Enriching the Designs of Contemporary Democratic Citizenship Through Practices

The objective of the paper is to discuss how to use the diverse practices of contemporary democratic citizenship education to enrich the designs of related policies, governance and educational solutions. The paper first discusses the opportunities and limits in strengthening responsible democratic citizenship in the contemporary context of the Western democracies. Contemporary citizens need to navigate the contemporary tensions related to mediatization, technocratization, disenchantment, radicalization, populism, securitization, digitalisation in their everyday practices in order to develop an autonomous yet constructive and effective path between the radicalizing and depoliticizing trends. Democratic citizenship competences are extremely useful here but to develop these we need to understand both the ideational and practice related aspects in developing the competences. This includes, on the one hand, making sense of the various ideations and normative perspectives embedded in democratic citizenship and developing integrity, reflectiveness and resilience vis a vis these different expectations. On the other, we also need to understand the practice related aspects from educational opportunities up to community and government linkages. The practices feed into democratic citizenship education policies, governance and educational solutions that can be discussed as designs, i.e., policy, governance and educational designs. This will be discussed, supported by empirical and practical material from the Horizon Europe Democrat project and also Tallinn University ELU and Democrat+ projects.