That is why you certainly will wonder why we decided to publish another directory of EDC sources.
 

No EDC teaching material for direct use in the classroom

Well, delving into the details of the results just mentioned shows why. It is because you can find an abundance of recommendations, declarations, of studies about the Council of Europe's EDC project and its implementation, about what EDC is or should be, what it should include, etc. What, however, is almost totally missing, is teaching material for EDC for direct use in the classroom.

You don't believe me? Then just make an attempt by youself and enter "education for democratic citizenship" "teaching material" into the search box of one of the prominent search engines as for example Google or Yahoo, or one of the meta-search engines like Vivisimo or Webcrawler, click "search" and explore the results.

But what are the reasons for this lack of EDC teaching material?
 

EDC - still a vague concept

The reasons certainly are manifold. One has to keep in mind that a new concept attracts special attention and therefore many scholars of EDC are primarily interested in discussing the concept as such. The most decisive reason responsible for the lack of teaching material from my point of view however is that - in spite of long lasting discussions - the concept has remained vague and that the questions what EDC is and what it should include still remain to be answered.

Writing that I'm aware that many of you will heavily object. You will possibly - to take only one example - refer to the Council of Europe's website on EDC where on the homepage it is stated what EDC is ...

"The Education for Democratic Citizenship (EDC) includes all practices and activities designed to help young people and adults participate actively in democratic life by accepting and exercising their rights and responsibilities in society."

... and what it does include:

"EDC encompasses various means of learning Democratic Citizenship. It includes in particular Human Rights Education, Civic Education, Peace Education, Global Education and Intercultural Education. As one cannot “learn” democratic citizenship without practicing it, EDC also includes various activities in which participation in society can be learned, exercised and encouraged."
 

What is EDC? - ambiguities and inconsistencies

Taking these two quotations as a starting point, one must come to the conclusion that EDC mainly is a kind of generic term comprising all the various "educations" (human rights education, civic education, intercultural education etc.) we already know. This is true - though only partly. In reality EDC is intended to be more than the sum of these parts, something specific, meeting the special requirements for citizenship at the beginning of the 21. century. If so, however, it has to be considered absolutely indespensable to

• clearly defining where the intersections between EDC and the other "educations" are and what they comprise (green arrows in the graph below) and

• secondly, to clarify what is specific to EDC and to what extent and in what respect it differs from the other "educations" (blue arrow in the graph below).

As far as I can see, this has not been done in a satifsfactory way. And this is why it's so tedious to search and to find teaching material for EDC.
 

Is there a way out of the dilemma?

On the other hand there can be no doubt that teachers and educators are keen on, want to and must teach EDC now, even though major conceptual questions still remain to be answered. So what is to be done? Is there a way out of this dilemma?

Having a closer look at the definition of EDC by the Council of Europe as the basis for the graph above might help us to find one. What about searching für teaching material covering the intersections between EDC and peace education, global education etc., i.e. the parts of the square and the circles shown above where the green arrows point to? This of course doesn't solve the conceptual problems just discussed; it however may enable us to discover at least what is offered in the Web at all!

Due to the already mentioned lack of clear definitions this has to be done in a pragmatic way by very carefully exploring the contents offered on the relevant websites. Moreover, one has to ensure that all areas constituting EDC are really included in our model. This, however, is definitely not the case. The concept rather remains inclompete insofar as it doesn't explicitly include media education. This is all the more surprising as numerous publications, reports, studies etc. agree that media education is an undispensable part, a prerequisite for modern citizenship (see for example Buckingham 2002, Reichmayr 2001 or the report of the Committee on Culture and Education of the Council of Europe from June 2000 concerning media education).

When adding this to the graph above, our model will look as follows:



And this completed model has been used as a starting point for searching the internet and compiling the directory you'll find on the following pages.
 

Search engines used

When searching the web for teaching material for EDC - in the sense explained above - the advanced search of following search engines has been used: Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, Microsoft Search, Google Scholar and Scirus. I additionally used some of the most popular meta search engines, especially Jux2, Dogpile and Vivisimo with its outstanding cluster technology.
 

Selection criteria

The websites selected for this directory first and foremost should contain high quality teaching material covering one or more intersections between EDC on the one, Human Rights Education, Civic Education, Peace Education, Global Education, Intercultural Education and Media Education on the other hand. And it turned out that only very, very few internet sources complied with these requirements.

Those selected, however, really deserve visiting and intensive exploring by teachers and educators of EDC. You'll get a lot of suggestions and models for your seminars and you'll discover teaching units, teaching material, methods etc. for direct use in your classroom!
 

Arrangement of the directory

Some of the websites chosen for the directory - as for example the Database on Human Rights Education - have a clear focus, whereas others - as for example the D@dalos Education Server - cover a considerable spectrum of topics and aspects. That is why it would have made no sense to arrange the websites of the directory concerning the contents. I decided to simply arrange them in alphabetical order.

Nevertheless there is a division in two main sections: the first and more comprehensive one comprises the websites reviewed, the second one contains some single PDF documents with valuable background information for teachers and educators of EDC.

For your convenience the reviews of all websites are organised in the same way, containing information about the authors/editors of the site, a description of its contents and clues how to navigate and most effectively use the contents of the site.

[Author: Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schumann]

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