The general goal of the study is to develop, implement, and evaluate an educational curriculum aimed at promoting adolescents’ democratic and intercultural competences in young adolescents. More specifically, the first aim is to develop the intervention program starting from existing programs, such as the CVS Curriculum (Ingoglia et al., 2021). The CVS Curriculum includes a series of activities that encourage students to actively exercise their democratic and intercultural competences at school and in their local communities through urban regeneration activities, making their voices heard about their needs, views, and dreams regarding their closest “urban” spaces. The activities to be implemented will be defined after a co-design session, involving students’ teachers. The CVS Curriculum is based on the main idea that youth belong to different groups and communities, and they have to take on the responsibility of each of them; adults caring for students have to help them in doing that. Adults can help adolescents to adequately manage this responsibility; youth are not the citizens of the future, they are already citizens, and their voices need to be heard by policymakers. They need to be protagonists and able to express their needs, views, and dreams about urban spaces in dialogue with local administrations. The new curriculum will be developed in order to integrate both a teaching and learning evaluation system, and an assessment system of adolescents’ competences. The second aim is to implement the new curriculum using an evidence-based approach. The third aim is to evaluate the efficacy of the intervention assessing change across time in adolescents’ democratic and intercultural competences, as well as in their civic engagement.
