11 June, 12 – 1 pm Committee Room 1, 20 Bedford Way.
Germ Janmaat and Adrian Arellano
Abstract: In this LLAKES seminar we will be presenting the Education for Democracy Index (EfDI). This index measures how well an education system in its policies, school practices and institutional characteristics promotes both levels of and equality in democratic competences. It is based on a sweeping review of the literature on the effect of education, broadly conceived,on such competences. We will begin by presenting the results of this review. The review allowed us to identify eight educational areas of influence. Some of these areas concern activities that are specifically intended to promote such competences, such as citizenship education and participatory pedagogies, while others represent institutional characteristics that can have unintended side effects on these outcomes, such as the degree of school autonomy or the extent of educational tracking. We will present the effects of these areas on both levels of and equality in democratic competences. We will proceed by showing how the results of the review have informed the construction of the EfDI. We developed the EfDI for all the countries taking part in the International Civic and Citizenship Study (ICCS) and for 3 points in time. We end by showing the main results of the index, which users can explore for themselves on the designated project website: https://educationfordemocracyindx.github.io/
Bios:
Germ Janmaat is a professor of political socialisation at the Institute of Education (IOE), UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society. He is interested in how education, in all its many facets, influences civic values and political engagement and whether particular educational programs or institutional designs help to reduce inequalities in these outcomes. His work features in many journals spanning education, sociology and political science.
Dr Adrian Arellano is a Quantitative Research Fellow at UCL Faculty of Education and Society and the LLAKES Centre. He obtained his PhD in Political Science at the University of Michigan. His interests include the causes and consequences of political, social, and economic inequalities as well as research methodology. He has published in journals including Security Studies and International Studies Review.