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How can school education encourage youth participation?

School education plays a fundamental role in promoting youth participation and helping students build confidence in their impact on the world in which they live. This tutorial will explore some helpful resources on how to facilitate active citizenship in the classroom.

Understanding youth participation

Youth participation is how young people engage with institutions and become involved with the decision-making process behind issues that impact their future. According to Voices of Youth, youth participation is a giant umbrella covering all forms of advocacy. Moreover, engagement has different degrees of participation, as illustrated by Roger Hart’s model of the ladder of children’s participation.

Ladder of Children’s Participation

Illustration of the Ladder of Children’s Participation from Hart’s essay Children’s Participation: From Tokenism to Citizenship

Despite participation being a fundamental right and a top-priority area of the EU agenda on youth, Petr Franc, Board Member at OBESSU, observed that some children and youth groups are not inclined to take part in policymaking processes. Is it possible that a limited understanding of socio-political dynamics deters young people’s involvement?

Why is it important to actively engage young people?

The promotion of citizenship education has recently gained prominence, as a result of increasingly widespread socio-economic issues and a lack of trust in democratic processes.

The Eurydice report on Citizenship Education at School in Europe (2018) underscores the fundamental role played by civic education in enabling student agency and preparing students for their role as active citizens, and explains how this can be achieved through curriculum and content organisation.

By the same token, the CIDREE Yearbook 2019 shows that a student voice approach can more effectively support young people in becoming active learners, compared to a teacher-directed approach. Students who have agency in their learning are more motivated and have greater satisfaction in their studies. Moreover, their renewed confidence in having their voice heard will likely lead them to have a greater impact on political developments in their communities.

Promoting youth participation in your classroom

The American Library Association highlights that ‘student agency is not something that can be provided in small doses and only during set lessons in the week…. Enabling student agency requires that it pervade every aspect of each student’s experience.’ To avoid overloading your courses, you might want to consider introducing a culture of democracy throughout the curriculum, teaching and management – following the example of these schools in Turkey – rather than simply training about governance, politics and democracy. Other examples of young European citizens in action demonstrate the benefits of including democratic participation in the classroom.

In this webinar, Isabelle De Coster discusses innovative pedagogies that encourage the development of social and civic competences, and promote equity, social cohesion, and active citizenship.

Tools to bolster active citizenship

Both School Education Gateway and the European Year of Youth 2022 platform have various resources on citizenship education and cover different elements of the topic. WeAreEurope outlined a Framework for the Key Citizenship Competences (2016) to analyse the Citizenship Education approaches in the EU Member States’ official curricula and identify the most significant competences of EU citizenship. Furthermore, as children and students are regarded as agents of social change, the FS2C project consortium designed a practical handbook (2014) to help teachers advise their students in their activities outside the classroom, conforming with the Child-to-Child approach.

In addition, the toolkit for Youth Participation in the Just Transition Fund (2021) offers advice on how to meaningfully engage young people, along with illustrating concrete methods and techniques to enable youth participation. Engaging ideas on how to engage and educate primary or secondary school pupils can also be found at the EU Learning Corner.

In this webinar on educational activism, Rares Voicu – an activist for school students and Board Member at OBESSU – provides insights on how teachers can empower young people to speak their minds and fight for their rights, be it at a political level or at a school decision-making level.

Ready to bring citizenship education to your classroom?


Further resources:

https://www.schooleducationgateway.eu/en/pub/teacher_academy/webinars/how-teachers-empower-students.htm

https://erasmus-plus.ec.europa.eu/programme-guide/part-b/key-action-1/youth-participation

https://www.schooleducationgateway.eu/en/pub/teacher_academy/teaching_materials/scale-of-reference-for-partici.htm

https://www.schooleducationgateway.eu/en/pub/latest/practices/debateville-ket-en-co.htm

https://www.schooleducationgateway.eu/en/pub/latest/news/jean-monnet-for-schools.htm

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