In person icon Reclaiming Liberal Democracy Through Citizenship Education?

Abstract

This panel presents research on the relationship between citizenship education and learning mechanisms in the postfactual age, related to the European dimension. In the last few years, experts and scholars have initiated an intense debate on how to tackle the complex conundrum of challenges in the post-truth era, such as mis/disinformation, and the resulting social polarization and fragmentation. They have devoted specific attention to possible responses and corrective actions, defined as “epistemological vaccines”, and have based their arguments on a more complex interdisciplinary approach than hitherto, aimed at consolidating stronger educational strategies that are useful “as a counterweight to understand and deconstruct post-truth” (Valladares, 2022). The underlying reasoning is that education, although it alone cannot provide a long-term solution to fight the post-truth “virus”, could contribute in various ways to building “antibodies” and to defending scientific evidence in an increasingly manipulative information environment. It becomes fundamentally important to reconnect liberal democracies with the virtue of truth-telling and to put at the centre of this process education and its social sense as a precious institution able to eradicate post-truth (Giroux, 2018). Moreover, education can fight illiteracy and weak knowledge – which can promote a lack of critical thinking. Since education is crucial in enabling individual members of society to learn how to tackle threats and challenges deriving from post truth era (such as disinformation and misinformation), learning and teaching mechanisms are consequently decisive because they are instruments useful to enhance competences (such as connected with media and digital literacy education) and skills (like critical thinking and the ability to evaluate information received through digital platforms and mobile devices) that can help people of all ages to raise their own awareness in dealing with the increasingly complex post-truth information environment and developing the capability to debunk mis/disinformation. In this perspective, the panel tris to investigate how the citizenship education processes have been changed in the post-truth age, with the analysis of various case studies: Italy, Bavaria, Iceland, Croatia and Bulgaria. In this general picture, the panel will focus firstly on the changing patterns of learning mechanisms in IR, and secondly on the role of the active learning as educational tool.

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