International crises and developments in European societies, have brought renewed awareness, that value education for democracy in schools is crucial for democratic societies. Therefore, the curricula in several European countries strengthened topics of democracy education. Teachers’ competencies and beliefs form an important variable in the actual realisation of these objectives. Empirical studies show that future primary school teachers need a better understanding and teaching methods of democratic principles and values learning to cope with rapid social changes, the emergence of new social and individual needs, especially with regard to diversity and tensions in primary school. This is why universities of initial teacher education can offer opportunities for creating these competencies by means of active professional interchange and guided experiences of trans-national understanding (Kolb, 1984).

To address these challenges, the joint Erasmus+ project ValiDE - Values in democracy education - enhancing competencies and beliefs of teacher students through a joint study program (KA220-HED - Cooperation partnerships in higher education) was initiated in three partner universities. Partners are the University of Education Weingarten (Germany), the University of Agder (Norway) and the Pedagogical University of Krakow (Poland). The project implements a joint exchange study program within the framework of teacher training at these universities, which focuses on reflection and discussion of democratic values in a tri-national group of teacher students. The participants also collaboratively elaborate teaching scenarios on democratic values education. The project will be matter of two research questions: (1) What national curricular differences in values education can be found? (2) In what respect do the students show changes in beliefs, attitudes and competencies regarding values education in due course of the exchange program?

The core idea of ValiDE is mainly based on an international exchange to foster competencies and beliefs. Every year a fix group of teacher students from Poland, Norway and Germany stays at each of the participating universities for one week and receive input, visit schools and work on didactical tasks. The teacher students also take part in workshops of three NGOs, one in each country to deepen their experience in different perspectives of democratic values. The NGOs add special competencies in the fields of democracy education, human rights education and ethical/interreligious education. With this approach, the project ValiDE responds to needs in the areas of: (A) student teacher mobility: teacher education for democracy needs partners from outside the own cultural community. It calls for experience of language barriers and own cultural difference and for tasks to collaborate in transnational groups. (B) placing democracy learning and dealing with democratic values in the everyday classroom of diverse social reality and the need of fostering teachers’ competencies in this area.

The poster shows how the intervention and the research design are conceived and reports the pilot study’s preliminary findings about students' goals and expectations at the beginning of the exchange.

The first step was to (1) analyse the existing curricula and (2) explore the changes in beliefs, attitudes and competences that are to be expected from the course intervention. Additionally, a literature review on the empirical evidence concerning the differing values concepts in teacher students is carried out. (1) The core curricula for primary education in Poland, Norway, and Germany (Baden-Wuerttemberg) are analysed abductively. Firstly, lexicometric and concordance analysis (Dzudzek et al., 2009) will be applied to identify the prevalent values in each of the curricula and the context they appear in. Secondly, thematic analysis (Clarke, Braun, Terry & Hayfield, 2019) will be used to link the conceptualisations behind values in each of the curricula. The results will be interpreted in relation to the model of competences required for democratic culture and intercultural dialogue (Council of Europe, 2016). (2) The student exchange programme is evaluated using different approaches of data collection including a logbook with the same open questions (t1 – t4: at the beginning and after each week of the exchange) that shows teacher students’ beliefs and aims connected to democratic values and value education pre-post the study exchange program.

Conceptual outcomes: We expect the project to have outcomes in several dimensions of the aims we address: We create an exchange program, comprising formal and informal learning activities, that is going to last for the future and offer the opportunity of intercultural project learning on the topic of democracy and values education year by year. The whole concept in theory and practice is going to be worked out as a ready to use handbook for other institutions of teacher education, for institutions of primary teacher further education and in the material part, integrating the student work output, even for primary school teachers themselves. This handbook is going to comprise theory, evaluated learning activities on staff level, the curriculum for the university seminar, the exchange course learning activities, learning material for the teacher students, descriptions for teachers, lessons, (practically tested) activities and material for use in primary schools and material for awareness, self-reflection and intercultural communication. Pilot study: Preliminary findings about students' goals and expectations at the beginning of the exchange: The participating student teachers are given a logbook with similar questions at the beginning and at the end of the exchange program. They also are supposed to reflect on their specific learning experiences after each week during the program. To get to know about from which points of view the participants started into the program they were asked in open questions to mention (1) their main reasons to join the program, (2) their expectations for the three-week program, (3) their aims to learn, (4) their points to avoid. The preliminary results of n=7 logbooks to these questions are reported in the poster. The thematic text analysis (Clarke, Braun, Terry & Hayfield, 2019) is used to run a qualitative analyse of the self-reported student teachers’ views.

Council of Europe (2016). Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture – Volume 1 Model. Council of Europe Publishing. Retrieved January 30, 2023, from https://rm.coe.int/a-model-of-the-competences-required-for-democratic-culture-and-intercu/16809940c3. Dzudzek, I., Glasze, G., Mattissek, A. & Schirmel, H. (2009). Verfahren der lexikometrischen Analyse von Textkorpora [Methods of lexicometric analysis of text corpora]. In Glasze, G. & Mattissek, A. (Eds.) Handbuch Diskurs und Raum: Theorien und Methoden für die Humangeographie sowie die sozial- und kulturwissenschaftliche Raumforschung [Handbook discourse and space. Theories and methods for human geography as well as spatial research in the social and cultural sciences]. 2. Ed. Transcript. Kolb, D. A. (1984). Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.