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This paper aims to examine teaching the values required for democratic citizenship while avoiding indoctrination by analyzing the case of “The reference framework of competence for democratic culture". The background of this paper is the long debate about how to teach democratic values democratically in the social studies educational field. This is related to the issue of value neutrality and independence. As a result of the analysis, the Council of Europe attempted to realize value education that avoids unconscious indoctrination by making learners explicitly aware of values and then critically examining them. This approach has the potential to become a powerful alternative approach in Japanese social studies education.

The purpose of this study is to develop digital contents that support inquiry based learning and to propose application examples of “local community studies” conducted in Japanese primary social studies education. For this reason, we set up a development project team by researchers and university students majoring in social studies education and developed digital contents over a year. In this project, we formulated five “design principles” for development. The contents were envisioned in consideration of the format, cooperation with social studies textbooks and supplementary readers for community studies, correspondence with the course of study, and the fairness of the areas handled. Finally, the digital contents which name is “NONTA’s Classroom” was developed and 10 keywords were released on the website. Along with the release, in cooperation with Higashi-Hiroshima City Library, we invited local elementary school students to use the digital contents and learn and verified the application and improvement of digital content. As a result of this research, 1)we conceived the design and concrete contents and structure of digital content that supports inquiry based learning and developed it. Also, 2)we specified an example of how to apply and confirmed its effectiveness.