Schools are where the next generation learns not only how to understand the world but also how to change it. Research by Simon Briole, Marc Gurgand, Eric Maurin, Sandra McNally, Jenifer Ruiz-Valenzuela and Daniel Santin highlights the benefits of a programme that helps teachers to support teenagers in putting civic virtues into practice.

The civic sense in a society is commonly measured by whether citizens respect the rules of collective life, their involvement in defining these rules and the priority they give to the general interest over private interests. In modern democracies, good citizenship is also understood to include tolerance for diverse religious beliefs, sexual orientations and political opinions, as well as support for equal rights for all citizens, regardless of gender, race and country of origin.

The importance of cultivating civic virtues in younger generations has long been recognised, and most modern school curricula include a civic education programme. But the effectiveness of civic education in schools is still a matter of debate, and there is no real consensus on how best to teach good citizenship in diverse, modern societies.

Our research demonstrates that fostering altruism, tolerance, political participation and respect for collective rules among young people can be done by helping their teachers use a teaching method that empowers pupils and involves them in the design and implementation of real civic projects, such as collecting food from supermarkets to distribute to homeless people or, within school, producing posters that speak out against racism or discrimination.

These results are in line with the longheld hypothesis that schools are among the places where children can best develop their civic sense by learning to cooperate in practice through projects that they have chosen and that concern them directly (Dewey, 1915; Williams, 2003).

Empowering pupils to be active citizens

Our findings are based on a large-scale randomised experiment conducted in a sample of more than 200 middle schools across France, Greece and Spain during the2018/19 school year. About 320 teachers and 6,200 pupils in grades eight and nine (aged 13-15), took part in the experiment.

Pupils who took part in the year-long citizenship project felt more able to act on political or social issues

Half of participating schools within each country were randomly selected to implement the Active Citizenship Programme (ACT). This was devised jointly by education authorities in the context of an Erasmus+ programme funded by the European Commission. An experiment was built into the project design: teachers from the selected schools attended a two-day training programme at the beginning of the year and then helped their pupils to choose democratically and then to run a real-world civic-oriented project over the rest of the school year.

The idea behind this approach is that empowering pupils, through involvement in real civic activities and the practice of democratic rules, helps them to learn the skills necessary to become responsible citizens. Most projects selected are designed to show solidarity and empathy towards those facing difficulties - such as performing a small play in a hospital or retirement home, organising a day to raise awareness of the problems faced by disabled people or migrants, or organising homework help for pupils in difficulty.

We use pre- and post-intervention surveys to measure the outcomes. These include measures of pupils' social and political engagement, their adherence to civic values, and the size and diversity of their friendship networks. We also have information on pupil participation in the Global Climate Strike, a day of school strikes that took place on 15 March 2019 with more than a million people demonstrating in around 2,000 events worldwide. This provides us with a concrete way to measure pupils' participation in political action.

In France, we also have administrative data on unjustified absences, late arrivals and disciplinary sanctions, of which the most severe (exclusions) arise from acts of aggression or violence towards teachers and other pupils. These data provide us with objective measures of pupils' ability to respect teachers, classmates and the rules of school life, namely some of the most basic dimensions of citizenship for a middle-school pupil. In addition, we have French administrative data on grades given by teachers, which allows us to assess the impact of the treatment on pupils' academic engagement.

Better behaviour, wider friendships

The comparison of treatment and control pupils before and after the intervention reveals that the ACT programme produced a significant improvement in pupil behaviour. We observe a decline in unjustified absences and late arrivals as well as in disciplinary sanctions, especially the most serious ones. We also observe a significant improvement in teacher assessed grades, including in subjects where no teacher was involved in the experiment and so teaching methods and curriculum content remained unchanged.

Empowering pupils through democratic actions and real civic activities widens their friendship groups to include those from different cultural or social background

The same comparison of treated and control pupils also reveals that the programme helps pupils to develop their network of friends. Specifically, we show that the programme has a sizeable, positive impact on the number of "socially different" friends (as measured by gender, social origin or geographical origin), while having no effect on the number of "socially similar" friends.

This greater openness may be due, in part, to the themes chosen by project participants, which are often about fighting prejudice and discrimination. It is also likely to be due to the fact that the programme requires pupils to work in small groups that are more diverse than initial friendship networks. In fact, pupils assigned to a small group with a higher share of socially different classmates made more diverse friendships than pupils in groups that were less diverse.

Hence, the introduction of an active-learning method for civic education leads to a significant improvement in a range of objective measures of pupils' compliance with school rules, their academic engagement and their ability to interact with people who do not share their cultural or social background. On a more subjective level, pupil surveys conducted at the beginning and end of the academic year reveal that pupils who took part in the programme felt more able to act on political andsocial issues.

In line with this empowerment, they show greater levels of social engagement in and out of school (such as tutoring younger students, participating in the school newspaper or volunteering in a humanitarian or community organisation outside school), as well as being more likely to take part in the Global Climate Strike. Very similar results were found in France, Greece and Spain.

Learning through choosing

Our analyses show that the pupils most strongly affected by the intervention in terms of civic attitudes and democratic participation tend to be those who have the best grades and are already (prior to the project implementation) the most altruistic and interested in politics. The programme also has stronger effects when it is carried out by teachers who are already more involved in the life of the school. Our findings suggest that active-learning methods - in which students participate rather than listen - require teachers to have strong interpersonal skills and engagement.Importantly, while their pupils' outcomes varied between teachers, these outcomes do not appear to be linked to the nature of the pupils' chosen project, and treatment effects are not significantly different across countries.

The key success factor of the programme - in terms of promoting altruism, tolerance, political participation and respect for collective rules - does not seem to be the precise theme of the project chosen, but the fact that the theme is debated and chosen democratically by local pupils.

To our knowledge, our research is one of few such projects to provide clear evidence on the causal effects of civicspecific education on pupils' behaviour and civic outcomes as well as the impact on different pupils. It also contributes to the long-standing economic debate exploring the relationship between education and citizenship, and the impact that civic education in schools can have on pupils' attitudes and values.

Our results are in line with a long tradition dating back to Aristotle, Tocqueville and Dewey, which defends the idea that citizenship is learned primarily through practical investment in local, social and political life.

The finding that the ACT programme has a stronger effect on pupils who began with higher levels of civic skills is in line with the idea that skills acquired in the early school years and in adolescence are complementary. More research is needed to assess the effect of implementing new civics programmes based on debates, group projects and learning by doing much more systematically for younger age groups.

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18 October 2024     Paper Number CEPCP689

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This CentrePiece article is published under the centre's Education programme.