Promoting Children’s Capacities for Active and Deliberative Citizenship with Digital Technologies: The CADE Project in Costa Rica

• Date: 01 January 2011
• Published date: 01 January 2011
• Author: Maria Eugenia Bujanda,Clotilde Fonseca
• DOI: 10.1177/0002716210383657
• Subject Matter: Articles

ANNALS, AAPSS, 633, January 2011 243

This article explains several core aspects of the experience

of the Omar Dengo Foundation of Costa Rica in the

development of the Deliberative Capabilities in School

Age Children project, a set of citizenship education

programs based on the conception of children as citizens

and on a particular conception of the role of digital tech-

nologies in the promotion of children’s high-order skills.

It analyzes the outcomes of the program designed for

elementary schools and presents the lessons learned in

the process of scaling up the initiative from its inception

as a pilot to its implementation as a regular after-school

program within the Costa Rican National Program of

Educational Informatics.

Keywords: citizenship education; participation rights;

information and communication technol-

ogies; self-efficacy; after-school programs

The Deliberative Capabilities in School Age

Children project (CADE, its Spanish acro-

nym) emerged in 2001 as a research and devel-

opment initiative of the Fundación Omar Dengo

(Omar Dengo Foundation [ODF]) to (1) con-

ceptually explore and operationalize children’s

deliberative capabilities by linking them to

children’s exercise of their participation rights,

(2) develop an educational methodology that can

promote these skills, and (3) explore the contri-

butions of digital technologies to the develop-

ment of these capabilities.

Promoting

Children’s

Capacities for

Active and

Deliberative

Citizenship

with Digital

Technologies:

The CADE

Project in

Costa Rica

By

CLOTILDE FONSECA

and

MARIA EUGENIA BUJANDA

Clotilde Fonseca is Costa Rica’s minister of science and

technology. She is a founding director of the Costa

Rican Program of Educational Informatics—created in

1988 in Costa Rica by the Omar Dengo Foundation

and the Ministry of Public Education—a program that

has reached more than 1.5 million children and teach-

ers during its more than two decades of work. She was

executive director of the Omar Dengo Foundation from

1987 (when it was founded) to 1994 and from 1996 to

2010.

Maria Eugenia Bujanda is research director at the

Omar Dengo Foundation. From 2003 to 2009, she led

the foundation’s citizenship education projects. She

holds a PhD in education from Complutense University

of Madrid.

DOI: 10.1177/0002716210383657

244 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

The result of these efforts has been the creation of a set of citizenship education

programs for children and youth, focused on the development of self-efficacy

and deliberative capabilities, both mediated by the use of digital technologies.

These programs have been implemented in Costa Rica and other Central American

countries.

In Costa Rica, CADE is being implemented in schools that take part in the

National Program of Educational Informatics, a joint initiative that ODF and

the Ministry of Public Education (MPE) carry out. From 2004 to the present, the

project has been executed in twenty-four schools and two high schools across the

country and has benefited nearly 950 children. It is conceived as an after-school

program under the supervision of the computer lab teacher and carried out over

four hours per week from February to November.

Between 2004 and 2010, CADE has extended its area of influence. It has defin-

itively affected the proposal of the National Program of Educational Informatics

related to the use of digital technologies to promote citizenship skills. Moreover,

with support from the United Nations Democracy Fund, the Democracy Builders

initiative was launched in 2007. This project seeks to build capacities for active

citizenship and personal fulfillment of youth by enriching the official high school

curriculum’s civic education, using CADE’s methodology.1

Two Founding Premises

CADE’s conception of citizenship education is based on two pillars. The first

is the recognition of children’s participation rights and the need to help them to

develop the skills required to exercise these rights in the context of a participatory

and deliberative democracy. The second pillar is the conviction that at the begin-

ning of the twenty-first century, digital technologies must be present in citizenship

education proposals.

Children as citizens

The first premise on which CADE was built is that the changes brought about

by the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) in the conception of chil-

dren and their rights require rethinking the basis and justification of citizenship

education. Such education can no longer be conceived exclusively as the prepara-

tion of our children and youth to assume future political and civic responsibilities

but, rather, as a process that partly consists of facilitating the enactment of the

participation rights that children and adolescents already possess (Bujanda 2007;

Fundación Omar Dengo 2010).

The CADE approach to citizenship education has been strongly influenced by

the extensive and insightful work that Earls and Carlson have done to promote

the conception of children as citizens as well as children’s capacities to participate

in the framework of a deliberative democracy (Carlson and Earls 2001; Earls and

Carlson 2002). Based on Sen’s capability approach (Sen 1992, 1999), these authors