Political Literacy

Blogging Together (OLD)

by Rozemarijn

At the start of this project, we almost immediately found common ground in our subject, namely the challenges regarding political literacy in Eastern Europe. We chose Poland as a focus point due to the recent legal contreversies between the EU and the Polish government. By creating several topics that covered all the aspects of the effect political literacy can have on overall political challenges in Poland, and by dividing this among the group members, we had a structured basis on which we could get started.


Blog Member: Rozemarijn

Rozemarijn focused her blogs of Political Literacy on the political participation rates and degree of democracy in Poland. Therefore, in her first blog, she discussed how the political participation rates of Polish citizens threatened the established democracy in Poland. Then, in her second blog, she discussed how the political instability of Poland had an impact on the political participation of the Polish people.

Blog Member: Adina

Adina focused her blog on the transition period from communism to democracy in Eastern Europe. The highlight was placed on Poland because it was the leader in building a strong opposition called Solidarity composed of intellectuals, workers, the Church, students and teachers all united to bring down the old regime. However, in today’s news, Poland is not celebrating Solidarity but it is a very controversial topic with its division between supporters of a more nationalistic and autocratic model and the ones favoring the ideals of European Union.

Blog Member: Renee 

Renee focused on the challenges that Poland faces regarding establishing a politically literate society. The aim of her first blog ‘Another shift… away from Liberal Democracy’ was to determine what the factors were that could determine a lower political literacy rate, and the factors that stand in the way of increasing political literacy. The impacts and responsibility of the EU regarding these challenges is then discussed in her second blog ‘A politically literate Defence Tactic.’ These topics are then interlinked with the political participation pieces of Rozemarijn and the communism backstory pieces of Adina.

Reviewing each other’s blogs and providing feedback to one another made our group very productive. In addition, and not less important, by reviewing each other’s blogs, we could interlink our blogs to create a coherent, interlinking topic. 

As in every group, there are always certain aspects that could have gone better. For us, it would have been more effective if we had set more deadlines, since we had a bit of a time struggle in the end. Furthermore, since we were a relatively small group, there were a lot of aspects that we could cover, and it was sometimes difficult to choose the most important ones. The most common problems we faced during the writing process was to focus on the idea of political literacy rates. We found this challenging due to the different interpretations of what ‘Political Literacy’ can mean. These rates cannot be calculated numerically and most of the sources we used covered general political news. We did our best to create our own justified arguments on the importance of political literacy and its important role in European society.

We used the time in the tutorials to work out these issues together and make our topics more clearly. Furthermore, we kept contact throughout the entire process to keep each other up to date on the progress of our blogs. We also met up to review each other’s blog and give each other constructive feedback.