Éabha Hughes (ORCID: 0000-0002-1212-4874) is a recent graduate of Biology and Physics Teaching for Post Primary level at the University of Limerick and is an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholar (GOIPG/2023/2919). As an early career researcher and PhD candidate at the School of Education, their doctoral research focuses on democratic education and student-led curriculum design through the "Negotiating the Essentials for Education in Democratic Societies" (NEEDS) project. This work explores the affordances of Negotiated, Integrated Curriculum for Global Citizenship Education through democracy, fostering meaningful learning and placing student voice at the centre of curriculum. Their doctoral research aims to provide an evidence-based framework to inform democratic curriculum design with a particular focus on addressing the risks of tokenism and barriers to authentic student decision-making in diverse educational contexts and fostering authentic student agency in education.

Negotiating the Essentials for Education in Democratic Societies (NEEDS):

Education must play a critical role in strengthening democracy, fostering student voice, agency, and meaningful participation. NEEDS aims to respond to UNESCO’s call for a new social contract for education by enabling students to co-construct curriculum through the Negotiated Integrated Curriculum (NIC) process. This offers a practice-centred approach to embedding student voice in curriculum development, leveraging 100 hours of unhurried time within the Junior Cycle Short Course structure to support deep, sustained student-led inquiry. Using a dual socio-ecological and socio-cultural approach, NEEDS explores the affordances of NIC for Global Citizenship Education through democracy.