The SALTO Participation & Information Resource Centre develops strategic and innovative action to encourage participation in democratic life by youth. The SALTO collection of projects focused on quality participation aims to inspire future projects and offer existing activities with a source of inspiration and critical thinking on impact, design and implementation. The DIGIT-AL project is included in this collection. On this occasion, the team interviewed me. Thank you!
Interview by Jaan Aps.
Could you briefly talk about your background and how you first got connected with this project idea?
My expertise lies in civic education and specifically in promoting democratic citizenship and human rights education. I have previously worked with several international initiatives aimed at supporting active engagement in civil society. Through my involvement in the Democracy and Human Rights Education in Europe network (the DARE network), we recognised a need to address the digitalisation of society and its impact on democracy. This sparked the development of a project focused on enhancing digital learning tools within the pedagogy of human rights and citizenship education.
Could you define ‘political adult education’ and its role in the project?
Political adult education here refers to education that addresses structural societal issues. Rather than focusing solely on individual behaviour, it’s about understanding and participating in governance and societal rule-making. For our project, it was about learners not just using digital tools but also contributing as co-creators to the digital transformation in their communities and as informed participants in society.
How did you begin the project, and how were partnerships and goals formed?
We started by exploring existing pedagogical approaches and identifying key stakeholders in media pedagogy. We noticed a shift towards more critical engagement with technology, prompting us to think about digital transformation beyond individual technology use to societal change. Our project is designed to make digitalisation understandable and engaging and to avoid overwhelming learners with complexity. The partners, who are active in youth, teacher and non-formal educator training, were drawn from our network, which focuses on challenges such as disinformation and societal polarisation. Together, we envisioned a role for civic educators as facilitators of meaningful change in the digital landscape.
Can you describe the approach and methodology used to develop the project’s activities and materials?
Initially, we structured this project over three years. Our goal at the start was to explore the ongoing discourse and developments in digitalisation across various fields. We also aimed to learn from the perspectives of different stakeholders. We didn’t approach this with an academic attitude, as we are practitioners at the boundary of research and theory.
We began with a conference in Brussels, where it was crucial for all organisations to bring their experiences and expertise from their respective countries or fields. This included preparing inputs and having discussions with the European Commission, the European Economic and Social Committee and other educational stakeholders in the field of digital rights, particularly those involved in Horizon 2020 projects on data protection and human rights.
The conference served as a multi- stakeholder exchange and a mutual learning space. Then COVID hit, and we realised the need to pool our resources. Different organisations took responsibility for various parts of the project. For example, our partners from Portugal, who are heavily involved in community work, took over the community and participation aspects. Our Italian colleagues, with their expertise in media and journalism, delved deeper into those areas. The Estonian partners, coming from a highly digitised country, focused on state and digitalisation.
The first year was intensive and it involved descriptions of the developments in education policy and catching up on scientific debates. The goal was to link these findings to adult learning and education, providing ideas and directions for adult learning in these fields.
In the project’s second phase, we aimed to create a more practical handbook for facilitators by presenting methods and tools to make the content less theoretical and more practical. The idea was to provide snippets that would encourage educators to explore further in their respective fields.
Throughout the project, we continuously engaged with the policy level, participating in events such as the Lifelong Learning Week in Brussels to gather feedback and understand the needs of policymakers and practitioners. Our policy recommendations ultimately aimed to translate these insights to both the policy level and educational organisations, viewing them as active stakeholders in digital democracy and learning.
The project had three phases overall: initially bringing in theory and current developments, then drawing conclusions for adult education with the readers and finally creating something more practical and hands-on for educators, through balancing the expectation for easy-to-apply methods with a more holistic pedagogy of digital learning.
Are there any other significant activities or outputs you’d like to highlight?
Dissemination was a critical aspect – sharing materials and creating a feedback loop. Our goal was to establish civic and democracy-related education as foundational, not just an add-on to digital competence. We aimed to convey that digital competence should be transformative and not just about adopting new technologies. We worked to translate complex topics into understandable concepts for policymakers and educators, using analogies like the diesel motor scandal In Germany to illustrate the importance of critical understanding over technical expertise. Our project hopefully encouraged the idea that one doesn’t need to be an engineer or coder to learn about and facilitate discussions on digitalisation.