Why
1. What to avoid
Education has two fundamental tasks beyond teaching knowledge and skills: protecting individual resilience, for instance by preventing mental health problems and protecting societal resilience by counteracting harmful radicalization. Mental health problems hinder individual well-being and development, while radicalization, when leading to extremism, poses a threat to democracy.
2. Minimum: "getting by"
According to Professor Bruce Alexander, psychosocial integration is a key factor determining an individual's ability to function in society. Ideally, people lead fulfilling, psychosocially integrated lives. If this ideal is not fully achieved, they may find themselves in a state of "getting by," in which they experience a minimal but sufficient level of psychosocial integration. Below this threshold lies dislocation—a prolonged lack of experience of psychosocial integration.
In Alexander's framework, psychosocial integration is based on experienced autonomy, belonging, and achievement. Other researchers expand on this concept: social psychologists like Bessel van der Kolk emphasize the importance of experienced safety, while social psychologist Jonathan Haidt highlights the significance of connection with something higher.
The state of dislocation is deeply distressing, forcing individuals to seek relief in various ways—by changing their lifestyle, adopting extreme ideologies, or developing unhealthy coping mechanisms.
3. Current state of adolescents
Research, including our own, shows that, on the one hand, the psychosocial integration of adolescents is high within their immediate surroundings: among family and close friends. In this context, most adolescents feel good and integrated. Almost universally, they have at least one peer and one adult with whom they can talk openly.
Beyond these small islands, most adolescents experience dislocation. Above all, they feel social isolation and reluctance to communicate with others. This indicates a lack of experienced belonging. Additionally, they experience a (total) lack of having a meaning and influence. They also dislike new and challenging situations, which is atypical for their age. This suggests a lack of experienced autonomy.
The widespread state of adolescent dislocation beyond their small islands is dangerous. It pushes them to seek relief in destructive ways.
4. Current general state
Adolescents live in a reality that provides both protection and challenges. They find protection by retreating to their small islands, but these islands gradually deteriorate over time. As they grow up, their relationships with parents and caregivers change and become less protective. Contact with close friends may weaken after finishing school or moving to a new place.
A significant challenge is the high level of affective polarization between social groups. This means that people outside one’s own group are perceived as morally inferior or even evil. Moreover, we live in "liquid" times. Many aspects of our reality change rapidly, and there are very few certainties. This leads to a general sense of anxiety. Additionally, according to Zygmunt Bauman, our identities are fragmented. These fragments resemble puzzle pieces, but we have lost the box. This means that we have no final image of our identity. As a result, we can only try our best to assemble its fragments in each situation without any guidelines.
There are also challenges that affect every adolescent in every era, stemming from brain development. First, adolescents live in a period that developmental psychologists call the age of conformity: peer pressure is very strong. Second, due to uneven brain development, they experience heightened impulsivity and insufficient control over impulsive behaviors. Often, when they are in a group of peers, excitability wins over rational thinking.
5. Effect in the classroom
The school classroom is where these processes become evident. It is not automatically perceived by adolescents as a private space connected to their small islands. It rather is perceived as a "public" space. As a result, signs of dislocation, such as mental health problems and radicalization, are clearly visible in the classroom.
Particularly concerning is the widespread fear among adolescents of expressing their own opinions because they fear peer judgment. At the same time, many adolescents respond moralistically to their peers—by reinforcing groupthink, mocking, or ignoring differing opinions.
6. Threat to democracy
The fear of expressing opinions and the lack of openness to different views are concerning because they undermine the process of a free formation of opinions. This process is crucial for democracy, as it forms the basis for conscious decision-making, both at the individual and collective levels.
7. Intervention needed
Just as disrupting the process of a free formation of opinions is the foundation of interventions against disinformation in society, it should also be the basis of interventions in the classroom. These interventions should reduce adolescents' fear of expressing authentic opinions and decrease their moralistic reactions to differing views. Consequently, interventions should strengthen both individual and social resilience.
“Interdemocracy” – method and format
1. Interdemocracy
Our method and format, Interdemocracy, constitute the first part of our proposed classroom intervention. As a format, Interdemocracy was recognized as a good practice in the European Commission publication Guidelines for Teachers and Educators on Tackling Disinformation and Promoting Digital Literacy Through Education and Training. Our academic book titled Interdemocracy. How to Communicate with Adolescents, Among Whom There May Be Individuals Supporting and Spreading Misinformation and our scientific article on "Interdemocracy" received highly positive reviews from both academics and practitioners. Interdemocracy is the result of 14 years of intensive pilot projects in various European countries, with the last six years conducted at High School No. 4 in Gdańsk, Poland.
2. Involves two essential democratic discourse types
Professor Stephan Lewandowsky states that two types of discourse are key to productive democratic dialogues: fact-speaking and belief-speaking. Fact-speaking is a narrative precisely based on the observable external world. Belief-speaking is a narrative that accurately reflects an individual’s internal world. It answers the question of what something means to me based on my life experiences.
During Interdemocracy sessions, students are invited to respond to a question. To understand the context of this question, an adult facilitator introduces students to academic-based knowledge. This is fact-speaking. Then, students are asked to formulate their individual responses. This is their belief-speaking.
As mentioned, students' responses do not necessarily reflect what they consider to be true. They are held back by the anticipated moralistic judgment of others. Therefore, it is necessary to properly prepare the classroom space (“set the stage”).
All Interdemocracy sessions follow a strict, repetitive format. This makes them highly predictable, leading to an experience of safety for students. The format includes a check-in—the facilitator asks each student, one by one, how they feel today. They ask all students without exception and repeat the question in the same positive-neutral tone. Students are asked the question in random order to reduce peer pressure. No one may react to individual student responses—not even the facilitator, who responds only with a neutral "thank you."
After check-in, the facilitator presents the fact-informed introduction and formulates the main question of the session. Students then have 90 seconds to write their responses by hand, individually, and in silence. They then have another 90 seconds to digitize their responses and submit them to a shared online platform—also in silence. They should end their responses with "thank you." After submitting the last response, the facilitator invites students to read their responses aloud, one by one, in random order. Again, no one may react to the responses, and the facilitator only says "thank you."
The session ends with a check-out—the facilitator asks each student, following the same rules, what this session meant to them.
The rules during sessions aim to minimize students' fear of peer reactions. Since students work in parallel, without interaction or peer reactions, they feel more confident in providing authentic responses. The facilitator's neutral "thank you" confirms the student's right to express their opinion. It is also helpful that students are encouraged to formulate responses in the first person and base them on their own experiences.
3. Effects
The effect of the method and format is that students feel noticed and heard. When they speak, the classroom is silent, and no negative reactions can be heard—only the facilitator leading the session says "thank you." Since the rules apply to everyone, and everyone has the same tasks and is treated the same way, students begin to feel that they belong to a new, small island where they can say what they want, and their opinions are respected. This strengthens their sense of belonging and security. The experience of being able to provide increasingly authentic answers to the questions asked over time induces an enhanced experience of achievement.
4. Limitations
Interdemocracy does not replace other didactic methods because it does not aim to teach knowledge or skills beyond those that enable a process of a free formation of opinions. And although Interdemocracy temporarily and under certain conditions expands the islands of trust on which most students live, it is limited to a specific classroom and does not extend to the external world beyond it. Individual resilience is strengthened. To also strengthen social resilience, a second element of intervention is needed—a participation process.
Participation process
1. Preconditions
To extend the proposed intervention from strengthening only individual resilience to also strengthening social resilience, a second element is needed. This element is participation. Participation, in addition to being rooted in Interdemocracy, is also based on the principles popularized by James Surowiecki in his book The Wisdom of Crowds. The most important of these are: every person should be able to freely express their opinion without fear, all opinions should be treated equally—regardless of the level of knowledge of their authors, though a minimum level of experience is required—and every person should formulate their opinion independently of others.
2. Fulfilling the preconditions
Interdemocracy meets these principles as long as it applies to a single classroom. However, when more classrooms participate, these principles lead to a new rule: all students in all classrooms should answer the question at the same time to eliminate the possibility of conversations between classrooms that could influence the answers of those who have not yet responded. This would violate the principle of independence. Therefore, so-called participation hours must be organized for all classrooms simultaneously.
3. Process
The participation process is to proceed as follows. First, students send their digitized responses to a central server. A mechanism must be implemented to prevent multiple responses. At the same time, responses are anonymized to ensure that the answers do not lead to repercussions. This enhances the authenticity of the responses and students' sense of security. Next, the responses must be analyzed not only in terms of the most frequently given ones but also in terms of pattern detection, clustering, identifying outliers, aggregating conclusions, sentiment analysis, and quality control. Only artificial intelligence produce this type of report effortlessly. Ideally, the AI used should come from Europe. The next step is to formulate recommendations. This cannot be done by artificial intelligence because it lacks empathy. The task of creating recommendations will be assigned to a new participatory body—the Youth Resilience Council. This council will consist of 16 randomly selected students from among those participating in the participation hours. The recommendations formulated by the Youth Resilience Council then return to the classrooms, where students respond to them and formulate their opinions. The student reactions to the recommendations are then sent back and processed in the same way as the original responses. Ultimately, the Youth Resilience Council reformulates its recommendations and presents them to the appropriate recipient.
4. Effects
The goal of the participation process is to allow students to experience that their voice is heard—not as isolated individuals but as a community. They feel represented because the reports resulting from their responses and the recommendations that take into account their opinions and feedback do not reduce their positions to a single simplified narrative but reflect the full richness of the collected responses. This aims to expand the experience of agency and, thus, the autonomy of students: we are heard and seen, and our voice can have an impact beyond our small islands of trust. It also aims to strengthen their sense of belonging, as they become part of the voice of their generation.
