The views young people have towards democratic values shape their views in later life. However, the values that are fundamental to democracy, such as majority rule and minority rights, are often competing. This study aims to provide insight into the ways adolescents view democratic issues in which democratic values are competing. To do so, three democratic issues with varying conditions were designed, and discussed during interviews with students in vocational education. The results show that most adolescents consider both democratic values that underlie an issue. Furthermore, as the conditions in which the issues take place were altered during the interviews, adolescents explicitly evaluated different perspectives and starting shifting between both values. The findings of this study show that adolescents’ views on democratic issues are layered, and include considering multiple democratic values and taking account of the conditions in which these are situated.
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Effective teaching for democracy requires an understanding of the teaching methods and educational characteristics that are effective in interventions. In order to address this requirement, we conducted a systematic literature review. We used an extensive search syntax and snowballing method that allowed us to find n = 2093 unique publications. After a screening process, we have included 54 interventions in 51 different quantitative effect studies written between 2010 and 2020. We categorized these interventions into five types of teaching methods: instruction, small-group work, assignments, projects, and democratic decision-making. We analyzed what the educational characteristics (i.e., subject matter, classroom interaction, classroom management) of these interventions were and for which democratic competences (i.e., knowledge, attitude, skill, behavior) they were effective. Our results show that teaching methods have differential effects on democratic competences. We also discuss the robustness of these results. Our study shows that there is still much to be gained in terms of research designs, the conceptualization of democratic competences, and the description of teaching methods.
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Smart city technologies, including artificial intelligence and computer vision, promise to bring a higher quality of life and more efficiently managed cities. However, developers, designers, and professionals working in urban management have started to realize that implementing these technologies poses numerous ethical challenges. Policy papers now call for human and public values in tech development, ethics guidelines for trustworthy A.I., and cities for digital rights. In a democratic society, these technologies should be understandable for citizens (transparency) and open for scrutiny and critique (accountability). When implementing such public values in smart city technologies, professionals face numerous knowledge gaps. Public administrators find it difficult to translate abstract values like transparency into concrete specifications to design new services. In the private sector, developers and designers still lack a ‘design vocabulary’ and exemplary projects that can inspire them to respond to transparency and accountability demands. Finally, both the public and private sectors see a need to include the public in the development of smart city technologies but haven’t found the right methods. This proposal aims to help these professionals to develop an integrated, value-based and multi-stakeholder design approach for the ethical implementation of smart city technologies. It does so by setting up a research-through-design trajectory to develop a prototype for an ethical ‘scan car’, as a concrete and urgent example for the deployment of computer vision and algorithmic governance in public space. Three (practical) knowledge gaps will be addressed. With civil servants at municipalities, we will create methods enabling them to translate public values such as transparency into concrete specifications and evaluation criteria. With designers, we will explore methods and patterns to answer these value-based requirements. Finally, we will further develop methods to engage civil society in this processes.
