TASKs for democracy

Part two
Toolbox
TASKS FOR DEMOCRACY: CORE COMPONENTS
OF COMPETENCES FOR DEMOCRACY
Pascale Mompoint-Gaillard
How to read the TASKs list
The following tool is the result of a three-year process in which 30 education practitioners were involved.
Through the collaborative development and design of training materials, teacher educators from all over
Europe set out to create the activities for developing competences for democracy that constitute the major
part of this book. Although these materials address particular topics such as history teaching or education for
democratic citizenship or languages and diversity, there is a general agreement that the activities all focus on
some core components of these competences.
The following tables present these core components of competences for democracy in the form of a matrix.
There are three tables, each corresponding to one dimension of the components: attitudes, skills and knowledge.
In each, the columns are to be read vertically and each column corresponds to one of the five different
areas of competences for democracy:
diversity and empathy: refers to intercultural competences and mutual understanding;
co-operation and participation: refers to the individual and group efforts necessary for working together;
human rights and equity: refers to aspects of social justice, anti-discrimination and equal rights;
knowledge construction and epistemology: refers to the way we think about knowledge;
self and interaction: refers to awareness of self in relation to the other (individual or group).
The numbers provide a coding system corresponding to that in the activities and the index (as “learning
outcomes”). There is no horizontal correspondence: for instance, the content of row 1 of the column “diversity
and empathy” has no specific correspondence to row 1 of the column “knowledge construction and
epistemology”.
Each of the tables is presented in three sections:
the first section presents a description of the components. All start with the key elements of that section;
the second and third sections present observable actions that either:
– an individual can engage in, or display, in order to show that s/he is actively developing
this component;
– a teacher, or any facilitator of learning, can engage in, or display, in order to show that
s/he is actively promoting and developing this component in an educational or teaching
context.
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