Community profiling (CP) is a useful tool for community development (Martini & Sequi 1988; Francescato 2000; Ehmayer, Reinfeldt and Gtotter 2000) that can be defined as a description of the needs and resources of a community through a process of “active involvement of the community itself” (Hawtin, Hughes and Percy-Smith, 1998:5) in the formulation of the priorities for community intervention and action. CP has been used to enhance participation in local programs, to improve networking among existing governmental and non-governmental organisations, and to identify specific weaknesses and strengths of a particular community (Gelli, Mannarini and Bonifazi 2004), considering various profiles: e.g., territorial, demographic, economic, services, institutional, anthropological, psychological and future (Francescato 2000).  Research also shows its potential as a learning experience in the education of young people (Martini and Sequi 1988; Ehmeyer, Reinfeltd and Gstotter 2000; Francescato, Tomai and Ghirelli 2002; Teater and Baldwin 2009).

This paper emerges from a project on Participatory Citizenship Education in Transitional Societies, aiming to examine how policies and practices of Citizenship Education in European countries, especially those that experienced a democratic transition, integrate the recognition of the authoritarian past and promote a critical and participatory civic and political culture. Our research explored the potential of CP as a tool for participatory citizenship education in the school context. CP can generate specific conditions for the empowerment of participants (pupils, teachers, parents, …) as it favours a flexible and creative approach in an eminently participative, collaborative, and negotiated research process (Menezes, 2010:60). In this case, pupils from different schools were involved with their teachers in researching opportunities for participation in the school and the community using three basic profiles: past (before the democratic transition of 1974), present and future (in 35 years).

This paper discusses both the implementation and results of CP and the soundness of its use as a collaborative research tool for promoting participatory citizenship education.

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