The Missing Element to Achieving a Citizenship-as-Practice: Balancing Freedom and Responsibility in Schools Today (original) (raw)
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This article argues that citizenship education already plays, and, indeed, should play an important role in schools. Not only does citizenship education deliver specific aims of education, which warrant its inclusion in the curriculum of any school, it also owes its existence to a moral obligation of states to educate citizens for effective participation in civic life. However, the particular type of citizen, which states wish to create will in large part be determined by the approach taken to teaching citizenship education. As a result of this, the role of citizenship education will differ considerably depending on which model is adopted. The article explores three roles for citizenship education in schools in detail. It then seeks to propose a transformative role for citizenship education in schools in order to create citizens who are equipped with the necessary knowledge, understandings and dispositions to make a fundamental difference in their societies. This article was formerly published by Citized.
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The main goal of this article is to provide conceptual guidelines to move the pedagogical debate in the field of citizenship education beyond idealistically narrow models. We begin by providing an overview of key shortcomings presented in most citizenship education programs, specifically in the United States of America. The second section presents the conceptual perspective of embodied cognition to discuss the prevalent metaphors and prototypes related to the notion of 'the nation as a family' commonly used in understanding citizenship education. The third and final section concludes with a set of suggestions for reconceptualizing the field of citizenship education using the tools of embodied cognition. With this article we want to contribute to moving the pedagogical debate about citizenship education beyond what we characterized in previous work as the impasse of idealized perspectives (Fischman & Haas, 2012). We argue that the notion of 'citizen' informing most citizenship education programs, specifically in the United States of America (USA), is often fantastically idealized and narrowly defined based on two combined problems. First, narratives of nationally bounded membership are no longer adequate for understanding the complex relationships between citizenship and education-if they ever were-because they do not consider the contemporary political, economic, social, and demographic changes related to the loosely defined, but very influential, processes of 'globalization'. A second argument that we want to discuss is that we use the label of 'fantastic discourses' in citizenship education because they overemphasize the notion of rationality related to the Cartesian tradition of 'cogito ergo sum'-and of human actors as purely conscious beings-that results in an overly idealistic and educationally impractical model of citizenship education. We begin with a brief presentation of some of the models most frequently used to describe the relationship between citizenship and education, particularly in the USA, followed by a discussion of their shortcomings. The next section introduces the concept of embodied cognition and the relevance of metaphors and prototypes for understanding citizenship. We conclude with some suggestions for going beyond idealized models of citizenship education. The Uneasy Relationship between 'Citizenship' and Education Theorists from a wide range of conceptual perspectives have proposed arguments about the fundamental aspects of citizenship: from its moral and legal status to its compulsory or voluntary character, its connection with patriotic sentiments or its identification with and subordination to the state, and its relationship with an imagined community of equals. These perspectives share two
Can Schools Teach Citizenship?
Discourse, 2020
In this essay I question the liberal faith in the efficacy and morality of citizenship education (CE) as it has been traditionally (and is still)practiced in most public state schools. In challenging institutionalized faith in CE, I also challenge liberal understandings of what it means to be a citizen, and how the social and political world of citizens is constituted. I interrogate CE as defended in the liberal tradition, with particular attention to Gutmann’s ‘conscious social reproduction’. I argue that CE in practice does not operate on the bases of non-repression or non-discrimination, and has weak claims for legitimacy. In fact, CE in many forms reproduces social inequalities, and contributes to the expulsion of disadvantaged students from schools and from the ranks of recognized citizens.
Education, Citizenship and Social Justice, 2019
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Citizenship, Social Change, and Education
CEPS Journal, 2021
In recent decades, discussions regarding citizenship and citizenship education have evolved from a marginal issue in political philosophy and the philosophy of education to one of the most pressing topics in contemporary discussions about the civic aims of public schooling. The place and contribution of citizenship education in public schools have become central points of discussion and debate in terms of theory, research, policy, and practice. Yet, existing conceptions of citizenship education differ considerably over various issues, including the basic motivational impulses associated with the civic aims of public education. In particular, the recent upsurge of phenomena as diverse as hate speech, populism, the shrinking civic space, radicalisation, and violent extremism have shifted the main justificatory impulse from consequentialist to urgency-based arguments. This shift of emphasis has had some unreflected consequences related to the justification for citizenship education in public schools. The central purpose of this article is to expound on the two main impulses associated with the civic aims of public schools and their interrelationship with social changes. The main part contrasts these two opposing motivational impulses associated with the justification of citizenship education. Each of the two impulses is presented and then clarified with an example to shed light on the basic justificatory procedure associated with it. The concluding part of this paper sketches the most distinctive challenges of the alternative conception of justifying citizenship education and its interplay with social change.
Learning for democracy: The politics and practice of citizenship education
British Educational Research Journal , 2018
It is now two decades since the Advisory Group on Citizenship, commissioned by the newly elected Labour government, recommended the introduction of statutory citizenship education. On the twentieth anniversary of the eponymously named ‘Crick Report’, this article presents the findings of a rigorous mixed-methods study of citizenship educators in the UK. This research suggests that teachers continue to lack a shared understanding of citizenship, conceptually and pedagogically, and also reveals an emphasis amongst teachers upon individualistic notions of good citizenship that are reflective of national, and increasingly global, political discourse. The findings are analysed using a new conceptual framework—the declarative–procedural paradigm—which is developed here to understand the relationship between political and normatively driven visions of democratic citizenship and classroom pedagogy. In doing so the article adds, theoretically and substantively, to the specific research pool of citizenship studies and broader debates about political disengagement
Paradox and Promise in Citizenship Education: A Reaction to Butts and Hartoonian
1988
The basic paradox of citizenship education in the United States is that the first steps toward the rational, autonomous, critical-minded citizen required by a democracy are necessarily nonrational and based on an unquestioned deference 'io * Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made * from the original document.