Exchange at Europe@DJHT 2025 in Leipzig
How can Education for democratic Citizenship/Human Rights Education empower young people to critically question digitality, shape it sustainably and have a say in society? These questions are at the heart of the Europe-wide Analysis on Digital Youth Work which was presented on 14 May 2025 as part of the europe@DJHT program at the 18th German Child and Youth Welfare Day.
In the well-attended workshop, Elisa Rapetti (DARE Network) together with Nils-Eyk Zimmermann and Georg Pirker (Arbeitskreis deutscher Bildungsstätten e. V., Berlin) and Markus Plasencia-Kanzler (Sozialprofil, Graz) presented the results of the 107-page analysis.
It examines practices and approaches to political (youth) education on digitality across Europe and places them in relation to available data and research findings on how young people deal with the digital.
The analysis focuses on the three major challenges of the digital transformation for young people:
- Reflecting on digital change and ecological footprint as an area of tension; sustainable development of digital transformation
- Understanding the interaction between digitality and young people’s identity formation processes
- Understanding, shaping and controlling digital change as a socio-political process
Markus Plasencia-Kanzler (Verein Sozialprofil) began by presenting the various steps of the Digital Youth Work project. Elisa Rapetti (DARE Network) and Nils-Eyk Zimmermann (AdB) introduced the participants to the analysis and presented digitalization as a task for shaping political youth education. Georg Pirker (AdB) explained the empty spaces, referred to as “blank spaces” in the analysis, which the analysis identified by contrasting existing education and youth work practices with the data situation.
The digital in the three dimensions as such is rarely made the subject of educational work. Rather, in almost all contexts of educational work, digital youth work seems to move in a cloud of digital phenomena such as AI, combating hate speech or app-oriented educational work (TikTok and others) instead of supporting young people in developing a critical meta-view of them and a practice of critical application and assessment.
In two workshop rounds, the participants discussed questions about these “blank spaces” in relation to the ecological dimension and identity formation. On the one hand, the conclusions of the analysis were critically reviewed and, on the other, the focus was shifted to the dimension of young people’s participation in digital governance issues.
With a view to the next steps in the project, a proposal was presented as to how the practice of digital youth work can use the three basic dimensions of analysis – sustainability, identity formation and control/governance – to align educational offerings in order to develop an educational approach to political education that helps to make digitality itself an object.