Cross-cultural Internet based resource for teaching democracy

The Spirit of Democracy Project was initiated in 2000 by the Citizenship Education Group at UNB, Canada, in partnership with the Russian Association for Civic Education. The goal of this project is to help Russian educators to develop a new dynamic approach to citizenship education in public schools. The focus of the Project is the development of online curriculum resources for use by teachers in Russia and Canada. The Canadian and Russian project teams are developing materials for similar topics based on local content. Researchers create learning opportunities using situations and springboards. The situations present democratic issues and concepts, for example the value of loyalty, or the meaning of privacy. An important role in the Project is assigned to visual materials and creative use of hypermedia. The project site brought together a community of practice in cyberspace-a community of social studies researchers and teachers from Russia and Canada.