context of dramatic geopolitical, social, technological and ecological challenges. Through experimentation with over 80 groups of young people between the ages of 12 and 18 in over 11 EU countries, the project has developed extensive knowledge about what can work to promote democratic skills, attitudes, dispositions and competences amongst young people. The European Union as a whole, and its individual member states, are increasingly placing an emphasis on defending democracy from both internal and external actors seeking to undermine it, and building societal resilience in a context of geopolitical contestation and planetary polycrisis. Education has a central role in achieving these objectives, as has been acknowledged by President Von Der Leyen in her political guidelines for the 2024 European Commission. Despite this, Commission studies show that the education sector in general across Europe has suffered one of the largest drops in investment of all public sectors. Under stress, democratic education and innovative approaches to education risk losing out. Indeed, development of what EU policy-makers refer to as ‘European citizenship education’ has to some extent taken a back seat in the most recent years, after a period of comparative prominence from the Paris declaration of 2015 through to the immediate post-Covid pandemic context of 2022. INTRODUCTION Overtaken by geopolitical and technological developments and internal divisions, there is currently little political discussion of a coherent and holistic European citizenship education as such, and rather an ad-hoc focus on addressing specific threats. Providing cutting edge insights from practice to update policy developments is therefore urgent. Underpinning the successful approaches to education for democracy developed through Critical Change Labs are transformative approaches to the topic of democracy itself, to technology, to the environment, to creativity and activity, to citizenship and politics and the connections between all these topics. This policy document seeks to explain these approaches and distinguish them from dominant approaches underlying much of policy-making over the previous period, and give recommendations by which policy makers, stakeholders, educators and institutions can reinforce the deep democratic competences amongst young people that will enable them to navigate contemporary dynamics. The four transformative approaches to democratic education that this document will explain are: Based on these approaches, 10 policy recommendations for EU and national stakeholders, policy makers, educational institutions and educators are proposed. Everyday Democracy Critical Consciousness Participative Democratic Health Creative technological environments POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS ON CITIZENSHIP EDUCATION FOR SUSTAINABLE EUROPEAN DEMOCRACY The Critical Change Labs model of democratic education for young people has been developed by adapting a model for change in workplaces that was successfully developed and deployed in Norway in the 1990s and has been used globally since in work environments. As such, the method is particularly well suited to 1. overcoming the barriers between vocational, hands-on approaches to education, and more ‘academic’, theoretical or conceptual approaches to learning 2. encouraging individual and collective competences that can navigate change and uncertainty democratically 3. adaptable use in different contexts and environments, in which vocabularies and articulations of core values, historical understandings, and attitudes towards change may differ This makes it particularly suitable for addressing education challenges at secondary school level in contemporary Europe in which 1. there is an increasing political divide and breakdown of understanding and solidarity between people with university education and those with more work experience or vocational training 2. the speed and scale of social, economic, environmental and technological change and the risks and uncertainties these produce can lead to disempowerment, anxiety and disenchantment. 3. There are internal political divides inside of the European Union which make ‘one size fits all’ policy solutions on topics relating to democracy and identity impracticable THE CRITICAL CHANGE LAB MODEL The Critical Change Labs model of democratic education finds practical ways of going beyond understanding topics, identifying different points of view and verifying factual information to challenging commonplaces. Beyond these aspects of literacy, the model enables learners to identify power dynamics and understand the history of problems as a basis for finding collective agency at an achievable and relevant scale. Instead of coming to learners with a preestablished idea of what they should learn about, the vocabularies they should use to discuss or analyse those issues, or actions they should take, the Critical Change Labs model starts from working with learners to identify issues of everyday importance to them (which may range from keeping the school tidy, to experiences of racism, worry about the planet, anxiety about finding jobs, addiction to social media…), and provides activities and formats by which the background, consequences, power dynamics and contradictions in those issues can be brought out, with a view to increasing the autonomy and capacity of learners to take action. UNDERSTANDING The base level of comprehnsion and contextual knowledge needed before the journey of developing critical literacies can begin IDENTIFYING Recognising issues that are creating conflict and contradictions DECONSTRUCTING Interrogation of the cultural construction of the "source" (e.g. text, concept, object), its social and political context, and societal transformation. Getting to the core of issues in Barcelona Gender relations and equality often emerged as a topic of major concern in CCLAB learner groups in response to the prompt ‘what are you really fed up about?’ Topics such as gender related violence, sexism, feminism, and inequalities were frequently mentioned. In a Barcelona school, learners aged 16-18 through a process of iterative democratic co-creation in several cycles of discussion and voting, deepened the issue of inquiry, to work specifically on affective responsibility, or how to behave in ways that do not harm other people, both individually and collectively. Educators expressed surprise that the CCLABS methodology empowered learners to move beyond the most widely-discussed words, to look at a deeper issue underlying them. A futures triangle of food quality In the ‘analyse’ phase of a CCLAB the learners are prompted to think about the historical origins of the issue they are concerned with, and also with how the issue projects itself into the future. Learners can use the ‘futures triangle’ the weight of the past, the push of the present and the pull of the future. Some students, for example, analysed poor-quality food, looking at how over past decades pollution, use of pesticides and mass agricultural production has led to decreasing food quality, and thinking about how the future could look if this trend continues, but also what more positive futures could be. In this way, the learners identified the political and commercial interests that would need to be challenged to work towards a better food quality future. ACTIVATING CHANGE Imagining alternative futures and identifying pathways to change. Using diverse transformative tools to make a positive impact locally, nationally, and/or globally. DISRUPTING THE COMMONPLACE Challenging assumptions and accepted norms, and analysing their impact. EMBRACING MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES Engaging with diverse voices and contexts to develop more nuanced understandings. INVESTIGATING POWER AND AGENCY Critically examining power relations, biases, and socio-political inequalities. The Critical Change Lab model involves 3 to 5 group sessions, which move through the phases of onboarding, questioning, analysing, envisioning, acting and reflecting. THE CRITICAL CHANGE LAB MODEL The concept of ‘everyday democracy’ has been used by scholars and analysts for over two decades, but has yet to be fully adopted by policy makers in general. At its most fundamental, the idea is that democracy is not only about voting and representation, but about our daily relationships in every social setting, the family, amongst friends, school, the workplace, the high street, or our interactions in hospitals, with government administration or with the police. These interactions increasingly take place not only offline, but also online, often in hybrid online and offline ways. How democratic these relationships are depends on how much of a say each individual has in the relationship and its direction, the degree to which their interests and identity are respected and taken into account. Everyday democracy does not mean that everyone has an identical role or authority in every social interaction: it does not imply each person should both be doctor and patient, teacher and student, employer and employee, parent and child, or decision-maker and voter. It rather means that social relations should not be based on domination or force, and that the autonomy of each person should be reinforced. The consequences of adopting an ‘everyday democracy’ approach in education include the following: Core concepts underlying the Critical Change Labs approach Everyday Democracy Acknowledging that all relationships in a learning setting, whether in a school or in a non-formal or informal context, model and influence attitudes, dispositions and values that learners will carry with them into other parts of their lives. Promoting democratic values in school therefore requires a ‘whole school approach’ 1 Fostering the capacity to identify power relationships, competing interests and stakeholders, and different ways of addressing imbalances, finding compromises or accepting difference. 2 A capacity of self-awareness amongst learners about their own role, interests and behaviours in relationships with other people and with non-humans and the planet as a whole. 3 Placing an emphasis on reinforcing a sense of responsibility amongst learners and a capacity for collective action to address problems, with the sense that democracy is not only taking place in grand political arenas, but in micro-areas of everyday life. 4 Putting as much emphasis on how learners learn, and how they interact together, as on what factual information they learn. 5 Recent education policy has focused on various kinds of ‘literacies’: media literacy involves being able to access, analyse and evaluate different media; technological and digital literacy involves the ability to use, manage, analyse technology safely, effectively and responsibly; critical literacy involves questioning and examining ideas, interpreting texts and challenging assumptions; futures literacy is the skill of being able to understand the future’s role in shaping today, understand that multiple futures are possible. Literacies of these kinds are all important and are developed in the Critical Change Labs model, but the model takes one step further by embedding these literacy abilities in a wider sense of ‘critical consciousness’. Critical Consciousness means the ability to ‘perceive social, political and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality’, as it was put by one of the forefathers of the approach, the Brazilian educator Paolo Freire. As such, fostering critical consciousness involves an understanding of power relations, and a confidence that each learner can have an influence in addressing domination, in interrupting injustice and pursuing transformation in both local and more structural ways. Core concepts underlying the Critical Change Labs approach Critical Consciousness: going beyond ‘literacies’ to action The Critical Change Lab model starts immediately with the critical awareness of the learners, by working with them to identify problems or issues that trouble or bother them, at whatever scale. The entire learning process, in which concepts are explored, literacies are developed, histories are learnt, and alternatives are imagined and designed, is thereby embedded in a practical process of identifying possibilities for taking action for change. As such, the model works to expand and develop critical consciousness and responsibility amongst learners. Over recent years, scales and indexes for measuring the health of democracies have flourished. Amongst notable indexes are the Varieties of Democracy project, which uses over 500 indicators and allows different kinds of democratic system, and the Democratic Audits of the Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance which defines popular rule and political equity as the core of democracy, mediated by values such as participation, representation, accountability, transparency and responsiveness. The most sophisticated of the indexes allow that a fundamental element of democracy can be disagreement about what democracy is and should be, and which values should be most cherished. These audits and indexes are established by experts and scientists, sometimes with input of citizens and civil society living in the countries. They focus on ‘democracy at large’, on government and governance, albeit they may focus on different scales (from local to regional to national to transnational). Core concepts underlying the Critical Change Labs approach Participative Democratic Health Democracy Health Questionnaire Critical Change Labs collected and analysed the results of self-assessment democracy health questionnaires distributed amongst thousands of schools and non-formal educational organisations in 10 European countries in 2024. The questionnaire posed questions about democratic values and practives in development of the educational program, access to it and delivery of it as well as about the outcomes and impact on learners. For each question, the head of the institution was required to assess the importance of the issue, and the current attainment towards that objective. As such, the questionnaire prompts educational institutions asking themselves difficult questions about how democratic they are and how much they promote democracy, whilst also allowing them to be clear on their objectives of improvement, and year on year measure progress in becoming more democratic. Analysis of the results of the Democracy Health Questionniare can be read here in Policy Brief 1 The ‘everyday democracy’ approach embedded in the Critical Change Labs model calls for assessing democratic health in two ways which are different from these large-scale indexes. Firstly, democracy is understood to be present or absent in all relationships, which means that any institution could be democratically audited, including notably schools. The project has realized a Democratic Heath assessment based on a Democracy Health Questionnaire amongst schools, non-formal and informal learning organisations. Secondly, democracy should involve everyone concerned, and therefore the establishment of criteria for what democracy is and should be, and the measuring of them, should involve young people notably in co-creation processes, both as an exercise in democratic education and empowerment, but also as a model of the democratic relationship between ‘observer’ and ‘observed’. Since 2020 the European Commission has issued annual ‘Rule of Law’ country reports, covering the justice system, the anti-corruption framework, media pluralism and other institutional issues related to checks and balances. Since 2024, the European Commission has been hosting citizens panels on a variety of policy areas. The new Commission since 2024 is developing a ‘Democracy Shield’ for a more comprehensive approach to reinforcing democracy. The conceptions of everyday democracy and democratic health underlying Critical Change Labs suggest both that the rule of law reports could potentially be significantly expanded to include much broader areas of democracy, and could involve participatory elements notably including young people.