Nowadays, the ubiquity of changes determines a new approach to programming development. In this situation, it is necessary to update the strategy of socio-economic development in many cities. The aim of the paper is to present the process of updating the city’s development strategy on selected examples (Katowice, Cracow, Poznań, Warsaw and Wrocław), through the prism of the scale and tools of public participation. Wrocław is a centre that particularly approached the implementation of the megatrend of public participation in the work on updating the development strategy. The paper delineates differences between public consultations and real public participation. The following research methods were used in the study: literature research, analysis of source texts, benchmarking and comparative analysis. The time horizon covers the period of public participation in the documents’ construction and is different for particular cities selected for analysis, however, it falls in the years 2013-2017.
The article deals with the issue of the meaning of the Polish early education coursebooks for conservation/change in educational practices. It is the liberal and constructivist discourse to which the coursebook authors should refer (especially in the context of the present time and democracy) if these books are to become a tool of the prodevelopmental and emancipatory interest of both students and society. However, the research on Polish coursebooks for early education (grades I – III), show that this very condition has not been ful3 lled. In such a situation it is the German school coursebooks that might be inspiring because of their discursive background as well as of the methodological proposals and the range of content present in them. The article is also an attempt to reconstruct “the image of school” present in German early education coursebooks. It is possible to name and describe the key dimensions in this image such as: the democratic nature of teacher-student relations, the focus on the activation of students’ personal knowledge as well as on their ethical and cognitive autonomy, realistic vision of the world, trust in students’ competences, and creating the sphere of the nearest development.