Through a structured participatory process, a competence framework for educators in the field of Citizenship Education has been developed. The framework constituted the basis for the development of self-assessment tools for teachers, but also of the validation of experiential learning outcomes of training modules for in-service teachers and curriculum development for future teachers that will be proposed and validated in the following phase.
The RFCDC was an important substantive and conceptual basis of work package 2. The centerpiece of the framework consists of a conceptual model comprising 20 Competences for Democratic Culture, also referred to as the RFCDC “butterfly”, as proposed by the Council of Europe (Coe).1 The RFCDC represents the Flagship project of educational policy within the Council of Europe, launched in 2017. It is an Instrument for both policy makers and other stakeholders. The underlying aims of the project are (1) to offer national education systems a framework that can be used to empower young people, (2) to prepare learners to be active citizens.
The RFCDC is a comprehensive tool which brings together different strands of the work of the CoE (human rights education, education for democratic citizenship education and intercultural education). It has a very strong focus on intercultural competences. It is also a tool that can give a common language to policy makers from different educational and national contexts.
Elements of the framework:
- A conceptual model of the competences which citizens require to participate effectively in democratic citizenship and intercultural dialogue;
- Behavioural descriptors for each individual competence that is specified in the model (What shows that someone has developed a certain competence?);
- Guiding documents to explain how the competence model and the descriptors can be used to assist curriculum design, the design of pedagogies, democratic school development, and the development of new forms of assessment.
