Democratic attitudes of children

The need of both organizations is to develop children in skills important for the future. As society evolves, children's needs naturally evolve and it is important to respond to this in the content of education. Both organisations are therefore constantly striving to develop their pedagogical concepts, which they have already tested in their work with children, and to enrich them with new knowledge and approaches. However, our need is not only to influence the children we work with directly, but our broader intention is to inspire both national school systems to consider what each school can do in educating today's children for a healthier society in the future. Therefore, our higher need is to create a simple and very inspiring foundation for the entire Czech and Icelandic education system. The applicant organisation Pangea Foundation openly claims the legacy of Jan Amos Comenius, who was a great European Pan-Sophist. Our main task is to bring European society back to his legacy - the rectification of human affairs.

The aim of the project was to exchange information and methodological practices of two national pedagogical concepts (Education for Virtues and Utiskoli), in a second step to link them methodologically and in a third step to create a new methodology that describes how to lead children to acquire democratic attitudes. Each progressive objective was implemented with a package of concrete activities, involving 26 teachers and 114 children from both participating countries. The new methodology is based on expert studies in the field of Political Psychology and Psychology of Democracy represented by the work of Martina Klicperova-Baker, PhD, DSc. Moreover, we have actively disseminated the new methodology to other EU countries.

In the project we implemented all planned activities: 1) Preparation of materials for the exchange of information and methodological practices of both national pedagogical concepts. 2) Exchange of experiences in the form of a workshop in the Czech Republic. 3) Exchange of experience in the form of a workshop in Iceland 4) Development of a new methodology and its validation in work with children from both countries In addition, compared to the original balance sheet, we have implemented the following activities: 5) Creation of a website in AJ 6) Dissemination of the new methodology at an international conference in Slovakia. 7) Dissemination of the new methodology at an international workshop in Iceland. 8) Dissemination of the new methodology at an international conference in Spain.

The output of the project is a new methodology for the Education of Children to Democratic Attitudes, in the form of a manual combining the methodology and a description of specific activities for educational activities in schools. We have implemented this methodology in practice in pedagogical approaches in 3 schools (1x Iceland, 2x Czech Republic) and verified that it is functional and cross-culturally understandable at European level. The manual is translated into 3 languages and publicly available on the EPRP platform and on the website https://vychovakectnostem.cz/en/. We presented the results of our research at 3 international conferences/workshops for educators and verified that the new methodology is inspiring and comprehensible in its content.