Articulando o Envolvimento Escolar e a Aprendizagem Política: Compreensão e Promoção de Práticas Democráticas Juvenis e Pensamento Crítico através de Ferramentas Digitais-Visuais

EDigiPolis is a research project anchored on the integrated application and refinement of very recent, highly innovative methodologies, platforms and software articulated in unique ways to achieve goals in three dimensions: knowledge-production, methodological innovation, and societal transformation. Knowledge-production goals: i) Identifying youth politico-educational challenges at the local level based on a mapping of youth online visual culture; ii) Understanding youths’ educational and political repertoires of engagement and disengagement throughout their online and offline practices; iii) Exploring the potential of visual-verbal modes of argumentation, engagement and learning in promoting youth educational and political inclusion; iv) Creating an overarching picture of the youth public sphere, based on different geographies of visualities and visibilities, through the combination of big data and ethnographic work, articulated with a participatory data analysis process. Methodological innovation goals: i) Refining a pioneering machine-learning algorithm that classifies big visual online data, testing it on and feeding it by diverse local cultural repertoires; ii) Applying a ground-breaking ethnographic method created to analytically capture the conjunction of the offline and online spheres in today’s youth lives; iii) Experimenting innovative educational formats and tools designed to foster engagement, creativity, debate and critical thinking around complex issues; iv) Advancing the application of participatory approaches and methodologies that can democratise research with young people. Societal transformation goals: i) Bridging the gap between engaged and disengaged youth groups regarding their political involvement, educational inclusion and participatory dispositions; ii) Shedding light on the challenges and obstacles faced by socio-educationally vulnerable youth groups, also highlighting their imaginaries of social change; iii) Fostering conditions for youth agency in shaping local politics towards democratic decision-making processes; iv) Bringing youth public spheres, schools and communities together with local political institutions and actors towards participatory models of governance. These three-dimensional goals are linked with important challenges the proposal addresses, namely young people’s changing modes of participation and engagement in the civic and political realms, and the ways in which they articulate with self-regulation in learning and academic performance. These issues are all the more pressing in what concerns young people in situations of heightened vulnerability, be they geographical and/or school and work related (such as in the case of NEETs). Taking these situations in due consideration, the proposal addresses how the youth increasingly visual culture and public sphere can transpire to learning processes in schools and to local political governance. Further, the project proposes to do so not only through methodologies that are beyond the state of the art, but also through their articulation into a cohesive and profoundly innovative strategy. Indeed, by bringing together a very recent AI-informed computational software for visual data analysis, a newly developed ethnographic method that accounts for the offline-online connection, and novel pedagogical interventions (be they through existing online platforms or fresh participatory methodologies), the project has a truly ground-breaking approach