Critical ChangeLab meets in Amsterdam

The Critical ChangeLab Consortium met for the first time in-person at Waag FutureLab in Amsterdam to lay the groundwork for everything to come. Some key areas of discussion included the evolution of the Critical Literacies Framework and the development of the Democracy Health Questionnaire.

Critical Literacies Framework

The Trinity College Dublin team led by Mairéad Hurley discussed the ongoing systematic literature review for defining the critical literacies framework. The critical literacies framework will inform the development of a conceptual and methodological framework for supporting critical democracy education through creative and narrative practices.

Together the Critical ChangeLab consortium investigated some key questions that included:

• What is the Critical ChangeLab’s differentiation between democratic education and democracy education?
• What is democracy in the more-than-human world?
• How can we define and develop a shared understanding of the meaning of critical in the project?

Democracy Health Questionnaire

Another important discussion during the meeting Amsterdam was on the development of the Democracy Health Questionnaire which will be one of the first major outputs of the project. Boris Jokić from the Institute of Social Research in Zagreb is leading the development of the Democracy Health Questionnaire in cooperation with the Critical ChangeLab partners.

The Democracy Health Questionnaire aims at assessing democracy cultures in various learning environments, as well as improving organizations’ capacity for self-assessing and identifying opportunities for promoting democracy values. It will be administered in 10 European countries to assess the state of democracy in formal and non-formal education institutions

The Questionnaire is envisaged as a self-assessment tool that both schools and institutions providing non-formal educational programmes can use in order to estimate current state of their democracy health and plan future activities to improve this important organisational characteristic.

The Democracy Health Questionnaire will be launched later this year, and be distributed in Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany, Greece, France, Austria, Spain Slovenia and Croatia by the Critical ChangeLab partner organisations based in the respective countries.