Preparing Young People for Tomorrow's Democracy. Evaluating the Impact of Citizenship Workshops of BELvue

This paper will discuss a quasi-experiment on the impact of citizenship workshops on student’s political attitudes and engagement. These citizenship workshops are organized by BELvue which is a center for history and democracy in Brussels that offers citizenship education courses and materials to compulsory education and teacher training in Belgium. This is a center that aims to increase trust in democracy and institutions by stimulating critical reflection on major democratic challenges, encouraging active citizenship and developing historical awareness. They use different formats and focus on different themes. On the one hand, you have for example workshops with role-playing, debate, video interviews with parliamentarians, street interviews, or visits to the parliament. On the other hand, you have a variation of themes going from the working of liberal democracy to how to actively participate in society. We are interested in the impact of these workshops on students and how this impact differs between participants and the various workshops. For this, we use a quasi-experimental design. At three points in time, we ask the students and the control group to fill out a survey that measures certain citizenship attitudes and engagement. This enables us to compare the different groups and measure the impact of these citizenship workshops. A growing body of research has been conducted on citizenship education. Quasi-experimental and experimental research is, however, still very scarce. With this research, we will contribute to the discussion on how citizenship education can make a difference or not.