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 controversies between the EU and the Polish government. By defining the most important topics on political literacy, we had a structured basis for our analysis of the situation in Poland.

Since we failed our first blogs, we had to do the resit. This also provided new circumstances in which we had to work together. Since there was only three weeks in which we had to revise our blog posts, we immediately made a plan of action. We met together with our tutor to discuss the feedback, and from there, we had a clear view of what we had to do. We set stricter deadlines and communicated with each other what and how we were going to revise and restructure our blog posts.

Rozemarijn focused her blogs of Political Literacy on how the socio-economic status and political instability affected political literacy. The first blog is connected to the blogs of Renee, since the socio-economic status of citizens is affected by the education level. The second blog is linked to the blog of Adina, since it argues about the effect of norms and values on political literacy, which Adina discussed in even greater detail.

Adina focused her blog on the interlink between political literacy as the foundation for a health democracy. It starts with some background on the news headlines nowadays which caught everyone´s attention and constitute such salient topics: the democratic backsliding an illiberal democracies.This part constitutes a good introduction for in depth case study presented by Rozemarijn and Renee.

Renee focused on the challenges that Poland faces regarding establishing a politically literate society, what factors determine political literacy and the impacts and responsibility of the EU regarding these challenges. These topics are then interlinked with the blog about socio-economic status of Rozemarijn and the communism backstory piece of Adina.

The idea was to read each others’ blogs and provide feedback to one another to make our group work more productive. Moreover, by reviewing each others’ blogs, we could make an interconnection between our blogs. However, the deadlines we set were not met by the whole group and communication was inadequate. This made the work more stressful and resulted in the fact that we had to do things last-minute.

It was sometimes difficult to choose the most important topics. The most common problems was to focus on the idea of political literacy, since there were many different interpretations of what ‘Political Literacy’ can mean. We did our best to create our own justified arguments on the importance of political literacy and its important role in Polish society. As perceived from our feedback, there was a struggle linking our blog specific topics to the overall topic of political literacy. However, since we met with our tutor to discuss the feedback, the meaning of political literacy and the connection of our topics to it became more clear.

* Featured Image by De Ondernemer