European democratic values and communicative competence on mobility programmes targeting adults

Abstract

EU educational mobility programmes have long been geared towards not only the promotion of intercultural communicative competence but also the uptake of European civic values. While the linguistic and socio-cultural effects of European training mobilities have been extensively studied, their effectiveness in supporting active citizenship and the emergence of shared community values remains largely unexplored. Similarly, no previous research has attempted to systematise the various conceptualisations of European civic and democratic values invoked in mobility projects addressing the topic. To bridge this lacuna, this paper reviews qualitative data from EU school-based mobility projects whose stated purpose, singularly or in conjunction with other educational goals, is the promotion of European civic awareness and democratic values among adult participants in a Spanish region. The methodological approach for the compilation of the corpus of project records, data extraction, and processing follows that of Qualitative Comparative Analyses. The results point to a broad operationalisation of European civic and democratic themes in the examined projects. The coexistence of a limited number of specific proposals for deliberate educational intervention aimed at promoting democracy and European citizenship abroad, alongside the prevailing stance, posits a spontaneous acquisition of such values through participation in transnational learning activities aimed at developing communicative, intercultural, and digital skills, is also reported.