Rethinking the Citizenship Curriculum: How to Meet the Needs of Twenty-First Century Citizenship? (original) (raw)
Related papers
Citizenship Education for a New Age
1994
This position paper examines the changing focus of citizenship education in Australia over the past 40 years. Citizenship education has not achieved as high a profile in Australia as in the United States and this situation has become a growing concern for many educators and community leaders. An examination is made on how questioning traditional values and changing the international scene have impacted the way Australians and Australian governments have come to see themselves. The changing nature of Australian society in recent years through a series of events, processes, and initiatives is recognized. A call for consensus is made in order to develop a citizenship education program for the Australian students to function in the new era of change. The paper includes the following divisions: (1) "Introduction"; (2) "Conflicting Images of Citizenship Education in Australia"; (3) "Issues for Ciitizenship and the School Curriculum"; (4) "Levels of Student Underitanding"; (5) "Student Attitudes"; (6) "Opportunity to Learn"; (7) "Teacher Attitudes"; (8) "Student Participation"; (9) "National Curriculum"; (10 "Curriculum Options"; and (11) "Conclusions." In summary, the level of student understanding of political concepts and processes is an important component of being an effective citizen. The development of citizen education involves not only a reconceptualization of citizenship education, but also a rethinking of how citizenship education might best become a major component of the school curriculum. Contains 28 references. (EH)
Ambiguities of Citizenship. Reframing the Notion of Citizenship Education
Ricerche di Pedagogia e Didattica – Journal of Theories and Research in Education, 2013
Complex transformations worldwide encompassed by the definition of 'globalisation' push us to rethink the concept of citizenship and its traditional definitions. The article aims to theoretically analyse the rich debate about citizenship from a socio-political point of view and tries to investigate the educational dimension related tod different concepts of citizenship. After having introduced three models for citizenship education (republican, liberal, and moral) and having explored their shortcomings, the authors shall propose a possible overtaking that is rooted on another way to understand the relationship among education and politics.
Moving beyond Idealistically Narrow Discourses in Citizenship Education
Policy Futures in Education, 2014
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
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
Reflecting Education, 2006
This special edition of Reflecting Education focuses on the teaching and learning of citizenship in the education system in England and in Lebanon. We have selected articles that raise questions for theory and policy and we have also included empirical studies based on the experiences of teachers and researchers who have engaged directly with classrooms.