Session Information
11 SES 08 A, Monitoring Citizenship Education in Europe and Beyond
Symposium
Contribution
The ways in which civil society actors empower citizens with means of non-formal (outside of schools) and informal civic education (lifelong learning) vary from country to country in Europe. And so do topics, approaches, and target groups. To draw a map of civic education is therefore challenging, but not impossible. The growing quest for (more) civic education underlines the importance of mapping it in Europe. Hence, the aim of the program ‘Mapping civic education in Europe’ to identify actors of civic education in 21 countries (Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Moldova, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Poland, Slovenia, Spain, Turkey, Ukraine), both in non-formal and informal civic education. While this is not strictly a monitoring attempt, it intends to fill a knowledge gap when it comes to key actors, their topics, target groups, networks, approaches, together with needs and assets. Following the definition of civic education framed by the Council of Europe (2010), the methodology of the mapping follows two stages. In the first stage, a list of initial contacts of civic education actors is collected by the local partners in each country. Each actor is approached with a request to fill in an online questionnaire. While filling the questionnaire, respondents are asked to recommend further civic education actors they know and cooperate with. Afterwards, recommended contacts are approached with the request to fill in the questionnaire, this way expanding the outreach of the mapping using the snowballing method. In the second stage, a shorter questionnaire is sent to the civic education actors who have filled in the initial survey, this time indicating their relationship to other respondents. The second stage of the mapping identifies existing civic education networks in each of the mapped countries. While the mapping strives at a wide outreach, it cannot claim representativeness and limits itself by the selectiveness of its approach to sampling. Being the first pan-European attempt to map non-formal and informal civic education actors, the project has the potential to give initial evidence and provide data for practitioners and researchers alike, interested to learn more about the state of civic education in the designated countries. The presentation will provide examples form an interactive map, clustering the actors based on various categories, but also analysing their relations in each country context.
References
Council of Europe (s.a.): Definitions of non-formal and informal education. Available at: https://www.coe.int/en/web/european-youth-foundation/definitions Council of Europe (2010) Charter on Education for Democratic Citizenship and Human Rights Education. Adopted in the framework of Recommendation CM/Rec(2010)7 of the Committee of Ministers. Strasbourg: CoE. https://rm.coe.int/16803034e5 Krempel, L., 2011. Network visualization. The SAGE handbook of social network analysis, pp.558-577. Borgatti, S.P., Mehra, A., Brass, D.J. and Labianca, G., 2009. Network analysis in the social sciences. science, 323(5916), pp.892-895. Biernacki, P. and Waldorf, D., 1981. Snowball sampling: Problems and techniques of chain referral sampling. Sociological methods & research, 10(2), pp.141-163. Crittenden, J. and Levine, P., 2007. Civic education.
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