Studies show that adolescents that follow a higher educational track have more positive experiences than those of lower levels with aspects of democracy, such as decision-making or discussions. In our study, we focus on how adolescents from different educational tracks evaluate the various possibilities to experience democracy in daily life, and whether school is compensating for any difference therein. Data were gathered by interviewing 40 adolescents at two points in time (eighth and tenth grade). The results suggest that, especially in the later phase of secondary education, according to the experiences of adolescents it is apparent that school exacerbates instead of decreases social differences in society. Those in the higher educational track experience more often than those in the lower track having discussions and being encouraged to be socially and politically engaged. We discuss opportunities for teachers and for citizenship education to strengthen democratic socialization in both educational tracks.
In the debate about smart cities, an alternative to a dominant top-down, tech-driven solutionist approach has arisen in examples of ‘civic hacking’. Hacking here refers to the playful, exploratory, collaborative and sometimes transgressive modes of operation found in various hacker cultures, this time constructively applied in the context of civics. It suggests a novel logic to organise urban society through social and digital media platforms, moving away from centralised urban planning towards a more inclusive process of city-making, creating new types of public spaces. This book takes this urban imaginary of a hackable city seriously, using hacking as a lens to explore examples of collaborative city-making enabled by digital media technologies. Five different perspectives are discussed. Hacking can be understood as (1) an ethos, a particular articulation of citizenship in the network era; (2) as a set of iterative and collaborative city-making practices, bringing out new roles and relations between citizens, (design) professionals and institutional actors; (3) a set of affordances of institutional structures that allow or discourage their appropriation; (4) a critical lens to bring in notions of democratic governance, power struggles and conflict of interests into the debate on collaborative city-making; and (5) a point of departure for action research. After a discussion of these themes, the various chapters in the book are briefly introduced. Taken together they contribute to a wider debate about practices of technology-enabled collaborative city-making, and the question how city hacking may mature from the tactical level of smart and often playful interventions to a strategic level of enduring impact.
This paper is a summary paper of the Thematic Working Group (TWG) on Adult Mathematics Education (AME). As the only thematic working group that focuses on adults’ lived experiences of mathematics, the research makes an important contribution to the field of Mathematics Education. The main themes in this group identify that adult numerical behaviour goes beyond the mathematics skills, knowledge, and procedures taught in formal education It is multifaceted, requiring the use of higher order skills of analysis and judgement, applied within a broad array of life’s contexts, experienced through a range of emotions. The research in this group points to the need to raise the profile of research that shows the benefits to adults of learning mathematics but also the long term economic disbenefits in the neglect of teaching and teacher training for this group.
