Learning Democracy with Children Aged 8-12: Handbook for Educators – a new publication in the DARE Blue Lines Series

“ENGAGE- learning democracy with children aged 8-12” (VOL II) is a handbook for educators which introduces and recommends a set of 11 different methods clustered in 3 dimensions for democracy learning with children aged 8 to 12 years.

Each method is introduced in the broader context of educational policies, of possible curricular entries and learning methodologies.

Given the fact that EDC in the different countries in Europe is more or less a term with a broad variety of applications it is clear that the suggested methods ask for adaptation and contextualisation.

In each method chapter there are provided further links to existing interesting and relevant EDC- practices from the 6 partner countries .

Handbooks

Two products have been developed:

The methods introduced in the handbook have been developed adaptated and  tested in the 6 partner countries (AT, FR, ESP, PL, UK, GER, BE) with the aim to get a view on quality education for democratic citizenship from the aspect of testing a standardised practice. Surprisingly the key findings of the testing of methods correspond with the findings of the ENGAGE country studies conducted in the project  2014-2015 – one and the same materials have been broadly tested in formal and non-formal educational settings with children aged 8-12 in six countries.

All documents and publications are free for use and can be found from http://www.engage-edc.eu.

Background

ENGAGE is a project devoted to analyse the situation of EDC with children aged 8-12 in 6 european countries (AT, FR, ESP, PL, UK, GER, BE). It looks deeply into formal and non-formal educational settings and tries to identify interesting initiatives and practices, but also looks in to gaps and barriers to establish the conditions for better citizenship education.