Andrew Peterson

Garth Stahl
Hannah Soong
Editors

The Palgrave
Handbook of
Citizenship
and Education
The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and
Education
Andrew Peterson • Garth Stahl •
Hannah Soong
Editors

The Palgrave Handbook of

Citizenship and Education

With 27 Figures and 14 Tables

Editors
Andrew Peterson Garth Stahl
Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues University of Queensland
University of Birmingham Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
Birmingham, UK

Hannah Soong
University of South Australia
Mawson Lakes, SA, Australia

ISBN 978-3-319-67827-6 ISBN 978-3-319-67828-3 (eBook)

ISBN 978-3-319-67829-0 (print and electronic bundle)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
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Preface

The terms “citizenship” and “citizenship education” remain quintessential contested

concepts. While the scope of “citizenship” and of what the “citizen” comprises scope
rightly been widened from limited status-based notions, critical questions remain
about whether and how the concept of the citizen is understood, constructed, and
practiced within and across contexts. Central to such critical questions is whether the
concept of “the citizen” is of any positive value at all, fundamentally compromised
as it may be by colonizing and subjugating historical and contemporary practices.
Given the contestation and debate, there are new serious questions for citizenship –
and by extension citizenship education – being raised by the intersections between
localities and various forms of globalization, cosmopolitanism, and
transnationalism.
This major reference work – The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Educa-
tion – brings together a large number of chapters of tertiary literature (i.e., literature
directed towards compilations or digests of available primary and secondary
sources) to examine and explain how various theorizations of citizenship, civic
identity, and participatory democracy are, and could be, operationalized within
educational theories, educational debates, educational curricular, and pedagogic
practices. Readers should note that the Handbook is a living handbook. First, there
are no hard limits on the focus and number of chapters to be included. Below, we
separate the chapters into five parts, but these parts are best understood as broad
umbrellas rather than neat categories. In addition, all of the chapters were published
online first as and when they were written, meaning that this collection has grown
over the last several years. Second, as editors we intend to commission and publish
many more chapters in the coming years to expand the scope of those available
online and, if we reach that point, to publish a second hard copy of these further
chapters. In addition, we will ask authors of the chapters contained in this book if
they wish to revisit their chapters, updating and refreshing them at appropriate
periods.
In working with authors, we have consciously allowed for and encouraged wide
defintions of the concepts of “citizenship” and “education”. For this reason, the
chapters include critique and advocate for a multitude of ways in which citizenship is
constituted in within various contexts. Furthermore, the attention of the chapters

v
vi Preface

flow across a range of educational settings, structures, and processes as relevant and
as appropriate to the age of the “learners” under consideration.
Truly international and diverse in its scope – though not universal (see below) –
this Handbook is structured around five parts. Part One – Foundational Thinkers
on, and Theories of, Citizenship and Education – includes 12 chapters which
explore the ideas of key historic and contemporary thinkers on, and theories of,
citizenship and education. Part Two – Citizenship and Education in National and
Localized Contexts – comprises 20 chapters that each explore the operation of
citizenship and education within particular contexts. In these chapters the various
authors explore the particular nuances of scholarly ideas associated with citizenship
and democracy in educational settings within national and sub-national localities/
communities that impact on and shape the implementation of citizenship and
education. Part Three – Citizenship and Education in Transnational Contexts –
contains 13 chapters that explore the operation of citizenship and education as
shaped by transnational factors, including migration, cosmopolitanism, neoliberal-
ism, global technologies, and global identities. The 12 chapters in Part Four – Youth
Advocacy, Citizenship and Education – focus on (changing) constructions of
youth and youth identity, and the ways that these interconnect (converge and/or
disrupt) notions of citizenship/citizenship education. Part Five – New Directions in
Citizenship and Education – includes 9 chapters in which the authors survey
existing literature to develop particularly novel insights on citizenship and
education.
One final note for this introduction. In any edited collection, even one as large as
this, there will be notable gaps in content and coverage. We are conscious of these
gaps and we hope to fill them in the next wave of chapters.

Birmingham, UK Andrew Peterson

Queensland, Australia Garth Stahl
Adelaide, Australia Hannah Soong
August 2020
Acknowledgments

We have two groups of people to thank for making this Handbook possible. First, we
would like to thank all of the colleagues who have contributed chapters. Each of the
authors has been a pleasure to work with, and all have accepted our thoughts and
feedback with good grace. In turn, we have learned a great deal from the insights and
arguments each of the authors have offered.
Second, we owe a debt of gratitude to our colleagues at Palgrave. We thank
Eleanor Christie (now at Open University Press) for bringing the possibility of a
handbook on citizenship and education to our attention. Eleanor Gaffney and Ruth
Lefevre have given the project a steady hand, guiding us where needed and helping
ourselves and the authors to navigate the online system. Eleanor and Ruth have
always been on hand to answer our questions and requests, and have done so with
patience and kindness – we are very grateful to them both.

vii
Contents

Part I Foundational Thinkers on, and Theories of, Citizenship and

Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

1 A Confucian Conception of Citizenship Education ............ 3

Charlene Tan

2 Aristotle on Citizenship and Civic Education: The Central

Role of Political Participation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Benjamin Miller

3 Political Liberalism, Autonomy, and Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

Blain Neufeld

4 Civic Republicanism, Citizenship and Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

Geoffrey Hinchliffe

5 Arendt, Citizenship, and Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67

Ramona Mihăilă and George Lăzăroiu

6 Rousseau on Citizenship and Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79

Bjorn Gomes

7 Paulo Freire: Citizenship and Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95

Kevin Kester and Hogai Aryoubi

8 Dewey and Citizenship Education: Schooling as Democratic

Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
Piet A. van der Ploeg

9 Cosmopolitanism, Citizenship, and Education Through the

Lens of John Dewey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
Jason Beech

10 Neoliberalism, Citizenship, and Education: A Policy Discourse

Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
Andrew Wilkins

ix
x Contents

11 Peace Education and Citizenship Education: Shared Critiques . . . 155

Terence Bevington, Nomisha Kurian, and Hilary Cremin
12 Citizenship (and) Inequality: Ethnographic Research on
Education and the Making and Remaking of Class Power and
Privilege . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
Dennis Beach

Part II Citizenship and Education in National and Localized

Contexts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183

13 Curriculum Policy and Practice of Civic Education in Zambia:

A Reflective Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
Gistered Muleya
14 The Language of Citizenship: Indigenous Perspectives of
Nationhood in Canada . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195
Frank Deer and Jessica Trickey
15 The Making of Neoliberal Citizenship in the United States:
Inculcation, Responsibilization, and Personhood in a
“No-Excuses” Charter School . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211
Garth Stahl
16 Citizenship, Education, and Political Crisis in Spain and
Catalonia: Limits and Possibilities for the Exercise of Critical
Citizenship at School . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227
Jordi Feu-Gelis, Xavier Casademont-Falguera, and
Òscar Prieto-Flores
17 Citizenship and Citizenship Education in Zimbabwe:
A Theoretical and Historical Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243
Aaron T. Sigauke
18 Religious Citizenship in Schools in England and Wales:
Responses to Growing Diversity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259
Peter J. Hemming and Elena Hailwood
19 Filipino Teachers’ Identity: Framed by Community
Engagements, Challenges for Citizenship Education . . . . . . . . . . . 275
Stephen Redillas
20 The Role of the State and State Orthodoxy in Citizenship and
Education in China . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297
Wing-Wah Law
21 Citizenship Education in the Republic of Ireland: Plus ça
Change? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315
Audrey Bryan
Contents xi

22 Moments of Possibility in Politics, Policy, and Practice in

New Zealand Citizenship Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329
Andrea Milligan, Carol Mutch, and Bronwyn E. Wood

23 The Politics of Citizenship Education in Chile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 343

Rodrigo Mardones

24 Global Citizenship Education in South Korea: The Roles of

NGOs in Cultivating Global Citizens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 359
Jae-Eun Noh

25 Citizenship Education in England: Policy and Curriculum . . . . . . 375

Liz Moorse

26 Justice-Oriented, “Thick” Approaches to Civics and

Citizenship Education in Australia: Examples of Practice . . . . . . . 403
Keith Heggart and Rick Flowers

27 “Fundamental British Values”: The Teaching of Nation,

Identity, and Belonging in the United Kingdom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 419
Sadia Habib

28 Civics and Citizenship Education in Australia: The Importance

of a Social Justice Agenda . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 435
Babak Dadvand

29 Citizenship Education in the Conflict-Affected Societies of

Northern Ireland and Syria: Learning Lessons from the Past to
Inform the Future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 449
Faith Gordon and Adnan Mouhiddin

30 Digital Citizenship and Education in Turkey: Experiences, the

Present and the Future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 465
Zafer İbrahimoğlu

31 The Dilemmas of Americanism: Civic Education in the

United States . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 483
Campbell F. Scribner

32 Towards an Education for Active Citizenship in Singapore . . . . . . 497

Siva Gopal Thaiyalan

Part III Citizenship and Education in Transnational Contexts . . . . 521

33 Discourses of Global Citizenship Education: The Influence of

the Global Middle Classes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 523
Miri Yemini and Claire Maxwell
xii Contents

34 Contested Citizenship Education in Settler Colonies on First

Nations Land . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 537
Sophie Rudolph and Melitta Hogarth

35 “Being Rooted, Living Global”: Citizenship and Education in the

Singapore City-State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 549
Charleen Chiong and Saravanan Gopinathan

36 Constructions of “Youth” and “Activism” in Lebanon ......... 567

Dina Kiwan

37 Inequality, Civic Education and Intended Future Civic

Engagement: An Examination of Research in
Western Democracies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 583
Dimokritos Kavadias, Echeverria Vicente Nohemi Jocabeth, and
Kenneth Hemmerechts

38 International Students: (Non)citizenship, Rights, Discrimination,

and Belonging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 599
Ly Thi Tran and Trang Hoang

39 Socialist Citizenship in the Post-socialist Era Across Time and

Space: A Closer Look at Cuba and Vietnam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 619
Hang B. Duong and Le-Ha Phan

40 Educational Mobility and Citizenship: Chinese “Foreign Talent”

Students in Singapore and Indian Medical Students in China . . . . 633
Peidong Yang, Mark Baildon, and Jasmine B.-Y. Sim

41 Bringing the Citizen Back In: A Sociopolitical Approach to

Global Citizenship Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 649
Quentin Maire

42 Global Citizenship Education Between Qualification, Socialization,

and Subjectification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 665
Sara Franch

43 Existing Research on Italian Migrants in the USA and Australia:

A Critical Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 679
Simone Marino

44 Advancing Diversity Through Global Citizenship Education

and Interfaith Dialogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 693
Mehmet Aslan and Mark Van Ommen

45 Civic Theory and Educative Processes in Informal Spaces:

A Case Study in Three Italian Realities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 705
Mauro Giardiello
Contents xiii

Part IV Youth Advocacy, Citizenship, and Education . . . . . . . . . . . 721

46 Undocumented Students and Youth Advocacy in the USA ...... 723

Ana K. Soltero López and R. Joseph Rodríguez

47 Informal Educational Infrastructure: Citizenship Formation,

Informal Education, and Youth Work Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 743
Ben Arnold Lohmeyer

48 The Development of Civic Participation Among Youth in

Singapore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 759
Jasmine B.-Y. Sim and Lee-Tat Chow

49 Rural Youth, Education, and Citizenship in Sweden: Politics

of Recognition and Redistribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 779
Susanna Areschoug and Lucas Gottzén

50 Youth Civic Engagement and Formal Education in Canada:

Shifting Expressions, Associated Challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 795
Mark Evans, Rosemary Evans, and Angela Vemic

51 Supporting Active Citizenship Among Young People at Risk of

Social Exclusion: The Role of Adult Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 813
Nathalie Huegler

52 Youth Citizenship in Sierra Leone: Everyday Practice and

Hope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 829
Alice Chadwick

53 Youth Engagement and Citizenship in England . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 845

Ian Davies

54 “You’ve Got the Skin”: Entrepreneurial Universities, Study

Abroad, and the Construction of Global Citizenship . . . . . . . . . . . 863
Sam Schulz

55 Youth Participation, Movement Politics, and Skills: A Study of

Youth Activism in Italy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 877
Ilaria Pitti

56 Online Citizenship Learning of Chinese Young People ......... 891

Jun Fu

57 Education for Youth Civic and Political Action in Australia . . . . . 905

Andrew Peterson, Rosalyn Black, and Lucas Walsh
xiv Contents

Part V New Directions in Citizenship and Education . . . . . . . . . . . 921

58 Affective Citizenship and Education in Multicultural Societies:

Tensions, Ambivalences, and Possibilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 923
Michalinos Zembylas
59 Hypercitizenship in the Age of Globalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 937
Sara Petroccia and Andrea Pitasi
60 World-Seeing and World-Making: The Role of Aesthetic
Education in Cultivating Citizens of the World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 951
Suzanne S. Choo
61 Lessons from Dystopia: The Security of Nations and the
Securitized Citizen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 965
Liam Francis Gearon
62 Citizenship and Education in an Age of Extremisms . . . . . . . . . . . 983
Reza Gholami
63 Teaching Migration as Citizenship-Building in the United States
and Beyond . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 999
Adam Strom, Veronica Boix-Mansilla, Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj, and
Carola Suárez-Orozco
64 Revisiting a Spiritual Democracy: In Search of Whitman’s
Democratic Vistas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1015
Gabriel P. Swarts
65 Typologies of Citizenship and Civic Education: From Ideal
Types to a Reflective Tool . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1029
Aviv Cohen
66 Citizenship, Disability Discrimination, and the Invisible
Learner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1047
Fiona Hallett
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1063
About the Editors

Andrew Peterson is Professor of Character and Citi-

zenship Education at the Jubilee Centre for Character
and Virtues, University of Birmingham. His research
focuses, broadly, on civic virtues and education. His
recent books include Civility and Democratic Education
and Compassion and Education: Cultivating Compas-
sionate Children, Schools and Communities. He is
Assistant Editor of the British Journal of Educational
Studies, is Associate Editor of the Asia Pacific Journal
of Education, and is Deputy Editor of Citizenship Teach-
ing and Learning.

Garth Stahl, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the

School of Education at the University of Queensland.
His research interests lie on the nexus of neoliberalism
and socio-cultural studies of education, identity, equity/
inequality, and social change. Currently, his research
projects and publications encompass theoretical and
empirical studies of learner identities, gender and
youth, sociology of schooling in a neoliberal age, gen-
dered subjectivities, equity and difference, and educa-
tional reform. Of particular interest is the exploration of
counternarratives to neoliberalism around “value” and
“respectability” for working-class youth.
ORCID Profile: orcid.org/0000-0002-1800-8495

xv
xvi About the Editors

Hannah Soong Ph.D., is a Senior Lecturer and a

Socio-cultural Researcher in the School of Education
at the University of South Australia. Hannah’s research
interests lie in the empirical studies and theorization of
transnational mobility of families, international stu-
dents, and migrant teachers, sociology of Asia’s literacy,
and teacher identity work in an “East-meets-West” cur-
riculum. Currently, she is exploring the transnational
aspirations of middle-class and refugee-background par-
ents on their children’s education and well-being in Asia
and Australia. One key area is the investigation around
developing ethical engagement with global shifts and
relations in education.
ORCID Profile: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1798-
4881
Contributors

Susanna Areschoug Department of Child and Youth Studies, Stockholm Univer-

sity, Stockholm, Sweden
Hogai Aryoubi Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Mehmet Aslan School of Humanities and Social Inquiry, University of Wollon-
gong, Wollongong, NSW, Australia
Mark Baildon National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University,
Singapore, Singapore
Dennis Beach University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden
University of Borås, Borås, Sweden
Jason Beech Escuela de Educación, Universidad de San Andrés – CONICET,
Victoria, Argentina
Terence Bevington University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Rosalyn Black Deakin University, Geelong, VIC, Australia
Veronica Boix-Mansilla Re-imagining Migration and Project Zero, Cambridge,
MA, USA
Audrey Bryan School of Human Development, Dublin City University, Dublin,
Ireland
Xavier Casademont-Falguera University of Girona, Girona, Spain
Alice Chadwick University of Bath, Bath, UK
Charleen Chiong Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Suzanne S. Choo National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological Univer-
sity, Singapore, Singapore
Lee-Tat Chow National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University,
Singapore, Singapore

xvii
xviii Contributors

Aviv Cohen The Seymour Fox School of Education, The Hebrew University of
Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel
Hilary Cremin University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Babak Dadvand Melbourne Graduate School of Education, The University of
Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Ian Davies The University of York, York, UK
Frank Deer University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, Canada
Hang B. Duong College of Education, University of Lehigh, Bethlehem, PA, USA
Mark Evans Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning, Ontario Institute
for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
Rosemary Evans University of Toronto Schools, Toronto, ON, Canada
Jordi Feu-Gelis University of Girona, Girona, Spain
Rick Flowers University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia
Sara Franch Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy
Jun Fu Youth Research Centre, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, Uni-
versity of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
Liam Francis Gearon University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Reza Gholami Department of Education and Social Justice, School of Education,
University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, UK
Mauro Giardiello University of Roma Tre, Rome, Italy
Bjorn Gomes Yale-NUS College, Singapore, Singapore
Saravanan Gopinathan Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National Univer-
sity of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore
Faith Gordon School of Social Sciences, Monash University, Melbourne,
Australia
Lucas Gottzén Department of Child and Youth Studies, Stockholm University,
Stockholm, Sweden
Sadia Habib Manchester, UK
Elena Hailwood School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK
Fiona Hallett Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, UK
Keith Heggart University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia
Kenneth Hemmerechts Political Science Department, Free University of Brussels
(VUB), Brussels, Belgium
Contributors xix

Peter J. Hemming School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK

Geoffrey Hinchliffe School of Education, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
Trang Hoang School of Education, Deakin University, Burwood, Australia
Melitta Hogarth The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
Nathalie Huegler UCL Institute of Education, London, UK
School of Education and Social Work, University of Sussex, Falmer, UK
Zafer İbrahimoğlu Marmara University Ataturk Faculty of Education, Istanbul,
Turkey
R. Joseph Rodríguez Department of Literacy, Early, Bilingual, and Special Edu-
cation (LEBSE), California State University, Fresno, Fresno, CA, USA
Dimokritos Kavadias Political Science Department, Free University of Brussels
(VUB), Brussels, Belgium
Kevin Kester Department of Education, Keimyung University, Daegu, South
Korea
Dina Kiwan University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK
Nomisha Kurian University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Wing-Wah Law Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong,
China
George Lăzăroiu The Cognitive Labor Institute, New York City, NY, USA
Spiru Haret University, Bucharest, Romania
Ben Arnold Lohmeyer Flinders University, Adelaide, SA, Australia
Tabor, College of Higher Education, Adelaide, SA, Australia
Quentin Maire Centre for International Research on Education Systems, Victoria
University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
Rodrigo Mardones Instituto de Ciencia Política, Pontificia Universidad Católica
de Chile, Santiago, Chile
Simone Marino School of Creative Industries, University of South Australia,
Adelaide, SA, Australia
Claire Maxwell UCL, Institute of Education, London, UK
Ramona Mihăilă Dimitrie Cantemir Christian University, Bucharest, Romania
Benjamin Miller Department of Political Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA
Andrea Milligan Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
xx Contributors

Liz Moorse Association for Citizenship Teaching, London, UK

Adnan Mouhiddin University of Surrey, Guildford, UK
Gistered Muleya Department of Language and Social Sciences Education, The
University of Zambia, Lusaka, Zambia
Carol Mutch Faculty of Education and Social Work, The University of Auckland,
Auckland, New Zealand
Blain Neufeld Department of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee,
Milwaukee, WI, USA
Jae-Eun Noh Learning Sciences Institute Australia, Australian Catholic Univer-
sity, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
Echeverria Vicente Nohemi Jocabeth Political Science Department, Free Univer-
sity of Brussels (VUB), Brussels, Belgium
Andrew Peterson Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, University of Birming-
ham, Birmingham, UK
Sara Petroccia Gabriele d’Annunzio University, Chieti-Pescara, Italy
Le-Ha Phan Department of Educational Foundations, College of Education,
Universiti Brunei Darussalam (Brunei) and University of Hawaii at Manoa (USA),
Honolulu, HI, USA
Andrea Pitasi Gabriele d’Annunzio University, Chieti-Pescara, Italy
Ilaria Pitti Department of Social, Political and Cognitive Sciences, University of
Siena, Siena, Italy
Òscar Prieto-Flores University of Girona, Girona, Spain
Stephen Redillas University of Santo Tomas, Manila, Philippines
Sophie Rudolph Melbourne Graduate School of Education, The University of
Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA,
USA
Sam Schulz College of Education, Psychology and Social Work, Flinders Univer-
sity of South Australia, Adelaide, SA, Australia
Campbell F. Scribner University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA
Aaron T. Sigauke School of Education, University of New England, Armidale,
NSW, Australia
Jasmine B.-Y. Sim National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological Uni-
versity, Singapore, Singapore
Contributors xxi

Ana K. Soltero López Department of Literacy, Early, Bilingual, and Special

Education (LEBSE), California State University, Fresno, CA, USA
Garth Stahl University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
Adam Strom Re-imagining Migration, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Carola Suárez-Orozco Re-imagining Migration and UCLA, Los Angeles, CA,
USA
Gabriel P. Swarts University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY, USA
Charlene Tan Policy and Leadership Studies, National Institute of Education,
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore
Siva Gopal Thaiyalan Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New
Zealand
Ly Thi Tran School of Education, Deakin University, Burwood, Australia
Jessica Trickey University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, Canada
Piet A. van der Ploeg University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands
Mark Van Ommen School of Education, University of Queensland, Brisbane,
QLD, Australia
Angela Vemic Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto,
Toronto, ON, Canada
Lucas Walsh Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia
Andrew Wilkins University of East London, London, UK
Bronwyn E. Wood Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
Peidong Yang National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University,
Singapore, Singapore
Miri Yemini Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
Michalinos Zembylas Program of Educational Studies, Open University of
Cyprus, Latsia, Cyprus
 Part I
Foundational Thinkers on, and Theories of,
Citizenship and Education
A Confucian Conception of Citizenship
Education 1
Charlene Tan

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
A Confucian Conception of Citizenship Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Junzi (Exemplary Persons) and Zhengming (Rectification of Names) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
A “Thick” Conception of Human Good Through Dao (Way) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
The Utilization of Dialogue to Foster Reflective Citizens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Abstract
This chapter examines a Confucian conception of citizenship education by
focusing on Confucius’ teachings and actions as recorded in the Analects
(Lunyu). Confucius’ belief in the historicity and potential of human beings
motivates him to emphasize the inheritance, acquisition, critical reflection, and
appropriation of traditional knowledge for citizenship education. He balances
teacher directiveness and student autonomy by foregrounding human beings as
both recipients and creators of their own culture. Three main characteristics of a
Confucian worldview of citizenship education are highlighted in this chapter:
first, that the goal of citizenship education is to nurture junzi (exemplary persons)
who perform their social roles and participate actively in their communities in
accordance with zhengming (rectification of names); second, that a Confucian
citizenship education curriculum reflects a “thick” conception of human good
through a substantive framework of beliefs and values that centers on dao (way);
and, third, that a recommended pedagogical approach, as demonstrated by

C. Tan (*)
Policy and Leadership Studies, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University,
Singapore, Singapore
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 3

A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_17
4 C. Tan

Confucius, is dialogue to foster reflective citizens. A Confucian conception of

citizenship education as outlined in this chapter debunks the perception that
Confucius and Confucianism necessarily promote authoritarian leadership,
unquestioning obedience to authority, passive citizenship, and political
indoctrination.

Keywords
Citizenship education · Confucius · Dao (way) · Dialogue · Junzi (exemplary
person) · Zhengming (rectification of names)

Introduction

A core identity in our modern world is that of citizenship. Broadly speaking,

citizenship in a democracy comprises the following: “(a) gives membership status
to individuals within a political unit; (b) confers an identity on individuals;
(c) constitutes a set of values, usually interpreted as a commitment to the common
good of a particular political unit; (d) involves practicing a degree of participation in
the process of political life; and (e) implies gaining and using knowledge and
understanding of laws, documents, structures, and processes of governance”
(Abowitz and Harnish 2006, 653).
Education of/through/for citizenship has become a primary concern in many
countries in their endeavors to nurture citizens who possess the capacity to address
local and global issues rationally (Gilbert 1996; Crick 1998; Criddle et al. 2004;
Noddings 2013). A survey of the developments in citizenship education for the past
few decades reveals a shift from state formation and patriotic education to wider
conceptions such as supranational, multicultural, critical, and cyber citizenship (Kerr
1999; Johnson and Morris 2010). Citizenship education is a general, contested, and
evolving term that encompasses, inter alia, civics, democratic education, national
education, and political education (Carr 1995; McLaughlin 1992; Amadeo et al.
1999; Kerr 1999). The specific definitions of and pedagogical approaches to citi-
zenship education depend on a host of contextual factors such as historical tradition,
geographical position, sociopolitical structure, economic system, and global trends
(Kerr 1999). Different writers have devised various concepts, models, frameworks,
and analytical tools to explain citizenship education (e.g., Galston 1989; Carr 1995;
McLaughlin 1992; Cogan and Derricott 1998; Kerr 1999; Westheimer and Kahne
2004; Johnson and Morris 2010). In their literature review, Abowitz and Harnish
(2006) identify seven distinct but overlapping frameworks, with the “civic republi-
can” and “liberal” frameworks being the two most influential in shaping current
citizenship education.
Citizenship education may be predicated upon a “thin” or “thick” conception of
human good or perfection (McLaughlin 1992). These two conceptions reflect the
extent to which a citizenship education approach stipulates specific substantial
frameworks of belief and value for citizens. Citizenship education that adheres to a
1 A Confucian Conception of Citizenship Education 5

“thick” conception of human good provides a comprehensive account of human life

and how it should be lived; such a conception is invoked to constitute, support, and
justify the notion of the public good (McLaughlin 1992). A “thin” conception of
human good or perfection, on the other hand, requires the state to be neutral on
matters of private good. As explained by McLaughlin (1992):

What is needed for this purpose is a ‘thin’ conception of the good, free of significantly
controversial assumptions and judgments, which maximize the freedom of citizens to pursue
their diverse private conceptions of the good within a framework of justice. An example of
an aspect of a ‘thin’ conception of the good is a commitment to the requirements of basic
social morality. The label ‘thin’ here refers not to the insignificance of such values, but to
their independence from substantial, particular, frameworks of belief and value. (240)

It should be clarified that these two interpretations are not the only two
approaches to citizenship education, nor are they mutually exclusive. Instead, a
plurality of interpretations exists along the spectrum with overlaps among them.
Besides understanding citizenship education in terms of its relationship with
human good or perfection, it is also important to identify the ideological and cultural
underpinnings of citizenship education. A review of literature published in English
shows that the existing citizenship education frameworks are largely premised on
Western/Enlightenment histories, traditions, developments, and presuppositions.
The term “citizenship” is a Western concept that originates from Athenian democ-
racy (Carr 1995). Abowitz and Harnish (2006) point out that the dominant citizen-
ship discourses of civic republicanism and liberalism are both “Enlightenment-
inspired” (654). The “Western imagination” – the Enlightenment settlement, its
values, practices, and institutions – has been exported to the rest of the world as
objective and universal worldviews (Kennedy 2004). Relatively little attention has
been paid to non-Western conceptions of citizenship and citizenship education,
especially East Asian viewpoints. Although there is a growing body of literature
on Confucian perspectives of citizenship and citizenship education, these works are
primarily concerned with aspects of citizenship such as democracy, liberalism,
human rights, civil society, equality, and individuality (e.g., Shils 1996; Nuyen
2001, 2002; O’Dwyer 2003; Ackerly 2005; Kim 2010; Yung 2010; Spina et al.
2011; Shih 2014; Wang 2016; Zhai 2017). There is, to date, no systematic presen-
tation of a Confucian conception of citizenship education based on the teachings and
actions of Confucius himself.
This chapter introduces a Confucian conception of citizenship education through
a textual analysis of the Analects (Lunyu). A Confucian canon, the Analects,
compiles the sayings and conduct of Confucius and his disciples. The concept of
citizenship is defined broadly in this chapter to refer to a practice through which
humans actively participate in their communities, negotiating their range of identities
as they do so (Peterson and Brock 2017). The methodology of this chapter, it should
be added at the outset, is theoretical rather than empirical, with a focus on the
philosophical basis for citizenship education as advocated by Confucius. The next
section elucidates the key features of a Confucian conception of citizenship educa-
tion based on relevant passages from the Analects.
6 C. Tan

A Confucian Conception of Citizenship Education

There is no historical record of Confucius (551–479 B.C.E.) discussing the mem-

bership status and political identity of citizens or the legislation, systems, and
processes in a nation-state. Such an omission is not surprising since these concepts
and practices did not exist during his time. But we should not thereby conclude that
citizenship education and issues related to citizenship are of no significance to
Confucius. On the contrary, Confucius has much to say about citizenship education
in terms of an individual’s commitment to the common good and active participation
in one’s community (Abowitz and Harnish 2006; Peterson and Brock 2017). Con-
fucius states that a person takes part in government simply by being a good son and
brother (Analects 2.21). Clarifying Confucius’ position, Shils (1996) writes, “Con-
fucius means that maintaining the family is a contribution to maintaining public
order or social harmony and hence is a contribution to the work of the government”
(49). We could identify three main characteristics of a Confucian conception of
citizenship education from the philosophy and conduct of Confucius, and these will
now be considered.

Junzi (Exemplary Persons) and Zhengming (Rectification of Names)

First, the goal of citizenship education is to nurture junzi (noble or exemplary

persons) who perform their social roles and participate actively in their communities
in accordance with zhengming (rectification of names). The term “junzi,” literally
“son of a lord,” was already in circulation during Confucius’ time and denoted
members of the aristocratic society. Confucius borrowed this term by extending it to
all human beings: anyone can and should be a junzi by becoming a morally noble
person. A junzi is exemplary as such a person is distinguished by humanity or
benevolence (ren): Confucius observes that a junzi “does not leave ren even for
the space of one meal” (Analects 4.5; all citations are taken from this text and
translated to English by the author, unless otherwise stated). Ren encompasses all
virtues such as reverence, sincerity, empathy, tolerance, trustworthiness, diligence,
and generosity (see Analects 12.1, 17.6) (Tan 2017). While all human beings are
encouraged to become junzi (although not everyone will eventually succeed in doing
so), a person who aspires for political office and leadership must be a junzi.
Confucius identifies five virtues of a junzi-ruler: “The junzi is generous without
being wasteful, works the people hard without their complaining, has desires without
being covetous, is at ease without being arrogant, and is awe-inspiring without being
fierce” (20.2). As a ren (humane) leader, a junzi follows the footsteps of sage-kings
such as Yao and Sun “to cultivate oneself in order to bring peace to the multitude”
(14.42). Rather than imposing authoritarian rule, an office bearer is a junzi who is
sensitive to the needs of the common people (1.5, 12.20, 20.2). An example is
Zichan who is a minister praised by Confucius for being a junzi in performing his
duties: “He had the way of the junzi in four respects: he was reverential in the way he
conducted himself, respectful in serving his superiors, generous in caring for the
1 A Confucian Conception of Citizenship Education 7

common people, and appropriate in employing the services of the common people”
(5.16). Calling for active citizenship, Confucius envisions himself and his disciples
assuming political leadership so that they could eliminate the oppressive regime and
enact humane policies for the common good.
How then should one perform one’s social roles – whether as a ruler or the ruled –
and contribute to the larger good? The answer, according to Confucius, is to conduct
oneself according to zhengming (rectification of names). The Analects records an
episode where Duke Jing of Qi asks Confucius about governance (12.11). Confucius
replies, “Let the lord be a true lord, the ministers true ministers, the fathers true
fathers, and the sons true sons” (translation by Slingerland 2003). Upon hearing
Confucius’ response, the Duke says, “Indeed! If the ruler be not a ruler, the subject
not a subject, the father not a father, the son not a son, then even if there were grain,
would I get to eat it?” Another passage in the Analects illuminates the principle of
zhengming:

When names are not correct, what is said will not be used effectively; when what is said is not
used effectively, matters will not be accomplished; when matters are not accomplished, ritual
propriety and music will not flourish; when ritual propriety and music do not flourish,
punishments will miss the mark; when punishments miss the mark, the people will not
know what to do with themselves. (13.3, italics added)

The expression “names are not correct” refers to not living up to the expectations
that are associated with one’s name or social role, be it as a ruler, subject, father, or
son (Tan 2013a). Confucius’ point is that one’s name conveys not just descriptive
content but also normative force. As Lai (1995) elaborates, “individuals have to live
appropriately according to the titles and names, indicating their ranks and statuses
within relationships, by which they are referred to” because these terms “prescribe
how values upholding the various roles are to be realized within the fundamental
reality of the lived human world” (252). A ruler has a “correct name” when such a
person fulfills one’s calling as a true ruler, i.e., becoming a junzi-ruler who is marked
by ren. The words of such a ruler will then “be used effectively,” i.e., his or her
policies will accomplish their goals. To put it another way, the ruler excels in
demonstrating and upholding wisdom, benevolence, and ritual propriety (15.33),
promoting virtuous officials and keeping immoral persons at bay (12.22), and
winning the hearts of the multitude by modeling qualities of reverence, tolerance,
trustworthiness, diligence, and generosity (17.6). By the same argument, a subject is
a junzi who lives up to one’s name by being loyal to one’s ruler and performing one’s
multiple roles in society, whether as a mother, sister, colleague, friend, and neighbor.
It should be added that the subject’s loyalty to the ruler is not unconditional as
Confucius discourages unquestioning obedience to authority. Confucius himself
critiques the officeholders during his time as “petty bureaucrats” (13.20) and
announces his vexation with political rulers for their immoral and oppressive
behavior (3.26, 3.1, 3.2). Rather than a blind allegiance to those in power, Confucius
advises those serving one’s lord to be honest and speak up for what is right at an
opportune time (14.22). In his exchange with Duke Ding on what causes a state to
perish, Confucius observes:
8 C. Tan

If what the ruler says is good, and no one opposes him, is this not good? On the other hand, if
what he says is not good, and no one opposes him, does this not come close to being a single
saying, that can cause a state to perish? (13.15, translation by Slingerland 2003)

With reference to 13.15, the standard for determining what is good or otherwise is
not the prevailing norm espoused by the ruler or the masses. Instead, it is dao (way),
which brings us to the next characteristic of a Confucian conception of citizenship
education.

A “Thick” Conception of Human Good Through Dao (Way)

The second feature of a Confucian framework of citizenship education is the

centrality of dao (way) that comprises a substantive framework of beliefs and values.
Such a framework reflects a “thick” conception of human good or perfection. Recall
that a “thick” conception of human good provides a comprehensive and normative
account of human life that constitutes, fortifies, and substantiates the notion of the
public good (McLaughlin 1992). A “thin” conception of human good, in contrast, is
devoid of ostensibly controversial assumptions and judgments; this conception
maximizes the freedom of citizens to pursue their diverse private conceptions of
the good within a framework of justice (McLaughlin 1992). Dao (way) refers to the
way of sage-kings such as Yao, Shun, and Yu in ancient China. Confucius teaches
that “it is human beings who are able to broaden dao, not dao that broadens human
beings” (15.29). To broaden dao is to “make and remake appropriate ways of living”
through the conscious efforts of human beings (Kim 2004, 123). A junzi is “anxious
about dao” (15.32) and “learns in order to reach that dao” (19.7). So important is dao
for a junzi that he or she is prepared to take up an official position on the condition
that doing so advances dao. The Analects records Confucius praising Qu Bo-yu who
is “prepared to hold an office only when dao prevailed in a state” (15.7). Confucius
hopes to nurture a community of junzi who broaden dao by transforming society’s
political structure from rule by law and punishment, to rule by virtue.
It is important to locate Confucius’ perspective on citizenship education within
his worldview of the historicity and potential of human beings. Such a belief
motivates him to give weight to the inheritance, acquisition, critical reflection, and
appropriation of traditional knowledge. On the one hand, Confucius’ cognizance of
the condition of human beings as historical beings leads him to respect the inheri-
tance and acquisition of cultural knowledge as part of citizenship education. Con-
fucius’ assertion that he “transmits but does not make; trusts in and loves antiquity”
(7.1) reveals his wish to transmit the dao of the sage-kings as epitomized in the Zhou
culture. He advises his own son to learn the poems from the Book of Songs (16.13)
and teaches his students the ancient “arts” (7.6) that comprise ritual propriety, music,
archery, charioteering, calligraphy, and mathematics. What qualifies as “good” and
“right,” for Confucius, emanates from and is continuously shaped by Chinese
history, cultural tradition, and epistemology. Hall and Ames (1987) shed light on
the cultural embeddedness of knowledge for Confucius:
1 A Confucian Conception of Citizenship Education 9

For Confucius, knowledge is grounded in the language, customs, and institutions that
comprise culture. Culture is the given world. Thinking is cultural articulation that renders
this givenness effective. There is no knowledge to be gained of a reality which precedes that
of culture or transcends its determinations. The ‘world’ is always a human world. (67)

A Confucian citizenship education curriculum, therefore, should not be primarily

derived from and organized by the students’ own views of the world. Instead, it
should include the history, norms, and cultural practices of one’s tradition (Tan
2017). This means, for example, introducing the music of the Zhou dynasty to
students for them to appreciate the Confucian ideal of harmony, rather than letting
students choose or compose their own music in whichever way they like.
Confucius’ attention to cultural inheritance does not imply that he endorses a
wholesale transmission of traditional knowledge. Instead, he supports a selective
adoption of the normative tradition that showcases the ability of human beings to
change the world of history. Although human beings are entrusted with the mission
to extend dao, dao is by no means fossilized and unchanging. Instead, dao “consists
of the process of generating an actual order in the world rather than an already fixed
order” and “human beings have to set boundaries for themselves and for other things
as they move forward in the world” (Li 2006, 594). A content mastery of cultural
knowledge does not mean that human beings are predetermined and mere objects.
On the contrary, Confucius’ conviction that human beings are subjects in the
historical process prompts him to propagate a critical reflection and appropriation
of received knowledge. Confucius cautions against accepting conventional wisdom
and social norms unconditionally, since the wisdom and norms are situated in their
own historicity. Confucius himself does not subscribe to any preconceived ideas of
what is permissive or not (18.8). Instead, he arrives at his own conclusions through a
critical awareness of the object of the knowledge.
Confucius’ disregard of popular opinion is evident in his decision to give his
daughter in marriage to Gongye Chang, who is a convicted criminal. At first glance,
this decision is puzzling since most fathers would object to their daughters marrying
someone who has transgressed the law. But Analects 5.1 informs us that Confucius
has prior knowledge that Gongye Chang is “not guilty of any crime.” By assessing
Gongye Chang’s character, Confucius concludes that he “will be a suitable choice
for a husband” (5.1). Confucius’ judgment therefore goes against conventions and is
based on facts and a person’s moral attributes. In another episode, when asked what
he thinks of a person who is liked by all the villagers, other than praising such a
person, Confucius asserts that it is better “for the good villagers to like that person
and those who are not good to hate that person” (13.24). Confucius’ point is that we
should strive to be moral persons who make good judgments that would attract like-
minded people to us, rather than seeking to please everyone. The implication is that
the learning of one’s normative tradition in citizenship education does not entail that
the tradition should be accepted unconditionally or that such learning should take
place uncritically. On the contrary, as I have argued elsewhere, learners within a
Confucian framework are encouraged to critique the cultural traditions and knowl-
edge they have received:
10 C. Tan

As part of the reservoir of information, tools, and resources for praxis, at least one normative
tradition from within the learners’ culture should be introduced to the learners. The objective
is two-fold: to provide the learners, especially children, with the cultural coherence and an
initial framework for them to acquire a substantive set of practices, beliefs, and values; and to
prepare the learners to subsequently critique the normative tradition itself and develop their
own views. (Tan 2017, 10)

In short, citizenship education from a Confucian viewpoint is enacted through

comprehending and realizing the reading of the text (normative tradition of the way
and passed down through classic texts) and reading of the context (the prevailing
social and political oppression in China).

The Utilization of Dialogue to Foster Reflective Citizens

The third characteristic of a Confucian conception of citizenship education is the

recommended pedagogical approach of dialogue to foster reflective citizens. Con-
fucius eschews indoctrination by stating that a person who can recite 300 poems but
is unable to perform an official duty and exercise one’s initiative when sent abroad
has wasted one’s effort in memorizing the poems (13.5). He also cautions against
merely repeating what one has heard without verifying the truth for oneself (17.14),
stressing instead the primacy of fostering reflective thinking. Reflection is premised
on the love of learning (1.14, 17.8) and the harmonization of learning and reflection
(2.15). Underlining active learning, Confucius avers, “I do not know what to do with
a person who does not say, ‘What should I do? What should I do?’” (15.16) He also
highlights the need to ask questions (19.6) and inquire into a matter deeply. As he
puts it, “When the multitude hates a person, you must examine the matter yourself;
when the multitude love a person, you must examine the matter yourself” (15.28).
Confucius also supports flexibility and openness by replacing dogmatism with
contextual understanding (4.15) and discretion (9.30). Underscoring the importance
of adjusting one’s responses in accordance with the other person’s readiness to listen,
he teaches: “If someone is open to what you have to say, but you do not speak to
them, this is letting the person go to waste; if, however, someone is not open to what
you have to say, but you speak to them anyway, this is letting your words go to
waste” (15.8, translated by Slingerland 2003). Reflective thinking equips individuals
to abide by zhengming as the former guides a person to self-examine one’s role
performance as follows: “Have I done my best in my undertakings on behalf of
others? Have I been trustworthy in my interactions with friends? Have I failed to put
into practice what was passed to me?” (1.4). Through reflective thinking, Confucius
aims to nurture citizens who exercise their agency by participating purposefully and
ethically for the public good.
A defining teaching approach propagated and modeled by Confucius is dialogue.
The Analects is essentially a compilation of “ordered sayings” of Confucius that can
be traced to his discourses with people around him (Slingerland 2003). The conver-
sations provide a platform for Confucius to instruct his disciples by engaging them
in real-life personal, social, and political issues. Yang and Yang (2016) assert that
1 A Confucian Conception of Citizenship Education 11

“there was no separation between classroom and society, Confucius’s classroom was
the entire world ‘under the sky or heaven,’ and the process of his teaching was life
itself” (110). An interactive form of teaching encourages his disciples to critically
reflect and discuss the political and social state of affairs against the standard of dao
and the practical steps they could take to redress the prevailing unrest. Using the
analogy of a square with four corners, Confucius sees the teacher as providing only
the basic content (“one corner”), and the students are expected to make their own
inferences (“the other three corners”) (7.8). In the process, mutual teaching and
learning take place, where the teacher is both an instructor for and fellow-learner
with the student.
Two passages in the Analects shed further light on Confucius’s employment of
dialogue to foster an environment where the teacher and students teach and learn
from each other. The first passage is taken from 3.8:

Zixia asked, “‘Her entrancing smile with dimples, Her beautiful eyes so clear, Unadorned
upon which to paint’. What does this mean?”
The Master replied, “The plain base comes first, then the colors are applied.”
Zixia said, “Just like ritual propriety that come after?”
The Master replied, “Zixia, you have stimulated my thoughts. It is only with someone
like you that one can discuss the Songs.”

In the above exchange, Confucius and Zixia are discussing a line from the Book
of Songs. After Confucius replies to Zixia’s first question, the latter responds with a
second question. This time, Zixia ingeniously relates the meaning of the poem to an
ethical question on the relationship between the concepts of ritual propriety (colors)
and rightness (plain canvas). Such an inference between two topics is not planned
nor expected by Confucius, prompting him to remark that Zixia’s comment has
stimulated or awakened his understanding of the topic. The above dialogue is an
instance where the student arrives at his own conclusion while the teacher gains new
insights from his student.
The second passage is taken from 17.4 where Confucius, through a dialogue with
another disciple, is corrected of his own mistake (translation by Slingerland 2003):

When the Master went to Wucheng, he heard the sound of stringed instruments and song.
Smiling gently, he remarked, “Why use an ox-cleaver to kill a chicken?”
Ziyou replied, “In the past, Master, I have heard you say, ‘If the gentleman learns dao he
will be able to care for others, and if the commoners learn the Way they will be easy to
manage.”
[Addressing the disciples who had accompanied him to Wucheng,] the Master said,
“Take note, my disciples! What Ziyou says is true. My earlier comment was meant only as a
joke.”

In the above passage, Confucius appears to despise Ziyou’s effort to educate the
masses in Wucheng by teaching them the music of the sage-kings. Confucius holds
that it is not fitting and a waste of time for Ziyou to promote fine music and songs to
the uneducated commoners. But Ziyou replies by reminding Confucius of the latter’s
exhortation for everyone, including the commoners, to learn the dao of the sage-
12 C. Tan

kings. This prompts an apology from Confucius who clarifies that his comment is
only a joke and that what Ziyou is doing is correct. We see here how the teacher, in
this case, Confucius, is not one who always knows all and the student is not one who
knows nothing. Instead, the teacher is able to learn from the student in an open and
mutually beneficial relationship. Making the same argument, Elstein (2009) asserts
that Confucius is not presented in the Analects as infallible or authoritarian; neither
are his students portrayed as completely submissive and accepting of Confucius’
opinions all the time.
A challenge for democratic societies in furthering citizenship education is how to
produce loyal, responsible, and united citizens without indoctrinating them or
handicapping the development of their rational autonomy (Callan 1991; Tyack and
Cuban 1995). It is pertinent that research shows that citizenship education in
Confucian heritage cultures tends to encourage and perpetuate passive, responsible,
rule-following behavior rather than one’s rights, entitlements, and status (e.g., see
Hill and Lian 1995; Cummings 2001; Thomas 2002; Lee 2004a, b; Roh 2004; Sim
and Print 2005; Tan 2007, 2008). Kennedy (2004), for example, maintains that “the
emphasis for citizens is not so much the rights they enjoy but the responsibilities they
have towards family and the community” (15). Researchers have also noted the
prevalence of teacher authority, a hierarchical relationship between the teacher and
students, didactic teaching, and passive learning in countries such as China, South
Korea, and Japan (e.g., Kim 2009; Han and Scull 2010; Tan 2013b; Guo and Guo
2015; Chou and Spangler 2016; Dawson 2010). The nature of citizenship education
programs in Confucian heritage cultures has given rise to a perception that Confu-
cian approaches to citizenship education necessarily promote unquestioning obedi-
ence to authority and suppress rational autonomy of citizens.
Here it is important to distinguish the conception of citizenship education as
advocated by Confucius and the formulation of citizenship education as practiced in
Confucian heritage cultures. As expounded in the foregoing, Confucius’ belief in the
historicity and potential of human beings motivates him to put an emphasis on the
inheritance and acquisition of cultural traditions and the critical reflection and
appropriation of traditional knowledge. Confucius would understandably repudiate
any citizenship education program that is targeted at stifling the independent think-
ing and agency of the learners. That said, Confucius also foregrounds human beings
as recipients of their own culture, situated within and dependent on particular social
and political formations in ancient China. Therefore, a balance is sought in a
Confucian conception of citizenship education between cultural transmission and
the development of rational autonomy – a task that poses a considerable challenge
for policymakers and educators.

Conclusion

This chapter has outlined a Confucian conception of citizenship as advanced by

Confucius – one that synthesizes the goal of producing committed citizens and
developing their critical faculties. An accent on cultural transmission and role
1 A Confucian Conception of Citizenship Education 13

performance does not mean that critical reflection and civil engagement are neces-
sarily imperiled in citizenship education. The condition of humans as historical
beings explains Confucius’ preference for “traditional innovation” where his novel
teachings are circumscribed by prevailing sociocultural realities. At the same time,
he fosters learner freedom by encouraging his students, as subjects and makers of
history, to reflect and transform society, thereby broadening dao. Confucius sub-
scribes to a “thick” conception of human good in the form of dao (way) that provides
a substantive and normative framework of human life and the public good
(McLaughlin 1992). A citizenship education program, from a Confucian standpoint,
should be one that develops a generation of junzi who perform their varied social
roles and participate actively in their community. Guided by zhengming (rectification
of names), all members of the society are inspired and equipped to broaden dao as a
public good. Overall, a Confucian citizenship education debunks the perception that
Confucius and Confucianism definitely support authoritarian leadership, unques-
tioning obedience to authority, didactic teaching, and mechanical learning.

Cross-References

▶ Aristotle on Citizenship and Civic Education: The Central Role of Political

Participation
▶ Dewey and Citizenship Education: Schooling as Democratic Practice

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Aristotle on Citizenship and Civic
Education: The Central Role of Political 2
Participation

Benjamin Miller

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Life and Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Major Texts and the Link Between Ethics and Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Essential Concepts for Understanding Aristotle on Citizenship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
The Characteristics of Aristotle’s Good Citizen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Aristotle’s General Definition of Citizenship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Different Political Regimes, Different Types of Citizens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
Puzzles About Citizenship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
How to Become a Good Citizen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Virtue Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
The Specifics of Civic Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
The Contemporary Uses of Aristotle on Citizenship and Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Citizenship Education as Virtue Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Aristotle as a Social Democrat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

Abstract
This chapter examines and summarizes Aristotle’s views about citizenship and
education. Aristotle defines citizenship functionally, rather than by birth or status,
and he understood participation and political authority to be essential to citizen-
ship. Aristotle’s definition of citizenship is tied tightly to his theory of the good
human life and to his ethics of virtue. A good citizen in the ideal state is identical
to the fully ethically virtuous person. For Aristotle, the virtues of living a good
human life are the same as those needed to rule and be ruled in turn. Because of
the link between ethics and politics of the person, Aristotle’s (admittedly

B. Miller (*)
Department of Political Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 17

A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_34
18 B. Miller

incomplete) program for civic education is connected to his program for ethical
training. This makes the civic educational process intensive and somewhat
foreign to modern conceptions of civic preparation. Despite this somewhat
foreign idea of education, a number of influential thinkers today have drawn on
Aristotelian ideas of citizenship to develop their own theories of governance for
modern states today. Social democrats, communitarians, and others looking to
revive the link between civic education and participatory communities have all
looked explicitly (and sometimes implicitly) to Aristotle for guidance.

Keywords
Aristotle · Virtue · Human nature · Citizenship · Participation · Education

Introduction

Even the most sterilized discussion of Aristotle will undoubtedly be controversial to

interested scholars. After upwards of 2000 years of a rich and detailed commentary
tradition beginning with the generation directly after Aristotle himself, any and every
choice made about philosophical interpretation (including which works to cite) will
be open to some measure of reasonable criticism. Given the extent to which
Aristotle’s writings and thought have drawn different interpretations, readers of
this chapter are encouraged to consider additional bibliographical and literature
review sources to gain a deeper understanding of the complexity of Aristotle’s
works as well as of subsequent interpretations. (The most comprehensive for
Aristotle’s ethical and political works are by Oxford Bibliographies (Lockwood
2013a, b). Excellent starting points for the more casual reader are the Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy articles on Aristotle (Shields 2016; Miller 2017;
Kraut 2018). For a good introductory overview of the historical context in which
Aristotle was living and writing, see Cartledge (2000). For a longer and more
comprehensive read, see Hansen (1991). Good and brief introductions to Aristotle’s
political philosophy can be found in various political companion collections (Taylor
1995; Schofield 2000). Especially excellent overviews of Aristotle’s Politics are by
Reeve and Lord in their respective introductions to each of their translations of the
text (Reeve 1998; Lord 2013).) Unfortunately for those seeking to understand his
position on citizenship and education, Aristotle himself spends no time (in his
surviving works) attempting to give a separate and comprehensive treatment of
these topics. To make matters more difficult, what he does say is not, as one might
expect given its focus on political constitutions, confined solely to his Politics.
Instead, to understand Aristotle’s views on citizenship and education, it is necessary
to draw on discussions sprinkled throughout his works, including Nicomachean
Ethics, the neglected Eudemian Ethics, Rhetoric, and Politics. As a result, this
chapter will be organized thematically rather than textually and will have four
main sections: (1) background (2) what a good citizen is like, (3) how to become a
good citizen, and (4) contemporary uses of Aristotle on citizenship and education.
2 Aristotle on Citizenship and Civic Education: The Central Role of. . . 19

Before getting to the main discussion of Aristotle’s views on citizenship and

education, it is worth sketching in brief some useful background on Aristotle, his
philosophical method, and the interlocking concepts that are central to his ethical
works and so are essential for understanding his views on education and citizenship.

Background

Life and Method

Aristotle lived most of his life in Athens, but he was born in Stagira and was
Macedonian rather than Athenian. When it comes to facts about his life most
relevant to citizenship and education, the most interesting was his residency status.
Despite being one of the earliest sources to discuss the definition of citizenship, and
to organize his theory of governance around the concept, Aristotle himself never
really lived the life of a participating citizen. This was true in both the official role
and duties of citizens in Athens at the time (he was not allowed to participate in
assembly, hold offices, etc.) and with respect to his own philosophical definition of
(good) citizenship. Aristotle’s own nonparticipation as a citizen is particularly
fascinating given his seeming commitment to the idea that participation in politics
is a necessary part of the good human life.
The other important thing to note about Aristotle’s life was his education. At the
age of 17 or 18, Aristotle came to Athens and immediately took up in Plato’s school,
the Academy. He remained under Plato’s tutelage for the next 20 years, until Plato’s
death in 347 BCE. Acknowledging Aristotle’s time spent under Plato’s wing is
crucial for understanding Aristotle’s philosophy. In many ways it is clear that his
own thought is a direct (and often critical) response to Plato’s thought, as is certainly
the case for Aristotle’s Politics and Ethics, which frequently make reference to
positions Plato held.
Aristotle is one of the more difficult historical philosophers to read and under-
stand, mainly because he has a precise philosophical method, writes in a clipped
style, and rarely explains himself in great detail. For this reason, even a more cursory
investigation of Aristotle’s philosophical thought such as this chapter requires
something to be said about Aristotle’s preferred method of investigation. In the
first place, and in direct contrast to Plato, Aristotle’s ethical and political thinking
(as well as much of his other philosophy) is guided by an ironclad commitment to
integrating pure theorizing with vigorous empirical study of the world. One of the
major and striking contrasts between descriptions of Plato’s and Aristotle’s ideal
states is Aristotle’s insistence on building physical and spacial constraints into his
ideal. Even more influential for nearly all future political theorizing up to the present
day, Aristotle is strongly committed to the thought that politics is informed, guided,
and constrained by human nature. Although many later philosophers have disagreed
with him about the precise conception of human nature, few have challenged the
more general view that political philosophy is dependent on particular views about
human beings. Today, this might feel like a trivial point, but it is worth remembering
20 B. Miller

that it was Aristotle who was one of the first to frame thinking about politics in
this way.
Delving a bit deeper into Aristotle’s philosophical method, especially with regard
to his ethical and political works, it is important to understand that Aristotle usually
begins each new topic and subtopic by outlining the views of others, both philoso-
phers and nonphilosophers alike. Without an understanding of Aristotle’s method,
this procedure can be a bit disorienting and distracting. The main thing to note here is
that Aristotle believes that philosophy makes progress by gathering together the
reputable beliefs that have already been expressed on a topic. The idea is then to aim
for a philosophical position that can stay true to the core components shared by these
reputable beliefs. If no reasonable philosophical theory can meet this standard, then
the aim is to choose the theory that does the best job accommodating as many of the
core components as possible (see NE 1145b2-7 and Topics 100b21-23, 104a10-11,
104b31-36; see Reeve 1998, pp. xviii–xxv for a good politically oriented discussion
of Aristotle’s method).
Recognizing Aristotle’s method makes it easier to read through the text of both
the Ethics and Politics. Politics especially often encourages confusion as Aristotle
usually introduces a topic by describing the many different positions other thinkers
hold on a subject without offering a clear statement that these positions are not his
own. Noticing that Aristotle’s method recommends consideration of these theories as
part of the process of coming to his own position helps to cut through some of this
confusion. Understanding that Aristotle’s philosophical method involves examining
a range of possible views on the matter at hand also explains why Aristotle often
ends up adopting a position that falls somewhere in between the positions of his
predecessors on a given topic. In the history of philosophy, this fact has often led
thinkers to deride Aristotle as a philosopher of common sense, but this derision is
based on a serious misunderstanding of what Aristotle considers good philosophical
truth-finding to involve (for more on Aristotle’s philosophical method and dialectic
in the secondary literature, see the good overview in Bostock 2000).

Major Texts and the Link Between Ethics and Politics

As mentioned above, understanding Aristotle on citizenship and education requires

noting that Aristotle gives us no definitive textual treatment of either topic. Instead,
his discussion of these topics is scattered throughout his ethical and political works.
For this reason, it is unreasonable to view Aristotle’s views on citizenship and
education as existing separately from his ethical position. In other words, to under-
stand Aristotle’s response to the questions “what is a citizen?” and “what makes a
good citizen?” we must first know something about his response to the question
“what is an ethical life?” The two most studied of Aristotle’s texts are his
Nicomachean Ethics and Politics. Of these, Nicomachean Ethics is by far and
away the more well-traveled by scholars. This focus on Nicomachean Ethics is no
doubt because Politics feels like a more incomplete text, and there are a number of
ongoing disputes about whether the text we have was meant to be a complete whole
2 Aristotle on Citizenship and Civic Education: The Central Role of. . . 21

at all or whether it is actually a composite of separate texts. There is also much

debate about which order the books (sections) of Politics should go in (for a good
survey of these textual issues, see Lord 1981).
For the purposes of thinking about citizenship and education, it is worth
keeping in mind that much of what Aristotle says about education is to be found
in Nicomachean Ethics, despite there being a brief, but sustained discussion at
the end of Politics. Citizenship as a concept is in the reverse situation. The bulk
of Aristotle’s discussion appears in Politics book 3.1-5, while Nicomachean
Ethics holds a few, scattered important nuggets about his views on citizenship.
That citizenship and education are distributed among both the ethical and
political elements of his works is due to Aristotle’s conception of ethics and
politics as fundamentally connected subjects. Unlike many modern-day thinkers
(and laypersons), Aristotle (and the Ancient Greeks generally) did not see the
two as distinct from one another. For Aristotle, ethics is the study of how human
beings should live, and understood this way, it is not hard to see why he would
therefore think that organizing government and the social order would be part
and parcel of a complete picture of the good human life. See, for discussion,
Adkins (1991).

Essential Concepts for Understanding Aristotle on Citizenship

To flesh out the connection Aristotle sees between ethics and politics a bit more, it is
necessary to consider three core concepts in Aristotle’s philosophy: Virtue, The
Good Life, and Human Nature.
The virtues, for Aristotle, are the central mode by which human beings are
conceived of and assessed ethically. In simple terms, the virtues are those states of
character that human beings develop and then use to act and live their lives well. For
Aristotle, there are a number of distinct virtues, each including its own unique
constellation of emotions, kinds of thinking, domains of application, and nuances
of behavior (e.g., courage and generosity). To be a good person, in Aristotle’s view,
one must develop the virtues to the proper extent avoiding an excess or deficiency of
the given virtue (his doctrine of the mean). Acting in accordance with the virtues,
according to Aristotle, requires extensive training, some of which is controlled by
the individual. To be a good person, in Aristotle’s view, one must develop and enact
the virtues to the right extent (i.e., the mean between excess and deficiency), which
will require extensive training, some of which is controlled by the individual and
some of which must be initiated at an early age by society and the individual’s
parents.
More generally, the virtues are those character traits that make a human being an
excellent instance of its kind. In this more general sense, we might speak of the
distinct virtues of a knife, a car, a hippopotamus, or a person. According to
Aristotle’s function argument, which appears at the beginning the ethical works
(Nicomachean Ethics 1.7), the characteristic activity of human beings, and what sets
them apart from other creatures, is the ability to use reason.
22 B. Miller

The completed story is more complex than this, of course, and this becomes
clearer when the concept of the good life is examined, including how the good life
and virtues are related. For Aristotle, the virtues are not just the generic pieces that
make a thing a good example of its kind. After all, we can ask: “a good example of its
kind relative to what purpose?” For Aristotle, the virtues are the distinctly human
answer to the non-relative purposive question: “What is a good human life?”
(Answer: a virtuous life).
On this more specific understanding of the virtues (see Curzer 2012), the virtues
are those character traits that uniquely identify human beings as distinct from other
types of creatures (the ability to reason) while at the same time serving as the keys
which enable a human being to live a good life as a human being. In this way,
Aristotle’s understanding of a good human life is fundamentally ethical. Unlike
many modern thinkers, Aristotle would resist the thought that we can carve out a
clear distinction between what is good for a person (well-being) and what one should
do ethically speaking (morality or ethics). Aristotle does not connect well-being and
ethics merely as a motivational connection but as a metaphysical one tied to human
nature. The connection is not meant to be an answer to the amoralist’s question:
“Why be moral?” Instead, the connection between well-being and ethics is a deeper
truth about the nature of human beings. For Aristotle then, ethics is inseparable from
questions about living a good life.
In much the same way, Aristotle viewed ethics as linked inexorably to politics.
For Aristotle, the first thing to think about when we do political philosophy is to
think about the purpose of the state. In his view, the aim of the state is to make sure
that the people living within it have lives that are good. Aristotle’s focus here on the
formative role of the state is one of the places where he reacts directly and critically
to Plato’s view of the state. For Plato, the best government does not aim to make
every individual within it happy. Aristotle, by contrast, believes that the entire
purpose of having a government is to facilitate the good life for individuals.
Aristotle expresses this view in a couple of key statements: “Every city-state
exists by nature” (Politics 1.2 1252b29-30), “anyone who is without a city-state, not
by luck but by nature, is either a poor specimen or superhuman” (1.2 1253a4-5), and
“a human being is by nature a political animal” (1.2 1253a3-4). There is quite a lot of
debate about what these statements mean precisely, but for the purposes of this
chapter, the main thing to note is that Aristotle draws a tight link between human
nature and the existence of the state. (For further discussion of these three claims
linking nature, the city-state, and human aims, see the canonical Keyt (1991). It is
worth considering dissenting views such as Chan (1992) and Kraut (2007).) In his
view, living in a community of this form is part of the definition of the human
species. Human beings as groups and individuals could not reliably satisfy their
natural goals without creating the state as part of this process. In other words,
Aristotle views the state as a necessary component of a complete (good) human
life. (For elaboration on this view, see Cooper (2010). For a more conflict-oriented,
and less communal, interpretation of human nature in Aristotle, see Yack (1993)).
In short, Aristotle’s vision of ethics and politics is that both are fundamental parts
of human life. This intimate connection between ethics and politics sits in fairly stark
2 Aristotle on Citizenship and Civic Education: The Central Role of. . . 23

contrast to much of modern political thought, in particular social contract theory

beginning with Hobbes, which holds that that state is not part of the natural order but
is instead an artificial construct that human beings choose to enter into. On the more
modern conception, the purpose of the state is not to play its proper part in satisfying
the aims of human nature but is instead an agreement between sovereign and
separate individuals who choose to create the state to solve a problem of individual
safety and security. For Aristotle security and safety, while provided by the state, are
not its main reasons for existence.
To get a full understanding of Aristotle on citizenship and education, then, we do
not necessarily have to agree with him about virtue, the good life, and the nature of
politics, but we must recognize that on his view, citizenship and education play a
core role in his theory of human life, since citizens and their character are central to
his understanding of politics and the political state. Unlike today, where we can ask
seriously whether or not the education of citizens is a central task of a well-
functioning political system, for Aristotle, the answer is based on his understanding
of the nature of the state and the good human life. We might say that for him, the
character of citizens is the central cog in the functioning of the state. Not only that,
but education for citizenship is part and parcel of becoming and being a good person.

The Characteristics of Aristotle’s Good Citizen

Most of what Aristotle has to say about how to define a good citizen can be found in
Politics Book 3, Chaps. 1–5. There he provides us with both a general definition of a
citizen as well as an account of what citizens are supposed to be like in respect of
different political regimes. In the process of outlining these definitions of citizenship,
Aristotle also seems to make some broader statements about what an ideally good
citizen is like. These three compressed tasks have led commentators to disagree over
a number of issues related to what it means to be a (good) citizen (see Johnson
(1984), Morrison (1999), and Frede (2005)).

Aristotle’s General Definition of Citizenship

For Aristotle, unlike in most governments today, citizenship is defined by political

participation and authority, not by one’s official status in a city- or nation-state. In
contemporary terms, citizenship is usually granted by birth or through a political
process of naturalization and imparts on residents a status that allows them to then
participate in the political system in ways relevant to that system (this was also the
case, for the most part, in Ancient Greece). In Aristotle’s view of citizenship, a
person might well be a “citizen” in the sense of residency, without thereby being
a citizen in its proper sense. For example, on the modern view, a person could be a
citizen in a monarchy without also having participation rights and privileges.
According to Aristotle’s definition of citizen, it is unclear whether a person living
24 B. Miller

in a monarchy could really properly be called a citizen at all (Morrison 1999;

Riesbeck 2016).
Fundamentally, then, for Aristotle, citizenship is primarily defined by political
participation. A citizen is defined by what they do (and are meant to do) and the type
of political authority they have to participate in governance and in making the laws.
Aristotle states his final general definition of citizenship at Politics 1275b12-20.
Aristotle says: “We can now say that someone who is eligible to participate in
deliberative and judicial office is a citizen in the city-state.” (See Johnson (1984)
for a good discussion of the complications Aristotle discusses in coming up with a
final definition of citizenship. See also Khan (2005) for a good overview of the
current state of the literature on Aristotle’s definition of citizenship.)
One way of thinking of this participatory definition of citizenship is directly
parallel to how Aristotle comes to the definition of the good human life in his ethical
works. In the Nichomachaen Ethics, Aristotle ultimately defines the human good life
by considering what the function of a human life is. Citizenship is defined in much
the same way. What is the function of a citizen? A citizen is someone who
participates in governance within the state.
Aristotle expands on this general definition by explicating participation. Citi-
zens can participate in two ways: by participating in ruling and by being ruled.
Aristotle then ties these two participatory tasks to a division based on the types of
labor involved in each and by the kinds of virtues needed to do each of these labors
well. He also establishes a hierarchical order between the two types of participa-
tion, where ruling is superior as an activity to being ruled. This mirrors exactly the
hierarchy of value he outlines regarding the virtues of the good human life. For
Aristotle, the superior virtues are the virtues of the intellect (such as practical
wisdom), while the inferior virtues are the virtues of character (such as generosity
and courage). According to Aristotle, practical wisdom is the virtue that is needed
to rule well, while the virtues of character are necessary for being ruled well.
Although both types of participation seem to be part of being a citizen, there is a
clear rank order such that ruling is a superior activity and is associated with
superior virtues, to being ruled and its associated inferior virtues (see Aristotle’s
discussion of better and worse parts of the soul in Politics 7.14 1333a16-30).
Although there is dispute about how to understand the relationship between
“superior” and “inferior virtues and parts of the soul in Aristotle, there is virtually
no dispute that this is how his value hierarchy works at a metaphysical level. For
the canonical discussion of the different ways in which a person might relate to this
hierarchy of value, especially with regard to the so-called natural goods, see
Cooper (1985). It is also helpful to consult the final chapter of the Eudemian
Ethics 8.3.
What this means is that Aristotle’s definition of citizenship allows for a neat and
visible categorization schema for identifying better and worse citizens. True exem-
plars of citizens are those involved in the process of ruling, while citizens who are
only involved in the activity of being ruled are, in some sense, not fully citizens. Or
at least, they are not ideal examples of citizens (just as a dull and rusted knife is not a
good example of a knife).
2 Aristotle on Citizenship and Civic Education: The Central Role of. . . 25

Because the types of participation are linked to the virtues and because the
virtues are excellent character traits, we can also see that on Aristotle’s picture,
citizenship is meant to be understood as a success and competence definition.
Strictly speaking, according to Aristotle, a citizen is a person who possesses the
virtues of ruling and being ruled (or being ruled but not ruling). This means that we
can easily identify noncitizens: These are individuals who do not have (or are not
capable of having) the virtues (Frede 2005). This brings into focus one of the
darker moments of Aristotle’s Politics (discussed mainly in 1.13). On his view,
there are quite a lot of individual persons who are not really capable of being full
citizens since they are not really able to develop the virtues. In the first place,
natural slaves are persons who by nature cannot really develop the virtues at all
except by having traits that approximate virtues in non-slaves. They are therefore
excluded from being citizens (Aristotle is convinced that many non-Greek ethnic-
ities and races meet his definition of natural slaves). Likewise, women are only
capable of having some part of virtue and so are, on Aristotle’s picture, incapable
of being citizens in the fullest sense, since they cannot develop the virtues of
intellect. Finally, and emphasized most directly in his discussion of citizenship, are
manual laborers (banausoi) who are incapable of developing the virtues in roughly
the same vein as slaves. For this reason, they are also excluded from the citizenry
(although this appears to be due to how they spend their time and not so clearly
because they are incapable of developing virtue because of their natures. For
discussion see Smith (1991), Spelman (1994), Lockwood (2007), and Deslauriers
(2009)). It is worth emphasizing that the disparagement of labor by Aristotle does
not seem to play an essential role in his theory of value but instead acts as a kind of
peripheral vestige of the racist, sexist, and classist views of his time. For this
reason, contemporary Aristotelians tend to vehemently reject these sorts of bio-
logical, non-egalitarian claims.
With these categories of participation organized in terms of the virtues associated
with them, Aristotle brings us quickly to his neat division of different types of
political systems. One dimension of this division is in terms of “correct” and
“deviant” regimes (while the other is a three-place division based on how many
rulers a state has: one, a few, or many). Relying on these distinctions, Aristotle
makes it clear that “correct” regimes are those where the citizens have at least some
part of virtue. He cites the Spartan system as an example of such a “correct” system,
since the Spartans are said to have the virtues of character (the virtues of being
ruled), but not full virtue. Part of the rationale for dividing things up this way is that,
for Aristotle, “correct” regimes are so because the laws and citizens of those systems
aim at the common good of the individuals living within the state, while “deviant”
regimes and rulers aim only at their own benefit, often at the expense of other
persons living within the regime. This alignment of aiming at the common good and
possession of the virtues is not a coincidence. For Aristotle, part of being virtuous is
having the right goals, aims, and motives. As a result, individuals who do not aim at
the common good are failing to be citizens on the strictest definition (since this
shows that they do not really have the virtues). Notice what this means for Aristotle’s
definition of citizenship. In an important sense, a person cannot really be a citizen
26 B. Miller

unless they possess the virtues in full. All individuals with imperfect virtue, or no
virtue at all, are not, strictly speaking, citizens. In this way, Aristotle seemingly
collapses the concepts of “citizen” and “good citizen.”

Different Political Regimes, Different Types of Citizens

This definition of citizenship, though, is complicated by the fact that Aristotle speaks
at length about citizens in “deviant” regimes. He also discusses the idea that the
definition of citizenship is relative to the type of political regime the citizen lives
in. A good citizen in a democracy is not a good citizen in a monarchy. A good citizen
in a “correct” regime is not a good citizen in a “deviant” regime.
This connection between citizenship and regime type leads to some confusion
about what Aristotle’s definitive understanding of citizenship really is. Scholarly
debates are wide-ranging on this issue (see Johnson (1984), Morrison (1999), Khan
(2005), and Riesbeck (2016)). On the one hand, it looks like Aristotle is strongly
committed to the idea that citizenship, strictly speaking, is a static concept across
regime types. On the other hand, he seems to want to leave space for the thought that
one might be a citizen even without possessing virtue (or some, but not all of, virtue).
For the purposes of this chapter, it is not essential to take a stand on how to solve this
tension within Aristotle’s discussion of citizenship, since scholars disagree on this
issue. Instead, it will be sufficient to lay out a few of the other central puzzles
associated with Aristotle’s definition of citizenship that are discussed in the
literature.

Puzzles About Citizenship

The first puzzle has already been alluded to in the previous section; namely, whether
or not Aristotle’s definition of citizenship – which is based on political participation
and having political authority – will be too narrow for certain types of governments
such as monarchies, tyrannies, oligarchies, and aristocracies. In these systems, some
residents will not really be political participants, which seem to imply that they will
not count as citizens by Aristotle’s stricter definition. This fact looks especially
problematic in one-ruler systems, since it looks like in such systems Aristotle will
have to say that these regimes only have one citizen within them, namely, the
monarch. (For a good survey of the literature and a novel solution to the puzzle,
see Riesbeck (2016).)
A second puzzle, much less frequently discussed, is the question of fully virtuous
individuals living in “deviant” political systems. A number of scholars (Garver
2005; Keyt 2007) have been interested in the question: “Will a fully virtuous person
be able to be a good citizen in a bad regime?” The puzzle arises when considering
Aristotle’s more relativized citizenship definitions, as it seems at least possible, if not
plausible, that the behaviors required of citizens in a “deviant” regime will be
antithetical to the behaviors required of a good person. If this is so, scholars have
2 Aristotle on Citizenship and Civic Education: The Central Role of. . . 27

asked, “then how could a virtuous person live under such a system without losing
their virtue or becoming a “bad” citizen?”
A third issue, perhaps less of a puzzle and more of a dispute among scholars, is
the question of whether the ideally good citizen living in the ideal regime must live
the life of a philosopher. Aristotle himself discusses both sides of this issue but
remains obscurely aporetic enough to create space for scholarly disagreement on this
point. The issue extends to other areas of concern; since if the ideal citizen must be a
philosopher, then this will have implications for how we evaluate citizens in less than
ideal conditions (they are not really good citizens but only good relative to their
imperfect regimes). A philosophical requirement for good citizenship will also draw
a tighter evidential link in debates about the role of philosophy in the good ethical
life, which is a major dispute among scholars focused on understanding Aristotle’s
ethical system separate from politics (c.f. Roochnik 2008; Depew 1991).
Combined with these three major puzzles, disputes about how to define citizen-
ship in Aristotle continue to be fruitful for scholarly investigation. Let us now turn to
Aristotle’s views about how to become a good citizen.

How to Become a Good Citizen

The first thing to understand about Aristotle on becoming a good citizen is that this is
not a separate question from becoming an ethical person. Since individual virtue is
so tightly connected to good citizenship, education for one will be education for the
other, at least when discussing the ideal definition of citizenship. The second thing to
keep in mind is that citizenship education (and so also education for virtue) will be
largely a state responsibility (see Curren (2000) and Politics 7.1). One of the striking
things about Aristotle is that he is an emphatic advocate of universal and egalitarian
publicly funded schooling. This commitment to public schooling fits neatly with
Aristotle’s conviction that part of becoming virtuous is the training one gets before a
person is truly an agent able to make choices for oneself. Both parents and society as
a whole have a responsibility to lay the necessary groundwork in the young in order
that they might have the opportunity to develop full virtue. Without the proper early
training, the window of opportunity will close, and no amount of ethical commit-
ment or effort will be able to lead the ill-educated back to the path to virtue.

Virtue Education

Since citizen education is not separable from ethical (virtue) education, it is worth
sketching out Aristotle’s general thoughts on how to develop virtue. Most of the
comments Aristotle makes on this subject are strewn about his ethical works and
have to be pieced together into a narrative form like the one offered now.
To be virtuous, a person must act well and in character. But in order to hit the right
action standard (which is set by the virtues and with reference to the good human
life), much more is required. In addition to acting correctly, a person must need to
28 B. Miller

think about the good life to be virtuous (Nicomachean Ethics 6.5 1140a25-8 and
1140b4-6). The ability to reflect about the good life (accurately) is not some capacity
we are born with or that some people have and others simply do not. Instead, it is a
capacity that needs to be developed (Politics 1.13 1260a13). Developing the reflec-
tive capacities needed begins with biology (Leunissen 2012; 2013) but continues to
develop in better or worse ways depending on our early-stage exposure to people,
experiences, and our surroundings (NE 10.9 1179b31-5). Because we need the
ability to think about the good life, and this is an ability that must be developed
from an early age, a person needs help from others to become virtuous. We need
guidance so that we can develop habits that will help us follow the correct path (NE
1.4 1095b4) until we can develop enough to be responsible for our own ongoing
development (NE 3.5 1114b22-3). For Aristotle, then, becoming virtuous is a mix of
nature, habit, and reason (Politics 7.13 1332a39-40). It is worth pausing to note,
here, that when Aristotle says “habit,” he does not mean the sort of mindless habits
we so often develop (intentional or unintentionally). Instead, for him, habit as part of
virtue is a cognitively deep state that is framed and held up by reasons for action. Not
only that, but habituation for virtue must be connected to the right motivational
structures. With respect to civic virtue, habits must be connected causally to the laws
of the state, and those laws must be constituted properly (Hitz 2012). In addition to
the development of the right habits, virtue requires methodical teaching and discus-
sion if it is to manifest correctly (NE 10.9 1179b23), since this is how any character
trait is acquired, according to Aristotle (NE 2.1 1103a15; see Kraut (2012) for
elaboration).

The Specifics of Civic Education

In the final book of Politics, Aristotle lays out his rather strict early education
program for musical training and its presumed role in citizenship and virtue educa-
tion. Unfortunately, we do not have a full account of the specifics of Aristotle’s
citizenship training program, but what we do have suggests that Aristotle had a
regimented and demanding program in mind. In addition, this program would have
been comprehensive in that it includes many elements that seem potentially tangen-
tial to citizenship and ethical training to modern ears. In the discussion we do have,
Aristotle focuses on the importance of musical education and physical fitness, both
of which he clearly believes are crucial to the proper development of children, not
just as people but as virtuous citizens. While this might be surprising from a modern
perspective, this fits quite neatly with Aristotle’s conviction that virtue is a compre-
hensive sort of human excellence and not just a domain-specific sort of thing to
learn. In this same way, citizenship for Aristotle has to be seen as a concept with
broader applicability than in modern states. To be a good citizen for Aristotle is to be
a person of sound education not just in depth but also in breadth. Frustratingly, what
we do not know about Aristotle on education is perhaps the most tantalizing: we do
not have much by way of direct discussion of what is required to become a good
person. Instead, we have a partial description of early-stage education components,
2 Aristotle on Citizenship and Civic Education: The Central Role of. . . 29

and of those, we have discussion of the elements that seem only distantly related to
questions about how to develop the virtues. (Scholarship on this issue ranges widely,
since most of it must be somewhat speculative. For thoughts about how music relates
to virtue training, see Drefcinski (2011). For questions about whether musical
education plays a role in developing the intellectual virtues, see Depew (1991) and
Koeplin (2009). For a rejection of the idea that musical training is meant to be a step
in the development of full philosophical virtue and is instead part of the way in
which non-philosophers can partake in a contemplation-like virtue, see Destrée
(2013).)
At the very least, it can be agreed that what specifics we do have from Aristotle on
citizenship education are on the one hand too general and on the other hand too
specific to be of a great deal of help to those seeking concrete guidance in thinking
about modern civic education. Lacking specifics, of course, does not preclude
developing an Aristotelian view of citizenship and education. That is, in fact, what
a number of contemporary scholars try to do.

The Contemporary Uses of Aristotle on Citizenship and Education

There are a number of different ways that contemporary scholars and thinkers use
Aristotle’s philosophy of virtue, citizenship, and education to help us to think about
those issues in our contemporary context. There are those who are neo-Aristotelians,
and there are those who are inspired by Aristotle, but are not self-proclaimed
Aristotelians. (For some examples of neo-Aristotelian scholars, see Nussbaum
(1990), Frank (2005), Collins (2006), many of the essays in Goodman (2012), and
Curren (2013). For an example of a scholar influenced by Aristotle, but who is not an
Aristotelian, see Sandel (1998).) In both cases, it is important to keep in mind that no
scholars argue that we should take Aristotle’s theories on any subject and apply them
wholesale to contemporary issues we face today. Always, there is some amount of
philosophical maneuvering that must take place, where key decisions will be made
about which pieces to abandon and which to hold on to. The main difference
between different scholars interested in Aristotle’s ethical and political project is in
how much of his framework they aim to adopt in their own theorizing.
There are two main areas where scholars are most interested in using Aristotle’s
philosophical ideas to supplement their thinking on contemporary issues: education
for citizenship as virtue education and theorizing about social democracy using
Aristotle’s general political framework. Focusing on these two areas illustrates both
the enduring interest in Aristotle’s ideas and also how they have been updated to
account for their expression in the contemporary context.

Citizenship Education as Virtue Education

The most general insight taken from Aristotle when it comes to ethics and politics is
the concept of virtue. A number of scholars are inspired by Aristotle to pay more
30 B. Miller

attention to development of the traits and skills necessary for good citizenship. This
is in direct contrast to much modern discussion of citizenship education both by
policy-makers and by social scientists, who have tended to focus on imparting
political knowledge as the main aim of citizenship education. Aristotelians, by
contrast, and as part of their wider focus on character education, have argued that
education should include the inculcation of the civic virtues.
Some scholars have focused in on particular Aristotelian virtues, such as practical
wisdom (Curren 2013; Kristjánsson 2016), while others have focused on the more
general idea that virtue education is the sort of education for citizenship that we need
today (Frank 2005; Collins 2006). Discussions of civic virtue are diverse and wide-
ranging with little agreement on what the virtues are, how to understand what virtue
consists in, and how to train citizens to become virtuous. Different accounts of each
borrow different parts of Aristotle’s own theory about virtue and education for it.

Aristotle as a Social Democrat

In addition to a renewed contemporary emphasis on virtue, scholars have also drawn

from Aristotle a focus on particular elements of social democracy. Some have gone
so far as to argue that Aristotle himself endorsed democracy (Frank 2005). For those
thinkers aiming to make an argument primarily about how Aristotle’s general
political framework and thinking can be useful for us today, Martha Nussbaum has
perhaps been the greatest champion (Nussbaum 1988, 1990, 1992, 1995, 2000).
Across her work, Nussbaum emphasizes the connection between Aristotle’s theory
of the good human life, good human functioning, and how these ideas ought to
influence political institutions. In Nussbaum’s view, the state is tasked with creating
meaningful opportunities for all citizens to meet their full human capabilities.
Achieving this common good requires a state which supplies material and educa-
tional goods to all citizens equally. Nussbaum (see also Franks (2005) and Collins
(2006)) adds to this insight the further thought that the state will provide these goods
to citizens so that citizens will be able to choose themselves whether or not to pursue
and develop any particular capabilities they have as human beings. In this way, the
idea of the common good linked with Aristotle’s theory of the human good as human
functioning can be developed into a theory of social democracy. (A good recent
overview of the scholarly views on Aristotelian ideas and contemporary democracy
can be found in Zuckert (2014). A survey of how Aristotle and Aristotelian thought
relates to the US Constitution can be found in Biondi (2007).)
In addition to scholarly attempts to connect Aristotle with social democracy,
much work has been done in the so-called “communitarian” tradition to bring
Aristotle’s thoughts on the good life and political community to the attention of
contemporary thinkers (MacIntyre 1984; Sandel 1998; Taylor 1985). These thinkers
have focused less on social democracy and more on the notion that there are goods
intrinsic to the political community that cannot be satisfied on a highly individual-
ized concept of persons. Scholars of this leaning tend to position their theories as
opposing forms of liberalism that emphasize separateness of persons and individual
2 Aristotle on Citizenship and Civic Education: The Central Role of. . . 31

autonomy, two concepts absent from Aristotle’s theory of citizenship, education, and
politics.

Conclusion

Although Aristotle himself does not give us the easiest primary materials by which to
“read-off” his theory of education and citizenship, his deep theory-building in ethics
and politics is full of insights and provides a fruitful place to look for inspiration on
these issues. At times, his views look quite dated and immoral (slavery, women), and
at others, they seem surprisingly useful as a foil against which to compare our own
modern thinking. As with most historical texts, the key is to locate those parts of his
framework which are essential to the philosophical program and not get overly
distracted by the components which are present, but not fundamental. When we do
this, Aristotle is a particularly interesting figure when it comes to civic education due
to his focus on the development of virtue and the centrality of character traits to his
account of the good citizen. He is surprisingly modern in his thinking when it comes
to public, equal-access education and his call for the state to focus on improving the
lives of its citizens. In addition, like most popular calls in democracy today, Aristotle
emphasizes the importance of political participation in a well-functioning state.

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Political Liberalism, Autonomy, and
Education 3
Blain Neufeld

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
Political Liberalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Reasonable Pluralism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
A Political Conception of Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
Citizens as Reasonable Persons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
Civic Respect and Public Reason . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
The Duty of Civility and the Public Political Forum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
Citizens as Rational Persons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
Citizens’ Higher-Order Interests . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
Full Political Autonomy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
Political Liberal Citizenship Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
Educating Students to Become Reasonable and Rational Persons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
Political Versus Comprehensive Autonomy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
Comprehensive Autonomy: Substantive Autonomy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
Political and Comprehensive Autonomy: For and Against the Convergence Thesis . . . . . . . . . . . 43
The First Moral Power Argument for the Convergence Thesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
Against the First Moral Power Argument . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
The Burdens of Judgment Argument for the Convergence Thesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
Against the Burdens of Judgment Argument . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
The Second Moral Power Argument for the Convergence Thesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
Against the Second Moral Power Argument . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50

B. Neufeld (*)
Department of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee,
Milwaukee, WI, USA
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 35

A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_12
36 B. Neufeld

Abstract
Citizens are politically autonomous insofar as they are subject to laws that
are (a) justified by reasons acceptable to them and (b) authorized by them
via their political institutions. An obstacle to the equal realization of political
autonomy is the plurality of religious, moral, and philosophical views
endorsed by citizens. Decisions regarding certain fundamental political issues
(e.g., abortion) can involve citizens imposing political positions justified in
terms of their respective worldviews upon others. Despite citizens’ disagreements
over which worldview is correct, “political liberalism” claims that there is a
form of political autonomy that is realizable within pluralist societies. (Political
liberalism differs from “comprehensive liberalism” by, inter alia, being “free-
standing” vis-à-vis citizens’ different worldviews.) Citizens can be politically
autonomous if they enjoy equal political power and justify its exercise with
“public reasons.” A political liberal education would aim at ensuring that all
students can become politically autonomous citizens by teaching them how to
exercise their democratic rights effectively and how to engage in public reason-
ing. Some political and educational theorists, however, argue that teaching
students how to be politically autonomous amounts to teaching them how to
be “comprehensively” autonomous. If this is so, then the distinction between
political liberalism and comprehensive liberalism collapses, at least with respect
to education. This chapter outlines the main elements of political liberalism,
summarizes the main requirements of a political liberal citizenship education,
and surveys three arguments in support of and against the thesis that a political
liberal education amounts to an education for comprehensive autonomy.

Keywords
Autonomy · Citizenship · Civic education · Democratic citizenship · Liberalism ·
Political autonomy · Political liberalism · Public reason · Rawls · Reasonable
pluralism

Introduction

Within a legitimate political society, Jean-Jacques Rousseau contends, “the words

‘subject’ and ‘sovereign’ are identical correlatives, the meaning of which is brought
together in the single word ‘citizen’” (Rousseau 1968, p. 138). Rousseauian citizens
possess what later philosophers refer to as “political autonomy” (e.g., Rawls 2005).
Leaving aside the idiosyncrasies of Rousseau’s account, the general idea of political
autonomy is that citizens are politically autonomous insofar as they are subject to
laws that are justified by reasons that are acceptable to them and are authorized by
them via their political institutions.
An obstacle to the realization of political autonomy within contemporary liberal
democratic societies is the plurality of religious, moral, and philosophical views
3 Political Liberalism, Autonomy, and Education 37

endorsed by citizens (e.g., Buddhism and utilitarianism). This pluralism cannot be

eliminated without the exercise of politically oppressive power, something
that liberalism’s commitment to toleration rules out. Yet accommodating this
pluralism seems to prevent the realization of all citizens’ political autonomy. This is
because decisions regarding certain fundamental political issues – for instance, what
the laws should be concerning abortion or physician-assisted suicide – can involve
citizens imposing political positions justified in terms of their respective worldviews
upon others. If this is so, then not all citizens can be politically autonomous: many will
be subject to laws that are justified by reasons that they cannot accept.
Despite citizens’ disagreements over which worldview is correct, “political
liberalism” – the account of legitimacy and justice developed most famously by
John Rawls (2001, 2005) – claims that there is a form of political autonomy that
is realizable within pluralist societies. Citizens can be politically autonomous if
they enjoy (roughly) equal political power and justify the exercise of that power
vis-à-vis fundamental political matters with “public reasons.” A political liberal
educational system would aim at ensuring that all students become politically
autonomous citizens. Educationally, this would involve teaching students how to
exercise their democratic rights effectively and how to engage in public reasoning.
Can students be taught to be politically autonomous without teachers and schools
also cultivating within them a “comprehensive” form of autonomy, that is, a form of
autonomy that encompasses not simply political matters but all or most dimensions
of persons’ lives? If not, then political autonomy may not be achievable for many
citizens after all. This is because comprehensive autonomy is an ideal that many
citizens reject (for instance, those who endorse certain kinds of religious views).
Such citizens will find it difficult if not impossible to support an educational
system that inculcates or promotes that ideal in their children. If teaching political
autonomy necessarily involves teaching comprehensive autonomy, then political
liberalism’s accommodation of pluralism may be quite limited.
This chapter surveys the debate concerning political liberalism, autonomy, and
education. The focus will be on Rawlsian political liberalism. (Similar versions
of political liberalism are presented in Cohen 1994, 2008; Larmore 1987, 2008;
Nussbaum 2011; Quong 2011; Watson and Hartley 2018.) The core
elements of political liberalism are outlined in §I. The main requirements of a political
liberal citizenship education are summarized in §II. Three arguments that such an
education amounts to an education for comprehensive autonomy are considered in
§III, along with replies to those arguments. Concluding remarks are in §IV.

Political Liberalism

Reasonable Pluralism

A central claim of political liberalism is that citizens living in societies that

respect basic liberal rights, including liberty of conscience, invariably will
subscribe to a range of incompatible philosophical, moral, and religious
38 B. Neufeld

“comprehensive doctrines” (e.g., Islam, secular humanism, etc.). Such doctrines

apply to most or all aspects of persons’ lives. Rawls calls this the “fact of
reasonable pluralism” (Rawls 2005, pp. 36f, 441). This pluralism can be eliminated
only through the exercise of political oppression (Rawls 2005, p. 37).

A Political Conception of Justice

In order to accommodate the fact of reasonable pluralism while respecting

citizens’ equal standing, Rawls holds that society should be organized by a “political
conception of justice.” Such a conception satisfies what may be called the “basic
structure restriction” and the “freestanding condition.” According to the basic
structure restriction, a political conception of justice applies directly only to society’s
“basic structure”: its main political and economic institutions, understood as
an overall system of cooperation encompassing all citizens. “Voluntary associations”
like religious institutions may organize themselves internally in other ways –
their governance, for instance, need not be democratic – but they cannot violate
the rights of citizens that are secured by the basic structure, including those of
their members. A political conception of justice satisfies the freestanding condition
by being formulated in terms of distinctly “political” ideas (concepts, principles,
ideals, and values). Such political ideas do not presuppose the truth of any particular
comprehensive doctrine. Instead, they are construed as implicit within the
public political culture of democratic society, namely, the conceptions of citizens
as free and equal, and society as a fair system of cooperation. Hence a political
conception of justice is compatible with (and ideally integrated into) the different
comprehensive doctrines endorsed by citizens (Rawls 2005, pp. 11–16, 374–76).
A “comprehensive” conception of justice, in contrast, is based upon a particular
comprehensive doctrine (say, utilitarianism) and/or applies directly to areas of life
beyond the basic structure.
Consider the conception of justice that Rawls defends as the most reasonable
one: “justice as fairness.” This conception consists of two principles, the first of
which enjoys “lexical priority” over the second (Rawls 1999, pp. 132, 266–267,
2001, pp. 46–47). The first principle secures a set of “basic liberties” – freedom of
association, the political liberties, and so forth – equally for all citizens. The second
principle consists of two sub-principles: (a) the “fair equality of opportunity”
principle, which regulates the distribution of unequal positions of authority, wealth,
and income, and (b) the “difference principle,” which concerns (inter alia) society’s
overall distribution of income and wealth. (see Rawls 2001, pp. 42–43.) An
account of the stability of a society that complies with these principles is
advanced in Part III of A Theory of Justice (Rawls 1999/1971). This account,
however, violates the freestanding condition: it presupposes elements of a compre-
hensive doctrine. Hence it is a (partially) comprehensive conception of justice
(Rawls 2001, pp. 186–87; see also Weithman 2010). In contrast, the revised version
of justice as fairness is a political conception, as its account of stability satisfies the
freestanding condition (see Rawls 2001: Part V; 2005: Lecture IV).
3 Political Liberalism, Autonomy, and Education 39

Citizens as Reasonable Persons

A core idea of political liberalism is that of citizens as capable of being reasonable

persons. Reasonable persons acknowledge the fact of reasonable pluralism and
share a commitment to satisfying what Rawls calls the “criterion of reciprocity”
when justifying fundamental political decisions to one another (Rawls 2005, pp. xliv,
16, 49–50, 54). The criterion of reciprocity is the “intrinsic (moral) political ideal” of
political liberalism (Rawls 2005, p. xlv). In order to satisfy this criterion, citizens must
justify their proposals concerning “constitutional essentials” and “matters of basic
justice” (Rawls 2005, pp. 214–15, 227–30, 235) in terms that other citizens – or at least
those similarly committed to the criterion of reciprocity (see Lister 2018) – find
acceptable. The reasonableness of persons expresses itself in what Rawls calls the
first “moral power” of citizens: their capacity to form and act upon a “sense of justice”
(Rawls 2001, pp. 18–19, 196).

Civic Respect and Public Reason

One way to understand how citizens can be reasonable persons is to see reasonable-
ness as involving a form of mutual respect (see Edenberg 2016). Given its political
context, this conception of mutual respect can be termed “civic respect” (Neufeld
2005, 2019). Civic respect has four features:

1. Civic respect requires that citizens acknowledge the fact of reasonable pluralism.
2. Civic respect is a form of “recognition respect” (Darwall 1995, 2006).
Recognition respect, roughly, is that respect which is owed to persons in virtue
of some characteristic that they possess. This characteristic grants such persons a
certain standing in their relations with others. Civic respect is the form of
recognition respect that is owed to persons in virtue of their standing as free
and equal citizens. One expresses such respect by taking this standing into
account when deciding fundamental political questions in concert with one’s
fellow citizens.
3. Because civic respect is owed to persons qua citizens, it is limited in its scope
to relations among citizens within the basic structure of society.
4. Civic respect requires that citizens decide political questions regarding
constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice in a way that satisfies the
criterion of reciprocity – that is, given the first three features of civic respect, in
accordance with the idea of “public reason.”

“Public reasoning” is the form of reasoning that Rawls maintains citizens

should use when deciding fundamental political questions. The idea of public reason
should be understood as “part of the idea of democracy itself” (Rawls 2005, p. 441).
The terms of public reason – particular “public reasons” – are provided by the family
of “reasonable” political conceptions of justice endorsed by citizens. A “reasonable”
political conception of justice is one that, in addition to satisfying the freestanding
40 B. Neufeld

condition and the basic structure restriction, also satisfies the criterion of reciprocity.
In order to satisfy this criterion, that conception must give priority to securing
the basic rights and liberties of democratic citizenship equally for all and, moreover,
ensure that all citizens have adequate resources to exercise effectively those rights
and liberties over the course of their lives (Rawls 2005, p. 450). Rawls holds that
justice as fairness is “the most reasonable conception because it best satisfies these
conditions” (Rawls 2005, p. xlvi). Public reasons also may include the methods and
conclusions of transparent forms of inquiry (such as those of logic and the sciences).
Decisions concerning constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice made
via public reasoning satisfy the “liberal principle of legitimacy” (Rawls 2005, p. xliv,
137). Such decisions have normative authority for citizens (Rawls 2005, p. 19). This
is because the public reasons that are used to justify those decisions are acceptable to
all reasonable citizens.

The Duty of Civility and the Public Political Forum

When citizens use public reasons to decide fundamental political questions, they
realize what Rawls calls their “duty of civility” (Rawls 2005, p. 444). This duty
applies primarily to public officials within the “public political forum.” This forum is
where national political issues are debated and authoritative decisions regarding
them are made. It consists of three parts: “the discourse of judges in their decisions,
especially of the judges of a supreme court; the discourse of government officials,
especially chief executives and legislators; and [. . .] the discourse of candidates
for public office” (Rawls 2005, p. 443). Other citizens, however, are not exempt
from the duty of civility: they fulfill it by holding public officials to the idea of
public reason when evaluating their performance within the public political forum,
especially (though not exclusively) when voting (Rawls 2005, pp. 444–445).
Political debates need not employ public reasons alone. Reasons drawn
from particular comprehensive doctrines can be introduced in the public polit-
ical forum, so long as what Rawls calls “the proviso” is satisfied. The proviso is
satisfied if “proper political reasons–and not reasons given solely by
comprehensive doctrines–are presented that are sufficient to support whatever
the comprehensive doctrines introduced are said to support” (Rawls 2005,
p. 462). For instance, a utilitarian legislator could explain her support for a
law permitting physician-assisted suicide on utilitarian grounds (arguing,
roughly, that such a law would maximize overall utility), so long as she also
provided a justification in terms of public reasons (say, that the law in question
best respects citizens’ equal freedom to control their own lives). Moreover,
political debates outside of the public political forum – discussions within civil
society, what Rawls calls the “background culture” – need not use public
reasons (Rawls 2005, pp. 442–443). Nonetheless, the duty of civility requires
sufficient public reason justifications for all decisions concerning constitutional
essentials and matters of basic justice.
3 Political Liberalism, Autonomy, and Education 41

Citizens as Rational Persons

Citizens also are characterized in political liberalism as capable of being rational

persons. Citizens’ rational nature includes what Rawls refers to as their second
moral power: the capacity to form, revise, and pursue conceptions of the good. A
conception of the good “is an ordered family of final ends and aims which specifies
a person’s conception of what is of value in human life or, alternatively, of what
is regarded as a fully worthwhile life” (Rawls 2001, p. 19). Rational persons
determine for themselves what kinds of lives have value, and they pursue or revise
their life plans in accordance with those determinations over time.

Citizens’ Higher-Order Interests

Citizens’ opportunities to exercise effectively their two moral powers – their

capacities to form and act upon conceptions of justice and the good – over the
course of their lives constitute their “higher-order interests” (Rawls 2005, pp. 74–75,
106). Moreover, citizens’ reasonable nature, their sense of justice, constrains their
rational pursuit of their conceptions of the good. (For more on the reasonable and the
rational, see Rawls 2001, pp. 6–7, 81–82, 191.)
This conception of citizens, Rawls stresses, “is meant as both normative and
political, not metaphysical or psychological” (Rawls 2001, p. 19). It is an ideal that
most persons with adequate education and resources are capable of realizing in
their lives (at least well enough to be considered equal citizens). Reasonable political
conceptions of justice are formulated with reference to this conception of citizens:
principles of justice are those that citizens can support freely given their higher-order
interests (their interests in being able to exercise the moral powers). This normative
political conception of citizens, moreover, is freestanding in nature and hence
compatible with different comprehensive doctrines.

Full Political Autonomy

When citizens are committed to interacting with one another on the basis of
civic respect, it is possible for them all to enjoy and exercise “full political auton-
omy.” There are two elements to citizens’ full political autonomy, what can be
termed “institutional autonomy” and “justificatory autonomy.”
Institutionally autonomous citizens possess the rights and resources that
enable them to take part as (roughly) equal contributors to their society’s
main decision-making processes. Citizens exercise institutional autonomy “by par-
ticipating in society’s public affairs and sharing in its collective self-determination
over time” (Rawls 2005, p. 78). Hence the equal political liberties – including the
rights to vote and run for public office – must be part of any reasonable political
conception of justice.
42 B. Neufeld

Citizens enjoy justificatory autonomy when fundamental political decisions are made
using reasons that they find acceptable (Rawls 2005, p. 77). Public reasoning makes
possible citizens’ justificatory autonomy despite the fact of reasonable pluralism. But
although public reasons are acceptable to all, citizens may reach different conclusions
concerning particular political questions. It is to be expected that individuals will give
different weights to different public reasons and, moreover, interpret them in somewhat
different ways. As Rawls says, “this is the normal case: unanimity of views is not to be
expected” (Rawls 2005, p. 479). Even when they disagree over which political positions
are the most reasonable, though, citizens possess justificatory autonomy insofar as the
positions selected are supported by public reasons.
Public reasoning, then, “is the form of reasoning appropriate to equal citizens who as
a corporate body impose rules on one another backed by sanctions of state power”
(Rawls 2001, p. 92). Such citizens are simultaneously “subjects” and “sovereigns.”
They are politically autonomous by exercising their political liberties to help decide
fundamental political decisions via public reasons (see Rawls 2005, p. xliv; for discus-
sion see: Neufeld 2019; Watson and Hartley 2018; Weithman 2011, 2017, 2018).

Political Liberal Citizenship Education

Educating Students to Become Reasonable and Rational Persons

A political liberal education for citizenship would teach students the skills,
concepts, and virtues necessary for them to become capable of being reasonable
and rational persons as adults. Teaching students how to be rational persons
would involve ensuring that they know how to use their rights and resources to
form, revise, and pursue conceptions of the good. Cultivating reasonableness in
students would involve teaching them how to interact with others on the basis
of civic respect. Students consequently would learn how to be fully politically
autonomous and respect the political autonomy of others. This is because they
would learn how to exercise their democratic rights effectively (institutional
autonomy) and how to justify to others their positions regarding fundamental
political matters with public reasons (justificatory autonomy).

Political Versus Comprehensive Autonomy

Rawls distinguishes between political autonomy and comprehensive autonomy –

the latter often also is referred to as “ethical” autonomy (the terms “ethical auton-
omy” and “comprehensive autonomy” will be used interchangeably hereinafter).
Comprehensive autonomy (inter alia) applies to the whole (or most aspects)
of persons’ lives. While political liberalism “affirms political autonomy for all,”
Rawls claims that it “leaves the weight of ethical autonomy to be decided by citizens
severally in light of their comprehensive doctrines” (Rawls 2005, p. 78). Democratic
citizens are to help to determine the laws to which they all are subject; whether
3 Political Liberalism, Autonomy, and Education 43

to value and exercise autonomy in the other dimensions of their lives is to be

left to them.
Does this distinction between political and comprehensive autonomy have
educational implications? Rawls thinks that it does. In Political Liberalism he
briefly considers the scope of the “requirements the state can impose” on the education
of children belonging to “religious sects [that] oppose the culture of the modern world
and wish to lead their common life apart from its unwanted influences.” Comprehen-
sive liberal approaches to education, Rawls explains, “may lead to requirements
designed to foster the values of autonomy and individuality as ideals to govern
much if not all of life.” By contrast, “political liberalism has a different aim and
requires far less” (Rawls 2005, p. 199). Because it aims only at political autonomy,
which is limited in its scope to society’s political decision-making processes, Rawls
holds that a political liberal educational system can accommodate the beliefs and
practices of the members of the religious sects in question.

Comprehensive Autonomy: Substantive Autonomy

Before considering the relation between political and comprehensive autonomy,

a clearer understanding of what the latter involves is needed. There are many
“conceptions” of the “concept” of autonomy – Rawlsian political autonomy is
an example of a particular conception. (On the distinction between “concepts”
and “conceptions,” see Rawls 1999, p. 5; for discussion of this distinction
with respect to autonomy, see Dworkin 1988, pp. 9–10.) Which conception
(or family of conceptions) does Rawls have in mind when he distinguishes ethical
autonomy from his conception of political autonomy?
When he refers to ethical autonomy, Rawls seems to have in mind something
like what Gerald Dworkin calls “substantive” autonomy (Dworkin 1988; see also
the discussion of “autonomy” in Benn 1988). A life lived autonomously, in this sense,
requires that persons critically reflect on their deepest ends and beliefs and display a
kind of “independence” by not deferring (at least not usually) to others, including
authorities (e.g., religious or community leaders), on such questions. Substantive
ethical autonomy also may involve a willingness to explore, or at least seriously
consider, alternative ways of life (projects, life plans, and the like). According to
Rawls, citizens can be politically autonomous even if they are not substantively
(ethically) autonomous (say, by accepting their religious views on the basis of faith
and community, and not through independent rational reflection).

Political and Comprehensive Autonomy: For and Against

the Convergence Thesis

Some political liberals defend Rawls’s claim that an education for political
autonomy differs from, and is generally less demanding than, one for comprehensive
autonomy (Davis and Neufeld 2007; De Wijze 1999; Ebels-Duggan 2013; Neufeld
44 B. Neufeld

2013). This position, though, has been challenged by a number of theorists who
have written on this topic. Some political liberals maintain that political liberalism
requires a form of education for citizenship that is much more demanding than
that suggested by Rawls (Costa 2011; Macedo 2000; Schouten 2018). And some
comprehensive liberals contend that teaching Rawlsian political autonomy
amounts to teaching comprehensive autonomy (Callan 1996, 1997; Gutmann
1995; Kymlicka 2001: Chap. 17). This section presents three arguments in support
of the claim that an education for political autonomy “converges” with an education
for comprehensive autonomy – hereinafter referred to as the “convergence thesis” –
as well as some replies to those arguments.

The First Moral Power Argument for the Convergence Thesis

The first kind of argument in support of the convergence thesis focuses on

the educational goal of creating reasonable citizens, specifically, the goal of
ensuring that students acquire, and learn how to exercise effectively, a sense of
justice (the first moral power). This requirement involves ensuring that students
know how to engage in the public life of their society in order to promote the
political values and principles of justice that they judge to be the most reasonable.
According to some defenders of the convergence thesis, the goal of teaching students
how to be effective democratic citizens amounts to teaching them how to be
comprehensively autonomous, even if this is not the explicit goal of such an
education.
Amy Gutmann, writing from a comprehensive liberal perspective, maintains that
despite the theoretical soundness of Rawls’s distinction between political and
comprehensive autonomy, there is no practical difference between them, at least
when it comes to educating future citizens. This is because, according to Gutmann,
“most (if not all) of the same skills and virtues that are necessary and sufficient for
educating children for citizenship in a liberal democracy are those that are also
necessary and sufficient for educating children to deliberate about their way of life,
more generally (and less politically) speaking” (Gutmann 1995, p. 573). In practice
at least, teaching citizens to become politically autonomous amounts to teaching
them to be comprehensively autonomous. (See also Kymlicka 2001: Chap. 17;
Reich 2002: Chap. 2.) (Gutmann (1995) also advances an argument in support of
the convergence thesis based on a shared commitment among political and compre-
hensive liberals to teaching mutual respect to students. Davis and Neufeld (2007,
pp. 53–60) contend that Gutmann’s argument fails because the conception of civic
respect differs from – and has less demanding educational requirements than – the
comprehensive liberal conception of mutual respect endorsed by Gutmann.)
Gutmann’s argument for the convergence thesis finds indirect support in the
account of citizenship education advanced by the political liberal Stephen Macedo.
Macedo calls his version of political liberalism “civic liberalism” and holds that it is
committed to a “transformative project”: liberal institutions must “mold people in a
manner that ensures that liberal freedom is what they want” (Macedo 2000, p. 15,
3 Political Liberalism, Autonomy, and Education 45

Macedo’s italics). Furthermore, Macedo defends what he calls “civic autonomy,”

according to which students are “provided with the intellectual tools necessary
to [. . .] formulate their own convictions, and make their own way in life” (238).
“[P]romoting [. . .] core liberal values,” Macedo writes, “will probably have the
effect of encouraging critical thinking in general.” Consequently, “Liberal civic
virtues and attitudes will spill over into other spheres of life”; indeed, a liberal
society’s institutions and practices must “work to transform the whole of the moral
world in the image our most basic political values” (Macedo 2000, pp. 179, 151).
Macedo characterizes civic liberalism as a form of political liberalism by
appealing primarily to the freestanding condition (Macedo 2000, pp. 166–174).
The basic structure restriction, in contrast, does not seem to be part of civic
liberalism. Macedo claims that the liberal distinction between public and private
life is only “superficial” in nature: “In a deeper sense,” he maintains, “liberal
institutions and practices shape all of our deepest moral commitments” (164).
Hence while “[p]ublic educational institutions should not promote comprehensive
ideals of life as a whole [. . .] that does not mean that public schools are limited to a
narrowly political agenda.” This is because, according to civic liberalism, “Our civic
ideals are not narrowly political” (239). Consequently, the requirements of a
civic liberal citizenship education include promoting in students a capacity for
civic autonomy and a willingness to exercise that capacity in most if not all domains
of social life. Macedo, then, ultimately seems to concur with Gutmann that political
and comprehensive liberals converge (for the most part) on the same demanding
account of citizenship education, differing only in their distinct rationales for that
account.
Both Macedo and Gutmann, in short, hold that teaching students how to be
effective democratic citizens – how to exercise their first moral power – involves
teaching skills and concepts that invariably spill over into other areas of students’
lives, thereby teaching them a comprehensive form of autonomy.

Against the First Moral Power Argument

Those who defend the distinction between political and comprehensive autonomy do
not deny that teaching students to become politically autonomous might lead some
(perhaps many) to come to value and exercise a more comprehensive form of
autonomy (Rawls 2005, pp. 199–200). Nonetheless, they maintain that the kinds
of spillover effects described by Gutmann and Macedo do not demonstrate that
teaching political autonomy and teaching ethical autonomy are indistinguishable in
practice. Davis and Neufeld hold that convergence in educational practice is nether
conceptually nor practically inevitable – there exists a “gap,” in both theory and
practice, between teaching students the political ideas necessary for free and equal
citizenship and teaching students a form of comprehensive autonomy (Davis and
Neufeld 2007, p. 60, n.41; Neufeld 2013). Classes that aim to teach students
how to be politically autonomous, roughly, teach them about their rights and
liberties as citizens, the political virtues, and how to participate in the political
46 B. Neufeld

decision-making processes of their society. Such classes differ from those that aim
to teach students to be ethically autonomous. The latter kind of classes would
encourage students to reflect critically on their comprehensive beliefs and values,
including their religious ones, as well as those of other students.
A pedagogic strategy for teaching students how to be politically autonomous –
in particular, how to interact with others on the basis of civic respect – is described
by Davis and Neufeld (2007). Students would participate in formal debates
concerning a range of fundamental political issues. Such issues could be both
historical (concerning, say, pivotal constitutional issues in the history of their
county) and contemporary in nature (regarding distributive justice, marriage,
physician-assisted suicide, abortion, alternative electoral systems, and the like).
After explaining to students that they live in a society characterized by persistent
disagreement over a wide range of religious and moral questions, the rules of the
debate would be introduced. The key rule would be that students defend their
positions concerning fundamental political issues with public reasons. Positions
defended without sufficient public reasons would be ruled inadmissible. Students
would be encouraged to rise on “points of order” in order to help them identify
arguments that violate the duty of civility. (For instance, an argument offered in
support of same-sex marriage based exclusively on utilitarian considerations would
be ruled inadmissible; an argument that appealed to the free and equal status of
citizens, in contrast, would be admissible.) Through their participation in such
debates, students would learn how to employ public reasons when deciding
fundamental political questions. (But these debates need not exclude comprehen-
sive doctrines altogether – recall Rawls’s proviso. Hence students could provide
nonpublic reasons for their positions so long as they also provide sufficient public
reasons.)
Such exercises would teach students how to exercise political autonomy with-
out necessarily exposing their comprehensive beliefs and values to rational scru-
tiny. Davis and Neufeld (2007) concede that some students may choose to
scrutinize their comprehensive doctrines as a result of their participation in such
debates (and similar educational exercises) and thereby come to value and exercise
comprehensive autonomy. Such broader critical scrutiny, though, is not necessary
or unavoidable.

The Burdens of Judgment Argument for the Convergence Thesis

Eamonn Callan advances another argument for the convergence thesis (1996, 1997).
Callan’s argument focuses on reasonable persons’ acceptance of the fact of
reasonable pluralism, specifically, on Rawls’s idea of the “burdens of judgment”
(Rawls 2005, pp. 54–58). Rawls sketches six factors – such as the indeterminacy of
many of our moral concepts and citizens’ diverse life experiences – that make up
these burdens. The idea of the burdens of judgment is advanced by Rawls to
help explain the fact of reasonable pluralism, that is, why people reasoning well
nonetheless may come to endorse different comprehensive doctrines.
3 Political Liberalism, Autonomy, and Education 47

Rawls’s distinction between political and comprehensive autonomy can be

seen to be “bogus,” according to Callan, “once we reflect on the educational task
of securing active acceptance of the burdens of judgement” (Callan 1996, p. 21).
An education designed to secure such “active” acceptance is indistinguishable
from an education designed to foster ethical autonomy. This is because, Callan
contends, “nominal assent to a list of abstractions is not enough; the relevant
acceptance must rather be an active and onerous psychological disposition,
pervasively shaping the beliefs we form and the choices we make” (Callan
1996, p. 15; see also 1997, pp. 34, 180f, 217f). Callan concludes: “the psycho-
logical attributes that constitute an active acceptance of the burdens [. . .], such as
the capacity and inclination to subject received ethical ideas to critical scrutiny,
also constitute a recognizable ideal of ethical autonomy” (Callan 1996, p. 21).
Hence educating students to actively accept the burdens of judgment – as part of
educating them to be reasonable persons – amounts to educating them to be
ethically autonomous.

Against the Burdens of Judgment Argument

In presenting the idea of the burdens of judgment, Rawls denies that it requires
that citizens become “hesitant and uncertain, much less sceptical, about [. . .]
[their] own beliefs” (Rawls 2005, p. 63). Drawing on recent work in episte-
mology on peer disagreement, Fabienne Peter (2013) defends a view similar to
Rawls’s concerning the relation between acceptance of the fact of reasonable
pluralism and citizens’ confidence in the truth of their comprehensive doctrines.
On the question of how to teach students to become reasonable persons, Kyla
Ebels-Duggan (2013) proposes that students can be taught to accept the fact of
reasonable pluralism and acknowledge that other comprehensive doctrines can
be endorsed by reasonable persons, without also teaching them to question or
doubt the truth of their own comprehensive doctrines. Davis and Neufeld
(2007, pp. 60–67) explicitly defend Rawls’s modest interpretation of what
acceptance of the burdens requires of citizens; they use possible lessons on
the history of religious conflicts to defend their view with respect to educating
students about the fact of reasonable pluralism. (See also Edenberg 2016.)
Even if Callan’s interpretation of the burdens of judgment is correct, though,
political liberals could respond by claiming that students do not need to be taught
to accept the burdens in order to become reasonable persons (see Strike 1996; Wenar
1995). The burdens of judgment may not be the only way to explain the fact
of reasonable pluralism. So long as students learn how to interact with others on
the basis of the principle of civic respect, including how to use public reasons
to decide fundamental political questions, they can learn to be reasonable persons.
Such a response still requires that students learn how to be politically autonomous,
but because it does not require the acceptance of the burdens of judgment in the
way presupposed by Callan, it does not seem to involve the necessary cultivation
of ethical autonomy.
48 B. Neufeld

The Second Moral Power Argument for the Convergence Thesis

The two arguments for the convergence thesis discussed above focus on teaching
students how to be reasonable persons. But what about the goal of teaching students
to be rational persons, specifically, persons with the capacity to form, revise, and
pursue conceptions of the good? The argument for the convergence thesis
advanced by Gina Schouten (2018) rests on the purported instrumental value of
autonomy for securing students’ future interests with respect to the second moral
power. Schouten calls this a “student-centered” argument for the convergence thesis,
as it has to do with the future ability of all students to live good lives, rather than
their future roles in promoting and maintaining the justice of their society’s basic
structure.
Schouten’s argument focuses on what is needed for citizens to exercise
effectively their rights and resources vis-à-vis their second moral power. Rawls
calls the rights and resources necessary for citizens to exercise their two moral
powers – things such as the basic liberties, income and wealth, and so forth –
“primary goods” (Rawls 2001, pp. 57–61). All reasonable political conceptions of
the justice secure for all citizens (at least) sufficient primary goods for them
to exercise effectively their two moral powers over the course of their lives.
With respect to citizens’ second moral power, the primary goods are used to
form, revise, and pursue conceptions of the good. Basic liberties like liberty of
conscience and freedom of association, along with resources like education,
income, and wealth, enable citizens to determine and act upon their plans, commit-
ments, relationships, and the like.
Schouten points out that different conceptions of the good are suitable for the
flourishing of different people: “There are perfectly good lives that some can live
well while others cannot” (Schouten 2018, p. 1090). If this is so, then persons
must be able to use the primary goods that they have available to them as
citizens in order to figure out which conceptions of the good have value – are a
“good fit” – for them. But this capacity, she contends, just is a “basic capacity for
robust autonomy” (Schouten 2018, p. 1090). An education for robust (comprehen-
sive) autonomy, then, is justified on political grounds as a kind of “safeguard”
to ensure that all citizens – if necessary – will be able to identify and pursue
conceptions of the good that are appropriate for them (even if not all citizens
will need to do this). The capacity for robust autonomy, then, helps ensure
that students will not end up living lives that are not good fits for them because of
factors outside of their control, such as the communities and families within which
they were raised. (A similar claim is sketched in Brighouse 1994.)

Against the Second Moral Power Argument

Political liberals sympathetic to the Rawlsian position can point out that Schouten’s
argument fails to distinguish adequately between “conceptions of the good” –
the concern of citizens’ second moral power – and “comprehensive doctrines.”
3 Political Liberalism, Autonomy, and Education 49

Some political liberals do not distinguish clearly between these ideas (e.g.,
Nussbaum 2011). In Rawls’s later writings on political liberalism, though, these
ideas play distinct roles. A conception of the good is not itself a comprehensive
doctrine. Rather, “[t]he elements of such a conception are normally set within,
and interpreted by, certain comprehensive religious, philosophical, or moral
doctrines in the light of which the various ends and aims are ordered and understood”
(Rawls 2001, p. 19). So, for instance, two people might endorse conceptions of
the good that include artistic excellence and rich family relationships. Yet one person
might interpret this conception from within a Jewish perspective, while the other
does so from within a utilitarian perspective. Consequently, their understandings of
these elements will be quite different.
This distinction threatens Schouten’s argument. Citizens who adhere to different
comprehensive doctrines often will exercise their second moral power in quite
different ways, according to different evaluative criteria and drawing on different
resources. For instance, the evaluative criteria and resources that a devout Catholic
will employ when deliberating about which life plan to pursue will be quite different
from those employed by a secular humanist – among other things, faith and the
pronouncements of relevant religious authorities will play a role in the former’s
deliberations that they do not in those of the latter. The exercise of the second moral
power, then, does not seem to require the exercise of robust autonomy any more than
it seems to require the use of faith – the appropriate roles of robust autonomy and
faith in citizens’ exercises of their second moral power are shaped by their respective
comprehensive doctrines. Of course, citizens are free to change their comprehensive
doctrines, and students must be taught “that liberty of conscience exists in
their society and that apostasy is not a legal crime” (Rawls 2005, p. 199).
But learning these things does not require more than learning to understand and
exercise political autonomy. Schouten’s argument, then, arguably presupposes a
comprehensive liberal interpretation of what exercising the second moral power
necessarily involves.

Conclusion

This chapter outlined some of the main arguments in support of and against the
convergence thesis. Opponents of the convergence thesis hold that Rawls is
correct in claiming that teaching political autonomy requires “less” than teaching
ethical autonomy. Consequently, opponents of the convergence thesis conclude that,
ceteris paribus, the kind of citizenship education required by political liberalism is
compatible with a range of educational options for students and families that
reflect the reasonable pluralism of their societies. In other words, opponents of the
convergence thesis generally are sympathetic to forms of educational choice
for families that accommodate citizens’ diverse comprehensive doctrines while at
the same time ensuring that all students learn how to become rational and reasonable
persons (see Davis and Neufeld 2007; Ebels-Duggan 2013; Edenberg 2016).
In contrast, defenders of the convergence thesis, because they contend that
50 B. Neufeld

all students need to learn to become ethically autonomous, generally are less
sympathetic to any decentralization of citizenship educational requirements, at
least with respect to curriculum content and pedagogy. These are general tendencies,
however, as political liberals who agree with Rawls readily acknowledge that
in certain social circumstances – say, in societies threatened by instability, or that
suffer from class or race inequality and segregation – securing political justice and
legitimacy may require that students share schools and curriculum irrespective of
their wishes or those of their parents (see Davis and Neufeld 2007; Neufeld 2013).
The political liberal conception of full political autonomy, and the role of public
reason with respect to the realization of that conception, can be interpreted as an
account of how a version of Rousseau’s ideal of a self-governing citizenry might be
realized in contemporary pluralist societies. A pluralist society in which citizens
are equal co-sovereigns is a “realistic utopia” (Rawls 2001). Realizing the
political liberal version of this ideal has significant educational implications.
Students must be taught to be capable of being reasonable and rational persons.
Whether such an education necessarily involves teaching students a form of com-
prehensive autonomy has been debated since the publication of Political Liberalism
– and continues to be debated by political and educational theorists.

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Civic Republicanism, Citizenship and
Education 4
Geoffrey Hinchliffe

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
The Concept of Republican Liberty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
Civic Republicanism: Problems and Issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
Implications for Citizenship Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

Abstract
This chapter provides a brief introduction to civic republicanism, providing a
historical overview, and focusing in particular on the work of scholars of modern
republicanism in the last 30 years. It shows why liberty is the cornerstone of
republican theory and discusses two types of liberty – liberty as nondomination
and participative liberty. Following this, the chapter sets out the differences
between instrumentalist republicanism and intrinsic republicanism. The nature
of sovereignty and the relation between a republican polity and the nation state
are also discussed. In the final section, the implications for civic education are
considered. Here, a discussion of civic education in England is provided as an
illustrative case, and it is suggested that while the National Curriculum for civic
education has a communitarian bias, it also has features that are welcome to civic
republicans. Finally, it is proposed that central to civic education, from a repub-
lican perspective, is the need for a clear narrative of liberty which has both a
historical and a contemporary dimension.

G. Hinchliffe (*)
School of Education, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 53

A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_9
54 G. Hinchliffe

Keywords
Civic republicanism · Liberty · Freedom · Nondomination · Community · Civic
education

Introduction

Civic republicanism designates a type of political arrangement – broadly, a commu-

nity of independent and free citizens who participate in self-rule. Central to this civic
republicanism is a view that this community is a political community and that its
citizens are attached both practically and emotionally to the republic. From a civic
republican standpoint, politics is seen as something which concerns everyone and in
which each citizen participates. The term “republic” derives from the Latin – res
publica – which designates “public affairs” and so, unsurprisingly, the history of
republicanism reaches back into antiquity. However, the idea of “republicanism”
should not be confused with the contemporary use of the term “republic.” Central to
republicanism is the idea that citizens are not beholden to other citizens or to the state
and that this freedom is something to be supported and cherished. From this
viewpoint, without one’s freedom one is scarcely a person at all; without freedom
one is unable to fashion any kind of identity worth having. Thus, a state that
proclaims itself a “republic” in which its citizens are not free is not republican in
its true sense. And, in case there is any confusion, it should be said that adherents of
civic republicanism do not have any particular attachment to the Republican Party of
the United States, and while civic republicans in Britain might, ideally, prefer that the
monarchy be abolished, this commitment does not usually feature very prominently
in their concerns.
Although, as previously stated, republican ideas stem back to antiquity, it is only
within the past 40 years or so that the idea has gained fresh ground, at least in Britain.
A number of philosophers and historians have engaged in both recovering and
developing the concept of republican liberty. Prominent among these are Quentin
Skinner (1998, 2002, 2008a, b), J.G.A. Pocock (1975), and Philip Pettit (1997,
2012). Pocock was, in some respects, the pioneer in his quest to excavate seven-
teenth century English republican thought in his The Ancient Constitution and the
Feudal Law (1987, first published in 1957). In his book The Machiavellian Moment
(1975), Pocock outlines more fully the development of republican concepts of
liberty in Northern Italy during the Renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, paying particular attention to the works of Machiavelli, especially his
Discourses (1960). Pettit, whose ideas will be referred to throughout this chapter,
gives the topic a more contemporary, analytical treatment. A number of other books
also contain worthwhile introductions of the historical development of republican-
ism, notably those by Iseult Honohan (2002) and Andrew Peterson (2011).
Possibly the most accessible and scholarly historical account of republicanism is
to be found in Quentin Skinner’s short book, Liberty before Liberalism (1998). In
this book, he suggests that before the mid-seventeenth century, there was both a
4 Civic Republicanism, Citizenship and Education 55

historical experience of, and in some instances a practical engagement with, liberty
(including in ancient Rome, the Italian city states of the fifteenth century (especially
Florence before the Medici) and seventeenth century England). However, in the
eighteenth century, there developed the idea of a “commercial” republic (Honohan
2002, p. 84) signaling the end of what might be termed the “heroic” period of
republicanism as the more quotidian (and peaceful) pursuits of trade and commerce
assumed greater prominence in the lives of citizens. But while the emergence of an
independent republic in the United States in 1783 served to enhance the attractive-
ness of the idea of republicanism, the bloody terror in France in 1794, following the
revolution of 1789, encouraged a revulsion against all things republican, especially
in England. Arguably, it is only now, more than 200 years later, that republican ideas
may once again receive a proper hearing.
Before elaborating the ideas of republicanism in more detail, it might be worth
noting how republicanism differentiates from other leading political ideas. It differs
from liberalism because of the importance placed on self-rule and the desirability of
participation in governance. For republicans, it is not enough that freedom consists
of absence of interference; rather freedom must be exercised in an active and
political manner if it is to be preserved. Furthermore, republicanism differs from
communitarianism, however, because it insists that the community is never prior to
the individual; instead the community is made of free individuals and it is the job of
the community to protect that freedom. And finally, republicanism differs from
socialism because the criteria of social justice do not merely consist in fairness or
greater egalitarianism but, for republicans, the aim of social justice is to enhance
liberty. It is true that republicans think that gross inequalities in societies are to be
avoided but this is not because inequality is somehow unfair per se but because
inequality risks the more powerful diminishing the liberty of the less favored. For
civic republicans, then, liberty is the master concept and it is this concept that will be
now be explored.

The Concept of Republican Liberty

Much of the contemporary discussion of liberty is influenced by Isaiah Berlin’s essay

“Two Concepts of Liberty” and his subsequent considered reflections (Berlin 1969).
Even now, over 50 years on, Berlin’s words still resonate and give us pause for
thought. Liberty, he says, is “the absence of obstacles to possible choices and
activities” (Berlin 1969: xxxix) and this is not to be confused with self-mastery, or
what he terms “positive” liberty; rather, liberty consists of that social space within
which I am free to be active, to be lazy, to be good or bad and suffer the conse-
quences. This space is not logically dependent on self-government – and although a
democratic regime is less likely to threaten this space than tyranny, such protection
cannot be assured: “Everything is what it is: liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness
or justice or human happiness or a quiet conscience” (p. 125). However, Skinner
(1998) contends that there is an older and ultimately more worthy concept of liberty
then that of Berlin’s. Skinner argues that the crucial step from republican liberty to
56 G. Hinchliffe

modern, negative liberty was made by Hobbes who, he suggests, was particularly
concerned to undermine claims that liberty could only flourish in conditions of self-
government. Since, for Hobbes, liberty was signaled by “the absence of external
Impediments” (Hobbes 1991, p. 91), it is manifest that the kind of government under
which one lived was immaterial as to whether one was free: what really counted was
the extent to which that government left you alone. Skinner contrasts this with the
“neo-Roman” outlook which can be summarized by the view of the historian Livy
for whom the possession of libertas involved the ability “to stand upright by means
of one’s own strength without depending on the will of anyone else” (quoted in
Skinner 1998, p. 46).
What Skinner further suggests, however, is that negative liberty is inadequate as a
concept of liberty because it is possible to live in a state of dependency even if one is
not being interfered with. The mere awareness of dependency can create a situation
in which persons behave in such an anticipatory, proactive way that the need for
exercising any constraint never seriously arises. Yet such servile behavior and its
accompanying dispositions are at variance with what a free person is supposed to
be. For we are all familiar with situations in which persons (sometimes ourselves)
avoid saying certain things and take care not to stand out or draw attention to
themselves because to do so may invite the disapprobation of those in authority or
those, especially, who can make things worse for us should they so wish. Occasion-
ally, it may be wise to keep quiet for pragmatic reasons; but if “keeping quiet”
develops into a more or less permanent feature of behavior then, from a republican
standpoint, one is no longer free. These stratagems are explored in more detail by
Pettit (see, for example, 2012, pp. 62–64).
However, the notion of freedom as nondomination is not without its difficulties.
For one thing, who is to say what counts as domination? The paradigm example is
that of the slave who is treated well by his master and wants for nothing; but since the
slave is dependent for their comfortable life on the goodwill of someone else, they
are not really free. Yet, it is possible that people may be living in a situation which,
for outsiders, appears unfree but for those on the inside it simply does not feel that
way. Proponents of republican liberty need to respect persons so circumstanced – or
else run the danger of imposing a version of freedom on persons who may think
differently. Phillip Pettit suggests that we could perform the “eyeball test” as a way
of flushing out potential domination. Here, domination is absent when one can say
that “They can look others in the eye without reason for the fear or deference that a
power of interference might inspire; they can walk tall and assume the public
status. . .of being equal in this regard to the best” (Pettit 2012, p. 84). But while
we may have some idea of what Pettit is driving at, the “eyeball test” does seem a
somewhat subjective instrument for detecting domination. After all, some people
have a natural sense of reserve, modesty, and humility and may fail the test more
often than not. However, the “eyeball test” does raise the question of the legitimate
scope of intervention to protect nondomination (for a further discussion in relation to
education, see Snir and Eylon (2017) and Peterson (2018)).
Another difficulty is that some scholars argue that domination is simply a form of
interference; it follows that a description of any relation cast in the form of
4 Civic Republicanism, Citizenship and Education 57

domination can be re-cast in the language of interference. This position implies that
the negative conception of liberty still stands as the best way of understanding
freedom (Carter 1999, p. 59; Kramer 2003, pp. 34–35; Lang 2012). But this
objection is not conclusive, because if critics such as Carter, Kramer, and Lang are
correct in thinking that domination can be expressed in terms of interference,
republicans may still be right to insist that one of the key forms of “interference”
is that of domination. All republicans need to do is to acknowledge that certain
interferences can be justified (e.g., taxation, laws relating to driving, etc.) but insist
that one kind of interference is never justified – namely domination.
There is, however, another view of republican liberty which, while not dismissing
the importance of nondomination, prefers to place an emphasis on freedom as
participation in public life and government. Iseult Honohan has stated this form of
republicanism as follows:

If freedom is understood as an ideal to be promoted, rather than a constraint to be observed,

non-domination appears to point beyond itself, not to full mastery, but to participating in
determining the conditions of social life. (Honohan, p. 188)

The idea here, then, is that our freedom is best realized through its being exercised
and that civic republicanism is best understood in terms of a political freedom which
entitles all citizens to contribute both to the long-term goals of the community as well
as its day-to-day governance. Participative liberty has an illustrious pedigree which
can be traced back to Aristotle, who suggested that all men (persons) are political
animals and are necessarily part of not merely a social order but a political order as
well. Allied to this suggestion is the position that there is a human good that can be
specified in teleological terms so that this good is best realized through being a part
of a polity and sharing in its common good: “the end and purpose of a polis is the
good life and the institutions of social life are a means to that end” which is “perfect
and self-sufficient existence” (Aristotle 1946: Book 3, Chapter ix, paragraph 13). In
other words, we realize our human purposes through being part of a wider commu-
nity. In this sense, community is not only composed of disparate individuals each
with their own purposes and goals in life. Instead, each person shares in a common
good which enables human flourishing – and an important part of this flourishing is
participation in the governance of the polity.
A particularly rich version of what might be called neo-Aristotelianism was
suggested by the political philosopher, Hannah Arendt, who proposes the view
that citizens require a public space in which they are able to conduct a life of activity
(vita activa) orientated to political goals (Arendt 1958). For Arendt, the “active life”
is not characterized by mundane domestic and commercial pursuits but through an
ability to improvise and innovate in a public domain which enables this kind of
activity to take place. In this space all are equal, as citizens, no matter what their
personal background might be (Arendt 1973, pp. 35–41). As citizens, all are entitled
to put forward views, to listen to others and (crucially) are able to influence matters
of public concern. It could be held that currently social media is a splendid example
of what Arendt was advocating back in the mid-twentieth century. But there are two
58 G. Hinchliffe

crucial differences. First, for Arendt, in any authentic public space persons must
show themselves, without shame. The public domain is therefore a risky place
because there is no hiding behind anonymity. Indeed, for Arendt, speech actions
that hid behind a mask defeated the entire purpose of action in a public space.
Second, Arendt assumed that public deliberations would not merely take place in an
isolated fashion with self-selected members of a group but would be open to all.
Arendt, therefore, advocated a political freedom with the strong implication that
those who confined themselves to domestic or commercial pursuits were not really
exercising their freedom at all. Indeed, a preoccupation with such pursuits was
emblematic of a kind of modern tyranny aimed at snuffing out independent political
activity; hence her interest in more “heroic” periods such as the American Revolu-
tion, the struggle of the Florentine republicans and, in the twentieth century, the
emergence of citizen revolutions such as the failed Hungarian uprising against
Soviet domination in 1956 (Arendt 1973, p. 112).
Just as the concept of freedom as nondomination has its difficulties, so does the
notion of freedom as participation. Perhaps the most obvious one comes to light as
soon as one asks: “is there a freedom not to participate?” The idea that freedom can
be exercised in many ways including, for example, the freedom to devote oneself to
one’s own private life as much as possible, is at odds with the participatory
perspective. Moreover, the participatory standpoint could also be criticized for
proposing a “perfectionist” standpoint if it is saying that one can only truly “flourish”
as a full human being if one contributes and shares in the common good. Arguably,
one of the strengths of traditional liberalism is that it recognizes and understands
what might be termed “nonpolitical” freedom and, in defining freedom as absence of
interference, also recognizes that noninterference gives a person license to pursue
whatever aims he or she wants, irrespective of any supposed good that may (or may
not) emanate from those aims. This includes, it should be said, the freedom not to
have any aims or life-goals whatsoever (see Hinchliffe 2015, pp. 26–30). However,
these considerations need not be fatal for the participatory perspective on liberty. For
it could be held that as long as participation is advocated as desirable, but not
compulsory, then the wishes of those who desire to devote themselves to a private
life will be respected.

Civic Republicanism: Problems and Issues

The previous discussion of the two types of liberty is reflected in most of the
analyses on civic republicanism to a greater or lesser degree. This has led Andrew
Peterson to distinguish between what he terms “intrinsic republicans” and “instru-
mental republicans” (Peterson 2011, pp. 57–76). Whereas the former see participa-
tion in governance and public life as intrinsically worthwhile, the latter see
participation as only instrumental to securing liberties, especially nondomination.
An instrumentalist will therefore acknowledge the right of citizens not to participate,
if they so wish: but would, nevertheless, strongly advise in favor of participation if
only on prudentialist grounds. Peterson’s distinction reflects the tension – possibly
4 Civic Republicanism, Citizenship and Education 59

an inevitable tension – between community and liberty. Civic republicanism does

not so much solve or dissipate this tension but rather provides scenarios in which this
tension can be played out in a productive way. One could imagine, for example, a
range of different kinds of republic – some in which citizens eagerly participated in
public affairs and others in which participation was seen as a burdensome, but
necessary, obligation. Possibly, then, one can envisage different “cultures of liberty”
in which some cultures will be strongly individualistic and others may be more
communitarian. It should not be too difficult, therefore, to envisage different ways in
which the practice of liberty could be enacted without there being only one “true”
practice.
A useful perspective on the tensions within the republican perspective has been
put forward by Honohan. She suggests that we should reject the traditional liberal
dichotomy between public and private person and acknowledge that each person has
both a private and a public identity: “Public and private are not primarily opposed as
two separate sphere, but as different orientations within individuals” (Honohan,
p. 158). It follows that one of the virtues or dispositions required by republicanism
is that of recognizing the public good, and this disposition may grow and develop in
an individual. The perspective that “everyone has both a public and a private
interest” (p. 159) is helpful because it is something that all civic republicans could
recognize – the fact that each citizen has a public interest (and a public identity) as
well as a private one. This commitment to the public interest distinguishes the
republican from the liberal; for the latter, it is entirely contingent that a citizen has
a public identity. For a republican, this is a requirement for each and every citizen,
but for the liberal, the public interest can be managed by the state, leaving the
individual to pursue her private pursuits if she so wishes.
Should a republic aim at harmony or encourage a more contestatory political
culture? There seems to be some measure of agreement here – namely that vigorous
contestation should be regarded as the norm of political discourse and activity. In the
Discourses, Machiavelli praised the willingness of citizens of Republican Rome to
engage in conflict if their liberties seemed threatened (Machiavelli 1960, p. 115) and,
indeed, stated that the establishment of liberty could only arise from conflict. Pettit
takes up this theme with enthusiasm, calling for “contestatory vigilance” (Pettit
2012, pp. 227–278). The thought here is that despots of whatever hue always
encourage peace, quiet, and harmony under the guise of the suppression of liberties.
However, a flourishing contestatory culture does not seem to be a requirement for
republicanism. Instead, it is not too difficult to envisage a republic whose citizens
strive to understand different points of view, motivated by the belief that harmony is
something worth cherishing.
Therefore, how should republicans understand the issue of sovereignty? Pettit
suggests a distinction between the Continental tradition (of whom Rousseau is an
example) and what he terms the Italian-Atlantic tradition. For Rousseau, citizens
meeting together formed a single body from which authority and legitimacy flowed.
Pettit notes that in this respect, Rousseau was following Hobbes in the belief that
sovereignty had to be unique and undivided – a single unity (Pettit 2012, pp. 12–18).
Pettit goes on to propose that a mixed constitution is to be preferred and here he
60 G. Hinchliffe

follows the American Founding Fathers in their desire to ensure that sovereignty be
distributed in a form of mixed government. The following reflections by Madison
are as pertinent today as when he first wrote them down in 1788:

. . .there are particular moments in public affairs when the people, stimulated by some
irregular passion, or some illicit advantage or misled by the artful representations of
interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most
ready to lament and condemn. (Hamilton 1970, Paper 63, p. 322)

Thus, Pettit suggests that a mixed form of government is necessary, with separate
powers for the judiciary, the Executive to be separated from the legislature and for
the latter to be divided (for example, a Senate and a House of Representatives) so
that any hasty decisions can be reviewed and scrutinized (Honohan, p. 235).
One issue with contemporary relevance is whether the republic should be con-
fined to, and be identical with, a nation state. Pettit suggests that this is preferable
since the possibilities of exercising full control over government and the state might
otherwise be diminished (Pettit 2012, pp. 160–166). Honohan, however, takes a
different view: she argues that a republic is based on interdependence rather than
commonality (p. 189). If we envisage a republic as founded on a shared love of
liberty then, arguably, this particular tie between individuals is even more important
than shared ethnicity or cultural heritage. This particular question is far from being
an academic one, as illustrated by the relation of the United Kingdom to the
European Union. In principle, there is no reason why a republic should not share
sovereignty with other republics for purposes of common defense, foreign policy,
and commerce. But from a republican standpoint, the EU could be seen as problem-
atic in two respects. First, the legislature of the EU cannot of itself initiate legislation,
although it can review and veto legislative proposals. Second, the limits of EU
sovereignty are to be found in the various pieces of legislation but there is no clear,
straightforward statement of the extent and the limits of that sovereignty. These two
factors combine to give the EU Commission perhaps greater prominence then one
would expect from what is essentially a civil service, even though it is ultimately
beholden to the Council of Ministers (the elected representatives of each member
state). However, whether these reflections are sufficient to justify leaving the EU
(as opposed to trying to reform it by giving the EU Parliament powers to initiate
legislation, for example) is quite another matter.
It was noted earlier in this chapter that civic republicanism is distinct from both
communitarianism and liberalism. Some further remarks can now be usefully made.
For some civic republicans, the role of citizenship must be an active one: this is the
view not only of Honohan and Peterson but also that of Pettit, who has elaborated at
some length the requirements needed so that citizens are able to actively “control”
the state, both in its legislative and executive capacity (Pettit 2012, especially
Chap. 3). For other advocates of republicanism, a less active role is possible
provided the mechanisms and procedures of mixed government are firmly in place
(cf. Skinner (2002) and Hinchliffe (2015)). But whatever these differences in
emphasis, it would be fair to say that for all civic republicans the concept of liberty
4 Civic Republicanism, Citizenship and Education 61

plays a key and central role. In this respect, republicanism can be seen as a
“comprehensive doctrine” in the Rawlsian sense. In his work, Political Liberalism,
Rawls states that a “comprehensive” doctrine encompasses not only the role of
political institutions but also morality and which personal goals are worthwhile
having. By contrast, political liberalism assumes the fact of a plurality of compre-
hensive doctrines held by different groups of people: the task is to find a method of
ensuring cooperation between them under conditions of fairness (Rawls 1993). Thus
the concept of liberty, according to the Rawlsian perspective, could be said to be a
“thin” one in that, unlike republicanism, Rawls does not advocate the pursuit of
liberty as a key motivating concern for all citizens, whatever other moral or religious
beliefs they might hold. While advocates of republicanism certainly acknowledge
the fact of a plurality of doctrines in any modern society, the key shared value is a
love of liberty. These shared values are what unite the citizens of a republic. The
implication, therefore, is that republicanism is closer to a comprehensive doctrine
than it is to political liberalism as such.

Implications for Citizenship Education

How might the ideas of civic republicanism translate into civic education? A brief
look at the recent history of civic education in England reveals some of the tensions
discussed above. The Advisory Group on Education for Citizenship and the Teach-
ing of Democracy in Schools, chaired by Professor Bernard Crick was set up by the
UK government after the election of the Labour Party in 1997; its deliberations are
often referred to as the “Crick Report,” which laid down the foundations of modern
citizenship education in England. In this report, it is stated:

‛Active citizenship’ is our aim throughout. Part One of this report states the case for positive
relationships with the local community, local and national voluntary bodies, whether
concerned with local, national or international affairs. (Crick 1998, p. 27)

There is increasing recognition that the ethos, organisation, structures and daily practices of
schools, including whole-school activities and assemblies have a significant impact on the
effectiveness of citizenship education. (Crick 1998, p. 36)

The suggestion throughout the report is that rights are dependent upon the active
exercise of duty within a community framework. Although freedom of the press is
mentioned several times, nowhere in the report is there a discussion of freedom or
liberty as forming the basis of citizenship. The emphasis throughout is on citizens as
members of a community. Although the report is presented in terms of civic
republicanism a possible criticism of it is that it is more communitarian in spirit.
Bernard Crick himself did comment subsequently that possibly not all members
of the Advisory Group may have known that they were proposing an Aristotelian
conception of citizenship (see Crick 2003, pp. 21–22) and goes on to suggest that the
“case for active, adult citizenship should not be overstated” (p. 23). Nevertheless, it
62 G. Hinchliffe

was a prescriptive Aristotelianism that did prevail and the notion of citizenship was
widened in its actual implementation in schools to include work experience, volun-
tary work, and any kind of community involvement (see the analysis of citizenship
education in action in the England by Lee Jerome (2012), pp. 122, 161–163).
Citizenship education, according to Jerome, was enthusiastically adopted by many
teachers but there was often an emphasis on practical activities aimed at developing a
sense of responsibility and maturity at the expense of discussions on political
processes and ideas. While there is much in the Crick Report which is very welcome
(for example, the clear statement of curriculum requirements in the recommenda-
tions), the emphasis on responsibilities and the requirements of “active citizenship”
conveys a clear sense that community is prior to the individual. In the report, the term
“responsibilities” occurs twice as much as that of “freedom.”
But while it is true that in England citizenship education often takes the form of
volunteering and outdoor activities, it is also the case that the initiative established in
2002 has delivered results that are clearly acceptable from a republican standpoint.
Thus in a review of citizenship education, Whitely (Whiteley 2013) reports that the
subject had a positive impact on three key components of civic engagement: efficacy,
political participation, and political knowledge. Furthermore, the national curricu-
lum for schools provides not only for appropriate knowledge acquisition but also
developing reasoning and evaluation capabilities. For Key Stage 3 (i.e., children
aged 11–14 years), for example, the national curriculum for citizenship states that:

Teaching should develop pupils’ understanding of democracy, government and the rights
and responsibilities of citizens. Pupils should use and apply their knowledge and under-
standing whilst developing skills to research and interrogate evidence, debate and evaluate
viewpoints, present reasoned arguments and take informed action. (Dept of Education)

There is little here, I suggest, with which any republican would wish to quarrel.
Given that there is much to be positive about the current provision of citizenship
education (at least, in schools), from a civic republican standpoint what else is
needed? What appears to be lacking from the curriculum, from a republican stand-
point, is a narrative that presents liberty as a central element of the political identity
of citizens.
What kind of features might such a narrative contain? Certainly there should be
some knowledge of the history of struggles of liberty and how what counts as
subjects of liberty was progressively expanded. For example, attention needs to be
paid to the suffragettes and the role of the antislavery movement in the United States
and elsewhere. This would include a narrative of specific figures such as Frederick
Douglass and W. Du Bois. But also, attention could be paid to those episodes of
history sometimes neglected in schools. As far as Britain is concerned, this would
include the English Civil War and the loss of the US colonies a century later.
Possibly a historical narrative that has a focus on the rise of citizenship would also
spend slightly less time on the Tudors, eminent Victorians and the causes of World
War 1. But it would include some account of the important stand taken by Churchill
in May 1940. Such a narrative – a narrative of liberty – is not easy to present in the
4 Civic Republicanism, Citizenship and Education 63

UK because it inevitably involves taking a critical stance regarding the role of

Empire, not to mention that of England’s first colony – Ireland. British history is
complex precisely because the same country can be described both in terms that
emphasize the growth of empire and subjection and the promulgation of ideas of
liberty both at home and abroad. This inheritance is still very much alive today:
“British values” are a contested domain. Nevertheless, the role of liberty could be
emphasized less as a triumph of British supremacy and more as a struggle for self-
rule and against domination. Republicans, therefore, would be keen to present
(as part of a curriculum) a narrative of liberty which weaves a trajectory through
Renaissance Florence and Northern Italy, through to the Putney Debates of 1647 and
the struggle for American independence in 1776, up to the present time (there is
some limited recognition of this alternative tradition in the mainstream media – see
David Marquand, The Guardian Dec 2017). One of the features of such a narrative is
that it presents an inclusive picture of citizens united in struggles against domination.
The attitude of American colonists regarding slavery and Cromwell’s treatment of
Ireland need not be ducked; a critical attitude to a narrative of liberty is no bad thing.
Perhaps, through such a narrative, persons will be induced to cultivate a love for
liberty – a love that is an indelible part of one’s identity such that without one’s
freedom, life is cheapened and sullied.
Such a narrative needs also to cultivate a democratic sensibility. For example, it
can sometimes be difficult to understand that a democratic process does not exist
simply so that one side can win the argument and vanquish the losers. For a
commitment to a democratic process is essentially a nonperfectionist commitment:
that is, the outcome is almost bound to be less than perfect. If one craves political
certainty then engaging in a democratic process is most emphatically not the way to
achieve it. The commitment to nonperfectionism enshrined in democratic process is
fundamental. For the process in question asks participants not to demand certainty;
indeed, it asks of them to embrace uncertainty in so far as any outcome achieved is
not only not perfect but is also very often provisional. This is because the outcome
itself is subject to scrutiny and revision, which applies not only, of course, to policies
which are adopted but also to government itself, through regular elections.
The notion that “uncertainty” may play a role in democratic politics can be a
difficult lesson to learn for some; but that for which they crave – certainty –
democracy can never deliver for them. And those who favor “actions over mere
words” as a way of delivering certainty merely exhibit a sensibility which is
profoundly undemocratic because, as Hannah Arendt suggests, in democratic gov-
ernance, words count for everything. Thus, the cultivation of what might be termed
“democratic uncertainty” is best placed to undermine the self-certainty and self-
entitlement that often accompany prejudice. It introduces the possibility that one’s
deeply held beliefs are not as obvious as one might assume, that listening to the
narratives and personal testimony of others may sow the seeds of doubt, and that
there is a virtue in being open to persuasion. Perhaps we need an education which
proclaims that, as far as civic affairs are concerned, a degree of uncertainty may be
no bad thing. Civic republicans have a strong regard for maintaining and nurturing
public institutions that make liberty possible. They understand that the craving for
64 G. Hinchliffe

political certainty may undermine those institutions and leave a large part of the
population (the losers in a political debate) permanently disaffected. A skepticism
regarding the role of political certainty marks the limits of a contestatory political
culture, and this skepticism needs to be reflected in the deliverances of civic
education.
Thus a civic education needs to encourage a democratic sensibility that cultivates
a degree of uncertainty in its citizens; an awareness that there are rarely easy answers
and that one’s own principles – and even dearly held prejudices – are subject to
revision and examination. In addition, such a sensibility involves acceptance that the
implementation of policies will be gradual and experimental so that there is time and
space to reflect on the effects and consequences of fresh policy. And above all, it
would be a civic education that introduces the notion that an acknowledgement of
imperfections and uncertainties is not a sign of weakness but rather signifies the
flourishing of a healthy democratic culture.

Conclusion

One of the main strengths of civic republicanism is its strong sense of history. Civic
republicans – whatever their differences – see republicanism as a living tradition that
stretches back over the centuries. This refusal to disconnect the present from the past
gives republicans a critical perspective that is largely lacking in many contemporary
liberal democracies. Republicans know how fragile and precious those hard-won
liberties are. There are two implications here. The first is that any program of civic
education needs to contain a historical narrative in order to sustain the living
tradition mentioned earlier. For republicans, history is never just a past, remote
series of disjointed events that have only a contingent connection with the present.
Thus the recovery of the republican tradition by historians such as Quentin Skinner
needs to have a resonance in the political culture more generally. Whereas, in
England it is fair to say that the struggles and issues of the seventeenth century
civil war (for example) are nowadays little known and discussed in public debate. It
has become the preserve of a few specialists and enthusiasts for re-enacting historical
battles. The wider implications of seventeenth century republicanism are seldom
discussed and certainly do not figure very strongly in the current national curriculum.
The second implication of developing republicanism as a living tradition is that
we may be able to see political debate in a different light. That is, we may learn to see
debate as educative in itself, as a way of developing political education. The thought
here is not that adversarial politics should be discouraged but that through listening
to political opponents one might actually learn something. This, after all, is the point
of dialogue: not simply to score points but to avail oneself of different points of view
and benefit accordingly. To this extent, civic education does not merely take the form
of a subject in the curriculum but is rather part of a wider culture in which political
education is shared by all. This was certainly the belief of Madison and Hamilton
back in the 1780s – we can still learn much from those gentlemen.
4 Civic Republicanism, Citizenship and Education 65

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Arendt, Citizenship, and Education
5
Ramona Mihăilă and George Lăzăroiu

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
Educational Citizenship Behavior: Arendt’s Notion of a Republic of Citizens United
by a Plural Collective Public Arena . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
The Plurality of Individuals and the Political Realm Between Them . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
Arendt’s Phenomenology of Action, the Morality of Politically Shared Citizenship
Education, and the Public Sphere . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77

Abstract
This chapter focuses on Arendt’s notion of a republic of citizens united by a plural
collective public arena. First, we clarify that, for Arendt, authentic self-
determination means cooperatively bringing the human aptitude for action to
refer to whatever is inaccurate in the joint arrangements. Political realms where
individuals represent themselves materialize whenever citizens constitute them.
The collaborative, disorganized architecture of the council system (an inverted
political structure centered on local legislative bodies that are accessible to all
individuals and so enable them to be involved in the government) functions as a
series of interlinked arenas for democratic purposes and as a catalyst for empha-
sizing the meaning of the citizens’ community. What concerns power is the
protest of individuals – their vigorous demonstrations in public spaces to
R. Mihăilă (*)
Dimitrie Cantemir Christian University, Bucharest, Romania
e-mail: [email protected]
G. Lăzăroiu
The Cognitive Labor Institute, New York City, NY, USA
Spiru Haret University, Bucharest, Romania
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 67

A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_49
68 R. Mihăilă and G. Lăzăroiu

convince other people of their ideas. Second, we observe that, for Arendt,
educational action supplies individuals with a withdrawal from the deep-rooted,
shaping, multiple self. The substance of politics is action as laws and institutions
provide the fabric for action that can demand underlying relevance, self-
containedness, and thus freedom. Individuals are plural beings who aim to
perform and to reveal themselves, requiring a political arena of actualization to
do so. As individuals are social, political action is a question of cooperation
between peers. Individuals are outstanding when they exhibit their distinct
individualities in the public arena. Citizens acting cooperatively identify among
themselves an efficiency somewhat inconsistent with their individual resources.
Third, we hold that, for Arendt, the public educational sphere cannot be
established in official and actual terms but becomes a reality when individuals
participate in action in relation to human meaning. Human status, i.e., the right to
citizenship, represents a transcendent standard. In the public sphere, the social
self must be permanently assertive.

Keywords
Educational citizenship · Individual · Political realm · Action · Democracy

Introduction

Arendt’s goal of authentic citizenship education is rigorous and ambitious: individ-

uals can cohabit as a principled and human collective mainly when unbounded
morality and material interests do not influence the purpose and the character of
politics. Politics deprived of the appeals of the body and conscience may eventually
satisfy the real moral and material concerns of individuals in satisfactory ways for
them. Suitably grasped and implemented, politics provides a framework for person-
ality, integrates reality into ordinary existence (Mihăilă et al. 2016), supplies the
infrastructure of community, and furthers the accomplishment of human excellence.
The reality of political life (Lăzăroiu 2017a,b) represents a phenomenon which can
be comprehended chiefly in the discourse individuals employ in the public space.
For Arendt, the concept of self-government as public action in the form of commu-
nication and performance between citizens provides the starting place of politics
(Nica 2017). The objective of politics is to supply a public realm in which individ-
uals can perform remarkably (Buckler 2011) and can display themselves as citizens
in their action. Imagination, essential to the mechanisms of action and judgment, by
facilitating political participants and onlookers to conceptualize a new realm that is
in contradistinction to the social interactions that exist (Tyner 2017), can be instru-
mental here as it is the mental capacity specifically appropriate to the investigation of
politics and history that rely for their actuality and significance (Lăzăroiu 2013) on
the human mind’s ability to think logically beyond common judgment (Arendt
1961). Politics constitutes the routine of civic life mitigated by a fashionable
responsiveness to the demands of imagination and meaning, politics and human
5 Arendt, Citizenship, and Education 69

meaning are feasible primarily with the accomplishment of freedom, and in its
legitimate and imaginative aspects, politics develops on the foundation of self-
government (Dossa 1989).
The main contribution this chapter has to mainstream educational thinking on
Arendt is by clarifying her notion of a republic of citizens united by a plural
collective public arena, together with the implications of her thinking for citizenship
education. We show how her relationship between political engagement and public
pedagogy articulates a convincing approach to the values of democratic pedagogy
and how her concept of phenomenology of action in the public sphere shapes the
morality of politically shared citizenship education.

Educational Citizenship Behavior: Arendt’s Notion of a Republic

of Citizens United by a Plural Collective Public Arena

As Arendt clarifies, authentic self-determination means cooperatively bringing the

human aptitude for action to refer to whatever is inaccurate in the collective arrange-
ments. Becoming a self-governing citizen necessitates realism, the dissatisfied identi-
fication both of a person’s genuine, exemplary self and of his/her socially assigned
categories. Educational society, training citizens for actively responsible roles, is a
dynamic, self-ruling agent purposeful in managing individuals, assimilating them, and
rendering them vulnerable. The social endangers and eventually consumes privacy
and public life. The social is a totality of individuals who regulate themselves in such a
manner (Curtis 2001) that they cannot dictate the large-scale outcome of their activ-
ities. The social (as self-seeking assimilationism) may be improved and become
ubiquitous largely with the disintegration of society (as a class system of reputation
and rating). The social is a double menace, threatening both distinctive personality and
unplanned action (Arendt 1963a). Institutional structures are not physical procedures,
comprising the patterned behavior and the connections between their actors (Mihăilă
et al. 2016), but they have a definite determination or inertia, intimidating non-
compliant participants. Institutional structures significantly impede the matters of
instrumentality, culpability, necessity, and independence and consequently the pros-
pects for invalidating the social (Pitkin 1998).
It is clear from the foregoing that the tremendous threat of modernity is that
individuals are unceasingly releasing further cataclysm, activating pseudo-natural
energies that may destroy civilization. Irrationally, individuals can subvert human-
ism, employing their power to degrade themselves and any other people to some-
thing unhuman. The destiny of stateless individuals proves that the universal human
rights that should belong to human beings can basically be demanded by citizens.
Arendt writes that the economic growth has brought about the contrived compulsion
of modern society (Nica 2017), in which individuals are excessively captivated by
consumption to be implicated in citizenship education. Individuals can thoroughly
carry out their identity as human beings (Lăzăroiu 2017a,b) first and foremost in the
public arena. Arendt (1963a) posits that human beings are not mechanical devices:
they are not confined to ordinary expected behavior (Nica 2018), and their endeavors
70 R. Mihăilă and G. Lăzăroiu

cannot be comprised by the idea of pursuing means in relation to an objective.

Personal morality cannot offer adequate protection against political evil. Action as
speech is legitimate politics, consonance and compliance establish republics, and
cooperation creates power (Canovan 1992).
Arendt asserts that citizens find again their interconnection and their own assess-
ment through being seen and heard by other individuals. Political realms where
individuals represent themselves materialize whenever citizens constitute them. The
collaborative, disorganized architecture of the council system functions as a series of
interlinked arenas for democratic purposes (Mihăilă et al. 2016) and as a catalyst for
emphasizing the meaning of the citizens’ community. Individuals are born not as
separate persons (Nixon 2015), but into communities. There cannot be an educational
democracy without perpetually jointed diversity. Current technologies necessitate
accurate appraisal for their capacity to subdue plurality. The social issue of pauperism
restores the state to the governance of citizens as if they were inanimate (Lane 2001).
The ideas discussed here imply that polls, like pointless requests for donation,
indicate either having been defeated or been deceived of one’s point of view. The
absolute control of totalitarian governments (their eradication of human self-
government) was the advent of pervasive malevolence in the world. While humans
are collective, the privilege to be autonomous (Topolski 2008) is the completion of
political revolution. The educational abilities to perform and to communicate are the
essential requirements of political freedom. Arendt thinks that a gulf swiftly broke
open between former times and time ahead when the extension of established norms
traversing the passage of time (Lăzăroiu 2013) was silenced by the previously
unanticipated political atrocities of totalitarianism (Arendt 1951). This gulf is defi-
cient in all spatial elements, including depth, as it is immeasurable. In the crevasse of
complete extermination, no settlement is feasible. If Christian belief had been
widespread across the twentieth century, its apprehensiveness of purgatory would
have hampered the dreadfulness of totalitarian oppression (Kohn 2018).
Arendt points out that totalitarianism denotes a kind of government that, no
longer endorsing the confined goals of classical tyranny, requires ceaseless involve-
ment of its subjects and does not allow society to stabilize into a long-lasting,
stratified order (Arendt 1951). Totalitarian dictatorship governs through absolute
intimidation; pursues, by use of the secret police forces, neutral opponents who are
generally not subjective contestants of, or authentic menaces to, the regime; provides
a wide-ranging ideological fabric that condenses the intricacy of life in a definite,
indubitable, reality-resistant prerequisite that tolerates no cognitive disharmony; and
is established on a practice of mass plethora accompanying the increasing freedom of
movement (Nica 2017), vulnerability, and “worldlessness” of present-day individ-
uals. Totalitarian governments, instead of stabilizing the moment they acquire
complete authority over the state, are set in motion perpetually toward world
oppression (Arendt 1951). Their domestic citizenries are constantly catalyzed
(Mihăilă et al. 2016) through armed conflicts, offensives, combats, or suppressions.
The decision of the chief and that of the citizens must steadily be carried out to bring
about the intolerable, oppose regression, and quicken the trajectory of the world in
the direction of its disastrous, if never achieved, completion (Baehr 2010).
5 Arendt, Citizenship, and Education 71

The line of reasoning throughout the above discussion is consistent with the
notion that to be political is equivalent with the claim to high standard and human
status. Between individuals who share a collective realm (Lăzăroiu 2017a,b), excel-
lence can be obtained in politics. In the human circumstances in which citizens find
themselves, such high standard stressed openly is the best individuals can and should
aim, that is, the human good – a mundane one to be differentiated from intrinsically
unworldly moral and natural goods. Such a worldly good is simultaneously a
transcendent one. Politics needs criteria of action: outstanding acts which traverse
the design of structured behavior (Arendt 1969). Political theory is a distinct manner
of conceptualizing the world, exactly as politics constitutes a particular mode of
collective existence. Arendt (1951) points out that educational politics is the con-
struction of the predominant or underlying reality wherever individuals cohabit in a
regulated way; counterbalances the norms inherent in the notion of character, in
either its ethical or appetitive sense; and sets up the constructive grounds of symbolic
and factual order: it defines the nature and the boundaries of human connections in
the shared realm. According to Arendt, in and through politics, individuals are
indebted to an unambiguous inventory of rights (Lăzăroiu 2013; Popescu 2018),
moral obligations, and social accountabilities. Reality and fundamental cohesion are
two facets of a well-defined configuration of shared life (politics). In its authentic
sense, self-government represents a political phenomenon. For Arendt, the concept
of reality is inherently associated with that of autonomy: at this level politics
represents the confirmation and the developing of freedom into an unbiased reality.
Surprisingly, self-government is as much the influential impetus of politics as it
constitutes a possible menace to its reality. As politics is inconceivable without the
truthfulness of human self-government, then autonomy is impossible outside the
configuration of ultimate accountability which politics determines (Dossa 1989).

The Plurality of Individuals and the Political Realm Between Them

As Arendt puts it, the rights of individual cannot be detached from those of the
citizen. Without inclusion in a collective of citizens, the rights of individual do not
have an objective reality. The rights of individual are to the greatest extent for people
who hold the rights of the citizen, that is, persons who are members of a prearranged
group, which is the requirement for the right of free speaking and action. Centered on
the quality of public instruction, educational politics is based on a power that cannot
be shared (Nica 2017) and should not be regulated. Political freedom is deferred for a
few individuals, despite the fact that politics has implications for all citizens. The
political elite encompasses persons in public positions who were neither selected
from above nor backed from below. It can be argued their prerogatives to these roles
depend exclusively on their drive for public contentment and self-determination and
on their aptitudes to serve such goals. Arendt (1969) holds that autonomous gov-
ernments should not accomplish administrative duties (Mihăilă et al. 2016), and the
revolutionary councils should not have felt compelled to do so. A power might
emerge from the concerted action of citizens who can produce and express beliefs
72 R. Mihăilă and G. Lăzăroiu

particular to each individual, to challenge such points of view and to proceed with
each other regardless of their dissimilarities. The defiance of discrepancies is indis-
pensable to the survival of public realm as an arena of manifestation of individual
freedom (Colliot-Thélène 2018).
These considerations suggest that righteous political undertaking should be
distinguished from personal morality that does not cover the public sphere (Nica
2018) but links between private individuals or the connection of a human being with
himself/herself. Educational politics has a specific morality, emerging from the
circumstances of action among plural individuals. Arendt (1969) contends the
citizen migrates from private to public sphere without leaving distinctiveness
behind. The citizens populate the same public realm, share its joint interests,
recognize its standards, and are immersed in its maintenance (Mihăilă 2017) and
in attaining a functioning concession when they are dissimilar. Individuals are plural
beings, distinct persons capable of ceaseless disillusions. Arendt states that totali-
tarian terror deprives individuals of their plurality and freedom for the purpose of
degrading them to an animal species (Arendt 1951). Individuals are implausibly to
be thoroughly human (Lăzăroiu 2017a,b) without populating a man-made realm in
addition to inhabiting the natural earth. The arena in which reality emerges is the
public and political realm which plural individuals can constitute among themselves.
Arendt (1969) remarks that plurality enables reality to be assimilated. Self-determi-
nation is the practical knowledge of the reality in the arena cleared by the diverse
perspectives of plural individuals who expose among them a realm in which reality
may emerge and be perceived from all sides (Canovan 1992).
Arendt remarks that educational political power is not brought about by individ-
uals discussing with their companions about themselves, their kinsfolk, or their
occupations. What concerns power is the protest of individuals, their demonstration
with vigor in public to convince other people of their ideas. An event is non-
discriminatory, it clashes numerous citizens (Mihăilă et al. 2016), and its aftereffects
influence a mass of various individuals. The effectualness comprised within an event
is the capacity of people who identify their endowment to render it manageable. The
prerequisite of that manageability is political commonalty (accomplished public
sphere), from which the characteristic or image of human injustice is canceled out.
The council structure of governance is the positive antithesis to totalitarianism
(Kohn 2018). Embracing an existential idea of Judaism, Arendt brings to light a
concealed established practice within the awareness of the pariah and analyzes the
issue of the Jewish people’s political system. The destiny of Judaism should be
defined politically and culturally by all Jews. Arendt condemns the position of the
Jewish Councils throughout the Holocaust and has reservations about the human
readiness for autonomy of action (Markell 2006) under totalitarian circumstances
(Arendt 1951). Jewry should abandon the notorious historical patterns, both the
fashionable ones to the extent that they entail integration, in addition to established
religious models insofar as they mean following religious laws or focusing on
folklore. Arendt’s opinion that the ecclesiastical and cultural works of art from
Germany and Eastern Europe should arrive finally primarily in Israel is an issue of
traditional government in conjunction with political realism (Knott 2017).
5 Arendt, Citizenship, and Education 73

The discussion above has shown that totalitarianism encompasses a bizarre mix
of fearfulness and ideology, while its targets, once authentic enemies are extermi-
nated, constitute notably social categories. Terror is absolute insofar as no individual
is informed who will be the next casualty, notwithstanding how obedient they are
(Arendt 1951). Totalitarianism was especially a movement and a range of institu-
tions, and not a system of notions. Totalitarian governments are the exact opposite of
bureaucracy (Nica 2017), as they allow no space for positive law, cohesion, or
expectedness. Such regimes set free relentless, tumultuous movements. Totalitarian
societies are classless. On Arendt’s reading, concentration camp prisoners are
entirely vulnerable and, without agency, excepting their general human features of
extemporaneity, plurality, and untrustworthiness that the regime vigorously
endeavors to eradicate. Arendt focuses on the educational public sphere as an
arena in which political participants can convey their legitimacy (Lăzăroiu 2013),
lending relevance and implication to an, in different circumstances, ephemeral,
private existence. Indignation is fundamentally a non-political approach. Insofar as
indignant individuals repudiate the world and its shortcomings, they are enthralled
by the elaborate assertions of totalitarian movements (Baehr 2010).
Arendt notes that totalitarianism is not demarcated by its broad ill-treatment of
freedom (as regarding tyranny), but by its revelation that self-government can be
employed to eradicate its own requirements of permanence: plurality and individu-
ality. Totalitarianism represents a practice in the invalidation of autonomy and self-
control and the discretionary mastery of citizens. Freedom is the archetypal element
of the public-political sphere (Popescu 2018) and fundamentally is equivalent with
action in which freedom is reified as a mundane event, as differentiated from a
conceptual claim to educational self-government (Arendt 1951). Human existence
demands that a universal component triggers the uniqueness of historical expression.
Unconstrained relativism and the nonexistence of a pecking order in knowledge and
awareness impede both human significance and moral boundaries. The new foun-
dation of judgment and assistance should be identified in the sphere of human affairs.
As the former times of citizens’ present is a testimony of predictability and violence,
the articulation and the criteria of the original starting point are instrumental in the
exploration of the new politics. Arendt (1951) insists that the educational public
sphere, a contrived array of activities (Mihăilă et al. 2016), sets up its specific realm
against the imperative and incessant claims of nature. The latter is constantly
imminent in invading the public sphere physically and spiritually, as it is the
personification of the organic energy which is the origin of corporeal life, but
detrimental to authentic human life. Arendt (1951) points out that the link between
nature and politics is stringently opposed. Distinguishing the persistent properties of
individuals in relation to their previous times or projected future (Nica 2018) does
not preclude unanticipated actions by people. A general human character, or one
corresponding to the attributes of objects things, does not typify citizens. The evil
that individuals do is attributable to the inconsistent character of their collective
public life. Arendt (1969) explains that the nature of individuals is intrinsically and
enduringly volatile and questionable. Individuals are shaped up by the behavior of
other persons, by natural facts, and by deeds. People and things constitute the
74 R. Mihăilă and G. Lăzăroiu

circumstances of life, without determining it. Human existence is an assimilated

practice collectively: no citizen can live uncooperatively or function as a sovereign
person. To know human character means to know individuals in the human condi-
tion that however does not personify the entirety of the nature of man (Dossa 1989).

Arendt’s Phenomenology of Action, the Morality of Politically

Shared Citizenship Education, and the Public Sphere

Arendt observes that educational action supplies individuals with a withdrawal from
the deep-rooted, shaping, multiple self. The substance of politics is action. Laws and
institutions provide the fabric for action that can demand underlying relevance, self-
containedness, and thus freedom. Political action goes beyond the moral standards
that regulate traditional human behavior. The political undertaking and speech of
individuals are archetypal, self-contained activities. Political action is citizens’ most
illusory (Popescu 2017) and revealing activity. The phenomenality of the public
sphere is the chief constitutive requirement of its meaningfulness. The public space
is a domain unto itself (Lăzăroiu 2013), disconnected by a broad gap from the
concerns and aspirations that constitute civil society. Arendt remarks that with the
advent of the underprivileged on the political arena, the public sphere and the self-
determination characteristic to it are overpowered by the stream of unsatisfied human
demands (Mihăilă et al. 2016) released from their space of concealment. Provided
that biological necessity constitutes an intricate feature of the human condition
(Arendt 1958), autonomy is achievable by and large via the rigorous demarcation
of endeavors involving the life process and activities covering politics. The political
community is a mechanism toward the completion of self-government. The perfor-
mative nature of action offers the circumstances of action’s inherent meaning or
value and its self-determination and materiality (Villa 1996).
The above arguments suggest that the activity of the mind is a collectively
dialogic practice that takes place outside, or beyond the bounds of, the practical
realm of the ordinary life citizens share with others. The requirement to abandon the
community is as much an indispensable component of the human condition (Nica
2017) as the obligation to be present in the community (Arendt 1958). Thinking is a
private, apolitical undertaking that occurs in addition to ordinary practical affairs.
Through praxis individuals create their realm (Schutz 2002), an arena that in concert
gathers citizens together as one person and disconnects each of them as people
(Duarte 2001).
When Arendt displays distinctive individuality as the critical value to which
undertaking is a channel, practical repercussions appear quite insignificant. Fellow
individuals constitute a public before whom the separate participant performs,
aiming to do something remarkable and attain perpetuity through them. When
Arendt displays educational action as the authentic objective, which presumes
distinctive individuality as a channel, fellow individuals perform as co-participants
rather than constituting a public (Mihăilă et al. 2016), and politics deals chiefly with
establishing and supporting the collective realm, and not with oneself. The single
5 Arendt, Citizenship, and Education 75

most important aspect to grasp about individuals is the capacity for performance
(Mihăilă 2017), which is invariably and unquestionably distinct. Thinking, as a self-
governing individual, encompasses constituting and pursuing one’s own judgment
and nevertheless paying attention to and showing consideration for the ideas of one’s
fellow individuals (Pitkin 1998).
According to this discussion, individuals are plural beings who aim to perform
and to reveal themselves, requiring a political arena of actualization so as to do it. As
individuals are plural, political action is a question of cooperation between peers.
Arendt observes that individuals are outstanding when they exhibit their distinct
individualities (Gordon 2001) in the public arena. Citizens acting cooperatively
identify among themselves an efficiency somewhat inconsistent with their individual
resources. Educational action is the stage of human self-determination. Arendt
insists that autonomy is a condition in which individuals unceasingly reunite in
vibrant association. The assent on which an autonomous government depends is a
type of collective accountability holding together plural human beings who share
obligation for their joint affairs. The power a government puts into effect is lent to it
by the undertakings of its citizens (Popescu 2017), especially by their consent to
accomplish orders. Common agreement is the most important component of political
power. Republican equality is a characteristic of the political realm between indi-
viduals who populate the same governmental space (Canovan 1992).
Arendt assiduously disputes any concept of world government, as possibly the
utmost imaginable reign of terror. In council structures of government, the lack of
restrictions to migrate, to ponder, and to enforce would be in process at each level,
even though power would be brought about to a large extent in the main levels’
accountability for the accomplishment of the obligations of the supervisory levels.
Council governments would make possible a collective realm, one really brimming
over with concerns and being positioned between the world’s mass of citizens
(Popescu 2018), relating them as dynamic people while preserving enough space
between them so that each can address other persons from his or her distinct
perspective. This intermediate space would be present in any council structure and
in a multiplicity of similar systems of governance (Arendt 1969). Council systems
enable citizens to relate as peers in the arena of ideas and of goods of consumption
and functionality. The intense cognizance of political fairness would impede dis-
crimination by law (Lăzăroiu 2013) and legitimize and substantiate its absence
thoroughly. The council structure of governance would crush the established idea
of state sovereignty. Arendt claims that the process of rationalization is the require-
ment of comprehending events that make increasingly less sense in their display on
the exteriority of the world. The meaning of what has taken place is instrumental in
making sense of what is occurring. A sensed moment, contrasted with simply
impermanent occasions, supplies the cohesion from which individuals can cooperate
into the indefinite future (Kohn 2018).
This strongly suggests that educational ideology is a kind of cognition that is
inferable and advances by deriving everything from that premise. The individual
dominated by an ideology ponders in relation to stereotypes and to logical consis-
tency. Instead of logic being a backing to rational reasoning, it is a surrogate of it
76 R. Mihăilă and G. Lăzăroiu

(Mihăilă 2017), as anything that seems to defy totalitarian logic is marginalized

(Arendt 1951). Ideology represents a manacle of the consciousness, a cerebral
constraint that obstructs the natural thinking mechanism, coercing the participants
who claim to advocate it. Monopolistic party and plural party procedures are, in
numerous decisive aspects, antithetical, but in the indifference they pursue in their
individuals (Roberts-Miller 2002), and in the manipulative function they conferred
to leaders, they are quite similar. On Arendt’s reasoning, educational politics covers
action under circumstances of plurality, whereas aggression is the diametric coun-
terpart of politics. Citizens who disdain voting, or who vote infrequently, are not
dissatisfied with the system intrinsically by its very nature (Mihăilă et al. 2016): they
may unreservedly feel that political procedures function satisfactorily adequate
without them and that modern times are pretty acceptable. Likewise, it is an
inaccuracy to infer that such persons are not honorable citizens. In the political
realm, individuals meet as officially unprejudiced persons who populate a world
conjointly, regardless of disagreeing in myriad other ways (Baehr 2010).
Arendt holds that the educational public sphere cannot be established in official
and actual terms and turns into a reality when individuals participate in action due to
human meaning. Human status represents a transcendent standard. To be rightly
human, individuals should attempt to accomplish what is exemplary in them (Euben
2001), and if the undertaking of high standards involves insensitiveness and aggres-
siveness against other individuals, then that is unreasonable and deplorable but
eventually justifiable (Arendt 1968). The aim of politics necessitates no rationale
beyond itself as the routine of politics permits citizens to be autonomous (Popescu
2017), demand human status, and attain distinct personal identities. Such virtues
possibly intrinsic in politics are feasible enough to cherish politics more than
anything else in the shared life of citizens. Arendt emphasizes that, although the
aim of politics is intrinsic (Nica 2017), the virtues which exonerate politics are
external as individuals regard them highly in their connections. The public nature of
these virtues makes them political ones. Individuals are naturally and persistently
unequal excepting in the sphere of politics. The fairness that people experience in
community is a responsibility of their citizenship education (Popescu 2018), of their
acceptance into the public-political space. Equality keeps going provided that
individuals remain citizens and political actors. Reality constitutes the democratic
judgment of the citizens regarding the legitimacy and pertinence of whatever takes
place in the public arena, whereas politics represents the human assessment of
reality. The public facet of human existence rehabilitates life’s natural meaningless-
ness and enriches the historical accomplishments of individuals with meaning
(Dossa 1989).

Conclusions

Arendt highlights that citizens are typically social participants, public people in the
fearless mould, that is, persons possessed of the suffering spirit, exasperated by
typical criteria of excellence and morality in quest of success. Public citizenship
5 Arendt, Citizenship, and Education 77

education is the starting place of the human sense of veracity and personal unique-
ness (Mihăilă 2017), justifying human freedom and liberating individuals from the
unexciting and relentless ineffectiveness (Popescu 2017) of ordinary life. Citizen-
ship education demands that the participants be constantly aggressive in the private
realm of his life. To discontinue aggression is to risk oppression by other people, loss
of self-government, and thus the likelihood of action and politics (Arendt 1963b). In
the public sphere, the social self must be permanently assertive. In politics the citizen
participates as ruler or as subject. Citizenship education does not thoroughly neces-
sitate or involve the employment of the moral faculty (Mihăilă et al. 2016), despite
the fact that the high probability that the individual is also a moral being. Arendt
(1963b) concludes that the citizen carries out his moral judgment as a private person,
not as a citizen (Nica 2018), on the grounds that moral judgment is a private issue
between an individual and his conscience (Dossa 1989). Political education does not
deteriorate as moral-emotional discourse, because empathy has a valuable role in the
maturing of political agency (Zembylas 2018).

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Rousseau on Citizenship and Education
6
Bjorn Gomes

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
Citizenship in Rousseau’s Thought . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
Amour-propre and the Challenges to Citizenship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
Rousseau’s Educational Project(s): Domestic and Civic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92

Abstract
This chapter examines the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the relationship
between citizenship and education. The section “Citizenship in Rousseau’s
Thought” offers a sketch of Rousseau’s political ideas and his understanding of
the nature, requirements, and duties of citizenship. Section “Amour-propre and
the Challenges to Citizenship” explains why education is required to form
citizens. The chief reason for this turns on Rousseau’s view of the passion of
amour-propre, which, once inflamed, impedes the development of civic virtue
and the performance of citizen duty. In Rousseau’s thought, education has among
its principal aims the prevention of amour-propre’s development into its inflamed
variant. Section “Rousseau’s Educational Project(s): Domestic and Civic” out-
lines Rousseau’s educational project and scholarly disagreements about how we
are to understand it. One influential interpretation holds that Rousseau offers us
two distinct models of education – domestic and civic – which are opposed to one
another. A second, more recent interpretation holds that the two models can be
read as parts of a single scheme. The section examines arguments for both

B. Gomes (*)
Yale-NUS College, Singapore, Singapore
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 79

A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_50
80 B. Gomes

interpretations before proceeding to discuss the details of Rousseau’s educational

project under the second interpretation.

Keywords
Rousseau · Citizenship · Education · Amour propre

Introduction

In the middle of the Discourse on Political Economy, an Encyclopédie entry

published in 1755, Jean-Jacques Rousseau tells the reader that “[t]he fatherland
cannot subsist without freedom, nor freedom without virtue, nor virtue without
citizens. You will have all these if you form citizens; without doing so, you will
have only wicked slaves, beginning with the leaders of the state” (PE 154). In this
statement, Rousseau not only reminds his readers of the great importance of virtuous
citizens to a flourishing republic, he also puts forth an idea that would be central to
his political philosophy, that citizens are not born but raised. The nature of, and
relationship between, citizenship and education form the central concerns of this
chapter. In what follows, we shall examine Rousseau’s views on citizenship
and education more closely and highlight, whenever possible, some of the more
contentious debates surrounding them in the vast and growing literature on the
Genevan’s thought.

Citizenship in Rousseau’s Thought

Establishing Rousseau’s views on citizenship and education must begin with a

sketch of his political ideas, which come most clearly to light in the Social Contract.
The work contains Rousseau’s proposed solution to the problem of finding “a form
of association that defends and protects the person and goods of each associate with
all the common force, and by means of which each one, uniting with all, nevertheless
obeys only himself and remains as free as before” (SC I:vi, 138). The solution, at the
most general level, involves a republican form of association constituted by a
separation of the legislative and executive powers of the state. The executive branch
of the republic – the government – is responsible only for interpreting and executing
the laws defined by a general will (volonté générale) expressed through the
legislative efforts of the sovereign body. The Sovereign, by contrast, is composed
of the people actively exercising their law-making powers in concert; it is a moral
being “to whom the social pact gave existence, and all of whose wills bear the name
of laws” (SW, 73). It is not difficult to appreciate the radical nature of Rousseau’s
project, for he wants to claim that since laws are the expressions of a Sovereign
body constituted by members of the body politic on the one hand, and since no
individual’s will can be represented on the other, all citizens are required to engage in
the legislative functions of the state. Unlike representative democracies where
6 Rousseau on Citizenship and Education 81

citizens typically vote in parliamentary or congressional representatives to make

laws on their behalf, citizens in Rousseau’s ideal republic must bear that responsi-
bility themselves and must do so directly in their own persons.
Two central questions follow from the discussion above. Why does Rousseau
require citizens to perform the arguably difficult task of lawmaking and what exactly
does he mean by the general will? Let us take these questions in turn. Now, we have
already seen that the social compact is, in part, Rousseau’s proposed solution to the
issue of how “each one, uniting with all, [can] nevertheless obey[] only himself and
remain[] as free as before.” Although Rousseau gives us varying accounts of what
freedom consists in, the most relevant definition for our present purposes is that
freedom involves not being subject to the will of another. As he describes it, “liberty
consists less in doing one’s will than in not being subject to someone else’s; it also
consists in not subjecting someone else’s will to ours” (LM, 260–261). In a true
republic governed by laws, citizens are not subject to the will of others but only to
democratically agreed upon laws. Yet if laws are made only by a subset of the
citizenry and applied to the rest, those not involved in the legislative project could be
rendered subject to the former’s will, leaving them without the very freedoms the
social compact is supposed to actualize and defend. To avoid being subject to laws
made by others and having those laws be externally imposed upon them (thus
subjecting them to the wills of others), citizens must all participate in making the
laws that are to govern the republic. Obeying a law I have made for myself, in short,
leaves me free.
It is very important that in voting on the laws, citizens are not to vote in
accordance with the particular or private interests they have as individuals; this
would amount to a mere sum of individual preferences, the will of all. Moreover,
because laws are general rules and apply to all members of the political association,
voting on the lines of one’s private interests can be seen as an attempt to subject
associates to those interests. Rousseau’s republican vision, devised as it is to
circumvent these problems, requires individuals to vote as members of the sovereign
body, purely in terms of their citizen identity. “Indeed,” Rousseau tells us, “each
individual can, as a man, have a private will contrary to or differing from the general
will he has as a Citizen. His private interest can speak to him quite differently from
the common interest” (SC I:vii, 140–141). The general will, in contrast to the will of
all, looks to the common good. Because it tends to the common good – the good of
every member of the republic (of which each is a part) – there is a vital sense in
which voting in accordance with the volonté générale still aims at one’s own good
even when it runs counter to one’s private interests. “In authentic acts of legislation,”
then, “a citizen does not vote for all by voting for himself but ‘votes for himself by
voting for all’” (Gomes 2018, p. 203; Putterman 2010, p. 11). While this is so,
placing the common good above one’s own personal good is no simple undertaking,
given especially the frailties of the human condition (to be detailed in the next
section). It requires no small measure of effort and no small degree of virtue. If
individuals in a republic are to place the common good above their own, they must
possess virtue, that is, they must be citizens. And since civic virtue is not a natural
endowment, citizens must be made. In making these associations, we are returned to
82 B. Gomes

the statement posed at the beginning of this chapter and have accounted for why “t]
he fatherland cannot subsist without freedom, nor freedom without virtue, nor virtue
without citizens.”
This said, we are still without an account of what the general will – the will of a
republic expressed through the lawmaking activities of its citizens – consists
in. David Lay Williams, in his inspired study of the Social Contract, remarks that
“[a]mong the many potential frustrations confronting readers of the Social Contract
is the simple fact that Rousseau never commits to spelling out the meaning of his
most important concept, the general will, in anything approaching a straightforward
or analytic fashion” (Williams 2014, p. 245). In their efforts to make sense of this
vital concept, interpreters disagree strongly on “whether or not the general will is
largely a formal or procedural concept on the one hand, or a substantive one on the
other” (Williams 2014, p. 250). On the procedural reading, the content of the general
will is determined by a set of procedures concerning how laws ought to be made
(Sreenivasan 2000). The will, by itself, has no particular content and aims at no
particular value or set of values. Certainly, Rousseau places a number of procedural
constraints on lawmaking. He insists, for example, that the general will “should
come from all to apply to all” (the double generality rule) where this means that all
citizens must vote on rules that apply to every member of the republic. The general
will “loses its natural rectitude when it is directed toward any individual, determinate
object” (SC II:iv, 149). He requires, moreover, that deliberation occur in the absence
of communication – citizens do not actually discuss their views on legislative
proposals but reflect (deliberate) on them individually so as to avoid having their
views be swayed by factions or private interests – and that they be asked “not
precisely whether they approve or reject the proposal, but whether it does or does not
conform to the general will that is theirs” (SC IV:ii, 201). The content of the general
will is simply the result of lawmaking subject to these procedural constraints.
Conversely, other interpreters have argued that “while the formal criteria of the
general will are necessary conditions for generating a general will, Rousseau also
associates that will with specific substantive ideas” (Williams 2014, p. 254).
According to Williams (2014, pp. 257–262), Rousseau’s account of the general
will encompasses three “tightly related” substantive values: “justice, goodness and
equality.” Justice consists in universal principles of morality prescribing standards of
conduct governing right and wrong, good and bad. Rousseau is not, of course, blind
to the cultural differences of the world, but he insists that in spite of these differences,
the principles of right underwriting these culturally diverse societies are nevertheless
similar. Justice, moreover, “is inseparable from goodness” and can be understood as
“the love of order which preserves order” (whereas goodness involves “the love of
order that produces order”) (E 444). A true republic built on fraternal bonds where
citizens are deeply attached to one another and to the republic constitutes one such
order, and it follows from this that justice “involves the love of one’s fellow citizens”
(Williams 2014, p. 260). Finally, equality stands as a central element of justice.
Justice as equality involves, on the one hand, recognizing the political and legal
equality of citizens, and having “a commitment to economic equality” on the other.
Economic equality is significant because vast disparities in wealth can not only lead
6 Rousseau on Citizenship and Education 83

to the moral corruption of citizens, they also reveal, or make possible and likely, an
environment of exploitation where the poor become subject to the tyranny of the
wealthy (Williams 2014, p. 262). Now, given Rousseau’s ideas concerning the great
virtues of citizenship, the general will and a healthy republic, and their importance to
freedom and justice, we might ask ourselves why Rousseau views the making of
citizens and the establishing of republics as rare and difficult enterprises. His reason
for this is that:

It is too late to change our natural inclinations when they have become entrenched, and habit
has been combined with amour-propre. It is too late to draw us out of ourselves once the
human self concentrated in our hearts has acquired that contemptible activity that absorbs all
virtue and constitutes the life of petty souls. How could love of fatherland develop in the
midst of so many other passions stifling it? And what is left for fellow-citizens of a heart
already divided among greed, a mistress, and vanity? (PE 155).

The problem, as Rousseau sees it, lies in the passions of the human subject. More
precisely, it lies in particular with the passion of amour-propre. In the next section,
we shall examine the passion in greater detail. Doing so will allow us to understand
why citizens need to be formed through a process of education.

Amour-propre and the Challenges to Citizenship

To understand what amour-propre is, we need to first begin with Rousseau’s clearest
statement on the passion, which he contrasts with the innate passion of self-love
(amour de soi-même):

Amour-propre and love of oneself (amour de soi-même), two passions very different in their
Nature and their effects, must not be confused. Love of oneself is a natural sentiment which
inclines every animal to watch over its own preservation, and which, directed in man by
reason and modified by pity, produces humanity and virtue. Amour-propre is only a relative
sentiment, artificial and born in Society, which inclines each individual to have a greater
esteem for himself than for anyone else, inspires in men all the harm they do to one another,
and is the true source of honor (SD 91).

There are, certainly, rather complex debates about the meaning and nature of
amour-propre in Rousseau’s works (Dent 1988; Cooper 1999; O’Hagan 1999;
Neuhouser 2008; Kolodny 2010; McLendon 2014). Laurence Cooper suggests, for
example, that the “great difference between it [amour-propre] and amour de soi is
simply that in amour-propre, the desire for one’s own good necessarily includes the
desire to esteem oneself.” It is “self-valuation, or the need for self-esteem” which
“lies at the heart of amour-propre” (Cooper 1999, pp. 137–138). This reading, it
should be said at the outset, does not have the deep textual support required to
recommend it, if only for the reason that Rousseau never quite puts the distinction in
those terms. At issue here is the rendering of amour-propre as a desire or need for
self-esteem. In his immensely important and influential study of amour-propre in
84 B. Gomes

Rousseau’s thought, Frederick Neuhouser calls attention to the perceived error of

Cooper’s description, remarking that the passion is not mainly a matter of needing or
desiring self-esteem. Rather, it is more suitable to understand the passion as the
desire for the esteem or recognition of others, of those surrounding us in our
inescapably social world. The great distinction between the two passions lies,
then, not only in amour-propre’s social sources in contrast to amour de soi’s innate
roots, but in the relative nature of the former passion, which, on the one hand,
emerges in a “desire to have a certain standing in relation to the standing of some
group of relevant others,” where its satisfaction “requires – indeed, consists in – the
opinions of one’s fellow beings,” on the other (Neuhouser 2008, pp. 32–33).
Rousseau never exempts the passion of amour-propre from the principal role it
plays in our social and political pathologies. It is impressed upon his readers again in
the Dialogues when he tells us that “amour-propre, the principle of all wickedness, is
revived and thrives in society, which caused it to be born and where one is forced to
compare oneself at each instant” (D II, 100). However, it is important to note that the
passion of amour-propre is neither an inescapably nor a necessarily dreadful affect,
that is to say, it is not unequivocally a bad passion. At one level, we have already
indicated very generally why this must be so: if amour-propre is the passion that
drives us to seek recognition, it surely cannot be the case that the desire that
underwrites every attempt to win some form of social recognition is ill turned or
ill conceived. The desire for equal recognition, whether socially or politically, or the
desire to love and be loved, whether by our parents or by our partners, by our friends
or by our acquaintances, are not, for example, in themselves unavoidably morally
suspect or lacking in virtue. Neither do they, in themselves, lead always to undesir-
able outcomes. At another level, Rousseau himself does on occasion speak of the
passion in positive terms. Not only can it be turned into a “sublime virtue,” it is
also responsible for some of the sweetest sentiments known to humanity (E IV, 389).
In the light of this, scholars working on Rousseau, following the lead of Nicholas
Dent’s seminal observations and remarks on the subject, now commonly draw a
distinction between amour-propre in its more general form and inflamed amour-
propre, where the latter signifies a passion “turned to excess,” of “having the
character of a strident demand for superior position and title as the terms and
conditions” of one’s “being for others” (Dent 1988, p. 58). Although Rousseau
does not make this distinction clear, it is nevertheless an important one to keep in
mind. In other words, whenever Rousseau speaks of amour-propre in distinctly
negative terms, which is not infrequently the case, or whenever he holds amour-
propre responsible for the evils that plague the world, he is really talking about
amour-propre in its inflamed form rather than the passion as it essentially is.
The principal aim of Rousseau’s educational project is the prevention of amour-
propre’s development into its inflamed variant. But what, more precisely, does
inflamed amour-propre consist in and how might it be clearly distinguished from
its non-inflamed form? In his study, Neuhouser (2008, pp. 90–92) offers a detailed
description of the varying ways in which the passion in its inflamed variant may be
distinguished. A person’s amour-propre is noticeably inflamed when it produces
violent conduct and cruel behavior in her pursuit of recognition, when it overwhelms
6 Rousseau on Citizenship and Education 85

the pursuit of her other “vital interests,” and when it becomes “restlessly imperial-
istic,” such that “nearly all of life’s activities” are transformed “into a quest for
prestige.” It is inflamed, too, when freedom is willingly sacrificed for public
approval, in the sense that conduct is determined less by an actor’s own judgments,
values, and principles than by those fashionable in (what is, arguably, an already
ethically corrupt) society. The drive for favorable opinion can further inspire
“duplicity, pretense, and hypocrisy,” since the appearance of excellence, rather
than the actual possession of it, is often enough to secure the high regard prized by
each and sought after by all. In addition, amour-propre is inflamed “when a person
has an exaggerated sense of the value of his own qualities and achievements and
demands that the recognition he receives from others reflect his own inflated self-
assessment, thereby ensuring not only his own dissatisfaction but also that of others
(since he is then disposed to be as stingy in his recognition of others as he perceives
them to be with respect to him)” (Neuhouser 2008, pp. 90–92). From servility to
over-assertiveness and domination, from dependence to self-indulgence and hypoc-
risy, the source of our social and personal ills can, Rousseau believes, be traced back
to an inflamed amour-propre, and it is securing this passion from turning into its
inflamed variant that the work of education principally involves.
It is worth mentioning at this point that the problem of an inflamed amour-propre
will not simply go away under a careful and rigorous upbringing. For the line
separating a healthy and self-determined respect for public opinion and an over-
reliance on it is easily crossed. We, as social beings, are all of us dependent on the
court of opinion not only for the construction of ourselves and our identities but also
for our internal sense of who we are and the value of our worth. The ceaseless effort
to be worthy of consideration in the eyes of those who surround us, to possess
considerable weight in their estimation, turns very quickly into a slavishness of spirit
or an impulse to hurt in the absence of an educational project that continues past
the careless exuberances of youth. In short, Rousseau thinks that insofar as our
“sentiment of existence” is dependent on the views others have of us, we are always
in danger of having our amour-propre inflamed. Any educational project that looks
to prevent this occurrence must not therefore end as the learner reaches adulthood,
but must go on, as it were, well into the later years of her life. It follows that the
practice of citizenship can itself be understood as serving an educational function,
where citizens learn and re-learn the ethics of civic virtue by engaging in the political
practices constitutive of republican membership, for instance, by performing the
duties required of citizens as specified by the participatory demands of a true
republican association.

Rousseau’s Educational Project(s): Domestic and Civic

Having pointed out the interpersonal, social, and political problems arising from
an inflamed amour-propre, our task now is to establish the main outlines of
Rousseau’s educational project, a project that has as its principal aim the prevention
of amour-propre’s development into its inflamed variant. But we are immediately
86 B. Gomes

faced with the question of how we are to understand the general structure of this
project. In dealing with this question, we find ourselves confronted with one of the
most controversial issues in Rousseauian scholarship. The reason for this is that not
only does Rousseau seem to present us with two philosophical visions in two
distinct educational schemes, he also appears to present us with visions that are
fundamentally opposed to one another. These seemingly competing visions can be
found (perhaps most obviously) in the two works Rousseau published successively
in 1762 – The Social Contract and the Emile – the latter of which is described
explicitly as a treatise “on education.” Can these alternatives be read together? Or
does Rousseau really offer us two opposing systems of education that admit of no
prospect for reconciliation? We shall now discuss two influential interpretations of
Rousseau’s educational project, beginning with the view that he offers us two
distinct and opposed models. Following that, we shall discuss recent challenges to
this view. On this second interpretation, Rousseau’s seemingly opposed forms of
education can be read as complementary rather than rival enterprises.
The first interpretation, which emphasizes the tension between the two models,
has most famously been articulated by Judith Shklar in her study of the Genevan’s
social theory, arguably one of the best works written on Rousseau. In her view of
things, “[w]hat is strikingly novel is his [Rousseau’s] insistence that one must choose
between the two models, between man and the citizen . . . All our self-created
miseries stem from our mixed condition, our half natural, half social state. A healthy
man, the model for any system of education, would have to adhere consistently to a
single mode of life.” “Education,” she goes on to say, “as a conscious choice is a
social experience. The alternatives are therefore not nature or society, but domestic
or civic education” (domestic education is the model found in Emile; civic education
is the model described in the Social Contract). More expressly, if human beings are
to “escape from” their “present disorientation and inner disorder,” they must either
be “educated against society, in isolation from and rejection of all prevailing customs
and opinions,” or they must be educated in a manner where their selves are entirely
immersed in society, where they “lose [themselves] in a collectivity” (Shklar 1969,
p. 5). Put simply, Rousseau provides us with two educational schemes. The first
looks to raise an individual with the greatest degree of independence from the
customs and opinions of society. The second looks to raise an individual wholly
integrated into the mores, routines and conventions of a republic. Any attempt
to raise an individual under the direction of both these educational schemes is
incoherent and can result only in an unfortunate breach of “the psychic needs of
men for inner unity and social simplicity” (Shklar 1969, p. 5). In her final assess-
ment, however, Shklar suggests that the choice between the two educational schemes
is a false one. As she describes it, “[w]hen he [Rousseau] called upon his
readers to choose between man and the citizen he was forcing them to face the
moral realities of social life. They were asked, in fact, not to choose, but to recognize
that the choice was impossible, that they were not and would never become either
men or citizens” (Shklar 1969, p. 214).
Setting aside the rather despairing note in Shklar’s final assessment, her view of
the distinction between man and citizen (and thus the two modes of education) has
6 Rousseau on Citizenship and Education 87

been deeply influential in the ways in which readers have come to understand
Rousseau’s philosophy. Mira Morgenstern (1996, p. 154) repeats the idea that the
two schemes are to be understood as opposing alternatives when she writes that for
Rousseau, we “can be either individual men or citizens, but not both.” Similarly,
Margaret Canovan (1983, p. 288), in her delightful essay on Arendt and Rousseau,
describes the Genevan not only as one “who claimed that upon each man’s con-
science were inscribed basic rules for individual moral conduct,” but also as one who
“did not think that these sharp rules sufficed for the citizen. On the contrary, he made
a sharp distinction between ‘man’ and ‘citizen’.” And even more recently, Karen
Pagani (2015, p. 3), in her study on the significance of anger and forgiveness in
Rousseau’s thought, speaks of the “impetus behind” her work as proceeding from
“the observation that Rousseau’s thoughts on both anger and forgiveness were
deeply influenced by the very important distinction between man and citizen that
underpins his political philosophy and the radically different ethical imperatives
regarding how one could and should respond to conflict that resulted on account
of it.”
In spite of this rather broad consensus, some scholars have in recent times
suggested that the rigid and sharp distinction drawn between the two schemes is
mistaken. This second interpretation holds that Rousseau does not oppose these
models to one another but is rather opposed to the simultaneity of their implemen-
tation. Neuhouser, who offers the most sustained defense of this interpretation,
argues that the aim of the educational project of Emile “is to produce a ‘man-citizen’,
an individual who possesses the capacities required to embrace the general will of his
polity as his own – the virtue essential to citizenship – while at the same time
embodying a certain version of the ideal of self-sufficiency that defines men: the
freedom to ‘see with one’s own eyes’, to ‘feel with one’s own heart’, to be governed
only by ‘one’s own reason’ rather than being compelled always to conduct oneself,
or to judge, as others see fit” (Neuhouser 2008, pp. 20–21). In defending this view,
he urges us to pay careful attention to Rousseau’s own statement on the matter, in
which he announces that “forced to combat nature or the social institutions, one must
choose between making a man or a citizen, for one cannot make both at the same
time” (E I, 163, emphasis added). Rousseau’s concern, as Neuhouser sees it, is
neither to offer us a choice between two competing alternatives nor to dismiss the
project of bridging the divide between raising men and citizens as a futile or hopeless
endeavor. Rather his concern lies with the attempt to engage in both projects
simultaneously, which if embarked upon, will surely fail. The educational project
as detailed by Rousseau in Emile aims, then, at the “overcoming of that opposition,”
and it does so by creating “a successive system of education that proceeds first with
the ideal of man and later with the ideal of the citizen” (Neuhouser 2008, p. 20, 172;
Gomes 2018, p. 195).
Endorsement for this second interpretation has recently grown. Agreeing with
Neuhouser that Rousseau’s account of the man and citizen divide indeed centers on
an objection to the simultaneity of implementing the two modes of education,
Gomes points out in further support of this view that Rousseau not only speaks of
“the possibility of fashioning men and citizens despite his initial repudiation of this
88 B. Gomes

possibility” in Emile, he also describes the Social Contract and Emile as forming a
“same” or “complete” whole (Gomes 2018, p. 196, 197). That Rousseau himself
thought of these works as parts of a complete whole should give pause to anyone
looking to defend the former interpretation which reads them as rival enterprises.
However, although Neuhouser is “indeed correct to argue for a successive system of
education,” Gomes suggests (in contrast to Neuhouser) that “the making of a citizen
is not completed in Emile but extends into the Social Contract.” The problem with
Neuhouser’s view, according to Gomes, is that he does not consider “the crucial role
the Lawgiver (Législateur) plays in the fashioning of citizens capable of discerning
the general will.” Since citizens in Rousseau’s ideal republic are still required to see
themselves in the first instance as citizens, that is, as selves whose identities are
intimately bound up with the greater entity that is the republic, and since “an
important aspect of the Lawgiver’s work” – which Emile’s tutor does not perform
– “lies in ‘changing human nature; of transforming each individual, who by himself
is a perfect and solitary whole, into a part of a larger whole from which this
individual receives, in a sense, his life and his being’,” it is doubtful that the project
of raising a man-citizen can be achieved by relying solely on the domestic mode of
instruction found in Emile (SC II:vii, 155; Gomes 2018, pp. 196–197).
Given Rousseau’s own commitment to reading The Social Contract and the
Emile as a single whole, and given that a central objective of education is to raise
individuals capable of performing the duties of citizenship, let us now turn to see
how domestic or private education can be understood as a first step towards the goal
of raising a citizen. As we have already seen, one of the express purposes of Emile’s
education is to prevent the inflammation of his amour-propre. Since this requires
virtue, and since we are natural beings who first experience the world through
sensory perception, part of his educational scheme must involve showing “how our
capacity for sensation might be cultivated to develop the judgment and wisdom that
distinguish the developed virtuous agent” (Hanley 2012, pp. 239–240). In Ryan
Hanley’s brilliant reconstruction of Rousseau’s “virtue epistemology” (upon which
the rest of this section on private education is based), the educational system found
in Emile is best understood as a developmental one, which “requires progress
through three discrete stages – first, sensation; second, judgment or reasoning;
and third, conscience and willing – necessarily in this order,” where “each stage
[serves as] a necessary preparative for the next” (Hanley 2012, p. 241) (This section
is based on Hanley’s work. Errors and departures are mine. See also (Gomes 2018,
200–201).).
Rousseau thinks that any system of education must begin with sensory training.
He makes clear that a child’s “sensations are the first materials of his knowledge”
since “memory and education are still inactive” at birth (E I: 193). Human
beings come into this world neither stocked with innate ideas nor endowed with
already developed cognitive abilities of reasoning, memory, and judgment. Because
of this “our senses are the instruments of all our knowledge” and “it is from them that
all our ideas come, or at least all are occasioned by them.” To say that our senses
are “instruments of all our knowledge” and that “it is from them that all our ideas
come” or are occasioned is not to say, however, that sensory perception can by itself
6 Rousseau on Citizenship and Education 89

provide us with certainty and knowledge of truths about the world. For “[o]ur senses
are given to us to preserve us, not to instruct us, to warn us about what is useful or
the opposite to us and not about what is true or false” (ML: 184). Nevertheless,
since sensory perceptions constitute the first materials of a child’s knowledge,
it is important to “present them to him in an appropriate order” since this
would “prepare his memory to provide them one day to his understanding in the
same order.” Or as Hanley describes it, “the indispensability of sensory education
consists partly in the fact that the child’s sense impressions ultimately form a
‘storehouse of knowledge’ that can later be employed and synthesized once
the faculty for judgment and comparison is cultivated” (E: 193; Hanley 2012,
p. 243; pp. 242–244).
The second stage of private education focuses on the “cultivation of judgment”
which, “‘in Rousseau’s definition, is a developed capacity for accurate and legitimate
comparison,” a capacity that “requires engagement in the process of synthesizing
discrete perceptions into systems of relations” (Hanley 2012, p. 246). Through
her sensory faculties, a child receives only images rather than ideas, where the
“difference between the two is that images are only absolute depictions of sensible
objects, while ideas are notions of objects determined by relations” (E II: 243).
In other words, our senses do not provide us with ideas. Rather, they give us images
of things. Ideas are formed by making comparisons of the images obtained through
the senses, by synthesizing and ordering them (and it is through comparison,
synthesis, and ordering that relations are thus established). In this way, ideas are
the result of and involve the activity of the mind. To be sure, ideas arising from the
comparison, synthesis, and ordering of sensory images can themselves be put into a
system of relations through the similar activities of reflection and judgment, the
result of which is a more sophisticated and complex set of ideas. Now, it is certainly
not the case that any relation of ideas or images will do; ideas and the relations
between them or contained in them are not arbitrary and cannot simply be decided by
the whims and fancies of any individual mind. Rather, they can be properly ordered.
Improper reflection and judgment produce false relations and thus false ideas. The
cultivation of a pupil’s judgment must therefore involve training his “ability to
compare and order the relations between sensations and ideas correctly, to see true
relations as they are. This is an important stage in the development of the moral
agent, since amour-propre is itself a comparative sentiment, and whether it becomes
inflamed or not is contingent on our capacity to judge, and judge human relations
accurately.” (Gomes 2018, p. 200, emphasis added).
In the third stage, the pupil’s “cultivated capacity for the judgment of physical
relations” is transferred “to the judgment of moral relations; indeed Rousseau is
explicit in insisting that the study of ‘real material relations’ is the necessary
preparative for ‘bringing him ever closer to the great relations he must know one
day in order to judge well of the good and bad order of civil society’” (Hanley 2012,
p. 255). The pupil must learn at this stage what the true relations of human beings
consist in. “Men are not naturally Kings, or Lords, or Courtiers, or rich men. All are
born naked and poor; all are subject to the miseries of life, to sorrows, ills, needs, and
pains of every kind. Finally, all are condemned to death.” This, in Rousseau’s
90 B. Gomes

opinion, “is what truly belongs to man,” “what is most inseparable” from human
nature, and “what no mortal is exempt from” (E IV: 373). The actual relations of
human beings are not constituted by characteristics that distinguish and raise certain
individuals above others or the struggle to attain a position of ascendency and
privilege. They are to be understood in terms of the equality of human weakness
and the likeness of their needs. To aid the student in gaining a clear picture of this,
Rousseau relies on the lessons of history (Gomes 2018, p. 200). For “if the object
were only to show young people man by means of his mask, there would be no need
of showing them this; it is what they would always be seeing in any event.” Instead,
education must attempt to reveal men as they are “since the mask is not the man and
his varnish must not seduce them” (E IV: 390). History allows the pupil to see
intricacies of human deception and the evils human beings do to one another without
being himself harmed by those acts: “It is by means of history that, without the
lessons of philosophy, he will read the hearts of men” and see them as “a simple
spectator, disinterested and without passion, as their judge and not as their accom-
plice or as their accuser” (E IV: 391–392). The results of this are worth stating in full:

Casting his eyes for the first time on the stage of the world; or rather, set backstage, seeing
the actors take up and put on their costumes, counting the cords and pulleys whose crude
magic deceives the spectators’ eyes. His initial surprise will soon be succeeded by emotions
of shame and disdain for his species. He will be indignant at thus seeing the whole of
humankind its own dupe, debasing itself in these children’s games. He will be afflicted at
seeing his brothers tear one another apart for the sake of dreams and turn into ferocious
animals because they do not know how to be satisfied with being men . . . If he judges them
well, he will not want to be in the place of any of them (E IV: 397; 400).

By coming to this understanding of the moral relations of humanity, by seeing

that human beings are fundamentally equal, the pupil also develops her “innate
principle of justice and virtue according to which, in spite of our own maxims, we
judge our actions and those of others as good or bad,” that is, her conscience (E IV:
452). As Rousseau explains elsewhere, “conscience develops and acts only
with man’s understanding. It is only through this understanding that he attains a
knowledge of order, and it is only when he knows order that his conscience brings
him to love it” (LB: 28). Once the student learns that the true order of humanity is
one marked by relations of equality rather than privilege, her conscience will bring
her to love it and work towards its preservation (Williams 2007; cf. Marks 2006).
It is worth stating at this point what domestic education does and does not do
for the formation of citizens. On the one hand, it provides the student with an
understanding of the truth of human relations – that we are fundamentally equal as
moral beings – and aids in the development of his conscience through which he is
impelled to preserve the fundamental order of human equality. Moreover, conscience
is the sentiment by which the justice or injustice of human conduct is judged. In this
way, domestic education helps prepare the student to discern the general will of his
republic, since equality and justice form two of the substantive values embodied in
that will. Moreover, private education prevents the inflammation of amour-propre,
which makes it possible to “draw us out of ourselves.” One of the consequences of
6 Rousseau on Citizenship and Education 91

an inflamed amour-propre is the concentration of the human self in individual hearts.

It is in Rousseau’s view almost impossible to reform corrupted hearts that can look
only at satisfying the narrow interests of the self. Because the citizen is one who is
able to see his self as part of a larger whole, the prevention of the inflammation of
amour-propre leaves the possibility of citizenship open to a student not yet enslaved
by vanity and pride.
What a private education does not do, arguably, is make a citizen. For the
student is at the end of his education a man in the first place; he does not see his
life and his being as part of a larger whole. He has not yet developed the bonds of
fraternity required of citizenship, and is as a result incapable of willing the general
will. Moreover, the general will is not a universal will. Each republic has a general
will unique to itself. In the absence of fraternal bonds and a love of country, and
without coming to an understanding of the unique nature of the general will of the
republic to which he will eventually belong, it is difficult to speak of him as an
already formed citizen. Indeed, as Rousseau makes clear, the project of transforming
an individual into a part of a larger whole is in great measure the work of the
Lawgiver, a foreigner of eminent wisdom and virtue who is able to see the corporate
will of a people he is tasked to form before they are even aware of it themselves. The
Lawgiver’s work does not happen in a private education and the student of this
education is not yet a true citizen.
“One who dares to undertake the founding of a people should feel that he is
capable of changing human nature, so to speak, of transforming each individual,
who by himself is a perfect and solitary whole, into a part of a larger whole from
which this individual receives, in a sense, his life and his being” (SC II:vii, 155). This
is the foremost duty of the Lawgiver; his task lies in transforming individuals into
citizens by making them cognizant of their corporate will. He is needed, moreover,
because “in order for an emerging people to appreciate the healthy maxims of
politics, and follow the fundamental rules of Statecraft” in the absence of guidance
and instruction, “the effect would have to become the cause; the social spirit,
which should be the result of the institution, would have to preside over the founding
of the institution itself; and men would have to be prior to laws what they ought to
become by means of laws” (SC II:vii, 156). He must therefore look to foster
corporate unity “and the edification of a people’s moeurs through the initiation
of laws that attend to all the particular features of a nascent people,” which include
“all that is required by the location, climate, soil, morals, surroundings, and all the
particular relationships of the people he was to institute” (Gomes 2018, p. 207; PE
147). He must do so because the general will is not universal but specific to each
collectivity.
The lawgiver goes about his task by “initiating laws that mirror the general will,
with ratification remaining the prerogative of the sovereign solely.” Individuals
develop civic virtue and an increasing knowledge of their corporate identity by
voting on the laws, since it is precisely through the act of voting that each must in
silent deliberation consider the common good and ask themselves if a proposed
legislation conforms to the general will (Gomes 2018, 207). Given their lack of
political experience and their as yet underdeveloped cognizance of their own
92 B. Gomes

corporate will, the lawgiver cannot hope to convince citizens of his wise counsel by
the use of reason alone. Nor can he simply use force to compel compliance. He must
instead “appeal to the gods,” “to win over by divine authority those who cannot be
moved by human prudence” (Williams 2014, p. 91; SC II:vii, 156–157). Yet he
cannot employ crude tricks – engraving tablets, buying oracles – to make an
impression; these are acts any individual can perform. If the people are to believe
that his wisdom and presence are indeed backed by divine sanction, then something
more than questionable miracles is needed. In the end, the “Legislator’s great soul is
the true miracle that should prove his mission” (SC II: vii, 157). It is by the miracles
of his own genius, wisdom, and virtue that he shall persuade the people of the divine
force behind his undertaking, and thus persuade them to adopt his counsel (Kelly
1987, 325). If he is successful, a republic will be formed and citizens will be made.

Conclusion

In this chapter, we examined the question of citizenship and education, and the
relations between them, in Rousseau’s political thought. We also examined some of
the major debates surrounding these issues in the growing literature on his ideas.
We began by identifying and clarifying some of his central political ideas before
proceeding to discuss the problem of inflamed amour-propre and the two educational
schemes he offers to counter it. In closing, it would perhaps be fitting to end with
some of Rousseau’s own remarks, which summarizes the views and arguments
expressed above: “Although men cannot be taught to love nothing, it is not impos-
sible to teach them to love one object rather than another, and what is truly beautiful
rather than what is deformed. If, for example, they are trained early enough never to
consider their persons except as related to the body of the State, and not to perceive
their own existence, so to speak, except as part of the state’s, they will eventually
come to identify themselves in some way with this larger whole; to feel themselves
to be members of the fatherland; to love it with that delicate feeling that any isolated
man feels only for himself, to elevate their soul perpetually toward this great object;
and thereby transform into a sublime virtue this dangerous disposition from which
all of our vices arise” (PE 155).

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Hanley, R. (2012). Rousseau’s Virtue Epistemology. Journal of the History of Philosophy,

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Paulo Freire: Citizenship and Education
7
Kevin Kester and Hogai Aryoubi

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
The Life and Work of Freire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
Freire’s Key Contributions to Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
The Concept of Conscientization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
Dialogue as Indispensable to Conscientization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
Praxis = Reflection + Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
Banking Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
Problem-Posing Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
Freire’s Influence on Educational Fields . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
Critical Pedagogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
Freire and Literacy Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
Citizenship Education, Politics, and Critique . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
Diversity and Social Justice Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
Democratic Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
Peace Education and Social Transformation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
Freire’s Contributions Across Educational Contexts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
Freire’s Focus on Adult Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
Relevance to Formal Schooling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
Freire and Informal Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
Summary Conclusion and New Possibilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109

K. Kester (*)
Department of Education, Keimyung University, Daegu, South Korea
e-mail: [email protected]
H. Aryoubi
Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 95

A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_29
96 K. Kester and H. Aryoubi

Abstract
This chapter focuses on the life and contributions of Brazilian educator
Paulo Freire (1921–1997). The emphasis is on his scholarly contributions to
educational theory and practice in educational fields that promote social change,
including critical pedagogy, literacy education, citizenship education, social
justice education, democratic education, and peace education. After outlining
Freire’s key concepts, the chapter synthesizes the use of the concepts in these
diverse fields, with a particular emphasis on formal, nonformal, and informal
education. Although Freire’s primary interest was adult nonformal education, the
scholarship indicates also the employment of Freirean ideas within formal and
informal educational settings. Critiques of Freirean ideas and corresponding
implications are highlighted throughout the chapter. The conclusion recapitulates
Freire’s main contributions to education for citizenship and social change and
offers some possible directions forward that emanate from within the literature.

Keywords
Paulo Freire · Conscientization · Dialogue · Praxis · Critical pedagogy

Introduction

The purpose of this chapter is to review the literature drawing on key contributions
of the twentieth-century educator Paulo Freire. The chapter focuses on primary and
secondary literature to provide an overview of Freire’s thinking and its influence on
other scholars and scholarly practices. The literature broadly indicates that Freire’s
contemporaries recognized him as a leading educational scholar-practitioner whose
thinking shaped, and continues to shape, contemporary academic thought and
practice in the areas of critical pedagogy, literacy education, citizenship education,
democratic education, peacebuilding education, social justice education, and adult
education, among other areas (Mayo 2009; Schugurensky 2011; Torres 2017a).
Roberts (2007) asserts that Freire, “left a legacy of practical and theoretical work
equaled by few other educationists in its scope and influence” (p. 505). As evidenced
by the establishment of numerous Freire Institutes in universities and adult education
centers around the world, Freire’s work has inspired countless scholars and educa-
tional practitioners globally toward humanistic and dialogic education for fostering
intercultural understanding, democracy, and social justice.
The chapter begins with a brief review of Freire’s biography followed by an
overview of his key social and educational concepts. The chapter then examines the
employment of these ideas by other scholars in various political and educational
fields and across nonformal, formal, and informal educational sites. In doing so, the
chapter highlights and reviews three signature strands from within the expansive
literature on Freire, citizenship, and education. These include (1) books and papers
that explore Freire’s life and the personal experiences that influenced his educational
7 Paulo Freire: Citizenship and Education 97

philosophy; (2) subsequent explications of Freire’s contributions to the theoretical

and pedagogical practice of other scholars; and (3) critical accounts of Freire’s
influence on adult, higher, and community-based formal, nonformal, and informal
education. The reviewed literature in this chapter relates to these three key areas
beginning first with his biography and key contributions.

The Life and Work of Freire

Paulo Freire was born in 1921 in Recife, Brazil (Schugurensky 2011). He grew up
with poverty and inequality in both the region and his family life. As a child, Freire
was four grades behind in school, as his poverty and hunger had negatively affected
his education (Bhattacharya 2011). Freire stated, “I didn’t understand anything
because of my hunger. I wasn’t dumb. It wasn’t lack of interest. My social condition
didn’t allow me to have an education. Experience showed me once again
the relationship between social class and knowledge” (quoted in Gadotti 1994,
p. 5). His early experiences with poverty would later influence his work in education.
When his brothers started working and the family’s economic situation improved,
Freire started making rapid intellectual progress which eventually led to university
matriculation (Schugurensky 2011).
In 1943, Paulo Freire was admitted into the University of Recife’s Law School
but only defended one client before becoming a full-time high school teacher. Then,
from 1947, Freire’s formative years were when he became the director of the
Department of Education and Culture of Pernambuco’s Social Service Ministry for
10 years (Aryoubi 2018). In Letters to Cristina, he mentions this decade to be “the
most important political-pedagogical practice of my life” (Freire 1996). In 1959, at
the University of Recife (now known as the Federal University of Pernambuco),
Freire defended his doctoral dissertation and was given a professorship at the
university (Schugurensky 2011).
In 1961, Freire became the director of the Division of Culture and Recreation, and
in 1963, he was the first director of the Cultural Extension Service at the University
of Recife (Schugurensky 2011). In his time at the Cultural Extension Service, he
brought literacy programs to peasants in northeast Brazil, which evolved to the entire
nation from 1963 to 1964. His team was successful in teaching illiterate adults to
read in very short periods of time, instances such as an impressive 45 days
(Bhattacharya 2011).
The 1964 Brazilian coup d’état led to the halt of Freire’s literacy programs and
imprisonment as a traitor. Freire then spent 15 years in exile. Holst (2006) suggests
these years in exile were crucial to the ultimate development of Freire’s Marxist
humanist ideology, claiming that prior to exile to Chile, Freire was “liberal
developmentalist” in orientation rather than Marxist humanist. Holst thus claims
the Chile exile intellectually molded Freire’s critical thought. In the 1970s, Freire
then worked with the World Council of Churches in Geneva, Switzerland, returning
to his religious roots (Aryoubi 2018; Roberts 2010). Freire returned to Brazil in
1980 at the age of 57 after the cultural political environment changed (Bhattacharya
98 K. Kester and H. Aryoubi

2011). At that time, Freire became the adult literacy project supervisor for the
Worker’s Party from 1980 to 1986; and when the party won the 1989 Sao Paulo
municipal elections, he was appointed as the Secretary of Education (Gadotti 1994).
Shortly afterward, in 1991, he resigned to continue writing and lecturing for the final
decade of his life. Throughout the 1990s, Freire experienced tremendous profes-
sional success and completed significant academic activity until his passing in 1997
(Roberts 2010).
Freire’s main recorded contribution to educational scholarship and civic practice
is in the form of monographs. He wrote more than 20 books over his career and
numerous journal articles. Among these, his most cited work is Pedagogy of the
Oppressed, a book published during the period of Freire’s exile to Chile, which was
interrupted when he spent a year as Visiting Scholar at Harvard University (Roberts
2010). Pedagogy of the Oppressed has been cited more than 75,000 times in the
50 years since its publication, as indicated on Google Scholar as of June 2019. This
book has received nearly a quarter of Freire’s more than 300,000 citations, more than
any of his other single works.

Freire’s Key Contributions to Education

Looking to Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, where he outlines many of his
enduring ideas, Freire presents his key concepts of conscientization, dialogue,
praxis, banking education, and problem-posing education. These concepts have
influenced numerous other scholars and educational practices around the world
toward promoting education for social change, which will be further examined
later in the chapter. The chapter now turns to discuss each one of these ideas briefly
in order to survey his key contributions to educational theory and practice in the
twentieth century.

The Concept of Conscientization

Paulo Freire’s goal was to make it possible for people who were illiterate to quickly
learn to read and write, while simultaneously learning the reasons why society works
the way it does (Horton and Freire 1990). In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire
(1970/2005) writes, “A deepened consciousness of their situation leads people to
apprehend that situation as an historical reality susceptible of transformation”
(p. 85). He termed the word conscientization, which according to Smidt (2014) is
almost synonymous with consciousness-raising and/or critical consciousness.
Conscientization is the process of teachers and learners becoming conscious, espe-
cially on what is problematic within contemporary society and to consequently have
the power to drive social change (Smidt 2014). Dale and Hyslop-Margison (2010)
state that conscientization occurs when people reflect critically on social reality and
historical experiences. The aim of conscientization is to enable illiterate adults to
read and make sense of the world in order to help them become critically aware of
7 Paulo Freire: Citizenship and Education 99

the reasons that they are in the situations in which they exist, whether it is poverty,
joblessness, or such, and to examine what is keeping them there (Smidt 2014).
In turn, personal and social transformation may be possible. Dialogue supports the
process of conscientization.

Dialogue as Indispensable to Conscientization

Paulo Freire stated, “If it is in speaking their word that people, by naming the world,
transform it, dialogue imposes itself as the way by which they achieve significance
as human beings. Dialogue is thus an existential necessity” (Freire 1970/2005,
p. 88). Dialogue as an exchange or conversation between two people or more should
be on the premise of equality, which Freire contrasted with anti-dialogue that was
handing down information in an exchange that was unequal (Smidt 2014). Further,
dialogue positions the teacher and student horizontally to be both knowing and
learning, rather than vertically with only the teacher holding the individualistic
stance of knowing (Darder 2015). Dale and Hyslop-Margison (2010) mention that
an important aspect of dialogue includes its ability to build emotionally and socially
caring relationships between people. Freire (1983) believed that dialogue was
indispensable to the process of conscientization, as it was the act of transforming
and knowing the world. Students can enter into the problematization process through
critical dialogue, which could lead them to experience breakthroughs of knowledge
that appear from their rethinking of both historical and contemporary conditions
(Darder 2015). Other scholars, however, have critiqued Freire’s faith in dialogue and
consciousness-raising to transform the world, arguing instead that such methods are
patronizing as the “enlightened few” seek to “emancipate the masses” (Berger 1974).
Such methods, the critics claim, often serve to reinforce social inequalities rather
than rectify them. These scholars argue this is primarily because such modes of
dialogue usually favor those within positions of power and dominance (Ellsworth
1989; Tuck and Yang 2012).

Praxis = Reflection + Action

For Freire, praxis means both reflection and action occurring together and “directed
at the structures to be transformed” (Freire 1970/2005, p. 126). The term describes
action and thought comprising the political and ethical life of humankind. Paulo
Freire believed that “humans were beings of praxis (a term he borrowed from
Marxist philosophy)” and possess a consciousness that distinguishes humans from
other living things (Smidt 2014, p. 22). He contrasted humans here with animals,
which are beings of pure activity that do not consider the world but are rather
immersed in it. In detail, Freire (1972) stated, “In contrast humans emerge from
the world, objectify it and in so doing understand and transform it with their
labour. . . (Human) activity consists of action and reflection. It is praxis; it is
transformation of the world. And as praxis it requires theory to illuminate
100 K. Kester and H. Aryoubi

it. (Human) activity is theory and practice” (p. 96). Freire (1970/2005) also stressed
that in revolutionary efforts to transform oppressive structures, the leaders of a
movement cannot be designated as the “thinkers,” while the oppressed become the
“doers” (p. 126). Mackinlay and Barney (2014) similarly cite Freire’s praxis as
informing their practices in Australia to contribute to decolonizing Indigenous
Australian studies. They write that their critical education “privileges the Freirean
concept of praxis, that is, the ongoing interaction of reflection, dialogue, and action
in order to illuminate human activity” and builds a better world (Mackinlay and
Barney 2014, p. 65). Hence, praxis is dialogue in action through reflection and
informed interventions in the world that challenge traditional forms of passive
education.

Banking Education

Freire disapproved of the style of teaching where teachers taught information to

passive students and compared it to what occurs in banks: money goes into an
empty account only to later be withdrawn. He called this banking education. This
teaching method depends on passivity in the students (Freire 1972), where they
wait for the teacher in a monological manner to give an answer, message, or
meaning behind a text. This information is deposited, memorized, and assessed.
Smidt (2014) describes this process when he explains, “Information is banked in
the empty head of the learner” (p. 123), and thus the student is “filled” with
knowledge. This method is in direct opposition with relational methods such as
dialogue. Freire (1970/2005) describes that in banking education, knowledge is
“the property of the teacher rather than a medium evoking the critical reflection of
both teacher and students” (p. 80). Darder (2015), for example, argues that banking
education “predominantly anchors ideas of teaching and learning to values of
individualism, independence, and competition” (p. 18). Freire argued that the
banking model not only impacts the classroom, which is reflective of broader
oppressive dynamics, but the method also has long-term implications for human
agency and eventually for social transformation (Schugurensky 2011). As students
passively accept and store the information given to them, they accept and adapt to
the state of the world, their passive role within it, and acquire a view of reality that
is fragmented (Schugurensky 2011). Critical thinking is arrested, and the learners
are less likely to attain confidence, attitudes, skills, and behaviors for social
change. Freire (1970/2005) sums up banking education to preserve the following
practices and attitudes:

(a) The teacher teaches and the students are taught;

(b) The teacher knows everything and the students know nothing;
(c) The teacher thinks and the students are thought about;
(d) The teacher talks and the students listen – meekly;
(e) The teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined;
7 Paulo Freire: Citizenship and Education 101

(f) The teacher chooses and enforces his/her choice, and the students comply;
(g) The teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of
the teacher;
(h) The teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were not
consulted) adapt to it;
(i) The teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his or her own professional
authority, which she and he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students;
(j) The teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are
mere objects (p. 59).

Problem-Posing Education

As a response to what Freire identifies as the core problematique of traditional

banking education, he offers the counter-practice of problem-posing education.
Also called emancipatory or liberatory education, this method emphasizes dialogue,
inquiry, discussion, and group projects for learners and regards education to be
the practice of freedom. The aim of problem-posing education is to constantly reveal
unequal social and institutional power structures via processes of conscientization
and critical thinking in order to transform the world (Schugurensky 2011). Darder
(2015) explains that for the learner, an “active engagement with an author’s ideas is
encouraged from the very setting up of a ‘problem’ to be (dialogically) investigated
in the first place” (p. 87).
Schugurensky (2011) compares the banking education model with the problem-
posing education model through eight points:

• Banking education emphasizes information transfer; problem-posing encourages

acts of cognition, liberating both the teacher and the students.
• Banking education attempts to mythologize reality by concealing certain facts
about social relations; problem-posing education aims at demythologizing and
unveiling the different layers of reality.
• Banking education resists dialogue; problem-posing education treats dialogue as
indispensable to the act of cognition.
• Banking education treats students as objects of assistance; problem-posing edu-
cation regards them as critical thinkers.
• Banking education fails to recognize men and women as historical beings;
problem-posing education starts with people’s own history and experience.
• Banking education has a predesigned, fixed, and static curriculum; in problem-
posing education, the content emerges from the reality and dreams of the learners.
• Banking education’s goal is the perpetuation of social inequalities; the purpose of
problem-posing education is to nurture the development of consciousness and
active intervention in the social world.
• Banking education is about reinforcing fatalism and domination; problem-posing
education is about nurturing autonomy and transformation. (p. 73)
102 K. Kester and H. Aryoubi

These concepts of conscientization, dialogue, praxis, banking education, and

problem-posing education are further expounded in Freire’s other core works: Cultural
Action for Freedom (1972), A Pedagogy for Liberation (with Ira Shor 1987), We Make
the Road by Walking (with Myles Horton 1990), Pedagogy of Hope (1994), Letters to
Cristina (1996), and Pedagogy of Freedom (1998), among others. This chapter now
turns attention to Freire’s influence on various educational fields. In focusing on these
influences, the hope is to highlight Freire’s significance specifically to critical peda-
gogy, literacy education, citizenship education, social justice education, democratic
education, and peace education in the late twentieth century and some implications for
education for social change in the early twenty-first.

Freire’s Influence on Educational Fields

Freire’s work is cited frequently in numerous fields of education, notably critical

pedagogy (Apple 1982; Giroux 1983, 1997; McLaren 2000, 2006; Kincheloe 2008),
literacy education (Muro 2012), citizenship education (Johnson and Morris 2010;
McCowan 2006; Schugurensky and Madjidi 2008; Torres 2017), social justice
education (Gibson 2012; Zembylas 2014), democratic education (Bolin 2017;
Carr 2008; Portelli and McMahon 2004), and peace education (Bajaj and
Hantzopoulos 2016; Harris and Morrison 2003; Kester and Booth 2010; Reardon
and Snauwaert 2015). This section reviews Freire’s influence on these educational
fields with an eye toward Freire’s efforts to cultivate social change, peace,
intercultural understanding, and democracy through education.

Critical Pedagogy

Freire’s impact is clearly evident in the field of critical pedagogy (Tuck and Yang
2012). The progenitors of the field cite his work as the impetus for their critical
pedagogy practice (Giroux 1988, 2010; Shor 1992; McLaren 2006), although
Freire rarely used the term instead referring to his work as “libertarian education”
(Freire 1970/2005, p. 72), “problem-posing education” (ibid., p. 81), or “education
as the practice of freedom” (ibid., p. 81).
In defining critical pedagogy, Freire’s close collaborator Ira Shor (1992) writes
that critical pedagogy is:

Habits of thought, reading, writing, and speaking which go beneath surface meaning, first
impressions, dominant myths, official pronouncements, traditional clichés, received
wisdom, and mere opinions, to understand the deep meaning, root causes, social context,
ideology, and personal consequences of any action, event, object, process, organization,
experience, text, subject matter, policy, mass media, or discourse. (p. 129)

Henry Giroux (2010) further claims “Paulo Freire is one of the most important
critical educators of the twentieth century. . . His book Pedagogy of the Oppressed is
7 Paulo Freire: Citizenship and Education 103

considered one of the classic texts of critical pedagogy and has sold over a million
copies” (p. 715). Giroux (ibid.) argues, “Since the 1980s there has been no intellec-
tual on the North American educational scene who has matched either [Freire’s]
theoretical rigor or his moral courage” (p. 715). Critical pedagogy, as a praxis of
reflection and social action, in turn provides the ethical and pedagogical core of
many other educational fields for social change.

Freire and Literacy Education

Numerous literacy programs draw from Freirean inspiration. Andres Muro (2012)
details the practical literacy work of the Community Education Program of El Paso
Community College in El Paso, Texas, which draws on Freire’s critical pedagogical
work to promote Spanish literacy and general education in Spanish to Mexican
immigrants. The program offers creative writing classes to immigrants so they can
“document their experiences through poetry and prose while acquiring the ability
necessary to earn a GED certificate (high school equivalency certificate in the US)”
(p. 2). The program aims to promote a measure of social change although it
acknowledges that its contribution in this regard is limited. Bartlett (2005) studies
the practice of Freirean ideals in popular adult education nongovernmental organi-
zations in Brazil. In doing so, she showcases the tremendous influence of Freire on
progressive educational practice in Latin America. She also highlights the limitations
that continue to trouble critical educators using Freirean methods, most notably
efforts to ensure the equitable practice of dialogue in educational encounters,
disrupting the teacher-student hierarchy, and the challenge of utilizing local knowl-
edges in and through educational interactions. More recently, Alison Phipps (2019)
employs Freirean thought to re-imagine ways to do literacy education and social
justice work multilingually in order to support decolonial forms of education,
citizenship, and justice.

Citizenship Education, Politics, and Critique

Another educational subfield notably influenced by Freire’s work is citizenship

education. McCowan (2006), acknowledging Freire, writes that the introduction of
citizenship education into the English school curriculum in 2002 allowed for the first
time such political issues of peace, development, and human rights to have an
“official presence” in schools (p. 57). McCowan (2006) explains:

Curricula in many countries have included political, citizenship or civics education as a

separate discipline, and the current National Curriculum provision recommends that it can be
either a separate subject or a cross-curricular theme. In Freire’s conception, however, all
education is politically oriented and has political consequences. The very existence of
‘citizenship education’ implies that the rest of the curriculum is not education for citizenship,
and may cause learners to view citizenship as a specific part of their lives, rather than
something that imbues their whole experience. (p. 67)
104 K. Kester and H. Aryoubi

Other contemporary citizenship educators push Freire’s thinking and the limits of
critical pedagogy forward to reconceptualize citizenship education through a lens of
responsibility, peace, diversity, and justice (Torres 2017a). For these scholars,
still drawing substantially on Freire, earlier critical pedagogy and citizenship
education tended to be overly preoccupied with issues of class at the expense of
gender, race, and intersectional analyses (Heggart et al. 2018; Beckett 2013). For
example, Jackson (2007) argues that Freire did not offer “sufficient attention to
difference, to the conflicting needs of oppressed groups, or to the specificity of
people’s lives and experiences”; and to this day, she remains critical of his “apparent
universalization,” “lack of gender analysis,” and conception of the teacher as
“emancipator” (p. 210). Beckett (2013) too offers criticism of the “rationalism,”
“universalism,” and “vanguardism” in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Although these
scholars remain committed to Freirean principles, they detail the implications of their
critiques, that is, to further engage with issues of race, gender, and intersectional
analyses in addition to class analysis.

Diversity and Social Justice Education

Kari Grain and Darren Lund (2016) draw on Freire’s “critical social justice peda-
gogy” to “advocate for a continued diversification of voices in the field, and adopt
a firm anti-oppressive stance” (p. 46). They draw on Freire’s profound hope,
claiming that the notion of critical hope in education “is inspired by the praxis and
frameworks of critical theory, particularly those emerging from the Frankfurt School,
neo-Marxist critiques, and the work of Freire” (p. 51). Other social justice educators
contend that Freire’s praxis offers personal empowerment and diverse potential to
transform conflict in and through education (Hahn Tapper 2013; Zembylas 2014).
Hahn Tapper (2013) writes, “Freire contends that education provides venues for
students to achieve freedom, both intellectual and physical. . . Freire asserts that
education either domesticates or liberates students and teachers” (p. 413). Hahn
Tapper continues, “Freire explains the role that identity plays in the shaping and
implementation of education. One of his most important arguments is that students’
identities need to be taken into account in all educational settings. They should not
be approached as if everyone in the classroom, including the teacher, is starting from
the same place in terms of social status and identity” (p. 414). Achieving social
justice is a core objective of Freirean pedagogy.

Democratic Education

Bolin (2017) contends that Paulo Freire’s teaching strategies also support radically
changing education toward democratic forms and structures as a means toward
socially just political and educational governance. Portelli and McMahon (2004)
concur arguing that Freire’s methods inform critical democratic engagement in
education; as does Paul Carr (2008) who suggests that Freire’s critical pedagogy
7 Paulo Freire: Citizenship and Education 105

helps underscore “thick” democracy. Glassman and Patton (2014) explain that
Freire’s educational praxis supports the development of democratic values for a
just, well-functioning society. To this end, Reardon and Cabezudo (2002) too claim
that a pedagogy of democratic engagement, influenced through Freirean thought, is
the best method toward achieving democratic citizenship for building cultures of
peace in and beyond schools. Freire’s methods thus inform myriad approaches to
constructing and supporting democracy and peace through education.

Peace Education and Social Transformation

Hilary Cremin and Terence Bevington (2017) write from peace education that,
“Perhaps the most notable educator for justice of the twentieth century was Paulo
Freire. Freire’s influence on peace education (as well as critical literacy, and
non-formal education) has been immense” (p. 43). Additionally, noted peace edu-
cator Betty Reardon cites Freire as core to influencing her practice (Reardon and
Snauwaert 2015), which in turn has influenced numerous peace educators around the
world for over six decades (Snauwaert 2019). Reardon writes, “Critical pedagogy is
the methodology most consistent with the transformative goals of peace education. . .
I have argued that the theories and practices that we have learned from Paulo Freire
are the conceptual and methodological heart of the most effective peace learning”
(as quoted in Reardon and Snauwaert 2015, p. xv). Bajaj and Hantzopoulos (2016)
too argue that Freire’s work is core to the field in his engagement with both the
oppressive and liberatory capacities of education. Bajaj (2015) builds upon Freire’s
work in elucidating a critical peace education praxis. She questions, “What content,
pedagogy, structures, and practices are needed in educational spaces that seek to
cultivate critical consciousness among learners (Freire 1970)? How might such
educative practices orient towards social action in ways that can effectively chal-
lenge unequal socioeconomic and political conditions?” (p. 164).
Drawing critical pedagogy, literacy education, citizenship education, democratic
education, social justice, and peace education together, Carlos Torres (2017b)
recapitulates the influence of Freirean praxis on each of these fields:

The first answer of why we need global citizenship education is that global citizenship
education contributes to global peace. . . Paulo Freire, recognizing that relations of domina-
tion are central to public and private life, argued that domination, aggression, and violence
are an intrinsic part of human and social life. (n.p.)

Any educational endeavor seeking to cultivate critical citizenship, peace, and dem-
ocratic participation in public life must ensure the interrogation of structures of
oppression and domination in society and, in consequence, propose alternative social
and political possibilities. Furthermore, as Freire ardently argued, such educational
efforts must also be recognized as inherently political and achieved through diverse
educational means. The next section will examine Freire’s contributions to non-
formal, formal, and informal spheres of educational activity.
106 K. Kester and H. Aryoubi

Freire’s Contributions Across Educational Contexts

Freire primarily worked in nonformal adult education contexts, and his writings have
contributed to theorizing in this educational domain (Mayo 1999, 2009). Yet, others
have given consideration to the implementation of Freire’s ideas within formal
schooling (Johnson and Morris 2010; McCowan 2006) and informal education
(Hall et al. 2012).

Freire’s Focus on Adult Education

The bulk of Freire’s work has been in nonformal adult education contexts. Freire
developed “culture circles,” as one of the early methods of teaching (Schugurensky
2011). The circles were composed of a coordinator, instead of a teacher, and adult
learners, who were mostly illiterate. The teaching method was dialogue, instead of
the traditional banking education method, and the discussions were on subjects that
interested the group of students. Smidt (2014) gives examples of the subjects being
on, “the rising cost of staple foods; the effects of flooding on daily life; the failure to
get children to school” (p. 42). The lessons also had images, narrative, pictures, and
some linguistic analysis. Eventually the culture circle would become an adult
literacy class site. Initially this method was used in Recife in Brazil. The first attempt
was with five illiterate adults, of which two dropped out in the early stage. The group
came from rural areas and felt accepting of their illiteracy and socially alienated from
formal education. Freire and his fellow workers decided to develop a literacy
program that addressed these issues from the adults’ life experiences, as Smidt
(2014) outlines, in these ways:

• The students in each session would be active dialogical, critical and involved;
• The content of the program was flexible and open to change;
• The techniques used would include what Freire called the breakdown of themes
and codification (p. 42).

Freire’s success in promoting literacy through these means underscored his

achievement in promoting literacy across Brazil and, in turn, nurtured his global
reputation. With time, the methods were adopted internationally in adult education,
and from this success others began to ask whether such methods could succeed
within formal schooling.

Relevance to Formal Schooling

Though the focus of Freire’s work was in nonformal adult education contexts, his
work was also later implemented within formal education and curricula as well
(Johnson and Morris 2010; McCowan 2006). In US secondary schools, for example,
Behizadeh (2014) argued, “Scripted curricula and other standardized teaching
7 Paulo Freire: Citizenship and Education 107

materials that do not start with the knowledge and questions students bring to school
are not effective tools for learning” (p. 103). The solution that Behizadeh presented
was to implement Freire’s problem-posing education for student-centered learning
experiences, which allowed students to learn critical-thinking skills and to
co-construct knowledge (Behizadeh 2014). There are multiple other examples of
Freire’s methods being used in formal education and curricula, which include
Hodder’s (1980) work in art education; Shor’s (1980) work with a college English
curriculum; Crawford-Lange’s (1981) work with foreign language instruction in
schools; Frankenstein’s (1983) work with a mathematics curriculum; Holzman’s
(1988) work in advanced literacy; and Sarroub and Quadros’ (2015) work on critical
pedagogy in classroom discourse, among others. Narita and Green (2015) too
discuss the use of nonformal and informal music educational practices to enhance
learning in formal music classrooms. Freire believed that literacy in itself would not
empower learners, who were living in oppressive conditions, but needed to be
connected to a critical awareness of social action and context to change their
conditions (Freire 1985). From this, Freire’s idea that teachers need to go beyond
literacy, or whichever academic subject is being taught, to empower learners is seen
across many age groups and various contexts, including within formal schooling.

Freire and Informal Education

Freire’s dialogical work has also been cited as influential for informal educational
spaces. The Encyclopedia of Informal Education (Smith 2002), for instance, states
the “emphasis on dialogue has struck a very strong chord with those concerned
with popular and informal education. Given that informal education is a dialogical
(or conversational) rather than a curricula form this is hardly surprising,” yet
“Freire was able to take the discussion on several steps with his insistence that
dialogue involves respect. It should not involve one person acting on another, but
rather people working with each other” (n.p.). One such arena for building respect
and dialogue among citizens is social movements and civic engagement. Thus,
informal learning in social movements and political participation is another area
where Freire’s approach has impacted on education in informal spaces, particularly
where participants learn politics through engagement in voting, jury duty, protests,
and other civic demonstrations (Butte 2010; Hall et al. 2012; Lerner and
Schugurensky 2007). Hall et al. (2012), in their work, detail cases of learning for
a better world through social activism in different global regions, including
evidence from democratic and environmental activism in Latin America, India,
the Middle East, the UK, and the USA. Lerner and Schugurensky (2007), for their
part, similarly build upon Freire and informal learning to inquire into what
knowledge and skills activists and members of participatory democracy programs
acquire through their participation in democratic processes. This emerging field is
part of renewed scholarly interests in the field of social pedagogy drawing from
Freire’s popular education as well as other Indigenous and progressive education
movements (Schugurensky 2016).
108 K. Kester and H. Aryoubi

That Freire’s work continues to be relevant to and influential in these diverse

educational arenas indicates the salience and power of dialogical education to
support social change. This is possible not only across sectors but at multiple social
and political levels within sectors and via personal reflection and social action.
Freire’s ideas remain just as important today as when they were first conceptualized.
The final section offers some implications for contemporary education.

Summary Conclusion and New Possibilities

Paulo Freire (1970/2005) famously wrote at the introduction to Pedagogy of the

Oppressed, “I hope that from these pages at least the following will endure: my trust
in the people, and my faith in men and women, and in the creation of a world in
which it will be easier to love” (p. 40). This chapter has highlighted Freire’s social
critique and hope offered throughout his many writings on pedagogy. In particular,
the chapter reviewed primary and secondary literature concerning educational efforts
to promote social change and critical citizenship drawing on Freire’s educational
concepts. This has included a review of writings related to critical pedagogy, literacy
education, citizenship education, social justice education, democratic education, and
peace education. Freire’s impact on these educational fields has been addressed
throughout the chapter providing evidence from within the literature.
Additionally, a review of Freire’s influence on adult education, formal education,
and informal learning has been discussed as emerging in the scholarly literature.
Despite some critiques related to Freire’s preoccupation with socioeconomic analy-
sis, his gender and rational limitations, and what some scholars have identified as his
naïve hope in the power of dialogue to nurture equality and social justice, nonethe-
less Freire’s main contributions to education for citizenship and social change cannot
be overstated. His influence on social justice, democracy, peace, and citizenship
education for the twenty-first century still widely endures.
Finally, we argue there are three renewed possibilities for educators today draw-
ing on Freire’s work for education, citizenship, and social justice. First, Freire’s work
allows for scholars and practitioners to re-engage with critical reflection on the
inherent political nature of education. This is particularly exigent in times of
contentious politics, such as the post-2016 era of divisive post-truth rhetoric and
the rise of alt-facts discourse. Working with politics rather than retreating from
difficult conversations opens space for transformative possibilities in and through
education. Second, related to the first point, the call to dialogue across social,
economic, and political difference is work to heal communities, build lasting respect,
and promote sustainable peace and social cooperation. Like Freire’s oeuvre,
it is a work in progress, unending, constantly shifting, and seeking growth.
The implication here for social justice, multicultural, peace, and democratic educa-
tion in the contemporary world is profound. Third, Freire calls for educators to
use straightforward humanizing language that is inclusive and compassionate. This
means avoiding paternalistic language and unnecessary jargon while offering cri-
tiques and incisive insights on present-day society. Dialogue and social action here
7 Paulo Freire: Citizenship and Education 109

must be grounded in shared experience and the collective belief that it is possible to
co-create a better world. From these three renewed possibilities re-emerges the hope
and faith in humanity that Freire embraced throughout his life and work. There could
hardly be a more important lesson for the educational community today.

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Dewey and Citizenship Education:
Schooling as Democratic Practice 8
Piet A. van der Ploeg

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
Democracy and Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
Early Work (Before 1900): The School as “Embryonic Society” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
Later Work (Post-1916): Intelligent Understanding and Scientific Spirit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124

Abstract
This chapter provides a reconstruction of Dewey’s approach to citizenship edu-
cation based on his books and articles written between 1885 and 1945. It is argued
that Dewey’s views regarding citizenship education coincide with his views on
democracy and on teaching and learning and are closely related to his general
philosophy. In the chapter, extensive attention is given to the development of
Dewey’s thinking on citizenship education: first through highlighting core ele-
ments of the book Democracy and Education and then through discussing
relevant aspects of both his earlier work and later work. For Dewey, education
and democracy are organically connected: Democracy is a condition for educa-
tion and education is a condition for democracy. In schools, citizenship education
cannot be distinguished as a separate subject or domain: All education contributes
to democratic citizenship, provided it is inclusive and equally accessible to
everyone. In addition, the chapter argues that, for Dewey, democratic education
must fulfill two elementary functions: familiarizing students with their social
roles and teaching them to think. Through the decades, Dewey’s focus

P. A. van der Ploeg (*)

University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 113
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_20
114 P. A. van der Ploeg

increasingly shifts towards the importance of learning to think critically, includ-

ing through investigating and understanding social structures and dynamics.

Keywords
Dewey · Citizenship · Democracy · Critical thinking · Citizenship education ·
History of education · Philosophy of education

Introduction

The American philosopher John Dewey (1859–1952) is arguably the most cited
author in the literature on citizenship education worldwide. Dewey’s popularity is
primarily due to three well-known features of his vision: firstly, his broad conception
of democracy, secondly, the highly participative, active, and interactive nature of his
views on both citizenship and learning, and thirdly, his emphasis on critical inquiry
and thinking.
Dewey published an extensive oeuvre comprising of books and articles on
philosophy, psychology, politics, and education, spanning the six decades between
1885 and 1945. Halfway through this period, in 1916, his book Democracy and
Education was published, which he considered a good summary and application of
his thinking. The present chapter reconstructs Dewey’s approach to citizenship
education by first highlighting core elements of Democracy and Education and
then discussing relevant aspects in both his earlier work and later work. Meanwhile,
it identifies what, over the course of his work over more than half a century, remained
consistent in Dewey’s approach to democracy and education and what changed. In
doing so, the chapter traces Dewey’s work on democracy and education closely, in
order to clarify his key ideas and make these accessible to readers of this chapter.

Democracy and Education

In the first four chapters of Democracy and Education, Dewey argues that social life
and education are organically linked. Education is social to the core, and teaching
and learning happen where people involve one another in activities. Education
occurs in “co-operative doings,” “sharing experience,” “sharing concerns,” “com-
munication,” and “conjoint activity.” At the same time, social life needs education to
ensure its continuity. According to Dewey, education stands for the “transmission”
of beliefs and language, “expectations” and “occupations,” “standards” and “aims,”
and “habits of doing, thinking, and feeling.” Furthermore, education enables the
adaptation of social life to changing circumstances: It stands for the “transformation”
of beliefs, standards, habits, etc. Hence, for Dewey, social life and education are two
sides of the same coin. That is, “Life is a self-renewing process. What nutrition and
reproduction are to physiological life, education is to social life” (1916a, 12).
8 Dewey and Citizenship Education: Schooling as Democratic Practice 115

The transformative, renewing nature of education is of the utmost importance to

Dewey. An activity is only truly educative when this activity refines and enriches a
person’s experience, making him more able to gain further and different experience.
According to Dewey, “A technical definition of education: It is that reconstruction or
reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and which
increases ability to direct the course of subsequent experience” (1916a, 82). In his
later work, Dewey illustrates the transformative nature of education in the following
way:

Any experience is mis-educative that has the effect of arresting or distorting the growth of
further experience. An experience may be such as to engender callousness; it may produce
lack of sensitivity and of responsiveness. Then the possibilities of having richer experience
in the future are restricted. Again, a given experience may increase a person's automatic skill
in a particular direction and yet tend to land him in a groove or rut; the effect again is to
narrow the field of further experience. An experience may be immediately enjoyable and yet
promote the formation of a slack and careless attitude; this attitude then operates to modify
the quality of subsequent experiences so as to prevent a person from getting out of them what
they have to give. (1938, 11, 12)

For Dewey, then education is at odds with practices such as training, disciplining,
directing, molding, and shaping. Such practices offer too little scope for the devel-
opment of personal initiative, open-mindedness, critical thinking, and creativity.
Education is not mere transmission, but transformation. Education keeps experience
open, and by doing so education opens the path to more experience, more education.
In Dewey’s words, “There is nothing to which education is subordinate save more
education,” and “The aim of education is to enable individuals to continue their
education, . . . continued capacity for growth” (1916a, 56, 107).
Dewey explains this basic educational theory in the first four chapters of Democ-
racy and Education. In Chaps. 5 and 6, he compares his educational theory to
competing theories, for instance, theories that conceive education in terms of
preparation (“getting ready” for “the responsibilities and privileges of adult life”),
development (“unfolding of latent powers toward a definite goal”), the training of
faculties or the formation of mind. In the remainder of the book, he gives a detailed
discussion of the implications of his own approach for democratic citizenship
education, including school education in a democratic context.
For Dewey, democratic citizenship is more than voting and having rights.
Democracy is not a form of government, it is considerably broader. It is a form of
social life: “a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience”
(1916a, 93). Social life is undemocratic, insofar as it is divided, hierarchical, and
conservative. Social life is divided and hierarchical, for instance, when certain
categories of people lay down the law and behave as if they are not dependent on
other groups, and as if the interests and contributions of other groups are
unimportant. Social life is conservative, for instance, when a society is comprised
of introverted and conservative groups, unwilling to learn from other groups and
reducing mutual contact to a minimum. Social life is democratic insofar as it is the
opposite of divided, hierarchical, and conservative, hence, insofar as it is communal
116 P. A. van der Ploeg

and renewing. For Dewey, social life is communal when it places “reliance upon the
recognition of mutual interests as a factor in social control.” Social life is renewing
via the “continuous readjustment through meeting the new situations produced by
varied intercourse . . . between social groups” (1916a, 92).
Crucially for Dewey, as previously mentioned, democracy is conducive to edu-
cation. The more communal social life is (so, the more democratic it is), the richer
and more varied the communication is, and the more experience and interests are
shared, the more educative social life is. Also, the more renewing social life is and
the more scope for flexibility and openness there is, the more creativity and personal
initiative are stimulated and rewarded, and in turn, the more educative it
is. Conversely, democracy needs education for two core features: communality
and renewal. Communality means that everyone is involved. Inclusive
co-determination and co-responsibility presuppose “that intellectual opportunities
are accessible to all on equable and easy terms” (1916a, 93). Renewal, the dynamics
of continuous development, assumes that citizens “are educated to personal initiative
and adaptability” (1916a, 94, also 105). For Dewey, offering intellectual opportuni-
ties and promoting initiative and renewal is what counts as education. In Democracy
and Education, this is elaborated in the form of two functions of school education;
according to Dewey, the two elementary functions are: learning to think and
vocational preparation.
At school, learning to think is crucial. Dewey contends that “(a)ll which the
school can or need to do for pupils, so far as their minds are concerned, is to develop
their ability to think” (1916a, 159). On Dewey’s account, the ability to think is the
reflective dimension of experience, and thinking coincides with inquiry: “Thinking
is a process of inquiry, of looking into things, of investigating . . .. (A)ll thinking is
research” (1916a, 155). The inquiring nature of thinking becomes even more
apparent where Dewey describes the role of thinking in “reflective experience”
(1916a, 157). He distinguishes between the “reflective experience” and “trial and
error”-like learning. Both kinds of experience follow three steps: A problem emerges
during an activity; an image emerges as to how the problem might be solved; and the
activity is adapted in accordance with this image. In “reflective experience,” how-
ever, the second step is more complex than in “trial and error”-learning. Reflection
goes beyond a spontaneous or associative image and involves critical thinking, the
application of knowledge, careful judgment regarding how best to (proceed to) act:
“a careful survey (examination, inspection, exploration, analysis) of all attainable
consideration which will define and clarify the problem at hand; a consequent
elaboration of the tentative hypothesis to make it more precise and more consistent,
because squaring with a wider range of facts” (1916a, 157). Democratic citizens
need such thinking abilities. The school develops them.
Besides this, schools in a democracy have an additional elementary function:
vocational preparation. On this subject, Dewey agrees with Plato. Adequate educa-
tion brings out the best in everyone and addresses children’s natural aptitudes.

We cannot better Plato's conviction that an individual is happy and society well organized
when each individual engages in those activities for which he has a natural equipment, nor
8 Dewey and Citizenship Education: Schooling as Democratic Practice 117

his conviction that it is the primary office of education to discover this equipment to its
possessor and train him for its effective use (1916a, 96, see also 121, 125, 318, 319).

Dewey believes that education should not identify children’s aptitudes with their
social origins. Children’s natural abilities, although it may sometimes seem other-
wise, are not dependent on their parents’ wealth or social status. It is the task of
education to correct “unfair privilege and unfair deprivation” (1916a, 126), to break
with the status quo, instead of perpetuating it. Democratic schooling remediates the
effects of unjust and restrictive aspects of society on opportunities for self-
development.
Furthermore, education should not predetermine students’ future vocational
activities by teaching- and training-specific vocational knowledge and vocation
skills. Technology and industry are ever changing, so that “an attempt to train for
too specific a mode of efficiency defeats its own purpose” (1916a, 126). Therefore,
for Dewey, education should guard against restrictive development and promote
personal initiative and adaptability, also in the realm of work. The changeable nature
of work is not the only reason for doing so. Another reason is that persons should not
be (made) subordinate to their work. Democracy means, among other things, that
everyone manages their own work. Democratic education helps “to develop capacity
to the point of competency to choose and make its own career” (1916a, 126).
In one of the last chapters of Democracy and Education, Dewey states that
vocation or career should be interpreted broadly: “each individual has . . . a variety
of callings, in each of which he should be intelligently effective” (1916a, 317).
Important activities besides work can be understood in terms of a calling, for
instance, fatherhood, friendship, membership of a church, or a political party.
Ideally, education also ensures that everyone can choose such callings for himself
and to make them his own by pursuing them in his own way and that everyone
adopts an open attitude towards new possibilities. For this reason, Dewey believes
that even the ability to spend one’s leisure time in a useful manner should be an
objective of citizenship education (1916a, 127). After all, leisure activities also have
a potential to contribute to “continued capacity for growth” (1916a, 107).
To summarize: for Dewey democratic citizenship education ensures that everyone
is intellectually equipped and skilled, is full of initiative and open to change, and is
able to use these qualities to investigate and solve problems, and to do his work and
live his life as he sees fit.

Early Work (Before 1900): The School as “Embryonic Society”

In Dewey’s work prior to Democracy and Education, the described approach to the
relationship between democracy, education, and the school is already clearly dis-
cernible, although vocabulary, emphasis, and justification were sometimes different
from his later work. Dewey’s core ideas on democracy change little from about 1890
onwards. From the outset, Dewey regards democracy as shared communication and
interaction, from which no one is excluded (cf. for instance: “Ethics of Democracy,”
118 P. A. van der Ploeg

1888). In Christianity and Democracy, for example, Dewey presents democracy as

standing for “community of ideas and interests through community of action,”
involving all members of society (1892, 91). Through their conjoint activities and
communication, people work at improving their activities and communication.
Besides being socially inclusive, democracy is also socially innovative: Democracy
is renewing social life.
Renewing occurs in conjunction with the “self-realization” or “development” of
individuals. In the period before about 1900 (for instance in “Outlines of a Critical
Theory of Ethics,” 1891), Dewey uses the term “self-realization,” tying in with
Neo-Hegelianism; after 1900 (for instance in “Ethics,” 1908) he uses the term
“development,” which is more befitting to functionalistic psychology and pragma-
tism. Although self-realization or development is considered a personal matter, it is
social to the core, both as a process and as a goal. It comes about through partici-
pation in culture (sharing language, rules, habits, meanings, thinking, values, ideals,
etc.), and hence, through communication and interaction, association, and social
intercourse. Self-realization or development, therefore, depends on community and
social life. Meanwhile, self-realization works towards developing one’s social roles
and tasks, discovering these and being able and willing to fulfill them. Besides being
deeply social, self-realization, or development is also open. Indeed, the direction of
self-realization or development is not fixed: It is guided by experiences, and hence
by circumstances, circumstances that are continuously changing. Self-realization or
development is also open in another sense: not unreservedly reproducing or
accepting roles and tasks, but adapting them, as required and possible, given the
circumstances at hand, and based on experience. Furthermore, it is never complete:
Self-realization and development remain fluid as long as experience is ongoing,
provided that there is growth. The dynamics between democracy and self-realization
or development reflect the organic relationship between democracy and education.
Education is a democratic practice, as democracy is an educative practice.
This understanding of the integral connection between democracy and education
is reflected in Dewey’s early writings on schools, education, and democratic citi-
zenship in the 1890s, for instance, in his much-cited Ethical Principles Underlying
Education (1897) and in School and Society (1899). As in Democracy and Educa-
tion, these early works stress the democratic importance of intellectual education and
of vocational preparation, broadly conceived. A minor difference from his later work
is that Dewey discusses the didactically crucial function of “occupations” more
explicitly than in Democracy and Education, particularly in School and Society.
Work-like doing, practical effort, labor, is understood as the motor of learning. To
illustrate the distinctive characteristics of Dewey’s early work, an impression of
Ethical Principles Underlying Education (1897) and School and Society (1899)
follows.
In Ethical Principles Underlying Education (1897), Dewey argues that education
coincides with the development of democratic citizenship: Apart from this “the
school has no end or aim” (1897, 60). School is not “training for citizenship” in
the sense of preparation for political participation and adherence to the law, because
citizenship requires more than this. The school provides for the development of the
8 Dewey and Citizenship Education: Schooling as Democratic Practice 119

student’s knowledge, insights, skills, and habits, needed to fulfill his social tasks, all
his social tasks: his tasks as a voter, a neighbor, a family member, a parent, a
breadwinner, an employee, a customer, a village resident, etc. Teaching and learning
are socializing, in this sense, but must be carried out in such a way as to not be at the
expense of the development of autonomy: “He is to be (for instance) a worker,
engaged in some occupation which will be of use to society, and which will maintain
his own independence and self-respect” (1897, 58; my italicization). Teaching and
learning, although aimed at socialization, must also be carried out in such a way that
the student is open to change and growth, also in the future, and that he is willing and
able to improve and reform the roles he will occupy, the organizations and commu-
nities in which he will be participating, and the society of which he will be a member.
The school should give the student “such possession of himself that he may take
charge of himself; may not only adapt himself to the changes which are going on, but
to have the power to shape and direct those changes” (1897, 60). In order to work in
this way towards the development of social participation, and citizenship in every
respect, the school must offer broad education:

(It) means training in science, in art, in history; command of the fundamental methods of
inquiry and the fundamental tools of intercourse and communication; it means a trained and
sound body, skilful eye and hand; habits of industry, perseverance, and, above all, habits of
serviceableness (1897, 59).

Developing the latter, serviceableness, is an integral part of education. Dewey does

not think highly of “teaching about . . . particular virtues or . . . instilling certain
sentiments with regard to them”; he disqualifies this as being “too goody-goody”
(1897, 75).
When the school functions properly as a “vital social institution” (1897, 61),
moral and social learning coincide with intellectual and academic learning. Outside
the school, in social life, moral and social development does not occur separately,
isolated from practice, but through first-hand experience with work, caring, and
other endeavors. Dewey is quite clear about this, as for example when he contends
that “The school cannot be a preparation for social life excepting as it reproduces,
within itself, the typical conditions of social life” (1897, 61, 62). He explains in
detail what this means for both the form of education (“methods,” 1897, 63–66) and
the content (“subject-matter,” 1897, 66–75). For didactics, this means providing
opportunities for cooperation, but, more specifically, it entails connecting to and
using “the child’s active powers, . . . his capacities in construction, production, and
creation” (1897, 65). For the content, it entails selecting and organizing subject
matter in such a way that “it brings the pupil to consciousness of his social
environment and confers upon him the ability to interpret his own powers from
the standpoint of their possibilities in social use” (1897, 67). In this way, education
fosters “social intelligence” and “social power,” enabling students to contribute to
society, in accordance with their own critical insight, as they see fit (1897, 75).
Elsewhere, Dewey develops this idea of education more fully, for instance, in School
and Society (1899).
120 P. A. van der Ploeg

In School and Society, Dewey discusses the function of schools in the context of
social progress arguing that schools should be social. In a democracy this means, first
and foremost, that education should be available to all children, regardless of their
social origins and class.

What the wisest parent wants for his own child, that must community want for all of its
children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys
democracy. All that society has accomplished for itself is put, through the agency of the
school, at the disposal of its future members (1899, 5).

The premise that schools should be social implies, secondly, that education should
not withdraw from developing society but participates in “the whole social evolu-
tion” (1899, 6). For this reason, Dewey welcomed the changes occurring in educa-
tion towards the end of the nineteenth century as it became more practical. One of the
key educational reforms, at that time, was the introduction of manual work and
domestic skills, such as woodwork, gardening, needlework, housekeeping, and
cookery. This is a good thing, Dewey explains, because, in this way, children
become familiar with “forms of industrial occupation” (1899, 7). Dewey’s conten-
tion was that due to urbanization and industrialization, most work was no longer
carried out in and around the home and that as a result, children no longer came into
contact with such tasks naturally and no longer learned, over the course of time, to
take part in these activities. For Dewey, this was a loss, given the educative value of
growing up around labor and gradually participating in it:

The children as they gained in strength and capacity, were gradually initiated into the
mysteries of the several processes . . . . We cannot overlook the factors of discipline and of
character-building involved in this kind of life: training in habits of order and of industry, and
in the idea of responsibility, of obligation, to do something, to produce something, in the
world. There was always something really needed to be done, and a real necessity that each
member of the household should do his own part faithfully and in co-operation with others
(1899, 7, 8).

According to Dewey, the loss of these traditional socialization processes ought to

be compensated by schools, and this is the social function of the school. For this
reason, Dewey assigns a central role to labor in schools. Not only because practical
and useful work motivates and activates children, which were the usual reasons for
introducing labor and domestic skills into the curriculum. Dewey goes a step
further. He proposes to make labor the organizational basis of education: “occu-
pations which exact personal responsibilities and which train the child in relation
to the physical realities of life” should become “the articulating centers of school
life” (1899, 9, 10). In practice this means that everything learned at school is
learned through, and in conjunction with useful activities, experienced as useful by
the students themselves (cf. Van der Ploeg 2013, 76–88). Understanding practice in
this way calls for fundamental didactical and curricular reform. Dewey developed
such ideas for the Laboratory School in Chicago and tried them out there (Dewey
1895, 1896).
8 Dewey and Citizenship Education: Schooling as Democratic Practice 121

In summary, Dewey’s idea of the school conceptualizes it as a mini-society: “The

introduction into the school of various forms of active occupation” gives schools the
opportunity “to be a miniature community, an embryonic society” (Dewey 1899,
15, also 27). Dewey wishes to base education on “occupations” (work-like activities)
because he viewed doing so as the most appropriate way to develop social power and
social intelligence in each and every child and, consequently, to help them to find
their place and role in society. In his early work, learning by doing is seen as a
didactical key to democratic citizenship education. In Dewey’s later work, the
emphasis shifts towards critical thinking.

Later Work (Post-1916): Intelligent Understanding and Scientific

Spirit

In the three decades following the publication of Democracy and Education, Dewey
wrote several articles specifically dealing with democracy and education (almost 20;
Van der Ploeg 2016). The views Dewey expressed in his later work confirms the
views in Democracy and Education. Nevertheless, there is a shift of focus that is
important so far as education for citizenship is concerned. In Democracy and
Education, the focus was on the cross-fertilization of intellectual learning and
vocational preparation. In Dewey’s earlier work, relatively speaking, a great deal
of attention was given to labor as a didactical key to democratic citizenship educa-
tion, conducive to both vocational preparation and intellectual learning. In Dewey’s
later work, the emphasis shifts towards critical thinking, investigation, and intelli-
gent understanding. When comparing the late with the early work, there is a clear
trend: Instead of “occupations” (work-like activities), “inquiries” become the key to
citizenship education.
In the articles published after 1916, Dewey argues particularly, and at length, that
education should teach students to investigate and to think. Education must ensure
the democratization of “the scientific spirit” (1916b, 142, 143). Students should
acquire an understanding of societal relations, processes, conflicts, and problems.
Even specialized vocational education should encourage “understanding the scien-
tific facts and principles or the social bearings of what is done” and “industrial
intelligence – a knowledge of the conditions and processes of present manufacturing,
transportation and commerce – so that the individual may be able to make his own
choices and his own adjustments, and be master, so far as in him lies, of his own
economic fate” (1917, 148, 149; see also 1916b, 139). For Dewey, society had
become so complex and extensive that citizenship becomes inconceivable without
specific schooling.

Only as the coming generation learns in the schools to understand the social forces that are at
work, the directions and the cross-directions in which they are moving, the consequences
that they are producing, the consequences that they might produce if they were understood
and managed with intelligence –only as the schools provide this understanding, have we any
assurance that they are meeting the challenge which is put to them by democracy (1937a,
122 P. A. van der Ploeg

183). What we need . . . is an intelligent understanding of actual conditions that will

stimulate individual inquiry and enable the minds of students . . . to think in a straightforward
and competent way and to reach their own conclusions (1934a, 176).

Schools should, therefore, “cultivate the habit of suspended judgment, of skepticism,

of desire for evidence, of appeal to observation rather than sentiment, discussion
rather than bias, inquiry rather than conventional idealizations,” regarding social
themes. Only then will “intelligent management of social affairs” come within reach
(1922a, 334). For Dewey, this is an essential condition of democracy. Education
should therefore become more investigative, more critical, more realistic.
The emphasis on inquiry, intelligent understanding, and critical thinking fits in
with Dewey’s other work in the 1920s and 1930s, firstly with his defense of
democracy against skeptical social and political scientists, for instance, in Human
Nature and Conduct (1922b) and The Public and its Problems (1927), and secondly
with his reflections on learning to think, particularly in How We Think (1933).
In understanding the shift in Dewey’s work in these later publications, it is
necessary to recognize that these were written at a time when the ideal of democracy
had come under pressure due to research findings in social and political sciences.
Experimental and empirical research had shown that thinking skills, reasonableness,
intelligence, powers of critical judgment, and rationality of most people were easily
overestimated and while ignorance, laziness, compliance, and credulity were readily
underestimated. Many scholars concluded that it was unwise to let everyone have a
say and take part in government. They thought social affairs and questions had
become too difficult to allow inclusive collective decision making. Decision making
could better be left in the hands of a select group of experts, those who are
sufficiently competent, reasonable, intelligent, critical, and rational. Dewey was
well aware of the problem of the tension between what democracy expects of
citizens and what citizens are actually capable of. His solution to addressing this
gap was radically different: not less democracy is called for, but more (Dewey 1922,
1927). For Dewey, all citizens should be involved in deliberation and decision
making, then they will learn naturally and become motivated in the process, and
learning by doing and through experience. Instead of exclusion and paternalism,
Dewey’s solution to the question of whether citizens possess requisite democratic
knowledge and skills is inclusion and participation. And the school is a good place to
start, according to Dewey: learning and practicing democratic citizenship through
gaining knowledge, investigation, critical thinking and judgment, regarding social
questions and affairs.
In How We Think (1933; an elaboration of two chapters of Democracy and
Education, 1916a, Chaps. 12 and 13), Dewey explains why critical thinking, as a
core skill, is really nothing special, why it is an ordinary skill belonging to everyone,
and how it can be practiced and developed through education. It was mainly written
to offer teachers guidance in this regard. Dewey offers various extensive and
concrete recommendations for teaching critical thinking, for instance, how the
teacher can encourage and direct children’s curiosity, how he can organize students’
thinking, how important it is to ensure that his personality does not stand in the way
8 Dewey and Citizenship Education: Schooling as Democratic Practice 123

of the students’ learning to think, how he should select learning-matter, how he

should organize and support tasks and how to prepare and handle whole-class
lessons. Learning to think does not just happen by itself. It requires constant alertness
and thoughtfulness on the part of the teacher. In this context, Dewey points out the
importance of knowledge of the subject matter:

This should be abundant to the point of overflow. It must be much wider than the ground laid
out in textbook or in any fixed plan for teaching a lesson. It must cover collateral points, so
that the teacher can take advantage of unexpected questions or unanticipated incidents
(1933, 338).

Dewey also focuses on the importance of attitudes, intellectual attitudes that is:
“open-mindedness,” “responsibility,” and “whole-heartedness” (1933, 136–138).
Those who are not “open-minded,” but “closed-minded,” learn nothing because
experience makes no difference. With “responsibility” Dewey does not mean
responsibility for practical consequences, but for logical consistency: “Intellectual
responsibility secures integrity; that is to say, consistency and harmony in belief. It is
not uncommon to see persons continue to accept beliefs whose logical consequences
they refuse to acknowledge” (1933, 138). Responsibility ensures consistency, and
hence logical connectivity, particularly in long chains of insights, arguments, and
conclusions. Responsibility also ensures what Dewey calls “thoroughness” (1933,
138): not settling for incomplete thinking or relying on sloppy assumptions or flawed
assessment or verification. “Whole-heartedness,” finally, is giving one’s undivided
attention, one’s intense commitment and exclusive focus to the subject at hand, to
what is relevant, concentration.
As is the case in his early work, in Dewey’s later work his thinking on citizenship
education is closely intertwined with his general philosophy. However, in this later
period, critical inquiry and thinking became the crucial activity. Critical inquiry is
obviously an “occupation” of some sort but is a different kind of “occupation” than
the practical livelihood-oriented activities that Dewey emphasized around 1900. At
that time, he moved away from idealism (Neo-Hegelianism) in favor of pragmatism,
hence, the emphasis on learning by doing. In this later work, he defends democracy
against the criticism and skepticism of the political and social sciences; hence, the
emphasis on the general human ability of critical thinking and on the importance of
practicing critical thinking at school as preparation for democratic citizenship.

Conclusion

The relationship between education and democracy has been a consistent focus of
exploration throughout Dewey’s scholarship. For him, they are two sides of the same
coin and are organically connected. Democracy is a condition for education and
education is a condition for democracy. Moreover, education is a democratic prac-
tice, as democracy is an educative practice. In schools, citizenship education cannot
be distinguished as a separate subject or domain: All education contributes to
124 P. A. van der Ploeg

democratic citizenship, including all school education. Provided it is inclusive:

equally accessible to everyone. And provided it is adequate education. Dewey
held pronounced views on the nature of adequate education. Adequate education
should fulfill two elementary functions: teaching students to think critically and
familiarizing them with, and becoming competent in social roles (such as family
member, parent, neighbor, employee, consumer, patient, voter, caregiver, and tour-
ist). Without the former, the latter would degenerate into mere socialization, trans-
mission. The combination guarantees that education will contribute to social
transformation. During the six decades that Dewey explicitly focuses on democratic
education, the emphasis increasingly shifted towards the importance of learning to
think critically: investigating and understanding social structures and dynamics.

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Works, 1925–1953 (Vol. 11, 1935–1937 (1987), pp. 408–417). Carbondale/Edwardsville:
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Saxion Dalton University Press.
Cosmopolitanism, Citizenship, and
Education Through the Lens of John Dewey 9
Jason Beech

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
The Challenges of Education in and for a Cosmopolitan World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
Experience and Democracy in the Philosophy of John Dewey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
Revisiting the Challenges of Educating in and for a Cosmopolitan World Through the
Lens of Dewey’s Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139

Abstract
This chapter analyses the challenge of educating students in and for a cosmopol-
itan world. I argue that since students live in a cosmopolitan reality, educational
institutions could address productively this challenge by using the everyday
experiences of students as a starting point and an input for pedagogic action.
I explore Dewey’s notions of democracy and experience and reflect upon their
implications for the development of pedagogies aimed at the education of young
people for living together in a hyperconnected world.

Keywords
Cosmopolitanism – Global citizenship · Dewey · Experience · Democracy and
education

J. Beech (*)
Escuela de Educación, Universidad de San Andrés – CONICET, Victoria, Argentina
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 127
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_33
128 J. Beech

Introduction

This chapter uses some concepts developed by John Dewey to reflect upon the
challenge of educating in and for a cosmopolitan world. Specifically, I explore the
concepts of experience and democracy, which are central to Dewey’s philosophy.
I contend that Dewey’s ideas could be used to expand pedagogic imaginations in
addressing one of the most pressing issues in education today: the need to prepare
young people for living together in a hyperconnected world.
The chapter is divided into three sections. In the first section, I analyze the
challenges of citizenship education in a cosmopolitan reality, and I sketch the idea
that these challenges could be addressed productively by using everyday experiences
of students as a starting point for pedagogic action. In the second section, I examine
the concepts of democracy and experience in Dewey’s writings. In the third section,
I revisit some of my initial ideas based on Dewey’s work and its implications for the
development of pedagogies aimed at education in and for a cosmopolitan reality.

The Challenges of Education in and for a Cosmopolitan World

Citizenship education has always been among the key objectives of educational
systems, promoting the kind of knowledge, abilities, and sensibilities that people
need to live together with others that are different. However, citizenship education is
dynamic. Its aims, and the methodologies that are used to pursue those aims, are
transformed as empirical conditions and social values change. Thus, one of the key
issues in thinking about citizenship education in the current times is to understand
the world in which our students live.
If education is defined as the process through which young people develop the
means of orientation (Elías 1994) that will help them interpret and act upon the
world, then these means of orientation should be defined in context. In the case of
education for living together with others that are different, a key element is to think
about who are the others with whom our students interact and those with whom they
will interact in the future. This empirical question is followed by an ethical one: How
do we want them to connect with these others? What kind of attitudes do we want to
promote in those encounters? The last issue is practical and refers to the kind of
pedagogic strategies that can be used to promote those dispositions.
In their origins, most educational systems were based on the logic of educating
citizens to develop a national identity and loyalty to the homeland. The spatial
reference was the nation-state. To know whether the others deserved our respect,
compassion, and loyalty, the question was simple and binary, are they our compa-
triots? This way of approaching citizenship education was rooted in the projects
aimed at constructing nation-states and at legitimizing the power of new modes of
social organization that included many groups that previously did not have much in
common. Rousseau (1966), one of the founders of political nationalism, argued that
patriotism was the most heroic of passions and the best way of educating good
people. He also asserted that the “feeling of humanity” evaporated and became
9 Cosmopolitanism, Citizenship, and Education Through the Lens of John Dewey 129

feeble when trying to include all humans. He deduced from this reasoning that it was
recommendable to limit our “humanity” to our fellow citizens.
Notwithstanding the opinion that one might have of Rousseau’s statement and the
educational priorities that were deduced from it, what is clear is that the empirical
conditions of connectivity have changed profoundly since the times of the French
intellectual. If the idea of including all humanity sounded implausible at those times,
the current global flows of images, ideas, people, and capital generate a situation in
which connectivity among all humans seems to be much more feasible (Appadurai
1996, 2013; Urry 2007; Vertovec 2009), while the notion of having geopolitical
territorial boarders that coincide with symbolic identity borders is much more
difficult to sustain (Rizvi and Beech 2017).
Nation-states with uniform languages, identities, and cultural experiences, if they
ever existed, have become a fiction. The coexistence of different identities, life
styles, and cultural preferences within the territories of nation-states and the recog-
nition of these diversities have become a global norm (Rizvi and Beech 2017). Thus,
even when senses of belonging to local and national spheres are still important, these
are dynamic phenomena that are articulated in new ways in changing empirical
conditions of extended connectivity and flows across national borders.
Citizenship education is aimed at promoting the type of knowledge, abilities, and
sensibilities that students need to live together with others. Consequently, shifts
in conditions of connectivity, mobility, and the growing presence of diversity imply
a challenge for the ways in which citizenship education is conceptualized and
enacted. How then can we think of citizenship education in a hyperconnected
world? To address this issue, I suggest, the first step is to question the idea that
globalization is a kind of abstract entity that is “out there,” dislocated from everyday
social interactions. On the contrary, the phenomena we tend to associate with
globalization are part of our everyday lives.
Beck (2006), for example, argues that we live in a “cosmopolitan reality,” since
we are in continual contact with what we construe as “other cultures.” This cosmo-
politan reality is not only a reality of the elites or middle classes that have access to
leisure travel. Migrations have grown significantly at a global level, and most of
those who migrate are escaping conflicts of adverse living conditions, searching for
a better life. For many, mobility is not a choice, but it is rather a strategy of survival.
Furthermore, cosmopolitan realities influence even those that are immobile and meet
“the other” in their own local territories.
In order to conceptualize these realities, Skrbis and Woodward (2013) use the
concept of “everyday cosmopolitanism,” arguing that most people participate in
cosmopolitan encounters in their daily lives. In addition, the increasing global
dimension of issues such as equity, justice, security, and sustainability, and the
realization of the global scope and origin of the challenges of current times create
“a global horizon of experience and expectation” (Beck 2006, p. 73).
People’s reactions to everyday cosmopolitanism are varied (Beck 2006; Rizvi and
Beech 2017; Skrbis and Woodward 2013). On the one hand, there are positive
reactions to the global mobility of people. Many people decide to travel abroad to
work, study, or simply to discover new experiences, if they can afford it. Others, that
130 J. Beech

might not be able to travel, celebrate meeting with different others in their own
locales. There are countries that promote global economic exchange, immigration,
and some have programs to host refugees that flee from unfavorable conditions at
home. However, on the other hand, the growing mobility of people images and
objects has created fears and anxieties resulting in xenophobic political views
(Appadurai 2006). Opposition to immigration has become widespread in some
parts of Europe, the USA, and other places, in some cases related to projects that
seek to reaffirm closed and reactionary national, cultural, and/or religious identities
(Wodak 2015). The politics of fear towards the other is growing in many parts of the
world, aiming at establishing barriers that define who is allowed to move and who is
not. Thus, we live in a world with contradictory views on mobilities and its
desirability (Rizvi and Beech 2017).
The challenge is even more complex when faced with a context of fragmentation
of the public sphere. Borja and Castells (1997) argue that processes of urbanization
have augmented ethnic pluralities in big cities through intranational and international
migration. Contemporary migration processes have certain characteristics that pose
huge challenges to social cohesion. The combination of migrations with digital
media result in what Appadurai (1996) calls diasporic public spheres, since migrant
groups can stay in permanent contact with their “culture” of origin, reducing the
need to “adapt” to the locale in which they now live. This creates a new order
of instabilities in the constitution of subjectivities and collective identities. In
addition, ethnic minorities tend to concentrate in specific areas of global cities,
where they sometime become the majority of the population. As noted by Borja
and Castells (1997): “spatial segregation based on cultural and ethnic characteristics
of the population is not the inheritance of a discriminatory past, but rather a
fundamental trait of cities in contemporary societies: the global information age is
also the age of local segregation” (p. 4 – my own translation).
Urban segregation and the dynamics of digital communications that tend to the
fragmentation and isolation of ethnic and political identities contribute to the devel-
opment of extreme and closed political positions. This creates a challenge for the
construction of communities that are open to dialogue in difference, and for demo-
cratic coexistence. As Arendt (1958, p. 57) noted, many years ago “The end of the
common world has come when it is seen only under one aspect and is permitted to
present itself in only one perspective.”
Global mobilities, everyday cosmopolitanism, and the political debates that
these realities trigger have a significant impact on education. Educators have the
challenge of helping students understand and interpret a complex world in which
mobility of people, images, imaginaries, ideas, and capital are happening at a scale
never before experimented and are considered to be desirable by some but are
feared by others. How can schools help young people to develop a moral sensi-
bility towards the type of cultural exchanges that have become a constitutive part
of their daily lives? How to promote democratic living together in a world in which
the encounter with the other is frequent and inevitable, but the public sphere has
weakened and conversation with those that different perspectives and positions is
the exception?
9 Cosmopolitanism, Citizenship, and Education Through the Lens of John Dewey 131

Although there is no univocal or definitive answer to these questions, Rizvi and

Beech (2017) have suggested that a possible approach is to consider the daily
experiences of students as a starting point for pedagogic practices that promote
citizenship education in and for a cosmopolitan world. To explore this approach, in
the next section I discuss some concepts in the work of John Dewey.

Experience and Democracy in the Philosophy of John Dewey

In the preface to his book Democracy and Education, Dewey (1916, p. 4) suggested
that “the philosophy stated in this book connects the growth of democracy with the
development of the experimental method in the sciences, evolutionary ideas in the
biological sciences, and the industrial reorganization.” According to Dewey, these
developments were key in promoting the transformations that were taking place in
the US society at the beginning of the twentieth century. Thus, when relating
education with democracy, Dewey was not developing a theory of democratic
education or a version of citizenship education but rather a much broader philosophy
for education in general (Quay 2016). The subtitle of the book – An Introduction to
the Philosophy of Education – is quite eloquent in this sense. As Quay (2016) argues,
Dewey’s project aimed at a philosophical reflection on the kind of reforms that
should be made in education to go along with the significant social changes of
the time.
Thus, when thinking about the relation between education and democracy in
Dewey’s work, it is important to understand that his writings encompassed much
more than citizenship education, addressing the role of education in the development
of individuals and society. As Biesta and Lawy (2006, p. 65) notes “democracy is not
confined to the sphere of political decision-making but extends to participation in the
‘construction, maintenance and transformation’ of all forms of social and political
life.”
One of the key issues in Dewey’s analysis of the relation between education and
democracy is the dynamism of societies and its implications for education. He
criticized what he called traditional education for being anchored in the past and
being unable to apprehend the waves of social change that were taking place in his
times. He had a very critical view of the contents of traditional education:

that which is taught is thought of as essentially static. It is taught as a finished product, with
little regard either to the ways in which it was originally built up or to changes that will surely
occur in the future. It is to a large extent the cultural product of societies that assumed the
future would be much like the past, and yet it is used as educational food in a society where
change is the rule, not the exception. (Dewey 1938/1997, p. 19)

Dewey’s focus on the relation between education and social change in moments
of significant transformations makes his work very relevant to analyze the type of
challenges that education is facing today in terms of educating young people in and
for a cosmopolitan world.
132 J. Beech

Dewey noted how the technological changes of his times, such as access to
automobiles, cinema, and radio, broadened the horizons of experience and aspira-
tions of children and people in general. In this way, he noted that there was a direct
relation between technological changes and transformations in the ways in which
people related to their environment and other people, creating new challenges for
social cohesion (Quay 2016). It was in this spirit that Dewey construed the chal-
lenges that democracy posed to education. In order to survive, democracy had to be
dynamic, and education is a fundamental strategy to foster the kind of change that
sustains democracy. Dewey (1937/1985) noted that “the greatest mistake that we can
make about democracy is to conceive of it as something fixed, fixed in idea and fixed
in its outward manifestation” (p. 138).
The fundamental unity of Dewey’s philosophy was found in understanding the
relation between experience and education (Dewey 1938/1997). Experience is
what permits a close connection between theory (reasoning) and practice
(Quay 2016). Thus, the development of a theory of experience was central in his
philosophical and pedagogical writings. Dewey promoted a progressive education
that should be based on the daily experiences of students. Consequently, he argued
that any “practical attempts to develop schools based upon the idea that education
is found in life-experience are bound to exhibit inconsistencies and confusions
unless they are guided by some conception of what experience is” (Dewey 1938/
1997, p. 51). The solution to this problem resided in the development of a profound
philosophy of the social factors that operate in the construction of individual
experiences (Dewey 1938/1997). He identified two key factors that influence
experiences.
The first of these factors is, according to Dewey, the principle of continuity. The
continuity of experience implies that each experience that an individual has is built
upon experiences that the person had in the past, and at the same time modifies in
some way future experiences. This implies that the central aim of an education based
on experience is to intervene on the effects that a given experience of the student will
have on his or her future experiences. Dewey stressed that a fundamental role of
educators is to define which kind of experiences contribute to the positive develop-
ment of the student and which do not.

Growth, or growing as developing, not only physically but intellectually and morally, is one
exemplification of the principle of continuity. The objection made is that growth might take
many different directions: a man, for example, who starts out on a career of burglary may
grow in that direction, and by practice may grow into a highly expert burglar. Hence it is
argued that “growth” is not enough; we must also specify the direction in which growth takes
place, the end towards which it tends. (Dewey 1938/1997, p. 36)

In that sense, for Dewey, the intervention of the educator is the key in influencing
the direction that growth will take, since each experience is a “moving force,” and its
value can only be judged in terms of the direction that that movement takes. Thus, it
is “the business of the educator to see in what direction an experience is heading”
(Dewey 1938/1997, p. 38).
9 Cosmopolitanism, Citizenship, and Education Through the Lens of John Dewey 133

The second factor that operates in the construction of experience according to

Dewey’s theory is the principle of interaction. This principle is based on the notion
that experiences take place in a given context. Experiences imply an interaction
between an individual and its environment. There is a subjective or individual aspect
and another contextual or external one that interact to constitute an experience.

The word “interaction,” which has just been used, expresses the second chief principle for
interpreting an experience in its educational function and force. It assigns equal rights to both
factors in experience—objective and internal conditions. Any normal experience is an
interplay of these two sets of conditions. (Dewey 1938/1997, p. 42)

Thus, experiences are not constituted solely in the body and the mind of a person.
They do not happen in a vacuum. They are partly constructed by the elements that
are outside the individual. The environment of experience can manifest in diverse
ways, and it is comprised of elements such as the people with whom the individual
interacts, the themes in the conversations they have, materials such as books or toys,
the location, etc. (Dewey 1938/1997).
The transactional characteristic of experience creates a challenge for teachers that
must generate a “connection between the child and his [sic] environment as complete
and intelligent as possible” (Dewey and Dewey 1915/1972, p. 390). Teachers must
learn how to use the material and social context that is available to extract from it
everything that could constitute a virtuous experience for students. Dewey stresses
that given this challenge, what he calls progressive education is much more difficult
to accomplish than traditional education (Dewey 1938/1997).
In this way, Dewey suggests that the principle of continuity and the principle of
interaction are closely related and should not be seen as different aspects. They are
the “longitudinal and lateral aspects” of experience. Given the principle of continu-
ity, when a person passes from one experience to the next one, what (s)he has lived
and learned in the first situation becomes an instrument to understand and act upon
the following situation. Thus, there is not only change in the individual but also in
the ways in which (s)he interprets the environment. In this way, continuity and
interaction taken as a unified process define the relevance and educational value of
an experience.
At the same time, Dewey’s notion of progressive education implies a particular
relation with temporality. One of his most well-known statements is the one that
suggests that education is not preparation for life, that education is life itself.

The ideal of using the present simply to get ready for the future contradicts itself. It omits,
and even shuts out, the very conditions by which a person can be prepared for his future. We
always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and only by extracting at each
present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same
thing in the future. (Dewey 1938/1997, p. 49)

Dewey argues that education must be centered on current experiences of students

as fundamental material for its intellectual, physical, and moral growth. Teachers
134 J. Beech

must help students develop the ability to make sense of their experiences at a moral
and cognitive level, so that they can also use it independently in future experiences.
Dewey did not elaborate in his work a detailed pedagogic method to obtain
the kind of educational effects he expected from experiences (Quay 2016). However,
he did provide some ideas linked with the relevance of reflexivity and with the role
of teachers that are worth exploring in more detail since they can provide a source of
inspiration for the development of pedagogies aimed at education in and for
a cosmopolitan reality.
Dewey highlighted the importance of promoting reflection on experiences so that
these could be educationally relevant. For an experience to have an educational
value, it should tend towards a more profound knowledge of facts and to the
development of new ideas (Dewey 1938/1997).

To reflect is to look back over what has been done so as to extract the net meanings which are
the capital stock for intelligent dealing with further experiences. It is the heart of intellectual
organization and of the disciplined mind. (Dewey 1938/1997, p. 86)

The relevance of promoting a reflexive attitude towards experiences stresses the

importance of the role of teachers. For Dewey progressive education based on
experience should not be seen as foreign to organization and planning. It does not
imply that the teacher leaves its students to develop knowledge and abilities in an
unstructured mode. On the contrary, the role of teachers is fundamental, even if the
style of their work is different from what they do in traditional education. The teacher
is no longer in the position of “external boss or dictator but takes on that of leader of
group activities” (Dewey 1938/1997, p. 59).
Freedom should not be understood as an end in itself. The lack of all kinds of
restrictions could be negative and destructive for cooperative activities and could
result in a negative kind of freedom. He gave the example of a game or a sport in
which children need certain rules that define restrictions to behavior to be able to
play. Without those restrictions, a state of absolute freedom becomes detrimental for
social relations and for cooperative activities. The freedom that matters is “a freedom
which is power: power to frame purposes, to judge wisely, to evaluate desires by the
consequences which will result from acting upon them; power to select and order
means to carry chosen ends into operation” (Dewey 1938/1997, p. 63). The ideal of
education is to develop the power for self-control, but if we simply remove all type
of external control there is no guarantee that self-control will be developed.
Thus, Dewey reminds us that the guide of the teacher contributes to the devel-
opment of the kind of freedom that matters. Sometimes, based on simplistic readings
of progressive education, teachers might think that intervention and restricting the
conduct of their students might be negative, risky, or even authoritarian. Dewey
mentions cases in which, in the name of promoting freedom, teachers leave their
students on their own surrounded by objects and materials without providing them
with guidelines regarding how they can make good use of those materials or the kind
of activities that they should perform. Reflecting on this kind of situations he sustains
that it “is impossible to understand why a suggestion from one who has a larger
9 Cosmopolitanism, Citizenship, and Education Through the Lens of John Dewey 135

experience and a wider horizon should not be at least as valid as a suggestion arising
from some more or less accidental source” (Dewey 1938/1997, p. 71). Of course
those teachers can also abuse of their positions and force students towards channels
that pursue their own objectives, rather than the well-being and the moral, physical,
and cognitive development of students. But the way to avoid this kind of negative
situation is not to renounce to the power and obligation that the adult has to plan
educational activities and guide students. “The plan, in other words, is a co-operative
enterprise, not a dictation. The teacher’s suggestion is not a mold for a cast-iron
result but is a starting point to be developed into a plan through contributions from
the experience of all engaged in the learning process.” (p. 72).
Therefore, from this brief review of some of the central concepts in Dewey’s
pedagogical theories, we can extract some principles to think more profoundly about
the challenge of educating in and for a cosmopolitan world. These are: a broad
conception of the relation between education and democracy, the dynamism of
democracy, the significance of using present experiences of students as an input
for their education, the principles of continuity and interaction as factors that define
experience, and the importance of promoting reflexivity and rethinking the role of
teachers.

Revisiting the Challenges of Educating in and for a Cosmopolitan

World Through the Lens of Dewey’s Philosophy

In this final part, I will reflect upon the relevance of Dewey’s philosophical concepts
for the challenge of educating young people in and for a cosmopolitan reality. It
might be worth clarifying that I will not present a series of detailed recipes for
pedagogic action, since that would be in contradiction with the main principle that
I want to put forward: that it is the actual everyday cosmopolitan experiences of
students that should be the starting point for democratic education. Experiences are
constructed through interaction between individuals and their environments, conse-
quently pedagogic strategies aimed at using experiences as a fundamental element
should be adapted to the specific experiences available to students (and teachers) in
their context.
The first aspect I want to emphasize is the focus in education for democracy. As
I mentioned when analyzing the link between education and democracy in Dewey, it
is important to have a broad conception of education for democracy, to avoid what
could be called a narrow perspective of its relevance. In other words, we should not
think that education for democracy is the task of a few school subjects or curricular
compartments that formally are in charge of the issue. Education for democracy is
what makes the school meaningful; it is related to the ontological aims of education
(Dewey 1916; Quay 2015), or what Jackson (2012) calls transformative educational
traditions. Education for democracy is the most profound aim of education: the
transformation of the self. The project of converting the other into something
different. I suggest that an education for democracy is a way of conceptualizing
this project, and consequently it cannot be reduced to a few school spaces and times.
136 J. Beech

In terms of the curriculum, it is also necessary to open the “curricular cage” of

citizenship education, understanding that all school subjects contribute to this central
role of schools. I am not only referring to the principle that all teachers should be
aware of their role as educators that exceeds teaching history or physics but rather to
the notion that the categories and concepts that students learn through the school
disciplines to understand, interpret, and act upon the world are a fundamental input
when people define their ethical positions. The disciplines are not exempt from
values, and school contents are not neutral. Consequently, the development of an
education for democracy in a cosmopolitan world requires a revision of disciplinary
contents to assess the kind of political and ethical values that they promote.
In his great book, Learning to divide the world, Willinsky (1998) argues that
attitudes of negative discrimination towards others are not the result of ignorance but
rather of the education that we receive. He shows how many of the categories we use
to classify the world and populations that are still taught in schools were created
during the times of the great European empires and their colonial projects. In this
way, he argues, educational systems keep reproducing ethnocentric views of the
world and stereotypes that are the breeding ground for negative discrimination
towards certain groups.
Thus, the concepts and ways of representing the world that are learned in the
different school subjects have a great impact on the ways in which we conceptualize
the world, construct our collective identities, and develop our views on others that
are different. For example, school textbooks for primary schools in Argentina offer
definitions of the notion of globalization such as this:

It can be said that globalization consists of a set of strategies that tend to consolidate the
hegemony of the big industrial, financial, and media corporations, whose aim is to appro-
priate the natural and cultural resources of poor countries. . . (Kapelusz 2001, p. 293)

It is clear that the process of globalization can be associated with modes of

economic, political, and cultural domination, and it is important that students learn
about global inequalities and how they are based on historical configurations of
international relations at a global level. Yet, this kind of ultra-simplified and biased
definition not only omits a significant and valuable part of global exchanges but also
seems to be quite negative in terms of promoting a morally productive attitude
towards cosmopolitan encounters and global processes.
In any case, global inequalities rather than being presented exclusively from
a defensive perspective that promotes closure should be the object of reflexive
practices, promoting the analysis of international power relations, inequalities and
injustices, and the evaluation of the political position of students, their representations,
imaginaries, and desires related to these issues. Dewey’s notion of the importance of
experience as a fundamental pedagogic input can be a valuable resource to contribute
to the reflexivity of students and to the analysis of how global flows and their
consequences impact on their own life and their communities. Global processes should
be studied in their complexity, understanding their historical construction with the aim
of generating the conditions for students to imagine a more just global order.
9 Cosmopolitanism, Citizenship, and Education Through the Lens of John Dewey 137

Another relevant aspect that Dewey contributes to this discussion is the dyna-
mism of democracy as a concept, both as an ideal and in terms of its empirical
manifestations. This is linked to what Beck (2006) identifies as the emergence of
a cosmopolitan reality in current times. We live in an interconnected world in which
the definition of collective identities, symbolic borders, and the idea of a common
ground for living together are being questioned and are unstable and dynamic. It is
a world of permanent change, complex, and chaotic. This is the reality in which
students live. It is the world that they must understand to be able to act upon it. Thus,
our pedagogic strategies should have the capacity to bring those complex and
dynamic realities into the processes of teaching and learning.
In this sense, Dewey’s perspectives imply a significant change in the traditional
way in which schools have addressed issues related with the moral development
of student. Pedagogic strategies often take abstract normative declarations as a
starting point: the Constitution, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or
others (Rizvi and Beech 2017; Todd 2009, 2013; Wahlstrom 2014). Of course that
it is important that students learn about these regulations. The challenge is how to
introduce them into the content of these norms in ways in which they can develop an
interpretation of how the normative and ethical principles that are included in
regulations relate to their everyday experiences and ethical decisions, so that they
can use them productively in their future experiences.
However, when these declarations are presented to students in an abstract form, it
is difficult for students to link them to their actual everyday experiences. We can
easily fall into a style of teaching that promotes decontextualized learning of these
norms if we simply present to students a list of principles that define the behavior of
a good citizen. In this way, we generate idealized moral constructions that do not
exist and cannot exist in reality, since no person can always abide by every rule that
(s)he would agree with in an abstract form.
Moral conflicts and contradictions are inherent to human behavior. It is not so
difficult to agree on a set of common ethical principles in abstract. The everyday
practical challenge is that the borders between those principles are not always clear
and the problem is not only to abide by an abstract moral order or not. We are many
times faced with the dilemma of making decisions in which we must choose between
violating one ethical norm or another, both of which we would agree with in abstract.
For example, most people would agree that lying is wrong, and that hurting someone
else’s feelings is also bad. The practical problem is that many times we are faced with
a situation in which one of these rules will be broken, and we need to decide in a
second which one to break.
Our students are already citizens that participate in interactions with others and in
cosmopolitan encounters, and consequently they are permanently faced with moral
dilemmas and ethical decisions. Based on Dewey’s notion of the educational poten-
tial of experience, the question then is how we can have pedagogic strategies that
link the conversations on normative declarations with everyday moral experiences
of students, opening the possibility for reflection and moral evaluation of their
actions and decisions, and having an impact on future experiences and ethical
behavior. In other words, what I am suggesting is that pedagogic strategies for
138 J. Beech

citizenship education take as a starting point the experiences of students, of teachers,

or even other experiences that could be similar to those lived by students and
are documented in cultural productions, such as movies or books (Rizvi and
Beech 2017).
As argued by Rizvi and Beech (2017), once experiences of encounters with others
are made visible, the next step is to promote reflexive and critical evaluation of these
experiences. The ethical evaluation of our own conduct and decisions should avoid
falling into a simplistic binary good-bad analysis (although of course in some cases,
it might be quite clear that certain attitudes or behaviors can be classified as being
good or bad). On the contrary, everyday experiences should be debated in their
complexity, making students aware of how moral everyday decisions can bring
certain values of rights of different groups into conflict.
I suggest that by identifying everyday experiences, and promoting a critical and
complex reflexive attitude and moral evaluation of these experiences, it is possible
for students to develop the capacities to relate to normative and ethical principles in
a more productive and contextualized from. Instead of students learning about
important normative declarations in an abstract form, they would be able to link
these norms with their everyday life and decisions and, in this way, their interpre-
tations of previous experiences could become a guide for action, generating the
reflexive capacity to relate their daily actions with the construction of a more just
global order.
As Dewey notes, enacting these types of pedagogic strategies is complex and
more difficult than simply teaching students to memorize the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights (to caricaturize what Dewey called traditional education). The role
of teachers change but in no way are they less involved with the learning process. On
the contrary, it is fundamental that teachers construct a scenario to make the
experiences of students visible and to promote a profound and significant reflection
so that the process can have an impact on future daily experiences of students.
Teachers are challenged with the need to find a fine balance between being the guide
that the learning process requires and allowing at the same time for students to
contribute to the proposed activity. This implies revising the ways in which we relate
with knowledge, certainty, authority, and agreement. It is not an easy challenge.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have defined citizenship education as the part of education aimed
at developing the kind of knowledge, abilities, and sensibilities that students need
to live with others. I also suggested that citizenship education is dynamic and should
be adjusted as empirical conditions and social values change. Consequently, in order
to define the kind of citizenship education that should be promoted, it is key to
understand the world in which students live.
Recent changes in connectivity, mobility, and the ways in which diversity is
valued imply significant shifts in terms of the kind of encounters with others that
people have and will have in the future. Thus, citizenship education needs to be
9 Cosmopolitanism, Citizenship, and Education Through the Lens of John Dewey 139

rethought. The first step I proposed in that direction is the awareness that students are
already living in a cosmopolitan reality in which encounters with different others are
part of their daily life. Thus, rather than presenting students with abstract normative
principles about global citizenship, I suggested that their everyday cosmopolitan
experiences could be used as a starting point for the development of pedagogies
aimed at education in and for a cosmopolitan reality.
To further explore this pedagogic principle, I argued that Dewey’s notions of
experience and democracy as potentially potent inputs to design pedagogies aimed at
a type of citizenship education that can dynamically adapt to different empirical
realities, using the experiences of students as a source for reflexive learning. In this
way, students could develop the ability to relate to ethical principles in more
productive and contextualized ways.
I have only reached the stage of proposing a series of pedagogical principles (set
at a quit high level of abstraction) for the design of a kind of citizenship education
that can address the challenge of preparing young people to live together with others
in a cosmopolitan reality. Partly because it would be contradictory with this approach
to give a detailed recipe for pedagogic action, when my main argument is that ethical
learning should be contextualized. But also because educating for democracy in and
for a cosmopolitan world is one of those challenges that some authors call “wicked
problems” (Rittel and Webber 1973). It is one of those problems that, given its
nature, it can never be fully solved. The challenge of educating good citizens does
not have an end. We will never reach a moment in which we will be satisfied.
Because it is a contested issue and we will not all agree exactly on what being a good
citizen entails, and even if we agreed, there will always be room for improvement.
Thus, education in and for a cosmopolitan world is a never-ending project that
requires permanent attention and effort both at an individual and at a collective level.

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Neoliberalism, Citizenship, and Education:
A Policy Discourse Analysis 10
Andrew Wilkins

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142
Contested Concepts and Approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
Neoliberalism and Citizenship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144
Neoliberal Citizenship in Context: Education Policy Making in England . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151

Abstract
In this chapter, I draw on various literatures and theories spanning different
academic disciplines to explore some of the connections between neoliberalism,
citizenship, and education. Not to be confused with studies of citizenship educa-
tion, this chapter documents how users of education services, specifically parents,
are invited, even compelled, to perform certain responsibilities and obligations as
bearers of consumer rights and champions of their own self-interest. Building on
literature which likens citizenship to a “governmentality” (Hindess, Citizenship
Stud 6(2):127–143, 2002; Ong, Neoliberalism as exception: mutations in citizen-
ship and sovereignty. Duke University Press, Durham, 2006), this chapter exam-
ines the ways in which parents are invited to manage themselves responsibly and
rationally through the proliferation of ever-greater forms of choice making and
calculated risk in their navigation of and access to education provision. To
evidence the range and reach of these interventions, this chapter adopts elements
of Foucauldian discourse analysis (Sharp and Richardson, J Environ Policy Plan
3(3):193–209, 2001) through a study of key education policy texts to show how

A. Wilkins (*)
University of East London, London, UK
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 141
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_10
142 A. Wilkins

parents are imagined and activated as consumers (or “citizen-consumers”) in the

field of education.

Keywords
Neoliberalism · Citizenship · Discourse analysis · Consumer · Education ·
Governmentality

Introduction

In this chapter, I draw on relevant theories and perspectives sourced from different
academic literatures to trace the relationship between neoliberalism, citizenship, and
education. A key focus of the chapter concerns the different ways in which users of
education services, specifically parents, are constructed and imagined through key
education policy texts. Through applying elements of Foucauldian discourse analy-
sis (Sharp and Richardson 2001), this chapter examines the rhetorical and ideolog-
ical significance of education policy texts to the promotion of distinct models of
citizenship, namely “active citizenship” (Kivelä 2018) or “neoliberal citizenship”
(Hindess 2002). The analysis includes a focus on the different kinds of oppositions
and distinctions that are articulated through policy rhetoric to effect certain con-
structions of the citizen as desirable (active) and undesirable (passive).
Neoliberal citizenship is a useful concept for making explicit the relationship
between neoliberalism and citizenship in the field of education. At the heart of
neoliberal citizenship is a narrow rational, utilitarian view of citizens as consumers,
namely citizens who exercise choice that is commensurate with consistent or pre-
dictable outcomes (i.e., outcomes that conform with a standard rationality pre-
supposed by utility theory or public choice theory, see Finlayson 2003); citizens
who are adept at navigating new responsibilities and their attendant calculations and
risks; and citizens who are adaptable and responsive to change and their moral
hazards, or what Chandler and Reid (2016: 53) call “resilient subjects.” In this
chapter I adopt the concept of neoliberal citizenship to capture the discursive terrain
of “ethico-politics” (Kivelä 2018: 160) through which citizens are trained and
enjoined by way of structured incentives and ethical injunctions to fulfill certain
obligations and responsibilities vis-à-vis their relationship to the state and to the
market more generally.
In practice, however, neoliberal citizenship is a muddy concept. Neoliberal
citizenship tends to be aligned with and grafted onto different models of citizenship,
be it socio-liberal citizenship, libertarian citizenship, or republican citizenship
(Johansson and Hvinden 2005). Moreover, neoliberal citizenship is mediated and
inflected by “processes of assembly” (Higgens and Larner 2017: 4) shaped by the
activities, rationalities, and priorities of national governments and their regional
authorities. While remaining attentive to these slippery dynamics, this chapter
utilizes the concept of neoliberal citizenship as a first approximation to
specifying a form of education governance (and “psychological governance,” see
10 Neoliberalism, Citizenship, and Education: A Policy Discourse Analysis 143

Jones et al. 2013) that is prevalent among mainly advanced liberal countries and their
education systems.

Contested Concepts and Approaches

Owing to the competing meanings attributed to neoliberalism, citizenship, and

education, this chapter draws on diverse theoretical perspectives to help situate
and refine the analysis. Theory “as a sort of moving self-reflexivity” (Gregory
1994: 86) is used here to trace the political-intellectual history of ideas and the
struggle over power (or “hegemony,” the dominance and ascendency of particular
ideas) linking politics and everyday life. Theory is the critical investigation of the
contested nature of language and thought and therefore is about making the familiar
strange, principally through challenging the kinds of everyday assumptions claimed
to be universal and acceptable or “truthful” (identical and indivisible to a reality “out
there”). On this account, theory is a suitable lens through which to examine neolib-
eralism, citizenship, and education because these terms are better understood as
overt political constructions – contingent, situated, and unstable – rather than
anything that resembles static, universal concepts. What is the role of education?
What does it mean to be a citizen? There are no simple answers to these questions. In
fact, these questions typically give rise to more nuanced questions. How should we
define the role and value of education – in relation to civic training, to self-
development, to employment? What types of identifications are actively promoted
or undermined through various definitions and practices of citizenship?
These questions remind us that neoliberalism, citizenship, and education are not
only dense concepts but overt political constructions underpinned by various sets of
interests, motives, and normative commitments. Citizenship is shaped by historically
conditioned patterns of exclusion and belonging for example, making it an “essen-
tially contested concept” (Lister 2003: 14). Similarly, neoliberalism fails to resemble
a coherent, uniform ideological project owing to its “contradictory tendencies”
(Apple 2017: 1) and co-option and translation by different national governments
(Peck and Theodore 2015; Plehwe 2009). On this understanding, neoliberalism,
citizenship, and education are better understood as compounds or assemblages of
various concepts, perspectives, and processes shaped by distinct political philoso-
phies, cultural traditions, and geo-politics. The contested nature of these terms means
that context is integral to any meaningful analysis of the ways neoliberalism and
citizenship are overlaid and aligned with national education systems and their
“specific semiotic, social, institutional and spatiotemporal fixes” (Jessop and Sum
2016: 108).
In what follows I unpack some of the various meanings attributed to concepts of
neoliberalism and citizenship in order to draw out their conceptual diffuseness.
Following this I move from the general to the particular through an analysis of key
education policy texts produced by successive governments in England between
1990 and 2010 (DCSF 2006, 2008; DES 1988, 1991; DfEE 2001, 2004; DfES 2005;
HMSO 1991; OPSR 2002; SCPA 2005). While these policy trends are specific to
144 A. Wilkins

England, they are expressive of a wider political and economic movement that has
dominated education since the 1980s, namely neoliberalism (Wilkins 2016), and
therefore the policy analysis presented here will resonate strongly with other coun-
tries around the globe with similar market imperatives governing their education
systems. The analysis is supplemented and strengthened by elements of Foucauldian
discourse analysis (Sharp and Richardson 2001) with its emphasis on the fluidity and
discontinuity of “truth” (Foucault 1981). Here policy texts can be viewed as
dynamic, productive spaces that attempt to constitute rather than simply reflect
reality and which seek to “authorize what can and cannot be said” (Britzman
2000: 36). The analysis relies on a textually oriented approach to discourse analysis
through a focus on education policy texts and therefore fails to capture discourse in
practice, namely the ways in which policy discourse is interpreted, translated, and
implemented. As Clarke (2004: 2–3) argues,

Achieving and maintaining subjection, subordination or system reproduction requires work/

practice – because control is imperfect and incomplete in the face of contradictory systems,
contested positions and contentious subjects.

A textually oriented approach to discourse analysis is key to understanding how

relations of domination are sustained and reproduced through policy texts that “seek
to purport ‘truths’ about who we are or what we should be” (McKee 2009: 468). At
the same time, relations of domination are not “monolithic, with state practices
fitting seamlessly with practices of self-creation” (Bevir 2010: 425). A textually
oriented approach to discourse analysis fails to capture these practices of self-
creation since it is a study of the intended effects of policy discourse rather than a
study of their actual effects. Therefore, what is missing from this analysis is a study
of the embodiment or lived experience of discourse, namely the ways in which
socially circulating discourses are contested, negotiated, and revised. I conclude the
chapter by adopting a “governmentality” approach (Dean 1999) to help situate and
refine some of the key observations and arguments presented in the analysis.

Neoliberalism and Citizenship

Neoliberalism (or “neoliberalization,” see Castree 2006) has emerged within aca-
demic jargon and common parlance as one of the most cited concepts used to
describe and understand the impact of global forces on the formation of national
economies and their welfare states. Over the past 30 years, the concept of neoliber-
alism has been indispensable to understanding the contradictory nature of welfare
reform, especially in many Western, social democratic countries where typically
governments design welfare programs with an emphasis on traditional welfarist
principles, be it distribution and to a lesser extent recognition, while simultaneously
and aggressively pursuing market principles of competition and private enterprise
(Hall 2005; Newman 2001). More generally, neoliberalism describes a movement or
“thought collective” (Mirowski 2009: 428) driven by specific economic and political
10 Neoliberalism, Citizenship, and Education: A Policy Discourse Analysis 145

goals. A key focus of these goals is the subordination of national economies to global
patterns of deregulated, precarious labor, high levels of consumption and debt,
repressive state fiscal practices (or austerity), and increased corporate monopoly of
industry (Harvey 2005). More specifically, neoliberalism denotes a form of govern-
ment (or “governance,” see Rhodes 2007) focused on disaggregating state power to
complement new forms of self-organization or “heterarchy” (Olmedo et al. 2013)
characterized by public-private partnerships, diminished collective bargaining, and
increased private sector takeover of public sector management.
More recently terms such as “postneoliberalism” (Springer 2015) and “after
neoliberalism” (Rose 2017) have been introduced to signal the displacement of
neoliberalism in some countries and the so-called “crisis of neoliberalism” (Beder
2009) that followed the global financial crisis in 2008. In Latin America, for
example, many countries have recentralized certain public utilities and entities in
order to bring them under state control (Lewkowicz 2015). However, global com-
petition means that many of these countries are making large concessions to the
market and to the circulation of private capital in order to survive economically, and
therefore neoliberalism, or some adapted form of neoliberalism, continues to shape
their political economies (Houtart 2016).
Key to understanding neoliberalism in these contexts is the disaggregation
(or “roll back,” see Peck and Tickell 2002) of state power and the commissioning
of new “intermediary associations” (Ranson et al. 2005: 359) including charities,
social enterprises, and private companies who manage the development of welfare
programs on behalf of the state, from health and social care to education and
housing. Sometimes referred to as privatization management of public sector orga-
nization or “exogenous privatization” (Ball and Youdell 2007: 14), the neo-
liberalization of political economies is less straightforward than the wholesale
transfer of public assets to the private sector since those assets sometimes remain
publicly funded and publicly accountable while under the management of private
organizations and actors. Unlike classical liberalism which held a strong belief in
spontaneous order and the moral primacy of the autonomous subject (Jonathan
1997), and, therefore, opposed all species and configurations of state intervention
in civil society and civil institutions, it is argued neoliberalism gives legitimacy to
the state as “a market-maker, as initiator of opportunities, as remodeller and
moderniser” (Ball 2007: 82). As Peck et al. (2009: 51) show,

While neoliberalism aspires to create a utopia of free markets, liberated from all forms of
state interference, it has in practice entailed a dramatic intensification of coercive, disciplin-
ary forms of state intervention in order to impose versions of market rule.

Neoliberalism therefore captures something unique about the political restructuring

of the state and the transmutation of the state form, namely the shift away from
government as the locus of power and the shift toward new modes of governing
(or “governmentality,” see Dean 1999) characterized by new institutional forms and
practices in which elements of state power are decoupled from the center and tightly
or loosely coupled to nongovernment authorities and actors (Wilkins 2016). At the
146 A. Wilkins

same time, the state is no less active in “setting rules and establishing an enforcement
mechanism designed to control the operation of the system’s constituent institutions,
instruments and markets” (Spotton 1999: 971; also see Levi-Faur 2005). Therefore,
neoliberalism denotes a form of advanced liberalism in which state power is
dispersed outwards and downwards through networks, partnerships, and policy
communities (namely businesses, social enterprises, and charities) who “consensu-
ally” work with stakeholders to overcome the restrictions that characterize traditional
models of governing with their rule-bound hierarchies and bureaucracies. At the
same time, power is recentralized as the state continues the work of setting priorities,
formulating rules, and managing expectations. In England, for example, the devel-
opment of a system of devolved management in which school leaders and governors
manage schools free of local government interference is expected to supplant the
“formal authority of government” (Rhodes 2007: 1247). Yet despite their indepen-
dence from certain local bureaucratic and political structures, school leaders and
governors continue to build legitimacy with central government and other regulatory
bodies through making themselves answerable as high-reliability organizations or
businesses (Wilkins 2016). Neoliberalism therefore entails strengthening the capac-
ity of the state to intervene in holding others to account, albeit at a distance,
principally through standardized testing regimes, data-driven audit cultures, and
comparative-competitive frameworks.
From a governmentality perspective (Dean 1999), neoliberalism entails the
political restructuring of the state and a redefinition of the role of government
more generally. No longer provider and regulator of public services, the role of
government under neoliberalism is to impose structured incentives and ethical
injunctions on behavior that might compel among welfare users and welfare pro-
viders specific kinds of dispositions, rationalities, or “worldviews,” especially those
that accommodate “the explicitness and transparency of quantitative, economic
indicators, of which the market price system is the model” (Davies 2014: 4). On
this account, the concept of neoliberalism does not sit comfortably within parceled
discourses or certain literatures, as if its meaning can be extrapolated from a single
perspective or canon of theory. Neoliberalism is a broad descriptor that can be
operationalized using a variety of conceptual toolboxes borrowed from Foucault
(Brown 2006; Chandler and Reid 2016; Dean 1999; Wilkins 2016), Marx (Bruff
2014; Duménil and Lévy 2004; Plehwe et al. 2006) and Gramsci (Apple 2017; Hall
and O’Shea 2013). Neoliberalism registers multiple discursive meanings and prac-
tices (Clarke 2008). It is therefore more accurate to describe neoliberalism as framed
by struggles over meaning owing to its articulation and translation through different
theoretical abstractions, ideal types, analytical strategies, and normative descriptions
and commitments.
Like neoliberalism, the concept of citizenship also suffers from promiscuity owing
to the various meanings and practices attributed to it. Traditional statist approaches to
citizenship emphasize the rights and duties of citizens within bounded sovereign
communities (Marshall 1950). Here citizenship can be understood to refer to the
civil rights of citizens to liberty and equality before law as well as the political and
social rights of citizens to participate in deliberative and judicial activities that affect
10 Neoliberalism, Citizenship, and Education: A Policy Discourse Analysis 147

communities and government. These forms of citizen participation may include voting
to appoint elected officials, participating in jury service, paying tax on earnings or
purchases, serving as a governor on a school board, or responding to local government
consultations on budget spending, urban planning, and community projects.
However, citizenship is contingent on geo-politics, for example. The rights and
opportunities for citizen participation are more restricted in autocratic and oligarchic
countries compared to democratic countries. Moreover, the term citizenship –
meaning the position or status of being a “citizen” – is now typically preceded by
and affixed to other words which give it new discursive meaning and political force.
The meaning of citizenship now extends to the rights and obligations of citizens as
consumers (or “consumer citizenship,” see Trentmann 2007); to the role of digital
tools as meaning-making devices in the creation and support of civic culture
(or “digital citizenship,” see Couldry et al. 2014); to the moral and ethical respon-
sibility of citizens as planetary humanists (or “cosmopolitan citizenship,” see Link-
later 1998); and to the rights of citizens to safe spaces and dignifying representation
in which diverse lifestyles and identifies are respected (or “cultural citizenship,” see
Pakulski 1997).
In what follows I operationalize the concept of “neoliberal citizenship” (Hindess
2002) through a discourse analysis of key education policy texts in England as an
illustrative case to show how meanings of neoliberalism and citizenship are com-
bined to effect certain changes in the field of education, namely specific social
arrangements, institutional orders, and dominant discourses. A focus of the analysis
concerns how users of education services, specifically parents, are summoned and
activated as “citizen-consumers,” that is, citizens who understand and manage
themselves as consumers of public services.

Neoliberal Citizenship in Context: Education Policy Making

in England

Since the 1980s education policy in England has been dominated by market princi-
ples of competition and choice. A significant turning point was the Black Papers of
1977 which called for parents to be granted freedom of school choice by application.
Up until this time parents were granted a school place for their child by the local
education authority (LEA, a government-run organization) who allocated school
places to children on the basis of geography (children were permitted to attend
schools within their “catchment” area or schools already attended by a sibling). It
was not until the introduction of the 1980 and 1986 Education Acts and the 1988
Education Reform Act (ERA) (DES 1988) by the then Conservative government that
school choice was underpinned by law. Yet the right to exercise choice was framed
using the language of responsibility: “This is your charter. It will give new rights to
you as an individual parent, and give you personally new responsibilities and
choices” (DES 1991). School choice was contingent on parents inhabiting and
performing a certain version of citizenship, namely “effective citizenship”:
148 A. Wilkins

Whilst some have suggested that becoming better informed about the range and quality of
services available is a “research cost”, it is one that most people could consider a legitimate
investment for effective citizenship (SCPA 2005).

Effective citizenship – or “active citizenship” (Kivelä 2018) – gained huge traction

among right-wing neoconservatives during the late 1970s. Although not called
effective citizenship at the time, the notion of shifting some of the responsibility
for personal welfare, from health to education, on to citizens appealed to those on the
right in favor of the liberty of individuals and a minimalist state. From this perspec-
tive, effective citizenship can be understood as a powerful vehicle for destabilizing
elements of Keynesian-welfarist and social-collectivist institutions with their empha-
sis on the socialization of risk and security (namely the protection of individuals and
groups against some of the unintended consequences of the capitalism) and the
administration of “need” through rationalist social planning. During the 1980s, for
example, LEAs were typically maligned by the then Conservative government as
demoralizing, oppressive, and antithetical to the needs of consumers. The scaling
back of LEA powers was considered necessary for a market-led education system,
namely one dominated by choice, competition, school autonomy, and diversity of
provision. The introduction of rate-capping on education provision, in which school
budget levels were linked to student intake, was another significant policy interven-
tion in this area. The result was that schools were forced to compete for students as
well as adopt a business/managerial approach to school governance that included
raising money from industry and charity to offset decreased government funding
(Lowe 2005).
These reforms were complimented and strengthened by successive governments,
from John Major’s Conservative government (1990–1997) to Tony Blair’s Labour
government (1997–2007) and Brown’s Labour government (2007–2010), who con-
tinued the discursive-political work of summoning parents as consumers of educa-
tion services, albeit using their own brand of rhetoric. In the 1990s, the Conservative
government introduced The Citizen’s Charter (HMSO 1991) which explicitly
addressed welfare users as consumers rather than citizens. Later in the 2000s, the
Labour government introduced similar policy rhetoric that sought to strengthen a
view of citizens as consumers and public services as providers. Central to New
Labour policy discourse was a desire to “modernize” public services by changing
their culture and bringing them in line with the expectations of a consumer society
(Wilkins 2010). These changes to the culture of welfare can be traced back to the
reforms introduced by Thatcher’s Conservative government (1979–1990). As Keat
argues (1991: 1), “this programme has increasingly also come to be represented in
‘cultural’ terms, as concerned with the attitudes, values and forms of self-
understanding embedded in both individual and institutional activities.” In educa-
tion, these modernizing reforms were contingent on parents adopting the vocabulary
of consumer choice and voice, for example. Moreover, it compelled schools to adopt
similar vocabulary so that they might better understand and capture through their
mission statements, visual iconography, and league table standing the “needs” of
parents as consumers (Wilkins 2012).
10 Neoliberalism, Citizenship, and Education: A Policy Discourse Analysis 149

At the heart of New Labour education policy was a rigid distinction between the
“old” system of education and the “new” system of education which underpinned
their proposals to modernize the education system. The old system of education was
strongly linked to the “rationing culture which survived the war” and to a structure of
education that, “in treating everyone the same, often overlooked individuals’ differ-
ent needs and aspirations” (OPSR 2002: 8). New Labour went onto argue that “our
education system was too often built on a ‘one-size-fits-all’ model” (DfEE 2001: 15).
In stark contrast to this old education system with its “focus on a basic and standard
product for all” (DfES 2004: Foreword), the new system of education was aligned to
the needs and desires of a “consumer culture” with its “expectations of greater
choice, responsiveness, accessibility and flexibility” (OPSR 2002: 8). The introduc-
tion of policy levers of competition and choice were therefore rationalized on the
basis that they compel schools to organize themselves as flexible, responsive orga-
nizations, with the result “that the system fits to the individual rather than the
individual having to fit to the system” (DfES 2004: Foreword). Moreover, the policy
of school choice was typically celebrated within an account of social change:

The affluent can buy choice either by moving house or by going outside the state system. We
want to ensure that choice is more widely available to all and is not restricted to those who
can pay for it (DfES 2005: 3.2).

But these reforms were not simply about redressing social inequalities in access to
public provision, namely removing contexts in which access is dominated by the
middle classes with their “louder voices, better contacts and sharper elbows”
(Le Grand 2007: 33). In fact, research suggests that, far from mitigating social
inequalities in access to public provision, choice in public services exacerbates
those inequalities since it privileges users already adept at positioning themselves
in the role of consumers (see Adler et al. 1989; Gewirtz et al. 1995; Willms and
Echols 1992). Moreover, as Yemini and Maxwell (▶ Chap. 33, “Discourses of
Global Citizenship Education: The Influence of the Global Middle Classes”) indicate
in this edited volume, the middle classes retain the special privilege of geographical
mobility due to their financial and cultural capital and therefore can transcend the
limitations of space and place to seek out educational opportunities wherever they
exist. Crucially, these reforms were about accommodating a model of citizenship –
“active citizenship” (Kivelä 2018) or “neoliberal citizenship” (Hindess 2002) –
which enabled governments to call upon public service users to manage their own
personal welfare as self-responsible, discriminating choosers: “Without any choice,
they [welfare users] are far more like the passive recipient than the active citizen so
often idealised by opponents of choice” (SCPA 2005).
Informed by neoclassical economics, rational choice theory, and public choice
theory, school choice is predicated on the idea that people “always seek the biggest
possible benefits and the least costs in their decisions” and “have sets of well-
informed preferences which they can perceive, rank and compare easily” (Dunleavy
1991: 3). On this understanding, public service users are rational utility maximizers
who are “basically egoistic, self-regarding and instrumental in their behaviour,
150 A. Wilkins

choosing how to act on the basis of the consequences for their personal welfare”
(ibid). A condition of rational choice, however, is that people possess “perfect
knowledge” (Goldthorpe 1998: 170) of the options available to them. The creation
of “better informed consumers” (DCSF 2008: 6) therefore necessitates the market-
ization of education in lots of ways, including the managerialism of school organi-
zation and the use of comparative-competitive frameworks like league table data to
distinguish between “poor,” “average,” and “good” or “excellent” education
providers.
From a governmentality perspective (Dean 1999), these reforms can be described
as techniques or strategies for producing ethical subjects who, in the absence of
direct state intervention, take responsibility for their personal welfare as matter of
moral obligation. At the same time, these reforms make it necessary for the state to
intervene to ensure that citizens make a rational, informed choice and who possess
the kind of information, advice, and guidance that enables them to become active
citizens. In 2006, LEAs appointed “choice advisers” (DCSF 2006) to assist parents
with the handling and preparation of their school choice application. These choice
advisers were introduced to assist parents who “find the system difficult to under-
stand and therefore difficult to operate in the best interests of the child,” or who are
simply “unable or unwilling to engage with the process” (DCSF 2006: 2). From this
perspective, neoliberal citizenship is “a political discourse about the nature of rule
and a set of practices that facilitate the governing of individuals from a distance”
(Larner 2000: 6).

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have sourced perspectives and theories from various literatures to
examine the complicated relationship between neoliberalism and citizenship in the
field of education and the contradictions that flow from that relationship in practice.
A key focus of the chapter concerns the political and pedagogic function of the state
in terms of its relationship to, and construction of, citizens as bearers of consumer
rights and responsibilities. Through applying the concept of neoliberal citizenship to
an analysis of key education policy texts in England, this chapter demonstrates the
significance of neoliberalism as a political and economic project shaping the devel-
opment of the relationship between parents and schools through the introduction of
structural incentives and ethical injunctions that compel certain orientations and
dispositions.
A Foucauldian discourse analysis of key education policy texts produced by
successive governments in England between 1990 and 2010 reveals the complicated
history of these developments and their neoliberal appropriation. Specifically, the
analysis documents the rhetorical spaces through which governments have sought to
reorganize the balance between rights and responsibilities through a narrow rational,
utilitarian framing of parents as consumers of education services. These rhetorical
spaces – what Clarke (2008: 139) calls “the discursive and political work of
articulation” – are more than just policy statements. Viewed from a Foucauldian
10 Neoliberalism, Citizenship, and Education: A Policy Discourse Analysis 151

discourse analytic perspective (Sharp and Richardson 2001), education policy

reflects attempts by those in power to make certain positions intelligible
(or unintelligible) according to prevailing ideology. As Foucault (1981: 52–53)
argues, “discourse is not simply that which translates struggles or systems of
domination, but is the thing for which and by which there is struggle.” Reflected
in the language of education policy is a continuing, albeit revised, narrative designed
to remake citizenship in the image of the market and its celebrated figure of “homo
economicus,” namely the rational, calculating, self-maximizing actor.

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Peace Education and Citizenship Education:
Shared Critiques 11
Terence Bevington, Nomisha Kurian, and Hilary Cremin

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156
Connecting Citizenship Education and Peace Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156
Peace Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158
Transcending Modernity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
Foregrounding Gender . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160
The Centrality of Nature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162
Faith Revisited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165

Abstract
Citizenship and peace are inarguably related – both have human fulfillment at the
heart of their endeavors. Their relationship is bidirectional and their influence
mutual; good citizenship begets good peace and good peace begets good citizens.
The purpose of this chapter is to explore ways in which recent developments in
the field of peace education can inform the evolution of the field of citizenship
education. Following discussion of the connections between peace and citizen-
ship education, the chapter provides an overview of the history and evolution of
the field of peace education. The second section of the chapter is a detailed
exposition of some of the criticisms leveled at peace education – specifically in
terms of its relationship with the questions of gender, nature, and faith – with a
view to examining how responses to these criticisms in the field of peace
education might be of use for citizenship educators in considering the continuing
evolution of their own field.

T. Bevington (*) · N. Kurian · H. Cremin

University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 155
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_51
156 T. Bevington et al.

Keywords
Peace education · Citizenship education · Postmodernism · Gender · Nature ·
Faith

Introduction

This chapter presents evolutions in the field of peace education and invites
citizenship educators to consider how the insights gained might be applicable to
their own closely related field. The chapter begins with a presentation of the
alignments between citizenship and peace education – conceptually, philosophically,
and politically – and then moves on to provide an overview of the history and
evolution of peace education. The subsequent section explores some of the criticisms
leveled at peace education – specifically in terms of how it deals with questions of
gender, nature, and faith – and reviews the ways in which peace education has
responded to those criticisms. We end by considering parallels between these
criticisms and responses and those that might also be applicable for citizenship
education. We hope that this might be useful for both peace educators and citizenship
educators.

Connecting Citizenship Education and Peace Education

Citizenship and peace are inarguably related – both have human fulfillment at the
heart of their endeavors. Their relationship is bidirectional and their influence
mutual; good citizenship begets good peace and good peace begets good citizens.
Both are “essentially contested” with active and ongoing debate regarding their
definitions (Bosniak 2001; Jutila et al. 2008; Lister 1997). Both bring into focus
questions regarding what it means to be a person, a citizen, and a human and what it
means to live a good life in good relation with others. There are thus many points of
connection, here, we highlight three.
Firstly, peace and citizenship education share common aims. Both fields are
concerned with positive futures for individuals and societies. Both fields have aims
that are wide in reach, spanning the range of human activity from the intrapersonal, the
interpersonal, the social, and the societal to the global. For citizenship education, Wiel
Veugelers draws on a variety of authors to categorize three aims: “citizenship may be
oriented towards adaptation, towards personal emancipation or towards more collec-
tive emancipation (Giroux 1989; Van Gunsteren 1992; Veugelers 2000; Isin and
Turner 2002)” (2007, p. 106). For peace education, Bar-Tal attempts to summarize
one overarching aim that also takes account of complexity and points toward human
emancipation as well as planetary well-being (2002, p. 28):

The goal is to diminish, or even to eradicate, a variety of human ills ranging from
war, violent conflict, inequality, prejudice, intolerance, violence, environmental destruction,
11 Peace Education and Citizenship Education: Shared Critiques 157

injustice, abuse of human rights and other evils in order to create a world of peace, equality,
justice, tolerance, human rights, environmental quality and other positive features. (see
Bjerstedt 1993b; Burns and Aspeslagh 1996; Harris 1988; Reardon 1988)

Neither field can be accused of a lack of ambition! This ambition is important,

however, if human beings are to survive and thrive. The closeness and timeliness of
the aims of peace and citizenship education is evidenced by the inclusion of
both within the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 (United
Nations 2016):

the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including, among
others, through education for sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles, human
rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence, global citizenship
and appreciation of cultural diversity and of culture’s contribution to sustainable
development.

Secondly, given their shared ambition, it is unsurprising that both fields engage in
shared domains. For peace education, Cremin and Bevington have identified the
“core themes of justice and equality, conflict resolution, global citizenship and
human rights” (2017, p. 38). For citizenship education, young citizens have identi-
fied the following core domains: “laws and rules, the democratic process, the media,
human rights, diversity, money and the economy, sustainable development and
world as a global community; and concepts such as democracy, justice, equality,
freedom, authority and the rule of law” (Young Citizens 2018). Therefore, the
aspects of human life of interest to the two fields are related and at times coincide.
Thirdly, both peace and citizenship education share an interest in the issue of
criticality. One distinction that is present within both fields is in education about
peace/citizenship and education for peace/citizenship. The question underpinning
this distinction is whether we teach about the topic of peace/citizenship or whether
we teach learners to become more peaceful/better citizens. Teaching for peace/
citizenship rather than about peace/citizenship relates to the question of criticality.
Critical approaches to peace and to citizenship education “enable students to
challenge power imbalances, negotiate identities and, ultimately, to achieve greater
equality, justice, democracy and peace via individual and societal transformation”
(Reilly and Niens 2013). With regard to citizenship education, Vanessa Andreotti
draws a useful distinction between soft and critical citizenship education (2006,
pp. 46–48). She argues that “a complex web of cultural and material local/global
processes and contexts needs to be examined and unpacked,” if young people are to
gain a deep understanding of global citizenship.
The question of criticality perhaps touches on the political nature of both fields.
The implicit and explicit political nature of citizenship education is frequently
discussed by commentators in the field (see Peters 2010; Staeheli and Hammett
2011). James Page remarks with regard to peace education: “it is difficult to avoid
the perception that peace education involves some implicit criticism of the existing
social order” (2008, p. 15). Given the overt and covert political aspects of both peace
and citizenship education, and the shared aims and coinciding domains identified
158 T. Bevington et al.

above, our argument is that each discipline is well positioned to learn from the
other. In order to make clearer the case of what peace education has to offer
citizenship education, it will be useful to provide an overview of the history, theory,
and practice of peace education.

Peace Education

As Ian Harris has pointed out, “throughout history, humans have taught each other
ways to avoid the scourge of violence” (2002, p. 19); peace education can therefore
be considered a perennial endeavor. Several prominent historical figures have been
identified as the philosophical ancestors of peace education. One such figure,
Jan Amos Comenius (1642), the Czech philosopher, teacher, and theologian, “devel-
oped peace education as a fundamental principle in all teaching, learning and
information processes” (Golz 2015). Immanuel Kant’s 1795 essay Perpetual
Peace presented the notion that peace could be achieved through the creation of
more humanistic legal and judicial systems (Harris 2002, p. 19). Teaching about
peace is embedded within the religious and spiritual traditions across the world
(Harris and Morrison 2013). From an educational philosophy perspective, John
Dewey in the 1910s, Maria Montessori in the 1940s, and Paulo Freire in the 1970s
have all identified teaching about peace as an integral purpose of education (Kester
2011; Harris 2008). Thus, from its early inception, peace education has been about
peacebuilding – preventing war and promoting justice and global citizenship.
As Kester remarks, peace education is “part of the larger field of peace and
conflict studies” (2012, p. 62), and as such, its evolution has been strongly informed
by developments in theory and research in that larger field. Johan Galtung is widely
recognized as the father of peace studies (Lawler 1995; Boulding 1977). Galtung has
played a key role in defining the field; he developed a lexicon for the study of peace
that persists today (Lawler 1995). In his editorial of the inaugural issue of
the Journal of Peace Research, Galtung presented one of his most influential
theoretical contributions to the field of peace studies: “there are two aspects of
peace. . .: negative peace which is the absence of violence, absence of war – and
positive peace which is the integration of human society” (1964, p. 2). He later added
that positive peace could be equated with social justice (1969, p. 190). This expan-
sion in the conceptualization of peace also served to expand the conceptualization of
peace education (Salomon and Nevo 2002).
Galtung made a further contribution to the theory of peace when he introduced the
novel construct of peacebuilding in his 1976 essay, Three Approaches to Peace:
Peacekeeping, Peacemaking, and Peacebuilding. He characterized the three notions
as, “peacekeeping: the dissociative approach” (p. 282), whereby parties in conflict
are kept apart under threat of punishment; “peacemaking: the conflict resolution
approach,” where the “source of tension, the underlying conflict,” is addressed and
resolved (p. 290); and, “peacebuilding: the associative approach” (p. 297), which
attends to the creation of structures “that remove causes of war and offer alternatives
to war” (p. 298). In applying the concept of peacebuilding to education, Kathy
11 Peace Education and Citizenship Education: Shared Critiques 159

Bickmore has translated Galtung’s original distinctions in the context of schools.

One focus of Bickmore’s work is to explore the “kinds of learning opportunities in
schools [that] might best address conflict constructively, and resolve the causes of
violence, in school and in society” (2011, p. 1). This focus on “learning opportuni-
ties” reflects the more holistic perspective on creating peace that is inherent within
the concept of peacebuilding (Tschirgi 2011). Cremin and Bevington (2017) have
built on Bickmore’s work to identify those aspects of education and schooling that
enable the three dimensions of peacekeeping, peacemaking, and peacebuilding to be
realized. In their book, Positive Peace in Schools, Cremin and Bevington include
critical citizenship education as one of three core dimensions of peacebuilding in
schools, alongside inclusion and well-being.
Following this overview of the history, theory, and practice of peace education,
we now turn to examine some of the criticisms that have been leveled at peace
education in recent years and the responses that have been made to those criticisms.

Transcending Modernity

As we explore how peace education can stretch the boundaries of citizenship

education, it becomes clear that the field of peace education itself is in a state of
flux. Since it sets itself a lofty ambition – to transform individuals and societies –
peace education must constantly evolve through debate and dialogue. In this section
we spotlight the field’s adventures in overcoming the constraints of modernity, as
these offer parallels for citizenship education. We begin by clarifying the meaning of
twentieth-century modernity as a historical category and a normative Enlightenment-
based ideal. Then, we use three dimensions of the human experience to highlight
how twenty-first-century peace education transcends modernity: gender, nature, and
religion. We argue that citizenship education can draw on these twists and turns
because they stem from a growing openness to alternative cultural epistemologies
and a nuanced understanding of the plurality of peace and therefore also
of citizenship.
Modernity originated in the Enlightenment, an eighteenth-century European
intellectual movement. Decrying religion as superstition, the Enlightenment consid-
ered reason the central source of authority. Grand narratives of humanity navigating
a linear path to progress deemed reason essential. Kant and Locke celebrated
individualism or the right of every individual to reason independently. Positivism
and realism, ideas which prioritized quantifiable, tangible truths, gained traction.
Science became a rational, deductive tool to systematically control and order the
world through human intervention (Outram 1995). Another concept underpinning
the Enlightenment was that of Cartesian duality or Descartes’ idea that the mind is
independent from the body (Fitzpatrick 2004). Yet another was liberal humanism, as
espoused by Kant and Locke, a belief in an essential, shared, and unchanging human
nature and universally valid and timeless values (Outram 1995). As an embodiment
of all these ideals, the rational, white, heterosexual, Western European male became
the normative icon of the Enlightenment because it reflected its canonical thinkers
160 T. Bevington et al.

(Rousseau, Voltaire, Hume, and so on). Thus, Enlightenment values – rationality,

individualism, scientific deduction, the mind-body duality, normative whiteness, and
universalism – underpin the historical epoch and analytical framework called
“modernity.” These values are important to delineate because they transcended
the eighteenth century and continue to permeate peace education and citizenship
education today.
It is worth noting that peace education became prominent after World War II,
in a century dominated by modernity and dissatisfaction: dissatisfaction with
faith, tradition, and totalitarianism (Pippin 1991). Deaf to voices from other cultures,
twentieth-century peace educators amplified Western narratives of peace (Gur Ze’ev
2001). These narratives were shaped through the lens of liberal humanism in their
emphasis on rationality and universalism. Western notions of securitized peace
shone as timeless, packaged for export to any local context. Gur Ze’ev (2001) brands
this ethnocentrism as a form of hegemonic violence. His critique seems valid
because if peace educators endorse a single cultural understanding of peace, they
risk imposing monolithic values on populations with different cultures and tradi-
tions. The contemporary challenge for peace education is thus to avoid the ideolog-
ical traps of modernity and to recognize that peace is no fixed entity but a contested
social construct whose meaning is continually negotiated, depending on context.
The same can perhaps be said for citizenship education.
We now delve into three developments in peace education that may be of interest
to citizenship educators. First, rebuffing excessively patriarchal discourses of ratio-
nality, peace education honors feminized perspectives and the role of affect
and relationships, particularly in its attention to care ethics. Second, rejecting
technocratic modernist values, peace education highlights diverse concepts of
peace that privilege nature and ecological well-being. Third, shifting away from
the Enlightenment view of religion as superstition, peace education recognizes
different faith-based philosophies and traditions globally. Sears and Hughes’
much-cited (2006) critique flags similar dangers faced by citizenship education:
the possibility of veering toward jingoism, indoctrination, or demonization of the
other. Our overarching argument is that peace education, with its emphasis on
understanding a plurality of worldviews, is beginning to address these dangers and
that peace educators and citizenship educators have much to gain from productive
dialogue.

Foregrounding Gender

The first critique of peace education reviewed here is the way that it has historically
overlooked the role of affect, care, and relationships in ways that ignore gendered
perspectives. A key educational theorist in this area is Nel Noddings. She has written
specifically about peace education (Noddings 2011), but her earlier work, Caring:
A feminine approach to ethics and moral education (1986), is also relevant to
citizenship education. This book makes an argument for education to be based on
natural processes of caring. Noddings is not interested in how moral reasoning
11 Peace Education and Citizenship Education: Shared Critiques 161

develops in children, nor in teaching about morality through rational argument. She
prefers instead to examine what it means to care and be cared for and how caring
functions in educational contexts.
Due to the historic marginalization of women in public spaces, feminized per-
spectives on conflict and caring are often seen as “odd” or relegated to the private
realm. Noddings wishes to challenge the dominance of standardized rules, debate,
and rational-cognitive approaches in education such that it is the quality of the
relationship – the commitment to care – that really counts. In her later book about
peace education, Noddings (2011) brings the ethics of care into the field. Drawing on
the work of thinkers such as Elise Boulding (2000), she argues that schools can
moderate the psychosocial factors that promote violence. Noddings wants peace
educators to help young people become more aware of the forces that seek to
manipulate them, to imagine new ways of educating children for a more peaceful
future, and to enable feminized perspectives on care, love, home, and community to
flourish in their classrooms.
This re-envisioning of human relationships in school spaces has widespread
appeal for peace educators. James Page sees care ethics as the essence of peace
education because peace is “ultimately about relationships” (2008, p. 8). Peace
educators have embraced care as a tool to transform. For example, Cann’s (2012)
study illuminates how care can nudge young people to be vulnerable and open about
how structural violence, such as racism and sexism, shapes their worldviews.
Cann suggests that such dialogue epitomizes what Bajaj (2008) calls critical peace
education. Critical peace education stimulates individuals to perceive the myriad
forms of violence marring their daily lives and to respond at both a micro- and
a macro-level. Care strengthens critical peace education because it creates safe
dialogical spaces for students to risk vulnerability. It involves deep attentiveness
and engagement. Among other purposes, care can nurture children displaced by
conflict (Munter et al. 2012), honor the values of indigenous peoples (Ritchie et al.
2011), and decolonize praxes of peace education to counter colonial violence
(Williams 2017).
This wide-ranging potential renders care ethics a rich foundation for citizenship
education as well as peace education. Furthermore, citizenship education has
been accused of undue masculinization by sociologists, political scientists, educa-
tors, and philosophers alike. Critics are keenly aware that citizenship is not gender
neutral. That citizenship is framed by a gendered vision of who may participate in
society was notably argued by the feminist political theorist Carole Pateman (1980,
1992). Prominent feminist and educational sociologist Madeleine Arnot delineates
how gender binaries translate into spatial binaries, elevating men to the public
sphere and relegating women to the private sphere (1997, 2008). She observes that
citizenship education has traditionally shunned the familial and domestic elements
intrinsic to many women’s social worlds including the realm of care.
Like peace education, however, contemporary citizenship education is beginning
to shed this historical baggage of gender exclusion. Citizenship educators have
identified care ethics as key to more humane praxis. Zembylas (2010) proposes an
“inclusive citizenship education,” anchored in care ethics, that refuses to other
162 T. Bevington et al.

and dehumanized individuals perceived as a threat to homogeneity. Nussbaum’s

(1997) vision of citizenship education foregrounds compassionate imagining:
understanding the pain and suffering of others to take action for social justice.
Also, Sevenhuijsen’s highly influential (1998) work on the morality of citizenship
pivots around care. For Sevenhuijsen, citizens dwell not in lone huts but in lively
webs. In light of the advent of feminism, which seeks to make human relations more
ethical and egalitarian, she argues that it is crucial to embrace how interdependent
and vulnerable individuals are. The great benefit of surrendering overly masculin-
ized, rationalist views of citizenship is that, in its bid to honor relationships, care
ethics liberates the ideal citizen to be empathetic and responsible for social change.

The Centrality of Nature

Peace education is forging new relationships with nature through stressing compas-
sion for the physical world as well as compassion for human beings. For example,
based on the Earth Charter, Wenden (2014) demonstrates how education for peace
must draw on values such as ecological integrity (recognizing that the natural
world has a right to be protected) and intergenerational equity (the present generation
must ensure that future generations have access to sustainable resources). Similarly,
Joseph and Mikel (2014) advocate a transformative moral education imbued with
notions of ecojustice, and Brantmeier (2013) proposes a “critical peace education
for sustainability,” alert to the power dynamics and systemic violence that hamper
our environmental stewardship. Dietrich’s Many Peaces (2012) include “energetic
peace,” found in the Global East and South, and “transrational peace” which
integrates a variety of peace traditions. Energetic and transrational peace ascribe
mythical attributes to nature; they emphasize human beings’ physical, psychic,
intellectual, and spiritual capacities. In opposition to the modernist view of nature
as an object to be controlled by science, energetic peace and transrational peace
depict nature as an object of worship, to be revered and guarded.
This approach fits the postmodern turn in peace education, which prioritizes
ecological sustainability. Harris (2013) has pointed out how school textbooks extol
the Industrial Revolution and technical inventions, and how such praise typifies
modernity, because the Enlightenment endorsed intervening in the natural world to
accelerate scientific progress. Reardon (1988) sees planetary stewardship as key;
Burns and Aspelagh’s classic (1996) anthology charts the ecological movement; and
Harris and Morrison poignantly call on students to “experience the sound of the earth
crying” (1988, p. 37). Contemporary peace education contends that an addiction to
technology has spawned nuclear weapons and exhausted natural resources, making
ecological sustainability an imperative (Bajaj and Chiu 2009; Harris 2013; Harris
and Morrison 2013). Lum (2013) notes a growing trend in peace education research
to focus on the interconnectedness of all life. Thus, concepts like “energetic peace,”
which seek caretakers, not commanders, of the natural world, make the concept of
peace more holistic and wide-ranging, hence proving a worthwhile departure from
the modernist technocratic worldview.
11 Peace Education and Citizenship Education: Shared Critiques 163

In this, peace education aligns itself with many of the goals and ideas of
citizenship education. Dobson’s (2003) seminal analysis of ecological citizenship
argued that liberal and civic republican conceptions of citizenship insist too firmly on
personal autonomy to cultivate a sense of duty toward the environment. His call for a
conception of citizenship inclusive of care and compassion for the environment
aligns well with postmodern peace education. Similar themes emerge in UNESCO’s
seminal guidance document, Global Citizenship Education, which portrays empa-
thetic care toward the environment as a key aim of citizenship education (UNESCO
2015). Similarly, the Gandhian concepts of nonviolence, so familiar to peace edu-
cators, are deployed by citizenship educator Dash (2014) to encourage deeper moral
changes in ecological citizenship education. Hayward’s (2012) model of ecological
citizenship education, which foregrounds the social agency of students to work
collaboratively for change, has much in common with Brantmeier’s model of critical
peace education for sustainability. The two fields – peace education and citizenship
education – thus have much to gain from reinforcing each other’s shared goals of
environmental stewardship.

Faith Revisited

Another innovation in contemporary peace education of interest to citizenship

educators is the increasing attention to diverse religions. Within the value system
of modernity, scientific progress took precedence over faith. The insistence on
rationality has permeated peace and citizenship education discourses globally. For
instance, England’s Crick Report, which famously broadcast the nation’s vision
of citizenship education, stressed the importance of rational decision-making
(QCA 1998). However, peace education is beginning to go beyond a rationalist
focus to explore the potential of international faith traditions. For example, Köylü
(2004) suggests a model of Islamic peace education. Divorcing Islam from its
stereotype as a violent religion, Köylü shows that the Quran renders God the source
of peace (as-salam) and “He” invites humanity to dar as-salam (the abode of peace).
Similarly, Gervais (2004) crafts a Baha’i curriculum for peace educators. The Baha’i
faith embraces peace education because it considers education to be a critical tool of
transformation, environmental sustainability, and virtues like patience and humility.
Peace educators are also beginning to study the Buddhist emphasis on compassion
for all living beings. Goulah and Urbain (2013) showcase how Nichiren Buddhism
can be a foundation for peace education programs in their tribute to Daisaku Ikeda,
the Buddhist philosopher, educator, and nuclear disarmament activist. Ikeda’s vision
of peace education extolled Nichiren Buddhist concepts such as honoring the dignity
of all life and the use of proactive dialogue to empower people to actualize their
innate Buddha nature (calm and compassion) and soka (value creation or education
that provides meaning, purpose, and happiness). The Hindu influences on Gandhi as
he preached satyagraha or nonviolence are also well documented by peace educators
(Luo 2010; Upadhyaya 2010).
164 T. Bevington et al.

Drawing such insights from faith-based traditions of peace challenges the

modernist worldview because the Enlightenment considered religion to be supersti-
tion. In addition, faith can involve collectivist rituals, which depart from the mod-
ernist emphasis on individualism and offer models of peace that prioritize
community and group-based identity. Recent research suggests that religion, despite
its potential to be polarizing or divisive, can be an effective basis for intergroup
contact, unity, and reducing tensions (Brantmeier 2011; Yablon 2010; Baratte 2006).
This cross-cultural research on diverse religions can perhaps be valuable for tailoring
peace pedagogy to the local context and the value systems of faith-based commu-
nities. Thus, diverse global faiths already find a home in contemporary peace
education, offering a context-sensitive replacement for the modernist framework.
The relevance of this shift for citizenship education lies in how it is also
increasingly recognizing religious and spiritual concepts. Gearon (2009) delineates
how citizenship education has traditionally been considered secular ever since
European Enlightenment-based conceptions of the modern polity. He traces how
the eighteenth-century formal separation of church and state accompanied the
French and American revolutions and infused political life with liberal secularism.
Now, however, policymakers increasingly argue that citizenship education must
attend to issues of religion and spirituality to empower students to become critical
thinkers accepting of diversity. In England, for example, Ajegbo’s influential Diver-
sity and Citizenship Curriculum Review (2007) argues that it is a moral imperative to
sensitize students to the multiplicity of identities that individuals hold and to
cultivate their empathy toward followers of different faiths. Such work suggests
that peace educators and citizenship educators who have addressed the potential of
diverse faiths for peace, and the crucial question of how to build interfaith under-
standing and tolerance, have much to contribute to each other.

Conclusion

In this chapter, we initially presented an overview of the alignments between peace

and citizenship education, followed by an overview of the history of peace educa-
tion. We then deconstructed the historical and conceptual roots of modernity before
going on to spotlight three ideological innovations in the twenty-first-century peace
education revolving around gender, nature, and religion. We have discussed links
with citizenship education in order to illuminate and develop theory, policy, and
practice in both. Our argument is that if both peace and citizenship are dynamic and
multidimensional, the postmodernist turn holds promise for them both. Postmodern
peace education does not replace one truth with another, but refuses to accept any
grand narrative. From a postmodern perspective, peace and citizenship are protean
and fluid, varying across place and time. They are not the static concepts of
modernity but contextual, historicized, and interactional (Zembylas and Bekerman
2013). As Denzin and Lincoln (2000) put it, no single umbrella can house the dreams
and experiences of people around the globe. This plethora of worldviews and
practices finds a home in postmodern peace and citizenship education, which reject
11 Peace Education and Citizenship Education: Shared Critiques 165

fixed definitions. Untethered from grand narratives, postmodern peace and citizen-
ship assume varied shapes across cultures and contexts. This dynamism seems the
best contribution to the twenty-first-century peace education and citizenship educa-
tion: the chance to offer future citizens ways of building peace that embrace
pluralism, nuance, and diversity.

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Citizenship (and) Inequality: Ethnographic
Research on Education and the Making and 12
Remaking of Class Power and Privilege

Dennis Beach

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170
A Brief Note on Method: Comparative Synthesis and
Meta-ethnography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
Bought Privilege and the Significance of Economic and Cultural Capital . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
Citizenship, Social Class Reproduction, and Resistance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
Cultural Dissonance Factors Including Race, Class, and Gender . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176
Closing Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180

Abstract
This chapter is based on a meta-ethnographic investigation. Its main theme is that
the processes of selection that operate in schools and education systems in
Western countries, taking Sweden as an example, are claimed to be just and
meritocratic but are instead fundamentally unjust and ineffective systems that
reproduce rather than challenge existing structural inequalities. Socio-economic
restrictions and the reproduction of upper-class cultural capital and ideology as
official school knowledge play key roles, but it is also concluded that education
and social equality, justice, and fair citizenship possibilities for all in capitalist
societies have never stretched further than wringing out minor concessions from
class society whilst leaving the reproduction and absolution of the class system
and inequalities based on class and distinctions of race, ethnicity, gender, sexu-
ality, and physical and mental differences intact.

D. Beach (*)
University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden
University of Borås, Borås, Sweden
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 169
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_74
170 D. Beach

Keywords
Meta-ethnography · Bought privilege · Social reproduction · Cultural
dissonance · Cultural capital · Symbolic capital

Introduction

Educational reforms evolve within national political systems as what is usually

expressed as a means of fostering possibilities for the realization of individual
propensities, for both the good of the individual and society. Principles of meritoc-
racy are said to operate through economic resources being invested in people on the
basis of talent, effort, and achievement, rather than wealth, gender, race, religion,
region, or social class; to create more efficient and well run just and equitable
societies with stronger future ties between citizens and the State (Heater 2004;
Ireland 2006; Wilde 2005). But is this really what happens? Just and equitable
education systems as ones that represent and prepare individuals for equal civil
and political rights and citizenship. They should treat people equally as beings who
are endowed with conscience and reason to undertake an education to prepare them
to in the future enjoy full involvement in social decision making and equal access to
social institutions and the fruits provided by them. But when we look closely we
have to conclude that education systems are rarely just at all in these senses, and that
no truly socially just and equitable education systems have hitherto existed (Arnot
1982; Brooks and Holford 2009; Kerr and Keating 2011; Wilde 2005). Even in a
democracy like Sweden, the education system has prepared people not for citizen-
ship equality but for citizenship inequality (Beach 2017, 2018; SOU 1990, p. 44).
Bought privileges remain an important denominator. They include the right to buy
places in prestigious educational institutions (Arnot 1982) and they lead later in life
to different possibilities for shaping not only one’s own future (Reay et al. 2005), but
also the futures of others and even those of social institutions such as schools (Beach
2018; Jonsson and Beach 2015; SOU 1990, p. 44; Weis et al. 2013; Weis and Fine
2012).
Based mainly on readings and analyses of ethnographic research on education
justice and the reproduction of inequality from the most recent four or five decades,
the present chapter presents a synthesis of findings related to the above and other
related features of education inequality such as social reproduction, cultural produc-
tion, and cultural dissonance, related to race, social class, and gender. However, it
does not focus particularly on recent education reforms that have introduced market
politics and new actors and forms of governance into education systems. My
intention is instead to discuss aspects of enduring education and social equality,
justice, and citizenship in capitalist societies broadly but with a particular focus on
Sweden, a country that is widely regarded as more educationally just and equitable
than most, which I will argue have never stretched further than wringing out a few
concessions from existing structures and institutions (Brooks and Holford 2009;
Ireland 2006). Education reforms have broadly left the class system and racial,
12 Citizenship (and) Inequality: Ethnographic Research on Education and. . . 171

ethnic, gender, sexuality, and able-ness inequalities intact (Beach 2018; Reay 2012;
Vahtera et al. 2017; Wilde 2005) and the ontological realities of misogyny and
racism untouched (Beach 2017; Gillborn 1990; Kerr and Keating 2011; Lundberg
2015; Wright 1992).
Works addressing neo-liberal reforms in education and their consequences, such
as Stahl (2017) and Wilkins (2016), describe how governments internationally have
recently introduced policies that have successively undermined the idea of direct
national political responsibility for education supply (Beach 2018). These reforms
have allowed philanthropy and businesses to take a place as significant actors within
education policy processes and delivery, through initiatives like charter schools and
school academies and various free trust schools that own their own assets and are
able to establish subversive partnerships with foundations outside the State
(Salokangas et al. 2016). Nations are moving towards an education supply chain
that is much messier and more diverse than in recent decades and that now involves a
variety of new providers with new forms of injustice and inequality that exist with
and reinforce the significance of older ones (ibid.; Stahl 2017; Wilkins 2017; van
Zanten 2009; Verger et al. 2016).

A Brief Note on Method: Comparative Synthesis and

Meta-ethnography

The method used for the research behind the chapter is meta-ethnography, which is a
way of reviewing and synthesizing individual ethnographic investigations that may
stretch across several years or even decades and lifting their findings to a higher level
of abstraction than in the primary studies. In line with descriptions of the method by
Noblit and Hare (1988), it involves reading ethnographic studies connected to a
particular theme and making a list of the key metaphors, phrases, ideas, concepts,
and interpretive storylines in each and any possible relationships between them. Two
types of interpretation are involved: reciprocal (exploring concepts and respective
storylines in terms of how they may be commensurate and reinforce each other) and
refutational (exploring them for contradictions and negations) as a way to develop a
synthesis that can hopefully renew or extend existing knowledge in the field. Noblit
and Hare (1988) use a seven-stage model to illustrate. Table 1 below provides an
overview.

Bought Privilege and the Significance of Economic and Cultural

Capital

Kenway et al. (2016) recently carried out a multisite ethnographic investigations in

seven global highly selective schools to cast light on the issue of bought privilege
and its value in relation to future citizenship. The schools were based on an updated
British public school model with a modern curriculum that included globally
recognized skill and competency needs (Kenway et al. 2016) and similar types of
172 D. Beach

Table 1 Describing Phase 1. Assigning a focus for the analysis

meta-ethnography
Phase 2. Selecting articles, books, reports or chapters addressing the
focus
Phase 3. Reading the studies: identifying concepts from the studies
Phase 4. Using reciprocal and refutational translations to interpret
concepts and determine how they are related
Phase 5. Translating the studies into each-other and integrating study
findings
Phase 6. Synthesizing translations to develop a new interpretation
Phase 7. Tailoring the communication of the synthesis as a line of
argument narrative that can be compared with research products from
other studies

schools to these have been described in investigations in Nigeria, Sweden, the USA,
UK, Ecuador, and India in research by Ayling (2019), Erlandson and Beach (2014),
Posecznick (2013), Delamont (1989), Wakeford (1969), Walford (1986), Johnson
(2009), Dewey (2006), and Gilbertson (2014). These scholars construct and convey
myths about themselves by using exalted ornaments of value to attract clients
through a notion that money can buy many things, but it means little culturally
and politically without experiences and merits like those passed on through schools
such as these. Mutually important symbolic capital was developed and employed to
signal worthiness and reputation with a message that these schools can prepare their
students for an influential future and that the students are worthy of this (Ayling
2019; Erlandson and Beach 2014; Kenway et al. 2016).
Simply buying a place in the schools was not an option. The schools were not
objects on an open economic market that could be accessed by anyone at all, with
money. Money was needed, but there were scholarships available. Rather than
money the schools traded off and nurtured hierarchy-legitimizing myths and prac-
tices. They also targeted a clientele that was identified and treated as not primarily
economically but rather principally culturally and even intellectually superior. And
the recruited pupils were then treated in this way, as an elite, before the start of and
throughout their education careers. Elaborate choreographies of privilege and capital
were fostered and used to uphold this charade (Ayling 2019; Beach 2018; Delamont
1989; Kenway et al. 2016; van Zanten 2009; Wakeford 1969; Walford 1986, 1991,
2009):

1. Bought privileges guarantee a monopoly of dominant class patronage that

concentrates and perpetuates the communication of upper-class cultural capital
with a high educational and economic exchange value as a resource for upper-
class pupils only.
2. Choreographies of symbolic capital have produced a mirage of added value to
inherent intelligence to project and protect a sense of the mutual exclusivity of
the schools and their clientele in their respective interests. The clientele are
treated, projected outwardly as (and consider themselves to be) members of a
special group who are the future bearers of civilization.
12 Citizenship (and) Inequality: Ethnographic Research on Education and. . . 173

3. Like the ruling colonial elite in books such as Orwell’s Burmese Days,
learners in elite schools describe themselves and are treated and socialized,
as civilized, aware and cultivated compared to others, who are in their turn
derided as uncultivated and irrational beings who need moral surveillance
and control in both their own best interests and the interests of the societies
they are part of.
4. Maintaining the mirage of mutual superiority is the core work of elite schools.
5. Elite schools have also been made available to working-class families in
new-deal capitalist (neo-capitalist) nations through the creation of State funded
grammar schools and scholarships that enable elite-school placements.
6. National investment provides a guaranteed economic supplement to elite
schools and together with privately sponsored scholarships also a means for
their social legitimation and the cultural hegemony of the dominant class.
7. Elite schools cement privileges for the upper-class by adding further weight to a
cultural and social imbalance in which individuals from outside this class are
denied full access but then still identify positively with forms of privilege that
undermine the attainment of full and equal citizenship rights and possibilities
for all.
8. Expensive private schools are part of an ongoing story about how the upper class
is able to gain domination through associations of its overt practices with high
values.
9. Although elite private schools do not rob subordinate groups of their own
cultural identity and its values, they do reshuffle these values on a specific
ideological terrain. They have been exercised for centuries by this dominant
class to make their class-cultural knowledge more worthy than other forms of
knowledge in ways that continue to bear down heavily on attempts to modernize
and democratize nations.
10. Elite schools are institutions that house, educate, and socialize the offspring of
the contemporary upper-class for their roles as anticipated future business,
cultural and political leaders. However, the power of the elite also becomes a
learned phenomenon that is accentuated by attendance at schools such as these
that instill a sense of privilege and entitlement.

The term, hegemony, is the mechanism behind the creation of elite-ness in

education for and in the interest of the dominant class. As described by Gramsci,
hegemony is the means by which power succeeds through the use of a discourse
that legitimizes that power regardless of whether the discourse is logically or
factually correct or not (Jonsson and Beach 2015). It means that the assumption
that economically advanced countries rely on achievement criteria in education
from effective and efficient schooling as the key to both individual success and
economic growth is false (Beach 2018). But it also means that for those who run
and use elite schools this does not matter, because the mutual interest lies only in
turning a profit (be this economic and/or cultural or political) and protecting and
reproducing class exclusivity and domination not creating justice, equity, and
efficiency (Stahl 2017).
174 D. Beach

Citizenship, Social Class Reproduction, and Resistance

Working ethnographically from within a UK national secondary modern school,

perhaps the antithesis to an elite school of the kind discussed above, Paul Willis
(1977) focused on the ways in which the education system prepares young people for
citizenship in capitalist societies, and how schools are complicit in social reproduc-
tion, by promoting the desirability of white-collar labor and undermining the possi-
bilities for working-class youth to be educationally successful while at the same time
still identifying positively with their class origins. His work was in a sense then about
what happens when the sanctioned translation and institutional transmission of
objective upper-class cultural capital confronts subjects with embodied forms of
capital from outside the elite or aspiring elite (middle) classes and with very different
dispositions and experiences from the dominant class. However, the book made the
following important recognition concerning this issue that had not received much
previous attention. It was not success in formal schooling that would carry the
working class forward, but manual, secretarial, and domestic work, which young
working class people experienced not as forms of damnation, but as things of real
value (Griffin 1985; Skeggs 1997; Weis 1990; Willis 1977).
The social conditions for independence through manual work did not exist in
exactly the same way for all young working class people. It did not exist to the same
extent for young women as it did for young men for instance: and nor was the same
possibilities of economic exchange through physical labor as easily accrued for
individuals who fell outside white, male mainstream working class norms (Arnot
1982; Griffin 1985; Vahtera et al. 2017; Willis 1977). But Willis never denied this.
Instead his point was that school propagated a perpetual class insult for working
class young people by valorizing middle class intellectualism against the grain of
working class physicality and the domestic care of women, with this thus
undermining in other words; at least for the majority of them, both the physical
work done by fathers, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, and cousins in industries and
domestic labor in the home by mothers as care-givers and the chief economists for
the weekly wage were devalued. Yet these things had helped to provide decent
home-lives, love, security, an annual holiday, a car to ride round in, a good bed to
sleep in, and furniture to sit on in rooms where parents and children alike could also
entertain their friends (Skeggs 1997). There was a stiff contradiction between the
messages given by school and the lived experiences of young working class subjects
(Willis 1977).
Moreover, the jobs the working class did at the time were not usually excessively
dirty or dangerous jobs. National (and even international) agreements between
capital and labor had struggled for and won that served to regulate factories and
other sites of production as relatively safe working environments where the levels of
exploitation of both male and female labor power in the pursuit of profit had to be
legally accounted for. Unions and the capitalist fear of socialist revolution had seen
to this through collective agreements and had also helped politicians to force forward
labor laws that drastically reduced the hours manual laborers needed to work in order
to make a living. The volume of leisure time had increased subsequently, which
12 Citizenship (and) Inequality: Ethnographic Research on Education and. . . 175

together with rising incomes made it possible for more and more people to buy cars,
holidays, televisions, refrigerators and become a mobile class whose economic
conditions rivaled those of much of the middle-class. In the eyes and social,
emotional, and material experiences of young working class people in school, they
were on top of the game (as Willis 1977 put it) and life actually seemed to be quite
rosy, despite the lack of respect for their values and lifestyles in the content of the
formal curriculum and from the dominant and middle-class fractions, including
many teachers (Beach 2018; Skeggs 1997; Willis 1977).
Working class young people understood their social conditions very well in many
respects, including the principle characteristic of their conditions of existence and
position within the social whole (Skeggs 1997), as well as the major the contradic-
tions at the heart of the working class school experience and this helped them to
liberate themselves “from the burden of conformism and conventional achievement”
(Willis 1977, p. 130). But this understanding still mirrored existing conditions of
production, and for the young male informants in Willis’s research these were
generally both blindingly white and emphatically homophobic, able-ist, and strongly
chauvinistic (Willis 1977). Willis used the concept of limitation to describe this
condition. It referred to internal and external cultural elements that worked effec-
tively against a deeper penetration and wider grasp of social conditions (Willis 1977)
and confused and impeded a more complete understanding of social class relations
(also Marshall 1950) in ways that were compounded by the almost complete
rejection of any value in intellectual work. The development of greater awareness
was blocked both by the official curriculum and within the circuits of cultural
production within the school context that left young working class pupils not only
unable to intellectually transcend class borders, but also susceptible to reinforcing
them through their own actions (Willis 1977). This was also identified to be a
problem for the majority of working class students in higher education in Maisuria’s
(2017) investigation.
Particularly missing from the cognitive map of the working class subculture was
what higher levels of education could entail for those who were placed outside of
their family members’ social class position and how these levels of education were
used by the middle- and upper-middle classes not only in the interests of these
classes themselves, but also in relation to the conditions of existence and future of
the working class as well, both at school and at work (Maisuria 2017). But above all,
no understanding was expressed about the depth of self-righteousness, derision,
mistrust, fear, and sense of “just-desserts” the educated upper- and middle-class
harbored. This was never given any consideration. And nor was how the middle- and
dominant classes also used education as a tool of justification for their rights to a
dominant position in society that enabled them to curtail citizenship possibilities
within the framework of society for others by denying them material power and full
cultural respectability (Beach 2018; Erlandson and Beach 2014; Jonsson and Beach
2015; Marshall 1950; Skeggs 1997; Torres 1998; Willis 1977).
History helps illustrate the significance of these developments. Since Learning to
Labour was published, the globalization of capitalism has taken new proportions
(Therborn 2018; Trondman and Lund 2019), with the emergence of new
176 D. Beach

confrontational economic policies, particularly following the dissolution of the

Soviet Coalition of States in 1991, subsequent to which the global economy has
been transformed in very significant ways by the economic and political elite. The
labor market agreements that existed during the time of Willis’ (1977) investigation
have been reduced, side-stepped, and even decommissioned (ibid.; Beach and
Sernhede 2011). Industrial labor has been moved to low income areas with low
levels of organized labor, and there have been severe cuts in public spending (called
austerity today) along with service outsourcing and upwards of 60% of households
in European countries, including the UK, Italy, and Sweden, can no-longer maintain
the living standards of the old working class in new times. Leaving school in Europe
without qualifications today is a very different matter than it was in the 1970s (Beach
and Sernhede 2011; Trondman and Lund 2019).
Internationally, paid manual work is now massively underpaid in relative terms
today compared to the 1970s. Average incomes among the top 10% of earners has
gone up to almost seven times those of the bottom 10% in the past 5 years (from four
to one during much of the 1990s), and the richest five economic individuals now
own and control of more resources than the poorest 50% of the combined population
(Beach 2018; Therborn 2018). Running a home from unqualified work today means
needing to take more than one job just to survive: driving cabs, cleaning hamburger
chains at night, or doing domestic work in the homes of the well-to-do (Beach and
Sernhede 2011). But what about people working in this new so-called “gig” econ-
omy comprising, for example, students, older workers, or parents looking after kids
who need a bit of extra income to supplement other sources (Ravenelle 2019). It may
mean ending up on the economic margins of society on a permanent or semi-
permanent basis, begging on the streets, or doing the work others do not have to
do in conditions of waged poverty just to try and get by (Beach and Sernhede 2011;
Ravenelle 2019).
For most of these “self-employed contractors,” the gig economy means low pay,
insecure work, no employment rights, and earning less than the hourly Minimum
Wage with no financial security (Ravenelle 2019). Moreover, the effects have spilt
over into traditional mainstream employment, as companies and public services are
now bidding down prices and adopting increasingly precarious contractual arrange-
ments. Zero-hour contracts are now commonplace in the public as well as the private
sector, in the health service, in schools, and even in some universities, where
lecturers (but particularly auxiliary staff) operate as independent contractors that
are outside the social safety net of basic workplace protections.

Cultural Dissonance Factors Including Race, Class, and Gender

In considering the relationship and tensions between education and citizenship,

an investigation involving young Muslim men in England and their daily inter-
actions as students at an elite university was conducted by Bhatti (2011). It
showed some of the tensions and pressures these young men experienced when
trying to get on in white middle-class education institutions. However, what cut
12 Citizenship (and) Inequality: Ethnographic Research on Education and. . . 177

against the grain for these young working class men was not a masculine working
class identity as much as a racial and above all Muslim one, where ethnic
stereotyping and racism had made the young men feel that they were both out-
siders and insiders in the country where they were born, brought up, and were
they were being educated (Bhatti 2011). Similar types of cultural experience are
also discussed for other ethnic groups in the work of Sewell (1997) and Mac an
Ghaill (1988). They capture how education identities are potentially both fluid
but yet also shaped in relation to epistemologies of race, class, and gender as well
as material conditions of existence. Furthermore, this scholarship highlights how
success and survival as a self-identifying black student in a white institution may
involve therefore having to cope with racial insults, stereotypes, misrepresenta-
tions and misunderstandings, and structural repression and reproduction along-
side the workings and content of Eurocentric, white, class dominated curricula.
Thus, although social reproduction is not something that is straightforwardly
fixed and hardwired to a single universal working-class identity that does not
mean that social reproduction does not exist at all (Bourdieu and Passeron 1964;
Marshall 1950; Reay 2001; Torres 1998).
Mac an Ghaill’s (1988) research explored this matter in terms of the relation-
ships to education that developed within three school subcultures that though being
unique in certain ways also shared things in common due to their very different
school experiences to those of white middle-class individuals: mainly through
class stereotyping and racism (the Asian Warriors, the Rasta Heads and the
Black Sisters). School academic success was uncommon, belonging mainly to
the Black Sisters. These girls were from different nonwhite ethnic groups, but they
used the term black to denote a common feeling of structural oppression (Mac an
Ghaill 1988). They helped each other, and although in private they expressed at
least as much resistance toward the dominant bourgeois white curriculum and
institution as the members of the two other groups did, they found ways of hiding
this and most of them went on to later study at university. But even so in study
trajectories that were still predominantly angled away from elite institutions and
study programs. Differentiation thus involved processes of institutional discrimi-
nation but also self-selection in the progression through the school system and into
higher education and/or employment (Fordham and Ogbu 1986; Lundberg 2015;
Torres 1998; Trondman et al. 2012).
Teachers can play a strong intermediary role here in these processes of differ-
entiation. As Sewell (1997) suggested, in strongly socially classed imperialist
societies, teachers will have admittedly been socialized into a racist, classist, and
structurally also obviously misogynous society, and they will also most likely have
been exposed to a form of teacher education that does not prepare them well for
dealing with class, gender and race related injustices (Gobbo 2011) or for the
responses these injustices can call forth. Wallace (2016) has considered this in his
research concerning how young black men may attempt to counter racial subordi-
nation through masculine domination, particularly when engaging with white
female teachers. Capitalist ideology hides exploitative social relationships from
teachers and counter-school cultures alike, and they both react to this by instinct at
178 D. Beach

the same time as ideological effects limit, confuse, and impede the full develop-
ment and expression of these impulses. Teachers reproduce stereotypes about
black young men and the young men draw on three common strategies to offset
these negative stereotypes: namely, distinctiveness, deference, and dominance
(Wallace 2016).
David Gillborn (1990) analyzed similar features to this and also the responses of
teachers to the actions of young black men in his investigation of how African-
Caribbean boys were often perceived to be a threat by their teachers when no threat
was intended, and how they often then became exposed to measures of control they
did not feel they deserved, and that they felt were based on teacher evaluations that
showed racist tendencies. Moreover, this happened, Gillborn pointed out, despite
the fact that the teachers not only openly claimed to be appalled by racism, they
also insisted that (despite the obviously different educational outcomes for black
boys) they did not treat black children differently to white, or black boys differ-
ently to black girls. But as identified also by Cecile Wright (1992), they probably
should have done, because society definitely does treat them differently (Gillborn
1990; Lundberg 2015; Wallace 2016). For as Gobbo (2011) wrote, when school
experiences are affected by perceptions and expectations that are shaped by
persisting stereotypes and harsh prejudices linked to material conditions in class
biased racially oppressive and exploitative societies, there does not need to be any
form of blatant class aggression or racism in educational contexts from teachers.
The system processes pupils differently and schools will tend to end up legitimiz-
ing marginalization, exclusion, and segregation unless these are concretely iden-
tified and opposed (Gillborn 1990; Johnson 2009; Sewell 1997). Objectively, and
despite constant assertions that schools and national education systems in Western
countries operate on the basis of class/color/disability/gender and race neutrality,
social class, gender, color/whiteness have remained significant in relation to
education differentiation with influences then also on future citizenship (Wilde
2005).
Similar points to these points were made also by Fordham and Ogbu (1986)
more than three decades ago when they described how institutions tend to sub-
merge racial and cultural differences and tensions just at the same time as students
are attempting to make sense of their racial identities in and out of school and cope
with discrimination (Beach and Sernhede 2011, 2012; Trondman et al. 2012). As
Johnson (2009) and also Wallace argue, in class and color hierarchic societies,
notions of white or nonwhite become identified in opposition to one another and
being nonwhite is usually seen to imply that pupils will be more difficult to manage
and less likely to do as well as white pupils. Success can also then become an
aspect of a style or performance, of acting white or not and as a cross-class or race
experience this can chafe against both the personal experiences of young people
and the professional habitus of teachers (Mac an Ghaill 1988). When being
successful in education, young men and women of nonwhite backgrounds may
experience a risk of devaluing their cultural inheritance and background and their
feeling of identity and belonging (Beach 2018). But as with the example of the
12 Citizenship (and) Inequality: Ethnographic Research on Education and. . . 179

Black Sisters in Mac an Ghaill’s research (1988), there are instances of high
academic achievements.

Closing Remarks

This chapter has been composed from an analysis of mainly ethnographic research,
which Gobbo (2011) writes means studying education at close quarters through
interaction and by intensive participant observation, to allow for not only the
identification and description of everyday rules and regulations in educational
institutions, but also the documentation of the differently enacted agency of pupils,
teachers, and families there. It has identified the significance of bought privilege and
the hollowness of elite school experiences that reproduce class distinctions and class
power and how schools in white capitalist societies, as also Reay (2012) points out,
rarely constitute social justice and fair citizenship possibilities for all, but rather
reproduce inequalities and forms of class, color, sexuality, able-ness, and gender bias
alongside forms of economic selection to privilege the dominant class ideology and
execute repression in the interests of this class (Beach 2018).
Some groups, such as Mac an Ghaill’s group of Black Sisters, cope and appear to
do well in education despite this, and these and other examples are sometimes held
up to illustrate that schools do reward and recognize intellectual prowess, commit-
ment, motivation and effort, not only race, physical able-ness, gender, and socio-
cultural or socio-economic inheritance. Yet at the same time we know the efforts that
these students have had to put in and the social chafing and tensions success in
school can create when the social and ethnic backgrounds and gender of young
people still determine their future educational pathways to a large extent (Bhatti
2011; Schwartz 2013; Trondman et al. 2012; Willis 1977). Sexualities and physical
as well as mental challenges also carry tensions that seriously contradict all sugges-
tions about integration and full and equal opportunities for everyone (Beach 2018)!
But as pointed out by others such as Reay (2012), Weis and Fine (2012), and Weis
et al. (2013), these injustices are not new phenomena. Economically and socially
privileged parents have always had and have also used greater possibilities to
reproduce their existing cultural, social, and economic advantages in the hierarchy
of public and private schools and these institutions have served them well for
decades as a way to work the system and reproduce class hierarchies through class
choreographies employing various signifiers of cultural and symbolic capital in
conjunction with economic power (Kenway et al. 2016). Education and social
equality, justice and fair citizenship possibilities for all in capitalist societies have
never stretched further than wringing out a few concessions from existing structures
and institutions (Brooks and Holford 2009; Ireland 2006), with this then leaving the
reproduction and absolution of the class system and other inequalities (such as racial,
ethnic, gender, sexuality, and able-ness) intact (Reay 2012; Vahtera et al. 2017;
Wilde 2005) and the ontological realities of misogyny, race, and racism untouched
(Gillborn 1990; Kerr and Keating 2011; Lundberg 2015; Wright 1992).
180 D. Beach

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 Part II
Citizenship and Education in National and
Localized Contexts
Curriculum Policy and Practice of Civic
Education in Zambia: A Reflective 13
Perspective

Gistered Muleya

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186
Education Provision in Zambia: Historical Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187
The Contemporary Revival of Civic Education in Zambia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194

Abstract
In recent years Civic Education has evolved into an important school curriculum
subject in Zambia. Similar to other parts of the world, Zambia has experienced
changes mostly driven by educational policy innovations. The educational policy
innovations have, in turn, been driven by the desire to democratize the teaching
and learning environment in schools. As a result of this development, the call for
more critical, active, and participatory approaches to the teaching of Civic
Education has become imperative. In this chapter, the historical development
of Civic Education in Zambia, including the curriculum policy provisions for
Civic Education and current practical aspects of the subject, is discussed. Using
the terms Civic Education and Citizenship Education interchangeably, the chap-
ter articulates what it perceives to be the best practices and values derived from
Civic Education. In so doing, the chapter concludes by highlighting the key
arguments about the curriculum policy and practice of Civic Education in
Zambia.

G. Muleya (*)
Department of Language and Social Sciences Education, The University of Zambia,
Lusaka, Zambia
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 185
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_53
186 G. Muleya

Keywords
Civic Education · Citizenship Education · Curriculum policy · Values

Introduction

Civic Education, also known as Citizenship Education, has become an important

focus in Zambia’s educational policy, and this is in line with an international surge of
interest and motivation in the wider field of Civic Education. One can speculate that
the reason or reasons for such a position are based on the understanding that Civic
Education is deemed as an important constituent of the development of citizenship in
current and future generations. In a similar fashion, Sim and Chow (▶ Chap. 48,
“The Development of Civic Participation Among Youth in Singapore”) note that the
active participation of citizens is crucial to the sustenance of a healthy democratic
society. The observation has been made on account of Civic Education being a
subject that equips citizens with the relevant knowledge, skills, values, and dispo-
sitions which allow them to participate effectively in the community. Similarly, Print
(2000) suggests that the purpose and content of Civic Education includes what is
taught in schools about the system of government, the rights and responsibilities of
citizens, the history of the government, parliament and constitution, the role of
citizens in a liberal democracy, and a set of values based on democracy, social
justice, and the civic virtues of an active, participating citizenry.
Despite Zambia’s democratic space being relatively constrained owing to chal-
lenges arising from the current sociopolitical context, it can be argued that there has
been a strong consensus among key stakeholders – academicians, educators, and
policy makers – concerning the importance and content of Civic Education in
schools, especially with regard to a revised curriculum of 2015. One of the key
aspects in the revised curriculum is to produce among other things self-motivated,
lifelong learners; confident and productive individuals; and holistic, independent
learners with the values, skills, and knowledge to enable them to succeed in life
(M.o.G.E 2015). This chapter discusses the historical development of Civic Educa-
tion in Zambia, including the curriculum policy provisions for Civic Education and
current practical aspects of the subject. As stated above, the subject has become
compulsory in all secondary schools in Zambia from grades 10–12. The age range of
the learners at this level (grades 10–12) is 15–19 years. At junior secondary level
(grades 8–9, ages 12–14), the revised curriculum requires that Civic Education,
History, and Geography are integrated within Social Studies. The chapter articulates
what are perceived to be the best practices and values central to Civic Education in
Zambia. Furthermore, the chapter highlights central arguments regarding the curric-
ulum policy and practice of Civic Education in Zambia. The key argument of the
chapter is that Civic Education has quickly become an important focus in Zambia’s
national educational provision owing to the fact that it teaches substantive knowl-
edge, skills, attitudes, and values that have a positive impact upon student behavior,
13 Curriculum Policy and Practice of Civic Education in Zambia: A. . . 187

all elements perceived by stakeholders to be vital for meaningful citizenship in

Zambia.

Education Provision in Zambia: Historical Perspective

To put this chapter in its proper context, especially to readers who may not be
familiar with Zambia, it is important that a brief background about Zambia is
provided. Zambia gained her independence from the United Kingdom on the 24th
of October 1964. In the period from independence to 1972, Zambia was governed by
the socialist United National Independence Party, first within a multi-party system of
governance, then, between 1973 and 1991, as a one-party state system. In the late
1980s and early 1990s, there was perceived discontent among Zambians regarding
the one-party system resulting in calls for multi-partyism which was attained in 1991
under the Movement for Multi-Party Democracy (MMD) (Muleya 2018a).
Of particular relevance to this move to a multi-party democracy was the world-
wide renewal of interest in citizenship, sparked by a number of political events and
trends across the globe, including, among others, perceptions of increasing voter
apathy, the resurgence of nationalist movements, the impact of global forces on local
social traditions, the stresses created by increasingly multicultural societies, and a
decline of volunteerism (Prior 2006). The MMD ruled for 20 years before losing
power in 2011 to the Patriotic Front, which formed government in 2011. There is
some perception that the coming of the Patriotic Front into government has eroded
the process of a functioning democratic arrangement. The perception has arisen from
the manner in which the principles and values of democracy are being applied in the
different governance institutions. Arising from the foregoing, it would appear that
such perceptions have the potential to impact on the intended capacities that Civic
Education develops in learners such as critical thinking, creative thinking, and
analytical thinking among the many others. Abdi, Shizha, and Bwalya (2006) have
described Zambia’s postcolonial economic development as a failed category on
account that what had been created could be described as socioeconomic
underdevelopment.
Civic Education, in general terms, provides possibilities for engaging students in
civil and political issues. However, in Zambia, as observed elsewhere by Kennedy
(2003), students are often marginalized and silenced through the use of repressive
state apparatus such as the police service or force. Since the return to a multi-party
state, Zambia has experienced political, economic, and social challenges constrained
by the narrow, economic base, which historically is dependent on copper mining,
concentrated ownership of assets, limited foreign and domestic investment, the
legacy of authoritarian, corruption, and high unemployment (USAID 2003). In
addressing such challenges, Flanagan (2003) stated that Zambians needed to be
socially and politically incorporated into “the body politic” and develop “habits” that
promote and sustain social, political, and cultural rights. Additionally, they should be
188 G. Muleya

given opportunities to exercise these rights and learn to fulfil responsibilities in the
community and institutions. In turn, Civic Education is prefaced as laying the
foundation for democratic citizenship by educating citizens about the types of
behavior and attitudes they need to function effectively in a democratic society
(Morris 2002).
Within this changing political and economic context, education has remained as a
core part of Zambia’s political and social infrastructure (Abdi et al. 2006; Muleya
2015). This is not to suggest, however, that education and schooling have remained
static and unchanged. Indeed, the development of education and schooling in
Zambia has passed through many phases, including those dating back to
pre-colonial traditional systems operated through Christian missionary-managed
education in colonial times to the postindependence era (M.o.E 1964). It is also
important to note that despite various educational policies that have come with
successive governments since independence, the Education Act of 1966 has contin-
ued to set the basic framework for the education system in Zambia (M.o.E 2000).
Despite achievements made in the implementation of previous educational reforms,
much more remains to be done to realize real change and transformation within
Zambian society (Muleya 2015). This observation is also supported by Carmody
(2004: 158) who asserts that the educational system in Zambia has not clearly
addressed the important question of educating future generations for democracy. In
other words, he noted that schools across the country were not encouraging learners
to foster a “democratic ethos in their interactions as young people,” whether in
school or out of school, and this has had an impact on the preparation of these
learners for democracy in the community. It is important here to highlight that Civic
Education had been discontinued in the school system in 1978 by the United
National Independence Party (UNIP) of Dr. Kenneth David Kaunda on the under-
standing that the learners exposed to Civic Education knowledge, skills, and values
would more easily challenge Dr. Kaunda and his government. On this score, the
Government at that time decided that Civics should instead be maintained at the
junior level of education so that learners would only learn basic knowledge, skills,
and values on governance issues.
Carmody also noted that the lack of actual democratic education was creating
challenges despite clear policy statements which hailed the ideal of democracy. The
national education policy on education published in 1996, Educating Our Future,
emphasized the democratic ideal that:

Zambia was a liberal democratic society. Hence, it was the values

of liberal democracy that were to guide the formulation of educational
policies and their implementation. The core values of rational and moral
autonomy, equality, fairness and liberty were to underpin the concept of a
liberal democracy. In this system, the people were expected to participate fully
and rationally in the affairs of the country.

Such a position at the time demonstrated a clear need for a more participatory
version of Civic Education to be reintroduced in schools in order to address the gap
13 Curriculum Policy and Practice of Civic Education in Zambia: A. . . 189

which the subject Civics had not clearly addressed. Civics as a school curriculum
subject had a narrow focus and did not allow the learners to engage actively in their
lessons. Civics was mainly promoting what would be described as procedural
knowledge thus knowledge about state institutions as opposed to substantive knowl-
edge or knowledge meant to challenge inequalities in the community and provide or
suggest alternative solutions to the powers that be without being censored. Civics as
a subject also promoted blind loyalty to those in authority, and this encouraged the
generally citizenry to remain mute on many issues that were affecting them for fear
of being reprimanded by the state apparatus. The other point to note here is that
Civics was only taught at the junior level of secondary education thus from grades
8–9 and could not be taken up at senior level of education (grades 10–12), and this
was seen as one of the many gaps that prompted the Ministry of Education and other
key stakeholders to of reintroduce Civic Education at senior level.
In summary, the reintroduction of Civic Education at the level of secondary
education aimed at renewing an ethos of critical thinking and creative thinking
among students which was seen to be greatly lacking in previous iterations of Civics
in Zambia. In the next section, the chapter discusses in more detail the reasons that
led to the revival of Civic Education in the school curriculum.

The Contemporary Revival of Civic Education in Zambia

Before examining the contemporary revival of Civic Education in Zambia, it is

worth highlighting that this revival has run concurrently with changing conceptions
of both citizenship and education for citizenship in academic scholarship. These
changes have recognized and prioritized the development of a set of skills to learners
which, in turn, will help them to become active and informed participants in their
communities (Muleya 2018a). As noted by Wilkins (▶ Chap. 10, “Neoliberalism,
Citizenship, and Education: A Policy Discourse Analysis”), meanings of citizenship
are now typically preceded by and affixed to other words which give citizenship new
discursive meaning and political force, and, as such, it is no longer meaning the
position or status of being just a citizen. In this way citizenship is about being an
effective citizen able to get involved in what is going on in one’s community or
society. Wilkins (▶ Chap. 10, “Neoliberalism, Citizenship, and Education: A Policy
Discourse Analysis”) further notes that citizenship should be understood to refer to
the civil rights of citizens to liberty and equality before law as well as the political
and social rights of citizens to participate in deliberative and judicial activities that
affect communities and government. The reintroduction of Civic Education rose out
of the need to produce learners who would be versed in the ideals and practices of a
democratic community. Central to this new curriculum was teaching learners about
how they can live as true citizens in the community, following the ideals of what may
be referred to as transformative citizenship education. Banks (2008) states that
transformative citizenship education aims to challenge mainstream conceptions of
citizenship by engaging students in critical analysis of taken-for-granted
190 G. Muleya

assumptions about membership, identity, and community. Mainstream citizenship

education – what Banks (2008) refers to as more traditional forms of citizenship
education – is rooted in factual information about systems of government and
constitutions, often reinforcing and therefore perpetuating hegemonic values and
institutional knowledge. Banks suggests that this kind of education is grounded in
versions of citizenship which adopt the established values and morals of the majority
and maintains the dominant power relations in society.
Interest in the reintroduction of Civic Education in Zambia’s school system
arose from a feasibility study which was commissioned by the Southern Univer-
sity/Democratic Governance Project under USAID in 1995. Muleya (2015) reports
that the study was undertaken by group of experts and academicians from the
University of Zambia after realizing that there was a gap in the education of
learners for democratic ideals in society such as the inability of the learners to
challenge taken-for-granted positions in the community; lack of critical thinking
skills; and lack of democratic skills like participatory, active, civic engagement and
civic involvement just to mention a few. The need to retrain teachers in line with
the objectives of Civic Education was also a critical element in the revitalization of
Civic Education in the Zambian school curriculum. Reflecting on key issues with
the approach taken prior previously, Carmody (2004) has argued that there were
important deficiencies in education for the promotion of democracy, social respon-
sibility, and justice. For example, he noted that discussions of explicitly political
matters were not encouraged and when they did happen were so somewhat
covertly. As efforts were made to depoliticize schools, they were not able to
prepare students for the practice of democracy in the community. The recognition
of the argument by carmody above was an important factor that created the revived
aims of fostering democratic communities and making such communities to
become the loci of citizenship.
Indeed, according to an Irish Aid Report of 2002, the rationale for the
reintroduction of Civic Education in schools in Zambia arose from the following
factors: that civics was taught at junior level of secondary education, which had
created a gap between the upper secondary and tertiary level; that the content at
junior level was too loaded and detailed to be grasped by learners at junior level; that
the skills and values in the content were limited to enabling learners to understand
and practice their civic rights and obligations in society; and that trained civics
teachers had a low esteem of the subject and preferred teaching subjects other than
civics. The reports’ last point was that pupils themselves thought of the subject as
less important and therefore did not give it the status it deserved.
At the same time, Civic Education across the globe had become a primary
concern for many countries in their endeavor to nurture citizens who were going
to possess the capacity to address local and global issues rationally (Gilbert 1996;
Crick 1998; Criddle et al. 2004; Noddings 2013). The Zambian Government White
Paper, the National Capacity Building Programme for Good Governance in Zambia,
identified and stated that central to the development of good governance was a need
to expand and intensify Civic Education (Muleya 2015). It is worth reflecting, too,
that the reintroduction of Civic Education in Zambian schools had become a critical
13 Curriculum Policy and Practice of Civic Education in Zambia: A. . . 191

issue due to the fact that what was being offered to the learners under Civics was in
most cases not impacting on the national consciousness required of the general
citizenry in addressing local and global issues rationally. The revised focus on
Civic Education was also meant to support the new overall education policy
direction which had been conceived on the lines of democratic principles and ideals
(M.o.E 1996).
In strengthening the subject in schools, the revised curriculum of 2015 has made
Civic Education a compulsory subject at senior level of the secondary education
where in both career pathways (academic and vocational), it appears as one of the
core subjects. This was not the case before the revision of the 2015 revised
curriculum. It also goes without saying that the Civic Education curriculum as
revised has a different approach to the way learning should be conducted as it places
a lot of emphasis on civic engagement among the learners a point of departure from
Civics which was carefully tailored to produce passive and obedient learners. As
such the observation to be made here is that the Zambian School curriculum no
longer has Civics as a subject but rather has now Civic Education. While Civic
Education is now compulsory at senior secondary school level, it is integrated at the
Junior Secondary level into what is referred to as Social Studies. The social studies
subject combines Civic Education with Geography and History on account that there
is interrelated content and similar competencies between these disciplines. (Reli-
gious Education does not fall into the social studies dimension in Zambia, and it is a
stand-alone in the current curriculum framework.) The Junior Secondary School
Curriculum is a 2-year course that covers grades 8 and 9 (12–14 years) of the
Zambian Education system (M.o.G.E 2015). However, Civic Education is a living
subject experiencing changes from time to time. As such, the curriculum intends to
provide learners with the basis for the acquisition of relevant knowledge, skills, and
values needed for learning in subsequent formal studies at Senior Secondary School.
According to the M.o.G.E, (2015), the curriculum at this level also equips the
learners with knowledge and skills to either continue with the academic education
or pursue prevocational and life skills. It is also important to point out here that the
two career pathways at senior secondary level are deemed as academic and voca-
tional. In order to realize the aspirations of the revised curriculum of 2015, respective
schools across the country are being encouraged to come up with continuous
professional development activities (CPDs) in Civic Education so that teachers
would be oriented and reoriented on the innovations taking place in their field of
study. Equally to note is that training institutions are also encouraged to train the
students in line with the changes made in the revised curriculum. Additionally, the
training institutions are also encouraged to design programs that will cater for the
integration of Civic Education, History, or Geography into social studies at grades
8 and 9.
In all this, the practice of Civic Education in Zambia remains alive to its mission
of what one could call refocusing, reinvigorating, and repositioning as well as
recreating in learners the tenets and rudiments of what it means to be citizens,
whether nationally or globally. According to Print and Smith (2000), the key
elements of Civic Education are the critical values required for participation in
192 G. Muleya

democratic societies. Values in this case appear to play an important role in the
formation of social capital, one of the foundation stones of civil societies and
democracies (Putnam 1995; Montgomery 1998 as cited in Print and Smith 2000).
Law (▶ Chap. 20, “The Role of the State and State Orthodoxy in Citizenship and
Education in China”) observes that Civic Education enhances the dominant ortho-
doxy values and fosters an obedient citizenry for social and political stability rather
than cultivating people to become more independent and autonomous. It is clear
from such a position that the values found in Civic Education are variously applied in
different contexts. Peterson et al. (▶ Chap. 57, “Education for Youth Civic and
Political Action in Australia”) observed that the rationale for the Australian Curric-
ulum Civics and Citizenship was aimed at helping the students to explore ways they
could actively shape their lives, value their belonging in a diverse and dynamic
society, and positively contribute locally, nationally, regionally, and globally. Sim-
ilarly, Muleya (2016) noted that Civic Education as a subject involved the active
participation of citizens in managing themselves in society and to make sure that
everyone who needs help is supported. Furthermore Muleya (2018b) contends that
Civic Education reflects on the assumptions, approaches, paradigms, worldviews,
philosophies, systems, structures, and people of diverse backgrounds as the means to
gain great understanding through hands-on knowledge on the ways of life in society.
This again has bearing on the kind of values that one gets through the principles and
ideals of Civic Education. A scrutiny of the 1996 National Policy of Education,
Educating our Future points to the upholding of national peace, citizenship, patri-
otism, national pride, and respect for other people’s freedom and sovereignty as
some of the values that should be promoted through Civic Education. These values
are guiding ideals for the nation in terms of what Civic Education should contribute
to the education of Zambian citizens. Thus, Civic Education is considered in the
Zambian education curriculum as achieving the objectives that may not be attained
by other subjects only.
It is thus clear that successive governments in the postindependence period in
Zambia adopted different education policies especially in the 1990s which played a
critical role in informing current educational provision and practices (Muleya
2018a). In addition to focusing on Civic Education as a curricular subject, as
argued by Abdi, Shizha, and Ellis (2010), educational policies and reforms during
this era also sought to democratize the education system. The current government’s
educational vision aims at providing education which is responsive and relevant to
the requirements of society. In doing so, through its Vision 2030 policy document,
the Government of the Republic of Zambia notes that the Ministry of Education
should provide for wider values and goals that are significant to the core of Civic
Education, namely, providing learners with the required knowledge, skills, and
values meant to uphold and respect their own freedoms and those of others in
society.
Based on the Civitas Framework of 1991, Muleya (2018a) contends that Civic
Education in Zambia has the capacity to bring forth to the learners’ attitudes and
habits that would help them as citizens to contribute effectively to the
13 Curriculum Policy and Practice of Civic Education in Zambia: A. . . 193

development of their communities. Civic Education is also said to help learners

acquire relevant knowledge and skills required of them to participate accordingly
in society and that Civic Education supports learners in becoming part of what is
happening around them and this in the long run has the potential to help get
involved in addressing the challenges of the day in their local communities. To be
able to fulfil their rightful obligations, the learners will first of all have to
understand their role as citizens of Zambia. Without this understanding of who
they are as citizens, it is difficult to realize the goals of Civic Education,
especially the values derived out of it. As to whether the current curriculum is
addressing the problems which led to the revival of Civic Education at the senior
level of secondary education, it can only be speculated that there is still a lot of
work to be done in this area. While the revised curriculum is clear on the aims of
Civic Education, there is a lack of studies which explicitly examine the practice
and impact of Civic Education in Zambian schools.
Whether the intended practices are being realized or not is something that will
have to be seen once the revised curriculum of 2015 has been fully implemented in
schools. However, it can be argued that Civic Education in the Zambian school
curriculum remains an important way and means of teaching citizens about their
individual rights, duties and responsibilities. It is worth concluding this section by
referencing Jekayinfa et al.’s (2010) contention, written in relation to Civic Educa-
tion in Nigeria, that Civic Education brings benefits for schools, other educational
organizations, and society at large. Schools and other educational organizations
argue that Civic Education supports motivated and responsible learners, who relate
positively to each other, to staff, and to the surrounding community, creating for
society, an active and responsible citizenry, willing to participate in the life of the
nation and the wider world and play its part in the democratic process. In this way,
that Civic Education stands out as a subject in the Zambian school curriculum whose
responsibility is to prepare the citizens for life and thus speaking to the depth and
breadth of what needs to be learnt.

Conclusion

Civic Education in Zambia has now become one of the compulsory subjects in the
school curriculum. The Ministry of General Education has been at the center of
policy, curricula, resources, curriculum materials, teacher professional development,
and research directed to Civic Education. It is clear to note that Civic Education in
the Zambian school system looks promising for now, and one gets the sense that with
this kind of support not only from the government but also from key stakeholders,
such civil society organizations and the like will continue to support the application
of the policy in schools. One interesting aspect about Civic Education in Zambia is
that it has become one of the subjects being taken at all stages of education provision,
and one can argue that just like in other parts of world, Civic Education in Zambia is
indeed experiencing rapid renaissance.
194 G. Muleya

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The Language of Citizenship: Indigenous
Perspectives of Nationhood in Canada 14
Frank Deer and Jessica Trickey

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196
Indigenous Nationhood in Canada . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197
Citizenship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198
An Era of (Re)Conciliation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200
A Case of Relationships Conditioned by Rights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202
Bill C-45: Concerns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203
Inherent Rights: From Time Immemorial . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204
Discussion: Opportunities for Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206
Conclusion/Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208

Abstract
The indigenous peoples in Canada are a demographic that has largely had
difficulties situating itself into the body politic of the Canadian nation state.
(The term indigenous will herein refer to the First Nations, Metis, and Inuit
peoples who are the descendants of the original stewards of what is now
Canada. These three groups that constitute the triumvirate of constitutionally
recognized “Aboriginal” peoples (Constitution Act, 1982, being schedule B to
the Canada Act 1982 (U.K.), 1982, c. 11) each represent a vast number of nations,
cultures, language groups, and treaty contexts.) If one accepts that the goal of
contemporary Canadian citizenship is the sharing of values in a collective,
democratic community (Deer F, J Educ Thought 42(1):69–82, 2008), then the
role of indigenous peoples in a Canadian citizenry may merit exploration. Indig-
enous peoples, who frequently show that they have demonstrably different
conceptualizations of their own group identity and nationhood that are different
from those of non-indigenous peoples, may be caught in a struggle of competing

F. Deer (*) · J. Trickey (*)

University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, Canada
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 195
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_76
196 F. Deer and J. Trickey

values – these struggles may have serious implications for social harmony and
contemporary reconciliation. This chapter explores the ways in which indigenous
peoples in Canada may be understood by others in terms of their national
contexts, the manners in which they view their own roles as members of a
Canadian citizenry, and the implications for educational initiatives.

Keywords
Indigenous · Citizenship · Nationhood · Education · Social movements

Introduction

Canada is a nation state that occupies the traditional territories of numerous indig-
enous nations – nations that represent a broad diversity of cultural and language
backgrounds (Kulchyski 2007). These indigenous nations have served as stewards of
the territories of North America far longer than the European colonizers that would
eventually establish the Dominion of Canada (Dickason and Newbigging 2010). The
colonial activities of settlers in these territories have experienced acute hardships that
include government-led initiatives designed to “get rid of the Indian problem”
(Miller 2004). Government initiatives such as the establishment of enforced habita-
tion in “reserves,” enfranchisement (i.e., forced acceptance of citizenship at the
expense of rights and entitlements as indigenous people), and the now well-known
and regretful Residential School System have contributed to ongoing poverty, lack
of opportunity, and trauma (Milloy 1999). (Indian residential schools were govern-
ment initiated and sponsored schools that were almost exclusively administered by
religious authorities across Canada. Many of the students who attended these schools
were forcibly removed from their families and communities to attend these schools
in which much abuse, neglect, and trauma occurred. Generations of indigenous
children attended these schools – these experiences are identified as one contributing
cause of the poor state of well-being for many indigenous peoples in Canada.) Many
of these colonial and postcolonial activities on the part of the federal government and
their partners (e.g., churches of various denominations) may be understood as
genocidal in nature (MacDonald 2019). (Although not a topic of focus in this
chapter, the concept of genocide has begun to be applied to numerous indigenous
contexts. The findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada is one
example of how the concept of genocide has (and continues to be) been considered
when describing the intent of government authorities with regard to the residential
school system.) Ongoing oppression has obscured indigenous perspectives and
worldviews from discussion. Even with current efforts to recognize indigenous
history, indigenous worldviews are still excluded from having a central focus.
Though schools are incorporating more lessons about indigenous history and tradi-
tions, students may find difficulty in understanding the discrepancy between having
rights and privileges as a function of Canadian citizenship and as a function of
indigenous sovereignty. The paragraphs to follow detail indigenous perspectives of
14 The Language of Citizenship: Indigenous Perspectives of Nationhood in Canada 197

nationhood and citizenship and how indigenous perspectives are now at the forefront
in a new era of reconciliation.

Indigenous Nationhood in Canada

Colonization imposed a new set of regulations on existing indigenous communities

to constitute one unified nation (e.g., Canada). Indigenous peoples had already
established their own concepts of nation and nationhood, but these were displaced
by White settlers.
Before colonialism, indigenous nations defined themselves with regard to kinship
and connections. Cornell (2015) identifies five important aspects of indigenous
nationhood: (1) connections to the land, (2) kinship and community, (3) narratives
and history associated with the land and culture, (4) self-governance, and (5) collec-
tive well-being. For example, Anishinaabe peoples conceptualized nationhood as
being built on stories and traditions and shaped by relationships and communities
(Stark 2012). Further, Anishinaabe peoples were not one people or one nation, but
consisted of multiple distinct nations. These different nations functioned in tandem
with one another by forming allyships and sharing land.
Colonialism disrupted and reconfigured indigenous ideas of nationhood. Colo-
nizers ignored all aspects of indigenous nationhood by exploiting land, dividing
communities, reconstructing narratives, denying self-governance, and emphasizing
individual well-being over the collective (Cornell 2015). Anishinaabe nations were
conglomerated into one nation (Stark 2012). This not only altered indigenous
nations but changed the overall definition of nationhood. In colonialist representa-
tions, nations are characterized by industrialization and working-class labor (Ander-
son 2015). This definition specifically excludes indigenous organizations, who are
instead considered “pre-nations” (Anderson 2015). Because of this, some scholars
argue that European definitions of nations cannot, therefore, apply to indigenous
nations. As an example, while Western nations are hierarchical and secular, indig-
enous nations are more egalitarian and spiritual (Anderson 2015). It is differences
such as these that represent challenges to the establishment and maintenance of a
single Canadian citizenry that is inclusive of indigenous peoples.
Kalant (2004) argued that nations are built on myths and are, therefore, fictional.
In relation to considering indigenous perspectives of nationhood in Canada, media
and interpersonal relationships ignite these fictions to create an instilled idea of a
unified nation, divided by geographic location, with certain principles and ideals.
Canada, for instance, holds the ideal of multiculturalism and is separated from other
nations by the US border and vast oceans. The Oka Crisis of 1990 doubted this
concept of Canadian nationality (Kalant 2004). The Mohawk peoples and Québécois
peoples came to be considered as separate identities and not under one nation.
However, by forcing Mohawk peoples to affiliate with Canada’s ideologies through,
among other things, mandatory and nefarious education, Canada became a nation
built on assimilation and the othering of indigenous peoples (Kalant 2004). Nations
are shaped by their relations with one another (Stark 2012). Just as indigenous
198 F. Deer and J. Trickey

nations were shaped through negotiations and conflict with settler Canadians,
Canada as a nation was shaped as well.
As a response to the transformation of indigenous nations, many indigenous
communities sought self-determination and self-governance. Many indigenous com-
munities have reorganized and reinterpreted their structures such as aligning with
other indigenous groups to create a subnation or having a firm focus on restoring a
collective identity (Cornell 2015). For example, in the Northwest Territories, four
First Nations came together to form the Tlicho Government; this reassessed the
boundaries and identities that the Canadian government had imposed (Cornell
2015). Further, many indigenous nations are now beginning to take control over
the well-being of their peoples, their exports, and their laws. As an example, the
Listuguj Mi’gmaq Nation passed a law on the management of their salmon fishery, a
key export for their economy (Cornell 2015). The law was a response to a decline in
salmon impacting Mi’gmaq well-being (The National Centre for First Nations
Governance 2015). To control fish production, Quebec raided Mi’gmaq fisheries
with arrests, confiscations, and even beatings. This prompted the Listuguj people to
come together and fight for their rights. They passed the law with the provincial
government in 1993, giving them full control of their fisheries. This example
illustrates how unacceptable and destructive government practices can facilitate
activism and response from indigenous nations.

Citizenship

With indigenous communities restoring its self-determination and self-governance,

some Canadian government officials are concerned that Canada is losing its national
unity (Blackburn 2009). What would it mean for Canada if indigenous peoples were
considered citizens primarily of their nations rather than Canada? Blackburn (2009)
examined this question in the context of a recent Treaty signed between the British
Colombian government and the Nisga’a peoples. The Treaty allows the Nisga’a
Nation, who resides in the Nass River Valley, to self-govern and define their own
version of citizenship. A citizen of the Nisga’a Nation is one who is of Nisga’a
ancestry (either themselves or through their mother) and who is tied to the land.
Nisga’a peoples’ use of “citizen” in the Treaty was strategic; it allowed them to
reconfigure Canada’s definition of a sovereign nation and create a new political
space within Canada that is not just another piece of Canada’s mosaic. While many
indigenous peoples in Canada already identify as having a dual citizenship with
Canada and their home Nation, Nisga’a peoples are officially a separate political
entity within Canada.
The Nisga’a Nation’s redefining of citizen is significant because Canada’s defi-
nition of a citizen, one who has certain rights, privileges, and responsibilities to the
state, has historically excluded indigenous peoples (Battiste and Semeganis 2002).
There is no agreed-upon conceptualization of citizenship by scholars; however, it is
recognized as a legal category, distinguishing those who are citizens from those who
are not (Cho 2011). The status grants certain privileges such as security and
14 The Language of Citizenship: Indigenous Perspectives of Nationhood in Canada 199

belonging. It also gives clarification to people of their place in relation to others

through inclusions and exclusions, creating an “us versus them” mentality. For
example, in Canada, citizenship was originally represented by the White man and
excluded women, indigenous peoples, and minorities (Fleischmann and Styvendale
2011). While the definition of citizenship has expanded, its foundation of exclusion
makes it an improper definition to expand to indigenous nations. For First Nations
communities, citizenship may be seen as a colonialist myth that is used as another
method of assimilating newcomers. Before colonialism, First Nations communities
were largely communal and collectivist (Battiste and Semeganis 2002). They oper-
ated on principles of reciprocity and consent, tied not to the state but to relationships
with others. Group values superseded individual hedonisms. By contrast, colonial-
ism brought ideologies of individuality and oppression, as well as a philosophy of
blind obedience to a state in order to have rights (Battiste and Semeganis 2002).
Indigenous peoples were put in a precarious position to be Canadian citizens,
granted the right to vote and contribute to policy, or be relocated to reserves and
lose any power in Canadian governance. The Haudenosaunee peoples in Ontario and
their ongoing disputes with the government to reclaim their land are an example of
the inconsistency between Canada’s conceptions of citizenship and First Nations’
conceptions of belonging to a nation. The Haudenosaunee peoples (Six Nations) are
in disagreement with the government to cease government and company-led con-
struction on their land so they can reclaim their land (Coleman 2011). While White
protestors demanded that all people in Canada be under one law as citizens,
Haudenosaunee peoples prefer for each group to share the land while not imposing
on one another’s rights and livelihoods. This idea can be represented by the Two
Row Wampum (Coleman 2011), important to Haudenosaunee peoples – a symbol
that indigenous peoples and Europeans can both live on the land and practice their
own customs without impinging on the customs of each other. The Two Row
Wampum is a belt containing white shells divided by two parallel rows of purple
shells. This symbol of mutual respect has challenged the notion of Canadian
citizenship by giving Haudenosaunee peoples their own laws and rights, separate
from those of Canada. For instance, some Haudenosaunee peoples will opt for a
Haudenosaunee passport instead of a Canadian passport. Neal McLeod, a Cree
scholar, stated that “a discourse of universal citizenship has the capacity to rational-
ize the process of colonization” (Coleman 2011, p. 191). Any argument for a unified,
Canadian citizenship obscures the history of citizenship as one who is included in
Canada’s body politic and, therefore, not indigenous.
Though indigenous peoples may not fit into the Canadian definition of citizen-
ship, they define their own nationhood and, within this, their own citizenship.
Battiste and Semanganis (2002) describe Western citizenship as resulting from
nationalism, an emotional connection and belonging to the state. With this form of
citizenship, however, comes certain ideologies and power imbalances. In order for
indigenous perspective to become more visible, current notions of citizenship and
nationhood must be revised to be more inclusive.
Nationhood and citizenship are complex terms that do not apply readily to
indigenous peoples. Western concepts of nations are not synonymous with
200 F. Deer and J. Trickey

indigenous nations. Policy-makers and governments have an obligation to consider

this in order to ensure indigenous nations are able to self-govern and exist both
separately from and together with the Canadian state.

An Era of (Re)Conciliation

There has been some significant sociopolitical distance between conceptions of

indigenous nationhood and how indigenous peoples may situate themselves within
the body politic of Canada (Green 2009). This distance is not trivial or ineffectual as
evidenced in the current and recent dialogue among and between indigenous and
nonindigenous peoples (Mzinegiizhigo-kwe Bédard 2018) as well as in the notable
conflicts that have occurred in recent times such as the 1990 Oka crisis and the
current Wet’suwet’en predicament. (The Oka Crisis of 1990 involved the defense of
a portion of Kanienke’haka territory in southern Quebec by members of an indige-
nous community involving the blockades of local roads. With the support of another
indigenous community nearby and the blockade of a bridge, government authorities
responded with force resulting two deaths. The Wet’suwet’en predicament involved
Wet’suwet’en (a nation that rests in the Province of British Columbia) hereditary
chiefs who opposed the construction of a pipeline across their territories – the threat
of incursions into the traditional territories led to solidarity protests across Canada.)
As is resident within many colonial states, many of the relationships between
indigenous and nonindigenous peoples in Canada are either strained, fractured, or
nonexistent. The need in Canada may be to (re)establish our relationships in a
healthy, fecund, and mutually beneficial manner (Truth and Reconciliation Com-
mission of Canada 2015a).
Reconciliation has been cited by commissioners of the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission of Canada as the act of establishing new relationships between indig-
enous and nonindigenous while retaining an understanding of a shared and perhaps
unsavory history (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015a). Recon-
ciliation may be regarded as a rather Canadian concern as it is a response to the
Indian residential school experience in Canada. Although reconciliation may focus
upon how primary and secondary education was handled by Canadian government
and church authorities for much of the last two centuries, the need to engage in
activities of reconciliation following the work and final report of the TRC has
extended beyond educational considerations and has extended into many forums
of endeavor in Canada (Frideres 2011). In terms of citizenship, topics such as law,
political participation, language and culture, and labor market participation are
captured in the TRC Calls-to-Action and have expanded the discussion of how
relationships between indigenous and nonindigenous peoples may be improved.
Although presented and discussed in length in the final report of the TRC, the
concept of and response to reconciliation is still a developing issue in Canada. Most
of the Calls-to-Action that emerged from the TRC were focused upon the potential
responses of federal and provincial/territorial governments (Truth and Reconcilia-
tion Commission of Canada 2015b). Other institutions such as churches/clergy,
14 The Language of Citizenship: Indigenous Perspectives of Nationhood in Canada 201

higher education, and offices of civil service were cited, but the emphasis upon the
two principal levels of government as being principally responsible for developing
reconciliatory activities represents what the TRC judged to be most significant.
These two levels of government are viewed as key:

• Federal areas of responsibility may be understood in the context of, among other
things, past roles in the establishment and administration of residential schools as
well as previous and current roles with regard to treaty and constitutional
responsibilities.
• Provincial areas of responsibility may be understood in the context of, among
other things, the responsibility for delivering and administering key social welfare
services such as those of health and public education.

In the brief period of time since the release of the TRC final report, these two
levels of government have been engaged in discussions on reconciliation (in varying
degrees of sufficiency and success) in numerous events, initiatives, and other
activities that are, ostensibly, in the public interest (Chandler-Olcott and Hinchman
2018).
In spite of the fact that most of the TRC Calls-to-Action cite initiatives of a
reconciliatory nature directed toward government – for which some efforts been
made to respond – many other public institutions and community groups have
expressed interest in (and even commitment toward) the reconciliation. In some
cases, such institutions and groups have begun to accept the Calls-to-Action that are
directed to government. Public sector organizations such as universities and com-
munity groups such as churches have been discussing and even initiating conversa-
tions and activities that support the achievement of the general goals of
reconciliation – activities intended to facilitate improved relations with indigenous
peoples while coming to terms with difficult histories. The general conception of and
approach toward reconciliation in Canada has extended beyond the interface indig-
enous peoples have had with government and has become inclusive of many for
whom the Calls-to-Action were not nominally directed (Korteweg and Russell
2012).
Although reconciliation appears to be a topic of concern in many public quarters,
the general discussion of reconciliation has, perhaps understandably, extended to
those involved in different forms of formal education (Newbery 2012). Indigenous
histories, experiences, and perspectives have become increasingly essential when
engaging in the creation of educational programming in schools. Many who are
affiliated with primary and secondary education have committed themselves to
explore indigenous content, histories, and social issues. In many educational set-
tings, the programming that is employed to provide opportunities for learning for
children and youth has become inclusive of important dimensions of the Canadian
indigenous experience that are relevant to First Nations, Metis and Inuit languages,
literacies, mathematics, and other areas where focus is on the numerous and specific
manifestations of indigenous knowledge, heritage, consciousness, and tradition.
School administrators and teacher leaders who have a role in developing and
202 F. Deer and J. Trickey

encouraging teachers to account for the emergent value associated with this rela-
tively new area of indigenous education are becoming more responsive. This
responsiveness is associated with the notion that indigenous content should be
shared and celebrated and inform the development of a balanced perspective on
the Canadian indigenous experience that is appreciative (Deer 2014).
The reconciliation movement in public education, as well as the more dated
movement toward integration of indigenous perspectives, has not developed without
critical reception (Montero and Denomme-Welch 2018). Numerous writers and
public figures have contributed to negative and dismissive dialogue on this topic.
In a country in which such pushback exists, many jurisdictional authorities have
pressed forward with this new chapter in Canadian history. Thus, many education
leaders in Canada have assumed responsibility to facilitate the development of
appropriate learning opportunities that will support a sustainable and educationally
useful journey toward reconciliation. Many school district boards and others who
occupy similar positions of authority have ventured into this area in a manner that is
inclusive of divergent indigenous perspectives. This progressive approach has allo-
wed many indigenous elders and community members to provide leadership and
knowledge that is essential to this process.

A Case of Relationships Conditioned by Rights

The issue of citizenship and how indigenous peoples in Canada may understand and
employ the concept has been (and continues to be) conditioned by the indigenous
rights movements of recent decades. The indigenous rights movement in Canada has
been buoyed by a number of events that have brought to school consciousness issues
of poverty and social marginalization experienced by many indigenous peoples. Of
the more fundamental mechanisms that have and continue to codify the rights of
indigenous peoples in Canada are the various Treaties with First Nations peoples, the
Royal Proclamation of 1763, and Section 35 of the Constitution Act 1982; what has
problematized the contemporary indigenous rights movement is how discussion on
legislation and entitlements has situated many people’s perspective on indigenous
people. Any consideration of how citizenship is understood and employed by
indigenous peoples in Canada would benefit from an overview of the contemporary
indigenous rights movement in Canada and how that may inform a discussion on
inherent rights and the broader international discourse on universal rights.
One of many events through which one might understand the contemporary
indigenous rights movement in Canada is the relatively episodic yet publicly visible
Idle No More (INM) movement. In the autumn of 2012, this movement began by
four women in the Canadian Province of Saskatchewan – Jessica Gordon, Sheelah
McLean, Sylvia McAdam, and Nina Wilson (The Kimo-nda-niimi Collective 2014)
in response to the then Conservative Government’s second omnibus budget bill, also
known as Bill C-45, in October 2012. These women initiated the first event of the
Idle No More movement, which was held in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, in early
November as a protest of this bill (Sinclair 2014). Within the following months,
14 The Language of Citizenship: Indigenous Perspectives of Nationhood in Canada 203

demonstrations were staged across Canada in an effort to protest the bill and to raise
awareness of the government’s treatment of indigenous issues. At the heart of the
movement was the notion held by many that Bill C-45 will have undesired conse-
quences for indigenous peoples with regard to their constitutional and Treaty rights.
Because of the pan-Canadian nature of the movement that was represented by
numerous regional perspectives, it may be difficult to provide a singular narrative
that reflects the INM movement. Similar to the Occupy movement in America at
the time, different groups from different regions have different foci that reflect the
diversity of colonial experiences. However, a number of individuals/groups have
ventured to comment on the purpose for the movement (Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation 2013):

• According to one prominent movement leader, the movement’s purpose is to

“stop the Harper government from passing more laws and legislation that will
further erode treaty and indigenous rights and the rights of all Canadians.”
• One statement reads, “Idle No More has a responsibility to resist current gov-
ernment policies in a Peaceful and Respectful way.”
• According to one social media source, the purpose of the movement is “to support
and encourage grassroots to create their own forums to learn more about Indig-
enous rights and our responsibilities to our Nationhood via teach-ins, rallies and
social media.”

There was no single prevailing purpose for all who affiliated with the INM
movement. However, there was a principal concern that was frequently cited by
the informal leaders of the movement and that was legislative changes that would
potentially affect indigenous peoples in Canada.

Bill C-45: Concerns

The principal concerns for indigenous people across Canada during the time of INM
were in regard to:

• Changes to the Indian Act (e.g., First Nations decision-making processes

governed by changes that can effectively silence community members;
AANDC can ignore resolutions developed by First Nations governments).
• Lakes and rivers (industry representatives involved in mining or other natural
resource extraction no longer have to demonstrate that their activity will not
damage/destroy/contaminate lakes or rivers).
• Environmental assessment issues; the previous assessment process which was
designed to ensure rigorous assessment of environmental impacts by industry and
other activities is replaced by a much faster process that is far less rigorous.

Perhaps, in terms of citizenship, an equally important concern for indigenous

peoples is that Bill C-45, which acquired Royal assent in December 2012,
204 F. Deer and J. Trickey

represents a larger movement by Government to forgo Constitutional and Treaty

responsibilities in an effort to further marginalize Canada’s indigenous popula-
tion. Many of the indigenous people affiliated with the INM movement can recall
their personal experiences within their respective communities during the infa-
mous “White Paper” episode when the Trudeau government attempted to change
Canada’s relationship with First Nations peoples through outsourcing to prov-
inces and to initiate federal institutional changes that would effectively end the
formal governmental relationship between the Government of Canada and First
Nations (Dickason and Newbigging 2010). The White Paper era is one instance of
the Canadian Government’s activities that may be interpreted as attempts to avoid
acting on responsibilities toward indigenous peoples in Canada – Bill C-45 as a
possible means of correcting the government’s relationship with indigenous
peoples that privileges the government’s position is not a unique occurrence
(Palmater 2012).
The INM movement has reminded the Canadian public and international
onlookers that issues of poverty, unrecognized rights, unaddressed governmental
obligations, and recognition among the broad public is still a pressing issue for
indigenous people in Canada. Although much attention in the media has been made
to the connections between Bill C-45 and INM, one might rightfully suggest that this
Bill is one initiative in a long line of government attempts to avoid deliverance on
their responsibilities within the contexts of indigenous rights (Diabo 2012). One of
the foundational principles that are advanced in support of the indigenous rights
movement has been the existence of un-extinguished rights and accords that are
intended to codify the relationship between indigenous peoples and the governing
authorities that have facilitated the settlement of what is now Canada by non-
indigenous peoples.

Inherent Rights: From Time Immemorial

Entitlements and rights may be an essential part of citizenship and citizenship

education – especially in Western contexts. In Canada, indigenous rights are some-
times broadly asserted, sometimes by indigenous peoples, as apropos of certain
inherent rights (Kulchyski 2013). These “inherent” rights, those rights that are
entitled to an individual by virtue of their existence as human beings alone (Orend
2002), are frequently argued to be existent due to the condition of indigeneity of
indigenous peoples (Grammond 2009).
The notion that indigenous peoples were here first has led to increased discus-
sions regarding indigenous sovereignty (Lindau and Cook 2000). The argument that
asserts indigenous peoples as the original inhabitants of Turtle Island may make for
interesting debate, but the more salient point regarding colonization and the original
inhabitants is contained by simply asking who was here first. This question can then
lead to perhaps the more crucial issue of who had/has sovereignty in the lands in
question. Traditional European and contemporary Western perspectives on
14 The Language of Citizenship: Indigenous Perspectives of Nationhood in Canada 205

settlement have pointed to this question in a way that may give undue privilege to the
colonial power’s perspective. Just as Christopher Columbus was said to have
ceremoniously erected a flag claiming lands in the Caribbean as Spain, so did French
explorers erect crosses and the British raised flags. The idea that these lands were
terra nullius, lands that were uninhabited and where sovereignty had not been
established by anyone, was essential to European settlement and the establishment
of colonial rule. Although much of the mid-twentieth century history asserts that a
number of European explorers “discovered” parts of what is now North America,
Peter Kulchyski reminds us that:

[O]bviously, columbus and jaques cartier and samuel de champlain and samuel herne and
alexander mackenzie and all the rest we hear so much about never actually ‘discovered’
anything at all. [A]ll the land they saw, the rivers and lakes and mountains they gave new
names to were already well known, used, occupied, and named by native peoples. [T]o say
they ‘discovered’ all this land is to act as if native people didn’t exist and hadn’t, for
thousands of years, themselves explored and discovered what today we call the [A]mericas.
(2007, p. 8)

The notion that the first peoples of North America had some measure of sover-
eignty associated with their respective lands became more prevalent in the late
nineteenth century when Crown officials began entering into negotiations with
First Nations in Western Canada for what would be referred to as the Numbered
Treaties. These negotiations were necessary for the Dominion of Canada as the
importance for acquiring land in Western Canada in order to establish sovereignty
informed much governmental action during this era. Authorities wished to acquire
these lands through negotiation.
Prior to, during, and following the establishment of Crown sovereignty in the
west through the processes of treaty negotiation, the Government of Canada engaged
in another process – the assimilation of the first peoples into peoples that can be
regarded as more civilized when measured against the ethnocentric standard of their
colonizers. The Indian residential school system, informed by the sentiments that led
to the development of such legislative developments as the Gradual Civilization Act
of 1857 and the Indian Act of 1876, was intended to facilitate assimilation by taking
“the Indian out of the child.” This assimilation was deemed necessary for the
realization of Canada’s goal of moving “Aboriginal communities from their ‘savage’
state to that of ‘civilization’ and thus to make in Canada but one community – a
non-Aboriginal one” (Milloy 1999, p. 2). The impact of separating First Nations
children from their families and the subsequent affect that such separation has had on
numerous aspects of their identity caused ongoing harm to First Nations peoples and
their cultures.
There are two manifestations of indigenous rights in Canada that are relevant to
this discussion – constitutional rights in the Canadian context and inherent rights in
the domestic and international contexts. Constitutional rights for indigenous peoples
in Canada are perhaps best understood within the context of Section 35 of the
Constitutional Act, 1982.
206 F. Deer and J. Trickey

Discussion: Opportunities for Learning

Currently, discourse that explores the awareness and importance of national and
international rights is a bona fide dimension of social studies education in Canada
(White Face and Wobaga 2013). Usually discussed within the context of charter
rights, universal human rights, and the larger discussion of citizenship (Hebert and
Wilkinson 2002), Canadian secondary students acquire an understanding of entitle-
ments and freedoms that emphasize social responsibilities toward others and to
themselves as well as their relationship with the state (Deer 2010). In recent years,
the discussions of rights and citizenship in secondary schools in Canada have begun
to include the perspectives associated with the Canadian indigenous experience
(Battiste and Semeganis 2002). These perspectives are frequently explored through
a supplementary discussion on the broader responsibilities and rights associated with
citizenship (Warry 2007).
However, many resources that are used in primary and secondary schools in
Canada do explore the allegedly inherent nature of indigenous rights. One of the
fundamental notions associated with the inherent nature of indigenous rights is that
they are entitlements of people based on the fact that they are individuals only
without any other source (Dick 2011). The inference of this notion in regard to
indigenous peoples – that there exists a set of entitlements that are (a) held by the
individual by virtue of their existence and (b) are, in the Cardinal-esque tradition,
unique in so far as they are additional entitlements to those normally associated with
Canadian citizenship (Cardinal 1977) – can govern the developing student perspec-
tive on indigenous peoples issues.
The tension between these two discourses, one which explores the broad range
of entitlements, freedoms, and responsibilities for all Canadians and the other more
focused discussion exploring those that are specifically associated with the indig-
enous peoples of this land, may have an undesired effect on how students and
adults perceive how indigenous people are situated in Canada. Concepts of citi-
zenship and nationhood further complicate indigenous peoples’ place in Canada as
these are applied through a Western lens and typically exclude indigenous per-
spectives and influences in Canadian society. Further, with indigenous rights
movements such as Idle No More cited above as well as some of the historic events
associated with land stewardship and rights issues such as the 1990 Oka Crisis, the
Grand River land dispute of 2006, and the Gustafsen Lake standoff of 1995, there
is potential that those who study or otherwise consume through media sources
narratives concerning the Canadian indigenous experience that are replete with
these stories may develop a proxy for understanding the Canadian indigenous
experience – that of jurisdiction.
It may be understandable that the Canadian indigenous experience is fre-
quently regarded principally as a jurisdictional discourse by both indigenous
and nonindigenous peoples; generations of First Nations, Metis and Inuit peoples
subject to residential schools, the denial of rights normally enjoyed by others, and
legislative developments intended to marginalize indigenous peoples may easily
14 The Language of Citizenship: Indigenous Perspectives of Nationhood in Canada 207

govern the quality of discussions that explore our first peoples. The sorts of
emotionally and/or politically charged rhetoric and posturing that is frequently
associated with such discussions that occur in the public realm have the potential
to create this proxy, that of jurisdiction, for understanding the Canadian indige-
nous experience. In some rather crucial ways, exploring indigenous peoples and
experiences as a jurisdictional issue has obscured some of the ethno-cultural
dimensions of indigenous identity in the broad public consciousness. It has been
suggested that exploring the Canadian indigenous experience through jurisdic-
tional, legislative, or political lenses may do little to achieve reconciliation in a
postcolonial Canada.
Many in the field of indigenous education have chosen to focus on more than just
jurisdictional issues for exploring indigenous peoples and issues. In many provincial
and community contexts, the content and pedagogies used to provide learning
opportunities for primary and secondary students have begun to employ aspects of
the Canadian indigenous experience that has direct relevance to language, literacy,
mathematics, and other curricular areas where emphasis is placed on a variety of the
unique manifestations of indigenous knowledge, heritage, consciousness, and tradi-
tion. Treaty relationships, legislative issues, and constitutional rights are and should
be a part of these educational discourses, but it is essential that they are not explored
in such a way that lends to the development of a perspective that is governed by
jurisdictional matters. School and district leaders are responsible for governing and
empowering educators to account for the emergent educational imperatives associ-
ated with contemporary indigenous education. Thus, they should be responsive to
the notion that indigenous content may be shared and celebrated and inform the
development of a balanced perspective on the Canadian indigenous experience that
is appreciative.

Conclusion/Summary

Indigenous peoples have had a longer history on Canadian land than has the
existence of the current nation of Canada. Settlers created a concept of Canadian
citizenship that does not take into account indigenous perspectives and knowledges.
Because of this, indigenous peoples have found it difficult to situate themselves
within the political climate of Canada. Through social movements and assertion of
rights, indigenous nations have sought self-determination and the right to construct
their own narrative of citizenship and nationhood that is distinguished from that of
Canada. Educational practitioners and policymakers must consider indigenous per-
spectives when considering human rights and indigenous experience. While educa-
tional institutions are beginning to incorporate indigenous content and attempt
effective transmission of indigenous perspectives, they must ensure that they do so
with a larger and more inclusive narrative of citizenship that considers indigenous
worldviews, thus creating a more comprehensive and balanced understanding of
Canada as it relates to experience.
208 F. Deer and J. Trickey

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The Making of Neoliberal Citizenship in the
United States: Inculcation, 15
Responsibilization, and Personhood in a
“No-Excuses” Charter School

Garth Stahl

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212
Charter Schools, Urban Spaces, and Underprivileged Populations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214
Inculcation Through Institutional Cultures and Pedagogic Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216
Reflections on Making Neoliberal Citizenship and the Responsibilized Subject . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222

Abstract
Schools remain important sites where identities are inculcated in accordance
with societal norms and values. With this in mind, this chapter reflects upon a
particular form of schooling in the United States – “no-excuses” charter
schools – where I seek to make connections between neoliberal governance,
educational practices, and the formation of subjectivities. Influenced heavily
by venture philanthropy, many charter schools – especially those in the upper
echelons of the market – promote the belief that education can and should
borrow heavily from corporate culture to ensure the best education for their
students. First, the chapter recounts some of the wider history of how
pro-charter school reform efforts have dramatically altered the provision and
style of education for underprivileged populations living in complex urban
spaces. Second, to further an understanding of how neoliberal forms of
personhood are privileged in charter schools, I draw on previous ethnographic
data to illustrate how institutional and pedagogic practices inculcate students
and staff to present a subjectivity aligned with the “entrepreneur of the self.”
Then, in bridging these two areas of scholarship, I ask what the implications
are for the making and (re)making of citizenship – neoliberal and otherwise.

G. Stahl (*)
University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 211
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_79
212 G. Stahl

Keywords
Neoliberal schooling · “No-excuses” charter schools · Citizenship · Personhood ·
Responsibilization

Introduction

In considering how subjectivities are formed and maintained, we should never

underestimate the potency of schooling and its capacity to structure our understand-
ings of self. Reay (2010) writes: “No other public institution is as crucial for the
development of the identities children and young people will carry into adulthood”
(277). In the United States, the bipartisan support and continued growth of charter
schools – closely aligned with fierce debate concerning their practices and values –
continue to both grab national headlines and further contentious debate on how to
ensure the best education for students of color living in poverty. We are witness to
wider neoliberal forms of governance in education internationally (Ball 2009;
Wilkins 2016) as well as exogenous privatization where public schools are opened
to private individuals and corporate companies. Giroux (2001) writes of capitalist
corporate culture as reconstituting our notions of democracy, childhood, and school-
ing. This phenomenon compels us – as educational researchers – to question how
policies determine who is in power, where the prerogatives may lie, and how risk is
constructed. Governance here is the embedded strategies and tactics within and
across institutions for conducting conduct. Schools are sites where techniques of
governance, such as responsibilization, have been used to mold “responsible
citizens.”
Neoliberalism, an amalgamation of economic and social policies which promote
the primacy of the market, is fragmented where different styles and sequences of
neoliberal power exist (Chester 2012; Phillips 2004; Ong 2006). However, while a
fragmented picture, the potency of neoliberalism should not be underestimated. In
the field of education, the effects of neoliberal governance have promoted the belief
that education is infused with human capital and an integral part of the formation of
the workforce (Connell 2013, p. 104). Within this approach, the humanistic, devel-
opmental, and personalized affective elements of teaching and learning are jettisoned
(Giroux 2001). Not receiving an adequate education carries with it not only signif-
icant risks but also brings forth notions of shame. The prevalence of such a form of
thinking has significant implications for how we conceive of ourselves and how we
perform subjectivities in relation to such notions of risk and self-worth. Rose (1996)
writes “. . .subjectivity is now fragmented, multiple, contradictory, and the human
condition entails each of us trying to make a life for ourselves under the constant
gaze of our own suspicious reflexivity, tormented by uncertainty and doubt” (p. 9).
In considering neoliberalism as a pervasive force, Wendy Brown writes of
rampant deregulation where state provisions and protections become endangered
and where there is the “increasing dominance of finance capital over productive
capital in the dynamics of the economy and everyday life” (p. 28). Certainly, the
15 The Making of Neoliberal Citizenship in the United States: Inculcation,. . . 213

ideologies associated with neoliberalism have become “the ruling ideas of the time”
(Harvey 2005, p. 36), and such ideologies do work to exacerbate both inequality and
guide our understandings of those who may fail to “measure up” as citizens. I draw
on the work of Elliott (2013) who defines neoliberal personhood as “possession of
individual interests and [the] ability to rank and decide between them” (p. 84) which
works under the assumption that, as citizens, we all have equal choices, thus ignoring
the gross inequalities we all operate within. Thus, the neoliberal prerogative frames
citizenship as “the duty of the individual to be sufficiently flexible to maximize the
opportunities available to her/him, and any failure resides in the individual rather
than in the socio-economic structures” (Francis 2006, p. 191). Therefore, in terms of
citizenship, neoliberalism diminishes certain forms of relationships and ways of
understanding relationships, aspirations, etc.
The notion of neoliberal citizenship (Hindess 2002), by its very nature, is focused
on individual advancement and subverts the idea of democratic citizenship which
primarily concerns itself with the common good. Woolford and Nelund (2013)
contend that “individualized responsibility have become the currency” for vulnera-
ble populations, integral to ensuring they are able to access services from the state
(p. 307). Reflecting on what responsibilization may mean for notions of selfhood
and subjectivities, it is worth acknowledging how neoliberal citizenship is easily
conflated with active citizenship where Nóvoa (2010) writes: “Active citizenship,
entrepreneurial culture and lifelong learning are part of a process of reconfiguring the
self” (p. 267). This reconfiguration is where notions of “rights” and “responsibili-
ties” become muddled and where paradoxes manifest especially for underprivileged
populations. However, as Wilkins (▶ Chap. 10, “Neoliberalism, Citizenship, and
Education: A Policy Discourse Analysis”) notes neoliberal citizenship is “a muddy
concept” (p. 2) where the notion of “neoliberal,” “citizenship,” and “education”
remains contested and problematic terms (p. 3).
Recent scholarship has explored the relationship between neoliberalism, school-
ing, race, and underprivileged populations (Lipman 2005; Buras 2011; Kretchmar
et al. 2014). Drawing on Molnar, Stuart Wells et al. (2002) focus on how market-
based reforms in education (e.g., for-profit school management companies, charter
schools) are built on the “illusion that our society can be held together solely by the
self-centered pursuit of our individual purposes as opposed to common, democratic
purposes” (p. 340). While discussions remain divisive, charter schools now remain a
permanent part of the education landscape in the United States, an illustrative
example of neoliberal governance exerting tremendous power and influence over
both the provision of education and educational practices. In her work on the
enactment of educational reform, Kretchmar (2014) asserts, “the revolution will be
privatized” (p. 632). In this reflective piece, I seek to both synthesize and pro-
blematize understandings of how “society-state relations and claims, and enactments
of citizenship” (Robertson 2011, p. 282) manifest in one charter school existing at a
moment in time. I am interested in the relationship between philanthropic investment
and “corporatized schooling” (Saltman 2001) and what this may mean for the
schooling practices for disadvantaged populations. Drawing upon an analytical
framework which considers both my own personal experience and my wider interest
214 G. Stahl

in how societal inequalities play out in schooling, I seek to make connections to how
charter schools contribute to the formation of subjectivities and notions of citizen-
ship, what Wendy Brown calls “habits of citizenship” (2015, p. 17). First, the chapter
briefly recounts some of the ways in which the pro-charter school reform efforts
(e.g., Democrats for Education Reform, Education Equity Project, Teach for Amer-
ica, etc.) have dramatically altered the provision and style of education for under-
privileged populations living in complex urban spaces. Second, to further an
understanding of how neoliberal forms of personhood are privileged in charter
schools, I draw on previous ethnographic data (Stahl 2017; 2019a, b; 2020) to
illustrate how institutional and pedagogic practices inculcate students and staff to
present a subjectivity aligned with the “entrepreneur of the self.” Then, in bridging
these two areas of scholarship, I address how schools are “crucial sites of identity
work and identity making” (Reay 2010, p. 278) and what the implications are for the
making of citizenship.

Charter Schools, Urban Spaces, and Underprivileged Populations

Motivated by teacher activism, charter schools in the 1990s were originally grass-
roots founded, anti-bureaucratic, and designed to be led by empowered teachers.
From the outset, charters were beholden to the principle of providing “more oppor-
tunity for innovative practices that, advocates argued, were stifled by the bureau-
cracy of district-run public education and onerous public regulations” (Bulkley
2012, p. 60). However, this original intent was quickly subverted; progressive
intentions quickly withered as “corporate elites and politicians from both major
US parties have taken them up as an opportunity to merge public education with
market-based assumptions” (Kretchmar et al. 2014, p. 744). As a result of heavy
investment by venture philanthropy (Robin Hood Foundation, Eli and Edythe Broad
Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation), discourses surrounding charter
schools are often deeply tied to promoting the belief that education can and should
borrow heavily from the “best practices” of corporate culture (Kretchmar 2014; Stahl
2017, 2019b) to ensure the best for students. Furthermore, through adopting this
model of schooling, underprivileged populations would experience pedagogical
practices which will allow them to become the “deserving poor” (Woolford and
Nelund 2013), disciplined for what the market has to offer.
For the most part, charter schools in the United States operate under the policy
remit that their continued existence is determined by student performance on high-
stakes state testing. While it may vary state to state and district to district, failure to
achieve the necessary test scores results in revoking the charter and thus immediate
school closure. Given their staunch nonunion stance, standard practices in charter
schools include a high level of attention to teacher effectiveness (Kretchmar et al.
2014; Malloy and Wohlstetter 2003), firing underperforming teachers (Stahl 2019b),
intense accountability and surveillance (Golann 2015), and the adoption of peda-
gogical practices focused on corporeality (Stahl 2019a). This has led charter schools
to be labeled as militaristic “skill and drill” environments where failure is not
15 The Making of Neoliberal Citizenship in the United States: Inculcation,. . . 215

tolerated and the expectation to perform consistently at a high level is paramount. In

terms of neoliberal citizenship, which foregrounds individual responsibility, such
practices influence the “reconfiguring the self” (Nóvoa 2010, p. 267). In defense of
such unconventional practices, pro-charter school political action committees – such
as Democrats for Education Reform and the Education Equity Project – contend
their model, and approach to schooling ensures that students can achieve regardless
of their circumstances. This, of course, dismisses both the robust resourcing many
charter schools receive (in contrast to their public counterparts) as well as the variety
of ways in which charter schools find ways to weed out students who may not be fit
for the model. Furthermore, the focus is on getting students into elite colleges where
many appear to flounder (KIPP Foundation 2011).
Educational research has documented the deep and sustained inequities that have
characterized the historic struggle for quality education in poor communities of color
(Anyon 2014; Noguera 2003; Buras 2014; Fabricant and Fine 2012). Scholars have
called attention to how investment is withdrawn from low-income communities –
through neoliberal governance – and how this disinvestment has led to so-called
crises in public education, which have, in turn, fueled a movement toward privati-
zation (Lipman 2008; Ravitch 2013). This is what Saltman (2007) calls “backdoor”
or “smash-and-grab” privatization (p. 134), where notions of “[c]risis and emer-
gency benefit privatization advocates who can seize upon a situation with
pre-formulated plans to commodify this public service” (p. 142). In considering
how ideologies work to exacerbate inequality, Swalwell and Apple (2011, p. 373)
note “the web woven between charter schools, venture capitalists, and neoconser-
vative think tanks forms an increasingly powerful, interconnected force intent on
influencing votes on policies supporting the expansion of charter schools and even
running candidates for office.” As public education endures despite these forces at
play, there exist important questions regarding the structural disinvestment in
low-income communities, resourcing, and policy prerogatives which foster private
interests.
Before considering my own experience at a charter school, I first set the context
by calling attention to two brief examples of education reform from Michigan and
New Orleans. In the 1990s Michigan’s state board of education pushed market-
oriented proposals which made the state conducive to the development of a wide
range of charter schools. This was all done under the remit that charter schools would
foster innovation, specifically in reference to increased competition and parental
choice. Drawing on empirical research from Michigan, Lubienski (2001) illustrates
how “the public” – as conceived among neoliberal reformers and advocates of
charter schools – no longer refers to the broader community of taxpayers. Rather,
given the legislative practices in Michigan, Lubienski (2001) contends the public is
represented as only those immediately owning or consuming a good or service where
“private ownership for the ‘consumer’ and ‘producer’ is the key to implementing
this vision of a redefined public education” (p. 642). This shift in consumer thinking
and what is meant by “public” has led to critiques not only in terms of how public
education has been coopted by private interests – specifically in reference to a
growing for-profit sector (Hill and Welsch 2009) – but also how the student
216 G. Stahl

composition of charter schools tends to intensify the disadvantaged students in urban

schools (Ni 2012). In thinking of this in terms of neoliberal governmentality and
neoliberal personhood, as citizens are cast as consumers aligned with a system of
“incentives and disincentives,” they are required to be “players in its game” selecting
“between options with perceptibly different and meaningful consequences” – all
under the guise of free choice (Elliott 2013, p. 87). In short, as citizens we are
expected to choose well when many of us may have limited choices to make.
In the time immediately following Hurricane Katrina, schools in New Orleans,
specifically schools in the Lower Ninth Ward, were dramatically restructured by
pro-charter advocates who were backed by venture philanthropists. Buras (2010,
2014) documents how the city was transformed into a charter school market of
competing networks where teachers and local community members had very little
say as they were witness to how these “reforms” exacerbated racial and economic
injustice. Strategies were put in place to disempower unions, and veteran teachers
were all fired in what could be described as a corporate takeover. Essential to Buras’
argument is how “policy actors at the federal, state, and local levels have contributed
to a process of privatization and an inequitable racial-spatial redistribution of
resources while acting under the banner of ‘conscious capitalism’” which has little
to do with improving academic attainment for children of color (Buras 2011, p. 296).
Similar to Michigan, this was all done under the neoliberal belief that scaling back
regulation and dismantling influential teacher unions would foster “innovation” and
expand opportunities. Highlighting the relationship between what is effectively the
privatizing of public goods, Buras’ research contrasts the “culture of the education
market” with the “culture of the community” where citizens are disempowered
through neoliberal, corporate interests. Furthermore, integral to the dramatic changes
in New Orleans was how charter schools were funded by and heavily staffed by
Teach for America (TFA) alumni and their affiliates (Kretchmar et al. 2014). As
Lefebvre and Thomas (2017) astutely note, TFA has a mission around education and
social justice, but such a vision exists within a neoliberal framing which heavily
echoes the interests of pro-charter school reform efforts. Such a framing has signif-
icant implications not only for our understandings of social justice but also for how
we personhood is realized.

Inculcation Through Institutional Cultures and Pedagogic

Practices

According to Stuart Wells, Slayton, and Scott (2002, p. 346), like all forms of
schooling, charter schools cannot be conceived of as “isolated institutions removed
from the political, economic, and social forces that surround them” but rather need to
be explored within the constraints of their local communities. With this in mind,
I seek to further an understanding of how neoliberal forms of personhood are
privileged within one “no-excuses” charter school drawing on previous ethnographic
data (Stahl 2017; 2019a, b; 2020). While the study of charter schools at the macro-
level remains robust, there is little study of daily life and common practices within
15 The Making of Neoliberal Citizenship in the United States: Inculcation,. . . 217

these institutions. I explore how institutional and pedagogic practices require the
students and staff to present a subjectivity aligned with the “entrepreneur of the self.”
Within the world of charter schools – where venture philanthropy and hedge-fund
investors donate billions of dollars annually in promoting deregulatory educational
reforms – many charter schools become products of a corporate work environment.
Or, as Scott (2009) notes, many individuals working within charter schools “often
believe that educational reform could greatly benefit from the strategies and princi-
ples that contributed their financial successes in the private sector” (p. 107). Within
the institution, tremendous emphasis is placed on high-stakes competition, audits,
accountability, and weeding out those who transgress the mission. The charter
school I worked in was nearly entirely staffed by either TFA affiliates and alumni
or those who previously worked in the corporate sector. Kretchmar (2014, p. 632)
calls attention to TFA’s idea of “relentless pursuit” around the mission of what they
believe to be an equity of opportunity around education. This section considers the
“pursuit” as lived reality while considering the implications for neoliberal forms of
personhood and, in turn, neoliberal citizenship.
Acknowledging that charter schools range widely in terms of philosophy, com-
position, and quality, I draw on my experience at one school site within a wider
“high-performing” charter school management organization (CMO) renowned for
its consistency in regard to students of color living in extreme poverty consistently
reached the top 1% on state exams. Closely aligned with venture philanthropy, the
board that oversaw the CMO was composed of prominent hedge-fund brokers. The
student body was 90% African American and 10% Latino. The days are long and
grueling with the doors opening at 7:15 am, and students were dismissed at 5:25 pm.
The curriculum is intensive (“skill and drill”) and ignores the sociohistorical context
and cultural backgrounds of the students. The pedagogy is authoritarian and trans-
missive considering theories of developmental intelligence such as Vygotsky or
Piaget as examples of the bigotry or low expectations. Existing within a complex
urban space, the school was located in a part of the city where there was generational
unemployment, extensive crime, and inadequate forms of schooling. In schooling,
the self is increasingly sublimated through neo-liberal agendas (Davies and Bansel
2007; Connell 2013), and I have previously discussed the ethical tensions of an
educator enacting this specific model of schooling (Stahl 2019a, b; 2020). As a
leader in a CMO, my primary role was to study the practices of the institution in
order to improve the organizational culture, the customs, habits, and rituals/tradi-
tions. On a daily basis, working as both agent and observer, I had full remit to
transverse the school site to foster and maintain a model of schooling while guarding
against any infringements.
In terms of my ethnographic account of working in a charter school, I make
comparisons to American corporate profit-driven environments. The logic underpin-
ning the daily schooling practices was aligned with the notion that student academic
attainment is viewed as profit, and any potential threat to the accrual of capital must
be removed in order to ensure growth and dominance. Failure to accrue profit (e.g.,
test scores) could entail an immediate shutdown, and, as a result, nothing in a “no-
excuses” charter school is left to chance. Such practices become a powerful
218 G. Stahl

mediating force in the identity construction of both staff and students with implica-
tions for how they come to see themselves as citizens within the wider polity. Here, I
draw on Brown’s (2015) provocation regarding how citizenship is “remade” in
response to the neoliberal free market – where “neoliberal rationality remakes the
human being as human capital” (p. 34). As the humanistic and affective elements are
squeezed out, education becomes centered around self-advancement contributing to
how we conceive of ourselves and how we perform subjectivities in relation to such
notions of risk and self-worth. Through focusing on school cultures and pedagogic
practices and what this means for the technologies of citizenship (Cruickshank 1993;
Dean 1999), I consider how “Techniques of relating to oneself as a subject of unique
capacities worth of respect run up against practices of relating to oneself as a target of
discipline, duty, and docility (Rose 1996, p. 35). In exploring these notions of the
disciplined “subject” and “subjectivity,” I draw on Bourdieu’s conception of habitus
which allows for a more in-depth analysis concerning the technologies
responsibilization (as extending the reach of governance) and the making of neolib-
eral personhood.
Habitus, as a mix of the conscious, subconscious, and the corporeal, is a social-
ized body “which has incorporated the immanent structures of a world or of a
particular sector of that world – a field – which structures the perception of that
world as well as action in that world” (Bourdieu 1998, p. 81). For Bourdieu (1997/
2000) the precise function of habitus is to restore to the agent “a generating,
unifying, constructing, classifying power, while recalling that this capacity to
construct social reality, itself socially constructed, is not that of a transcendental
subject but of a socialized body, investing in its practice socially constructed
organizing principles that are acquired in the course of a situated and dated experi-
ence” (p. 136–137). Drawing on two examples to illustrate how standard practices
contribute to the structuring of the habitus and thus neoliberal personhood, I seek to
foreground schooling as a form of inculcation where students and staff were required
to present subjectivities aligned with the “entrepreneur of the self.” What we knew as
the relational and affective elements of education become recast according to the
neoliberal demands of selfhood, while mere anecdotes, for example, work to illus-
trate how policies, as a mode of subjectification, can “trickle down” – structuring
“school cultures,” subjectivities, relations, and corporeality (Ball et al. 2011, p. 620).
They highlight both modes of subjectivation (principles and logics drawn upon) and
technologies of self (how people work on themselves, what methods they adopt)
(Spohrer et al. 2018, p. 332). Charter schools often spend considerable time and
resources on developing their model of schooling designed to have students buy into
a “pull ‘em up by their bootstraps’ meritocratic discourse where personal responsi-
bility is aligned with notions of ‘owning one’s failure.”
First, I consider how middle-class aspirations – and the privileging of a certain
conception of self – are worked upon within the institution. Most schools are casual
about the ways in which they foster student aspirations wherein “no-excuses” charter
schools structuring of aspiration is both central to the mission and infused with the
pedagogy. Many challenge no-excuses practices as a form of institutional racism that
undermines the well-being and pyschosocial health of children (Renzulli and Evans
15 The Making of Neoliberal Citizenship in the United States: Inculcation,. . . 219

2005). As evidence of standard practice, within the institution I worked in, there was
a significant emphasis on décor where learning is cast according to the idea of
“empowerment through education” and “education as a ticket to success.” All
educators were required to display pennants and their degrees from their mainly
elite alma maters (e.g., Yale University, Princeton University, etc.). The physical
manifestation of a culture of aspiration contributes to what Grodsky and Riegle-
Crumb (2010, p. 14) term a “college-going habitus” (p. 40). As fiercely goal-driven
environments, where the notion of TFA’s “relentless pursuit” pervades (Kretchmar
2014, p. 632), staff encourage students from a very early age to “choose” their
college and make it their goal and “let nothing stand in their way.” There is little
emphasis on the intellectual foundations of knowledge as well as the fulfilling nature
of learning. This goal is then reinforced through various routines where students
are presented with the opportunity to verbalize their intended goal. These practices
stress the importance of getting students to think about college early and often where
students come to “own their future” or aspirational trajectory (Stahl 2017). In terms
of social mobility, the aspiration to educational success promises a remedy to
poverty, simplifying complexity (Spohrer et al. 2018). A certain form of personhood
is privileged through this process where students came to embody an identity that is
both “entrepreneurial” and market ready. After all, the notion of neoliberal citizen-
ship (Hindess 2002) is one focused on individual advancement. Furthermore, the
shaping of aspiration is reinforced through visits from college representatives, and
thus students, who spend a significant part of their waking moments within the
institution, come to see this as the only acceptable form of personhood as their
habitus is inculcated toward a middle-class notions of success.
Second, I consider the corporeality of the body drawing on Watkins and Noble’s
(2013) work on “scholarly habitus” in which academic success “depends on partic-
ular embodied capacities which are evidenced of dispositions towards learning
which, in turn, affect cognitive ability” (p. 7). Scholarly habitus is an amalgamation
of scholarly labor, composed of and influenced by parental engagement, aspirations,
stereotypes, homework habits, spatial and corporeal congruence, schemas of per-
ception, and student attitudes to teaching and learning. Watkins and Noble (2013)
write of the scholarly habitus as “embodied dispositions and sociocultural back-
ground because it allows us to address issues of self-regulation and the possession of
educational capital” (p. 8). As the high-stakes policy remit of a charter school
requires a high level of success on exams, there is a substantial amount of attention
to cultivating the body to endure spells of prolonged concentration (Stahl 2019a).
There are echoes here to Giroux’s (2001) work on capitalism and childhood where
he asserts bodies, desires, and identities are all subject to the capitalist logic. At the
charter school where I worked, attention to the corporeal involved a continuous
attention to detail including how students walked (pace, tilt of the head) in the
hallway to how they held their pens and pencils (Stahl 2019a). Staff were required to
ensure that all students answered questions using a confident voice under the
assumption it would build confidence and ownership necessary to be successful in
a competitive market. Failure to achieve a certain level of corporeality resulted
in reprimand and punishment (Stahl 2017) – reinforcing issues of risk, value,
220 G. Stahl

self-worth, and shame. My experience highlights how it was the mission of the
charter school to actively form durable thoughts and actions where – in thinking of
terms of citizenship – developing the capacities around being adept test-takers was
paramount, thus reflecting the embedding of neoliberal ideology (“education-for-
self-advancement”), an integral part of competing in the workforce (Connell 2013,
p. 104).

Reflections on Making Neoliberal Citizenship

and the Responsibilized Subject

Brown (2015) contends “As neoliberalism wages war on public goods and the very
idea of a public, including citizenship beyond membership, it dramatically thins
public life without killing politics. Struggles remain over power, hegemonic values,
resources and future trajectories” (39). This highlights an important dimension of
neoliberal personhood – its power to narrow certain conceptions of what is valued –
and thus valuable. Strategies of responsibilization, as a technology of neoliberal
governmentality, seek to transform and reconstruct what is possible. Bridging two
areas of scholarship – reflecting on the history of how pro-charter school reform
alongside my own ethnographic experience – I now consider two dimensions of
neoliberal citizenship in reference to education, specifically: the devaluing of stu-
dents diverse cultural background; the performance of a subjectivity aligned with the
“entrepreneurial self”; and its implications for the responsibilization of the poor.
These areas further our understanding of the implications for the making and (re)
making of citizenship but also highlight some of the uneasy tensions involved when
considering the neoliberal agenda and social justice.
Within the neoliberal readings of selfhood, intersectional identity categories (e.g.,
race, gender) are often ignored as all individuals are expected to be self-sufficient
and enterprising. Within the charter school, there were notable and purposeful
silences around the cultural background of their students as well as the socioeco-
nomic context the students existed in. In conversations with the leadership team, it
was clear that part of the model of the charter school was to make certain that notions
of being “poor” and “black” or “brown” had no role in the school environment. Such
notions were seen as an infringement on the “relentless pursuit” (Kretchmar 2014,
p. 632) where everyone can and should succeed. Furthermore, the implication here is
that without validation from the school, the richness of certain cultures are margin-
alized. For minority youth who may live on the margins, drawing upon a framework
of culturally and linguistically relevant citizenship education is an essential aspect of
democratic citizenship, social cohesion, and communal collectivity (Jaffee 2016).
Placing the cultural and civic assets as central to pedagogic enactment frames
notions of “community” and “selfhood” in affective ways.
In studying the performance of a subjectivity and responsibilization aligned with
the “entrepreneurial self,” the article uses habitus. For Bourdieu, habitus, as the
“social embodied” is “‘at home’ in the field it inhabits, it perceives it immediately as
endowed with meaning and interest” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 128). The
15 The Making of Neoliberal Citizenship in the United States: Inculcation,. . . 221

students were often at school for long periods of time where they came to reflect the
meritocratic ideologies of neoliberalism structuring the school culture. Therefore,
the dispositions in their habitus became centered around becoming competitive in
terms of gaining academic qualifications in order to perform self-responsibility and
enhance their future employability, a tenet of neoliberal citizenship (Hindess 2002).
In her research on charter schools, Kerstetter (2016, p. 513) notes:

. . .studies have demonstrated that when students are able to learn skills that more closely
align with the evaluative standards of middle-class institutions, such as an ease in commu-
nicating with authority figures, they tend to receive more help from teachers (Calarco 2011),
more attention during doctor’s visits (Lareau 2003), and have an easier time transitioning to
elite postsecondary institutions. (Jack 2016; Torres 2009)

However, this is subject to critique as, for the most part, it would appear that while
the practices in charter schools may contribute to preparing citizens for competition
in the modern market, these practices cannot consistently compensate for the
limiting effects of poverty (KIPP Foundation 2011; Kerstetter 2016). Or, as Golann
(2015) puts it, “Behavioral norms might help students get through high school, but
the types of skills needed for success in higher levels of learning and work become
evident when students enter college” (p. 106).
Extending the possible frailty in preforming neoliberal personhood, I draw
attention to how subjectivity is a performance as recent research has also shown
how working-class poor, who are vulnerable, can “mobilize characteristics of neo-
liberal or responsible citizenship” to perform/embody what is referred to as “the
deserving poor” (Woolford and Nelund 2013, p. 294). Performances, by their very
nature, hone our attention to questions of authenticity. Within the charter school,
students performed an identity aligned with a privileged conception of neoliberal
personhood which held currency within the school walls. However, the capacity to
operationalize this outside the highly structured norms and routines of the institution
may have been problematic. Therefore, there may be limits to the level of inculcation
within the habitus. Or, as Woolford and Nelund (2013) note, we require a “fuller
account of performances of self and citizenship among the marginalized requires first
that we examine the broader constraints that structure these performances, which
give them their shape and purpose and which are, in turn, shaped and reshaped by
these very performances” (p. 296).

Conclusion

Within the onset of neoliberal governance, contemporary forms of schooling are

borrowing heavily from corporate logics which ignore the vast inequalities structur-
ing our everyday lives. In exploring neoliberal citizenship through a reflection on
pro-charter school reform and previous ethnographic data, I have sought to illustrate
some of the ways in which techniques of governance influence policies and person-
hood to inculcate individuals into presenting subjectivities aligned with the
222 G. Stahl

“entrepreneur of the self.” Schools are sites of responsibilization where notions of

responsible citizenship are molded in the interests of those in power. Reay (2010)
writes “School norms, practices and expectations provide key symbolic materials
that students draw on to make sense of their experiences and define themselves”
(277). Keeping in mind the political climate, the formation of subjectivities, and
development of neoliberal personhood, I conclude by making some conjectures
regarding neoliberal citizenship focusing specifically on the motivations of educa-
tors in the “no-excuses” charter school.
Proponents of the NE model argue that the no-excuses approach is not only
defensible but is the best way to counteract the “soft racism” of low expectations and
solve racial and class inequities in schools (Thernstrom and Thernstrom 2003).
Many people I worked with at the charter school recognized how the practices
were controversial but felt they would be beneficial in the long term. Integral to
the model of schooling was an inbuilt rationale where the standard practices were
rationalized according to the “hero narrative” of saving urban children from the
bigotry of low expectations, mismanaged schools, etc. What pervaded many con-
versations between leadership and staff is how not receiving a good education carries
significant risks (e.g., children only “get one shot at a good education”). For those
educators who have chosen to work in a “no-excuses” charter school, they are often
acting on their own perception of the “common good.” One reading of this is as an
example of “going with the flow” which could signify the erasure of contestation and
thus demonstrate the pervasiveness of neoliberal personhood. However, upon reflec-
tion, I believe their motivations highlight another dimension of neoliberal citizenship
that has received less attention. In considering the culture of neoliberal performativity
in the “no-excuses” charter school, the actions of the staff I worked with was a
reflection of how they perceive risk and rewards, which structured not only their
“habits of citizenship” (Brown 2015, p. 17) but also how they see the habits of others.
Neoliberal citizenship, in this instance, is more about fostering “individualized respon-
sibility” for vulnerable populations (Woolford and Nelund 2013, p. 307), rather than
simply individual advancement. This muddies the water even more when we consider
how the education reform movement’s mission reframes social justice in a neoliberal
paradigm (Lefebvre and Thomas 2017). Therefore, the actions we associate with
inculcating – or disciplining – vulnerable populations so they can perform effectively
in a marketized and competitive world is a significant aspect of how the self is
reconfigured and how neoliberal citizenship is made.

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Citizenship, Education, and Political Crisis
in Spain and Catalonia: Limits and 16
Possibilities for the Exercise of Critical
Citizenship at School

Jordi Feu-Gelis, Xavier Casademont-Falguera, and

Òscar Prieto-Flores

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228
The Concept of Citizenship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228
Catalonia Within the Framework of the Spanish State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229
The Process of Political Recentralization in Catalonia and Its Consequences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230
Education and Language as a Pretext . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232
The Future of Catalonia: Civic and Participatory Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234
Arguments Accusing Families and Catalan Schools of Indoctrination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235
The Current Debate: The Relationship Between Education, Citizenship, and Politics . . . . . . . . 237
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241

Abstract
The process of the independence of Catalonia has generated great interest on the
part of international analysts as well as among a part of the citizenry while also
producing disputes and controversy that have grown with the passage of time.
This controversy lies, at first glance, in the opposition of interests defended by
independentist sectors (who want the independence of Catalonia) and unionists
(defenders of the unity of Spain). However, deeper analysis reveals another
element of discord: the latent concept of citizenship.
This chapter deals with six aspects: first, it briefly addresses the concept of
citizenship used in the chapter; second, it situates Catalonia within the framework
of Spain; third, it analyzes the process of political recentralization and its conse-
quences (citizen mobilization, referendum, and use of police violence by the

English translation by Michael Weiss

J. Feu-Gelis (*) · X. Casademont-Falguera · Ò. Prieto-Flores
University of Girona, Girona, Spain
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 227
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_26
228 J. Feu-Gelis et al.

State); and fourth, it addresses the issue of education and language as a weapon of
political combat. This is followed by a section explaining the process of partic-
ipation in favor of the right to decide and a presentation of the arguments used to
counter the independence movement. The chapter concludes with a section
devoted to analyzing the relationship between education, citizenship, and politics
and a proposal to encourage political and citizen debate that can be framed
beyond the Catalan-Spanish context.

Keywords
Citizenship · Politics · Education · Spain · Catalonia · Democracy

Introduction

The ongoing independence process in Catalonia has generated a great deal of interest
among various international analysts. The linguistic and educational reality in
Catalonia, which is not without controversy and polemic, has been the subject of
particularly noteworthy debate, as the Spanish government and unionist political
parties (defenders of the unity of Spain) supported by the media have repeatedly
accused Catalan schools and families of the political indoctrination of children. The
main arguments employed include claims that the Spanish language is prohibited in
Catalan schools; that families have taken their children to demonstrations to demand
the referendum [on Catalan independence] held on October 1 2017; that inappropri-
ate textbooks are used in schools and politics is being discussed in a biased and
tendentious way; and that once the referendum was held, there were teachers who
openly talked about what had happened with their students. In short, it has been said
that both families and Catalan schools indoctrinate, though those making this charge
do not ever specify the precise meaning of this term.
This chapter situates the process of independence of Catalonia, addressing the
political and institutional crisis that has occurred from 2000 onward and which is
related to the concept of citizenship generated in this context. By extension, the
chapter examines debates concerning the teaching and learning of democracy,
participation, and politics in Catalan schools. The chapter concludes with a reflection
on how citizenship can be worked on both in the family and in school.

The Concept of Citizenship

“Citizenship” is one of the most used concepts in political science and political
philosophy. It is routine to hear the concept in common parlance, whether by
political representatives, the media, or in the wider population. However, as with
many other concepts in the social sciences, there is a risk of using the concept in
contradictory ways, as a “conceptual stretching” (Sartori 1970), due to citizenship’s
historical essence and polysemic nature. Thus, today, we find multiple
16 Citizenship, Education, and Political Crisis in Spain and Catalonia:. . . 229

interpretations of citizenship: global, cosmopolitan, urban, sexual, cultural, etc.

(Hampshire 2013).
For the purposes of this chapter, our concept of citizenship focuses primarily on
identity aspects and, to a lesser extent, on legal aspects. Following Connor (1989)
and Krauss (1996), in plurinational democratic states, it is just and appropriate for
different nationalities to be recognized as such and for them to cooperate or remain
united by choice and not by imposition. Plurinational states face the challenge of
articulating, harmoniously and through free consent, flexible political-administrative
structures that allow diversity of identity to be expressed satisfactorily. This
approach, from our point of view, leads us to consider it pertinent that different
nationalities, as sovereign political polities, have the right to exercise self-
determination, that is, the ability to freely decide their future through referendums
or other forms of democratic participation.
The translation of this concept of citizenship in the school encompasses three
basic questions: to visualize and positivize diversity in a broad way (social class,
sexual orientation, religion, cultural practice, geographical origin, cultural belong-
ing, etc.) (Levinson 2012); to be able to talk about everything, without exception,
with the only condition being not to disrespect anyone, especially minorities (Fox
and Messiou 2004); and to promote the institutionalized and spontaneous participa-
tion of the entire educational community, especially referring to students (Susinos
and Ceballos 2011).

Catalonia Within the Framework of the Spanish State

Catalonia is, for now, an autonomous community that, together with 18 other
autonomous communities, is part of the Kingdom of Spain. This system was
established by the Spanish Constitution of 1978, which is the first and only consti-
tution that the Spanish State has had following the death of the dictator Francisco
Franco who ruled Spain from 1939–1975. Throughout his dictatorship, Franco
implemented an annihilative policy regarding any manifestation of democratic
expression and civil liberties, including the attempted liquidation of the cultural
and linguistic diversity inherent in the country, especially in the territories with more
marked idiosyncrasies: Catalonia, Basque Country, and Galicia. With the so-called
Spanish political transition (1975–1978) and the advent of democracy, Catalonia, as
a historical community with its own language, history, laws, and institutions dating
from medieval times, recovered its political institutions: the Parliament and the
Generalitat de Catalunya [Government of Catalonia].
In contemporary times, Catalonia has consistently been, with more or less
intensity, a controversial subject of political debate to determine, essentially, its
degree of autonomy in the framework of the Spanish State (Fontana 2014). The
Constitution of 1978 establishes four types of competences: exclusive competences
of the State, exclusive competences of the autonomous communities (including
Catalonia), concurrent jurisdiction between State and autonomous community, and
shared competences. This question is “resolved” in a way that, now that we have a
230 J. Feu-Gelis et al.

certain historical perspective, has led to substantial confusion and dissatisfaction on

all sides, namely, through a distribution of powers between the Spanish State and the
Catalan government (hereinafter Generalitat) that in some respects can be consid-
ered confusing, unclear, and, above all, ineffective.
The ambiguity of the distribution of competences and the progressive emergence
of new aspects (such as tax increases on sugary drinks or banks) that could either be
attributed to the State, the Generalitat, or to both institutions, has entailed legal issues
that have had to be resolved by the Constitutional Court (a court accused by many
actors, including Juezas y Jueces para la Democracia [Judges for Democracy], of
being highly politicized as magistrates are proposed by the different political parties
according to their parliamentary quota in the Spanish Congress of Deputies). This
situation generates a high number of appeals of unconstitutionality and conflicts of
jurisdiction presented by both sides; 26 lodged by the Generalitat in the period from
2010 to 2013 and 8 by the Spanish government against the Catalan administration in
the same period. However, it is worth mentioning that on certain occasions – albeit
very few – a broad and flexible interpretation has been adopted, thus enabling higher
levels of self-government to be achieved and, consequently, greater autonomy.
Education is a confusing sphere of competence because there is no legal text that
clearly determines whether it is subject to concurrent or shared competence. Even so,
examination of Catalan autonomic law affirms that the Generalitat can develop its
own, although quite limited, educational policy (Prats 2015). This legislation gives
the Generalitat full (but not exclusive) powers that are specified in the “regulation
and administration of education in all its extension, levels and degrees, modalities
and specialties,” reserving to the central government the regulation of academic and
professional qualifications, the promulgation of the basic norms that guarantee
fulfilment of the obligations of public authorities toward education, and supervision
and control (the so-called High Inspectorate) of the entire education system.

The Process of Political Recentralization in Catalonia and Its

Consequences

Since 2000, and with greater visibility from 2010 to the present – a period in which
Spain has been governed by the Partido Popular (PP), a neoconservative political
formation advocating a traditional Spanish nationalism – Catalonia has suffered a
far-reaching process of recentralization, with the subsequent reduction of a range of
rights and powers that had already been integrated into the ordinary functioning of
the country (Puigpelat 2016).
A major turning point in the recognition of rights and the concept of self-
government of Catalonia took place in 2006 when the Government of the Generalitat
and the political parties of the Parliament of Catalonia modified the Statute (equiv-
alent to the constitution of Catalonia). In this year, Parliament passed a new
regulatory framework (the previous one was from 1979) by an overwhelming
majority (120 votes in favor and 15 against), which was substantially modified
(more than 50% of its articles) when it was sent to the Spanish Parliament. After
16 Citizenship, Education, and Political Crisis in Spain and Catalonia:. . . 231

tense negotiations, and reluctant acceptance of the suppression of concepts referring

to the Catalan nation, among other aspects, the Statute was approved in the Spanish
Parliament by a large majority. Subsequently, and as mandated by the Spanish
Constitution, the new Statute was submitted to a referendum among the Catalan
population, obtaining 74% of the votes in favor, 21% against, and 5% abstentions.
Even so, the PP collected signatures throughout Spain to bring the Statute to the
Constitutional Court, which, in 2010, invalidated certain key articles regarding
identity, reducing still further the legal and symbolic value of Catalan difference.
Throughout the duration of the process of the new Statute, there was a continued
weakening of the recognition of a plurinational State and the diversity of the
communities that coexist within it, as well as of the acceptance of the embodiment
of historical nationalities and plural forms of citizenship, at the same time that
political tension became increasingly evident (Castells 2017).
The progressive construction in Spain of a restrictive model of citizenship, when
not directly exclusive and discriminatory, has had unexpected effects to the point that
it has reached a kind of dead end that, from a strictly political point of view, brings
into question the logic and viability of the policy. The fact that little by little – but in a
persistent way – the concept of Spanish citizen has been built around a less plural
and more homogeneous national identity has also contributed to the fact that a
significant part of the Catalan population feels increasingly detached from Spain.
For example, data from the Centre d’Estudis d’Opinió in February 2018 shows that
40.8% of the population supports the independence of Catalonia.
On July 10, 2010, shortly after the Constitutional Court cut back the Statute of
Autonomy of Catalonia, a demonstration attended by one and a half million people
took place in Barcelona (the capital and largest city in Catalonia) under the slogan
“We are a nation, we decide.” This demonstration was supported by all the political
parties comprising the Parliament of Catalonia, except for Spanish nationalist parties
contrary to the aspirations for greater self-government in Catalonia (Partido Popular
of Catalonia and Ciudadanos). As of this moment, the institutional declarations
appealed to “the moral exclusion of the Spanish Constitution” and every September
11 (national day of Catalonia), there have been massive demonstrations, always
festive and peaceful, requesting the right to decide on, or directly calling for,
independence. On September 11, 2017, approximately one million people from all
over Catalonia filled the streets of Barcelona in one of the massive demonstrations
that have been held on the national day of Catalonia every year since 2011.
The articulation in Catalonia of an increasingly large independence movement
has been led by both civic and cultural associations of all kinds, most of which are
characterized by being politically plural (within the broad pro-independence ideo-
logical spectrum), intergenerational, and peaceful. On the other hand, the movement
has also been supported by those Catalan political parties that have always been
pro-independence, as well as others that until this time had only been autonomists
and that in some cases had even supported unionist parties to facilitate the formation
of the government in Madrid.
The discontent of an important part of the population of Catalonia during these
years (2000–2018) has not only come about because of the symbolic (although not
232 J. Feu-Gelis et al.

minor) issue, of the refusal of the Spanish government to grant legal recognition of a
singular national identity. Discontent also stems from an economic issue: from 2000
onward there has been a constant breach of investment commitments by the State. It
is not that the State has not invested sufficiently in Catalonia (although that too, in
the opinion of many citizens) but that part of the investments planned and approved
in the general State budgets in Parliament have not been implemented, thus ham-
pering the development of certain infrastructures and services, many of which have
affected and continue to affect the poorest classes. Furthermore, and as a demon-
stration of a clear exercise of lack of transparency, the State has repeatedly refused to
publish the fiscal balances that account for the real economic contributions of
Catalonia to the whole of the Spanish State.
The fact is that, since 2010 and amid this tense climate, a political confrontation
has grown exponentially in which the national element and the latent concept of
citizenship have played a central role. For some, the Spanish nation is singular and
indivisible, and they call for a recentralization process to be launched in which the
autonomous communities would have competences taken away, thus
disempowering them while strengthening the role of the State. In fact, in recent
years, the percentage of people in Spain who are in favor of a more centralized state
has increased from 25% to 36% (from 2015 to 2017) (Barómetro del Real Instituto
Elcano (BRIE), 39 Oleada, January 2018. Available at: http://www.
realinstitutoelcano.org). This opinion is reflected in declarations by people in exec-
utive positions in the Partido Popular such as those of the Minister of Justice Rafael
Catalá, who emphasized in November 2017 that, more than expanding competences,
it is necessary that the central government again assume control over essential
public policies (https://www.eldiario.es/politica/Gobierno-promover-regresion-auto
nomica-constitucional_0_706580002.html). On the other hand, in Catalonia, the
support for independence among the population has increased from 19% in January
2010 to 40% in October 2017 (Baròmetre d’opinió política del Centre d’Estudis
d’Opinió de la Generalitat de Catalunya. 3ª onada 2017. Available at: http://ceo.
gencat.cat/).

Education and Language as a Pretext

In this context of political-national tension, the Spanish government of the Partido

Popular, as well as a substantial part of the major statewide political parties and
diverse mass media, has used education and language to try to influence public
opinion. In the case of Catalonia, the complex linguistic reality of the country has
been used as a battlefield by the PP and, above all, by Ciudadanos, a party that came
into being in Catalonia and later extended throughout the rest of Spain with the aim
of governing the whole nation.
It is important to note that the linguistic issue in Catalonia, although it has always
been a sensitive subject and of concern, has not always been as controversial as it is
now. So much is this so that in 1983 all the political parties with representation in the
Catalan Parliament voted in favor of the law of linguistic normalization, a law that, if
16 Citizenship, Education, and Political Crisis in Spain and Catalonia:. . . 233

we take into account policy development as well as the tacit political agreement
between the Catalan and Spanish governments during certain periods, has allowed
language immersion in Catalan schools to this day. In practical terms, this means that
children are mainly taught in Catalan, with Spanish being progressively introduced
so that at the end of the primary education cycle all students are competent in both
official languages of Catalonia (Catalan and Spanish). This model differs from other
autonomous communities such as the Basque Country, for example, where until
relatively recently there were as many as four models of schooling based on how and
when the Basque and Spanish languages were introduced (Turell 2007). While the
Basque Country has tended to move away from using an immersion model, consid-
ering that it favored segregated school communities, Catalonia has maintained its
immersion policy, especially after verifying that, even though the country has
received an important contingent of foreign migrants, 12-year-old children are
competent in both Catalan and Spanish. Moreover, objective testing of students in
Catalonia has repeatedly shown that they are as (or more) competent in the Spanish
language than students from other monolingual communities, according to data from
the Ministry of Education on the results of university entrance exams in Spain in 2017
(https://www.mecd.gob.es/servicios-al-ciudadano-mecd/estadisticas/educacion/univer
sitaria/estadisticas/estadistica-de-las-pruebas-de-acceso-a-la-universidad0/Ano-2017.
html).
Nonetheless, the political struggle over the Catalan language in school and by
extension in the whole of society has become evident. In 2010, as we have already
commented, the Constitutional Court issued a sentence against the Statute of Auton-
omy and, in particular, against the fact that Catalan is the vehicular language in
Catalan schools. The Court ruled that in those cases in which Catalan is considered
normalized, schools must move toward having a similar percentage of classes in the
two official languages.
The Minister of Education of Spain, by virtue of the implementation of the
Organic Law for the Improvement of Educational Quality (LOMCE 2013),
established that families residing in Catalonia that requested to receive primary
education in Spanish would have to enroll in private schools and forced the Gov-
ernment of Catalonia to pay the costs of this schooling. This decision brought
concern because Catalan teachers, academics, families, and unions considered that
there was a partisan, instrumental, and political use of the language in the sense that
it slowed the normalization of Catalan (a pending normalization, among other
reasons, owing to the banning of this language during the periods in which Spain
has been subject to dictatorial regimes) and laid the foundation for a sociolinguistic
confrontation, nonexistent until then. Despite the fact that this decision was revoked
by the Constitutional Court in 2018, both the current Minister of Education and the
President of the Spanish State have publicly stated that in the 2018–2019 school
year, Catalan families, when preregistering their children for school, must choose if
they want to be schooled in Catalan or Spanish.
This dispute reveals, as we have said, different conceptions of citizenship within
the framework of an unequivocally plural Spanish State in which there are territories
with two official languages and with multiple and diverse identities. Everything
234 J. Feu-Gelis et al.

suggests that, while it may bring electoral benefits in Spanish national elections, the
aspiration to diminish, if not completely silence, projects that seek recognition of
individuality in territories such as Catalonia has little future. Moreover, seeking
political, linguistic, and social confrontation between two sectors of the same
territory is dangerous because of the increased tensions and social conflicts that
are generated (Suselbeck 2008).

The Future of Catalonia: Civic and Participatory Processes

The process of recentralization we referred to above, the curbing of linguistic

normalization that we have just described, the cuts in the Statute of Autonomy of
2006, the failure of the Spanish government to invest in Catalonia, the configuration
of an imaginary in a plurinational state that fails to recognize plurality, the impos-
sibility of establishing an egalitarian dialogue between Catalonia and Spain to see
how the two realities can fit together, the systematic and repeated invalidation of
laws of a social nature approved by the Generalitat, and other factors have increased
independence sentiment among part of the Catalan population. This sentiment, both
politically and socially, crystallized with the demand expressed in an outcry: “the
right to decide” the future of Catalonia.
The “right to decide” was a social movement that was generated in 2013 and was
specified in the National Pact for the Referendum at the end of 2016 on the grounds
that 80% of the Catalonian public was in agreement with holding a referendum on
the independence of Catalonia. This movement brings together diverse groups of
people, associations, platforms, and political parties: ranging from independentist
options to federalists and including unionists with strong democratic convictions.
Despite repeated requests from the Government of the Generalitat of Catalonia, the
Parliament, and Catalan civic entities, the Spanish government would not agree on
the development of an official referendum, in contrast to Britain and the granting of a
referendum on Scottish independence. Two consultation processes were carried out
in Catalonia: the 9-N Consultation (November 9, 2014) was responded to by
2,305,290 voters, of whom 1,861,753 opted for an independent Catalonia and
104,760 for Catalonia to remain within Spain. In the Referendum of 1-O (October
1, 2017) 43.3% of the census participated, with 2,044,038 (90.18%) voting in favor
of independence and 177,547 (7.83%) against it.
The two participatory processes were actively fought by the Spanish govern-
ment and ended up being judicialized, to the extent that a considerable number of
people are currently under investigation and many political leaders are either in
prison or in exile. Moreover, the repression by the police and State on 1-O has been
denounced by several international organizations, including Human Rights Watch,
as a disproportionate violation of human rights. From the moment the polling
stations opened, the Spanish police tried to prevent people from voting, and, failing
to do so, a government order unleashed indiscriminate and brutal police violence
against voters.
16 Citizenship, Education, and Political Crisis in Spain and Catalonia:. . . 235

Hundreds were left injured, some seriously. Catalonia’s Health Department estimated on
October 2 that 893 people had reported injuries to the authorities. Spain’s Ministry of the
Interior said on October 1 that 19 National Police and 14 Civil Guards had required urgent
medical assistance, and that an “innumerable number of others” were injured. Following the
referendum, Human Rights Watch documented excessive use of force against peaceful
demonstrators by Civil Guards or National Police at a primary school in Girona being
used as a polling station, and in the hillside villages of Aiguaviva (Girona province) and
Fonollosa (Barcelona province). Human Rights Watch received other allegations and pur-
ported evidence of police ill treatment, which it has not been able to verify or examine in
detail, along with instances of assaults on police officers by some demonstrators. (https://
www.hrw.org/news/2017/10/12/spain-police-used-excessive-force-catalonia)

In the days following the referendum, there were many schools that spoke about
the events of 1-O with their pupils. In some schools, the incidents were addressed
because when the children entered the school they saw the damage and destruction
(doors broken down, shattered glass, closets with their contents ripped apart, school
material on the floor, etc.). In other cases it was talked about because the children
asked to do so, if only to be able to express their anxiety or fear about what they had
witnessed in person or saw replayed in the media or Internet on the day of the
referendum. There were also schools that spoke about what had happened by
decision of the teachers, simply because they are teachers who tend to talk about
what happens in society, in their town, etc. or because, like so many other citizens,
they felt outraged, harassed, humiliated, or beaten. For whatever reason, educators in
many schools deemed it an appropriate time to talk about rights versus responsibil-
ities, of violence versus peace, of democracy versus tyranny, and of citizenship and
rule of law.

Arguments Accusing Families and Catalan Schools

of Indoctrination

As noted in the introduction to this article, that several schools discussed what had
happened on October 1 led the Spanish government to react by constructing a meta-
narrative based on the “indoctrination” of children by families and the school. The
main arguments of this narrative revolved around four ideas that, in summary,
amounted to the following: parents bring their underage children to
pro-independence demonstrations and events, and this is unacceptable; many par-
ents took their children to vote in a referendum declared illegal by the Spanish State,
thus contributing to the ideologization of defenseless minors; separatism is advo-
cated in Catalan schools, thus propagating a clearly indoctrinating and anti-
Spanish ideology; and to hammer the point home, in Catalan schools it is prohibited
to speak Spanish.
The seriousness of the case is that these arguments, including those that are false,
were constructed by commentators, mass media, and members of the government
itself with the idea of creating a seamless monolithic public opinion that would
legitimize the Spanish government. Next, we proceed to a detailed analysis of the
236 J. Feu-Gelis et al.

arguments that we have just described with a double objective: to explain whether
they are true or false and, independent of that, the latent concept of citizenship they
lead us to.

1. Parents bring their underage children to pro-independence demonstrations and

events, and this is unacceptable. It is true that all the demonstrations related to the
independence process have been attended by families with children of all ages. In
fact, they have been demonstrations made up of a marked plurality of people,
from both the political-ideological point of view (as already mentioned earlier)
and the generational: children, adolescents, young people, adults, and large
numbers of seniors have participated. It is important to emphasize that all these
demonstrations have been overwhelmingly peaceful. In this regard, the authors of
this article consider that an act like the one explained here is closely related to the
concept of educating in politics and in and for democracy.
2. Parents took their children to vote in a referendum declared illegal by the Spanish
State, thus contributing to the ideologization of minors. It is true that on the day of
the referendum there were families who came to vote with their children, and it is
likely that this fact would give rise to speak about why a referendum was being
held, what its meaning was, the voting orientation of their parents and, who
knows if also, other family members, etc. This act was criticized by some. The
political culture of citizenship, especially that of children, is acquired in various
spaces and areas of socialization, among which the family is of great importance.
However, here we can see how some political parties strove to emphasize the
conflict and tensions surrounding the socialization of children by questioning
whether the family or the State is the “right” agent of socialization. Under our
approach, these tensions should not be present in the public sphere if the
conceptualization of citizenship were to be addressed from the republican
model mentioned in the beginning of this chapter.
3. Separatism is advocated in Catalan schools, thus propagating a clearly indoc-
trinating and anti-Spanish ideology. There exists little evidence to suggest that
this claim is actually true. Considering how primary schools and secondary
schools teach history, political institutions, democracy, and citizenship, it is not
possible for the Catalan school to indoctrinate. Neither the school curriculum, nor
the educational competencies, nor the textbooks allow it. The Catalan school, if it
infuses a national sentiment, does nothing more than schools in the rest of Spain
or in democratic Europe. Here we would add an observation, one which is by no
means unimportant: while schools in Catalonia teach about the history of both
Spain and Catalonia and Spanish and Catalan political institutions, and children
end up speaking and writing both languages equally, the same does not occur
elsewhere in Spain.
4. In Catalan schools it is prohibited to speak Spanish. While this claim has been
constantly repeated and disseminated by some politicians, it is not the case that
speaking Spanish is prohibited; Spanish has never been banned in schools in
Catalonia because, among other things, politicians, intellectuals, academics, and
ordinary citizens who lived through the Franco dictatorship know all too well the
16 Citizenship, Education, and Political Crisis in Spain and Catalonia:. . . 237

consequences of prohibition of a language. The Spanish Constitution, the Statute

of Autonomy of Catalonia, the Law of Linguistic Normalization, and common
sense have established that Catalan and Spanish, both, are official languages of
Catalonia, and, as such, every citizen has the right and the duty to know them.

As previously mentioned, the regulatory framework and the political consensus

around it (when it has existed, of course) has meant that in Catalan schools children
are taught in Catalan with Spanish being progressively introduced, so that at the end
of primary school students are equally familiar with both languages. Even so, there
are primary and secondary schools, especially in the periphery of Barcelona (areas of
significant Spanish immigration during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s of the last
century) where there has not been any linguistic immersion in Catalan and schooling
has been conducted exclusively in Spanish. Yet, despite this, nothing has happened,
except the fact that these students have not learned Catalan. This situation, which
could be considered anomalous and contrary to the spirit of normalization of the
Catalan language, has not been denounced by the Catalan educational authorities nor
by educational inspectors, labor unions, or pro-independence political parties. We
might also add that beyond the schools and secondary schools where linguistic
normalization has not been implemented, there are many educational centers
where Spanish is spoken primarily or solely on the playground, being a reflection
of the sociolinguistic situation of the neighborhoods where these centers are located.
Moreover, as it cannot be otherwise, it is a question that has been respected always
and everywhere. Consequently, Spanish has neither been prosecuted nor persecuted
in Catalonia.

The Current Debate: The Relationship Between Education,

Citizenship, and Politics

In line with our analysis so far in this chapter, and in the fundamental spirit of this
publication, the purpose of this section is to frame the relationship between educa-
tion, citizenship, democracy, and politics, focusing on both the role of the family and
the school.
In a mature democracy, it is desirable for the family to be involved in the civic and
citizenship education of their children (Prieto-Flores et al. 2018). To completely
delegate political education to other socializing agents is not, from a holistic and
integrative educational perspective, highly recommendable. How can a family
educate their children to be citizens in the twenty-first century? Obviously, there is
no single answer, especially when this education will depend largely on the political
and ideological perspective of the family and the communities in which they live.
Even so, if we look for fundamental and cross context guidelines that are compatible
with the ideological diversity described above, perhaps we can consider the follow-
ing recommendations appropriate: educate children to have a thorough respect for
the opinions expressed within and outside the family unit; educate in the knowledge
and practice of the rights and duties that, in accordance with children’s age, can be
238 J. Feu-Gelis et al.

understood and practiced; educate in the experiential knowledge of the town,

neighborhood, or city in which they live; educate in respect for human diversity
present in the place where they live, as well as in other areas; etc.
Apart from what has just been mentioned, the fact that families encourage their
children to actively participate in activities carried out in the territory facilitates and
fosters citizenship education. In this way, children become, to the extent that it is
possible, part of the associative, cultural, and recreational fabric of society, priori-
tizing, if possible, community-based activity (Biesta and Lawy 2006). As a deriva-
tive of this proposal, the authors of this chapter believe that it is important to
accustom children to conscientiously participate in public life, attending political
and social demonstrations that, apart from the experience itself, serve as a pretext to
discuss issues that have to do with the shared community reality. A “good” education
for citizenship within the scope that we are addressing also involves doing every-
thing possible to prepare and form “good people,” “useful people,” that is, people
interested and involved in community issues that in this way transcend the strictly
personal or family space.
Regarding schooling, education for responsible citizenship, according to
Edelstein (2011) and considering the contributions of the Demoskole Research
Group, can be worked on (i) from the testimony of adults; (ii) from an appropriate
modulation of the relationships and interactions among members of the educational
community; (iii) from an appropriate teaching-learning methodology; and
(iv) through the curriculum.

(i) The testimony of teaching professionals and other adults present in the school is
essential to guide students toward a model of responsible citizenship. The adult
who addresses students with respect, care, and attention; who sets reasoned
boundaries, both reasonable and with love; who knows how to listen and is able
to create a favorable climate to talk about whatever is necessary; who trusts
their students and does not hesitate to allow them to speak and express
themselves freely and respectfully; and who strives for their students to be
able to speak with a voice of their own, etc., embodies a citizen model that
encourages active and informed engagement. As stated by Max Van Manen
(1998), the example of the educator, and their gestures, is crucial for students to
incorporate certain values that, as if they were attitude-generating matrices,
shape certain behaviors and patterns of interaction.
(ii) Appropriate modulation of the relationships and interactions among members
of the educational community. The construction of respectful and flexible social
relationships, accustomed to the diversity of ways of doing and feeling and
radically opposed to any form of discrimination or violence, is conducive to the
construction of an open, tolerant, and just citizen model (Hayward 2012). A
democratic school concerned with forming responsible citizens should promote
such relationships and should do everything possible to quickly detect any
situation that goes in the opposite direction. In this regard, we believe that we
must be very attentive to the standards of naturalized violence (taken as a matter
of course and as inevitable) that occur in so many primary and secondary
16 Citizenship, Education, and Political Crisis in Spain and Catalonia:. . . 239

schools – violence that, in many cases, is mistakenly seen as admissible

because it is considered to be contingent on the tension that occurs in society.
Needless to say, the acceptance of this violence does nothing other than
impoverish the prototype citizen that is slowly being constructed while also
lowering the fraternal aspirations of the human species.
(iii) The teaching-learning methodology also has to do with, although perhaps more
indirectly, democracy and the model of citizenship propagated in the center.
Although on many occasions the methodology employed in the classroom is
considered a strictly technical issue, authors that have reflected on this from a
critical point of view do not believe this to be so (Gimeno Sacristan and Pérez
Gómez 1992; Contreras 2010). The way in which knowledge is transmitted and
created in the classroom to the extent that a conception of learner and educator
intervenes is objectified, in part, in a complex of interactions of power and
domination (Bourdieu and Passeron 1970) projects different models of citizen,
citizenship, and society. Even the most novice observer can discern the differ-
ences that may exist between a school based on traditional pedagogy and one
that is based on active learning. The latter has to do with the postulates of the
active school (De Zubiría Samper 2008) and, in a more transparent way, with
the principles of free and respectful education (Wild 2002) and also with the
broad spectrum of student-centered learning and green pedagogy that, as
explained by Heike Freire (2011, p. 12), “stimulate a sense of deep connection
with life, with oneself and others, and that fosters the capacity for empathy and
responsibility.”
(iv) A curriculum that is committed to citizenship must integrate, without reserva-
tions, aspects having to do with democracy, politics, and ideologies, among
others (Giroux 2003; Guichot 2014). Democracy is something that is practiced
every day and everywhere; it is something that is part of the school’s DNA and
is manifested, more than with grand discourses or classes, through the gestures
and attitudes of teachers and educators. Politics and ideologies are worked on in
all their extent and complexity, and, unlike what frequently occurs in the family
environment, ideology is not guided, to begin with. In the event of doing so, the
school or the teacher would be restricting the ideological freedom of the child,
which would hinder the possibility of choosing. It is also true that we do not
only subscribe to a simple description of different ideologies, like someone
who presents different neutral “products” that can be consumed according to
the tastes and impulses of consumers. Along with the presentation of different
equal ideologies, we believe it is necessary to consider two fundamental
questions: to enumerate the values that support them as well as the conse-
quences involved in their implementation and, in addition, to also encourage
students to raise fundamental questions precisely so that they can evaluate any
and all ideologies, especially those the teacher most identifies with and that
because of caution and especially ethics they would never explain.

Apart from what we have just said, citizenship and politics can also be worked on –
and it is good that this is done – through a more structured curriculum that takes
240 J. Feu-Gelis et al.

into account diverse and complementary aspects. We consider the following points
to be important: First, to deal with the rights and duties of the citizens, placing
special emphasis on the different generations of human rights. Second, to make
known the political institutions comprising the local, national, state, and interna-
tional spheres, explaining their role or objectives, the functioning, and the
decision-making process. Third, it is also necessary to speak of the different actors
involved in politics, with, in our opinion, a special focus on noninstitutional actors
that work for collective rights and causes. Fourth, it is appropriate to present the
different systems of government, highlighting the role of the citizen in each of
them as well as the rights that are recognized or denied. Fifth, it is desirable for
students – when they are in a sufficiently advanced stage of maturity – to know
political, social, and economic history, paying much attention to the problems and
conquests in the aforementioned areas. And sixth, it is necessary to speak about
linguistic, ethnic, or identity problems and how these are contained in constitutions
and international norms that promote respect and tolerance for diversity. In line
with what we have been explaining, it is clear that education for citizenship is a
broad and transversal area full of possibilities.

Conclusion

We cannot finish this chapter without outlining how we can work effectively on a
topic as far-reaching and complex as the one we have been exploring. Aiming only
to introduce the subject, and taking as a starting point the guidelines of Barbosa
(2000) and the Demoskole Research Group, it is desirable to treat aspects related to
the area of citizenship from proximity, in other words, based on everyday issues that
have to do with the reality experienced by students. By not doing so, we can easily
fall into the mistake of imparting an excessively abstract curriculum and moving
away from the interests and experiences of students.
Starting from the consideration we have just made, citizenship can be addressed
through very different ways or systems. These include:

– Through a master class, the viewing of a film or documentary, focused and

comparative analysis of the press, and by interviewing political actors and
members of social movements that come to school
– From student visits to the headquarters of different actors
– Through service learning activities inside and outside the school
– From carrying out actions linked to the needs of the neighborhood, town, or city
(worked on before school)
– Through participation in protest demonstrations, with prior work and consensus
with families
– Through incorporating new democratic structures of participation that go beyond
what is habitual – especially if they have democratic stumbling blocks that limit
free expression
16 Citizenship, Education, and Political Crisis in Spain and Catalonia:. . . 241

– Through the distribution of positions whose exercise has individual and collective
repercussions
– By involving students and families in the ordinary life of the center
– By organizing shared directions between teachers and families
– By creating meaningful communities and therefore going beyond the rhetoric to
which we are so accustomed, making use of active, nondirective, and free
pedagogies
– Through embodying a consciously chosen ethos that is applied in a transversal
way throughout the center

In summary, as explained by Feu and others (2016, 2017), we need to take into
account governance, habitance, otherness, ethos, and pedagogical practice to make
possible the development of free, responsible, critical, creative, and solidary human
beings at the service of a more egalitarian and just society.
The fact that the Catalan school has addressed the central theme of the contro-
versy – the process of independence of Catalonia, or aspects related to it including
the referendum on October 1, the police violence, the previous and subsequent
demonstrations, etc. – does not necessarily have to be a negative issue. In line
with what we have said, talking about politics in school based on issues that are
part of current political and social debate “vivifies” them and makes them easier to
understand. Dodging them, pretending they do not exist, and leaving them outside
the walls of the school does nothing but increase the existing divorce between
society-politics and school while renouncing critical and informed citizen education.

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Citizenship and Citizenship Education in
Zimbabwe: A Theoretical and Historical 17
Analysis

Aaron T. Sigauke

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244
Civics and Citizenship Education: A Brief Theoretical Background and Some Pertinent
Controversies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245
Civics and Citizenship Education in Zimbabwe: A Historical Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 246
Political, Social, and Economic Context Prior to the Introduction of Civics and
Citizenship Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 246
The Presidential Commission of Inquiry into Education and Training (1999) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248
Content/Focus of the 2007 Civics and Citizenship Syllabus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249
Civics and Citizenship Education in Zimbabwe: Current Position (2018) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 250
Debates on Ideological Implications of the Current Program in Zimbabwe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 250
The Nature of Civics and Citizenship Education Program in Zimbabwe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251
Concluding Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 254
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255

Abstract
Civics, citizenship, and citizenship education are currently issues of attention for
a number of state education systems over the world. Yet, because civics and
citizenship education are contested and controversial concepts, it is sometimes
not clear as to what the intentions of state authorities are in introducing civics and
citizenship education in the curriculum. This chapter discusses the position of
civics and citizenship education in Zimbabwe. Firstly, it looks at the different
theoretical conceptions associated with civics and citizenship. It then traces the
historical position of this subject in the country’s education system focusing
mostly on why the subject has taken different forms at various political stages.
The chapter then focuses on the current position of civics and citizenship

A. T. Sigauke (*)
School of Education, University of New England, Armidale, NSW, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 243
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_42
244 A. T. Sigauke

education in Zimbabwe as of 2018 and tries to respond to the question as to why it

is the way it is. It concludes with a summary regarding the subject in the country.

Keywords
Civics and citizenship · Zimbabwe · Controversies · Presidential Commission ·
National and strategic studies · Ubuntu/hunhu · Values · National identity ·
National Pledge

Introduction

Civics and citizenship education is generally regarded as important in teaching

citizens of a country to be politically, socially, and economically active members
of society (Olssen 2004; Lawson 2001; Tibbitts and Torney-Purta 1999; Crick
Report 1998). However, in many cases, negative macro-socio-political factors can
negatively impact on attitudes of these same citizens (young and adults) and the
extent to which they can participate in the socio-political activities of the country. In
Zimbabwe, citizens have become distrustful of the political environment. They are
disillusioned with the political system and are unhappy with the economic develop-
ments in the country (Sigauke 2011b). Introducing a citizenship education program
in such a politico-socio-economic atmosphere of mistrust may neither change the
attitudes of learners, nor alter their participation levels now and in future. In support
of this view, Matereke (2012) notes that the official perception of civics and
citizenship education in Zimbabwe has

“rendered both the school system and teachers as mere functionaries of the status quo, thus
constricting the public sphere and eroding civil liberties, these being the very elements which
enable citizens to fully participate in the political process and to hold public officials and
institutions accountable. It is these developments that bring the dual crisis of citizenship and
education into purview” (p. 97).

Over the years, since independence in 1980, a number of attempts have been
made to introduce civics and citizenship education in the curriculum in Zimbabwe
but without success. This failure to a successful implementation of the subject is a
result of conflicting interpretations between government (ruling party) on one hand
and teachers and the general public on the other concerning the nature and role of
civics and citizenship education in the Zimbabwean society.
This chapter discusses the position of civics and citizenship education in
Zimbabwe’s education system. Firstly, it looks at several relevant theoretical con-
ceptions and controversies associated with civics, citizenship, and citizenship edu-
cation in general. It then traces the historical background of the subject in
Zimbabwe’s education system focusing mostly on how and why it has taken
different positions at various political stages. The chapter then looks at the subject
in Zimbabwe as of 2018 and tries to respond to the question as to why it is the way it
is. The concluding section summarizes views raised in the chapter.
17 Citizenship and Citizenship Education in Zimbabwe: A Theoretical and. . . 245

Civics and Citizenship Education: A Brief Theoretical Background

and Some Pertinent Controversies

There is as much controversy about what constitutes citizenship education as there

is about citizenship itself. Arthur and Wright (2001: 8) identify three different
views often presented in discussions concerning citizenship education, that is,
“education about citizenship; education for citizenship and education through
citizenship,” what Kerr (2003: 14) calls the “tripartite division of about-for-
through” citizenship. A distinction is also often made between a citizenship
education that empowers the learner and that which is tantamount to indoctrina-
tion, that is, involving teaching someone to accept that something is true in spite of
evidence to the contrary (Sears and Hughes 2006). Indoctrination is used as a
useful means to an end for people in positions of political power. Citizenship
education thus can be used to control young people so that they do not question the
status quo and to mold, manage, and reform young people for the benefit of people
in positions of power. In such cases, citizenship education does not develop active
citizens who are capable of thinking critically, questioning and making decisions
about issues that concern them. At the political level, this narrow sense of citizen-
ship education neither raises nor offers political empowerment to young people,
keeping them passive and ignorant of political, economic, and other social issues
that benefit the powerful ones. Davies (2001) observes that in many cases the
nature of citizenship education a country adopts is greatly influenced by the
political context and ideology of the state. Osler and Starkey (2005) and Magudu
(2012) add that if citizenship is as controversial and as contested a concept as noted
above then being a “good citizen” is therefore similarly controversial and contest-
able. In this sense, and as defined by any government, a good citizen could mean
someone who unquestioningly accepts and conforms to values, norms, and beliefs
as defined by authority.
In contrast, authentic citizenship education enables learners to engage in critical
discussions of issues, using evidence, exploring alternatives and developing dispo-
sitions and skills that allow them to act on other possibilities. Authentic citizenship
education goes beyond the development of passive citizenship and seeks instead
citizens who are justice-oriented and who critically analyze and address social
injustices. Authentic citizenship education involves teaching and learning about
social and moral responsibility, involvement in the community, and about political
literacy (Olssen 2004; Westheimer and Kahne 2004). It is a citizenship education
that sharpens critical thinking capacities important in the analysis of political, social,
and other issues, a preparation of young people for their roles and responsibilities
and for the challenges and uncertainties of life through provision of relevant
education (Kerr 1999). The main goals of this deeper, thicker sense of citizenship
education are thus to provide political socialization and to equip young people with
the knowledge, skills, and values to participate effectively in a democratic society
(Kisby and Sloam 2009 cited in Magudu 2012).
Authentic citizenship education, especially at the classroom level, may require a
methodological and pedagogical shift, especially regarding the medium of
246 A. T. Sigauke

instruction, given that it involves an emancipatory and transformative model of

instruction that promotes questioning of knowledge as well as awareness of social
injustices that are inherent in society. In addition, authentic citizenship education
includes making students aware of power and political differences (Panganayi et al.
2017). Authentic citizenship education or education for democracy aims at pre-
disposing and developing students’ skills, attitudes, beliefs, and values that will
empower them to participate and remain engaged and involved in their society’s
culture, politics, governance, and general democracy (Runhare and Muvirimi 2017).
In the case of civics and citizenship education in Zimbabwe, which is the focus of
this chapter, it is important to have some understanding of the background to this
subject.

Civics and Citizenship Education in Zimbabwe: A Historical

Background

Political, Social, and Economic Context Prior to the Introduction

of Civics and Citizenship Education

Over the last four decades, that is, since independence from United Kingdom in
1980, Zimbabwe has been going through a downturn in political, social, and
economic conditions. This downturn can be attributed to the introduction of harsh
legislation against democratic dissent by the ruling Zimbabwe African National
Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) party. This legislation has targeted and restricted
civic organizations, labor movements, opposition political movements, non-
governmental organizations (NGOs), churches, and student demonstrations which
demanded a recognition of their rights as citizens and citizen organizations (Ham-
mett 2010; Zeilig 2008). As a result, the country has been characterized by hyper-
inflation, social hemorrhage, and political conflict. Specifically, the year 1998 was
characterized by radical political opposition to the ruling party evidenced by the
formation of the main political opposition party, the Movement for Democratic
Change (MDC), an alliance of civic society, and groupings of labor movements
(Raftopoulos 2002). Prior to and beyond 1998, student political discontent and
activism had also been on the rise especially at the tertiary education level. Zeilig
(2008) notes that student voice reconstructs historical events and should therefore be
interrogated in order for the public to understand the meaning of student activism.
For most of the 1990s and beyond, Zimbabwe has been characterized by a gradual
economic decline characterized by rising unemployment, underdevelopment, and
disillusionment with elite corruption. Thus, the political upheavals of the 2000s
resulted in the dwindling of the democratic space and an upsurge of populist rhetoric
from the ruling politically powerful aimed at justifying their positions (Hammer et al.
2003). That is, to silence the general public from openly voicing against these socio-
economic hardships and elite corruptions, the ruling party became more and more
autocratic.
17 Citizenship and Citizenship Education in Zimbabwe: A Theoretical and. . . 247

These political events in Zimbabwe since 1998 may be summarized as follows:

the referendum of February 2000 which rejected the government’s proposal for a
new constitution; the popularity of the opposition party as confirmed in the June
elections of that same year when the MDC got a number of seats in parliament
followed by what has been generally regarded as “controversial” presidential
elections in 2002, parliamentary elections in 2005, and the 2008 elections
(Raftopoulos 2002; Chimhowu 2009). As suggested above, Zimbabwe’s continual
political crisis up to the present day (2018) has further exacerbated the country’s
economic decline, political instability, and social divisions resulting in a lack of
trust in the political system from some sections of the population locally and
internationally. In addition, the political crisis has resulted in a rise in conflict
between citizens as illustrated by some public violence between members of the
ruling and opposition parties.
Over the years, and in the context of these worsening conditions, the ZANU-PF
government’s popularity has continued to decline drastically as evidenced by rising
support for the opposition party (i.e., the rise in the numbers of citizens who voted
for opposition party members in parliament). The response of authorities to these
events has, in some cases, been further political suppressions including the closing of
the space for democratic debates through various legislation and measures. The 2002
Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA), for example, allowed
state media to broadcast ideological messages on behalf of the state. The Land
Designation Act, also known as the “Fast Track Land Acquisition Reform Pro-
gramme,” led to violent occupation of farmland and the displacement of farm owners
and workers (McGregor 2002). In 2001 the judicial system was restructured. Sig-
nificant too have been the appointment of military personnel to lead some state
institutions, what has been described as “the militarization of state institutions”
(Chimhowu 2009: 19), and the Public Order and Security Act (POSA) which
extended the powers of the Zimbabwe Republic Police (ZRP) (Raftopoulos 2007a;
Raftopoulos 2007b; Raftopoulos 2002; Bond and Manyanya 2002). Added to the
above was “Operation Murambatsvina/Restore Order” or “Clean-up Operation”
(Tibaijuka 2005) of 2005, euphemistically described as the “tsunami.” While this
was meant to “restore order” by destroying unplanned and illegal accommodation
and business structures, it was violent and indiscriminate. In addition to making
society submissive to the state, it also ended up making people, mostly those living
in the low income residential areas, homeless (Fontein 2009).
These events, regarded as an “evolution of a repressive political governance
culture characterized by violence, insecurity and political paralysis” (Chimhowu
2009: 19), worsened relations between the state and civil society. It is within this
socio-political context that citizenship education was to be introduced in schools in
2007, raising significant questions for and from Zimbabweans about what it means
to be a citizen, who is a citizen, and whether citizenship is about practicing
democratic values such as tolerance, participation, and empowerment (Tshabangu
2006). To engage with, and to seek to answer such questions, it is necessary to
examine how the events in Zimbabwe help in understanding the operationalization
of citizenship, including the form it takes within curricular programs.
248 A. T. Sigauke

The Presidential Commission of Inquiry into Education and Training

(1999)

It was within the above context that in 1998 the Government of Zimbabwe
established a commission whose task was “to inquire into and report on education
and training in Zimbabwe” (Presidential Commission 1999: i). Prior to 1998, no
such comprehensive review had been carried out on the education system.
According to the commission, during public debates, young people were blamed
for antisocial behavior, and such behavior was attributable to a lack of citizenship
values, relevant ethics, morals, and individual and collective responsibility towards
property. Furthermore, young people were blamed for lacking knowledge about the
meaning and qualities associated with good citizenship. The commission also noted
that during its hearings “people expressed concern about the absence of citizenship
education in the school and tertiary education curricula” (Presidential Commission
1999: 350). The commission thus recommended a compulsory and statutory citi-
zenship education in the entire school curriculum.
As noted earlier, citizenship and citizenship education are controversial and
sometimes subjectively defined concepts (Osler and Starkey 2005). In such a
deteriorating political context and given this controversy, the claims made by the
Presidential Commission about young people were politically motivated and sought
to silence young people on the ruling party’s political abuses. One such example of
the indoctrination or silencing of young people is the infamous National Youth
Service introduced in Zimbabwe at the peak of the socio-political instability in the
country (Nyakudya 2007; Mashingaidze 2009; Ranger 2004). Furthermore, claims
about young people’s lack of citizenship values and the need for citizenship educa-
tion were based on information collected from the public and not directly from or
through research on young people themselves. By excluding the voices of young
people, the Commission’s review presented a narrow conception of citizenship.
A critical discourse analysis of the citizenship education chapter of the Commis-
sion’s report (Sigauke 2011a) shows bias in the agenda for the appointment of the
commission and that this was influenced by the socio-economic and political events
in the country. In addition, various statements from the report demonstrate the
Commission’s concern about the socio-economic and other problems in the country
at the time of its operation. It concluded that these problems could be addressed
through education because:

Education is a fundamental strategy to prepare Zimbabweans for socio-economic well-being

in the new millennium and to be competitive in the global era dominated by information
technology. (Presidential Commission 1999: i)

Citizenship education curriculum would enable children to grow into good citizens who
conform to certain accepted practice (italics: author’s emphasis); train them to hold beliefs;
to ensure the reception and acceptance of our values, ethics and civic processes by all our
youth; and to enlighten our children of their civic rights, obligations and responsibilities
(Presidential Commission 1999: 353).
17 Citizenship and Citizenship Education in Zimbabwe: A Theoretical and. . . 249

The suggested curriculum would also focus on such aspects as “Our Heritage,
Legal Education (learners learning about human rights, responsibilities and obliga-
tions); National Identity: a study of our culture. . .a close study of our democracy”
(Presidential Commission 1999: 252).
The report was, however, not specific about the disorder in the country, and it was
deliberately general and nonpartisan in its arguments. However, the report implicitly
advocated for public commitment to the ruling party’s ideals. While the Commission
says it consulted widely before arriving at its conclusions and making recommen-
dations for citizenship education in the curriculum, in addition to not finding out
student positions on the subject, the report did not consult the teachers who were to
implement the citizenship education program. Large-scale surveys elsewhere have
shown that where teachers are not consulted and if they hold negative views about
the subject, this may lead to significant issues, and even failure in its implementation
(Losito and Mintrop 2001; Wilkins 2003).

Content/Focus of the 2007 Civics and Citizenship Syllabus

In between 1999 when the Presidential Commission Report was released and 2007
when the civics education syllabus was implemented, there is no official policy
document directing the Ministry of Education and Culture to develop the civics
syllabus (Source: Interview with official at Curriculum Development Unit (CDU);
May 30, 2006). Subsequently, 8 years later (in 2007) a “Civics Education” syllabus
was designed by the Curriculum Development Unit (CDU) of the Ministry of Educa-
tion and Culture initially to be taught at the secondary education level. Consistent with
the Commission’s suggestions, the first aim focused on the need to develop in young
people the quality of unhu/ubuntu which the Commission describes as

the human being in the fullest and noblest sense; a good human being; a well behaved and
morally upright person (Presidential Commission 1999: 61–62, 349).

The assumption is that through the civic education syllabuses, these qualities can
be “cultivated” and “sustained” Government of Zimbabwe (GoZ) (2007: 4). The
inclusion of these qualities in civics and citizenship education is in response to the
Commission’s observation that “unhu/ubuntu is currently lacking in society and in
the formal education system” (Presidential Commission 1999: 353). However, the
Civics syllabus was only “allocated one period per week” (GoZ 2007: 6). A number
of different teaching/learning approaches were listed in the syllabus including
community participatory methods, again in response to the statement that “the
subject encourages the use of a variety of methods with particular emphasis on
participatory methods. . .” (GoZ 2007: 4). These observations, combined with gov-
ernment’s apparent sudden interest in citizenship education in schools at a time when
the same government was experiencing political, economic, and other social diffi-
culties, raise questions about whether or not there were other motives for the
introduction of citizenship education in schools at that time.
250 A. T. Sigauke

Civics and Citizenship Education in Zimbabwe: Current Position

(2018)

Debates on Ideological Implications of the Current Program

in Zimbabwe

The current position on civics and citizenship education in Zimbabwe, which is

offered as a cross-curriculum theme rather than a stand-alone subject (as of 2018), is
outlined in a number of documents of the Ministry of Primary and Secondary
Education and Ministry of Higher Education (see Ndhlovu 2016; Mushava 2014;
Magudu 2012; Matereke 2012; Mapetere et al. 2011; Makanda n.d.; Chabikwa n.d.).
A stand-alone or statutory citizenship education subject in the school curriculum, as
recommended by the Presidential Commission (1999) and introduced in schools
2007, was not successful as it was unpopular with teachers who were worried about
teaching sensitive political issues in a politically sensitive environment (Sigauke
2011b). The section on “The Nature of Civics and Citizenship Education Programme
in Zimbabwe” which comes next provides details on the suggested content and
teaching approaches on the subject. However, before discussing the content and
teaching approaches, it is important to be aware of ideological implications of the
current program in Zimbabwe.
Writing of the Zimbabwean context Matereke (2012), citing Gutmann (1999),
believes that political education, that is, the cultivation of the virtues, knowledge,
and skills necessary for political participation has moral primacy over other purposes
of public education in a democratic society. According to this position, the role of
citizenship education or political democracy (Gutmann 1999) should be the devel-
opment of a “deliberative/democratic” character. The current curriculum in Zimba-
bwe does not match these ideals and is too narrow and focused on political
knowledge rather than active participation. The question then is: to what extent
has citizenship education in Zimbabwe bequeathed individuals with what Milner
(2002: 1) terms “civic literacy” or the knowledge, ability, and capacity of citizens to
make sense of their political world? Writing about education for citizenship in
Zimbabwe Matereke (2012) further points out that education in general should
cultivate students for critical citizenship emanating from the undeniable fact of
pluralism: we live in a world that is characterized by multiple identities (ethnic,
racial, sexual, religious, etc.), different and often competing (thus incommensurable)
conceptions of the good. This “fact of pluralism” makes it unreasonable to expect
that national borders should coincide with a single homogenous community. Thus,
as Matereke (2012) argues, education should prepare all citizens, especially the
young, by imparting critical skills to engage with plurality. The fact of pluralism
requires Zimbabweans to question how they can achieve political stability in the
polity. Rather than promoting critical dispositions that allow citizens to hold public
officials accountable, through various processes, including those specifically
connected to citizenship education examined in the next section, education in
Zimbabwe at the moment has fostered intolerance and heightened the risk of political
instability through a curriculum which prioritizes conformity and commitment to
17 Citizenship and Citizenship Education in Zimbabwe: A Theoretical and. . . 251

existing political structures. Therefore, it can be argued that the political polarization,
economic decline, and social strife that characterize the Zimbabwean crisis are a
manifestation of an instability that stems from an education system that demands an
acquiescent citizenry (Matereke 2012). As Giroux (1998a: 173) points out, there is
need for educators to define “schools as public spheres where the dynamics of
popular engagement and democratic politics can be cultivated as part of the struggle
for a radical democratic state.”
At present in Zimbabwe, as in other parts of the world, educational reforms have
tended to assign teachers and schools the roles of reproducing the political society
and creating a predetermined political consensus by imparting specific kinds of
knowledge in order to buttress the ruling party’s hold on power. The ideology that
underpins the postcolonial education reform in Zimbabwe does not question the
“relationship between knowledge and power” (Giroux 1998b: 6). Zimbabwe needs a
citizenship education that raises citizens’ critical consciousness (Freire 1987), one
that transforms teachers and students into intellectuals who conceive teaching and
learning as “an emancipatory practice” and who “work relentlessly, dedicated to
furthering democracy and enhancing the quality of human life.” They should not
behave as functionaries “whose labor is to benefit those in political power”
(McLaren 1988: xviii). Through various processes, ruling elites have stifled the
role of teachers and lecturers as transformative intellectuals.

The Nature of Civics and Citizenship Education Program

in Zimbabwe

More recently new programs that incorporate some aspects of civics and citizenship
education have been introduced at various levels of the education system. These
include, for example, the “National Pledge” in primary and secondary schools, the
“National and Strategic Studies (NASS)” in teachers’ and polytechnic colleges and a
compulsory course on “Peace Leadership and Conflict Transformation” in universi-
ties (Ndhlovu 2016). At the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education level,
Magudu (2012) notes that the History curriculum remains central in the delivery of
aspects of citizenship education. In addition, attempts have been made to introduce
Human Rights education as a stand-alone subject, but this failed due to the same
reason that teachers are hesitant to teach issues they regard as politically sensitive
that would get them in trouble with the ruling party (see Sigauke 2011b). In the
primary school, the HIV/AIDS and Life Skills Education Primary School Syllabus
was introduced in 2003. Although the content of the syllabus focuses heavily on
HIV/AIDS education, it includes aspects of citizenship education such as values and
beliefs, participation in community programs, and conflict resolution. It should also
be noted that citizenship education initiatives in Zimbabwe primary schools have not
generated much debate, perhaps because they do not focus on obviously controver-
sial issues.
In his work, Makanda (n.d.), a Principal Director of the Curriculum Development
and Technical Services unit of the Ministry of Education and Culture in Zimbabwe,
252 A. T. Sigauke

identifies three key content areas for the new civics and citizenship education
curriculum which at the moment is being treated as a cross-curriculum subject:
concepts of hunhu/Ubuntu, values and national identity, all three also mentioned
in the Presidential Commission Report discussed above.
Hunhu/Ubuntu denotes a good human being, a well-behaved, and morally upright
person characterized by qualities such as responsibility, honesty, justice, trustwor-
thiness, a commitment to hardwork, integrity, a cooperative spirit, solidarity, hospi-
tality, devotion to family, and the welfare of the community (Sigauke 2016). Ubuntu/
hunhu also means a well-rounded and respectable human being, one with particular
characteristics of care, good mannered and with regard for others, self-disciplined
and courageous, diligent and tolerant. These are characteristics treasured by other
cultures and are upheld and promoted as virtues of good citizenship.
On values Makanda (n.d.) further adds that values denote what humanity is; they
give weight to humanity and must therefore be shared, especially when they are
acceptable to society. Values are what people cherish as guiding principles and act as
a main reference for their choices and behaviors. Any system without values lacks
order and has a very limited shelf-life. The new curriculum, it is believed, will
inculcate positive ethics and values in every learner. So, learners in the school system
are expected to exhibit acceptable values such as discipline, integrity, honest, and
Ubuntu/hunhu. If learners enter society without these values, they become a threat to
the social fabric and socio-economic development. Incidences of corruption, infi-
delity, theft, lying, murder, and natural environment and property destruction
become rampant. This preparation of learners, it is believed, will enable them to
rise to the challenges they inevitably face as they grow into adulthood. Principally,
some of the key life values relate to peaceful resolution of conflicts, employment of
sound judgment and principles at critical moments and integrity, conviction and
commitment to do what is right (Makanda n.d.).
On national identity, learners are expected to exhibit a Zimbabwean identity in
every respect of their life, a manifestation of patriotism, a recognition of and respect
for national symbols, and voluntarily engagement in participatory citizenship. How-
ever, while these are genuine qualities expected of any citizen in any nation,
currently in Zimbabwe participatory engagement in political activities that are
critical of the ruling party (ZANU-PF) is generally punishable. This discourages
citizens from engaging in these same activities that are suggested here. It appears that
only activities that are supportive of the ruling party are acceptable. The process of
building consciousness and patriotism through citizenship education is also viewed
as only being possible through drawing on hunhu/Ubuntu (see expected qualities of
hunhu/Ubuntu as described above). Furthermore, learners should be grounded in
their culture, show respect for life, diversity, environment, property, laws, and the
dignity of labor, and have a clear identity, confidence, assertiveness, and be enter-
prising with reference to opportunities offered by new knowledge, technologies, and
circumstance. Again, the weakness of the current curriculum is that some of the
above ideas are missing. These views are perhaps best summarized in the document
Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education: The New Curriculum Framework
(Chabikwa n.d.) which outlines the curriculum aims as being to promote and cherish
17 Citizenship and Citizenship Education in Zimbabwe: A Theoretical and. . . 253

the Zimbabwean identity, prepare learners for life, and work in a largely agro-based
economy and an increasingly globalized and competitive environment, foster life-
long learning in line with the opportunities and challenges of the knowledge society,
prepare learners for participatory citizenship, peace, and sustainable development,
and to prepare and orient learners for participation, leadership, and voluntary service.
However, while the aims set out in the document are appropriate, wide ranging, and
democratic for civics and citizenship education, the actual lived political environ-
ment in the country makes it unlikely that these would be achieved since they may
only be enacted in a much narrower way. The narrow enactment of these aims is
because the ruling party often enforces conformity to its political wishes which are
different from the stated aims.
The introduction of the National Pledge in primary and secondary schools in 2016
was, again, one of the responses to the Presidential Commission Report. The pledge
was designed to encourage a patriotic work ethic among students and is intended to
uphold honesty and hard work, while affirming freedom, justice, and equality as
national values. These are regarded as fundamental features of citizenship education
meant to equip students with basic rights, values, duties, and responsibilities.
Students are expected to sing the pledge like a national anthem at school assemblies
pledging their respects and acknowledgments of various national symbols (the flag,
fallen national heroes, natural resources, traditional cultures, etc.) and qualities
associated with good citizenship (Ndhlovu 2016).
The content of the pledge is, however, currently the subject of religious and civic
controversy. Opponents to the pledge (parents, church leaders and others), as it is
presently constituted, say that debate must have preceded the pledge. There was no
public debate about what should make up the pledge. By citing the phrase “Almighty
God” at its introductory stage, the pledge is viewed like a prayer which elevates
secular symbols such as the national flag and deceased liberation war heroes,
scenarios which opponents to the pledge equate to idolatry and ancestral worship
rather than to God. Using the phrase “Almighty God” is tantamount to giving respect
to idols (Ndhlovu 2016). Implementing the pledge requires an oath from minors
(school children) which is tantamount to forcing someone to act against their will
(indoctrination). Furthermore, presenting the pledge as a compulsory requirement is
a violation of the liberty of conscience, a value provided for by Zimbabwe’s
Constitution. Given that its content was not consulted upon and is missing a plural
dimension, the current pledge is viewed as falling short of its “national” adjective
(Ndhlovu 2016). Government, on the other hand, argues that the pledge was reached
upon consultatively since the principle and much of its content are drawn from a
nationally ratified constitution, technically developed and endorsed by elected rep-
resentatives at cabinet level.
At tertiary institutions in the country (i.e., the Ministry of Higher Education’s
teacher education colleges, universities and other tertiary levels) a new compulsory
subject, the National and Strategic Studies (NASS) program was introduced in 2004,
also as a response to the 1999 Presidential Commission Report. This was meant to
accomplish the goal of producing socially relevant individuals with desirable values
and attitudes (italics: author’s emphasis) and who would be effective role models for
254 A. T. Sigauke

future generations (Moyo et al. 2011; Zvobgo 1986). In addition, another program,
Peace, Leadership and Conflict Transformation also covers issues of civics and
citizenship education. However, as Mapetere et al. (2011) point out, the introduction
of NASS has also been surrounded by controversy. Some have viewed NASS as
unnecessary and an attempt to indoctrinate the youth (student teachers) along the
same lines as the infamous National Youth Service introduced in Zimbabwe at the
peak of the socio-political instability in the country (Nyakudya 2007; Mashingaidze
2009; Ranger 2004). Other observers have viewed NASS as another attempt to
advance the political agendas of people in power. On the other hand, those who
support the program see its aim as “to produce skilled personnel with a sense of
patriotism . . .” (The Herald 11 May 2016). Yet other commentators argue that there
is no education that is apolitical; all education is designed to achieve certain political
and economic ends and so are these programs in Zimbabwe (Maravanyika and
Ndawi 2011; Apple 1990 and Jansen 1991). Such a lack of consensus on the
relevance of the subject is likely to manifest itself among the implementers (teachers)
and the consumers (students) of the NASS curriculum as well as other stakeholders
outside the education system.

Concluding Summary

This chapter has discussed the theoretical, historical, and current position of civics
and citizenship education in Zimbabwe’s primary, secondary, and higher education
levels. The general impression from the reviewed literature on the current position of
civics and citizenship education in the country provides a diversity of opinions on
this subject. The discussion demonstrates a lack of consensus on the relevance of the
subject to the country. This is a result of perceived political interferences in what
exactly should be involved in civics and citizenship education. For instance, in a
study on Zimbabwean teachers’ and students’ views on the subject, Sigauke (2011b)
found out that teachers consistently expressed fears that teaching about some issues
could lead to victimization especially if these issues were seen as being politically
sensitive and controversial. For students in that study, it seems that taking part in
political activities does not constitute a measure of democracy or good citizenship.
Students do not regard discussions of political issues and following political discus-
sions in the media as indicators of good citizenship. Students have a low trust in
political institutions of the country, perhaps a result of their experiences of political
conflicts in the country (Sigauke 2012). Unless current political tensions change, this
may have negative implications for future levels of political action by young people
in the country indicating the beginning of future political apathy. As Print (2007)
points out, political apathy arises where citizens are distrustful of politicians, where
they are skeptical of government institutions, and where they are disillusioned about
how democratic processes work. Introducing a citizenship education program in
such an environment seriously undermines its possibilities.
In the case of the NASS program noted in this chapter, research points to a
significant level of antipathy towards the program in teacher training colleges where
17 Citizenship and Citizenship Education in Zimbabwe: A Theoretical and. . . 255

the top to bottom approach makes it difficult for some NASS lecturers and students
to identify with the program. Researchers have suggested a number of improvements
that can be made to and for the success of the program (see Mapetere et al. 2011). At
the secondary school level, Magudu (2012) notes that civics and citizenship educa-
tion in Zimbabwe is generally characterized by dichotomies and what Sears and
Hughes (2006) describe as a tension between education and indoctrination in both
discourse and practice. The need to educate the youth to be informed and responsible
is recognized but a narrow conception of citizenship is enacted. The prevailing
socio-political environment in the country does not allow for the proper implemen-
tation of the citizenship education curriculum. What passes for citizenship education
in the country today is inconsistent with the principles of experiential and service
learning. Indeed, some of the features of indoctrination are manifest, for example, a
narrow or “jingoistic view” of nation building (Magudu 2012: 187), demonization of
opponents and gross over-simplification of both problems and solutions (Sears and
Hughes 2006). Consequently, the legitimacy of the discourse in the school curricu-
lum has been compromised. Clearly, there is a need for a de-politicized approach
where citizenship education is not seen as a political ploy but where stakeholders can
begin to freely appreciate its relevance. In view of all of the above observations, it is
recommended that, if the goal of citizenship education in Zimbabwe is to be realized,
there is need for fundamental changes in the way the subject is conceptualized,
perceived, and taught. Also, there is need for the involvement all stakeholders – the
curriculum planners, teachers, and the community to be engaged in developing a
model for citizenship education that all conceive to be the best for the country,
Zimbabwe.

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Religious Citizenship in Schools in England
and Wales: Responses to Growing Diversity 18
Peter J. Hemming and Elena Hailwood

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 260
Access: Faith Schools and Pupil Admissions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262
Recognition: Religious Education and Festivals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 264
Accommodation: Collective Worship and Prayer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266
Belonging: Pupil Values and Interfaith Relations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 268
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 270

Abstract
This chapter explores the concept of “religious citizenship,” in the context of
state-funded schooling in England and Wales, and against a backdrop of growing
religious pluralism. The chapter considers the role of various educational actors in
determining the extent to which schools recognize and accommodate diversity of
religion and belief. With reference to the existing research literature, religious
citizenship is explored through various dimensions of education, including faith
schools and pupil admissions, religious education and festivals, collective wor-
ship and prayer, and pupil values and interfaith relations. In so doing, the chapter
highlights an important dimension of the informal citizenship education that
state-funded schools in England and Wales provide to pupils on the basis of
their religion and belief.

P. J. Hemming (*) · E. Hailwood

School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 259
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_44
260 P. J. Hemming and E. Hailwood

Keywords
Belief · Citizenship · Diversity · England · Equity · Faith · Religion · Rights ·
Schools · Wales

Introduction

In recent years, diversity of religion and belief has been increasingly recognized
within social and public policy debates as distinct from “race” and ethnicity and as
worthy of attention in its own right. England and Wales have become progressively
more diverse in religious terms since the turn of the twenty-first century. The two
nations share a decennial Census, meaning that religious demographic trends in
England and Wales are typically considered together. Data from the Office for
National Statistics (2015) show that while the number of people identifying as
Christian fell significantly in the period between the 2001 and 2011 Census, there
were marked increases in respondents with no religion and smaller but nevertheless
notable increases in those from Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, and other minority
faith backgrounds (see Table 1).
Bouma and Ling (2009: 509) argue that: “the theme of the early twenty-first
century appears to be religious diversity and its consequences for social order and
public life.” Religious pluralism may present a number of issues and challenges for
societies to grapple with, such as how the state can adequately accommodate for
diverse religious needs within public service provision. Machacek (2003) argues that
the biggest challenges are likely to arise in fields such as education, where partici-
pation is relatively compulsory for religious and nonreligious groups (except in cases
where parents are legally permitted to educate their children through home school-
ing). Many schools in England and Wales now find they are catering for a greater
diversity of religion and belief amongst their pupils than was previously the case. As
such, questions about how these groups should be provided for in schools have
become more common (e.g., see Pring 2018; Wilson 2015). Many of the judgments

Table 1 Census figures, Office for National Statistics

2001 (%) 2011 (%)
Christian 71.8 59.3
No religion 14.8 25.1
Muslim 3.0 4.8
Hindu 1.1 1.5
Sikh 0.6 0.8
Jewish 0.5 0.5
Buddhist 0.3 0.4
Other religionsa 0.3 0.4
Not stated 7.7 7.2
a
In the 2011 Census, the most numerous affiliations in the “Other Religion” category included
Pagan, Spiritualist, Mixed Religion, Jain, and Ravidassia
18 Religious Citizenship in Schools in England and Wales: Responses to. . . 261

made in these cases have the issue of competing rights and interests at their core and
cannot be fully understood without reference to citizenship.
Contemporary conceptions of citizenship have moved beyond notions of fixed
rights and responsibilities bestowed upon citizens by law (e.g., Marshall (1950
[1973]). Instead, scholars have pointed to the fluid and contested nature of citizen-
ship, and the on-going power struggles for rights and inclusions that it entails
(Ho 2006). Similarly, citizenship is increasingly understood as encompassing issues
of identity, belonging and inequalities, and thus possessing a social/cultural dimen-
sion, as well as a political one (Painter and Philo 1995). In this light, citizenship is
viewed as a complex process rather than a fixed given, encompassing both politics
and culture, and constituted through everyday practices and discourses (Staeheli
et al. 2012).
The concept of citizenship has traditionally been associated with “race” and
ethnicity (e.g., Kymlicka 2007), but researchers have also identified a number of
other strands of difference through which processes of citizenship play out, includ-
ing, for example, gender and sexuality (e.g., Bell 1995; Chouinard 2004). In the case
of religion, Hemming (2015) has drawn on the work of Joppke (2007) and his three
dimensions of citizenship – status, rights, and identity – to interrogate the relation-
ship between religion and the everyday practices and discourses of citizenship.
Hemming (2015: 27) defines “religious citizenship” as: “the role of religion in
devising criteria for access to state or community membership, the political rights
and responsibilities attributed to particular religious groups within that membership,
and the religious aspects of collective social/cultural identity that influence
belonging.”
In the context of education, religious citizenship is therefore concerned with
religious influences on access to schooling, the ways in which particular religious
and nonreligious groups are recognized and accommodated within schools, and the
implications for pupil/parent identity and belonging. Fundamentally at stake here is
social justice and the extent to which educational arrangements privilege certain
groups over others. Evaluating these arrangements requires consideration of what
Kymlicka (2007) refers to as “the politics of identity” and “the politics of interest.”
Are there inequities in the extent to which different religious and nonreligious
identities are recognized through the types of schooling offered and the contents of
the curriculum? How far are the interests of different groups accommodated in
education through provision for diverse religious and nonreligious needs? What
are the effects of such arrangements on feelings of identity and belonging to school,
community, and society for members of different groups?
In order to investigate these issues, the chapter focuses on state-funded education
in England and Wales. Education is a devolved matter in the UK, with separate
systems operating in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. However, the
role of religion in schooling in England and Wales has always been quite similar,
reflecting the close links between the two education systems prior to Welsh devolu-
tion in 1999. Both systems include nondenominational schools and schools with a
religious character, which make up 34% of all state-maintained schools in England
and 16% in Wales (Long and Bolton 2017; Welsh Government 2018). The chapter
262 P. J. Hemming and E. Hailwood

considers aspects of education such as faith schools and pupil admissions, religious
education (RE) and festivals, collective worship and prayer, and pupil values and
interfaith relations with reference to the different roles played by various educational
actors. Collectively these aspects constitute an important dimension of the informal
citizenship education that state-funded schools in England and Wales provide to
pupils on the basis of their religion and belief.

Access: Faith Schools and Pupil Admissions

The importance of religion for access to education in England and Wales is apparent
in the case of schools with a religious character. Faith schools, as they are otherwise
known, are significant for religious citizenship because they attempt to recognize
and accommodate religious groups within the schooling system and thus potentially
encourage a wider sense of cultural belonging (Power and Taylor 2013). The
existence of faith schools in Britain is rooted in the historical involvement of the
Christian churches in the development of universal education and the “dual system”
of state-led and church-led schooling in the late nineteenth century (Baumfield
2003). After 1944, schools previously funded by religious bodies entered into a
formal partnership with the state, ensuring state-funded Anglican, Roman Catholic,
and a smaller number of Methodist and Jewish schools (Jackson 2001).
There are now a number of different types of state-maintained faith schools in
England and Wales, including voluntary controlled, voluntary aided, and foundation
schools. Voluntary controlled and foundation faith schools are fully funded by the
state, but maintain a distinctive religious ethos, with the latter enjoying greater
autonomy in relation to school governance. Voluntary aided faith schools are state-
funded but are expected to raise 10% of their own capital funding costs. They
maintain a distinctive religious ethos and enjoy greater autonomy in relation to
school governance, pupil admissions, and RE than voluntary controlled faith
schools. After 1999, applications to establish voluntary aided faith schools from
minority religious groups began to be accepted, and there are now a small number of
state-maintained Islamic, Sikh, Hindu, Greek Orthodox, and Seventh Day Adventist
schools (among others) in England (Long and Bolton 2017). The rolling out of
academies and free schools in England over the last decade or so has created the
potential for more schools with a religious character. Academies are independent,
state-funded schools, which are run by charitable trusts and sometimes sponsored by
other groups (including faith groups). Free schools are independent, state-funded
schools, which have been set up by parents, teachers, or other organizations (includ-
ing faith groups) to meet local demand. Both types of school receive their funding
directly from central government, rather than a local education authority. Faith-based
academies and free schools maintain a distinctive religious ethos and enjoy similar
privileges to voluntary aided faith schools regarding pupil admissions and RE.
The above arrangements have implications for the level of access that different
groups are granted to faith-based education. Firstly, the religious profile of schools
does not match that of the population, as represented in Table 1. In England, 99% of
18 Religious Citizenship in Schools in England and Wales: Responses to. . . 263

all state-maintained schools with a religious character are Christian-based and in

Wales this figure is 100% (Long and Bolton 2017; Welsh Government 2018).
However, the Census figures for 2011 highlight that only 87% of those with a
religion describe themselves as Christian with 13% identifying with a
non-Christian faith (Office for National Statistics 2015). As such, schools with a
minority religious character are significantly under-represented. Furthermore, 25%
of the population have no religion, but there is no dedicated category of schools to
cater for this group. Nondenominational schools are not technically secular (see
section on “Accommodation: Collective Worship and Prayer”) and typically cater
for pupils from a range of backgrounds.
Secondly, levels of access to faith-based schools are particularly dependent on
geography. As previously stated, 34% of all state-maintained schools in England
possess a religious character, but this figure is only 16% in Wales (Long and Bolton
2017; Welsh Government 2018). Church schools are distributed in certain ways due
to historical factors, such as the large numbers of Anglican schools in rural villages,
reflecting the church’s traditional mission to provide education for the whole parish
(Louden 2012) or the concentration of Roman Catholic schools in North West
England, due to the influx of Irish migrants to the region in past times (Flint
2007). The small numbers of state-maintained schools with a minority religious
character, such as Islam, are located in urban, metropolitan areas and hence only
accessible to families living nearby. Such arrangements reflect an unequal landscape
of schooling, where certain groups have more access to faith-based education than
others.
Pupil admissions procedures can also play a role in access to faith-based educa-
tion. Nondenominational schools cannot select pupils on the basis of faith, but some
schools with a religious character are permitted to do so. According to Allen and
West (2009, 2011), on aggregative, faith schools contribute to higher levels of ethnic
and religious segregation in the education system and disproportionately cater for
more affluent families. However, the picture is more complex than these patterns
suggest. The majority of local authorities prevent their voluntary controlled faith
schools from including religion on their admissions criteria, and some faith-based
academies are obliged to take a quota of pupils from other religious backgrounds
(Fair Admissions Campaign 2013). In the case of other types of faith school, under-
subscription may mean that admissions criteria do not come into operation, or
schools may choose not to select by faith in order to cater for a wider cross-section
of the community (e.g., Hemming 2018a). School admissions policies can, therefore,
reinforce the existing inequities that different groups experience in access to educa-
tion, but there are also instances where they can mitigate such inequities.
It is important to note that parents are not passive recipients of these processes.
Research has shown that some middle-class Christian parents are adept at utilizing
strategies to gain admission to high performing church schools, through what has
been referred to as the “cashing in” of their faith-based resources (Butler and
Hamnett 2012). This may involve reaffirming a latent religious affiliation or
recommencing church attendance at convenient moments, in order to obtain school
admissions references from church leaders. However, there is also evidence of other
264 P. J. Hemming and E. Hailwood

groups negotiating the school system to their benefit, despite starting from a less
privileged position in terms of access to faith-specific schooling provision. Muslim
parents often favor church schools over nondenominational schools, where places
are available, for the value they attach to religion (Scourfield et al. 2013). Similarly,
there is a range of reasons why nonreligious families might choose to send their
children to a school with a religious character where the option exists, including to
take advantage of local or high quality provision (Hemming and Roberts 2018).
The examples above further emphasize the contested nature of religious citizen-
ship in the context of access to schooling. Although the education systems in
England and Wales tend to privilege Christian groups, through access to dispropor-
tionately high numbers of church schools with a wider geographical distribution than
other faith schools, the situation is continuously negotiated and contested by a range
of actors. Faith schools themselves may reinforce or mitigate these inequities in
access through exclusive or inclusive use of their religious-based admissions criteria.
Parents from different religious and nonreligious groups may also negotiate admis-
sions requirements for their own ends, in order to try and gain access to more
desirable schools. Religious citizenship in education can therefore be understood
as a fluid and dynamic process involving a range of actors, rather than a fixed and
static contract between citizen and state.

Recognition: Religious Education and Festivals

RE is an important vehicle through which schools can recognize diversity of religion

and belief. In its current form, RE has been part of the curriculum in England and
Wales since 1988, although syllabus content is set at the local, rather than national
level. The subject has gradually evolved since 1944 from an approach based on
evangelistic Christian instruction to education about world religions (Conroy et al.
2013; Copley 1997). RE in nondenominational schools is expected to reflect the
predominantly Christian nature of the religious traditions in Britain but also include
the beliefs and practices of other principal religions represented nationally (National
Association of Teachers of Religious Education 2017). Faith schools may teach RE
in line with the beliefs of their religious denomination. However, voluntary con-
trolled and foundation schools with a religious character usually follow the locally
agreed syllabus. All parents have the right to withdraw their children from RE
lessons, although this is rarely enacted in practice (Richardson et al. 2013).
The above arrangements have implications for the kind of RE experience
received by pupils from different backgrounds. RE is widely viewed as important
for citizenship, with the potential to develop interfaith understanding, promote
common values, and tackle religious discrimination (Baumann 1996; Madge et al.
2014). Several research studies suggest that pupils value RE as an opportunity to
hear about different religions and worldviews from an objective viewpoint and may
feel more inspired to learn about their own faith or beliefs as a result (Francis and
Robbins 2011; Jackson 2012; McKenna et al. 2009). However, pupils often ask for a
18 Religious Citizenship in Schools in England and Wales: Responses to. . . 265

more diverse range of traditions to be taught in RE lessons, in schools both with and
without a religious character (Jackson 2004; Revell 2007).
The opportunity to study a broad range of religious traditions is usually reflected in
locally agreed RE syllabuses in England and Wales, but some researchers have expressed
concern about the tokenistic coverage of non-Christian faiths (Nesbitt 2004). Many
teachers lack confidence in delivering RE, often feeling they do not have adequate
knowledge of different faiths (Revell 2007). Moreover, pupils from minority groups
sometimes report that teachers do not accurately represent their religion in the
classroom (Ipgrave 1999; Moulin 2011). The inclusion of nonreligious worldviews
in RE has become increasingly common but is not yet as widespread as other
religious traditions (Watson 2010). Pupils from different religious and nonreligious
groups therefore experience differing levels of coverage of their particular religious
tradition or worldview in RE lessons. This has implications for citizenship, in terms
of whether or not particular groups feel recognized and accepted within the school
and wider community, as well as the extent to which pupils are adequately prepared
for life in a diverse, multifaith society.
Despite the above issues, parents and pupils can nevertheless become involved in
contesting RE arrangements. The interests of nonreligious groups were recently
given a boost by a legal judgment concerning the content of a new GCSE exam
syllabus for 14- to 16-year-olds. The ruling from the High Court stated that RE
provision should include teaching about nonreligious worldviews, such as human-
ism (R (Fox) v Secretary of State for Education [2015]). Similarly, pupils from
minority faith groups can also demonstrate resistance to RE teaching. Wilson (2015)
conducted research in a Church of England primary school with a diverse pupil
intake. He found that although learning about Christianity in RE was generally
acceptable to Muslim pupils, in some circumstances, pupils adopted forms of
resistant behavior when they were worried about contravening their own
faith, including fidgeting, not listening, and saying “stafallah” (meaning “Allah
forgive me”).
The celebration of religious festivals could also be understood as a type of
RE. Christmas, Easter, and Harvest Festival are generally marked with activities
and celebrations in schools in England and Wales (Nesbitt 2004). The ability of
minority pupils to participate in these Christian celebrations often depends on
whether they are perceived as religious or cultural, such as if they are held in a
church or school hall (Wilson 2015). Many schools also choose to mark minority
religious festivals such as Eid, Diwali, Hanukkah, and Vaisakhi (Keddie 2014;
Nesbitt 2004). It is widely viewed as appropriate to recognize non-Christian festivals
in an educational sense, during assemblies or classroom discussions (e.g., Catholic
Education Service 2008). Some schools go further and hold school-wide celebra-
tions by emphasizing the cultural aspects of festivals, such as telling stories and
sharing food, which can be popular with minority religious families. However, this
approach can also result in a backlash from some Christian parents, particularly in
church schools, who may view it as inappropriate (Hemming 2015).
In both the teaching of RE and the marking of religious festivals in schools,
Christianity enjoys a certain amount of privilege, even if this is sometimes
266 P. J. Hemming and E. Hailwood

understood in a cultural rather than a religious sense. Schools often find themselves
mediating between the desires of minority groups for more recognition of
non-Christian beliefs and festivals and the concerns of other parents that Christianity
should maintain its primacy in the curriculum and for school celebrations. This
typically involves attempting to strike an appropriate balance between the various
sets of interests represented among school stakeholders. At the root of these issues is
the struggle for proper recognition of different religious and nonreligious groups, a
key component of religious citizenship. The active role that schools, parents, and
pupils play in this process further underlines the fluid and contested nature of
religious citizenship in the context of education.

Accommodation: Collective Worship and Prayer

All schools in England and Wales are required to “promote the spiritual, moral,
social, and cultural development of pupils” (Estyn 2017; Ofsted 2017). However,
accommodating for the spiritual and cultural needs of minority groups sometimes
requires changes to existing provision in schools. One example of this is the daily act
of collective worship, which all schools are expected to provide. This should be of a
“wholly or mainly Christian character,” unless the school has applied for a special
exemption (Copley 2000). More commonly known as “assemblies,” such events
involve whole-school gatherings of pupils and teaching staff and can be important
for developing a shared identity within a school community (Hemming 2015).
Research indicates that both pupils and teachers largely support and enjoy the
collective, celebratory, and moral aspects of assemblies, such as the presentation
of awards for good work or the sharing of stories that promote desired behaviors
(Gill 2000a). However, teachers in schools with multifaith pupil intakes often view
the religious components of assemblies as more contentious (Gill 2000b).
The expectation that assemblies will include Christian worship presents a number
of difficulties for the accommodation of non-Christian pupils, especially as parents
rarely enact the right to withdraw their children (Richardson et al. 2013). Conse-
quently, many nondenominational schools no longer comply with the law, although
Christian-based collective worship is still commonly practiced in church schools
(Smith and Smith 2013). The inclusion of stories and other material from different
religious and nonreligious traditions are popular ways of approaching assemblies in
diverse contexts (Baumann 1996; Gill 2000b). Nondenominational schools tend to
emphasize common values and virtues rather than explicitly Christian messages
(Mogra 2017; Smith and Smith 2013). It is possible, therefore, for schools to balance
the requirements for collective worship set by the state, which predominantly favor
Christianity, with the spiritual and cultural needs of pupils from other religious and
nonreligious groups.
In contexts where Christian worship does feature in assembly proceedings, for
example, in church schools, problems can arise (Smith 2005). Parents from
non-Christian backgrounds sometimes express concerns about perceived indoctri-
nation (Weller et al. 2015), and pupils may find Christian worship alienating or
18 Religious Citizenship in Schools in England and Wales: Responses to. . . 267

difficult to engage with (Kay and Francis 2001; Scourfield et al. 2013). Such
instances may lead pupils to adopt creative responses, such as changing the words
of Christian prayers in their head to ensure they are consistent with their own faith
(Hemming 2015). While schools sometimes make provisions for minority religious
pupils, such as allowing them to sit quietly during Christian prayers, nonreligious
pupils do not always receive the same recognition, which can be uncomfortable if
they find prayer meaningless or insincere (Fancourt 2017; Hemming 2018b). Prayers
that express common values, avoid reference to a specific God, and/or provide
opportunities for nonreligious reflection are likely to be more accessible for pupils
from diverse backgrounds (Wilson 2015). However, schools will need to balance
the interests of different groups, as such approaches may lead to concerns from
Christian parents about the perceived dilution of Christian worship (Hemming 2015;
Nesbitt 2004).
There are a number of other spiritual and cultural needs that schools typically try
to accommodate, including prayer, dietary, and dress needs. Taking prayer as a case
study, research indicates that while many schools aim to provide for these needs
where possible, some could be more proactive in offering space and/or facilities such
as prayer mats and washing areas (Conroy et al. 2013). For example, Hemming
(2015) found that Muslim pupils in one multifaith primary school did not always feel
comfortable to pray during Ramadan because they did not have appropriate ways of
storing their prayer mats to ensure they remained clean. Berkley and Vij (2008) also
note the importance of accommodating the spiritual needs of nonreligious pupils,
who may benefit from the provision of spaces dedicated to reflection or meditation.
Despite its importance, providing for diverse prayer needs is not always easy. In
some circumstances, schools with a large proportion of pupils from a minority faith
may not have enough space to provide facilities for all to pray. Moreover, some
schools with a religious character do not feel it is in keeping with their ethos to
designate prayer facilities for other faiths (Wilson 2015). In such circumstances,
pupils sometimes adapt their prayer routines to fit around school hours. For example,
Muslim pupils may not strictly adhere to all five of their daily prayers or may “catch
up” when they return home (Wilson 2015). Hemming (2015) found that pupils may
even resort to praying in toilet cubicles due to the lack of provision made for prayer
space in schools. Such examples highlight the creative ways that pupils attempt to
negotiate school arrangements to provide for their spiritual and cultural needs.
This section has highlighted the contradictory nature of educational policy in
relation to religion and belief and some of the implications of these tensions for
religious citizenship. While one strand of policy requires schools to provide for
pupils’ spiritual, moral, social, and cultural development, regardless of background,
another demands daily assemblies that privilege Christian worship. These tensions
are further exacerbated by spatial and temporal constraints that impede the ability of
schools to adequately provide for issues such as minority religious prayer needs. As
a result, schools are not always able to fully accommodate the religious and
nonreligious needs of pupils to the satisfaction of all concerned, leading to unequal
experiences for different groups. In these circumstances, pupils may be compelled to
employ their own creative responses to the problematic situations they are presented
268 P. J. Hemming and E. Hailwood

with, further highlighting the role of multiple actors in the contestation and negoti-
ation of religious citizenship.

Belonging: Pupil Values and Interfaith Relations

Another aspect of religious citizenship in education is the extent to which schools

create an environment where pupils from different religious and nonreligious back-
grounds feel a sense of belonging as valued members of the school community and
interact harmoniously as a result. The legal and curriculum frameworks in England
and Wales are generally supportive of this aim, with the school inspectorates
assessing schools on issues such as valuing diversity, promoting respect and toler-
ance, and preventing bullying and discrimination (Estyn 2017; Ofsted 2017). In
England, schools are expected to promote “Fundamental British Values” including
“mutual respect for and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs and those
without faith” (Ofsted 2017: 40). The nonstatutory subject of Personal, Social,
Health and Economics Education (PSHE) or Personal and Social Education (PSE)
as it is known in Wales also plays a key role, covering topics such as the celebration
of difference (e.g., Welsh Assembly Government 2008).
Despite the above policy frameworks, research indicates that children from both
religious and nonreligious backgrounds often fear being negatively stereotyped or
experience bullying in school on the basis of their beliefs (e.g., Moulin 2015). A
survey conducted by Weller et al. (2015) found that a majority of survey respondents
from almost all religious groups experienced some unfair treatment from other pupils
at school because of their religion or worldview. Examples included name-calling,
social exclusion, and ridiculing beliefs. Some studies have found that pupils from
nonreligious backgrounds can be less tolerant of religious perspectives (McKenna
et al. 2009), but others have shown that nonreligious pupils can also be subjected to
prejudice from both teachers and peers (Madge et al. 2014). Such experiences may
contribute to informal religious segregation, given that friendship groups in diverse
schools are often relatively homogenous (Smith 2005).
One of the ways that schools can combat such experiences is through the values
they foster among pupils. There are variations in the extent to which schools in
England and Wales explicitly recognize diversity of religion and belief, but most
appear to encourage a climate of tolerance and respect for difference (e.g., Hemming
2015; Keddie 2014). There is also plenty of evidence in the research literature to
suggest that schools with a religious character actively educate pupils to respect
religious difference (Ipgrave 2016; Wilson 2015). However, there can be limits to the
effectiveness of schools in their promotion of these citizenship values. Despite its
“ethos of tolerance,” the school in Welply’s (2017) research inadvertently reinforced
division between pupils of different religious backgrounds due to a lack of oppor-
tunities for pupils to discuss, explore, and understand their differences and
commonalities.
The above example points to the need for schools to do more than simply promote
respectful attitudes and tolerance among pupils, instead creating the conditions for
18 Religious Citizenship in Schools in England and Wales: Responses to. . . 269

positive interfaith encounters and the prevention of bullying. Research shows that many
young people view schools as playing an important role in facilitating healthy interfaith
relations (Madge et al. 2014), but a significant proportion believe their schools
could do more to help different groups get along well together (Conroy et al. 2013).
The literature documents a number of approaches to building good interfaith rela-
tions in schools, including creating a climate where religious-based bullying is not
accepted and encouraging open discussion about different perspectives and common
values in RE and PSE/PSHE (Hemming 2015; Jackson 2004).
Schools with a less diverse pupil intake may have a more difficult task in
facilitating interfaith encounters. This is true of many schools, but particularly
those faith schools with religiously homogenous pupil intakes (Berkley and Vij
2008). Initiatives that build links between schools with different religious demo-
graphics, such as school “pairing” and joint activities, events, and visits, represent
one approach to this dilemma (e.g., Breen 2009). Technology can also be harnessed
for this purpose, by setting up email, instant messaging, and video conferencing
exchanges with other schools (e.g., Ipgrave 2009). If well managed, programs like
these have the potential to facilitate an increased understanding of others’ perspec-
tives. They may also help to develop a more inclusive type of religious citizenship
where pupils from all religious and nonreligious backgrounds feel a sense of
belonging to the school and the wider community. Such developments would align
well with wider social and public policy agendas in the UK that emphasize the need
for stronger interfaith relations and understanding among citizens and that view
schools as playing an important role in achieving this (e.g., Casey 2016).

Conclusion

This chapter has explored the issue of religious citizenship in schools in England and
Wales through a focus on faith schools and pupil admissions, RE and festivals,
collective worship and prayer, and pupil values and interfaith relations. Collectively
these aspects constitute an important dimension of the informal citizenship education
that schools provide to pupils on the basis of their religion and belief. By exploring
the existing literature on these topics, a number of crosscutting themes have emerged
that shed further light on religious citizenship in the context of education. They
underline the involvement of multiple actors in the fluid and contested nature of
religious citizenship, as well as its constitution through a range of everyday practices
and discourses.
The influence of the state on religious citizenship, through educational policies
and frameworks, is a central theme. There is a clear tension evident between
respecting Britain’s religious heritage through the privileging of Christianity and
ensuring fair treatment for minority religious and nonreligious groups through a
more neutral approach. This is reflected in the over-representation of Christian faith
schools and the prioritizing of Christianity in RE and collective worship on the one
hand, but the requirement to provide for the spiritual and cultural development of all
pupils and the role of PSE/PSHE and the inspectorates in valuing diversity of
270 P. J. Hemming and E. Hailwood

religion and belief on the other. Schools are then left to find an appropriate path
through these competing policy requirements.
The role of the school is therefore highly significant for the structuring of
religious citizenship. The decisions that faith schools make regarding pupil admis-
sions can reinforce or mitigate inequities in access to education. The religious
festivals that a school chooses to mark, and the way it chooses to mark them, can
have an impact on which groups feel recognized. The arrangements that schools
make for pupils’ prayer and reflection, and for collective worship, can determine
how well Christian, nonreligious, and pupils from minority faith backgrounds are
included and accommodated. The approach that schools take to promoting cohesive
values and facilitating meaningful encounters between different groups can influence
the extent to which pupils feel they belong to the school and wider community.
School policies and practices therefore have real implications for the educational
opportunities and experiences of different religious and nonreligious groups.
Schools and the state are not, however, the only agents involved in influencing
religious citizenship. Parents from minority groups are active in challenging ineq-
uities by making use of church schools for their own ends, lobbying for more diverse
representation of religious festivals and nonreligious traditions in RE, or pushing for
accommodations in collective worship and provision for pupils’ cultural and spiri-
tual needs. However, other groups of parents use their resources to try and maintain
Christian privilege, by ensuring access to high performing church schools or
questioning the celebration of non-Christian festivals and the “dilution” of Christian
worship in assemblies. Pupils also negotiate school arrangements through subtle
resistance in RE and collective worship, or creative responses to issues arising with
prayer. Pupils can also undermine school attempts to promote respect and tolerance
by participating in religious-based bullying. The challenge for schools is to find a
way to balance the needs and interests of parents and pupils from these different
groups, thus contributing to more inclusive forms of religious citizenship.

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Filipino Teachers’ Identity: Framed by
Community Engagements, Challenges for 19
Citizenship Education

Stephen Redillas

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 276
The Philippine Context of Citizenship Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277
Filipino Teachers’ Immersive Community Engagements: Re-imagining the Significance of
National Citizenship Education (NCE) as a Crucial Factor for Meaningful Global
Citizenship Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279
The Contribution of School-Community Linkage to Filipino Teachers’
Identity Formation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281
How the Colonizers’ Mandate for Teachers to Engage the Community Contributes
to a Distinct Notion of Citizenship Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 282
Forms of Contemporary Community Engagements, Social Identity, and
Citizenship Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283
Mandated to Engage the Community: An Identity Required to Deliver
Citizenship Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 284
Voluntary Engagements, Social Identity, and Citizenship Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287
Collective Militant, Progressive and Nationalistic Identity, Political Activism,
and Dissent as Articulation of Democratic Citizenship Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 288
Religious Affiliation and Cultural Leadership; Identity and Citizenship Education
as Social and Cultural Reproduction? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 290
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 292

Abstract
This chapter explores how contemporary Filipino teachers’ mandated and volun-
tary community engagements contribute to the construction of their social iden-
tity while positioning their role towards a culturally sensitive citizenship
education. The chapter first interrogates the state of citizenship education in the

S. Redillas (*)
University of Santo Tomas, Manila, Philippines
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 275
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_11
276 S. Redillas

Philippine context with particular attention to the tensions between global and
national citizenship education. It then articulates how Filipino teachers’ numer-
ous and continuous civil participation may contribute to the construction of their
social identity. The discussion then focuses on how identity, particularly the
manner by which this identity is constructed, influences how they deliver citi-
zenship education both in school and in their respective communities. This
analysis of teachers’ community engagements draws from data collected in my
earlier study entitled “Exploring Filipino teachers’ identity and community
engagements” (Redillas, Exploring Filipino teachers’ identity and community
engagements. Unpublished dissertation, University of South Australia, Adelaide,
2017). Through cursory historical analysis of how teachers’ community engage-
ments are implicated in a colonization agenda, this chapter establishes how
engrained teachers’ community engagements are in the Philippine culture. The
chapter proceeds to examine how teachers’ continuing community engagements
can position them as critical agents for citizenship education in Philippine society
and provide possible links between global and national citizenship education. The
chapter concludes by retracing the main arguments of how Filipino teachers’
community engagements facilitate the construction of their social identity and
how the experiences drawn from these civic participations contribute to organiz-
ing a culturally sensitive citizenship education.

Keywords
Teachers’ community engagements · Identity · Citizenship education · Schools
and communities

Introduction

While the majority of existing studies point to how curriculum and policy statements
are structured as the centerpiece of ongoing debates surrounding citizenship educa-
tion, the roles that Filipino teachers play in this discourse remains underexplored.
Specifically, the possible influence of the more than 800,000 cadre of Filipino private
and public-school teachers, strategically dispersed in almost every community of the
Philippine archipelago, cannot be underestimated. While the connection between
teachers and their communities is interrogated further in the sections below, it is
worth highlighting from the outset. One of the participants in the authors’ empirical
research, Crisanto (public school teacher from National Capital Region), offered the
following reflection on the ramification of a life lived in the very community where
they teach

If you live in the very same community where you teach, all the children from [the] school
see what you do most of the time, they can observe what you do even at home—for example,
it is unacceptable for teachers to be seen drinking in [a] public place or loitering around
inebriated.
19 Filipino Teachers’ Identity: Framed by Community Engagements. . . 277

Supported by Localization Act, a landmark legislation prioritizing the assignment

of teachers to schools where they are bona fide residents (Republic Act No. 8190),
teachers in the Philippines are prioritized to teach in the very community they spend
their day-to-day life. The repercussions of this law to how teachers’ identity is
constructed potentially extends to how they formally (in the classroom) and infor-
mally (in their respective communities) deliver citizenship education. Hence, the
prevalence and persistence of Filipino teachers’ community engagements that help
“cultivate the reality of citizenship as an immersion [or] ways of being in the world”
(DesRoches 2015, p. 548) can also help foster teachers’ capacity to creatively create
and re-create meaning in the world in the development of a critically informed and
actively engaged citizenry.
The aim of this chapter is to make and examine the link between community
engagements and teachers’ social identity in order (1) to understand how Filipino
teachers may positively contribute in the ongoing discourse on citizenship education
and (2) how they can possibly contribute in the organization and delivery of a more
critical, culturally sensitive yet global, citizenship education. The central argument
of this chapter is that the peculiar manner by which Filipino teachers engage their
respective communities – enforced by various legislations, strengthened through
cultural expectations and conditioned by historically exigencies – locates Filipino
teachers in the vortex of a critical praxis of citizenship education.
Pursuing the aim of this chapter involves two levels of analysis: historical and
current analysis. In the contemporary analysis section, I utilize a case study of
current Filipino teachers’ identities to examine and illustrate the arguments advanced
in this chapter. Specifically, the chapter is divided into six sections. In the first
section, I investigate the Philippine context of citizenship education. In the second,
teachers’ agency in linking national citizenship education and global citizenship
education is established. This second section is further elaborated by two subsections
which, respectively, explore the contribution of School-Community linkage to
Filipino teachers’ identity formation and analyze how Spanish and American colo-
nizers’ mandates for teachers to engage the community contribute to a distinct notion
of citizenship education. In the third section, I present the modalities of contempo-
rary Filipino teachers’ civic participations. This section provides the materials for the
analysis in the subsequent two sections. In the fourth section, I examine how
mandatory engagements are linked first to identity construction and second to
citizenship education. In the fifth section, the same links are explored through
teachers’ voluntary engagements in religious/cultural activities and political exer-
cises. The final section summarizes the key arguments and relates them to the main
goal of this chapter.

The Philippine Context of Citizenship Education

In recent years, citizenship education in the Philippines has been generally and
officially dominated by the desire to create global citizens. However, notwithstand-
ing the perception that the future of an individual state lies in strengthened
278 S. Redillas

collaboration, shared resources, and deeper intercultural understanding to form a

more global society, in the Philippines, education-based efforts around this project
have not gained the expected traction (UNESCO GEM Report 2016). Nonetheless,
efforts are not wanting in the pursuit of transforming Philippine society into a global
community via education. This observation is evident in the aggressiveness through
which the Philippine government pursued and ensured the passage of the widely
debated “Enhanced Basic Education Act of 2013,” popularly known as K-12 basic
education program. This law underscored the urgent and sustained aspiration for
membership in a globalized community as a global citizen through education.
Expectedly, education programs emanating from this law generally aim to nurture a
global orientation among students (De Los Reyes 2013) by organizing curriculum and
designing pedagogical strategies that help acquire requisite literacies for meaningful
participation in an interconnected world. In other words, the intent of the said law is to
educate Filipino students to be an “informed, engaged, and emphatic citizen”
(UNESCO 2014, p. 11) by obtaining literacy towards meaningful collaboration and
also acquiring skills for global competitiveness (Adarlo and Jackson 2017).
In the Philippine context, obtaining literacy for global citizenship through a
pedagogical route (Global Citizenship Education or GCE) inevitably reveals
untapped resources and exposes deficit conditions of Philippine education, particu-
larly in areas of policy enactment, curriculum, infrastructure, teacher training, and
professional development. Compounding these assessments are observations –
relevant to Philippine social condition – that most GCE programs only offer a
diluted concern for social justice (Davies 2017), thereby failing to “facilitate dia-
logue and deal with social justice issues essential to ameliorate social inequalities”
(Adarlo and Jackson 2017, p. 207). Furthermore, GCE has also been critiqued for an
inauthentic and uncritical understanding of how national identity and consciousness
may be forged alongside the global (Maca and Morris 2015), and for this reason
GCE has been assailed for offering ineffective strategies to significantly address the
present travails of Philippine citizenry (De Los Reyes 2013). For example, as a
country whose economy is impacted by remittances of overseas foreign workers
(OFW), the present form of GCE in the country appears inadequate to sustainably
address the causes of economic insecurity attendant to migration (Durant et al.
2013). Finally, the above assessments of how the present form of GCE in the
Philippines is being deployed indicate a crucial lack in critical understanding of
Filipino social and cultural values, particularly in its capacity to resist continuing
colonial impositions (see Enriquez 1992).
These fundamental deficiencies in GCE programs in the Philippines raise the
demand for a more critical understanding and culturally sustainable notion of GCE.
One possible way to acquire such an understanding is to re-examine the significance
of citizenship education at the national level (Goren and Yemini 2017) and to
specifically illuminate the capacity of national citizenship to provide cultural, social,
and historical context to any GCE projects. Translating this argument to the
Philippine context means highlighting the need to include discourse on the follow-
ing: education towards national identity (Maca and Morris 2015; Constantino 1970)
and social rights for migrants and transnational identities (Faist 2009; San Juan
19 Filipino Teachers’ Identity: Framed by Community Engagements. . . 279

2001); preparation of skills for disaster resiliency (Alcantara 2013); strengthening

regional (ASEAN) collaboration (Albia 2015); and critical appreciation of indige-
nous culture (Cornelio and de Castro 2016). I further argue that citizenship education
in the Philippines also needs to provide a space for discourse on current social issues
like extra judicial killings and human rights, labor contractualization and security of
tenure, peace and conflicts, environmental concerns, economic sustainability, polit-
ical dynasties, and conversion to federal form of government.
Notwithstanding the issues briefly set out here in regard to GCE, a culturally
sensitive global citizenship education remains as the most viable and sustainable tool
towards the creation of a global society. So, how can these tensions and debates be
addressed sufficiently to render viable forms of citizenship education in the Philip-
pines today? Exploring alternative routes (i.e., beside curriculum and policy enact-
ment) to arrive at culturally sensitive GCE involves a two-step process: first to
reposition the focus of discourse on citizenship education from the global to national
stage, and second, to explore what I have termed the “teacher factor,” or the relations
among Filipino teachers’ civic involvement, social identity, and citizenship
education.

Filipino Teachers’ Immersive Community Engagements:

Re-imagining the Significance of National Citizenship Education
(NCE) as a Crucial Factor for Meaningful Global Citizenship
Education

The definition of national citizenship education (NCE) utilized in this chapter is one
aimed at developing students’ capacity for active “participation in civil society,
community and/or political life, characterized by mutual respect and non-violence
and in accordance with human rights and democracy” (Hoskins and Van Nijlen
2006, p. 6). This notion of citizenship education contains the veiled suggestion that
the success of global citizenship education (GCE) hinges on a critical notion of NCE,
where local values are first nurtured, identities are constructed and respected, and
what constitutes a citizen of a nation is deeply interrogated and established. More
importantly, foregrounding these important elements of NCE counters the perception
that “national citizenship is now weakened [thereby] necessitating new forms of
education” (Davies et al. 2005). By taking a step back or by repositioning discourse
on citizenship education from the global to the national level, a space is created
wherein Filipino teachers’ role in citizenship education may be examined critically.
This argument anchors on the possible affordances of the manner by which Filipino
teachers are expected to engage their respective communities as part of their
professional identity. For instance, the project of becoming a global citizen might
need to be deferred or, temporarily backgrounded. This strategy provides a space to
interrogate Filipino national identity by examining how the colonial periods
impacted our present identity construct. It is in this space, that Filipino teachers
occupy a strategic position in their respective communities to facilitate this discourse
both in school and in the community. In other words, Filipino teachers’ multiple and
280 S. Redillas

chronic participation in civil society does not only contribute to the construction of
their social identity but also has the potential to form their notion of citizenship,
which in turn influences their pedagogical practices of citizenship education.
Filipino teachers are mandated to engage in and their respective communities as
part of their professional and citizenship identity (Losada 2010; Redillas 2017).
A provision in the Code of Ethics for Professional Teachers in the Philippines (PRC
2013) defines Filipino teachers’ civic participation. The most significant part of the
provision states that:

Every teacher is an intellectual leader in the community, especially in the barangay (village),
and shall welcome the opportunity to provide such leadership when needed, to extend
counselling services, as appropriate, and to actively be involved in matters affecting the
welfare of the people.

This encompassing policy designating teachers as “intellectual leaders” in their

respective communities indicates their social position therein, identifying possible
engagements and suggesting roles they ought to play. Adding to the weight of this
provision are various supporting legislations that are further strengthened by
cultural expectations. In a research entitled “Exploring Filipino teachers’ identity
and community engagements” (Redillas 2017), I obtained modalities of teachers’
year-round civic participation. One of the findings in that study indicates that
regularity of exposure to community activities and the inevitability of these
engagements contribute to Filipino teachers’ dispositions to habitually engage in
their respective communities. Furthermore, these legal cornerstones and the weight
of cultural and social expectations vest Filipino teachers with power to dispense
multiple roles in various fields – whether in cultural, political, religious, educa-
tional, and social domains. These legal and cultural foundations legitimize their
community engagements and function as resources that can be converted into
various forms of capital required in navigating the social world (Bourdieu 1986).
However, the value of these resources fluctuates depending on the demographics of
the field and agents upon which these capitals were utilized. For instance, the
recognition of teachers as intellectual leaders increases or diminishes depending on
the degree of diversity of the population in community (i.e., presence or absence of
other professionals and the level of involvement in community affairs). Further-
more, the volatility of the political climate and the hierarchical structure of their
religious affiliations determine their vulnerability to forms of violence, physical or
symbolic (Redillas 2017). The above discussion illustrates the problematic nature
of designating and identifying Filipino teachers as intellectual leaders in the
community, not only in constructing a collective identity but also in constituting
and delivering citizenship education.
On another level, the importance of examining Filipino teachers’ identity forma-
tion and how they deliver citizenship education relates to the inquiry of whether, in
the Philippine setting, teachers have practices that facilitate the reproduction of
hegemonic structures or whether they function as transformative intellectuals
19 Filipino Teachers’ Identity: Framed by Community Engagements. . . 281

(Muff and Bekerman 2017). The relevance of reflecting on this inquiry necessarily
draws attention not only to the potentiality of how Filipino teachers’ community
engagements facilitate the construction of their social identity but also on how their
community participation set the condition for how they deliver formal citizenship
lessons both in the classroom (see Abulon 2014; De Leon-Carillo 2007) and in their
respective communities (Waterson and Moffa 2016; Redillas 2017). Since the
literature just cited indicates that Filipino teachers’ professional practice includes
both school and community fields, these two fields, particularly the activities therein,
are spaces wherein teachers’ identity may be constructed. For this reason, it is
imperative to explore how the community, the school, and teachers are interlinked.

The Contribution of School-Community Linkage to Filipino Teachers’

Identity Formation

While the formal delivery of citizenship education transpires in school settings,

particularly in classrooms, the sphere in which learning is applied is the community.
For this reason, meaningful involvement in community activities requires that
teachers are equipped with the skills and literacies necessary to critically navigate
this social sphere. However, the potentiality of Filipino teachers’ roles in citizenship
education remains an unexplored area, as evidenced by the dearth of present
literature and the lack of professional development programs for teachers on how
to critically engage their respective communities. Notwithstanding this deficit, the
conception that Filipino teachers naturally engage their respective communities has
acquired a legitimacy as a taken for granted reality.
In the Philippine context, teachers’ civic participation is not exclusive to the
social and political activities of the community. On the contrary, they are involved in
different (i.e., cultural, religious, economic) aspects of community life. As a conse-
quence, Filipino teachers’ ubiquitous presence and active participation in civic
activities indicate that “schools are not simply part of the community [. . .] they
actively constitute it” (Lindsay 2014, p. 117). This appreciation of the relations
between school and community also furthers the long-standing claim that commu-
nity is a reservoir of resources [for teachers, students, and general citizenry] vital for
transformation in developing countries (Waterson and Moffa 2016). In other words,
the cultural knowledge teachers acquire in their civic participation can provide them
with insights on how to “guide classroom discussion for democratic citizenship
education” (Schuitema et al. 2018) and on how to address the observed widespread
civic disengagements among the youth (Print 2012).
This said, it is also important to note that Filipino teachers’ community engage-
ments are shaped by a colonial legacy. Hence, a deeper interrogation of the colonial
beginnings of contemporary forms of Filipino teachers’ community engagements is
shown in the succeeding section. This analysis exposes another layer of difficulty in
comprehending the complex but promising link between teachers’ identity, commu-
nity engagement, and citizenship education.
282 S. Redillas

How the Colonizers’ Mandate for Teachers to Engage the Community

Contributes to a Distinct Notion of Citizenship Education

While the main focus of this chapter centers on contemporary forms of civic participa-
tion, it is important to recognize that teachers’ education-mediated community engage-
ments were formally and institutionally configured during the Spanish and American
colonial periods. Deciphering the genesis of social phenomenon underscores the impor-
tance of historicity in making sense of contemporary social realities (Steinmetz 2011).
During these two influential colonial periods in Philippine history, teachers’ iden-
tity was distinguished between the colonizer as teachers and the local (Filipino
indigenous educator). However, regardless of their nationality, teachers in general
were required to engage in their respective communities whereby the objectives of
such participation conformed to that of the colonizers. Hence, Spanish colonizers (i.e.,
both civil officials and the missionaries/clergy) organized teachers’ community par-
ticipation mostly along religious objectives. As a consequence, since “Spanish edu-
cation was generally designed to convert the population to Catholicism and to
maintain (converts) in the faith” (Schwartz 1971, p. 203), teachers’ engagements
with the community were largely invested in the attainment of such an objective.
The attainment of this singular religious objective was further ensured through the use
of the visitas (chapels) both as a place of worship and as a classroom. Utilizing a
religious space for education shaped how religious instruction and basic education
(i.e., reading, writing, and arithmetic), as well as the identity of the missionary and the
teacher, were conflated to optimize the success of the colonial aim (i.e., conversion
into the Catholic faith). In contemporary times, while there are designated spaces for
each activity, Filipino teachers, particularly from private schools, continue to facilitate
the transmission of religious values. This is done specifically by expecting or requiring
Filipino teachers from these schools to disseminate the vision-mission of the institu-
tions they are affiliated with. It is in this sense that, in a predominantly Catholic
country, national citizenship education includes religious content in the curriculum and
requires teachers to practice a pedagogy aimed at instilling religious values.
Teachers’ civic participations during the American colonial period were more
ubiquitous and inserted not only in the religious domain but in all aspects of Filipino
life. In his book “The Philippine Islands” (Atkinson 1905, pp. 261–262), a
Thomasite (US school teachers sent to establish public schools in the Philippines)
by the name of Fred Atkinson summarized American teachers’ community roles
wherein they acted as:

conciliators of religious leaders, advisers to civil servants, advertisers of education, play-

wright, organizers, advocates, builders and a litany more [in order] to secure the loyalty of
the inhabitants to the sovereignty of the United States by implanting the ideals of western
civilization.

The main objective of their engagements was without doubt; “para capturar la
simpatiya del pueblo” (to capture the sympathy of the public) (Aldana 1949, p. 11). It
can be argued that the introduction of citizenship education, as we identify it now, entered
19 Filipino Teachers’ Identity: Framed by Community Engagements. . . 283

through the agency of American teachers and later, with and through their Filipino
counterparts. This project was accomplished by mandating public, free, and compulsory
education, which prioritized – within schools and communities – a democratic, liberal,
English language-mediated and capitalistic ideals, facilitated, in no small parts, by
teachers. Hence, it is tenable to trace the beginnings of citizenship education aimed at
developing a proactive democratic life [not only] in rural [but also in other] communities
(Waterson and Moffa 2016) to a period where teachers were utilized as instruments of
colonization in what is aptly termed as a “pedagogic invasion” (Roma-Sianturi 2009).
Since meaningful citizenship is formed through its links to history (Peterson et al.
2015), it is important to interrogate how these multiple community engagements
provide impetus to how Filipino teachers translate, read, and even resist the colonial
imprints. Doing so illuminates both how teachers comply to the impositions of these
regimes and suggests how they could have modified and even subverted the colo-
nizers’ practices. The importance of foregrounding how Filipino teachers construct
and assert their agency cannot be undervalued when set against a colonial society that
gives premium to unqualified obedience to the Catholic teaching (Spanish period) and
compliance with democratic ideals (American period). It is also important to interro-
gate whether the notions of citizenship education central to the colonial periods can be
regarded as a blessing or a curse. In other words, the ideals and values which form the
ethical aims of personhood and nationhood in the Philippines are deeply ensconced as
conversations with colonial experiences. Failure to see through the veneer of coloni-
zation will only sustain the suspicion that teachers are agents or simple ideological
“dupes” of national governments (Bon Yee Sim 2011). Additionally, indifference to
the historical genesis of Filipino teachers’ identity and community engagements will
only lend credence to the impression that citizenship education does not only perpet-
uate colonial forms of democracy but also utilizes civic participation to introduce
neoliberal ideas as contemporary forms of Western imperialism. Lastly, the signifi-
cance of recognizing colonial historical genesis of these practices rest on its capacity to
provide contemporary Filipino teachers with insights on how to untether our citizen-
ship education from colonial mentality by opening new standpoints – decolonial
pedagogical experience – for citizenship education (Nieto 2018).
This section has, briefly, established the genesis and practice of Filipino teachers’
community engagements during the two colonial periods, including how these
periods have helped to form the notion of citizenship. In the next section, the
contemporary modalities of teachers’ civic participation are explored. The analysis
focused on how this participation works to construct Filipino teachers’ contemporary
social identities and, in turn, how they practice citizenship education.

Forms of Contemporary Community Engagements, Social

Identity, and Citizenship Education

The provision in the Code of Ethics for Professional Teachers in the Philippines (PRC
2013) mandating Filipino teachers, from both private and public educational institutions,
to participate in civic activities generated diverse forms of culturally differentiated
284 S. Redillas

community engagements. Drawn from focus group discussions among public and
private school teachers from four rural areas and four urban centers, the table below
summarizes the events, occasions, social phenomena, and programs where Filipino
teachers are involved vis-à-vis their respective roles therein (Redillas 2017). Understand-
ing the forms and frequency of teachers’ participation deepens our comprehension of
how specific engagements define their identity as Filipino teachers. Moreover, examining
the nature of their contemporary civic participation reveals not only their substance but
also their contributions in organizing culturally sensitive citizenship education programs.
The general goal of any citizenship education is the increased “participation in
civil society, community and/or political life, characterized by mutual respect and
non-violence and in accordance with human rights and democracy” (Hoskins and
Van Nijlen 2006, p. 6). In the Philippine context, Filipino teachers can help obtain
these goals through their participation in cultural, social, political, and religious
activities of their respective communities. Consequently, these engagements become
spheres where contemporary issues (e.g., national identity and sovereignty; envi-
ronmental integrity and resiliency during calamities; political, economic, and social
reforms; migration and poverty issues; and various social justices) are discussed. The
following two sections illustrate how the practice of Filipino teachers’ contemporary
mandated and voluntary community engagements facilitate the construction of their
identity and the organization of culturally sensitive citizenship education program.

Mandated to Engage the Community: An Identity Required

to Deliver Citizenship Education

Filipino teachers’ civic participation as election officers, facilitators of Brigada

Eskwela program, and census enumerators derives authority from various laws and
institutional memoranda. (See Electoral Reform Act of 1987. [The Board of Inspec-
tors shall be composed of a chairman and two (2) members, one of whom shall be
designated as poll clerk, all of whom shall be public school teachers. In case there are
not enough public-school teachers, teachers in private schools [. . .] may be
appointed for election duty.] See Department of Education Order 24, s. 2008.
[This is a nationwide maintenance program that engages all education stakeholders
to contribute their time, efforts, and resources in ensuring that public schools are all
set in time for class opening. It is a week-long event where local communities,
parents, alumni, civic groups, local businesses, NGOs, private individuals, and even
teachers and students volunteer their time and skills to do minor to medium repairs
and maintenance work in the schools (DepED Order 24., s. 2008).] See Batas
Pambansa No. 72. [“Public school teachers shall be employed for enumeration
work and for such service shall be paid an honorarium as may be determined by
the National Census Coordinating Board v[. . .].”]). Even if these engagements are
prescribed by law, the weight of their obligatory nature varies. To illustrate, election
duty and involvement in Brigada Eskwela are indispensable duties for public-school
teachers. Census enumeration, on the other hand, started as mandatory for teachers
but gradually evolved into voluntary participation in some municipalities. It is
19 Filipino Teachers’ Identity: Framed by Community Engagements. . . 285

necessary to take note of these variances since the heterogeneity of how Filipino
teachers perform these mandates provides a basis in differentiating teachers’ identity
in their respective communities while serving as a principle of diversity in how
teachers construct notion and practice citizenship education. Furthermore, these
legal foundations tend to function as currencies valuable in navigating the social
and religious world and as a legitimating resource therein (Bourdieu 1991).
Filipino teachers’ identity and function as intellectual leaders in their respective
communities is evident through their civic engagements, which also serve to reinforce
their identification as representatives of the state. In turn, such engagement lends
credence to perceptions in communities that public school teachers are “agents
empowered to act in the name of the state [where they] routinely perform and reinforce
the authority of the state as citizens do by following state orders’ [thereby] inevitably
leading to the embodiment of civic engagement” (Chopra 2016, p. 1). The ramifica-
tions of the obligation to perform these civic roles, regardless of the political climate
and conditions of the community, are twofold. On one the hand, these engagements
expose teachers to violence, symbolic, or physical (e.g., reports of Filipino teachers
harrowing election-related experiences). On the other hand, these engagements legit-
imize their identity as intellectual leaders in their respective communities (e.g., through
their leadership roles in cultural activities of their community). This particular tension
does not only mirror how teachers’ social identity are constructed in these fields of
encounter but also indicates how these experiences become an embodied disposition
(see Bourdieu 1986; Grenfell 2014). In the form of embodied disposition, this practical
knowledge becomes both a mold and a tool in constructing notions of citizenship as a
practice of democratic participation in political exercises and in nurturing communal
collaboration. Furthermore, reminiscent of how religious spaces (i.e., visitas or
chapels) were used both as places of worship and education, and the use of classrooms
as venues for electoral processes and evacuation centers, further strengthens the link
between teachers’ identity, community, and citizenship education.
To obtain an understanding of the extent and the degree by which Filipino
teachers engage their respective communities as part of their everyday existence,
Table 1 also includes other mandatory forms of community engagements (i.e.,
programs and activities such as educational mapping, community extension services,
education and training, and community consultancy that create spaces for teachers’
engagement with members of their respective communities). While I establish how
these engagements contribute to the construction of Filipino teachers’ social identity,
in this chapter I argue that teachers’ experiences in these engagements can be
converted to funds of knowledge (González et al. 2006), the value of which cannot
be underestimated particularly in educating for democracy and democratic pro-
cesses, right of suffrage, governance, and collaboration. In other words, the same
engagements that construct Filipino teachers’ identity to their respective communi-
ties are the same activities that provide the content of citizenship education.
From various focus group sessions conducted by the author, teacher participants
explained that interactions with members of the community during these activities help
them nurture relationships among their neighbors, while at the same time, configuring
them to their fluctuating ascendant and subordinated positions in various fields of
286 S. Redillas

Table 1 Modalities of Filipino teachers’ contemporary community engagements

Events, occasions, phenomena,
programs Frequency Roles and functions
Mandated engagements
Local and national elections Every 3 or Mandated election duty as poll officer (chair or
6 years member of Board of Inspectors or Board of
Tellers)
Election-related social-cultural roles
(information dissemination, education of
voters, election observers)
Census Every Census enumerator (conduct house visits,
10 years interview, and data collectors)
Brigada Eskwela Annual Prepare the school/classroom for the coming
school year (solicit materials and assistance
from the community, coordinate with other
agencies for volunteer work, etc.)
Educational mapping Annual Conduct house-to-house campaign to promote
enrolment
Community extension services regular Join in private institutions’ community
activity extension program, e.g., medical missions,
relief operations, and teaching in the villages
Education and training Regular Conduct literacy programs, skills development
activity to out-of-school youths and senior citizens
Community consultant or Regular Adviser to youth groups, community sport
adviser activity programs, beautification and development of
the locality
Voluntary engagements
“Fiesta” (local celebrations) Annual In charge or part of program planning,
decorate, train participants, emcee, judge
pageants and contests, among others
Local politics Occasional Member of Lupon ng Barangay (village
council)
Officers and members of local Regular Officers of Parish Pastoral Council (PPC) and
church organizations and activity other organizations of different religious
committees affiliations
Social movement Regular As members of party list organizations, work
activity for teachers’ welfare and improvement of
educational system through political actions
Communication and liaison Occasional Coordinate with local agencies and
organizations during election, Brigada
Eskwela, fiestas, and other celebrations
Weddings and baptisms Occasional Stand as sponsor to former students and
people in the community during socio-
religious rites like weddings and baptisms
Financial resource Occasional Source of financial aid, no matter how meager,
and human resource in the community
Perceptions Expectations
Role model Teachers are expected to uphold socio-cultural
and ethical values and to transmit and instill
(continued)
19 Filipino Teachers’ Identity: Framed by Community Engagements. . . 287

Table 1 (continued)
Events, occasions, phenomena,
programs Frequency Roles and functions
the same to their students in the classroom and
in the community
As role models, teachers are often invited to be
a sponsor during social and religious rites like
baptisms and weddings
They are also expected to extend help, no
matter how meager it could be
Local intellectual There is an expectation for teachers to be
relatively knowledgeable about matters in the
community. As critical agents (for members of
unions and Alliance of Concerned Teachers),
an enlightened teacher is expected to possess
the skills to analyze and act on the socio-
political situation of and challenges in the
country
Use of school
Evacuation center Teachers perform various voluntary functions
to assist evacuees or refugees, using the
classrooms as temporary shelters
Voting precincts Local and national elections are typically held
in the school classrooms

community engagements. Therefore, the same community engagements that provide

avenues to confirm their ascendant position in the community also open them to possible
marginalization and other forms of violence. Hence, these dynamic, multiple, and
protracted modes of civic participation characterize citizenship as “relational, emotional,
embedded in power, and uncomfortable” (DesRoches 2015). On account of this com-
plex and fluid relations, teachers’ identity is configured differently in regard to the
degree of their experiences. By extension, the manner by which Filipino teachers
interpret and deliver the content of citizenship education programs is also differentiated.
In addition to mandatory community engagements, Filipino teachers also partic-
ipate voluntarily in various social, cultural, and religious undertakings. Conse-
quently, the voluntary character of their engagements sets the stage for different
modes of identity construction that, in turn, provide spaces and opportunities to
enrich the notion and delivery of citizenship education.

Voluntary Engagements, Social Identity, and Citizenship

Education

As just stated, Filipino teachers also voluntarily engage in their respective commu-
nities and actively participate in various activities therein. These unprescribed civic
participations are derived mainly from cultural and social expectations and religious
288 S. Redillas

affiliations and driven by economic exigencies. These engagements in turn create

culturally organized spaces for the construction of both teachers’ identity and
citizenship education. The following two subsections explore how this construction
is possible through Filipino teachers’ participation in the political arena as well as in
religious and cultural domains.

Collective Militant, Progressive and Nationalistic Identity, Political

Activism, and Dissent as Articulation of Democratic Citizenship
Education

Filipino teachers have found an avenue for augmented participation in politics

through membership in Party List or sectoral (political) parties formed to promote
proportional representation in the House of Representatives (Party-List System Act
1995). While there are several registered teachers’ “party list” groups with repre-
sentation in the lower house, in my research (Redillas 2017) I opted to examine
teachers’ participation in the party list Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT), as
they are regarded as a very progressive and militant group and also represent the
majority of public school teachers. My interview with Juaquin (public school teacher
and local officer of ACT) describes how participation in political and democratic
processes shapes their identity as progressive educators:

While we use the halls of the House of Representatives as a space for struggle, we are also
convinced that this avenue for critical negotiation with the government is ineffective without
the pressures exerted through street parliamentary actions. For instance, while ACT repre-
sentatives propose bills for salary increase, the urgency of these bills are not simply argued in
the halls of congress but in the streets where we hold rallies and demonstrations. If we do not
hold mass actions, the government is usually indifferent to our situations—they could not
care less. The street then is an important space for our struggle. It is there that media
broadcast our demands and other marginalized sectors sympathize with our fight.

How this form of progressive community engagement translates into citizenship

education as a form of dissent can be gleaned from Juaquin’s further elucidation of
their practices. For him, a distinguishing characteristic of ACT is how it is structured
to immediately respond to its members’ predicaments, particularly in providing them
legal support. He also emphasized that ACT members often include the education of
their students and parents on various current social issues and on the necessity of
their participation in this democratic process as part of their professional practice.
For example, Juaquin observes that parents and students wonder why teachers need
to participate in demonstrations and rallies. Responding to this query, he found it
necessary to explain to his students that authentic democracy provides a space where
citizens are free to articulate their views on social and political issues. He discusses
with the students in his class that social learning includes the formation of critical
dispositions as well as the development of students’ capacity to apply knowledge
learned in schools to social issues. For Juaquin, these dispositions can be facilitated
by participation in social processes (e.g., rallies and demonstrations). Expressing
19 Filipino Teachers’ Identity: Framed by Community Engagements. . . 289

dissent to government policies deemed detrimental to the general welfare contributes

to the development of what he termed as “mulat na magaaral” (eyes opened/with
critical consciousness/educated).
The notion of teacher as activist and militant was the most contentious discussion
point during the focus group sessions I conducted (Redillas 2017). The divisiveness
that activism causes suggests that militancy among the ranks of teachers is not yet
fully accepted. More senior teachers from rural provinces remain critical of teachers’
participation in this progressive movement. This contrary position was shared across
different focus groups. Reggie (a public-school teacher from northern province)
echoed this common sentiment:

The law requires that we (teachers) should be non-partisan. So how could we abide with this
provision when ACT is highly politicized? This dilemma is unsettling, and for this reason—
at least in this province—teachers are not that enthusiastic to become members of ACT.

More positive appreciation among early career teachers, particularly those from
urban centers, on teachers’ active participation in ACT underscores the link between
citizenship education and political activism (Stitzlein 2015). This link positions
teachers towards culture-permeated democratic citizenship education built on an
environment of discussion and dissent in addressing social issues (Abowitz and
Harnish 2006). In various focus group sessions conducted by the author, discussions
provided an insight as to how this is achieved. First, in the school setting, teachers
who were reprimanded for their participation in various election-related protests are
provided with legal support where they are shielded from arbitrary penalties. Par-
ticipants in the focus groups also observed that enlightened ACT members are more
aware of their rights. Hence, instead of capitulating immediately when confronted by
any accusation delivered through memoranda, they are now literate of various legal
remedies available to them. Second, in a larger social context, ACT as an organiza-
tion often advocates through different platforms in lobbying for teachers’ just
compensation, for the improvement of teaching conditions, for increases in educa-
tion budgets, etc. Third, ACT often joins forces with other Party Lists and margin-
alized groups to amplify their protest and dissent thereby magnifying the importance
of their cause.
Regardless of the benefits that teachers obtained through their active involvement
in party list organizations, educators’ participation in the political field remains a
divisive form of civic engagement. The one side of this divide is represented by
conservative teachers whose understanding of their identity and professional practice
is circumscribed within classroom spaces and consistent with Department of Edu-
cations’ policies. The other side is constituted by teachers who believe that mem-
bership in militant, progressive, and nationalistic political movements is a necessary
strategy to advance the causes of teachers. Regardless of their position in this debate,
teachers are inevitably caught in various power relations through their community
involvements. For this reason, teachers also assume contradictory roles, necessarily
locating them in the “conflicting demands of citizenship education, i.e., on the one
hand, alliance, obedience, and loyalty to the state, and on the other hand, the demand
290 S. Redillas

for critical thinking, pluralism, and transformation (Muff and Bekerman 2017).
Nonetheless, this contradictory appraisal of political activism among teachers does
not only provide a space for discourse on teachers’ identity but more importantly
potentially enriches the substance and provides context in organizing critical peda-
gogy in delivering citizenship education.
While Filipino teachers’ involvement in the political sphere is contentious, their
participation in cultural and religious activities remains to be the traditional and, it
would appear, more acceptable mode of civic involvement. In the next subsection, the
cultural and religious nature of teachers’ civic participation is scrutinized, and it is
argued that this mode of civic engagement reproduces the identity of Filipino teachers
as disengaged from political and social activities, on the one hand, and wherein they
are culturally expected to act more as vessels of traditional values, on the other hand.

Religious Affiliation and Cultural Leadership; Identity

and Citizenship Education as Social and Cultural Reproduction?

Perhaps the most common form of Filipino teachers’ voluntary community engage-
ments relates to their roles in various traditional cultural, social, and religious
activities, such as the ubiquitous annual fiestas (from village to municipality level)
where teachers typically organize and facilitate different forms of celebrations (e.g.,
town parades, pageants, community games). Their work in these cultural activities is
typical. In almost all of the focus group discussions in the author’s own research
(Redillas 2017), participants echoed common tasks, where they:

act as ‘consultant’, plan the cultural activities, function as program emcee, serve as judge in
pageants and various contests, coordinate the decoration of venues, chair the sports activ-
ities, prepare the students in their participation (street dancing, parade, presentations), and
officiate in various sports competitions.

The focus group discussions revealed that Filipino teachers’ roles in cultural
celebrations correlate with the heterogeneity of the community and are influenced by
the distance from urban centers. That is, the further the community is from urban
centers, the more prominent the roles that teachers assume in these communities
become. In addition, teachers are more likely to be the most numerous professionals
residing in more remote areas. This is evident in Lagring and Carmen’s (both public
school teachers from a rural municipality in the province of Isabela) description of
teachers’ indispensable role in the 2015 town fiesta parade and pageant:

99% percent of the activity this morning required the involvement of teachers. It is a town
fiesta that without the participations of the teachers, it will not push through (in the manner
that happened this morning) and perhaps. . . there will be no parade and show to watch.

Through voluntary and regular participation in these traditional activities,

teachers find space to develop what may be referred to as “practical skills and self-
19 Filipino Teachers’ Identity: Framed by Community Engagements. . . 291

efficacy [necessary] to interact with their immediate and wider communities”

(Hampden-Thomson et al. 2015). These literacies not only accrue to their identity
in the community but also enrich citizenship education, particularly in education for
national identity both in the classroom and in the community. To be more precise,
this self-efficacy takes the form of social and cultural capital and is a valuable social
currency in increasing civic participation among students and other community
members.
How does voluntary civic engagement contribute to the teachers’ understandings
and delivery of citizenship education? In these fields of engagements, where social
and cultural traditions are valued as sacred, teachers appear to act more as agents in
reproducing values that constitute their social and cultural identity. Teachers’ par-
ticipation in these activities allows them to comprehend relations of power and locate
their position in this structure. Additionally, teachers act as repository of these
traditions and educate their students and their community on the importance of
sustaining these practices. Unlike teachers’ participation in progressive political
organizations (i.e., ACT) where dissent, critical thinking, and participation in dem-
ocratic processes are necessary components, active participation in cultural activities
reflects a more conservative form of citizenship education where compliance to
traditional practices and obedience to norms and values are both modeled and highly
regarded. As reproducers of cultural values, this role appears to run counter to what
global citizenship education requires of teachers. For instance, while GCE values
cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism and diversity, teachers’ engagements in cultural
and religious activities – through which they act as role models to students and
families – typically require them to promote practices that will sustain traditional
cultural and social values as a constitutive element of the citizenry’s collective
identity and, together act therefore, as a particular form of national citizenship
education program.

Conclusion

This chapter has examined how Filipino teachers’ social identity is formed through
performance of their mandatory and voluntary civic roles in their respective com-
munities. Through these engagements, they are able to obtain authentic knowledge
and understanding of the community. The chapter has demonstrated the conceptual
links between Filipino teachers’ community engagements, the construction of their
social identity, and citizenship education.
In brief, the two “conceptual cradles” ensconced in this chapter are, first, that the
colonial experience has influenced teachers’ manner of educating for citizenship
through their own active engagement within their communities and, second, that the
relationship between the nation and citizenship evolved into modern project
underscored by contemporary modalities of their civic participation that has, for
some teachers, manifested in voluntary forms of critical citizenship. The chapter also
argued that in the same manner that the heterogeneity of Filipino teachers’ commu-
nity engagements constructs their identity in multiple and sometimes contrary
292 S. Redillas

modalities (e.g., as reproducers of cultural norms, agents of the state on the one hand,
and as militant and progressive professionals on the other), the manner through
which Filipino teachers constitute and model citizenship also varies.
The chapter sustained the notion that to be a Filipino teacher is not only to teach in
the convenience of the classrooms but also to engage in the complex world of their
respective communities. In addition, the plurality of the modes (i.e., community
engagements), by which Filipino teachers’ identity is constructed, also differentiates
their appraisal of their participations therein. By extension, the same diverse nature
of civic participation does not only illuminate the tensions between the traditional
teachers’ identity (i.e., classroom centered, typically compliant with education
policies and reproducer of the way things are) and emerging activist identity (i.e.,
progressive, militant and nationalist), but they also magnify the tension between
national citizenship and global citizenship.
The above discussions also reveal the manner by and through which Filipino
teachers’ collective identity is not only reproduced but also critically evaluated and
aligned with the aspirations of national citizenship education in educating for
national identity. In Philippine society, authentic forms of citizenship education
require a space that generates and respects cultural and social values. However, the
same space also needs to accommodate the development of Filipino citizens as
progressive, militant, and nationalistic. It can also be concluded that appraising
Filipino teachers’ community engagements increases the potential for accommodat-
ing discourse on both traditional and progressive values and issues, as well as for
exploring how citizenship education may be organized to include both national (e.g.,
national identity) and global (e.g., cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism)
components.

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The Role of the State and State Orthodoxy
in Citizenship and Education in China 20
Wing-Wah Law

Contents
Traditional Chinese Citizenship and Education Prior to the Socialist Chinese Republic . . . . . 298
Socialist Chinese Citizenship and Education in the People’s Republic of China . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 300
Conceptual Distinction Between Gongmin and Renmin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 300
The Fundamental Supremacy of the CPC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301
Development and Changes of Socialist Chinese Citizenship Framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 302
Socialist Education for Citizenship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305
Contentious Issues Confronting Chinese Citizenship and Education in China . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311

Abstract
This chapter draws on existing theoretical and empirical literature to examine
citizenship and education in China. The chapter broadly traces the intertwined
relationships between the state, its governing orthodoxy, citizenship, and educa-
tion for citizenship in China. The chapter argues that Chinese citizenship and
education for citizenship are situated and state-centric and can vary – and has
varied – with changes in political regimes and domestic and global contexts. The
state defines Chinese citizenship and education and selects the official orthodoxy
for state governance to legitimize its leadership and rationalize the precedence of
collective over individual interests. Education is more an instrument of citizen-
making than person-making and is used to promote the ruler’s orthodoxy and
values and foster an obedient citizenry for social and political stability, rather than
cultivating people to become more independent and autonomous.

W.-W. Law (*)

Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 297
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_16
298 W.-W. Law

Keywords
State · State orthodoxy · Chinese citizenship · Chinese education · China

This chapter draws on existing theoretical and empirical literature to examine

citizenship and education in China. Citizenship can be broadly seen as one’s
membership in a political community, involving “relationships between rights,
duties, participation, and identity” (Delanty 2000, p. 9). The state is responsible
for protecting its citizens and their rights, and in return citizens have certain
obligations – e.g., respect the law and pay taxes (Oltay 2017). Broadly speaking,
education has three main functions: preparing students as human capital for
economic development; socializing students into political, social, and cultural orders
and norms (citizen-making); and making students more independent and autono-
mous (person-making) (Biesta 2009).
China’s citizenship and education history spans three periods: ancient and
imperial China (pre-1911), the Republic of China (ROC) (1912–1949), and the
People’s Republic of China (PRC) (post-1949). This chapter examines mainly the
latter. It argues that despite changing political structures and leadership, Chinese
citizenship has remained situated and state-centric. The Chinese state defines state-
society relations, prescribes individuals’ membership, responsibilities, rights, and
participation, and stresses collective over individual interests. However, Chinese
citizenship can vary – and has varied – as a result of changing domestic and global
contexts as well as state leaders’ perceptions over time. In different periods, the
Chinese state adopted different orthodoxies to define state-society relations, legit-
imize its leadership, and maintain social order, using education to promote these
orthodoxies. Thus, the overall aim of the chapter is to examine existing literature to
explore the ways in which Chinese education is intertwined with the state and its
ideology and how education policy in China stresses citizen-making above person-
making.

Traditional Chinese Citizenship and Education Prior

to the Socialist Chinese Republic

In ancient/imperial China, society was paternalistic, hierarchical, and non-

egalitarian, its people owned and ruled by the emperor. Citizenship was mainly
Confucian-oriented. Since 134 BCE, Confucianism – which advocated a clear
social hierarchy subordinating son to father, wife to husband, and all to the
emperor (Mencius 2003) – was the official orthodoxy. The state utilized edu-
cation to promote Confucian values and foster obedient collective selves.
Traditional Chinese education emphasized Confucian classics and related
texts to inculcate loyalty, filial piety, and collectivism (Law 2016), as well as
to promote a harmonious, hierarchical society, and to cultivate moral citizens
20 The Role of the State and State Orthodoxy in Citizenship and. . . 299

(Chen 1986). Thus, education stressed citizen-making, rather than person-

making. This is, education focused on cultivating obedient citizens rather
than human beings with independent, critical thinking. Despite dynastical
changes, the relationship between the state, Confucianism, and education
maintained social stability for over two millennia (Law 2011) and shaped
Chinese citizenship and education by deifying the emperor and demanding
the people’s submission (Fu 1993).
Following China’s military defeats in the 1800s, Confucian-oriented education
was criticized for keeping China economically and technologically backward (Wang
1977), and its usefulness for developing a modern Chinese citizenry questioned
(Gray 1990). The late Qing dynasty was overthrown in the 1911 Revolution;
replacing the royal family with political parties did not, however, end the state-
ideology-education symbiosis.
In 1912, under Sun Yat-sen’s leadership, the Kuomintang (KMT) established
the ROC, adopting Sun’s (1981 [1906]) Three People’s Principles (Nationalism,
Democracy and the People’s Livelihood) as its governing orthodoxy and citizen-
ship framework. To restore and modernize China, Sun attempted to blend Confu-
cian values with Western ideals to create a constitutional republic wherein power
rested with the people. His proposed political framework synthesized the Western
tripartite model (executive, legislative, and judiciary powers) and traditional
Chinese powers (examination and control) (Meissner 2006), and advocated
democracy through local self-government. However, the KMT neither institution-
alized constitutional democracy nor tolerated pluralism. After Sun’s death, Chiang
Kai-Shek deified him to legitimize his succession and used Sun’s three principles
to monopolize political power and combat his main rival, the Communist Party
of China (CPC).
The KMT-led state used education to consolidate its leadership, develop China,
and shape Chinese citizenry. To foster modern citizens, the state followed the
American three-tiered public education model, emphasizing learning Chinese,
English, and science subjects. In 1923, it introduced China’s first Civics subject, to
help junior secondary students understand key constitutional and political principles
(Government of ROC 2001), allowing Civics textbook authors some flexibility in
their content selection and emphases.
However, after Chiang assumed power, education became overwhelmingly
KMT-oriented (Law 2011) and focused on eliminating communist influences
on campus and reinforcing students’ affiliation/identification with the KMT.
Specifically, it required educators to incorporate Sun’s principles within
all courses, to replace Civics with the KMT’s Political Doctrines, and to educate
students to obey the KMT. Schools organized student activities commemorating
Sun and praising the KMT. Confucian values that informed Sun’s principles –
propriety, rightness, integrity, and a sense of shame – were promoted as core
moral standards. However, the symbiosis between the KMT-led state, Sun’s
Principles, and education could not sustain the KMT’s rule, and the CPC
supplanted it in 1949.
300 W.-W. Law

Socialist Chinese Citizenship and Education in the People’s

Republic of China

Early Chinese communists rejected Confucius in favor of Engels, Marx, and Lenin.
Under Mao Zedong, the PRC upheld socialism as its state orthodoxy for constructing
a new socialist China. Per its Constitution, China is a “socialist state under
the people’s democratic dictatorship” (National People’s Congress (NPC) 2018).
However, different CPC leaders have interpreted socialism differently at different
stages of nation-(re)building, to reinforce the CPC’s political domination. The CPC
controls education to foster socialist Chinese citizenry under its leadership. Under-
standing the development of citizenship and education in socialist China requires
understanding the conceptual distinction between gongmin and renmin.

Conceptual Distinction Between Gongmin and Renmin

In post-1949 China, gongmin (citizens) and renmin (people) were different, yet
related concepts of state-society relations and individual’s membership, rights, and
responsibilities. In the 1900s, gongmin popularly referred to “legally recognized
members of nation-states” (Goldman and Perry 2002, p. 4); in the 1950s, gongmin
was incorporated into China’s Constitution to represent “citizens” (NPC 1954).
While gongmin included all legally recognized citizens, renmin referred to groups
who were politically acceptable to the CPC – e.g., patriots, workers, peasants, and
petty/national bourgeoisies (Yu 2002). Gongmin was mainly a legal concept,
whereas renmin was an ideo-political concept.
Gongmin is associated with rights and duties, but not power. In China’s Consti-
tution, citizens are individuals holding a PRC nationality and are equal before the
law (NPC 2018, Article 33). Citizens have the right to vote in and stand for election,
enjoy freedom of speech, press, assembly, association, process, demonstration,
religion, scientific research, and literary, artistic and cultural pursuits (Articles
34–36, 46). Their freedom, personal dignity, and right of abode are “inviolable”
(Articles 37–39). In 2004, the state enshrined in the Constitution that “the state
respects and preserves human rights” (Article 33). Privacy and freedom of corre-
spondence are protected (Article 40), and citizens may “criticize and make sugges-
tions regarding any state organ or functionary” and expose, complain, or charge “any
state organs or functionary for violation of the law or dereliction of duty” (Article
41). In exchange, Chinese citizens must receive an education, practice family
planning, rear their children, observe the Constitution and law, work and pay
taxes, perform military services, and safeguard national security, national unifica-
tion, and ethnic solidarity (Articles 42–56).
Renmin is more directly associated with China’s ideological and political founda-
tions and structure under the CPC, than with rights and duties. In China’s Constitution,
renmin (people) appears in the country’s name and the names of state organs (e.g.,
People’s Congresses) indicating these organs’ power derives from the people and is
used vis-à-vis the CPC (“people’s democratic dictatorship”) or China’s internal and
20 The Role of the State and State Orthodoxy in Citizenship and. . . 301

overseas adversaries (NPC 2018). Renmin have constitutional power to ensure the state
serves and answers to the “people.” Renmin’s dominance over and ideo-political
distinction from gongmin can be found in leaders’ speeches and reports. For example,
President Xi Jinping’s (2017) speech to the 19th National People’s Congress (NPC)
mentioned gongmin once (regarding the development of citizens’ civic and moral
qualities), but renmin over 200 times (usually vis-à-vis the CPC).

The Fundamental Supremacy of the CPC

CPC supremacy is the dominant feature of citizenship in China. Since 1949, the CPC
has maintained a one-party state (Kennedy 2014), partly by institutionalizing Con-
fucian paternalism to legitimize its rule (Fairbrother 2014). This section contends the
CPC has used six main strategies to minimize political challenges to its leadership
and to consolidate and sustain its political power.
Firstly, the CPC ideologically rationalizes concentrating popularly derived power
in the hands of a few leaders. Before 1949, CPC leaders like Liu Shaoqi (1940) and
Mao Zedong (1945) opposed the KMT’s “one-party dictatorship” and sought
a coalition government that would return power to the people, before finally
overthrowing the KMT. After 1949, the CPC adopted the principles of “people’s
democratic dictatorship” and “democratic centralism” (NPC 2018, Articles 1 and 3),
arguing that while all power belongs to the people, the NPC and local people’s
congresses are democratically selected to exercise it on their behalf (Article 2) and to
establish popularly responsible state organs (Article 3) “under the unified leadership
of the central authorities.” However, the unified leadership is centralized in the hands
of a very few top CPC leaders, such as the CPC’s secretary-general.
Constitutionally, China’s highest state organs are the NPC (legislative), State
Council (executive), and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference
(advisory). However, China’s most powerful supra-state organ is the CPC Politburo
Standing Committee, which leads and controls all state institutions. It is chaired by
the CPC Secretary-General and (currently) has six other senior party members. As
Secretary-General Xi Jinping (2017) asserted, building a great China and reviving
the Chinese nation requires strong CPC leadership, and for all people to unify under
the CPC’s central leadership.
Secondly, like the KMT’s Sun, CPC leaders appeal to popular support by regularly
reinterpreting socialism at different stages of China’s development and modernization.
Moreover, they enshrined these interpretations – from Mao Zedong Thought
(pre-1976) to Xi Jinping’s China Dream (NPC 2018) – in the Constitution as blue-
prints for constructing a socialist China. Xi’s China Dream, for example, includes
principles for nation-(re)building (prosperity, democracy, civility, and harmony),
social construction (freedom, equality, justice, and rule of law), and individual behav-
iors (patriotism, dedication, integrity, and friendship). One may question whether these
values are socialist; however, they indicate Chinese leaders’ intentions.
Thirdly, the CPC has suppressed interparty power struggles by recognizing only
the eight political parties that existed before 1949 (and prohibiting the formation of
302 W.-W. Law

new ones) and only allowing them to “participate in and deliberate on state affairs”
on the condition they accept CPC leadership (State Council 2007), and that the CPC
is China’s only legitimate leading and ruling party.
Fourthly, although Chinese citizens have rights to vote and stand for election (NPC
2018, Article 34), most are excluded from senior posts (e.g., President, NPC Chair-
person, Premier, Central Military Commission Chairperson), as these are reserved for
top CPC leaders, elected by the CPC National Congress (CPCNC). In 2017, the 19th
CPCNC’s 2280 carefully selected party delegates elected 204 CPC Central Committee
members, who elected 25 CPC Politburo members, who then elected seven Politburo
Standing Committee members and the CPC Secretary-General (Zhao et al. 2017).
Although the NPC technically elects and appoints state leaders (NPC 2018, Article
62), in March 2018, the CPC Central Committee nominated all candidates for the
2018–2023 term (Xinhua News Agency 2018), ensuring China’s key state positions
were overwhelmingly held by CPC members. The CPC’s Secretary-General is also
China’s President and Central Military Commission Chairperson. All ten current State
Council members are CPC members, as are the heads of all 26 ministries or ministry-
equivalent units. The Chairman of the NPC Standing Committee Council is a CPC
Politburo Standing Committee member; moreover, eight of 14 Council members are
CPC members, and six chairpersons of recognized non-CPC political parties under
CPC leadership (http://www.npc.gov.cn).
Fifthly, the CPC has integrated Party and state by embedding two lines of
authority (political and administrative) at all governance levels. The political line
monitors and ensures implementation of CPC ideology and policies and controls the
recruitment and appointment of personnel at the same or next-lower level, whereas
the administrative line oversees affairs within their jurisdiction (Xu 2016). The two
lines are not mutually exclusive, but are overwhelmingly intertwined, with the same
personnel often occupying institutions’ top political and administrative positions; of
China’s 26 state ministers, 19 are also party secretaries, and four are deputy party
secretaries (per ministry websites).
Sixthly, the CPC uses the law to consolidate its status as China’s ruling party.
After the turn of the century, China was one of very few countries still claiming to
have a socialist ruling party, and the CPC feared a crisis of leadership legitimacy, due
to its ideological mandate (Law 2011). The NPC (2004) thus amended the Consti-
tution to state that CPC-led multiparty cooperation “will exist and develop in China,”
without specifying for how long. In 2018, it further amended Constitution’s Article
1, establishing CPC leadership as the “most essential feature” of Chinese socialism
(NPC 2018), thus reifying the CPC’s sole-ruling-party status in perpetuity, and
outlawing any attempt to overthrow or transfer power with the CPC.

Development and Changes of Socialist Chinese Citizenship

Framework

Despite the CPC’s dominance and insistence, China is a “socialist” state, the
meaning of socialism varies at different stages of China’s development, as do such
20 The Role of the State and State Orthodoxy in Citizenship and. . . 303

citizenship elements as Chinese people’s relation to the world, markets, law, Chinese
culture, and civil society.
Mao’s socialist citizenship framework, which redefined Chinese people’s rela-
tionship to the world, the state, the market, and society, had three major features
(Law 2006). First, it was based on the CPC-led state’s dualist ideological worldview,
perceiving socialist countries as friends and capitalist countries as enemies, thus
limiting China’s diplomatic ties and its people’s international relationships and
exchanges.
Second, it was expected to help China transition from a semi-feudal, bourgeois
society into a socialist, utopian, classless society. To that end, the state eliminated
market forces, took ownership of all property and the means of production,
implemented a state-planned economy, diminished the role of law, adopted the
party line of class struggle, suppressed civil society, and downplayed Confucianism
and Chinese culture – thus depriving the Chinese people of rights and protections in
these domains.
Third, it was characterized by radical political mobilization campaigns. Chinese
people participate in mandatory nationwide movements to further the CPC’s political
agenda, including campaigns against counter-revolutionaries (1950–1953), the Anti-
rightist Movement (1957–1959), the Great Leap Forward (1958–1960), and the
Cultural Revolution (1966–1976).
After Mao’s death, in 1976, the socialist Chinese citizenship framework became
less restrictive. In 1978, the CPC-led state under Deng Xiaoping redefined its party
line to emphasize economic modernization and introduced the policy of economic
reform and opening to the world. Post-Mao China’s socialist Chinese citizenship
framework reintroduced five elements eschewed by Mao: expanded international
relations, reliance on market forces, the rule of law, traditional Chinese culture and
values, and civil society (Law 2011). These elements redefined Chinese people’s
interplay with foreign and domestic actors and gave rise to new issues and problems.
Firstly, China’s international relations expanded beyond the former socialist bloc to
include capitalist countries once deemed enemy states (e.g., Britain and the USA). It
allowed Chinese people to travel the world for business, education, cultural exchanges,
or tourism. China also dramatically increased its international political and economic
engagement (e.g., participating in Korean denuclearization and financially aiding
African countries), although some viewed this as a threat (Al-Rodhan 2007).
Secondly, the market became a significant element in redefining socialist citizen-
ship and in diversifying and redistributing power and resources, with the CPC-led
state increasingly relying on market principles and capitalist practices to reform
China’s economy. After serious ideological debate within the CPC, Deng Xiaoping
(1992) introduced a drastic ideological change, stating a market economy and central
planning could coexist in China, as China was at a primitive stage of socialism.
China now recognizes the importance of private ownership, and allows Chinese
people to invest and own property; some scholars (e.g., Xing and Shaw 2013) deem
this state-directed capitalism. However, market reforms have intensified competition
for resources, increased interpersonal and ethnic conflicts, and spawned numerous
moral and social problems (CPC Central Committee 2011). Moreover, China’s
304 W.-W. Law

growing upper and middle classes increasingly demand individual rights and have
increased expectations of the Chinese government (Pei 2016).
Thirdly, paralleling this was the reinstatement of the rule of law as a macrolevel
mechanism governing market forces and the relationships and practices arising
therefrom. Because the disastrous Cultural Revolution eviscerated China’s legal
system and judiciary, the CPC-led state had to rebuild its legislative and judiciary
systems (State Council 2011). In 1982, the NPC (1982) revised the Constitution to
enshrine the rule of law. Since then, old laws and regulations have been revised, and
new ones enacted. Law is now an external force regulating the behaviors of the
Chinese government and its people and balancing the legal rights and responsibil-
ities of different parties (Law 2011).
However, individuals’ rights remain inadequately enforced and protected, and
Chinese people’s constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of speech and assembly are
routinely suppressed (Feng 2017). For example, 2010 Nobel Peace Prize laureate
Liu Xiaobo, who called for political reform in his writings, was imprisoned for
subverting state power and the socialist system (Beijing No. 1 Intermediate People’s
Court 2009). Despite Liu’s 2017 death while in custody, his wife, Liu Xia, remains
under house arrest; this has infringed on her “inviolable” right to freedom (NPC
2018, Article 37). Lawyers defending political and social activists have also been
suppressed. For example, on 9 July, 2015, over 200 human rights lawyers and
activists were interrogated or arrested (Agence France-Presse 2018b), with some
being convicted of crimes and sentenced. As of April 2018, Wang Quanzhang,
charged with subversion of state power in the crackdown, has “disappeared” without
trial for over 1000 days. The authorities reportedly still block Wang’s wife and
family-appointed lawyer from reaching him (Agence France-Presse 2018b). These
events have led some countries to question China’s commitment to its constitution-
ally guaranteed human rights (e.g., U.S. Embassy and Consulates in China 2017).
Fourthly, Chinese culture and values, once downplayed, are now seen as key to
socialist Chinese citizenship and national identity (CPC Central Committee 2011).
Post-Mao CPC leaders have made use of traditional Chinese values and virtues as an
internal, impelling force supplementing the function of law by reshaping people’s
thinking and behaviors, reinforcing ethnic solidarity, and addressing moral and
social issues and problems socialism cannot.
More important, as the commitment to socialism has declined in China and
overseas, the CPC has repositioned itself within Chinese culture and civilization to
legitimize its continued leadership. Under Jiang Zemin (2001), the CPC claimed to
represent China’s advanced cultures. The CPC Central Committee (2011) even
claimed that the CPC had, since its founding, been the inheritor and promoter of
Chinese culture and developer of China’s advanced culture. The CPC also realizes
the soft power of Chinese culture in promoting China’s image and influence globally
– e.g., through Confucius Institutes in overseas universities. During the 2008 Beijing
Olympics and 2010 Shanghai World Exposition, China showcased Chinese culture
and civilization, not socialism. Likewise, in his speech to the 2018 Boao Forum for
Asia, Xi Jinping (2018) referenced five Chinese classical texts (including Laozi and
Xunzi), rather than Marx and Lenin, to explain China’s developments and
20 The Role of the State and State Orthodoxy in Citizenship and. . . 305

achievements since 1978. This raises the question of how relevant socialism is to
China, its development, and its leaders in the twenty-first century.
Fifthly, while still tightly controlled, civil society – as a realm of social relations,
public discourse, and participation – is an increasingly important element of
China’s new socialist citizenship (Law 2011). The Internet, mobile phones, and
social media have become important tools for daily communication, sharing
diverse views on public policy and affairs, expressing dissatisfaction, and calling
for social action – they have, in short, facilitated “societal pluralism” (Xing
and Shaw 2013, p. 107). Recognizing this, the state increasingly uses social media
to explain its policies and solicit popular support, instead of large-scale political
mobilization campaigns.
However, the CPC-led state under Xi Jinping began to use state security and
national solidarity to justify greater control over civil society. In 2016, it began
requiring overseas NGOs operated in China to register with, secure approval from,
and be overseen by the Ministry of Public Security and local police departments
(NPC Standing Committee 2016b). Although the law welcomes “friendly” interna-
tional NGOs, it could suppress “hostile” ones (Feng 2017).
Cyberspace is no exception to the CPC-led state’s increased control. The Cyber
Security Law requires netizens to use their real name and information during real-
time communications and Internet service providers to provide the state with users’
personal information and stop or restrict services during ad hoc social security events
(NPC Standing Committee 2016a). In 2017, the CPC-led state cracked down on
virtual private networks (VPNs) used by Chinese netizens (and China-based foreign
companies) to access global websites (e.g., Facebook, Google) blocked by China’s
Great Firewall. China’s domestic social networking websites (e.g., Weibo) were
asked to remove vulgar and unhealthy contents, and some popular news apps (e.g.,
Jinren Toutao and Tencent) were removed from app stores for 3 weeks, as a penalty
for previously allowing users to post contents in conflict with CPC-prescribed
socialist values (Agence France-Presse 2018a). Jinren Toutao’s chief executive
publicly apologized for ignoring “socialist core values” and promised increase
content censorship (Lau 2018). Chinese authorities also asked global publishers to
deny Chinese portals access to articles deemed politically sensitive (Bland 2017;
Cambridge University Press 2017). Similarly, religion is subject to increased polit-
ical control, with thousands of crosses being removed from churches
(Congressional-Executive Commission on China 2017), religious bodies having to
apply to local authorities 30 days in advance for permission to hold large-scale
religious activities, and prohibitions on overseas travel for religious training, con-
ferences, and activities (State Council 2017).

Socialist Education for Citizenship

Since 1949, education in the PRC has embodied the ruling elite’s political will and
has been used as an agent of socialization to promote the CPC-led state’s orthodoxy
and socialist citizenship, and maintain its leadership, through four main strategies.
306 W.-W. Law

Firstly, the CPC-led state has legislated the embedding of its political will in
education and has prescribed sociopolitical values to be fostered to develop a
socialist citizenry. Education is explicitly entrusted with two nation-(re)building
tasks: equipping students for national development and modernization (economic
task) and training students to be “builders and successors of socialism” (political
task) (NPC 2015). According to its Education Law, China’s education is to be guided
by Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong’s Thought, and theories of Chinese socialism
(NPC 2015). Public and private schools and tertiary institutions have the constitu-
tional responsibility of fostering state-prescribed sociopolitical values: “five loves”
(loving the nation, the people, labor, science, and socialism) for China’s develop-
ment and modernization, and “five-isms” (patriotism, collectivism, internationalism,
communism, and dialectical and historical materialism) to fight “capitalist, feudal
and other decadent ideas” (NPC 2018, Article 24). The 2018 Constitution deems
these “socialist core values,” and the 2015 Education Law tasks education with
reinforcing students’ consciousness of them (NPC 2015). This reflects that using
education to foster modern citizens is important to the development of socialist
politics and a harmonious society and cultivating human capital for modernization
(Chuanbao Tan 2014).
Secondly, like other state institutions, universities and schools feature a dual
leadership system (political and administrative) under the president/principal respon-
sibility system. For example, in Peking University (China’s oldest and most impor-
tant university), the university party secretary oversees political work, whereas
the university president (also deputy university party secretary) oversees adminis-
trative affairs. Peking University’s charter vests most governing power in the Peking
University Party Committee, which is responsible for implementing the CPC’s
party line, policies, and decisions (Peking University 2014). The charter decides
university structure, reform, and development and chooses key personnel.
In comparison, Peking University’s president’s power is largely limited to daily
university operation, recruiting/dismissing staff, managing students, and drafting
university development plans. Similar dual leadership is institutionalized in
schools (Xu 2016).
Thirdly, since the 1950s, the PRC has adopted a cross-curriculum approach to
teaching socialist orthodoxy and political positions, through such subjects as Chi-
nese Language, Chinese History, Geography, Music, and compulsory political
education. In September 2017, the latter subject was renamed Ethics and Law
(daode yu fazhi). University students must also pass political courses (e.g., Principles
of Marxism, Mao Zedong Thought) for graduation, as must school students if they
wish to continue to the next level of education.
Interestingly, during Mao’s period (1949–1976), school curricula emphasized
collectivistic selves rather than individuality, to cultivate “new socialist persons”
who were both “red” (allowing socialist ideology to command their lives) and
“expert” (having academic knowledge and technical skills for China’s socialist
modernization) (Law 2011). Curricula promoted the superiority of socialism over
capitalism and the CPC’s dualist worldview of socialist countries as friends and
capitalist countries as enemies. Chinese culture was downplayed and criticized.
20 The Role of the State and State Orthodoxy in Citizenship and. . . 307

During the Cultural Revolution, education was severely disrupted, and Mao’s
thoughts upheld as the highest knowledge.
Under Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao (1980s – early 2010s), school
curricula were less ideologically restrictive, both to help students adapt to “primitive
socialism” and to reflect leaders’ varied interpretations of Chinese socialism. In the
1990s, China began to help students transition to a socialist market economy. Per
Lee and Ho (2008), China’s citizenship education emphasized students’ personal
growth and psychological capacity; ethics in family, occupation, and society; and
global outlook and awareness. In the early 2000s, the state began to gradually extend
the learning of English from junior secondary one to primary three, and even primary
one in such developed cities as Shanghai. Lee and Ho (2008) saw these changes as
depoliticizing education.
However, the CPC-led state has not abandoned education’s citizen-making func-
tion in fostering modern socialist citizenry. The 2002 revised citizenship curriculum
continues to promote CPC political views and positions (Ministry of Education
2002). As part of the CPC’s repositioning of Chinese culture, students were encour-
aged to study past Chinese civilization and culture and their global contributions.
Students were reminded of China’s national humiliation by foreign powers, and how
the CPC had helped save China from foreign encroachments. Although the CPC-led
state no longer mentioned socialism’s superiority over capitalism, it encouraged
students’ pride in China’s achievements under the CPC leadership and fostered their
enthusiasm and love for the CPC. Moreover, as in Mao’s period, students were
required to learn and to be tested on CPC leaders’ theories, important statements,
policies, and socialist values. Although students learned more about foreign coun-
tries and cultures, such learning still highlighted China’s role in and engagement
with the world (Law 2011).
Compared to his immediate predecessors, Xi Jinping has more tightly controlled
education’s ideo-political function of sustaining the CPC’s leadership in the twenty-
first century. As one deputy minister of education explained, education is an impor-
tant means to help students strengthen their fundamental understanding of China
(dahao zhongguo dise) and to transplant “red DNA” (hongse jiyin) into them so they
can resist ideological infiltration by adversarial forces in increasingly complicated
domestic and global contexts (Chang Tan and Yang 2017). Education has been given
two specific political tasks – to strengthen the CPC leadership, fully implement its
education policies, and ensure schools are strong bases of CPC support; and to
cultivate students’ love of the CPC, the nation, and its people, and their understand-
ing of, identification with, and support for the state’s political system (Ministry of
Education 2017).
To that end, in 2016, the CPC Central Committee and State Council issued
a document (Opinions on the Strengthening and Improvement of Textbooks for
Universities, Secondary Schools and Primary Schools) demanding school and
university textbooks be revised to ensure their correct political orientation (Fan
2016). By early 2017, the Ministry of Education completed its revision of textbooks
for three primary and junior secondary school subjects deemed most related to the
CPC’s ideology and ethnic identification – Chinese Language, Chinese History, and
308 W.-W. Law

Ethics and Law. The major textbook amendments included increased learning
contents about Chinese cultural traditions, China’s revolutionary traditions (partic-
ularly CPC heroes and red classics), state sovereignty, education in law, ethnic
solidary, and understanding the world. These textbooks began to be used in schools
in September 2017.
Fourthly, the CPC-led state uses extracurricular activities and national civic
rituals to enhance students’ national identity and reinforce their affiliation with the
CPC. The National Flag Law requires primary and secondary schools to conduct a
weekly flag-raising ceremony in which the national anthem is played or sung (NPC
1990). China’s current national flag is CPC-specific; its red color symbolizes the
spirit of socialist revolution, with five stars representing the CPC (the largest star),
the working class, peasants, urban petty bourgeoisie, and national bourgeoisie,
arranged to symbolize the unity of the people under CPC leadership. In 2017, the
NPC Standing Committee (2017) passed the National Anthem Law, requiring
primary and secondary school students to learn the national anthem’s background
and spirit and sing it in a solemn ritual as part of their patriotic education.
Moreover, since its assumption of power in 1949, the CPC has established and
developed two important political leagues on campus to help foster students’
affiliation and identification with the CPC. The Young Pioneers is for students
(aged 6–14) in primary schools and junior secondary schools to learn
socialism and become a preparatory team for constructing socialist undertakings
(China Young Pioneers National Congress 2005). The league’s anthem is: We
are Communist Successors. Although not CPC members, Young Pioneers
must swear they will “enthusiastically love the Communist Party of China, the
nation, and people. . . and prepare to contribute to the communist undertaking”
(Article 12). When asked on important occasions about whether they are
preparing to strive for socialist undertakings, young pioneers are required to respond,
“Always preparing” (Article 9).
The second on-campus political league, China Communist Youth League
(CCYL), targets students (aged 15–27) in senior secondary schools, colleges, and
universities. CCYL is seen as a cradle for future state officials; President Hu Jintao
(2003–2012) and Premier Li Keqiang (2003 – present) are former CCYL leaders. In
the CPC’s structure, the CCYL’s political status is very high, as its central committee
is under the direct leadership of the CPC Central Committee. The number of CCYL
members increased to 87.5 million in 2015, from 78.6 million (of which 51.3% were
students) in 2008 (CCYL 2009; Xinhua News Agency 2016). The CPC has high
political expectation of CCYL members, regarding it as the CPC’s “assistant and
reserved army” and a place for young people to learn and practice Chinese socialism
and communism (CYCL National Congress 2008). CCYL members are required to
“resolutely support” the CPC’s manifesto, unswervingly hew CPC’s party line, and
strive for the final realization of communism.
All this suggests that Chinese education and citizenship education have become
the embodiment of the CPC’s political will and an important ideo-political instru-
ment with which to consolidate and sustain its leadership. The CPC-dominated state
and Chinese socialism, as the state orthodoxy, have played important roles in
20 The Role of the State and State Orthodoxy in Citizenship and. . . 309

defining and shaping modern Chinese citizenry for the last seven decades. As such,
the future of the CPC and Chinese socialism, as examined in the next section, could
be critical to the future of Chinese citizenship and education for citizenship in the
twenty-first century.

Contentious Issues Confronting Chinese Citizenship

and Education in China

China has made significant changes in Chinese citizenship and education for citi-
zenship for nation-(re)building. However, the more China opens to and engages with
the world, the more the CPC leadership relies on China-specific elements to define
China’s national identity and the tighter its political and ideological control of
Chinese society and education. China faces three contentious issues in making
modern Chinese citizenry in the twenty-first century: power monopolization and
participatory citizenship; the relevance of socialism to a rising China; and education
for citizen-making or person-making.
The first concerns who governs and who is governed and how the latter can
participate in governance and be protected from the former’s misuse or abuse of
power. Aside from Taiwan’s democratization since 2000 (Law 2004), no Chinese
society has peacefully transferred power between political parties, which Huntington
(1991) called a minimal indicator of a fairly well-established democracy. The 1911
revolution heralded the beginning of party-based governance, and, like the power
transfer from the KMT to the CPC, was achieved through bloodshed and death.
Despite having urged the KMT to abandon one-party dictatorship and share power,
the CPC has, since 1949, maintained a similar model of party-dominated gover-
nance, jealously guarding its power against other political parties.
Does China need an inter-party power transfer in its leadership and governance,
particularly when China is growing stronger and rising as a world power? The CPC’s
answer is clearly no; thus, it has institutionalized inequality in state structures to
monopolize power and minimize political competition. In 2018, the CPC Central
Committee (2018) reformed state institutions to allow the CPC to lead all aspects of
Chinese life, including government, the military, education, and society. The CPC
has actively suppressed groups and activities it deems challenging to its leadership,
and current CPC leaders argue for strong CPC leadership in China’s national
development, national security, and rejuvenation in the world.
Since the 1978 policy of economic reform and opening to the world, some
elements of socialist Chinese citizenship have changed significantly, including
individuals’ relationships with the market, law, and Chinese culture. Chinese society,
through technology and social media, has become increasingly pluralistic and
diversified – except in its political landscape. Chinese people’s needs have grown,
as have their expectations of and demands on the Chinese government, and their
desire for participatory citizenship (Woodman and Guo 2017). As shown by the
example of Liu Xiaobo, suppression, this author believes, may silence people’s
voices, but cannot end their thoughts of freedom and liberty. The CPC-led state
310 W.-W. Law

should embrace its constitutional responsibility to protect its people’s rights and
freedoms and remember and reestablish the CPC’s original mission (buwang chuxin)
of sharing power with and governing through the people (rather than dictating in
their name).
The second issue concerns the relevance of socialism to China’s development and
the needs of its people. Chinese rulers have not abandoned the country’s millennia-
old tradition of adopting a specific school of thought or ideology – Confucianism in
imperial China, Sun Yat-sen’s Three People’s Principles in the ROC, and socialism
in the PRC – to guide and shape the state’s structure and governance and legitimize
their leadership. However, since the 1990s, the CPC has faced a dilemma between its
political orthodoxy that only socialism could save China, and the practical reality
that only China could save socialism. Thus, CPC leaders have constantly adapted
socialism to suit changing conditions and needs at different stages of China’s nation-
(re)building. The CPC has used China’s primitive stage of socialism and socialism
with Chinese characteristics to rationalize its drastic ideological shift in using market
forces to allocate resources, reinforce the role of law, and tolerate the emergence of
social classes.
To preserve its ideological mandate, CPC-governed China tried to make Marxism
more relevant by establishing Marxist institutes in universities and republishing
writings on Marxism. Simultaneously, the CPC created a cultural mandate for its
leadership by reinstating traditional Chinese culture and encouraging people to
learn and appreciate Chinese culture and civilization. It has made more efforts
at promoting Chinese culture and civilization than at promoting Marxism and
socialism, suggesting its efforts are more about China saving socialism, than
about socialism saving China, and that the CPC needs socialism more than
the Chinese people do.
The third controversial issue is the tension between citizen-making and person-
making (Law 2017). Chinese education has been severely criticized for being an
instrument of social and political forces, failing to help students become autono-
mous persons, and not developing students’ creativity and ability to innovate and
think independently and critically (Zhao and Deng 2016). In recent curriculum
reforms, China’s Ministry of Education (2012) admitted this hindered students
from handling the challenges of globalization and assigned education two
contrasting tasks: to help students learn CPC-prescribed values and be patriotic,
and to enable them to inquire, think independently, and examine issues from
multiple perspectives.
It remains to be seen how these two contrasting tasks will be balanced. To foster
autonomous persons, some propose a return to Confucian pedagogy and self-
cultivation to help students become autonomous persons (Wu 2014), and nurture
their capacity for independent critical thought (Zhao 2016). However, the CPC
instead uses Confucianism as a cultural mandate for its continued leadership and
domination. Despite calls for individualism and self-making (Woodman and Guo
2017), the PRC under Xi Jinping has tightened, rather than loosened, its ideological
grip on state institutions, education, society, and cyberspace, emphasizing the CPC’s
leadership.
20 The Role of the State and State Orthodoxy in Citizenship and. . . 311

Conclusion

This chapter has broadly traced the intertwined relations between the state, its
governing orthodoxy, and education in imperial China, the ROC, and the PRC. It
has demonstrated Chinese citizenship is situated and can vary with changes in
political regimes and domestic/global contexts. Despite changes of dynasty or ruling
party, Chinese citizenship is state-centric, rather than people- or citizen-oriented. The
state defines Chinese citizenship and education and selects the official orthodoxy for
state governance to legitimize its leadership and rationalize the precedence of
collective over individual interests. Education is more an instrument of citizen-
making than person-making and is used to promote the ruler’s orthodoxy and values
and foster an obedient citizenry for social and political stability. This symbiosis of
state, state orthodoxy, and education is a cultural tradition, and unlikely to change
soon. The future of Chinese citizenship and education for citizenship depends on the
CPC’s future, who its leaders will be, and their responses to changing domestic and
global contexts in the twenty-first century.

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Citizenship Education in the Republic
of Ireland: Plus ça Change? 21
Audrey Bryan

Contents
Introduction: Citizenship Education in Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 316
A Brief History of Citizenship Education in the Republic of Ireland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317
Citizenship Education as a “Cinderella Subject” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319
Citizenship-as-Responsibilization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321
The Citizenship-as-Well-being Discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323
Concluding Comments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325

Abstract
This chapter presents a critical overview of the literature concerning the reception
and content of citizenship education which has been taught as a compulsory
subject to lower-secondary level students in Irish second-level schools since the
late 1990s in the form of Civic, Social and Political Education (CSPE). It seeks to
illuminate the “placebo” function that citizenship education serves (Gillborn,
Educ Citizenship Soc Justice 1:83–104, 2006). While ostensibly concerned
with enabling young people to come to a deeper understanding of social and
global injustice and empowering them to take action against these injustices, it
presents evidence to suggest that CSPE works to constrain young people’s
imagination about what is possible and how they might engage in struggle for
a more egalitarian world (Kennelly, Citizen youth: culture, activism and agency
in a neoliberal era. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2011). The chapter also
interrogates the recent reframing of citizenship within a newly foregrounded
well-being discourse in contemporary educational policy, paying particular
attention to the ideological work performed by the civic dimensions of a newly
implemented well-being program in Irish schools. Specifically, it is argued that
A. Bryan (*)
School of Human Development, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 315
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_54
316 A. Bryan

the citizenship-as-well-being discourse serves to amplify earlier individualized

versions of citizenship promoted in CSPE and to encourage citizen-subjects who
are self-reliant, self-responsible, self-managing, and resilient. In so doing, it seeks
to demonstrate the ways in which the contemporary focus on well-being detracts
from the actual social and material determinants of well-being and considers what
forms of citizenship are foreclosed by a citizenship-as-well-being discourse.

Keywords
Citizenship education · Well-being · Welfare · Resilience · Neoliberalism ·
Education policy · Reform · Curriculum · Responsibilization

Introduction: Citizenship Education in Context

In the Republic of Ireland, the task of educating young people for citizenship has
gained significant momentum in recent years, as evidenced by the introduction of
a new, elective, upper-secondary subject known as Politics and Society, in 2018.
At lower-secondary level, there has been a revisioning of citizenship education
within the context of a broader reform of the “junior cycle” curriculum, resulting
in a realignment of citizenship as part of a larger well-being program for 12–15-year
olds. In view of the fact that Politics and Society has only recently been introduced as
a subject at senior cycle or upper-secondary level, resulting in a lack of published
research on this new subject, the chapter focuses primarily on developments in
citizenship education at junior cycle or lower-secondary level. Its primary focus,
therefore, is on Civic, Social and Political Education (CSPE), which was introduced
as a universal, examination subject as part of the junior cycle curriculum in the late
1990s.
The chapter begins with a necessarily selective engagement with some of the
main sociocultural influences which have informed the focus and direction that
citizenship education has taken in Ireland. The next section presents an overview
of the literature concerning the reception and substantive content of CSPE, before
considering some of the implications of recent curricular developments in the area of
well-being which are shaping the particular “brand” of youth citizenship that is
currently being promoted in Irish schools (Mills and Waite 2017). Specifically, it
interrogates the reframing of citizenship within a newly foregrounded well-being
discourse in contemporary Irish educational policy, paying particular attention to the
ideological work that the civic dimensions of the well-being program perform. It is
argued that the citizenship-as-well-being discourse serves to amplify earlier efforts to
encourage individualized understandings of citizenship and to promote citizen-
subjects who are self-reliant, self-responsible, self-managing, and resilient. In so
doing, it seeks to demonstrate the ways in which the contemporary focus on well-
being detracts from the actual social and material determinants of well-being and
considers what forms of citizenship are foreclosed by a citizenship-as-well-being
discourse.
21 Citizenship Education in the Republic of Ireland: Plus ça Change? 317

A Brief History of Citizenship Education in the Republic of Ireland

Historically speaking, citizenship education’s place in the Irish curriculum has been
highly contentious; as in other jurisdictions, curriculum developments in the Repub-
lic of Ireland are a reflection of power struggles among different interest groups,
most notably, in this instance, among representatives of the Catholic Church on the
one hand, who were opposed to the introduction of citizenship education, and
educationalists and government officials on the other, who advocated for the intro-
duction of citizenship education as a stand-alone subject as far back as the 1920s.
The evolution of citizenship education in Ireland cannot be understood, therefore,
without reference to the centrality of the Catholic Church in Irish educational, social,
cultural, and political life; nor can the form that citizenship education has taken be
understood without reference to the consensualist and anti-intellectual cultures
which dominated Irish intellectual thought for much of the twentieth century, the
ramifications of which are arguably still evident today (Lynch 1987).
Citizenship education was absent from the formal curriculum at both primary
and secondary levels until the 1960s. Whereas the post-independence Free State
government had plans to include civics as a curriculum subject at primary level as
early as 1922, it only appeared on the primary school syllabus for the first time in
1971, largely as a result of Church-led opposition to the proposal. Educational policy-
making during the first four decades of the Irish State’s postindependence existence
was dominated by a “theocentric paradigm” (O’Sullivan 2005, p. 106). The Roman
Catholic Church presided over a privately owned but state-financed system, insisting
on “monopolistic control of the education of young people” (Garvin 2004, p. 201).
Church control over the education system met with a passive, deferential response
from successive education ministers who were content to act merely in a caretaking
capacity, leaving to the Catholic Church the task of training children in the fear and
love of God through the prioritization of religious and moral training and character
formation and reviving the Irish language (O’Connor 1986; O’Donohue 1999).
The Catholic Church’s opposition to civics stemmed in part at least from the
belief that civic issues should be addressed within the context of religious education
(Kerr et al. 2002). When citizenship education was eventually introduced at primary
level in the early 1970s, civics and religious formation were viewed as inextricably
linked (Williams 1999). Both subjects were seen to “share much common ground in
the knowledge they seek to impart and the attitudes and virtues they aim to develop,”
and as a result “. . .[t]here is obviously a very close affinity between religious
education and civics” (Department of Education 1971, p. 116; cited in Williams
1999, p. 326). Similarly, when civics was introduced as a separate subject at second
level for the first time in 1967, official documentation about the new academic
subject articulated the primacy of religious education and expressed the belief that
moral and civic education were derived from religious principles (Williams 2005).
Instructional materials stressed the importance of “co-ordinating civics with
religious instruction” (Williams 1999, p. 325), with the result that in practice, civics
and religious education were often taught by the same teacher and treated as a single
subject (Gleeson 2010).
318 A. Bryan

The civics curriculum also had a strong patriotic dimension. The introduction to
the syllabus stated that one of the key functions of education was to ensure that
future citizens “. . .will acquire the civic virtues of integrity, fortitude, independence
of mind, loyalty to this country and diligence” (Government of Ireland 1968–1969,
p. 111). One of the stated goals of civics was to “inculcate. . . an understanding of
true patriotism and its demands” and to teach young people “to be ready to defend
the national territory should the need arise” (cited in Keating 2009, p. 168). The
resulting syllabus was “bland” (Hyland 1993; Jeffers 2008), and students and
teachers alike experienced it as “dull, boring and conformist” (Jeffers 2008, p. 12).
It was within this context that civics – even through it was a curriculum require-
ment – came to occupy a very marginal status in schools and was often quietly
ignored in favor of examinable subject areas and other topics (Hammond and
Looney 2004; Hyland 1993; Kerr et al. 2002). As early as the 1970s, it had become
clear that civics was “a dying subject” (NCCA 1997, p. 1), having failed to establish
itself in the curriculum in any meaningful way (Clarke 2002). It wasn’t until the
1990s that sufficient political commitment to a reimagining of citizenship education
resulted in the implementation of a pilot project which led to the introduction of a
new curriculum program in CSPE at lower-secondary level in 1997. Heralded as a
“landmark event” (Jeffers 2008, p. 11), CSPE was introduced against a wider
backdrop of significant economic, political, and social change in Irish society,
including a growing secularization of Irish society, an increasing desire at
European Union (EU) level to promote a sense of European identity among member
states, the birth of the so-called Celtic Tiger economic boom, and growing national
as well as international concerns about the broader trend of disaffection of young
people from political and social institutions (Hammond and Looney 2004). Orga-
nized around seven key concepts (democracy, rights and responsibilities, human
dignity, interdependence, development, law, and stewardship) and taught through
four units of study (the individual and citizenship, the community, the state, Ireland
and the world), CSPE sought to develop active citizens who have a sense of
belonging to the local, national, European, and global communities.
Since 2017, CSPE has featured as one of the four main pillars of a new well-being
program for junior cycle students (alongside physical education (PE); social, per-
sonal, and health education (SPHE); and guidance education), the goal of which is to
teach and encourage young people to be active, responsible, connected, resilient,
respected, and aware (DES 2018, p. 10). CSPE, along with SPHE and PE, must be
included in the well-being program devised by each school, and schools have to
meet a minimum requirement of 70-h in each of these across 3 years of the junior
cycle program. Since 2017, schools have had three options in relation to CSPE. They
can either use the original 1996 CSPE syllabus or continue to teach citizenship
education over 70-h (one 40-min class per week) over the 3 years but adapting the
syllabus to reflect newly established “well-being indicators” (discussed in more
detail below). Alternatively, schools can introduce the somewhat lengthier NCCA
CSPE “short course” (comprising 100-h to run over 2 or 3 years) which is built
around three strands: rights and responsibilities, global citizenship, and exploring
democracy. Finally, schools have the option to design a shorter, 70-h CSPE program,
21 Citizenship Education in the Republic of Ireland: Plus ça Change? 319

based on the new short course specification for CSPE. Irrespective of which option
schools choose, the goal of CSPE is “. . .to inform, inspire, empower and enable
young people to participate as active citizens in contemporary society at local,
national and global levels, based on an understanding of human rights and social
responsibilities” (NCCA 2016, p. 5).
The next section presents a brief overview of the research exploring the reception
and implementation of citizenship education since its introduction as a stand-alone
subject in the late 1990s. This analysis provides the foundation for a consideration of
some of the key implications of the recent alignment of citizenship within a well-
being framework, with a particular emphasis on the ideological work that is
performed by this new focus of learning in Irish schools.

Citizenship Education as a “Cinderella Subject”

Since its inception in the late 1990s, there have been a number of studies examining
the reception and implementation of citizenship education as a discrete curricular
subject in Irish schools (e.g., Bryan and Bracken 2011; Gleeson 2009; Gleeson and
Munnelly 2003; Niens and McIllrth 2010; Nugent 2006). Gleeson and Munnelly
(2003) highlight the role of school cultural and organizational actors in influencing
perceptions of, and attitudes toward, CSPE. They attribute the poorer reception of
CPSE in privately owned schools (which are denominationally managed) to the
historical opposition by the Catholic Church to citizenship as a discrete subject in the
curriculum highlighted above. While state-owned schools may have proven rela-
tively more enthusiastic about the introduction of CSPE as a discrete academic
subject than their privately owned counterparts, there is a body of evidence to
suggest that CSPE has been regarded as a “Cinderella subject” in many schools,
regardless of their ethos or managerial structure (Gleeson 2009; Murphy 2009; Niens
and McIllrth 2010; Sugrue et al. 2007). The perception that CSPE is underappreci-
ated (albeit potentially with much to offer) exists for a variety of reasons, not least
because of the failure to afford it parity of esteem with other academic subjects and
its consignment to one 40-min session per week. As in other jurisdictions, CSPE
often acts as a timetable filler to cover shortages in teachers’ timetables (Clarke
2002), which means that in practice, many, if not most of those tasked with teaching
CSPE, are effectively “conscripted” into this role rather than qualified and motivated
to teach CSPE (Davies 2010; Murphy 2009; Niens and McIllrth 2010).
The exam-driven focus of the curriculum at second level has also been identified
as a major obstacle to the meaningful inclusion of citizenship issues in the
formal curriculum more generally, particularly in relation to in-depth exploration
of social and global justice themes and issues. Research suggests that teachers
often feel restricted by the need to produce “safe” and acceptable answers in the
context of a competitive national examinational system which militates against
more critical engagement with the complexities of social and global problems and
injustices (Bryan and Bracken 2011). Despite many teachers’ sophisticated under-
standing of the complex nature of social and global injustices, simplistic “softer”
320 A. Bryan

prescriptions offer a more manageable, “knowable world” and therefore constitute a

more seductive and reassuring alternative within a system that privileges and
rewards people on the basis of tangible, measurable outputs and definitive results.
These restrictions are a function of a highly centralized, point-driven system which
leaves very little “freedom. . . for teachers or schools to experiment with different
approaches or for pupils to try a risky subject or indulge a particular interest or
passion” (Dunne 2002, p. 83). The broader suite of junior cycle reforms alluded
earlier is intended to provide schools with “greater flexibility to design programs that
are suited to the needs of their junior cycle students and to the particular context of
the school” and places much greater emphasis on classroom-based and formative
assessments than on terminal examinations (Department of Education and Skills
[DES] 2015, p. 7). However, the allocation of 70–100 contact hours over three years
(depending on the particular program which individual schools opt for) arguably
does not provide sufficient opportunities for deep, meaningful, or complex engage-
ment with citizenship themes and issues.
In addition to these perceptual and structural constraints, the actual content
of CSPE textbooks and curriculum resources has been found to be wanting. Faas
and Ross (2012), for example, identified “discrepancies between the progressive
rhetoric of policy documents and the content of textbooks and other curriculum
material” (p. 574). These authors maintain that “while the rhetoric of the CSPE
syllabus presents education for citizenship in terms of active participation, the
empowerment of young people and reflective citizenship, the prevailing impression
is of a largely liberal conception of citizenship” (p.583). Other analyses suggest that
citizenship education texts reflect and promote neoliberal understandings, as
evidenced by their promotion of individual action as the primary “solution” to
large-scale social problems (Bryan 2014). Biesta and Lawy (2006) maintain that
since the 1980s, conceptions of citizenship have become increasingly depoliticized
and individualistic and that education has come to play an instrumental role in this
individualized notion of citizenship through the attempt to instill a specific set of
knowledge, skills, values, and dispositions with the aim of producing committed,
active, self-regulating, and responsible citizens. Similarly, Westheimer and Kahne
(2004) point to the existence of citizenship education initiatives premised upon the
personally responsible vision of citizenship, which encourages citizens to act
responsibly by, for example, making charitable donations, being an ethical con-
sumer, picking up litter, giving blood, recycling, and obeying laws. In addition to
framing activism as an individualistic endeavor, educational initiatives premised
upon a personally responsible citizenship framework are often further informed by a
“solidarity with benefits” ideology that stress the individual reward, personal
empowerment, and self-enhancement that accompany one’s actions (Bryan 2014;
Chouliaraki 2013; Kearns 1992; Kennelly 2011). As Westheimer and Kahne (2004)
observe, the personally responsible citizen – namely, someone who engages in
voluntaristic, charitable acts, and whose activism simultaneously functions as a
resource for the self – is not arbitrary but rather reflects a specific set of political
choices with both ideological and material effects. Looking at the specific actions
that young people are encouraged to take in CSPE textbooks and related materials
21 Citizenship Education in the Republic of Ireland: Plus ça Change? 321

suggests that they are encouraged to perform solidarity through individualized,

voluntaristic, and typically “low-cost” actions that tend to involve no more than
minimal effort. Both learning resources and school-based efforts to promote
so-called active citizens are reflective of a “three Fs” approach to citizenship
education – comprising fundraising, fasting, and having fun in aid of specific causes
(Bryan and Bracken 2011). As Kennelly (2011) observes, the conflation of “good” or
“responsible” citizenship with narrowly conceived versions of activism and legiti-
mized through citizenship education curricula has a range of problematic effects,
including the regulation and curtailment of activism and the undermining of an
alternative set of activist practices, particularly those which pose a challenge to state
legitimacy.
The content of CSPE is further compromised of a failure to provide young people
with access to knowledge about the structural dimensions of social injustices such as
poverty and a tendency to promote apolitical, sanitized understandings of global
problems, which do little, if anything, to inform them of their underlying complex-
ities and causes. In addition to concealing the root causes of the very injustices it
seeks to raise awareness about, citizenship education fails to critically or meaning-
fully engage students with their own complicity in these unequal global relations of
power (Andretti 2006; Bryan and Bracken 2011). From this perspective, citizenship
education can be seen to function as a sort of “public policy placebo” or “pretend
treatment” for social and global injustices as intractable as the global climate crisis,
poverty, and the unjust policies and practices of international institutions and
transnational corporations (Gillborn 2006, p. 83). In other words, while ostensibly
concerned with enabling young people to come to a deeper understanding of social
and global injustice and to “make a difference” by “taking action” against these
injustices, citizenship education in effect works to constrain young people’s imag-
ination about what is possible and how they might engage in struggle for a more
egalitarian world (Kennelly 2011). The next section considers these criticisms of
citizenship education’s so-called placebo effect within the context of the
repositioning of CSPE as a key pillar of the well-being program in Irish schools.
Through a consideration of a number of concepts which “appear. . .benign at first
glance” (Howell and Veronka 2012, p. 4), it seeks to illuminate the role that the
citizenship-as-well-being discourse plays in displacing responsibility for solving
social problems from the state and institutional level to the individual.

Citizenship-as-Responsibilization

As outlined above, in 2017 CSPE became part of a new curricular and educational
policy emphasis on the promotion of well-being in schools. The foregrounding of
well-being in Irish educational policy is reflective of a new “zeitgeist” on the
perceived importance of social-emotional learning (SEL) (Humphrey 2013, p. 2)
as well as an increasingly therapeutic approach to schooling which is concerned with
individual development and emotional and psychological well-being (Ecclestone
and Hayes 2009; Wright 2015). As McLeod (2015) notes “. . .the reach of well-being
322 A. Bryan

as an educational discourse is extensive” (p. 179). There exists a small but growing
body of critical literature on the prevalence of well-being as a discourse in an Irish
context (e.g., Cronin 2015; McAleavey 2013; Mulhall 2016; O’Brien 2018; O’Brien
and O’Shea 2018). This work considers the extent to which the increasing emphasis
on nonmaterial determinants of well-being in public policy and mainstream media –
such as contributing to one’s community, feeling connected to others, being able to
cope with life’s challenges, etc. – elides the importance of attending to the material
and economic conditions that also affect people’s quality of life and physical and
mental health.
Drawing on the deployment of well-being discourses in Ireland in multiple
domains such as mainstream media as well as health, mental health, and educational
policies, Mulhall (2016) provides compelling evidence of how the discourse of well-
being and its “proxy concepts” such as “happiness,” “resilience,” etc. (Marklund
2013, p. 210) function “. . .as a symbiotic neoliberal technology of self-
responsibilization that works in tandem with a shrinking of publicly-funded
resources and the targeting of ‘problem’ populations for a kind of extinction at a
distance” (pp. 30–31). As Mulhall persuasively argues, it is no coincidence that the
enthusiasm for well-being discourses intensified in the context of economic reces-
sion and structural adjustment which had a profound impact on Irish society in the
wake of the global financial crisis that began in the late 2000s. Mulhall’s compelling
interrogation of national policy documents and international initiatives to measure
subjective well-being and happiness demonstrates that while national governments
and international agencies may acknowledge the detrimental impact that poverty and
the unequal distribution of resources can have for people’s lived realities, they tend
to privilege personal and local determinants of well-being to the neglect of state-
level or economic factors. The emphasis on local and personal-level sources of well-
being is, Mulhall argues, an ideological decision. She puts it like this:

If happiness primarily derives from the social (rather than economic) capital available to the
individual, the family, the neighbourhood and the community, then the responsibility of the
ruling class for the immiseration attendant on the dismantling of the welfare state in the name
of the free market can be effaced to a considerable extent. (p. 33)

O’Brien (2018) addresses the tension that exists between individualized psycholog-
ical conceptions of well-being on the one hand, and collective, welfarist, or socio-
logical approaches to well-being, on the other, with a specific focus on how these
discourses are being applied in schools. Given the contraction of the welfare state,
she questions whether well-being can be meaningfully addressed with those students
whose basic needs for housing, a safe environment and nutrition are not being
properly met. Approaching the question about the role of schooling in the promotion
of well-being from a sociological perspective, O’Brien draws our attention to the
inherent tension that exists between the increasing responsibility that schools have to
promote well-being and the socially reproductive function that schooling serves,
replicating and reinforcing inequalities that exist in the wider society, and thereby
functioning as a hindrance – rather than an enabler – of well-being.
21 Citizenship Education in the Republic of Ireland: Plus ça Change? 323

The remainder of this chapter looks specifically at the realignment of CSPE

within this broader well-being agenda that constitutes a new area of learning for
students at second level. Despite its appearance as a progressive feature of the
curriculum, it is argued that the positioning of CSPE within a wider well-being
program reflects a deepening of the responsibilization of citizenship; tasking citizens
with increased personal responsibility for their own individual educational, health,
and welfare needs; and promoting a significantly greater role for communities –
rather than the state – in ameliorating social and global injustices (Hartung 2018;
Kisby 2017; Lister 2011).

The Citizenship-as-Well-being Discourse

“Managing myself” and “staying well” are two of the eight “key skills” that
students are expected to learn as part of the junior cycle program, implying that
young people have a duty to manage themselves and to remain healthy. Well-
being is further operationalized in terms of six so-called well-being indicators
(DES 2018, p. 10). Young people are taught and encouraged to be active,
responsible, connected, resilient, respected, and aware through their involvement
in a “well-being program,” which seeks to produce citizens who are “confident
and skilled participant[s] in physical activity”; who make “healthy eating
choices”; who know when their “safety is at risk” and who “make right choices”;
who possess the right “coping skills to deal with life’s challenges”; who believe
in themselves; who feel listened to and valued; who have positive relationships
with, and show care and respect for, others; and who are aware of their values and
have an understanding of what helps them learn and how they can improve. The
picture that emerges is that of an autonomous, self-managing, self-regulating,
self-reliant citizen who is individually responsible for their well-being through
making “the right” choices, such as actively choosing heathy behaviors and
lifestyles and avoiding risky situations – in short the ideal subject of the neolib-
eral order (Brunila and Siivonen 2016). According to Fisher (2011, p. 52), “terms
such as “well-being,” “empowerment,” and “ability” constitute a form of cultural
politics that involve “an introduction to, preparation for, and legitimization of
certain ways of seeing and behaving in the world (Morgan 2000, p. 274).”
The citizenship-as-well-being discourse sets the norms of what it means to be
an acceptable individual by advocating normative versions of what it means to be
a responsible citizen (Juhila et al. 2017). Casting well-being as the effect of
certain abilities and life choices (e.g., being physically active and eating “health-
ily” or being able to cope with adversity) renders certain forms of personhood
more desirable and more valuable than others (Ahmed 2010). This version of
citizenship education has implications in terms of young people’s preparedness to
show solidarity with others and their sense who is/who is not deserving of care,
rights, or responsibilities – ideas which are central to their practicing of citizen-
ship (Devine and Cockburn 2018). Furthermore, casting well-being as the effect
of what individuals do, rather than in terms of a basic set of conditions that the
324 A. Bryan

state has a responsibility to ensure, surely encourages people to prioritize their

purely private interests in a context where different groups are forced to compete
for a shrinking share of state resources (Devine and Cockburn 2018) and are
premised on what Howell and Veronka (2012, p. 4) describe as “a technology of
looking inward.”
The positioning of citizenship education as one of the four well-being pillars in
the curriculum serves to preempt criticism that might be levelled against an individ-
ual focus on well-being in other areas of the curriculum.

Without CSPE, there is the risk that discussion of well-being can feed into individualism and
miss the opportunity to make links between individual well-being and collective well-being,
between the personal and the political, and ultimately between our well-being and that of the
planet. Students become aware of themselves as local and global citizens with rights and
responsibilities and develop a sense of care for the well-being of others as they learn how
their well-being is connected to the well-being of others and of our planet. (NCCA 2017,
p. 46)

Taken in conjunction with questions such as “Do I take action to protect and promote
my well-being and that of others?” (responsibility well-being indicator) and “Do I
appreciate that my actions and interactions impact on my own well-being and that of
others, in local and global contexts?” (connected well-being indicator), these state-
ments give a clear sense of the extent to which the individual is perceived to be
responsible not just for their own well-being but also for the well-being of others
(and the entire planet). These ideas are further reinforced in instructional materials
and textbooks that instruct students to “[take] responsibility for [their] well-being
and the well-being of others” on the basis that “happy and healthy citizens can create
a World of Well-being” (Murphy and Ryan 2018, p. v). Echoing what Ahmed (2010,
p. 7) refers to as “the happiness duty,” the citizenship-as-well-being discourse
instructs young people that they have a responsibility to be well and to “stay well”
both for others and themselves, creating a relationship of dependence between one
person’s well-being and the well-being of others and obfuscating an awareness of the
role that negative emotions such as anger and unhappiness play in effecting positive
social change. Ahmed’s problematization of happiness is further instructive as a
means of illuminating the power of states of unhappiness to effect change. As she
explains, “[r]evolutionary forms of political consciousness involve heightening our
awareness of just how much there is to be unhappy about” (pp. 222–223; emphasis in
original).
The injunction to manage and be responsible for one’s own health and well-
being, as well as the health and well-being of others, is a weighty one,
especially for children as young as 12. While not denying the role that indi-
viduals can play in supporting others and addressing social injustices, placing
the burden of responsibility for the well-being of others (and the planet) on
children is arguably highly irresponsible. Moreover, it constitutes a shifting or
displacement of responsibility for ameliorating social and global problems from
the state, international agencies, and other entities such as corporations to the
individual.
21 Citizenship Education in the Republic of Ireland: Plus ça Change? 325

Concluding Comments

The theocentric paradigm which long dominated the Irish educational landscape
was eventually challenged by a mercantile one, resulting in the formulation of
educational policies and curricula designed, first and foremost, to fulfil the needs
of a capitalist economy (O’Sullivan 2005). The emergence and intensification of
a neoliberal-inflected mercantile paradigm in Irish education has had profound
implications for how citizenship education is conceived and practiced in that
context. In other words, the particular “brand” of youth citizenship that is pro-
moted in Irish schools is not arbitrary but rather reflects a specific set of political
choices with both ideological and material effects (Mills and Waite 2017;
Westheimer and Kahne 2004). Moreover, the emergence of well-being as a
“touchstone idea” in Irish education policy-making and curricula (McLeod
2015, p. 180), and the positioning of citizenship education within this broader
well-being agenda, has an amplifying effect where the responsibilization of
citizenship is concerned. The highly individualized and responsibilized version
of citizenship which is evident in the citizenship-as-well-being discourse has the
effect of forestalling political dialogue and social questioning – encounters which
should be at the very heart of citizenship education – and of producing instead
individualized, atomized ways of thinking about the self, based on a “technology
of looking inward” (Howell and Veronka 2012, p. 4) that detract from the actual
social and material determinants of well-being and repudiate collective solutions
(McAleavey 2013; Mulhall 2016). As Mulhall (2016, p. 30) puts it: “with the
individual interpellated as fully responsible for their own condition, the forces of
capital and their institutional and political collaborators are exonerated of any
responsibility for the suffering of the majority population.” Thus, the
responsibilization of citizenship has implications for how citizen-subjects practice
solidarity with others and who is perceived to be deserving or undeserving of care
in contexts which are profoundly shaped by neoliberal polices and ideologies.
Rather than constantly looking to education as the panacea to social or mental
health problems in the wider society (Vavrus 2003), there needs to be much
deeper engagement with the role that schooling plays in replicating and
reinforcing inequalities that exist in the wider society and recognizing its role in
hindering – rather than an enabling – well-being.

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Moments of Possibility in Politics, Policy,
and Practice in New Zealand Citizenship 22
Education

Andrea Milligan, Carol Mutch, and Bronwyn E. Wood

Contents
Citizenship Education as an Education Ensemble . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 330
Moments of Possibility in the History of Citizenship Education in New Zealand . . . . . . . . . . . . 331
Moments of Possibility in Present Debates Around Citizenship Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 334
Social Inquiry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335
Social Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 337
Seizing Moments of Possibility for Citizenship Education in the Future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 339
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 340

Abstract
The history of citizenship education in New Zealand has entailed several key
moments that have been subject to contested historical, social, political, and
economic forces. While there has never been a stand-alone citizenship education
curriculum in New Zealand, the social studies curricula remain the primary
vehicle for citizenship education delivery since its origins in 1944. This chapter
examines the development of citizenship education, through New Zealand’s
social studies curricula, as an “education ensemble” in which five historical
moments of “politics, policy, and practice” (Dale, The contradictions of education
systems: Where are they now? Address to the School of Critical Studies in
Education, The University of Auckland, New Zealand, 2017) emerged. Examin-
ing these moments against a critical theoretical lens, this chapter considers the
possibility such moments held for the development of more critical and active

A. Milligan (*) · B. E. Wood

Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]
C. Mutch
Faculty of Education and Social Work, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 329
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_32
330 A. Milligan et al.

citizens. The authors analyze the more recent emphasis on social inquiry and
social action as two further moments of possibility for enhancing critical and
active citizenship. This analysis attests to the potential for critical change through
curriculum reform, but also, in contrast, the potential for an enduring minimal,
content-heavy, and neoliberal approach to learning citizenship in the absence of
seizing a curriculum moment. In doing so, the chapter contributes to wider
debates about how citizenship curricula are positioned within an ensemble of
competing political agendas, practitioner influences, and policy frameworks.

Keywords
Citizenship education · Politics · Policy · Practice · Ensemble · New Zealand

Citizenship Education as an Education Ensemble

The concept of an educational ensemble (Robertson and Dale 2015) challenges the
idea that singular, immutable structures or powerful discourses are necessarily the
best explanations for the way in which education is shaped in any given context.
Instead, the idea of an ensemble highlights the fluid and dynamic impact of multiple
and contesting forces, both visible and invisible, that coalesce to create the current
situation and, in turn, influence future directions. To investigate the past, present, and
future of citizenship education in New Zealand, we draw on Robertson and Dale
(2015) and Dale (2017), especially where Dale (2017) highlights the interrelatedness
of moments of politics, policy, and practice in influencing educational outcomes. In
this chapter, this is applied to debates about the best way to prepare children and
young people through citizenship education for their future as citizens of
New Zealand (Fig. 1).
Moments of possibility can be bifurcations, that is, forks in the road where
particular notions of the ideal citizen are emphasized, marginalized, or not yet

Moments of politics

Outcomes for
citizenship
education

Moments of policy Moments of

practice

Fig. 1 Moments of possibility in politics, policy, and practice in citizenship education in

New Zealand. (Adapted from Dale 2017)
22 Moments of Possibility in Politics, Policy, and Practice in New. . . 331

imagined. There is not the space here to analyze extensively gains and losses in the
twists and turns in New Zealand’s history of social studies and citizenship education.
Instead, this chapter uses “moments of possibility” to describe, with the benefit of
hindsight and without suggesting a seamless narrative, the extent to which
approaches to citizenship education in New Zealand could be considered “critical”
and “active.” These terms loosely define a more “maximal” approach to citizenship
education, which McLaughlin (1992) described as promoting discussion, debate,
active participation, and critical thinking. In contrast, minimal approaches focus on
learning about civics and citizenship but not engaging in it (McLaughlin 1992). The
authors suggest that a framework for “critical” and “active” citizenship education
includes the following dimensions:

1. Flexible, open, and inclusive understandings of how citizenship is constituted

2. Considerable knowledge of the complexity of society and the contested nature of
social issues
3. Critical links to real world social issues
4. Support for active responses (Wood and Milligan 2016. p. 69–70)

These components are founded broadly upon critical theory. Critical theory holds
as its goals a commitment to expose how power relations and inequality are manifest
within cultural, political, and social institutions, to reveal the practices that serve to
create inequalities and injustices in society, and to transform society especially for
those who hold the least power (Apple et al. 2009). When applied to citizenship
education, this approach evokes goals of critical societal understandings, in which
young people learn to critique social issues and systemic historic and contemporary
injustices and also develop the skills and ability to participate with active responses.
The following section presents a critique of five “moments” in the historical
development of citizenship education, culminating in the 2007 New Zealand Cur-
riculum, which, despite various updates, has not yet been replaced with a more
recent version (Ministry of Education 2007). The section focuses on social studies –
as the primary vehicle of citizenship education in New Zealand (Archer and
Openshaw 1992) – and how a competing ensemble of political agendas, policy
debates, and practical realities led to different outcomes that, to a greater or lesser
degree, enabled the emergence of a critical and active citizen.

Moments of Possibility in the History of Citizenship Education

in New Zealand

The first moment of possibility to provide children and young people with prepara-
tion for citizenship came with the Education Act of 1877. Politically, the Act was in
response to the need to keep children and young people usefully occupied in the
newly established British colony. Policy-wise, the Act was forward-looking,
establishing a schooling system that was free, compulsory, and secular.
332 A. Milligan et al.

New Zealand’s first formal curriculum for primary-aged children provided a wide-
ranging liberal education, including geography, nature study, music, and drawing
(Bailey 1977). The practice, however, did not live up to the promise. While the
curriculum was described as, “more ambitious in aim than any in the British Empire”
(McLaren 1980, p. 22), there were few teachers available to teach the curriculum in
the manner in which it was intended, large class sizes, and inappropriate buildings
(May 2011). Māori were excluded from this curriculum and instead were educated
under the 1967 Native Schools Act, which “aimed to bring an uninitiated but
intelligent and high spirited people into line with our civilisation” (Bailey 1977,
p. 5) and to prepare them for roles in laboring or domestic service (Simon 1994). The
arrival of the First World War further amplified the imperialist aims of the curricu-
lum. The curriculum became harnessed to the war effort, constantly reminding
children of their duty to the Empire and promoting the values of heroism and self-
sacrifice (Perreau and Kingsbury 2017). Following the catastrophic losses of the
First World War, there was a distinct change towards loyalty to the nation rather than
the Empire (Perreau and Kingsbury 2017). This change was reflected in curriculum
policy, but the 1928 curriculum did not go as far as it might have. It was a missed
opportunity to forge an education system that prepared children and young people as
citizens for the more egalitarian society that was forming in New Zealand, without
the yoke of a rigid class system (Simon 1994).
In the 1930s, a second moment of possibility presented itself. Ideas from the New
Education Fellowship, a progressive education movement with its genesis in Europe,
became noticed in New Zealand (Abbiss 1998). This coincided with the election of
the first Labor government, with its promise of a fairer society following the hardship
of the Great Depression (Alcorn 1999). Education was to be the vehicle to achieve
this aim. New schools were built, more teachers were trained, and education had a
sense of momentum that had not been seen before. In classrooms, progressive
education methods fostered the arts alongside more holistic and experiential learning
(Mutch 2013). By 1944, the influential Thomas Report (Department of Education
1944) set the scene for the establishment of social studies as “an integrated course of
history and civics, geography and some descriptive economics” (Shuker 1992, p. 36)
and part of a core curriculum for the first two years of secondary schooling. The
curriculum was to prepare young people to value democracy and to take an “active
place in New Zealand as a worker, neighbour, homemaker and citizen” (Department
of Education 1944, p. 5). The expectation that young people would begin to identify
and solve social problems, that is, exercise judgment, is somewhat distinguishable
from the civics focus in the former 1877 and 1928 syllabi. This showed a small nod
towards critical and active citizenship, but not a significant one.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, a third moment of possibility occurred. Polit-
ically, in New Zealand, the period of social and economic stability of the 1960s was
about to be challenged by economic downturn and social change movements, such
as feminism, antiwar protests, and minority rights (Dunstall 1981). Responses to a
changing society were echoed in policy. Social studies became aligned with a more
responsive and active citizenship approach. The 1961 curriculum and a subsequent
series of handbooks stated that social studies aimed to get students, “to think clearly
22 Moments of Possibility in Politics, Policy, and Practice in New. . . 333

about social problems, act responsibly and intelligently to social situations . . .”

(Department of Education 1961, p. 1). Looking back, it is also notable that little
was said about how students were to address social problems other than the
expectation that students would act intelligently and responsibly.
In the 1970s, in line with the “new social studies” movement, social studies in
New Zealand became more multidisciplinary, including, for example, teaching
sociological and anthropological concepts alongside those from history, geography,
and economics (Mutch 2008). Social studies aimed to get students to “respect human
dignity, to show concern for others, to respect and accept the idea of difference and to
uphold social justice” (Department of Education 1977, p. 4). A new Forms 1–4
(middle) school curriculum was approached via four themes: cultural difference,
interaction, social control, and social change. An important development over this
time was the notion that it was not enough to be taught social knowledge and
abilities, but that values awareness and analysis, together with taking social action
to address injustices, were important. These two curricula paved the way for ideas-
led (as opposed to facts-driven) learning through processes of self-critical, reflective
inquiry, and the importance of developing active citizen responses to social issues
which continue underpin the structure of the social studies curriculum today.
With social studies now entrenched as the vehicle for citizenship education, the
subject’s fortunes became entwined in a highly contested fourth moment of possibility
in the 1980s and 1990s. At this time, the politics that underpin the competing
discourses surrounding the “good citizen” (Archer and Openshaw 1992) emerged in
a more blatant way the before. This political moment emerged against a backdrop of a
worldwide economic downturn that was felt keenly in New Zealand. A new Labor
Government, in 1984, inherited a funding shortfall from the previous government and,
in line with the market-led neoliberal ideology of the time, set about radically
restructuring health, education, and social welfare to ensure the country remained
financially viable and globally competitive. The social sciences (the umbrella term for
social studies, history, economics, and geography) still had a place, but their purpose
was hotly contested (Mutch 2008) as demonstrated by the “curriculum wars” which
ensued in the 1990s (Openshaw 2000). The stand-alone social studies curriculum was
re-written three times before it was finally mandated. The first version was not
acceptable to conservative business interests or the Ministry of Education. Another
writing team was formed. This second, more traditional, curriculum was not accepted
by teachers. Finally, a compromise was reached (Mutch 2004). In the third version, the
subject’s stated aims were to “enable students to participate in a changing society as
informed, confident and responsible citizens” (Ministry of Education 1997, p. 8).
Continuing social studies’ focus on social problems, the 1997 document placed
considerable emphasis on societal issues. In addition, it affirmed and considerably
amplified the valuing, decision-making, and social participation elements social
studies. The separate social studies skills were crystalized as three inter-related
processes – inquiry, values exploration, and social decision-making – that were
leading features of social studies curriculum design. A much stronger sense of
criticality was also evident throughout the curriculum, within the social studies
processes, and through the expectation that students would explore different
334 A. Milligan et al.

worldviews (perspectives). For example, students were now to be “challenged to

think about the nature of social justice” (Ministry of Education 1997, p. 17), rather
than accept concern for social justice as a commonly held value. Nevertheless, in
order to reach a compromise between politics, policy and practice, a stronger civics
thread appeared in the social organization content strand. Social action, however,
was watered down to a less controversial “social decision making” process strand.
Further, as has always been the case, opportunities for critical reflection were
tempered by encouraging particular commitments, most notably expressed in the
Attitudes and Values section of 1997 document.
The final moment of possibility in this historical overview leads us through to the
2000s. In 2003, social studies became an examinable subject in the National Certificate
of Educational Achievement [NCEA] (the national qualifications that assess student
achievement in the final three years of secondary schooling). Prior to that, students had
to select a senior social science subject such as history or geography. This change
provided greater status for social studies in the senior years and offered a qualifications
pathway for students with an interest in the critical and active dimensions of citizenship.
In addition, a curriculum review (Ministry of Education 2002) led to previously separate
learning area statements becoming two national curricula: The New Zealand Curriculum
(Ministry of Education 2007) and a version in te reo Māori. Rather a direct translation,
this version, Te Marautanga o Aotearoa (Ministry of Education 2008a) draws on a
Māori worldview to frame the content, understandings, and approaches for teaching the
curriculum in Kura Kaupapa Māori (Māori immersion schools) or schools with
bi-lingual classes. However, despite the curriculum review also recommending a stron-
ger focus on citizenship education as a cross-curricular theme (along with social
cohesion and education for a sustainable future), no specific citizenship education
statement exists within New Zealand’s English-medium curriculum. Citizenship educa-
tion instead appears in an aspirational manner within the curriculum’s vision, values, and
principles and in a practical manner through the key competencies and recommended
pedagogical approaches such as future-focused themes (Mutch 2010). The main vehicle
for citizenship education remains the social sciences, specifically social studies. How-
ever, the goals of citizenship education are characterized by a pastiche of competing
claims (Kliebard 1986), including the idea of the twenty-first century learner which is
positioned as a more “active” type of learner to meet the needs of a rapidly changing
global marketplace. Notably, the Māori-medium version of the social studies curriculum
adopts a more critical theoretical position that aims to address historical injustice more
openly than the English-medium version (H. Dale 2016).

Moments of Possibility in Present Debates Around Citizenship

Education

The historical summary of key moments of possibility in politics, policy, and

practice in citizenship education highlights the politically contested and socially
constructed (Cornbleth 1990) nature of the curriculum in New Zealand. This section
discusses dilemmas and possibilities that have arisen since the 2007 curriculum.
22 Moments of Possibility in Politics, Policy, and Practice in New. . . 335

Like many other nations, the challenges of equity and meeting the demands of a
complex, changing society are significant policy concerns. In 2009, New Zealand
participated in the International Civics and Citizenship Education Study [ICCS]
(Schulz et al. 2010). The ICCS highlighted both strengths and weaknesses in the
New Zealand approach to citizenship education. New Zealand students performed
well above the international average (517 points compared to 500) with 35%
achieving scores at the highest proficiency level (Level 3). The ICCS assessment,
however, confirmed the ethnic disparity in achievement that was apparent in other
national and international assessments; that is, that students identifying with Pākehā
or Asian ethnic groups did better than Māori or Pasifika students (Bolstad 2012). The
policy response to challenges such as these has largely occurred through system-
wide and pedagogical levers and has not involved curriculum review. However, in
the decade since the publication of The New Zealand Curriculum (Ministry of
Education 2007), a range of subtle mechanisms have elaborated and re-worked the
curriculum’s rather concisely drawn expectations. For example, within a series of
“curriculum updates,” a 2011 statement re-emphasized the need for citizenship
education as a key cross-curricular and future-focused theme along with sustainabil-
ity, enterprise, and globalization (Ministry of Education 2011). Two further mech-
anisms are particularly notable because they specifically signal a shift in practice and
offer the possibility for more critical and active approaches to citizenship education
for the future: namely, the elaboration of social inquiry within curriculum support
documents and an increasing focus on social action within the context of NCEA
assessment. These are discussed in turn.

Social Inquiry

Using a social inquiry approach, the 2007 social studies curriculum strongly
recommended that students:

• Ask questions, gather information and background ideas, and examine relevant
current issues
• Explore and analyze people’s values and perspectives
• Consider the ways in which people make decisions and participate in social action
• Reflect on and evaluate the understandings they have developed and the
responses that may be required (p. 30)

At the time of publication, this methodology was likely familiar to many

New Zealand social studies educators, particularly given a persistent focus on
inquiry operations since the 1970s and the tradition of reflective inquiry that has
informed social studies, social sciences, and citizenship curricula internationally.
However, while the processes of inquiry, values exploration, and social decision-
making within this methodology were clearly identifiable in the 1997 statement and
in a series of exemplars that demonstrated how the processes enhance learning in
relation to social studies achievement objectives (Ministry of Education 2004), the
336 A. Milligan et al.

term “social inquiry” was still new in the 2007 curriculum and established “an
appropriate and distinctive approach for studying human society” (Ministry of
Education 2008b, p. 4).
The 2007 curriculum statement sketched the details of social inquiry rather
lightly, a small section within a one-page description of the social sciences learning
area as compared to greater detail and achievement indicators provided in the 1997
document. One of the immediate effects of this was a widespread confusion between
social inquiry and “teaching as inquiry,” the latter being a model of reflective
professional practice that was newly promoted in the curriculum to improve teacher
decision making. However, a key opportunity to elaborate social inquiry, now the
name given to the overarching methodology, rather than an aspect of it, came
through the Building conceptual understandings in the social sciences [BCUSS]
(Ministry of Education 2008b, 2008c, 2009, 2012). This series of booklets provided
second-tier support material for the implementation of the 2007 curriculum, one of
which specifically focused on approaches to social inquiry (Ministry of Education
2008b). While the 1997 document envisaged the social studies processes as inter-
related, these booklets did much to emphasize, through text and imagery, the
re-iterative nature of seven interconnected aspects: framing a conceptual focus for
learning, finding out information, exploring values and perspectives, considering
decisions and responses, so what, now what, and reflection and evaluation. In many
ways, this catch-all social inquiry approach attempted to outline an approach that
held the possibility of meeting the citizenship aims of more informed, reflective,
active, and critical citizens through the study of society.
The explanation of social inquiry in the BCUSS documents preserved a proce-
dural orientation to inquiry that was evident in previous curricular iterations and, at
the same time, sustained the critical and active dimensions. Students were, for
example, now encouraged to explore the contested nature of concepts, missing
perspectives, and to consider the decisions or actions that they might make/take in
relation to their social inquiry (Ministry of Education 2008c). This encouragement
notwithstanding, the critical and active dimensions of citizenship were somewhat
underdrawn in the BCUSS series. Social action is, for example, a suggestive aspect
of social inquiry and largely positioned as an outcome rather than a site of critical
reflection. As a result, the extent to which social studies teachers read citizenship
outcomes as involving the critique of social issues and injustices, and the skills and
ability to take active responses, is an open question. This “moment lost” has not been
helped by a tendency – at least in the authors’ experience – for social inquiry to be
collapsed into more generic models in primary school settings and for the “hard bits”
(Keown 1998), such as the contested nature of knowledge and values, to be dropped
out. Furthermore, few other citizenship education resources produced by govern-
ment, nongovernmental organizations, or commercial publishers have deeply
engaged with the opportunities for a critical and active approach to citizenship
education (Tallon and Milligan 2018).
In the absence of strong curricular direction, there appears a vital need for
encouraging more “maximal” readings of social inquiry. A step towards this lies in
a more recent elaboration of this model, “social inquiry for social action” (Mutch
22 Moments of Possibility in Politics, Policy, and Practice in New. . . 337

et al. 2016). This is perhaps the most explicit expression of the transformation
potential for social inquiry published to date. The authors demonstrate how social
inquiry can be read in a more critical light, with social justice as a visible aim of both
inquiry and action. They propose, for example, a series of “acceptability criteria” for
selecting social inquiry resources based on their social justice content, such as the
visibility of social justice movements and an acknowledgment of the central impor-
tance of social action within democracy. Arguably, similar criteria could be extended
to the entirety of the social justice model. Indeed, what appear lacking in this current
moment in time is shared, national agreement about what constitutes robust social
inquiry and/or tools that enable teachers to evaluate the strength of their approach. In
the absence of this, it is quite possible for educators and policy makers to social
inquiry as containing a less ambitious intent.

Social Action

Notions of more “active” citizens were prevalent across the 2007 New Zealand
Curriculum and, as discussed above, prominent in social studies. This heightened
focus on social action in the New Zealand social studies curriculum mirrors trends in
many citizenship education curricula seen elsewhere (Davies et al. 2014; Ross
2008). The impetus for a more active curriculum is difficult to pin down to one or
two single factors and instead is more likely to have emerged from an ensemble of
multiple and complex relationships (Robertson and Dale 2015). In keeping with the
timing of the launch of the 2007 New Zealand Curriculum, Nelson and Kerr’s (2006)
analysis of active citizenship across 14 countries found that changing societal
patterns and challenges – such as migration, economic flows, globalization, and
environmental issues – and the need for an active citizenry to address such concerns
were key to the growth of more active approaches. Further, the global promotion of
themes associated with the “knowledge age” (OECD 1996) and key competencies
(OECD 2005) required a greater commitment to creativity, innovation, and problem-
solving in order to keep up with the skills required for the twenty-first century and
the demands of a global educational marketplace, which in turn encouraged more
“active” ideas about learning (Gilbert 2005; Nelson and Kerr 2006; Wood and
Sheehan 2012). A final, less well-known impetus was from social studies teachers
involved in curriculum and NCEA assessment development who, in the words of
one curriculum writer, decided that “we were sick of our students just studying about
the social action of others and wanted to have a chance for them to take social action
themselves on issues, so we just thought we’d give it a go and write social action into
the curriculum” (pers. comm. Greenland, August 2017). This combination of criti-
cal, cultural, political, and economic factors contributed to the structures and rela-
tions which underpinned the development of the 2007 NZC and the stated outcome
of social studies, that students will “participate and take action as critical, informed,
and responsible citizens (Ministry of Education 2007, p. 17). The curriculum created
a moment of possibility, with arguably a more critical and active notions of social
action (Abbiss 2011; Wood et al. 2013).
338 A. Milligan et al.

Despite this curriculum endorsement, research about the application of social

action in by New Zealand social studies teachers has shown that social action is
viewed as one of the “hard bits” of social studies (Keown 1998). For example,
Taylor’s (2008) postal survey of 45 social studies teachers found that while a few
embraced the active citizenship potential of the curriculum, many expressed caution,
noting concerns about controversy in the social issues studied and fears of indoctri-
nation. Similarly, Wood’s study of four diverse social studies departments identified
that teachers were anxious about the expectations that social action could place on
students, as well as concerned about health and safety compliance and management
when students engaged with the local community (see Wood et al. 2013, pp., for a
fuller description of these two studies). A 2015 survey of 145 social studies teachers
identified similar patterns (Wood et al. 2017), with the lack of implementation of
social action by some teachers attributed to the time-consuming nature of taking
social action and the anxiety of the “riskiness” of the standards. These studies
confirm earlier research findings that show that social action still represents a
challenging aspect of social studies teaching – even with a heightened support in
both curriculum and assessment policies.
However, while there has not been a wholesale adoption of social action since the
2007 curriculum, there is evidence of an increasingly active response to social
studies, at least at the senior end of schooling. In particular, the specific focus for
the senior social studies curriculum for Year 11–13 (ages 15–18) where students can
gain NCEA achievement credits if they take “personal social action” has served to
cement this focus further. Drawing on data collected as part of a Teaching and
Learning Research Initiative project, Wood et al. (2017) showed that there has been
a steady uptake of both senior social studies and the use of the social action
standards, to the extent that by 2015, 61% of New Zealand secondary schools
were offering at least one Social Studies achievement standard. These data show
that the integration of social action into the national assessment framework may have
created a moment of possibility for a more “active” approach to citizenship educa-
tion in New Zealand than many earlier curriculum reforms. In many ways, this 2011
assessment policy shift – which placed active citizenship participation (social action)
into the suite of assessment credits available through NCEA – has driven greater
participatory practice into social studies teaching and learning. While this was
underpinned largely by neoliberal, twenty-first century ideals for a certain type of
active learner, the greater practice of social action has come about as a result of the
possibility the 2007 curriculum offered.
However, while the growth and acceptance of social action in social studies has
been steady, research shows that the types of social action students take still tends
center on personal and community-related actions. Wood et al. (2017) found that
students’ actions held more “maximal” potential if they: (i) focused on personally
and socially significant issues (these held greater meaning and authenticity for
students), (ii) were underpinned by in-depth knowledge and critique of how and
why the issues emerged (evidence-based and informed by a wide range of perspec-
tives), and (iii) developed an action strategy that matched the social issue and
reached a range of interest groups, including those who held positions of power to
22 Moments of Possibility in Politics, Policy, and Practice in New. . . 339

inform change. The study also promisingly found that when students were well
supported, undertaking social action was viewed by students (and their teachers) as
highly valuable forms of citizenship learning about society, social issues, and skills
for civic and community engagement (Wood et al. 2017).

Seizing Moments of Possibility for Citizenship Education

in the Future

This chapter contributes to wider debates about how citizenship curricula are
positioned within an ensemble of competing political agendas, practitioner influ-
ences, and policy frameworks. Citizenship education in New Zealand has histori-
cally encountered several moments of possibility. The authors in this chapter have
analyzed five such moments which heralded either a growing or declining emphasis
on the development of critical and active citizens. As Robertson and Dale (2015)
remind us, such moments cannot be isolated and pinned down to one singular
narrative or explanation – instead an ensemble of critical, cultural, political, and
economic factors shapes an event such as a curriculum development. The authors
also remind us that at the moment of outcomes (Fig. 1), it is important to not only
take into account the unity of multiple determinations of such an outcome, but also
the hierarchy of such contributing factors. The analysis of five such events in
New Zealand citizenship education curriculum history points to a contested and
erratic pattern – in which some held a greater and lesser potential for a critical
citizenry to emerge.
The historical analysis places the current situation in New Zealand in a different
position as regards citizenship education in both policy and practice from those
settings in which the curriculum is tightly prescribed. In New Zealand, there is no
specific citizenship education curriculum, although social studies takes responsibil-
ity for much of the content and related skills teaching. There are no mandated
textbooks and the concepts are outlined in only the most general terms in the social
studies achievement objectives and teacher support materials. Teachers have a high
degree of autonomy in selecting both what and how they will teach. Yet, many
New Zealand students appear to gain the appropriate knowledge, skills, and dispo-
sitions that prepare them to be active and engaged citizens in their communities, their
nation, and on the global stage (Schulz et al. 2010).
This high level of teacher autonomy offers a new moment of possibility. While
the two particular themes identified in this chapter of social inquiry and social action
build upon a legacy of these traditions in the New Zealand curriculum and hold
considerable opportunities for critical and active citizenship, the authors in prior
work have all noted that social inquiry and social action is less commonly “political”
or transformative in practice (Mutch et al. 2016; Wood and Milligan 2016; Wood
et al. 2017). Nevertheless, at least since the 1970s, we have witnessed an expanding
landscape of possibility, to the extent that there is now little that expressly precludes
teachers from advancing a transformative approach to citizenship education through
the social studies learning area. We believe that teachers have the capability to seize
340 A. Milligan et al.

the possibility offered by the fertile ground of the accepted traditions of social
inquiry and social action and drive a citizenship education for social transformation.
What appears most needed is not so much another iteration of the social studies
curriculum – although a clearer explication of its citizenship intent is certainly
warranted – but much stronger support for social studies teachers to take up its
existing possibilities for critical and active citizenship. This chapter’s historical and
current analysis of citizenship education attests to the potential for transformative
change through curriculum but also the potential for a minimal, content-heavy, and
neoliberal approaches to learning citizenship in the absence of seizing the next
moment of possibility.

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The Politics of Citizenship Education in
Chile 23
Rodrigo Mardones

Contents
Introduction: An Institutional Perspective for Citizenship Education Policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 344
Civic Democratic Education: The Progressive Education Movement in Chile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 345
The Centrist and Leftist Comprehensive Reforms During the 1960s and 1970s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 347
Civic Education under Dictatorship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 348
Citizenship Education under Democracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 349
Global Citizenship and National Identity: The Missing Issues in Contemporary Chilean
Debate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 352
Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 353
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 355

Abstract
This chapter reviews citizenship education in Chile as a national public policy
vis-à-vis the international academic and political debates in the field. Chile’s
citizenship education policy appears highly conditioned by successive paradig-
matic experiments – progressive education (1930–1950), Christian democratic
reformism (1964–70), socialist revolution (1970–73), and authoritarian and neo-
liberal (1973–90). Since 1990 civic education policy in Chile has tried to update
to the international paradigm on citizenship education, conditioned in this attempt
by a long transition to democracy and the recent appearance of a student social
movement agitating for a shift away from neoliberal educational policies. As a
result, Chile has partially adopted international standards in its citizenship edu-
cation curricular guidelines, with some notable omissions such as the ideas of
global citizenship and multiculturalism. Actors’ interests and preferences, as well
as normative ideas and debates, are ubiquitous; therefore, no adversarial or

R. Mardones (*)
Instituto de Ciencia Política, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 343
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_35
344 R. Mardones

deliberative approach by its own could explain citizenship education as a public

policy. Instead, the analysis provided in this chapter applies an institutional
perspective that integrates the adversarial and deliberative approaches into a
long-term process that defines institutional development, historical legacies, and
social and political context.

Keywords
Citizenship education · Public policy · Politics · Chile

Introduction: An Institutional Perspective for Citizenship

Education Policy

Looking at diverse national contexts and varying political constraints, there exists a
broad consensus that the primary normative objective of citizenship education is to
improve the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and experience of children and youth to
allow them to effectively exercise democratic citizenship (Campbell 2012). How-
ever, the important role that citizenship education plays in the quality of democracy
is potentially diluted by the emergence and operation of various competing objec-
tives, views, and agendas. To understand citizenship education policy in a given
jurisdiction, that is, we need to examine and comprehend which competing objec-
tives, views, and agendas are at play and how these are mediated through political
processes.
The adversarial model has been prominent in theories of politics; so it is by
extension in the politics of education. Under this model, institutions – such as the
school system – reflect the ideas and preferences of self-interested dominant groups.
As Moe (2000, 130) puts it: “In a diverse society, democracy produces winners and
losers. It is the winners who will control the schools, and the winners’ preferences
that will set educational policy and structure.” Yet educational policy is also about
defining the democratic purposes of education, a highly normative goal better suited
to a deliberative model of politics, an alternative model that reflects norms and rules that
extend beyond self-interest and which prioritizes consensus politics developed through
the give-and-take of political discussion (McDonnell and Weatherford 2000, 130).
To overcome the limitations of both the adversarial and the deliberative models of
policy decision-making, this chapter uses the institutional perspective of March and
Olsen (2000, 150) to explore the politics of citizenship education in Chile. This
institutional perspective integrates the adversarial and deliberative models and tries
to explain how the exogenous factors contemplated in the adversarial model –
interests, resource redistribution, interpretations, and rules – are formed, modified,
and sustained through a political process that includes distributional exchanges as
well as public deliberation on ideas and values (March and Olsen 2000, 152).
The first five sections of this chapter reviews and analyses the politics of
citizenship education in Chile from the nineteenth century through to the present
day. The sixth presents two citizenship education topics (global citizenship
23 The Politics of Citizenship Education in Chile 345

education and national identity vis-à-vis multiculturalism) that while widely present
in the international debate have been mostly missing in Chile. This chapter argues
throughout in favor of this institutional perspective, which as an integrative approach
effectively explains the politics of a particular public policy, in a specific case,
unfolding over a long period.

Civic Democratic Education: The Progressive Education

Movement in Chile

In the nineteenth century, public interest in civic education was framed by the
political objective of building the nation-state. In Italy, for example, the school
system responded to two political objectives: strengthening the country’s recent
unification and contributing to state secularization (Ribolzi 2004). In France, as
Osler and Starkey (2001) argue, the government of the time concerned itself with
civic education to consolidate the citizenry’s support for the Third Republic, an
effort that took its first form in the 1882 introduction of instruction morale et civique
(Mardones 2018, 746). In Chile, a development model known as the “teaching state”
(Estado Docente) emerged soon after independence to reinforce the state’s role in
education. This purpose manifested in the 1860 primary instruction law (Ley de
Instrucción Primaria), which formally permitted the coexistence of public and
private education. The state’s main objectives were to expand free public primary
education and promote literacy (Serrano et al. 2012a). The 1860 law mandated
reading, writing, and arithmetic, along with Catholic catechism, Chilean history,
and constitutional studies, as the principal subjects of instruction. In 1898, “civic
instruction” was incorporated as a subject at the primary level (Serrano et al. 2012b).
Using the adversarial model, one can identify three political issues at the begin-
ning of the twentieth century that could be instrumently served by the political
socialization of public school students: patriotic nationalism, to strengthen the
identity of a new nation-state still fighting and negotiating border conflicts, the
state–church scission, and the emergence of a social policy agenda. From Lira’s
study (2013, 28–31) of three history and civic education textbooks with different
political orientations used at that time (roughly liberal, social democrat, and social-
ist), it is possible to conclude that while political actors broadly concurred on
patriotic nationalism, social policy caused controversy, as the social democratic
and socialist textbooks strongly emphasized the need to develop a critical awareness
in students of social issues. With respect to the state and church cleavage, the 1925
constitution – which replaced the previous 1833 constitution – was followed by a
presidential decree that eliminated the teaching of Catholic catechism at public
schools. However, in an attempt to avoid further conflict, this measure was later
partially reversed by Decree 1.708, April 29, 1927, which provided that religion
classes would be available to students whose parents require it and at no cost to the
state as teachers (Catholic priests) could not charge public schools for their lessons
(Salinas 2016).
346 R. Mardones

Primary education became compulsory in Chile in 1920 with Law 3.654, which
prescribed that school programs should include civic instruction (Gobierno de Chile
1920). Its updated version mandated a similar “social and civic education” subject
(Decree 5.291, May 19, 1930) (Gobierno de Chile 1930). Chile and other Latin-
American countries, influenced by the progressive education movement, underwent a
paradigm shift that decade. These ideas, associated with Latin America’s “new
school” (Escuela Nueva), included a child-centered education principle and the
progressive movement’s democratic education goal. Following John Dewey’s
model, the Chilean government founded in 1932 its first experimental school (Liceo
Experimental Manuel de Salas) for the purpose of piloting and testing organizational
and pedagogical innovations in secondary education (Zemelman 2010, 52).
One of the innovations that emerged from experimental schools was a type of
homeroom or advisory, known as “class council” (Consejo de Curso). By 1953 class
councils spread across the Chilean school system, operating as a time during which
students elect representatives and discuss issues such as class and school convivial-
ity, the organization of social and cultural events, and, notably, national and political
affairs. Class councils consolidated the progressive movement in Chile, as they were
officially conceived as a space for fostering democratic life by developing attitudes
like tolerance, responsibility, honesty, and cooperation in students (Gobierno de
Chile 1957, 15–18).
According to Serrano (2018), between 1930 and 1960, the public secondary
schools, “lyceums,” peddled in the political culture of the middle class. In Serra-
no’s (2018, 46) view, lyceums taught Western history and civic education as the
continuous advance of liberty, democracy, and social justice, a hegemonic vision
shared by teachers and government authorities. The conservative historical and
political perspective limited its influence to the private school system, which in
1957 accounted for 38% of total secondary school enrollment (Campos 1960, 92).
At this time, the main public university in the country (Universidad de Chile)
designed the national university admission test (Bachillerato), which incorporated
a history and civics component tilted toward a social democratic perspective
(Serrano 2018, 58).
Civic education at the Chilean lyceums extended beyond the schoolyard, as it
promoted student organizations and their involvement in national politics, some-
times driving students to riot in the streets instead of using formal, institutional
channels. Cautionary calls were made by government officials regarding the alleged
use of students for partisan purposes, as well as by conservative groups that blamed
the progressive education movement as responsible for “excessive” participation and
social unrest (Serrano 2018, 106).
The legacy of the “teaching state” was a very strong educational system. By the
beginning of the twentieth century, there was a solid national educational system
fed by well-established, capable body of teachers. Teachers took and promoted the
proposals of the progressive movement in Chile from the 1920s onward into the
1960s (Reyes 2010). This was a bottom-up demand for change; the proposals of
the progressive movement in Chile were mostly normative and non-distributional
in nature. From the institutional perspective, it was the long-term development of
23 The Politics of Citizenship Education in Chile 347

education and teachers’ organizations that channeled the adoption of the progres-
sive movement. Furthermore, the progressive movement led to the development
and practice, at least in public schools, of a social democratic approach to
citizenship education within which student activism and political engagement
were central.

The Centrist and Leftist Comprehensive Reforms During

the 1960s and 1970s

Comprehensive educational reforms to the existing system in Chile began in 1964.

Both the centrist Christian Democratic government (1964–1970) and the Marxist
Popular Unity coalition (1970–1973) had foundational political, economic, and
social objectives which shaped both education policy more widely and citizenship
education itself (Mardones 2018, 747).
The Christian Democratic government changed the overall approach to educa-
tion, focusing less on hierarchy and course content while placing more emphasis on
the integral education of students through innovative pedagogical practices (Cox
1984). For this purpose, in 1967 the government created a research, experimentation,
and teacher training center (CPEIP) within the Ministry of Education. It also
grappled with one of the lyceum’s main problems, its emphasis on grooming
students for university, which served few students well. To that end, the Christian
Democratic government promoted increased high school enrollment, shortened its
duration from 6 to 4 years, and emphasized vocational education. In this process the
government subsumed civic education within the subject of “social sciences and
history” (Gobierno de Chile 1967).
This reformist project was nurtured by the critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire,
who collaborated with the Christian Democratic government, especially in the
areas of adult and rural education. The Popular Unity government that followed
also employed Freire’s critical pedagogy when developing its National Unified
School (ENU) project. The ENU was a comprehensive educational reform
project envisioned as the government’s flagship and was soon seen by the
opposition as an attempt at Marxist indoctrination. The ENU’s launch in 1971
generated intense opposition, its approval postponed and finally aborted by the
1973 military coup. The enormous political and social implications of the ENU
project exceeded the technical and curricular issues of education (Mardones
2018, 748).
Distinct, defined political identities clashed over opposed social projects between
1964 and 1973 in a political system that had previously enjoyed high levels of
stability relative to other Latin-American countries. However, following the military
coup of 1973, civic education was conceived of as a political socialization project
aimed not at fostering politically active citizens but rather at legitimizing the newly
established right-wing dictatorship. In the next section, it is argued that this failed
even coupled with comprehensive neoliberal economic and social reform and huge
transformations in the education system.
348 R. Mardones

Civic Education under Dictatorship

Following the 1973 coup, the military dictatorship created a commission to revise all
elements of the school curricula that might contain ideological biases left by
previous governments (Gauri 1998). In 1980–1981, a comprehensive curricular
reform was enacted (Gobierno de Chile 1980a, 1981). For primary schools, civic
education continued to be part of history and the social sciences, while for high
schools, “civic education and economics” were reintroduced as school subjects
(Gobierno de Chile 1980b, 1981).
The government decrees that regulated the curricula conformed to a traditional
approach to civics, but detailed analysis reveals a nationalistic, authoritarian focus.
For example, while the previous curricula of 1965 offered a more balanced account
of the disputes between liberals and conservatives during the nineteenth century in
Chile (Gobierno de Chile 1968), the 1980–1981 curricula unambiguously credited
the virtuous role of conservative authoritarianism for Chile’s political stability during
that period (Gobierno de Chile 1980b). With respect to economics, while the
1965 curricula prescribed the teaching of the political economics of development,
including, for example, commodity mono-production, and dependency, the 1980
curricula emphasized the market economy and free trade (Gobierno de Chile 1968,
1980b).
For the secondary education curricular reform of 1981, Bascopé et al. (2015) note
that the Ministry of Education’s Centro de Perfeccionamiento, Experimentación e
Investigaciones Pedagógicas (CPEIP) consulted educators and scholars of educa-
tion. As in the case of the primary education reform, consultations were primarily
with private school teachers, who were close to the ministerial authorities. Espínola
and De Moura Castro (1999) pointed out that the new curricula and programs of
study proposed by the Ministry of Education generated permanent conflicts, even
within the small circle of actors that supported the dictatorship. From then on, at a
micro level, expert consultation and commissions appointed by the government – as
will be shown in the next section – defined the main outcomes of citizenship
education while operating as restricted deliberation spaces that fed bureaucratic
designs and decisions.
The dictatorship was defeated in a national plebiscite in 1988 and in the open
presidential elections of 1989. On March 10, 1990, the day before handing over the
presidency to a center-left coalition government, the dictatorship proclaimed several
laws to protect its legacies, the authoritarian regime defined by the 1980 Constitution
and a neoliberal economic model. One of these bills was a general education law
(LOCE), which among other things terminated the ministerial monopoly on school
curricula and educational plans, a power the state had held since the nineteenth
century (Cox 2006b). Through this process, school autonomy increased, so that
within the curricular framework of Fundamental Objectives and Minimum Manda-
tory Contents defined by the Ministry, schools could develop their own plans and
programs, including those related to citizenship education.
Educational freedom as the capacity to create a mission-driven, nonprofit school,
along the lines of a religious or lay educational project, had a long history in Chile but
23 The Politics of Citizenship Education in Chile 349

under strong state regulatory power. The dictatorship’s educational reforms of 1980
changed this institutional legacy, allowing for-profit schools and universities. Follow-
ing its unexpected defeat in 1988 and 1989, the outgoing government relaxed state
regulatory power over the school system with its 11th-hour 1990 law. This deregula-
tion was consistent with the dictatorships’ neoliberal social policy framework but
mostly aimed at limiting the powers of the incoming democratic government.

Citizenship Education under Democracy

Since the 1990s, citizenship education policies in many nations have undergone
important changes. In the UK, France, and Australia, for example, concerns over low
rates of youth participation in politics and political alienation shaped civic education
reforms that variously introduced new classes and a greater focus on understanding
the functioning of government and democracy (Haigh et al. 2014). In line with this
worldwide trend, the Chilean government’s national commission on twenty-first-
century educational challenges proposed a framework for modifying the citizenship
education curricula for primary and secondary education (Gobierno de Chile 1995).
Those recommendations came during a period of educational reform after the
restoration of democracy. However, the reform failed to substantially change the
deregulated neoliberal system implemented by the dictatorship, which had created
school vouchers, transferred public school oversight from the Ministry to munici-
palities, increased curricular flexibility, permitted for-profit education, and loosened
teacher contracts (Gauri 1998). Reversing these changes was either not possible due
to authoritarian institutional legacies or undesirable in an era in which structural
adjustment policies and neoliberal reforms were being implemented across the
world. Chilean education reforms in the 1990s had different priorities: introducing
information technologies, targeting socially deprived segments of society, injecting
additional funds into the system, extending the length of the school day, improving
labor conditions for teachers, and, finally, reforming curricular content (Espínola and
De Moura Castro 1999).
The Ministry of Education proposed a curriculum that included a series of
emerging themes – each potentially connected to citizenship education – such as
gender, environment, and human rights. The opposition objected to the proposal,
comparing it with the ENU project of the Popular Unity government (Cox 2006a;
Picazo 2007). Points of technical dispute included the distribution of hours between
the different subjects as well as the fate of elective subjects, but attempts to introduce
the emerging themes to citizenship education provoked much of the opposition’s
resistance (Cox 2006a). Fearing ideological confrontation and unable to end the
political gridlock over the educational reform initiative, the first post-authoritarian
democratic government (1990–1994) decided to withdraw the proposal.
Conditioned by authoritarian legacies and threatened with the use of force by the
military, the second center-left democratically elected government (1994–2000)
appointed a national commission to solve the education reform impasse (Mardones
2018, 751). The commission had 32 members from different areas of national life
350 R. Mardones

and included a technical committee. It produced a report stating that the curriculum
should include a civic education component that would familiarize students with the
mechanisms and day-to-day processes of society’s functioning, which at the same
time would allow them “. . . to fulfill their duties and demand their rights as a
member of the community” (Gobierno de Chile 1995). According to Cox (2006a),
the national commission approach adopted by the government opened both an expert
and a citizen forum that ultimately articulated a political decision using a framework
of consensus and cooperation. To Picazo (2007), this consensus was achieved within
the technical committee by purposefully ignoring the normative dimension of
education, which intermingles with the normative dimension of democracy itself.
The commission’s politically neutral declaration on civic education avoided entering
into the still ongoing democracy–dictatorship cleavage. Within the framework of
adversarial politics, pragmaticism emerged with a mask of consensus and delibera-
tion, to make feasible comprehensive reform.
Defining what should be incorporated into the curriculum has been a field of
intense dispute in many countries. In the USA, the controversies over the content of
the subject of social studies have been characterized as a true ideological war (Evans
2004), a hopeless confrontation between radical and conservative excesses regarding
democracy and citizenship (Barber 1992). In one corner there is a vision that aims to
maintain a specific social order according to values and the country’s traditional
institutions (social reproduction) and in the other, a vision that disputes this order
(social reconstruction) via critical examination of traditions, institutions, and
existing social practices (Ross 2004). Chile’s specific historical evolution produced
the same confrontation.
To facilitate its approval, the government decoupled the curricular reform from
the more comprehensive educational reform. While some components of the edu-
cation reform require congressional processing, the curricular reform requires only
executive decrees, which are mostly molded by internal government politics. The
details of the executive decrees on curricular reform were shaped at the bureaucratic
level of the Ministry of Education’s Curriculum and Evaluation Unit (UCE). The
UCE conducted several rounds of consultations with education scholars, teachers,
and policymakers, ultimately generating the curricular frameworks for primary and
secondary education, approved in 1996 and 1998, respectively (Espínola and De
Moura Castro 1999).
In these curricular frameworks, four fundamental changes were introduced,
following international practices (Mardones 2018, 752). First, the model of civic
education, centered on the description of the organization and functioning of the
political system, was replaced by the model of citizenship education, which includes
three dimensions: knowledge, skills, and attitudes. Second, the frameworks elimi-
nated the specific subject of “civic education and economics,” replacing it with
objectives and contents that ran through different subjects across every grade. Third,
that content would be preferentially taught within the subject of “history and social
sciences” but complemented in language and communication, class council (created
in 1953), and philosophy. Fourth, citizenship education would be present in other
areas of the school experience, such as student organizations, community service,
23 The Politics of Citizenship Education in Chile 351

debate or litigation tournaments, civic ceremonial events, and other extracurricular

activities (Gobierno de Chile 2005). These four changes generally aligned with
citizenship education practices at the time in a number of other nations. In addition,
and notably, the emerging themes (gender, environment, and human rights) that had
obstructed the first round of consultations in 1991 were included in the 1996 and
1998 curricular reforms. This suggests that it was the political dynamics of the
transition to democracy that explain the blockade in 1991, which evaporated when
the transition consolidated.
The following years saw growing concern and controversy over inequality of
education opportunities. One legacy of the neoliberal educational reforms in Chile is
broad access to schools accompanied by high, persistent socioeconomic stratifica-
tion (SES) school segregation, resulting from market dynamics (Valenzuela et al.
2013). That is, the quality of education a student receives is highly correlated with
the amount of money families can pay. This educational inequality, alongside low
youth voter turnout, was the main concern expressed by a 2005 government com-
mission on citizenship education comprised of experts, scholars, politicians, and
social actors (Gobierno de Chile 2005; Mardones 2015).
The socioeconomic stratification problem became part of a broader struggle when
taken up by a number of social mobilizations over education which have been
especially active since 2006 (Somma 2012). As for boosting youth electoral partic-
ipation, the 2005 commission’s report inspired the 2009 and 2013 curricular adjust-
ments which without fundamentally altering the content defined in the 1990s aligned
with international citizenship education standards (Cox and García 2017). Never-
theless, and again mirroring trends in other nations, young people in Chile remain
alienated from formal political institutions, such as elections and political parties,
and are more likely to engage instead in informal, protest-based forms of action
(Somma and Bargsted 2015).
Since 2006, an incredibly strong student social movement emerged and consol-
idated in Chile and remains extremely active. This student social movement encom-
passes mostly secondary and higher education students and the social organizations
that support their demands. With a variety of objectives and loose coordination, the
student social movement has lasted and been effective at protesting for the improve-
ment of education quality, the reduction of socioeconomic stratification in education,
and ending for-profit primary, secondary, and higher education. Additionally, the
student social movement agitated for free-of-charge higher education. Today, per-
haps the movement’s most noteworthy achievement is the fact that free higher
education is available to 60 percent of students from the lowest-income families,
with a commitment by the government to eventually reach universal coverage.
Those private universities receiving funding from the state have chafed not so
much at the general purpose of this policy but because of its ill-designed mecha-
nisms, which have compromised their financial sustainability. In any case, since
2006 the student social movement has successfully framed vigorous national debate
over education (Somma 2012; Von Bülow and Bidegain 2015). However, the
Chilean education social movement has demanded little or nothing with respect to
citizenship education, which has developed as a normative and technical issue
352 R. Mardones

mostly discussed by experts within the confines of government commissions rather

than by the wider public.
The latest development in the public policy of citizenship education in Chile was
the reintroduction in 2018 of citizenship education for the last two grades of
secondary education. Law 20,911 requires all Chilean schools, public and private,
to include a citizenship education plan from preschool through secondary and was
enacted in April 2016 by Congress, marking the first time that legislators, rather than
bureaucrats and technical consultants on government commissions, formally
discussed and sanctioned citizenship education (Gobierno de Chile 2016). The
legislation provides legal impetus to the guidelines while giving teachers a greater
sense of the purpose of a fragmented, confused curricular framework. The law
mandates that schools must integrate the bulk of national curricular guidelines,
most notably on democracy, human rights, and diversity, although the law has left
out two emerging issues of importance in international academic and political
debates: national identity in face of massive migratory influxes and global citizen-
ship. So far these elsewhere salient issues have been absent from the Chilean
discourses on citizenship education.

Global Citizenship and National Identity: The Missing Issues

in Contemporary Chilean Debate

Strengthening national identities has been a major goal in the developed world,
pursued at times via citizenship education. Denmark, for example, undertook a
curricular reform in the 1990s with the objective of protecting democracy, social
cohesion, and national identity, all challenged by globalization (Jensen and
Mouritsen 2015). The right-wing government that took office in 2001 held that
some youth in Denmark lacked a sufficiently democratic mentality and, without a
sense of national belonging, would be prone to disaffection or radicalization. In
response, the curriculum was centralized and Danish history, language, and litera-
ture, and citizenship education content increased (Jensen and Mouritsen 2015).
The aforementioned 1990s citizenship education reforms in France and England
intended to strengthen democracy, just like in Denmark, with a focus on tolerance of
racial and ethnic diversity (Osler and Starkey 2001). Their response was to include a
focus on traditional national identity. Citizenship education in France, for example,
has maintained the objective of reinforcing the state’s republican character, which
has in some cases created conflict with private, ethnic, or religious groups that might
weaken the national identity and that, therefore, should be submitted to the repub-
lican ethos (Osler and Starkey 2001). The same occurs in the USA, where the diverse
cultural origins of its population are recognized, yet there is a widespread idea that
there exists a set of easily identifiable common beliefs that should be promoted
(Westheimer and Kahne 2004).
From the international experience, it is not clear whether the formula of embrac-
ing multiculturalism while reinforcing national identity centered on traditional
patriotic values is effectively more inclusive than past forms. The challenge lies in
23 The Politics of Citizenship Education in Chile 353

updating an ever-shifting national identity to retain a commonality alongside

plurality.
In the 2017 national census, 12.4% of Chile’s population identified themselves as
belonging to an indigenous people. Since the 1990s, the multiculturalism debate in
Chile has contemplated indigenous peoples and their demands for land restitution,
poverty and inequality reduction, cultural recognition, self-governance, and legisla-
tive quotas. Layering over this issue is the emerging immigration debate. According
to census data, immigrants grew from 0.81% of the population in 1992 to 4.35% in
2017 (Gobierno de Chile 2018).
Immigrants in Chile are mainly from other Latin-American and Caribbean coun-
tries. Even though this 4.35% figure is relatively low, it is a growing trend that is
altering Chile’s social landscape. In any case, it is high enough to constitute an
important issue for Chile’s government. The legal status of immigrants, discrimina-
tion, and access to social services, including education, are common discussion
topics nowadays. If the abovementioned countries are any guide, recognition and
efforts toward social cohesion might be addressed by citizenship education.
As for global citizenship, nationalism has been viewed as impeding the forging of
an international community (Banks 2004), while in democratic theory, the concept of
global citizenship has been incorporated as a critical component of citizenship
education (Mardones 2012; Nussbaum 1996). Motivations for promoting the global
citizenship education model vary, but two noteworthy extremes are developing labor
skills that a globalized economy needs, the “global competence approach,” and
developing cultural sensitivity and empathy toward non-countrymen, the “global
consciousness approach” (Goren and Yemini 2017). The latter is a key feature of the
concept of “cosmopolitanism,” which Amy Gutmann (1999) defines as “an affect
towards all human beings, independent of particular identities.”
From a policy perspective, UNESCO has been a leading advocate of global
citizenship, with a focus on sustainable development, justice, social equity, and
global solidarity (2015). But despite UNESCO’s efforts, a study of six Latin-
American countries – including Chile (Cox 2010) – shows that global citizenship
does not even appear as a thematic category in their curricula (Mardones et al. 2014).

Conclusions

In Chile, deliberative politics around citizenship education falls short of its purposes,
despite the topic’s highly normative character. Excepting the progressive education
movement, deliberative politics seems to have had marginal impact on the way
policy has evolved. Meanwhile, the adversarial approach’s straightforward explana-
tion of citizenship education as the outcome of the preferences of self-interested
actors also fails to provide a full explanation. The institutional approach produces a
more useful perspective that considers historical development, context, and institu-
tional legacies, as well as interests, values, preferences, and ideas. Citizenship
education curricula, for example, are the result of several layers of ideas, policy
tools, and institutions. No winning government coalition can completely erase these
354 R. Mardones

legacies; not even the dictatorship, with its formidable power, could ensure that the
curricula could be implemented in its authoritarian and neoliberal character at the
grassroot level.
For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Chile, civic education was
present but submerged in wider political processes and broader policy domains, as
shown by the comprehensive neoliberal reform of the school system during the
dictatorship. This reform had two notable political implications. The first was the
attempt to promote the protected democracy model under the aegis of allegedly
politically neutral civic education and to depoliticize institutions and society – a
failed attempt, considering the dictatorship’s later electoral defeat. The second
implication was the promulgation of the general education law in 1990 at the end
of the dictatorship, which among other things enabled school-level curricular flex-
ibility within the general guidelines prescribed by the government. This was valu-
able in ensuring educational freedom. However, the dictatorship never intended to
boost educational freedom but to limit the political discretion of the incoming center-
left democratic government.
Thus, this policy is not a mere direct by-product of winners advancing their
narrow interests but also the unintended consequences of other political purposes.
For example, neither the idea of global citizenship nor the challenges of national
identity vis-á-vis multiculturalism have seemed preeminent up to now in Chile.
Instead, Chile’s troubled recent record of and efforts to promote human rights have
been prominent. Entering the twenty-first century, curricular adjustments in Chile, as
in other countries, responded specifically to the perception of the low quality of
democracy, considering indicators of alienation from formal political institutions
such as voter turnout and political party disengagement, in addition to rampant social
inequality and the socioeconomic stratification of the school system.
Massive social protests and student mobilizations along with an even broader
social debate on the need for a new constitution have recently pushed education
policy in Chile away from a neoliberal legacy. However, changes in citizenship
education occurred specifically through expert consultation, combined with bureau-
cratic, not legislative, decision-making, excepting the 2016 citizenship education
law. The prospects for a deliberative turn in citizenship education policy seem good
thanks to the newly designed local agencies for public education, where students and
parents should have a formal voice in political control of their schools. The empow-
erment of parents and students will counterbalance or complement the adversarial
exchange with the expert commission consultation, politicians, bureaucrats, school
authorities, and teachers. Moreover, as the institutional perspective suggests, this
empowerment would add key stakeholders in a highly complex process that also
involves history, context, institutional legacies, public ideas, and normative goals.

Acknowledgment This chapter is a result of a broader research initiative for which the author
has received funding from the Chilean government through FONDECYT project No. 1171448.
The author wishes to thank Dania Straughan and Nikolai Stieglitz for English editing and
proofreading and Alejandra Marinovic and the editors of this handbook for extensive comments
and suggestions.
23 The Politics of Citizenship Education in Chile 355

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Global Citizenship Education in South
Korea: The Roles of NGOs in Cultivating 24
Global Citizens

Jae-Eun Noh

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 360
The Quest for Global Citizenship as a Pressing Issue in South Korea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 360
Changing Population . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 360
International Agenda for Global Citizenship Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 361
Underpinning Concepts and Typologies of Global Citizenship Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 362
Key Concepts of Global Citizenship Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 363
Typologies of Global Citizenship Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 364
State-Led Global Citizenship Education in Korea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 365
GCE-Related Policies and Programs in Korea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 365
Limitations of State-Led GCE in Korea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 365
NGO-Led Global Citizenship Education in Korea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 367
NGOs as GCE Provider . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 367
Key Issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 369
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 371
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 371

Abstract
Global citizenship education (GCE) has recently emerged as a prominent issue in
South Korea, a nation faced with an inflow of immigrants and international
demands for GCE as emphasized, for example, in the Sustainable Development
Goals (SDGs). This chapter examines existing literature in the field to explore
how GCE has been understood and implemented in South Korea. Despite the
increasing GCE imperative in South Korea, GCE has not been well integrated
with the national curriculum. In addition, pedagogic strategy development has
been limited. Building on studies which suggest inherent limitations of state-led

J.-E. Noh (*)

Learning Sciences Institute Australia, Australian Catholic University, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 359
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_13
360 J.-E. Noh

GCE, this chapter explores the potential of NGOs as GCE provider in the Korean
context. On the basis of a review of Korean NGOs’ GCE programs, the chapter
identifies a number of notable strengths compared to state-led GCE as well as
some remaining issues for further development.

Keywords
Global citizenship · Citizenship education · Global education, Nonformal
education, NGO

Introduction

Debates on global citizenship education (GCE) have arisen out of concerns with how
to prepare all citizens to live in multicultural societies and in an interconnected world
where diversity and equality are appreciated. Mirroring other national contexts
where “others” have been encountered for a relatively long time (Bebbington et al.
2008, p. 302) and where global citizenship education (GCE) has received significant
policy, academic, and practical attention, discussions about GCE have increased in
recent years in South Korea. A systematic review of 255 GCE studies published in
South Korea between 1995 and 2016 reveals that the amount of research has rapidly
increased since 2010 (Park and Cho 2016). Early studies on GCE programs in the
context of South Korea sought to establish the rationale for GCE based on survey
results showing Korean students’ prejudice against foreigners and the examination of
global trends in education (Im 2003; No 2003). More recent studies have identified
demographic change and the rising demands from the international community as
underpinning reasons for the increased attention on GCE (Moon 2010; Pak 2013).
This chapter provides an overview of how GCE has been embraced in South Korea
and examines the role of NGOs’ in promoting GCE in this context. The chapter is
divided into four sections. The first section explores the reasons why the past decades
have seen a rapidly growing interest in GCE in South Korea. The second section
outlines the key concepts and typologies of GCE. The next section discusses
GCE-related policies and programs of the Korean government, before the last section
investigates the nature of NGO-led GCE in order to identify the strengths and remaining
challenges to be addressed of NGO involvement as an alternative to state-led GCE.

The Quest for Global Citizenship as a Pressing Issue in South

Korea

Changing Population

A key driver informing and shaping GCE in South Korea has been the changing
nature of its population. Traditionally, Korea has regarded itself as a monoethnic
society. A monoethnic society has been associated with positive images in South
24 Global Citizenship Education in South Korea: The Roles of NGOs in. . . 361

Korea, similar to Japan (Banks 2004). Korean people have lived within a “nation-
alist” ideology, rather than one of “cosmopolitanism,” as denoted in a long-kept
slogan, “one blood, one culture, and one nation” (Moon 2010, p. 6). However, the
growing number of immigrants to South Korea means that Korea is not a single-
ethnic and homogeneous country anymore.
One element of the changing demographics is Korea’s rapidly increasing number
of non-Korean citizens. According to the Korea National Statistical Office, the
registered number of foreigners jumped to 2,049,441 (3.9% of the total population)
in 2017, a drastic change in comparison to 206,895 (0.4%) in 1999. The increased
heterogeneity is mainly explained by a significant growth in migrant workers and
marriage migrants who married Korean nationals. South Korea is now one of the
major destinations for migrant laborers, who are filling a labor shortage caused by an
aging population and a low birth rate (Korea National Statistical Office 2015).
Marriage migrants increased sixfold from 25,182 in 2001 to 152,374 in 2015, and
72% of marriage migrants are women largely from Vietnam and China (Korea
National Statistical Office 2017). Children of international marriages are correspond-
ingly challenging the traditional concept of “one nationality.”
In response to such demographic change, the Korean government revised its nation-
ality law in 1997 and announced the “Grand Plan” which included a principle of raising
awareness about cultural diversity (Lee 2008, p. 116). The Ministry of Justice introduced
the Korea Immigration and Integration Program (KIIP) in 2009, which was designed to
support new migrants’ initial adjustment with a focus on knowledge of Korean culture
and language (Korea Immigration Service 2016). The Korean government is trying to
make KIIP mandatory for all permanent and temporary immigrants. This program aims
to make immigrants fit in Korean society, described as “a transformation of immigrants
into normal citizens of South Korea” (Kim 2016, p. 11).
Korea’s short history of living with others and prevalent nationalism can result in
discrimination against foreign residents. Identified issues include discrimination
against marriage immigrant women and their children (Chung and Lim 2016),
limited access to the labor market for immigrant women (Yang 2017), and manda-
tory foreigner-only HIV/AIDS test (Wagner and Van Volkenburg 2011). Recent
media coverage on children with no registration (Park 2017) and hardship facing
refugees and immigrants (Seong et al. 2017) has provoked discussions about the
necessity for awareness raising and policy reforms.

International Agenda for Global Citizenship Education

The international recognition of global citizenship education (GCE) can be traced

back to the 44th UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization) Conference in 1995. GCE is defined as education for ensuring peace,
human rights, democracy, and sustainable and equitable economic and social devel-
opment (UNESCO 1995). GCE has been high on UNESCO’s agenda, with changing
emphases on reflective and transformative learning (UNESCO 2013), lifelong learn-
ing, and contextualization (UNESCO 2014).
362 J.-E. Noh

Korea’s promotion of GCE was accelerated by the facts that South Korea became the
24th member nation in the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) in the Organi-
zation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 2009 and that it hosted
key international conferences on GCE in 2015 and 2016. Firstly, Korea’s membership of
the DAC meant increased financial contribution from South Korea to developing
countries for development and poverty reduction through official development assis-
tance (ODA). According to research conducted by the Korea Institute for International
Economic Policy in 2005, only 37.1% of Koreans were aware of ODA, and 48.8%
responded that Korea should maintain or decrease the amount of ODA (Kwon et al.
2006). This posed an urgent need to raise people’s awareness of international aid, with
GCE positioned as an effective way to shape public awareness on global development
issues and build public support for foreign aid (Lappalainen 2015).
Secondly, the World Education Forum was held in South Korea in May in 2015.
Chung and Park (2016) suggest that the Korean government strongly emphasized GCE
while preparing for the Forum, possibly influenced by the Global Education First
Initiative (GEFI) which was promoted by the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, a
South Korean, in 2012. The 2015 Forum puts GCE high on the global education agenda.
The global education agenda has been dominated by catchphrases such as “education for
all” and “quality learning for all.” Within this agenda, the newly emerged focus on GCE
confirms the necessity that education should contribute toward peace building and social
cohesion (Kim 2017). In September in 2015, all 193 member states of the United Nations
agreed upon the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs suggest the most
pressing issues to be addressed by 2030, including GCE in Target 4.7 as follows:

“By 2030, ensure that all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote
sustainable development, including, among others, through education for sustainable devel-
opment and sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of
peace and non-violence, global citizenship and appreciation of cultural diversity and of
culture’s contribution to sustainable development.” (UNESCO n.d.)

The importance of GCE for sustainable development was emphasized in two

international conferences held in Korea in 2016: the International Conference on
GCE hosted by the Korean Ministry of Education in partnership with UNESCO and
the 66th UN DPI (Department of Public Information)/NGO conference entitled
“Education for Global Citizenship: Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals
Together.” Hosting these conferences enabled the Korean government and Korea-
based NGOs to mobilize national efforts for GCE.

Underpinning Concepts and Typologies of Global Citizenship

Education

With increasing interests in GCE, there has been much discussion about curriculum,
pedagogy, and assessment related to GCE, but its underpinning ideas were not much
examined in Korea (Park and Cho 2016). This section hereby outlines key concepts
24 Global Citizenship Education in South Korea: The Roles of NGOs in. . . 363

which comprise GCE and typologies of GCE emerging from the literature. Under-
standing these concepts and typologies provides a valuable basis for the examination
of the differences between state-led GCE and NGO-led GCE in the South Korean
context which follows in the remaining sections.

Key Concepts of Global Citizenship Education

Global citizenship education (GCE) has evolved through the integration of diverse
agendas and through promotion in varied education settings. As a result, GCE
remains loosely defined and ambiguous (Rapoport 2010). GCE is not an independent
educational agenda. Rather, GCE embraces universal values such as human rights,
peace, social justice, nondiscrimination, diversity, and sustainable development
(Kim 2017).
It is possible to discern varied names for education which has a global dimen-
sion. The names usually specify their focus, as seen in “development education”
(recently replaced by “education for sustainable development”), “human rights
education,” “peace education,” and “multicultural education.” In this sense, global
citizenship education (GCE) is perhaps best understood as an umbrella term.
Scholars have tried to draw a distinction between GCE and other types of global
education. For example, Banks (2004) suggests that GCE is the highest level of
multiculturalism (Banks 2004), and Arshad-Ayaz (2011) argues that GCE should
be differentiated from multicultural education which has a narrow focus on only
the cultural dimension, with no consideration for social justice and tensions. With
regard to differences, education for sustainable development tends to be centered
around environmental issues and has been considered as less critical than GCE
(Chung and Park 2016).
Even when GCE incorporates diverse concepts, a central question is around who
a global citizen is. An earlier attempt to define “global citizen” was made by Korten
(1990) as follows:

“The distinctive quality of the responsible global citizen is found in a commitment to

integrative values and to the active application of a critical consciousness: the ability to
think independently, critically and constructively, to view problems within their long-term
context, and to make judgments based on a commitment to longer-term societal interests.”
(Korten 1990, p. 107)

Heater (1996) suggests four characteristics of a global citizen: (a) belief in

community of mankind, (b) environmental entitlements and obligations, (c) accep-
tance of moral laws, and (d) contribution toward world government. More recently,
Pike (2008) suggests six features from a critical viewpoint: (a) multiple identities and
loyalties; (b) critical understanding of both nationalism and globalism; (c) develop-
ment of global thinking; (d) understanding citizenship as doing, not just being or
knowing; (e) acceptance of the moral responsibilities; and (f) understanding citizens’
roles for the health of the planet.
364 J.-E. Noh

In order to cultivate such global citizens, key components of GCE curriculum are
commonly suggested as follows: knowledge and understanding (e.g., international
issues, interconnectedness, reflection, and awareness), values and attitudes (e.g.,
sense of solidarity, shared responsibility, and respect for differences), skills (e.g.,
political literacy and critical analysis), and actions (e.g., active interests in interna-
tional affairs, commitment to justice, and practice for solving problems) (Davies
2006; Merrifield 2002; Osler and Vincent 2002; Parekh 2003).
It is argued that transformative learning processes are essential for global citizen-
ship. Critical thinking, dialogue, and reflection are suggested as the key dimensions
of a pedagogical framework for GCE (Grossman et al. 2008). An empirical study
conducted in Mexico recommends shifting the priority of GCE “from the formal
curriculum to the transformation of school practice” to promote students’ participa-
tion and political ability (Pérez-Expósito 2015, p. 251). Ensuring the learning
process is reflective and open to diversity can be both the means and the ends
of GCE.
As discussed, key concepts and components of GCE have been well documented.
However, what really matters is how these concepts and components are understood
and practiced. In Korea, these concepts and components remain too vague, too ideal,
and normative without much discussion (Kim 2017).

Typologies of Global Citizenship Education

Existing studies identify many different ways in which GCE can be grouped in terms
of major focus and orientation. GCE can have differentiated foci, as Davies (2006),
for example, offers the following typology:

• Global citizenship + education: GCE is a framework to nurture global citizenship.

• Global + citizenship education: GCE is basically a citizenship program but
redesigned to respond to globalized world.
• Global education + citizenship: GCE is seen as global education which promotes
awareness on global governance, rights, and responsibility, with an emphasis on
citizen participation and roles.

Veugelers (2011) suggests three categories of global citizenship: open, moral, and
sociopolitical. Each category emphasizes openness, humanity and global responsi-
bility, and equal relations, respectively. Dill (2013) upholds that GCE can take an
approach with a focus on either global competencies or global consciousness.
Another recent study (Oxley and Morris 2013) categorizes GCE into two main
strands: cosmopolitan-based and advocacy-based. The former involves political,
moral, economic, and cultural aspects of global citizenship, and the latter incorpo-
rates social, critical, environmental, and spiritual dimensions.
The aforementioned typologies highlight the diversity of framing and
implementing GCE. These typologies are helpful for understanding differences
between state-led GCE and NGO-led GCE. According to Davies’ framework,
24 Global Citizenship Education in South Korea: The Roles of NGOs in. . . 365

GCE implemented by the state is suggested as an extension of existing “citizenship

education” (Davies et al. 2005; Davies 2006), while NGOs’ GCE has focused
typically on “global education.” Of course, how “global education” is conceptual-
ized and implemented by a given NGO determines the focus and content of their
GCE programs. The typologies set out in this section are helpful in informing an
examination of GCE in the Korean context in the following sections.

State-Led Global Citizenship Education in Korea

GCE-Related Policies and Programs in Korea

A number of policy interventions have strengthened the focus on GCE in South

Korea over the last 20 years. Education Reform in 1995 acknowledged the impor-
tance of young Koreans being prepared for globalization (Kim 2017). Following the
direction of the Reform, the “Adapting Education to the Information Age” policy
was introduced in 1998 (Grossman et al. 2008). In 2007, textbooks were revised to
remove descriptions which invoked nationalistic and ethnocentric sentiment (Cha
et al. 2016). The Revised Curriculum in 2009 aimed to nurture concerning and
caring global citizens who can contribute toward development of global community.
To meet this aim, the 2009 Revised Curriculum confirmed the necessity for strength-
ening GCE components in teacher education and training (Kim 2017). However,
GCE suggested by the 2009 Revised Curriculum was limited to an educational
strategy for enhancing national competitiveness and for raising awareness of multi-
culturalism (Lee 2015). While preparing for the 2015 World Education Forum, the
Ministry of Education announced the 2015 Revised National Curriculum with a long-
term vision to embrace key components of GCE (Korean Ministry of Education n.d.).
Translating the GCE-related policies into teaching practices is not yet well
established in South Korea. Korea has no formal curriculum for multicultural
awareness and global citizenship. Instead, subjects such as “Morals” and “Social
Life” include a focus on interconnectedness and moral responsibility but with far
greater emphasis on national citizenship than on GCE (Lee et al. 2015; Moon and
Koo 2011). Kim’s (2017) analysis also reveals that Korean moral education encom-
passes key concepts of GCE to some degree, but commitment to and participation in
action is rarely discussed.

Limitations of State-Led GCE in Korea

The governmental drive to foster global citizenship education (GCE) implies that the
state enacts the cultivation of global citizens. However, one of the problems involved
in state-run GCE is the possibility of indoctrination (Biesta 2011). In addition,
Gaventa (2002) argues that state-driven GCE has a limited concept of citizenship
since it is generated by a liberal approach which prioritizes citizenship as a set of
rights and responsibilities defined only by the relationship with the state. Such a
366 J.-E. Noh

concept of citizenship developed out of city-states, secular culture, and moderniza-

tion, which were peculiar to the West in the eighteenth century (Turner 1993). The
critique on the Western centrism of human rights (Nyamu-Musembi and Musyoki
2004) also invites an examination of conceptual foundations of GCE. Although the
values of human rights and democratic citizenship are universal, the concepts of
citizenship and human rights can be interpreted differently in non-Western contexts
(Thompson and Tapscott 2010). As a result, key ideas of GCE such as citizenship
and human rights can be regarded as rooted in Western discourse, and citizenship-
focused GCE appears unfamiliar to non-Western people (Kim 2017).
Another issue is that GCE in formal education tends to lack a social justice
framework and action-oriented perspective, both of which are necessary to improve
political literacy (Davies et al. 2005; Bourke et al. 2012). Political literacy refers to an
ability to “think critically about what socio-cultural, economic and international politics
that generate multicultural society mean for a citizen in a global world” (Moon 2010,
p.10). With no emphasis on political aspects of global citizenship, GCE could build
cosmopolitan solidarity but fail to challenge transnational inequality (Nash 2008). A
systematic review of 90 empirical studies published between 2005 and 2015 in 5 con-
tinents shows that teachers are reluctant to talk about sensitive and political issues
(Goren and Yemini 2017). Given that citizen action is one of the key components of
GCE (McCloskey 2016), some criticize state-led GCE as decontextualized and
depoliticized (Kim 2017; McCloskey 2016; Pérez-Expósito 2015).
The extent literature suggests that GCE should embody universal values and at
the same time contextualize the values to be relevant to the Korean context. Current
Korean laws and policies concerning immigrants have been criticized as “one-sided
assimilation” (Corks 2017). Likewise, governmental orientation toward GCE has
been based on the notion of assimilation (Yoon 2008). This liberal assimilation is
strengthened by Confucian values such as social unity and harmony (Moon 2010).
Confucian beliefs can create tension as well, given that case studies of other Asian
countries note tensions between state-oriented education and individual-oriented
education (Grossman et al. 2008). However, it should be noted that some studies
suggest that Confucian values fit well with GCE because of their humanitarian focus,
as observed, for example, in China (Reed 2004; Xiong and Li 2017).
Existing reviews of actually implemented GCE programs in South Korea evi-
dence a number of challenges, including ambiguity, low awareness, unequal acces-
sibility, and a lack of action. Global education at primary schools is criticized as too
simple and abstract (Park et al. 2007). Park et al. (2007) emphasize that GCE should
be linked to communities out of schools to have practical implications. One empir-
ical study shows that less than 30% of primary schools offer GCE and more than
60% of teachers indicate low levels of knowledge with regard to GCE (Lee et al.
2015). Another critical finding is that GCE is more widely performed in schools
from affluent areas than in schools from less affluent areas (Lee et al. 2015). This
implies a gap in access and exposure to GCE based on socioeconomic status. Lack of
action-oriented learning is commonplace in state-led GCE as discussed earlier. In
South Korea, for example, GCE tends to be framed with humanity without a focus
on political contexts and conflicts of interests (Kim 2017).
24 Global Citizenship Education in South Korea: The Roles of NGOs in. . . 367

NGO-Led Global Citizenship Education in Korea

Non-governmental organizations involved in international development and human-

itarian aid (development NGOs hereinafter) have played an active role in GCE in
partnership with schools. For example, schools in the UK have worked with
development NGOs including Oxfam, which have provided schools with support
in terms of resources and curriculum (Marshall 2009). Likewise, in Europe, Devel-
opment Education and Awareness Raising (DEAR) programs have been
implemented by CONCORD (the European Confederation for Relief and Develop-
ment NGOs) (Lappalainen 2015).
In South Korea, development NGOs have taken a key role in delivering GCE.
NGOs’ involvement in GCE has been suggested by some Korean scholars as a way
of refining the state model (Yoon 2008; Moon 2010). Target 4.7 of the Sustainable
Development Goals (SDGs) also confirms that GCE is a common goal between the
state and NGOs.

NGOs as GCE Provider

In non-Korean contexts, development NGOs have been regarded as appropriate

providers of GCE. Osler and Vincent (2002) maintain that NGOs can play an
effective role for GCE, because NGOs themselves are a part of globalization by
linking supporters in developed countries to those in developing countries
(Desforges 2004). NGOs have provided development education, in turn shaping
public awareness on global developmental issues and building public support for
foreign aid (Lappalainen 2015). In addition, development NGOs’ strengths to
implement GCE can be found in their value-orientation and vitality. Habermas
(2001), for example, presents NGOs as an important actor to institutionalize inno-
vative values. Many NGOs have worked for realizing values such as sustainable
development, human dignity, and good governance, which resonate with key ele-
ments of GCE. In terms of implementation, NGOs are presumed to be cost-effective,
innovative, and flexible (Dichter 1999). These traits have legitimated NGOs’
involvement in GCE.
Korean development NGOs are also suggested as effective organizations for GCE
because of their relevantly abundant experience in developing countries and the
possibility they offer for creative and flexible GCE, as compared to state-run GCE
(Park 2008). It is reported that 21.3% of registered Korean NGOs (122 as of 2015)
provide GCE programs (UNESCO Korea 2015). A key influence on Korean NGOs’
recent interests in GCE was the decision by KOICA (Korea International Cooper-
ation Agency) to sponsor NGOs’ GCE program (KOICA 2009).
Korean development NGOs’ GCE is diversified in terms of the focus (global
competency/global consciousness, cosmopolitanism/advocacy), operation (within/
out of the school system), target group (school children, university student, adults),
learning style (lecture, visual tools, volunteering, outdoor activity), and duration
(1-day session, several week-long course, long-term project). An initial form of GCE
368 J.-E. Noh

delivered by NGOs was teenagers’ camps for global understanding, as seen in

examples of the Korean National Commission for UNESCO, World Vision Korea,
and Korea NGO Council for Overseas Cooperation (KCOC) (UNESCO Korea
2010; World Vision Korea 2010; KCOC 2010). These camps were dominated by a
competency approach (Dill 2013), which is based on the neoliberal perspective that
education should nurture competitive workers for cosmopolitan capitalism (Goren
and Yemini 2017; Lynch et al. 2007). Most participants in these voluntary events
were students from foreign language schools or from a privileged background (Heo
2017). With less emphasis on moral responsibility and critical awareness, camp
participants conceived of a global citizen as a fluent English speaker. Highly valued
capabilities to serve the global workforce in turn reinforced neoliberalism as the
defining reality in which people learn and work (Shin 2016).
Another type of GCE program widely implemented by Korean NGOs is an
introductory program designed for volunteers overseas, mostly university students
and adults. Korean development NGOs put a volunteer program under the category
of civic education (Good Neighbors International 2010; Global Civic Sharing 2010),
as they regard it as an effective way to cultivate global citizens. The induction
program for volunteers aims to broaden their understanding of global issues and to
gain a global perspective. This induction training is followed by short-term and long-
term participation in international development projects in developing countries. The
focus is given to cosmopolitanism, humanity, and global responsibility, which
embody moral aspects of global citizenship. Participants in this practice-based
GCE are expected to play an active role as a project worker, not as a passive learner
(Kim 2017).
Recently, some larger NGOs with adequate financial and personal resources have
started to develop more refined and standardized educational programs for school
children to promote global citizenship nationwide. These NGOs offer training to
volunteers, who deliver global citizenship education at schools. Global Civic Shar-
ing is the first Korean NGO which launched a development education program titled
“Global Civic School” in 2002. Volunteers trained by this program, mostly univer-
sity students, have taken part in GCE programs in primary or secondary school as
guest teachers (Global Civic Sharing 2010).
When it comes to GCE programs designed for children and youth, Global
Citizenship School is the most renowned program run by World Vision Korea
since 2007. Close to two million participants have completed the program since
2012 when Global Citizenship School was accredited by the Ministry of Educa-
tion (World Vision Korea n.d.). UNESCO Korea and Good Neighbors Interna-
tional are also implementing GCE in primary and secondary schools (UNESCO
Korea 2010; Good Neighbors International 2010). Working with schools is
possible because of the reputation and nationwide networks of these organiza-
tions. For example, one program of Good Neighbors International, “Writing a
hope letter” to poor children living in southern-tier countries, involved 1,764,221
students from 2414 schools in 2011 (Good Neighbors International 2011). How-
ever, smaller NGOs with no nationwide network have difficulty in gaining access
to schools (Yoo 2015).
24 Global Citizenship Education in South Korea: The Roles of NGOs in. . . 369

Besides, Good Neighbors International and Korea Food for the Hungry Interna-
tional have online contents to expand their reach to more children, especially those
who live in remote areas (Good Neighbors International 2010; Korea Food for the
Hungry International 2010). These NGOs are expanding the targets to include
everyone in Korean society as well as school students (Good Neighbors Interna-
tional 2011; World Vision Korea n.d.).

Key Issues

Acknowledging that NGO-led GCE is under-researched, this section outlines the

strengths and remaining issues of NGO-led GCE in South Korea. Identified strengths
include transformative learning by doing, orientation toward cosmopolitanism, and
diversity in program types and participants.
The first notable strength of NGO-led GCE in Korea is that volunteering activities
in the name of GCE provide participants with opportunities to develop awareness of
multiculturalism and global community in practice. Participants in international
development projects or in GCE delivery in a classroom can experience transforma-
tion from passive learners to active practitioners or to trainers, respectively (Kim
2017). In addition, Korean NGOs’ GCE programs are more accessible than those of
international or national governmental organizations such as UN bodies and
KOICA, in which participation is limited due to competitive selection processes,
longer participation periods, and the high cost involved (Kim 2017).
A further strength of NGO-led GCE is that it can overcome one of the typical
problems of state-led GCE, namely, assimilation and depoliticization. Korean NGOs
state their GCE aims as “to seek justice in helping youths become mature global
citizens” (World Vision Korea n.d.) and “become future leaders of social change”
(Good Neighbors International 2011, p. 222). Although there can be a gap between
these aims and their enactment, NGOs’ language of GCE suggests that these NGOs
pursue values aligned with key concepts of GCE.
In addition, in South Korea, NGOs’ GCE programs take various forms, targeting
various groups, whereas state-run GCE is designed mainly for school-aged children.
NGOs can reach out further to include learners at different stages of life, including
university students, adults, or the elderly. Providing GCE with diverse age groups
accords with one of the principles that GCE should be connected with lifelong
learning (UNESCO 2014). NGOs’ use of field offices in developing countries or
web-based software diversifies GCE programs to suit varied needs of all target
groups.
However, there are challenges to be addressed to be an alternative to state-led
GCE. Remaining issues are a lack of expertise in GCE, a lack of effectiveness, and
limited options for actions other than donation – each of which are discussed now
in turn.
Korean development NGOs’ GCE programs tend to focus on the interconnected-
ness of global world, world poverty, and cultural diversity based on their specialty in
aid and development. Other issues such as human rights, peace, and democracy are
370 J.-E. Noh

covered in a rather superficial way. However, many Korean development NGOs do

not seek collaboration with other NGOs specialized in those issues. In addition, it is
critical that NGOs examine the particular ways of teaching and learning which are
apt for GCE, including connecting with students’ experiences of such learning
(Breunig 2016). Here, partnership with educational professionals can be of help.
Another issue is that the GCE teaching materials used by South Korean devel-
opment NGOs were mostly developed by copying work from other international
NGOs. As such, these programs hardly reflect the social, cultural, and political
context of South Korea. As Merrifield (2002) holds, it is important to consider the
context in which people learn and apply their learning. GCE delivered by Korean
NGOs does not encourage students to identify problems in their own society and to
find strategies to solve the problems.
An effectiveness-related issue is that NGOs’ GCE are mostly delivered on a
one-off basis (UNESCO Korea 2016). Critical thinking and comprehensive under-
standing are not likely to be acquired from such a short-term single session.
Merrifield (2002) argues that providing information is not enough to deepen under-
standing. Taking key characteristics of GCE into account, Korean NGOs’ GCE
sessions seem too short to provide opportunities to link knowledge, attitude, skills,
and practice. For example, one evaluation report illustrates changes to students’
perception and attitudes but does not capture any sign of their commitment to action
(World Vision Korea 2015).
Delivery by voluntary instructors might also result in ineffectiveness. Although
volunteerism should be encouraged in recognition of its importance as described in
Korten (1990) as a “key to transformational change,” the use of volunteers in GCE
can risk the quality of education. High-quality instructors are needed for successful
delivery of GCE. Instructors are required to be equipped with knowledge and some
skills for facilitating activity-oriented programs. Existing studies show that school
teachers in the UK and the USA have difficulty in teaching GCE due to lack of
resources, training, and confidence (Davies 2006; Rapoport 2010). These limitations
deeply affect the contents and the focus of GCE: teachers tend to cover only
comfortable issues other than complex ones; teachers prefer depoliticized languages
such as “caring,” “unselfishness,” and “cooperation” to rights talk; cultural differ-
ences and conflicts are confined to private life; GCE is presented in a didactic way
with simple facts (Davies 2006, pp. 14–17). These concerns raised in other contexts
are relevant to South Korea. Korean NGOs face difficulty in recruiting and retaining
qualified instructors. Therefore, volunteers, mostly university students, fill the
demand for instructors. While not degrading volunteer instructors per se, it is
questionable whether Korean NGOs’ cascade training can guarantee the quality of
GCE conducted by volunteers.
Last but not least, Korean NGOs provide GCE participants with limited options
for acting as global citizens. As donations are often encouraged by GCE providers,
GCE appears to serve a fundraising purpose. In other words South Korean NGOs
suggest that making a donation is a way to be a responsible global citizen. For
example, Good Neighbors International ran a 10-year campaign named “Miracle of
100 Korean won” (equivalent amount to 5 UK pence). This campaign changed its
24 Global Citizenship Education in South Korea: The Roles of NGOs in. . . 371

name into a GCE program in 2008. The slight change is the provision of educational
service before collecting money from school children. The amount of money raised
from GCE is the most important criteria for an internal evaluation of this campaign
(Good Neighbors International 2009). This suggests that NGO’s GCE may be, even
partly, driven by a fundraising purpose. When NGOs use GCE as a fundraising
strategy, their GCE is likely to be limited in terms of providing diverse options for
action.

Conclusion

Global citizenship education has been embraced in formal education in many

countries. In South Korea, contemporary changes such as an influx of immigrants
are increasing the necessity for GCE. While GCE is not yet included in mainstream
education, some Korean NGOs working globally for international development have
responded to this social request more rapidly than other actors. Even though current
understandings of GCE programs run by development NGOs are limited, with little
empirical research, existing studies have explored various aspects of GCE, drawing
on several comparison points with state-driven GCE. The argument made in this
chapter suggests that NGOs’ involvement can compensate for some defects of state-
led initiatives. Examples of some GCE programs delivered by Korean development
NGOs demonstrate both the strengths and limitations of providing an alternative to
state-driven GCE. A review of South Korean GCE programs identifies a number of
remaining issues which warrant further examination. Future research which offers
GCE participant perspectives would undoubtedly be valuable.

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Citizenship Education in England: Policy
and Curriculum 25
Liz Moorse

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 376
The History of Citizenship Education in England: A Brief Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 377
Toward a Curriculum for Citizenship Education in England . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 378
Policy Opportunity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 379
Political Will . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 381
The National Curriculum for Citizenship Since 1999 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 383
The First National Curriculum for Citizenship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 383
The Second National Curriculum for Citizenship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 387
The Third National Curriculum for Citizenship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 392
Recent Policy Initiatives and the Impact on Citizenship and “Active Citizenship”
in the Curriculum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 395
The Process of Designing National Curriculum Policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 395
Ideology and Citizenship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 397
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 400
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 401

Abstract
This chapter outlines the context and key developments that led to the introduc-
tion of citizenship education in schools in England and examines some of the
recent education policy changes that have had an impact on the subject. Despite
many previous initiatives connected to Education for Citizenship, it was not
until 1999 that citizenship was introduced formally as a national curriculum
subject for secondary schools in England. As Bernard Crick (Parliam Aff
55:488–504, 2002), who had chaired the influential Advisory Group on Educa-
tion for Citizenship and the Teaching of Democracy in Schools, put it, the lack
of formal citizenship education prior to the new curriculum subject was

L. Moorse (*)
Association for Citizenship Teaching, London, UK
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 375
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_22
376 L. Moorse

primarily “because, of course, we thought we didn’t need it.” Tracing key policy
developments, provides an account of the key people, context, and events that led
to the introduction and continuation of citizenship as a subject in the school
curriculum in England and explains how policy has changed over time. The
processes used to construct the content for the national curriculum and successive
curricula reviews, as well as influential shifts in the ideological context in which
policy development has occurred, are also explored. The chapter closes with a
discussion of how these processes and ideological influences have impacted in
particular on the inclusion of active citizenship in the curriculum for citizenship
and highlights how debates about the purpose, status, and content for citizenship
in England are set to continue.

Keywords
Citizenship · National curriculum · Citizenship education · National curriculum
review · Active citizenship · Crick · Education · Policy

Introduction

At the time of writing, citizenship is on its third iteration as a national curriculum

subject in England. For the purposes of this chapter, “citizenship” is the title of
the national curriculum subject in England, and as such the term is used when
specifically discussing the subject. “Citizenship education” is used when discussing
the concept more broadly; the GCSE qualification is titled “Citizenship Studies” and
is referred to as such. Over the last 20 years, a number of factors have influenced and
shaped citizenship education policy and curriculum. Such factors include moments
of policy opportunity and political will that led to the subject being introduced in the
late 1990s to recent shifts in the way citizenship and in particular “active citizenship”
are included in the curriculum. Two key factors stand out: first, differences in the
processes used to consult on and construct the national curriculum, and, second,
shifts in the education priorities and the ideological influences that have shaped the
curriculum. Twenty years on from its introduction into the curriculum in England,
debates about purpose and policy for citizenship education endure, and these will
continue to influence the curriculum subject and its status in schools.
This chapter begins by tracing the early context for citizenship education well
before the national curriculum was created in the 1980s and then discusses how the
subject was introduced and has evolved over a series of periodic reviews of
the national curriculum initiated by successive governments – first under labour
administrations in the late 1990s/2000s and then in the early 2010s by the
Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government. An account of the key
influences, politics, and policy moments is provided, followed by an exploration
of how the aims, purpose, and content of citizenship as a subject have developed and
changed. The chapter closes with an examination of active citizenship, an essential
component of the subject which should be understood as both a key concept and
25 Citizenship Education in England: Policy and Curriculum 377

process within the content of what is taught, as well as a pedagogy for teaching
pupils how to participate in democratic decision-making. In this final section, it is
argued that the way active citizenship is positioned reflects sensitivities around the
term and the different views held by respective governments as to the kinds of
citizens young people are to become.

The History of Citizenship Education in England: A Brief Overview

The development of citizenship education is often linked to important periods of

social and political change. Historically, reasons for introducing citizenship educa-
tion have included state formation and a desire to establish or renew a sense of
identity and belonging among citizens (Johnson and Morris 2010). In England,
explanations for policy attention on citizenship education are more complex and
appear to shift over time. Over the last 70 or so years, these explanations include
moments of policy opportunity or “policy windows,” the political will that has led
to the subject being introduced and then retained in the school curriculum, shifts
in education priorities often influenced by political ideology, and the effects of
processes used to construct, consult on, and reform the national curriculum.
Perhaps the easiest place to begin to trace the development of citizenship educa-
tion in England is between the two world wars. This is also a good place to illustrate
how the concept and practice of citizenship has changed through recent history
(Heater 2001). In the inter-war period, real concerns existed about the growth of
fascism in Europe, leading to a desire to use schools as a means to strengthen liberal
democracy and, subsequently, the establishment of the Association for Education in
Citizenship (AEC) in 1934 (Heater 2001). Oliver Stanley MP, the President of the
Board of Education (now the Department for Education), captured the context in his
foreword to the Association’s publication, “Citizenship in Secondary Schools”
(1935):

The decay of democracy abroad has led many people to the conclusion that, if those
democratic institutions which we in this country agree are essential for the full development
of the individual are to be preserved, some systematic training in the duties of citizenship is
necessary.

The founding members of the AEC, Sir Ernest Simon and Eva Hubback, set out
the aims of education in citizenship as being a sense of responsibility, a love of truth
and freedom, the power of clear thinking in everyday affairs, and a knowledge of
the broad and economic facts. They advocated a direct method of Education for
Citizenship through the new subjects of Politics, Public Affairs, and Current History,
rather than relying on teaching through traditional subjects in the curriculum and the
school ethos (Clarke 2007).
Interest in political education gathered momentum in the 1970s, fuelled by a
decline in membership of political parties among young people and the lowering of
the voting age to 18 in 1970 (Clarke 2007). Around this time the Nuffield
378 L. Moorse

Foundation provided funding to the Hansard Society, with cooperation from the
Politics Association, to launch the “Programme for Political Education” (PPE). This
initiative involved curriculum work with schools aimed at developing young peo-
ples’ political literacy through the specific teaching of political education. The
program was based on work by Crick and Porter (1978) with the aim “to develop
a critical awareness of political phenomena, rather than an uncritical acceptance of
the status quo.” However, political events (including the election of the New Right
Conservative government in 1979) and economic recession caused a shift away from
broader education to a focus on basic skills and employability (cf. Clarke 2007).
Kisby (2006) also suggests that the Conservative government under Margaret
Thatcher was suspicious of the PPE and the possibility of indoctrination of pupils
by teachers.
During the 1980s, a number of high-profile people and organizations began to call
for educational change, including a focus on Education for Citizenship. Notably, a
Commission on Citizenship was set up in 1988 by the Speaker of the House of
Commons, the Rt Hon Bernard Weatherill, in order to consider how to “encourage,
develop, and recognize active citizenship within a wide range of groups in the
community, both local and national, including school students.” The Commission’s
report was published as Encouraging Citizenship (HMSO 1990), and the opening
sentence of the report continues to resonate today. “Citizenship. . . has to be learned,
like everything else.”
By the late 1980s, an increasing number of prominent organizations and people
were calling for citizenship education to be more formally taught in schools. The
Speaker’s Commission report had noted that the introduction of Education
for Citizenship to the national curriculum, as one of several cross-curricular themes,
had not had the desired impact in schools. The Citizenship Foundation (now also
known as Young Citizens), set in up 1989 by Andrew (Lord) Philips OBE, called for
education to address a lack of public legal understanding. Similarly, Community
Service Volunteers, an organization led by Dame Elisabeth Hoodless, called for
schools to take a greater role in promoting voluntary activity and community service.
Both organizations, together with the Hansard Society, subsequently acted as
key contributors to the development and implementation of citizenship education
in schools in England (Democratic Life 2011b). However, while there was a broad
consensus that citizenship education was needed in some form, debates about its
status as a subject and purpose in the curriculum continued.

Toward a Curriculum for Citizenship Education in England

For most of the twentieth century, then, citizenship education had been identified,
and sometimes supported, as a meaningful focus for schools in England. However,
by the late 1980s, no real curriculum for citizenship education existed. Indeed,
the majority of guidance published concerning citizenship education followed the
pattern identified by Kerr (1999, p. 204) of “. . .noble intentions, which are then
turned into general pronouncements, which, in turn, become minimal guidance for
25 Citizenship Education in England: Policy and Curriculum 379

schools.” At the time, there also seemed to be a lack of political conviction and will
on the part of the Conservative government to give prominence and status to the
teaching of citizenship education in schools as a subject. In this section, the shift
from this context to the introduction of citizenship education in 1999 is traced. It is
argued that two factors, each now considered in turn, were crucial in this shift: policy
opportunity and political will. Key moments in the development of citizenship
education between 1988 and 2018 are also summarized in Table 1.

Policy Opportunity

In the late 1980s, a policy opportunity emerged, as education policy began to

shift toward a greater specification at national level of what should be taught in
schools in England. A subject-based, national curriculum for England
was introduced by Kenneth Baker (then Education Secretary) for the first time, in
1988. The rationale for this decision was described as having four intentions:
establishing an entitlement to a broad and balanced curriculum, improving school
accountability, improving curriculum coherence, and aiding “public understanding”
of schools (House of Commons Library 2018).
In part the move to a national curriculum reflected a desire for education that
better prepared young people for adulthood, including to contribute to the economic
prosperity of the country. The 1988 Education Reform Act, which established the
national curriculum, did not provide a place for statutory citizenship education.
However, the Act did place a responsibility on schools to provide a broad and
balanced curriculum, promoting the spiritual, moral, cultural, mental, and physical
development of pupils and to prepare pupils for the opportunities and experiences of
adult life. In 1990, “Education for Citizenship” was included nationally as a cross-
curricular theme along with other themes on health education, economic and indus-
trial understanding, careers education and guidance, and environmental understand-
ing (Tilbury 1997, p. 93). These themes did not have statutory force but were
intended to help schools deal with important matters that crossed over individual
subjects.
At this time, schools were expected to take responsibility for introducing
these themes into their curriculum, and teachers would address them through their
subject teaching. Research suggests, however, that the cross-curricular themes did
not work in practice. Many teachers were too busy teaching their subject according
to the requirements of the national curriculum to have time to think about them and
implement them properly (Tilbury 1997, p. 93). In addition, the theme “Education
for Citizenship” was criticized for leading to fragmented and incoherent learning,
dry civics teaching and for being marginalized from the rest of the curriculum
(Oliver and Heater 1994, pp. 163–4). Crick himself wrote about this issue in his
Essays on Citizenship (2000) describing “the aspiration of many individuals and
interest groups frustrated by the marginalisation of citizenship as a cross curricular
theme in the 1990s and by its general absence from the curriculum in the decades
before.”
380 L. Moorse

Table 1 Key moments in the development of citizenship education 1988–2019

1988 National curriculum for England was introduced in primary and secondary schools
1990 Cross-curricular theme “Education for Citizenship” introduced in Curriculum
Guidance 8, for schools
1997 Schools White Paper “Excellence in Schools” announced Advisory Group on
Education for Citizenship and the Teaching of Democracy in Schools
1998 Crick Advisory Group report “Education for Citizenship and the teaching of
democracy in schools” published, recommending citizenship becomes a national
curriculum subject Recommendations accepted in full by government
1999 Revised national curriculum published including statutory programme of study for
citizenship at key stages 3 and 4 (secondary) making citizenship a national
curriculum subject
A non-statutory framework for personal, social, and health education and
citizenship is published for use in primary schools
2001 National Foundation for Educational Research commissioned by government to
undertake a longitudinal study into the impact of citizenship
Qualifications and Curriculum Authority launch national guidance and teaching
exemplification for citizenship in the form of schemes of work for citizenship
Post 16 citizenship support program launched with government funding
2002 First teaching of national curriculum for citizenship in schools
GCSE Citizenship Studies qualification becomes available as a “short” course
(50% of full GCSE)
2005 Government announces a review of the national curriculum in schools
2005–2006 House of Commons Select Committee Inquiry into the impact of citizenship education
2006 Ofsted publish report on inspection subject monitoring findings “Towards
Consensus? Citizenship in secondary schools”
2007 Sir Keith Ajegbo reports on “Review of Diversity and Citizenship in the
curriculum” for government
2007 Revised national curriculum published, including revised teaching requirements
for citizenship and attainment targets for pupils described as an 8 level scale
2008 Reformed A level Citizenship Studies available for first teaching
2009 GCSE Citizenship Studies qualification (full course) available for first teaching
with 60% weighting on active citizenship
2010 Ofsted report on school subject inspection findings “Citizenship established?”
National Foundation for Educational Research Longitudinal Study for citizenship,
final report on impact published
2011 Coalition government launches a review of the national curriculum for primary and
secondary schools
2013 Ofsted publish subject monitoring report, “Citizenship Consolidated?”
2014 Reformed national curriculum is published including revised program of study for
citizenship with new teaching requirement on political institutions and aspects of
personal finance education
2016 Reformed GCSE Citizenship Studies qualifications available with greater emphasis
on knowledge of constitution and institutions and reduction of active citizenship to 15%
2018 House of Lord Select Committee Citizenship and Civic Engagement Committee –
recommends statutory citizenship in every school primary and secondary
2019 Citizenship is included explicitly in the new School Inspection Framework: as a
national curriculum subject under Quality of Education measure and as a leading
subject under the personal development measure
25 Citizenship Education in England: Policy and Curriculum 381

A shift in policy commitment started when, in 1993, Ofsted – the agency responsible
for school inspection – developed a “Framework for the Inspection of Schools” that
recognized the role and importance of citizenship education. The framework stated:

Judgements should be based on the extent to which the school encourages pupils to: relate
positively to others, take responsibility, participate fully in the community, and develop an
understanding of citizenship; and teaches pupils to understand their own cultural traditions
and the richness and diversity of other cultures.

The policy opportunity to pay more explicit attention to citizenship education in the
school curriculum was also informed by the fact that in the mid-1990s, public concern
had developed about the morality and values of young people. These concerns were
highlighted by a number of high-profile murders: of Jamie Bulger 2-year-old-child
killed by two other children; of Stephen Lawrence, a black teenager killed by white
youths at a bus stop in East London; and of Head Teacher Philip Lawrence who was
stabbed while trying to protect a pupil at his London school who had been assaulted.
However, a revised national curriculum in 1995 (School Curriculum and
Assessment Authority 1994) offered little reassurance for advocates of citizenship
education. Notably, the reduced subject requirements did not include the cross-
curricular themes from 1990, and many felt that the materials discarded by the
slimmer curriculum were those very parts that helped subjects to promote more
explicitly the wider purpose of the curriculum. Taken together these were “to
promote pupils’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural development” and “prepare
them for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of adult life” (1988
Education Reform Act; see also Moorse 2015).

Political Will

The turning point for citizenship education came in 1997. With the Labour govern-
ment elected to power, and David Blunkett appointed as Secretary of State for
Education and Employment, the commitment to citizenship education began to
shape policy (Jerome and Moorse 2016). The significance of David Blunkett in
the development of citizenship education is clear; he was “an absolutely key figure in
the initiative” (Kisby 2006). However citizenship education was not a “flagship
policy” of the Blair government; it did not, for example, feature in the Labour Party
manifesto or in the Queenʼs speech. Indeed, Mycock and Tonge (2012) suggest the
inclusion of citizenship education in the White Paper “Excellence in Schools” (1997)
was a surprise to many in the party. However, the policy did fit with broader
objectives to create political change and democratization through political reform,
devolution, and increased transparency through Freedom of Information, all aiming
to enhance social capital (Kisby 2006).
The commitment to citizenship education in “Excellence in Schools” was clear.
The White Paper set out the new Labour government’s education policy priorities
and stated that schools should:
382 L. Moorse

help to ensure that young people feel they have a stake in society and the community in
which they live by teaching them the nature of democracy and the duties, responsibilities and
rights of citizens. (para 6.42, p. 63)

An Advisory Group was announced with a remit to examine citizenship

education and the teaching of democracy in schools. Professor Bernard Crick,
Blunkettʼs former teacher and mentor, accepted the role as chair of the group
(Kisby 2006). The group was managed by the body with responsibility for the
national curriculum, the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority (SCAA
later the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority or QCA), and reported directly
to the Secretary of State. Attempts were made from the start to ensure the work had
cross-party political support, if not formal endorsement. The Advisory Group’s
terms of reference were:

to provide advice on effective education for citizenship in schools – to include the nature and
practices of participation in democracy; the duties, responsibilities and rights of individual
citizens; and the value to individuals and society of community activity. (QCA 1998, p. 4)

The Advisory Group worked together for a year and during that time had
dialogue with hundreds of organizations and individuals (all are listed at the end of
the report). A series of national consultation conferences were organized across the
country for school governing bodies, parents, teachers and teacher associations, local
authorities, youth, community and voluntary bodies, and employer and employee
associations (QCA 1998, p. 72). The group also looked to learn from existing national
curriculum subjects and drew lessons from best practice in other countries following an
international seminar in London (Crick 2002, p. 495).
The Advisory Group reported in 1998 and set out their view of Education for
Citizenship and the Teaching of Democracy in Schools (QCA 1998). Commonly
known as the Crick report, the document made the case for statutory citizenship and
set out what constitutes effective citizenship education (Jerome and Moorse 2016).
The group was ambitious about what it wanted to achieve through citizenship
education:

We aim at no less than a change in the political culture of this country both nationally and
locally: for people to think of themselves as active citizens, willing, able and equipped to
have an influence in public life and with the critical capacities to weigh evidence before
speaking and acting. (QCA 1998, p. 7)

In addition, the report recommended:

that citizenship and the teaching of democracy. . .is so important both for schools and the life
of the nation that there must be a statutory requirement on schools to ensure that it is part of
the entitlement for all pupils. It can no longer sensibly be left as uncoordinated local
initiatives which vary greatly in number, content and method. This is an inadequate basis
for animating the idea of a common citizenship with democratic values. (QCA 1998, p. 7)
25 Citizenship Education in England: Policy and Curriculum 383

Three essential strands of citizenship education were put forward:

– Social and moral responsibility, knowing from the very beginning of education
about fairness, rules, and the difference between right and wrong and social
responsibility
– Community involvement, becoming helpfully involved in the life and concerns
of communities and learning through community involvement
– Political literacy, the knowledge, skills, and values needed to be informed, active,
and responsible citizens and be effective in public life (Crick 2002)

The report was accepted in full by the government, and the three strands
of effective citizenship along with a framework of key concepts, skills, attitudes,
and values were the basis from which the first national curriculum programme of
study was developed in 1999. The next section will examine the features and shifts in
the national curriculum for citizenship since 1999.

The National Curriculum for Citizenship Since 1999

The First National Curriculum for Citizenship

In 1999, an order was placed before parliament to introduce citizenship as a

national curriculum foundation subject. The national curriculum provided a “strong
bare bones” (Crick 2002, p. 498) rather than detailed or prescriptive teaching
requirements and set out the aim of the subject as being to develop “knowledge
and skills necessary for effective and democratic participation” (DCSF/QCA 2007).
First teaching would begin in 2002, giving schools 2 years to prepare for the new
subject. Programmes of study – a description of teaching requirements comprising
knowledge, understanding, and skills – set out what must be addressed by schools
in their teaching at key stage 3 (11–14 year olds) and key stage 4 (14–16 year olds).
A non-statutory framework for personal, social, and health education and citizenship
had been introduced for primary schools in 2000 and provided for progression from
what should be taught to 5–11 year olds to the subject in secondary education.
National qualifications at GCSE and A level were developed to publicly recognize
pupil achievement in citizenship.
An emphasis on using knowledge and understanding to take action was deliberate
to ensure citizenship did not become civics and was active where pupils learned
through participation with others.
National Curriculum Programmes of Study for Citizenship 2002
384 L. Moorse
25 Citizenship Education in England: Policy and Curriculum 385
386 L. Moorse

The Department for Education and Skills (DfES) agreed that the QCA, the body
with responsibility for the school curriculum, should develop necessary support for
the new subject by producing some initial guidance to help schools understand what
the new requirements meant and how to approach planning and teaching citizenship.
Key questions the DfES and the QCA were interested in examining, about how well
the subject was implemented included: How prescriptive or light touch was the new
programme of study for citizenship? How much discrete provision or teaching time
would be required? What links could be made with other subjects, and how would
this affect teaching?
It was difficult to determine how well schools and teachers could answer these
questions, and indeed they remain pertinent to the teaching of citizenship education
in schools in England today. In particular a debate began about what light touch
meant and whether the flexibility schools were given and encouraged to take
was creating sufficient and rigorous teaching for pupils to make progress in their
citizenship learning. The tension was highlighted in the House of Commons
Select Committee Inquiry into citizenship education conducted in 2006–2007. The
following extract makes clear the focus of the light touch approach:

From the outset, the DfES has deliberately adopted a “light touch” approach to citizenship
education, allowing schools a very high degree of freedom in terms of delivery, avoiding
prescriptive models. For example, when the curriculum was launched, guidance stressed that
citizenship could be delivered as discrete units, during special “citizenship days” where the
regular timetable was suspended, in an embedded form through other subjects such as
history, geography or even maths, or any combination of these methods. Additionally,
provision could take the form of organised activities which encouraged active participation;
for example, working with local community organisations to achieve an identified goal, such
as the improvement of local play facilities or other community services. (House of Com-
mons, Select Committee Enquiry 2006–2007)

However, Ofsted expressed concern about this in evidence given to the House of
Commons Inquiry, questioning whether “light touch” had been interpreted by some
schools as “soft touch.”
Early evidence from Ofsted subject monitoring of the quality and impact of citizen-
ship as a national curriculum subject was published in Toward Consensus? (2006). The
Qualifications and Curriculum Authority whose brief “to keep the curriculum under
review” (QCA 2004) highlighted some of the issues in establishing and implementing
the subject. Perhaps the most critical were how the subject was being included in a
school’s curriculum provision and the quality of teaching. QCA’s annual monitoring of
the curriculum found two thirds of schools surveyed had given no additional teaching
time to accommodate the new curriculum requirements for citizenship and a significant
number of teachers (17%) reported they were not confident in teaching key aspects of
the new subject (QCA 2004). Ofsted reported that schools had responded in very
different ways, “a minority have embraced it with enthusiasm and worked hard to
establish it as a significant part of their curriculum. Others, also a minority have done
very little.” In others, “school mistakenly believe they are doing it already.” They also
concluded most teachers of citizenship are non-specialists and “far from their normal
25 Citizenship Education in England: Policy and Curriculum 387

comfort zone” (Ofsted 2006). The issues of specialist teaching and curriculum space and
time remain key to the quality of provision in schools today. The Department for
Education and Skills commissioned a longitudinal study of citizenship by the National
Foundation for Educational Research that highlighted the key indicators needed for
successful citizenship including: the importance of a school’s senior leadership team
supporting the subject; a nominated subject leader to coordinate subject teaching;
specialist trained citizenship teachers; and sufficient and regular teaching time on the
school curriculum (NFER 2010).
The Department for Education and Skills (DFES) had made some efforts to address
these early concerns, by commissioning the QCA to develop detailed guidance and
schemes of work for citizenship showing how it could be organized and taught in
primary and secondary schools and by introducing citizenship teacher training courses
in the form of PGCE citizenship. The main aspects of the guidance are still available on
the Standards website. See QCA (2002a) https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/
20080804145057/http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/schemes3/.

The Second National Curriculum for Citizenship

In 2005 the government asked the QCA to review the national curriculum in order to
“increase flexibility” and “improve coherence to ensure effective progression from
primary to secondary education” (QCA 2007, p. 3). The review led to a revised
national curriculum being published in 2007 and shortly after the House of
Commons Select Committee Inquiry reported into the impact of citizenship educa-
tion. A second version of the national curriculum program of study for citizenship
was developed and published. The subject remained true to the principles of the
Crick report but also took account of the work of Sir Keith Ajegbo, a head teacher of
some 21 years at a London school, who was asked by ministers in 2006 to review
how the school curriculum addressed diversity and citizenship (DfES 2007).
The context within which the Ajegbo review had taken place was very different to
1998, and two developments were particularly significant. The first was the Victoria
Climbie Inquiry in Hackney, London, which evidenced the failure of various ser-
vices (including medical and social services) to prevent her torture and murder and
which in turn influenced the “Every Child Matters” education policy. (Every Child
Matters was a flagship government policy which sought greater interdisciplinary
working and commitment to protect and support children’s health, well-being,
safety, and participation.) The second were the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and 7/7. In
England, the latter had resulted in a series of policy responses, including those
affecting schools, with proposed changes to the citizenship curriculum to pay greater
attention to cultural diversity and a new a duty on schools to promote community
cohesion (Moorse 2015). Additionally, in 2008 the government introduced a deliv-
ery strategy for the prevention of violent extremism. Although the strategy did not
make any particular reference to the role of national citizenship education in schools,
it did focus on the idea of extending citizenship education to young Muslims,
particularly those attending madrassas and being educated by Imans (Maer 2008).
388 L. Moorse

The revised national curriculum 2008 encouraged schools to take an “aims-led”

approach to building their curriculum and to consider the needs of the whole child
alongside the needs of communities and preparing children for the opportunities and
challenges of adult life. The 2008 curriculum aims stated that all learners should
develop as: responsible citizens who make a positive contribution to society
The requirements of the 1999 Citizenship Programme of Study were replaced
with a format common to all national curriculum subjects that set out teaching
requirements as key concepts and processes, range and content, and curriculum
opportunities. An importance statement set out the essence of the subject, includ-
ing how citizenship contributed to the overarching aims of the curriculum. The
concepts of citizenship education took a cue from the those laid out in the Crick
report in 1998, but also the direct influence of the Ajegbo report (2007) that
introduced a new focus on identities and diversity in the curriculum. Criticality
and taking action remained central within the skills and processes that pupils need
to learn, as did the focus on using contemporary issues, problems, and events to
learn about the key concepts, institutions, and processes and to bring the subject
to life.
National Curriculum Key Stage 3 Programme of Study for Citizenship 2008

EXPLANATORY NOTES

Citizenship equips pupils with the knowledge and skills needed for Democracy and justice: This focuses on the role that citizens can take
effective and democratic participation. It helps pupils to become informed, within the political and justice systems in the UK. It includes: freedom
critical, active citizens who have the confidence and conviction to work as part of democracy; fairness and the rule of law as part of justice;
power and authority; and accountability. Pupils should understand that
collaboratively, take action and try to make a difference in their communities
accountability happens at many levels, ranging from a responsible
and the wider world. opposition in parliament challenging, testing and scrutinising what
government is doing, to citizens in local communities challenging
decisions that affect them.
1 Key concepts Pupils should learn about the need to balance competing and conflicting
demands, and understand that in a democracy not everyone gets what
There are a number of key concepts that underpin the study of citizenship. they want. Linking teaching about democracy, elections and voting with
Pupils need to understand these concepts in order to deepen and broaden the student council provides a way for pupils to apply their learning to real
their knowledge, skills and understanding. decision-making situations. Active participation provides opportunities to
learn about the important role of negotiation and persuasion within
a democracy.
1.1 Democracy and justice
a Participating actively in different kinds of decision-making and voting
in order to influence public life.
b Weighing up what is fair and unfair in different situations, understanding
that justice is fundamental to a democratic society and exploring the role
of law in maintaining order and resolving conflict.
c Considering how democracy, justice, diversity, toleration, respect and
freedom are valued by people with different beliefs, backgrounds and
traditions within a changing democratic society.
d Understanding and exploring the roles of citizens and parliament in
holding government and those in power to account.
25 Citizenship Education in England: Policy and Curriculum 389

EXPLANATORY NOTES

1.2 Rights and responsibilities Rights and responsibilities: There are different kinds of rights, obligations
and responsibilities – political, legal, human, social, civic and moral. Pupils
should explore contested areas surrounding rights and responsibilities,
a Exploring different kinds of rights and obligations and how these affect for example the checks and balances needed in relation to freedom of
both individuals and communities. speech in the context of threats from extremism and terrorism.
b Understanding that individuals, organisations and governments have
responsibilities to ensure that rights are balanced, supported and Identities and diversity: living together in the UK: This includes the
protected. multiple identities that may be held by groups and communities in a
diverse society, and the ways in which these identities are affected by
c Investigating ways in which rights can compete and conflict,
changes in society. For example, pupils could learn about: how migration
and understanding that hard decisions have to be made to try to has shaped communities; common or shared identity and what unifies
balance these. groups and communities; and how living together in the UK has been
shaped by, and continues to be shaped by, political, social, economic
and cultural changes. The historical context for such changes should be
1.3 Identities and diversity: living together in the UK considered where appropriate.

All pupils, regardless of their legal or residential status, should explore

a Appreciating that identities are complex, can change over time and are and develop their understanding of what it means to be a citizen in the
informed by different understandings of what it means to be a citizen UK today.
in the UK.
b Exploring the diverse national, regional, ethnic and religious cultures, Community cohesion: Citizenship offers opportunities for schools to
address their statutory duty to promote community cohesion.
groups and communities in the UK and the connections between them.
c Considering the interconnections between the UK and the rest of Europe
and the wider world.
d Exploring community cohesion and the different forces that bring about
change in communities over time.

EXPLANATORY NOTES

2 Key processes Critical thinking and enquiry: Using real case studies to explore issues
and problems can help to develop skills of critical thinking, enquiry,
debate and advocacy. Pupils should learn how to make judgements on the
These are the essential skills and processes in citizenship that pupils need basis of evidence, exploring ideas, opinions and values that are different
to learn to make progress. from their own.

Topical and controversial issues and problems: Political, social and

ethical issues and problems can be controversial and sensitive, and can
2.1 Critical thinking and enquiry lead to disagreement. They should not be avoided, but need to be handled
so that pupils develop skills in discussing and debating citizenship issues
Pupils should be able to: and considering points of view that are not necessarily their own.
Setting ground rules and using distancing techniques can help to manage
a engage with and reflect on different ideas, opinions, beliefs and values the discussion of such issues.
when exploring topical and controversial issues and problems
b research, plan and undertake enquiries into issues and problems using a Analyse and evaluate: This includes pupils evaluating and assessing
different opinions and challenging what they see, hear and read through
range of information and sources
research and investigation, considering scenarios and case studies.
c analyse and evaluate sources used, questioning different values, ideas
and viewpoints and recognising bias. Advocacy and representation: Developing skills of advocacy and
representation provides opportunities for pupils to build on the skills of
speaking and listening, reading and writing from the English programme of
study. In the context of citizenship, they learn to take account of different
2.2 Advocacy and representation points of view and the various ways in which people express themselves.
They practise communicating with different audiences, including those in
Pupils should be able to: positions of power, to try to influence and persuade them about ways of
making a difference to political and social issues.
a express and explain their own opinions to others through discussions,
formal debates and voting Voting: This includes knowing about and participating in different kinds
b communicate an argument, taking account of different viewpoints and of voting, for example a show of hands, a secret ballot and simulating
drawing on what they have learnt through research, action and debate division. Voting can be part of activities, for example to decide on a motion
c justify their argument, giving reasons to try to persuade others to think within a debate or to agree a new policy for the student council.
again, change or support them
d represent the views of others, with which they may or may not agree.
390 L. Moorse

EXPLANATORY NOTES

2.3 Taking informed and responsible action Take action: Action should be informed by research and investigation into
a political, social or ethical issue or problem. This includes developing
and using skills, while applying citizenship knowledge and understanding.
Pupils should be able to: Actions could include: presenting a case to others about a concern;
a explore creative approaches to taking action on problems and issues conducting a consultation, vote or election; organising a meeting, event
or forum to raise awareness and debate issues; representing the views
to achieve intended purposes
of others at a meeting or event; creating, reviewing or revisiting an
b work individually and with others to negotiate, plan and take action on organisational policy; contributing to local community policies; lobbying
citizenship issues to try to influence others, bring about change or resist and communicating views publicly via a website, campaign or display;
unwanted change, using time and resources appropriately setting up an action group or network; training others in democratic skills
c analyse the impact of their actions on communities and the wider world, such as advocacy or campaigning.
now and in the future
d reflect on the progress they have made, evaluating what they have
learnt, what went well, the difficulties encountered and what they would
do differently.

It helps pupils to
become informed,
critical, active citizens

EXPLANATORY NOTES

3 Range and content Political rights: This includes the development of universal suffrage
and equal opportunities, which can be linked with the study of the
development of democracy in history.
This section outlines the breadth of the subject on which teachers should
draw when teaching the key concepts and key processes. Citizenship Human rights: Human rights and the rights of the child can be revisited
in many different contexts. Linking teaching to topical issues provides
focuses on the political and social dimensions of living together in the UK
a way of engaging pupils in learning about the values and principles
and recognises the influence of the historical context. Citizenship also helps underpinning human rights, including exploring decisions that need to be
pupils make sense of the world today and equips them for the challenges made to balance conflicting rights and the extent to which conventions
and changes facing communities in the future. and declarations have been enshrined in national law.

The study of citizenship should include: Law and the justice system: This includes the criminal justice system.
Some topical areas of law, such as antisocial behaviour legislation,
a political, legal and human rights, and responsibilities of citizens can provide a focus for exploring the difference between criminal and
b the roles of the law and the justice system and how they relate to civil justice.
young people
c key features of parliamentary democracy and government in the Key features of parliamentary democracy and government: This includes
constituent parts of the UK and at local level, including voting and an understanding of the role of political parties, the ‘first past the post’
system of elections, the role of government and opposition, and cabinet
elections
decision-making.
d freedom of speech and diversity of views, and the role of the media in
informing and influencing public opinion and holding those in power The constituent parts of the UK: This includes how democracy has
to account changed in recent times with the devolution of power to the Scottish
e actions that individuals, groups and organisations can take to influence Parliament and the assemblies in Northern Ireland and Wales. This can be
linked with the study of the origins of the UK in history.
decisions affecting communities and the environment
f strategies for handling local and national disagreements and conflicts Environment: This provides opportunities to evaluate individual and
g the needs of the local community and how these are met through public collective actions that contribute to sustainable practices. Pupils could
services and the voluntary sector consider the different ethical implications of actions, policies and
h how economic decisions are made, including where public money comes behaviour. This work can be linked with work in science and geography.
from and who decides how it is spent
25 Citizenship Education in England: Policy and Curriculum 391

EXPLANATORY NOTES

i the changing nature of UK society, including the diversity of ideas, Changing nature of UK society: Change is a constant feature of UK society
beliefs, cultures, identities, traditions, perspectives and values that and pupils should understand some reasons why change occurs (eg
are shared migration, economic factors, globalisation) and how communities change
as a consequence (eg shops, food, schools, languages).
j migration to, from and within the UK and the reasons for this
k the UK’s relations with the European Union and the rest of Europe, the Diversity: Diversity includes our different and shared needs, abilities
Commonwealth, the United Nations and the world as a global community. and membership of groups and communities such as gender, sexual
orientation, race, ethnicity, physical and sensory ability, belief, religion
and class. Learning about diversity involves recognising that culture,
including the language, ideas, customs and traditions practised by people
within a group, also forms part of identity. Pupils should explore the
diversity of groups and communities and examine the changes that occur.
They should also explore things that unify us, including the shared values
that UK society is committed to, and what groups and communities have
in common as we live together in society.

Europe: A European dimension can be incorporated when exploring many

topical issues, including human rights, the environment, immigration, trade
and economic issues, diversity and identities.

The Commonwealth: This includes the development, membership and

purpose of the Commonwealth. It can be linked with the study of the
British Empire in history.

The United Nations: This includes exploring the role of the United Nations
in the context of topical events such as conflict situations affecting the
international and/or global community.

EXPLANATORY NOTES

4 Curriculum opportunities Community-based citizenship activities: These encourage pupils to work

with people beyond the school community to address real issues and
decisions. They can involve inviting people into schools to work with
During the key stage pupils should be offered the following opportunities pupils on issues and/or pupils working with others beyond the school site.
that are integral to their learning and enhance their engagement with the
Campaigning: This can help pupils learn how to influence those in power,
concepts, processes and content of the subject.
take part in decision-making and participate positively in public life in
The curriculum should provide opportunities for pupils to: ways that are safe, responsible and within the law.

a debate, in groups and whole-class discussions, topical and controversial Community partners: These could include voluntary organisations and
issues, including those of concern to young people public and private bodies. For example, the police, magistrates and the
courts could support work relating to the law and justice system. Local
b develop citizenship knowledge and understanding while using and
councillors, MPs and MEPs could support work relating to parliament,
applying citizenship skills democracy and government.
c work individually and in groups, taking on different roles and
responsibilities Historical: This includes considering relevant historical contexts in order
d participate in both school-based and community-based citizenship to inform citizenship issues and problems. For example, pupils could
activities consider the movement and settlement of peoples within the British Isles
over time and the impact of migration on diversity in communities living
e participate in different forms of individual and collective action, including
together in the UK today.
decision-making and campaigning
f work with a range of community partners, where possible Media and ICT: This includes: using different media and ICT to
g take into account legal, moral, economic, environmental, historical and communicate ideas, raise awareness, lobby or campaign on issues; using
social dimensions of different political problems and issues and interpreting a wide range of sources of information during the course
of enquiries and research; and learning how different media inform and
h take into account a range of contexts, such as school, local, regional,
shape opinion. Pupils need to evaluate the extent to which a balanced or
national, European, international and global, as relevant to different topics partial view of events and issues is presented.
i use and interpret different media and ICT both as sources of information
and as a means of communicating ideas Make links: This includes: making links with work on the media in English
j make links between citizenship and work in other subjects and areas of and ICT; work on diversity and inclusion in history and RE; and work on the
the curriculum. environment and sustainability in geography and science.
392 L. Moorse

There is some evidence to suggest that, at this time, the status of citizenship was
developing in schools. The Ofsted subject monitoring report “Citizenship
established?” (2010) highlighted a number of improvements including that the
quality of provision had been good or outstanding in more than half of schools
inspected and the number deemed inadequate had reduced from 25% to 10%. This
period also saw significant growth in the uptake of the GCSE Citizenship Studies –
peaking at 94,000 candidates who achieved the qualification in 2009 – and citizen-
ship teachers were beginning to share their practice and ideas for teaching the subject
through regional groups established to support the revised curriculum. One such
teacher, teaching at Sir Keith Ajegbo’s own school in London, developed an
approach to describing citizenship in the curriculum, culture, and community of
the school – also known as the three Cs of citizenship (Moorse 2015). The approach
drew on thinking developed in QCA schemes of work (2001, 2002b) and was
designed to encourage teachers and schools to see citizenship as a subject but also
as more that a subject. The three Cs are still used as a way of framing a model of
effective citizenship provision by the official subject association in England – the
Association for Citizenship Teaching – and are included in the latest strategic plan
(Association for Citizenship Teaching 2018).

The Third National Curriculum for Citizenship

A further review of the national curriculum was announced in 2010 following

the election of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government, when
Michael Gove took up the role of Secretary of State for Education.
Early indicators suggested that the review would slim down the national curriculum
further and might even remove certain subjects from the national curriculum,
including citizenship. The Government White Paper for Schools 2010 “The
Importance of Teaching” described the aims of the curriculum review as:

reducing prescription and allowing schools to decide how to teach while refocusing on the
core subject knowledge that every child and young person should attain at each stage of their
education. (DFE 2010)

In the absence of a non-governmental body to conduct the review (the Qualifi-

cations and Curriculum Development Agency and its predecessor body QCA had
previously handled such work but was being dispanded and closed in 2011 as part of
a policy to reduce the number of agencies and centralize policymaking), the gov-
ernment established an Expert Panel to advise on the review. The possibility of
citizenship being removed from the national curriculum became a real one, when the
Panel, Chaired by Tim Oates, published a report with recommendations that
included:

Citizenship is of enormous importance in a contemporary and future-oriented education.

However, we are not persuaded that study of the issues and topics included in citizenship
25 Citizenship Education in England: Policy and Curriculum 393

education constitutes a distinct ‘subject’ as such. We therefore recommend that it be

reclassified as part of the Basic Curriculum. (Department for Education 2011)

However, the reformed national curriculum was put out to public consultation with
proposals for citizenship as a subject in the secondary education at key stages 3 and
4. Following a coordinated campaign known as Democratic Life, by the citizenship
subject community supported by many politicians, academics, parents, and young
people as well as teachers and 40 organizations, citizenship was retained in the revised
national curriculum published in 2013 (Democratic Life 2011a; Moorse 2014).
The revised national curriculum for citizenship began first teaching in schools
from September 2014. However, contrary to the previous versions of the curriculum
outlined above, this time there was no national support program to help teachers and
schools adjust to the changed curriculum.
This said, some aspects of previous versions of citizenship were still in place
including democracy, parliament and the political system, and law and the justice
system and at key stage 4 human rights and international law, local, regional,
and international governance and the UKs relations with the rest of Europe, the
Commonwealth, and the wider world, alongside content on the ways citizens
contribute to community and influence decision including through voting. However,
some new elements had been introduced. For example, for the first time, there was an
explicit requirement to teach about the UK’s constitution and the role of political
parties in the political system of the UK. Personal aspects of finance education
were also included more explicitly than before. In addition, some key content that
had appeared in previous versions of the national curriculum for citizenship were not
explicit, for example, teaching about the economy, consumer, employer and
employee rights and responsibilities, sustainable development, public debate, policy
formation, pressure and interest groups, and diversity and change in society. Refer-
ences to pupils taking action or active citizenship, although implied, were made in
relation to “participation in volunteering” and “other forms for responsible activity.”
Although in citizenship there remains a requirement to teach critical thinking,
research and enquiry, debate, evaluation of evidence, reasoned argument, and taking
informed action, there was a significant shift away from specifying subject skills to
be developed. This was not just in citizenship but across the national curriculum as a
whole (ACT 2014; Moorse 2014).
Overall, the 2014 version of the national curriculum for citizenship – still in effect
at the time of writing – is shorter with less detail and arguably contains less clarity.
Teachers have to work hard to interpret the requirements and translate them into
meaningful schemes of work and lessons. This coupled with a limited communication
strategy by the DFE about the curriculum reforms and what changed for each subject
has left many schools in the dark about what was expected and some who still do not
realize citizenship is still part of the national curriculum in secondary education.
Furthermore, while there were no changes to the non-statutory framework for citizen-
ship in primary education, many schools and teachers thought it had gone and simply
stopped teaching the subject (Association for Citizenship Teaching 2017).
National Curriculum Programmes of Study for Citizenship 2014
394 L. Moorse
25 Citizenship Education in England: Policy and Curriculum 395

Recent Policy Initiatives and the Impact on Citizenship

and “Active Citizenship” in the Curriculum

A central purpose of citizenship education is to develop the knowledge, understand-

ing, and skills that pupils need to become politically literate, active citizens. Over
the three iterations of the national curriculum for citizenship, the ways in which
teaching requirements have interpreted this aim have changed. Jerome and Moorse
(2016) identify two key reasons for this: first, differences in the approach and
methods used to construct and develop the content of the national curriculum
teaching requirements and second a shift in the ideologies influencing education
priorities and the subject.

The Process of Designing National Curriculum Policy

Since the policy push for the “academization” of schools, the national curriculum
carries less weight and status than when it was established in the late 1980s and
was statutory in every state school Academies are state schools which receive their
funding directly from central government and, as such, are independent of local
authority control. Some academies have been compelled to enter such status on
the basis of a schools “underperformance,” while others have converted to acad-
emy status by choice and on the basis of their “outstanding” or “good” perfor-
mance. Free schools are legally academies but are schools which are new to the
schooling system (rather than having replaced or been converted from an existing
school). Both academies and free schools are granted particular flexibilities to
396 L. Moorse

increase their autonomy, including what they teach within the national curriculum,
employment practices, and the structuring of the school calendar. Yet often the
national curriculum is one of the first things that a new Education Secretary seeks
to reform. The processes used to review and reconstruct the curriculum and how
much participation citizens have is therefore an important consideration in its final
shape.
In summary the three iterations of the citizenship national curriculum involved
three different processes:

• The 2002 version involved a short and closely controlled process managed inside
the then Department For Education and Employment and a public statutory
consultation managed by the QCA (a non-governmental body whose remit
included keeping the curriculum under review).
• The 2008 version involved a longer and more developmental approach organized
by the QCA that was more open and involved many planned face-to-face
interactions with stakeholders both in education and from the wider public
involving committees, conferences, and seminars across the country, followed
by formal consultation involving both online and face-to-face stakeholder
activities (QCA 2007, p. 5).
• The 2014 revisions were made after the abolition of QCDA. This time the DFE
managed the consultation process and the development of new programmes of
study for each national curriculum subject internally. There was much more
minimal contact with stakeholders and short public, online consultation.

It is noticeable that the more extended and inclusive development process in 2008
coincided with a more confident and well-established citizenship subject community
and a fuller curriculum specification of what should be taught in the subject.
At this point the subject was also being embedded within schools. There was a
network of more than 20 universities training citizenship specialist teachers as well
as a wider range of NGOs involved in supporting aspects of the subject or the subject
as a whole with resources, conferences, and training for existing teachers (Hayward
and Jerome 2010). The subject association – Association for Citizenship Teaching –
also reached its peak membership at this point, and shortly afterwards the uptake of
GCSE Citizenship Studies also peaked (Joint Council of Qualifications 2009).
During 2013 it was to the surprise of many that government rejected their own
Expert Panels’ view and Michael Gove confirmed citizenship would remain a
national curriculum subject in secondary education. This was in no small part the
result of extensive lobbying of many in the subject community who organized a
campaigning group, “Democratic Life,” supported by leading politicians including
the former Education Secretary who established citizenship as a subject, Lord
Blunkett. However, while the lobbying was successful in ensuring citizenship
continued as a national curriculum subject, there has been a narrowing of subject
content and a focus on the softer “voluntary” action rather than political and
democratic action and change making of earlier iterations.
25 Citizenship Education in England: Policy and Curriculum 397

Ideology and Citizenship

As noted earlier, discussions about citizenship education have been influenced by

governments’ ideologies about what the good society looks like and what roles
citizens might take in such a society – as law-abiding and compliant citizens who
do their duty and vote and/or as critical and active citizens who take a more
prominent part in democratic and political decision-making and policy shaping.
While there remains a broad consensus that citizenship education is needed if
democracy is to survive and thrive, the form, content, and teaching approaches
required remain subject to much debate.
One of the main areas where important shifts in meaning are evident in curricu-
lum policy is in relation to active citizenship (see Table 2).
In 1998, the Advisory Group for citizenship stated that “Active citizenship is our
aim throughout” although they then chose the term “community involvement” to
describe this – perhaps fearing a negative association with the more politically
loaded term, “activism.” The drive for active citizenship was based on concerns
about the democratic deficit, political apathy, concerns about the moral health of the
young, and the goal of building greater involvement of young people in their
neighborhoods and communities. The first national curriculum published in 1999
required pupils to be taught skills of “participation and responsible action” alongside
“knowledge and understanding about becoming an informed citizen.” By 2008, the
purpose of the subject included “to become informed, critical, active citizens who
have the confidence and conviction to work collaboratively, take action, and try to
make a difference in their communities and the wider world.” Citizenship knowledge
and understanding were accompanied by skills of “advocacy and representation” and
“taking informed and responsible action” The list of guidance notes for teachers
referred to actions including presenting a case to others about a concern; conducting
a consultation, vote, or election; organizing a meeting, event, or forum to raise
awareness and debate issues; contributing to local community policies; setting up
an action group; and training others in democratic skills such as lobbying and
campaigning. Both the 2002 and the 2008 programmes of study included active
citizenship built on the premise that students should develop the ability to work
together with others within the school and wider community to achieve real change
and contribute to public life.
In the 2014 Citizenship National Curriculum, there are some noticeable absences
of key subject terms and concepts and in particular in relation to “active citizenship.”
The curriculum now talks of “volunteering and responsible activity” although
teaching requirements do make references to learning about the actions citizens
can take in democracy. The shift in language can most obviously be attributed to the
interests and motivations of the minister responsible for decision-making about
the national curriculum at the time the reforms took place – Michael Gove. This
resulted in a content-led “traditional knowledge-rich” curriculum and a return to
more “direct instruction.” In a speech given in 2013 by Michael Gove cited a number
of academics and writers who supported this view. Notably Daniel Willingham who
398 L. Moorse

Table 2 Changing descriptions of “active citizenship”

Source Description
1998 Crick report “learning about and becoming helpfully involved in the life
Community involvement and concerns of their communities, including learning
through community involvement and service to the
community”
2002 National Curriculum for Key stage 3 teaching requirements
Citizenship “use their imagination to consider other people’s
Participation and responsible experiences and be able to think about, express and explain
action views that are not their own”
“negotiate, decide and take part responsibly in both school
and community- based activity”
“reflect on the process of participating”
2008 National Curriculum for Key stage 3 teaching requirements
Citizenship “Pupils should be able to:
Taking informed and explore creative approaches to taking action on problems
responsible action and issues to achieve intended purposes
work individually and with others to negotiate, plan and take
action on citizenship issues to try to influence others, bring
about change or resist unwanted change, using time and
resources appropriately
analyse the impact of their actions on communities and the
wider world, now and in the future
reflect on the progress they have made, evaluating what they
have learnt, what went well, the difficulties encountered and
what they would do differently”
2014 National Curriculum for From subject aims –
Citizenship “develop an interest in, and commitment to, participation in
Volunteering and responsible volunteering as well as other forms of responsible activity,
activity that they will take with them into adulthood”
Key stage 3 teaching requirements
“the ways in which citizens work together to improve their
communities, including opportunities to participate in
school-based activities”
Key stage 4 from preamble to teaching requirements
“They should experience and evaluate different ways that
citizens can act together to solve problems and contribute to
society”
Key stage 4 teaching requirements
“actions citizens can take in democratic and electoral
processes to influence decisions locally, nationally and
beyond”
“the different ways in which a citizen can contribute to the
improvement of his or her community, to include the
opportunity to participate actively in community
volunteering, as well as other forms of responsible activity”
2015 DFE GCSE Citizenship “Citizenship action may be defined as a planned course of
Studies Subject Content informed action to address a citizenship issue or question of
Taking citizenship action concern and aimed at delivering a benefit or change for a
particular community or wider society. Taking citizenship
action in a real out-of-classroom context allows students to
apply citizenship knowledge, understanding and skills, and
(continued)
25 Citizenship Education in England: Policy and Curriculum 399

Table 2 (continued)
Source Description
to gain different citizenship insights and appreciate different
perspectives on how we live together and make decisions in
society. It requires them to practise a range of citizenship
skills including: research and enquiry, interpretation of
evidence, including primary and secondary sources,
planning, collaboration, problem solving, advocacy,
campaigning and evaluation”

says “the more knowledge students acquire, the smarter they become” and ED
Hirsch, who Gove claimed “proved this phenomenon beyond any doubt. . .”.
In a context in which the Secretary of State for Education makes such comments,
it is not surprising that the concept, process, and pedagogy of “active citizenship”
based on the idea that children need to learn citizenship through doing politics,
participating in democracy and democratic decision-making and experiencing
the process of taking informed action with others including campaigning, are not
made explicit in the revised national curriculum citizenship programs of study.
Some years on from the 2014 curriculum, the phrase “active citizenship” has
reappeared in national education policy alongside “social action” but this time in
a new context. The DFE’s statutory guidance on Relationships and Sex and Health
Education published in 2019 advises that schools link taking action with the well-
being of citizens, service to others, and the development of personal attributes:

As in primary, secondary relationships education can be underpinned by a wider, deliberate

cultivation and practice of resilience and character in the individual. These should include
character traits such as belief in achieving goals and persevering with tasks, as well as
personal attributes such as honesty, integrity, courage, humility, kindness, generosity, trust-
worthiness, and a sense of justice, underpinned by an understanding of the importance of
self-respect and self-worth. There are many ways in which secondary schools should support
the development of these attributes, for example, by providing planned opportunities for
young people to undertake social action, active citizenship, and voluntary service to others
locally or more widely (Paragraph 74).

The new rationale seems to be that students should be an active and good citizen
because of the benefits for the individual, rather than for democratic society and
collective democratic well-being.
This narrow and individualized approach has been recognized elsewhere. In
2018, the House of Lords Select Committee report, “The Ties that Bind: Citizenship
and Civic Engagement in the 21st Century,” highlighted the “Citizenship challenge”
as how to create an environment in which everyone feels they belong and have a
stake in society. The report also discussed active citizenship:

What became increasingly clear through the course of this inquiry is that the United
Kingdom’s approach to citizenship has in many policy areas become synonymous with an
arguably over-narrow and individualised emphasis. Active citizenship is too often defined
purely in terms of volunteering, social action or learning facts, and too rarely in terms of
400 L. Moorse

learning about and practising democracy in the sense of political engagement and democratic
participation. (Para 13, House of Lords 2018)

The report called for the citizenship curriculum to be reformed and “re-priori-
tized, creating a statutory entitlement to citizenship education from primary to the
end of secondary education and set a target which will allow every secondary
schools to have at least one trained citizenship teacher.”
The government response rejected this suggestion on the basis that they had
committed not to reform the national curriculum during the current parliament,
stating that “We want all pupils to understand democracy, government and how
laws are made and to understand the different ways that citizens can work together
to improve their communities and society. We want children and young people to
use this understanding to become constructive, active citizens” (HM Government
2018).

Conclusion

In examining citizenship education policy and curriculum in England, this chapter

has argued that a number of key factors have shaped and influenced the content of
the national curriculum subject of citizenship. Notably key moments that both led to
the subject being introduced and included in the school curriculum in England and
its subsequent development have directly reflected the views and values of those in
power, political will, and policy windows of opportunity as well as the process used
in the formation and construction of subject content and the levels of engagement
with politicians, stakeholders, and the wider public. The most recent curriculum
reforms in 2014 led to a narrowing of the subject and even greater need for teachers
to interpret and plan their teaching to meet the requirements and provide a mean-
ingful citizenship curriculum for students.
At the time of writing, it is notable that there is a renewed interest in the
curriculum and what is taught in schools in England, including citizenship. This
has emerged from the School Inspectorate Ofsted, and the curriculum subject has
been included explicitly in new inspection framework which was introduced in
the autumn of 2019 (Ofsted 2019). The subject of citizenship will be inspected as
national curriculum subject under the new Quality of Education measure. Ofsted
are clear all schools must provide a broad and balanced curriculum based on the
national curriculum or a curriculum of equivalent rigor and breadth. Citizenship
is also one of two subjects identified as contributing to personal development,
another new measure which schools will be evaluated against. It remains to be
seen what impact this might have on the quality of citizenship education, the
status of curriculum provision for the subject, and the place of active citizenship
in schools. In today’s somewhat temporary and ever-changing political context,
where ministers and policymakers and shapers come and go, the debate about the
role, purpose, content, and teaching of the citizenship curriculum in England
looks set to continue.
25 Citizenship Education in England: Policy and Curriculum 401

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government/speeches/michael-gove-speaks-about-the-importance-of-teaching
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parliament.uk/Commons/2013-02-07/debates/13020759000004/CurriculumAndExamReform?
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Journal of Education for Teaching, 36(2), 211–222.
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1/Citizenship%20established.pdf
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Further Reading
Association for Citizenship Teaching website has copies of the National Curriculum programmes of
study 2002 and 2008 available at https://www.teachingcitizenship.org.uk/resource/national-
curriculum-programmes-study-citizenship
Justice-Oriented, “Thick” Approaches
to Civics and Citizenship Education 26
in Australia: Examples of Practice

Keith Heggart and Rick Flowers

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 404
“Thick” and “Thin” Approaches to Citizenship Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 405
Thick and Formal Approaches to Citizenship Education: Pop-Up and
Student-Led Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 406
Thick and Formal Approaches to Citizenship Education: Examples that Established
a Place in School Curricula . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 408
A Threefold Typology of Informal Citizenship Education with Adults: Examples from
Australian Refugee Advocacy Groups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 411
Drawing on Practices of Community Cultural Development for Justice-Oriented
Citizenship Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 413
Citizenship Education for and with Cyclists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 414
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 416
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 417

Abstract
There has been extensive research into formal approaches to civics and citizen-
ship education which has identified different typologies (e.g., justice-oriented and
participatory) and underlying philosophies (“thick” vs. “thin”). However,
research remains limited in regards to the pedagogical possibilities that enable
such approaches. This chapter explores a range of different examples of justice-
oriented and thick approaches to citizenship education. It begins by identifying
both formal and informal examples from schooling before broadening the debate

K. Heggart (*) · R. Flowers

University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]; rick.fl[email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 403
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_38
404 K. Heggart and R. Flowers

to discuss examples from civil society, such as refugee advocacy groups and
cycling social movements. In doing so, this chapter explicates a typology that
frames different forms of citizenship education from passive to active and partic-
ipatory and then to justice-oriented.

Keywords
Thick citizenship · Justice-oriented citizenship · Participatory citizenship · Active
citizenship · Community cultural development · Examples · Grassroots ·
Organizing

Introduction

It is one thing to critique the state of citizenship education as being too constrained
and narrowly focused only on information-giving and raising awareness but is
another to then argue that there should be bolder approaches to citizenship education
which not only raise awareness but also foster active citizenship. An important and
necessary starting point in detailing these bolder approaches is to focus on defining
and theorizing about their main features. In this chapter, we examine approaches to
citizenship education which foster active citizenship by drawing on existing litera-
ture to theorize two key concepts. The first concept is the notion of “thick” citizen-
ship, and we begin by illustrating what constitutes a “thick” approach by describing
various examples from the formal education sector. The second concept is “justice-
oriented,” and in the second half of the chapter, we describe various examples from
informal education projects to illustrate our angle on what constitutes “justice-
oriented” citizenship education. To make clear what thick and justice-oriented
approaches look like in practice, we illustrate our analysis with examples drawn
from the context in which we work, namely, Australia.
Thick and justice-oriented approaches to citizenship education have had to be
resourceful and resilient in the face of politically conservative forces that have
enjoyed an ascendancy in Australia for over 20 years. This conservatism is exem-
plified in criticism of the Australian Civics and Citizenship Curriculum by the then
federal Education Minister, Christopher Pyne, as being biased and leftist (Crowe
2014). The conservative policy environment is illustrated further by recent legisla-
tive proposals to make Australian government funding for community organizations
and charities conditional on them agreeing not to make critical comment on major
policies of the government of the day. Peak bodies have labeled such legislation as
seeking to gag NGOs in their political advocacy (Wade 2007; Hassan 2018). Despite
recent, overly narrow policy agendas, there is, nonetheless, good reason to remain
optimistic about efforts to build and sustain radical approaches to citizenship edu-
cation. When appraising these efforts – and as we seek to do in this chapter –
attention should, however, be paid not only to official and institutionalized curric-
ulum spaces but also to informal and grassroots spaces.
26 Justice-Oriented, “Thick” Approaches to Civics and. . . 405

“Thick” and “Thin” Approaches to Citizenship Education

There is extensive scholarship about the prevailing models of minimalist or thin

citizenship education that are dominant in most schools and educational systems in
Australia (Cogan and Morris 2001; Kennedy 2007; Macintyre and Simpson 2009;
Peterson and Tudball 2017). Typically, commentaries and critiques of these mini-
malist or thin approaches to citizenship education seek to advocate for a wider, more
expansive approach. In this section, we examine and theorize “thick” approaches to
citizenship education and describe the ways in which these provide a valuable
conceptual base for citizenship education in Australia.
The term “thick” itself has a lengthy etymology in relation to notions of citizen-
ship and citizenship education (Isin and Turner 2002) and has been used by a number
of scholars – including Terence McLaughlin (1992), Joel Westheimer and Joseph
Kahne (2004), and David Zyngier (2011a) – to describe citizenship education that
emphasizes student-led, activist, and participatory approaches. One of the key
differences between thick and thin (or maximal and minimal) approaches to citizen-
ship and citizenship education is the level of civic involvement – which could be
advocacy, activism or/and voluntary community service – expected and required of
individuals within society. McLaughlin describes the difference in this way:

On minimal views, there is a degree of suspicion of widespread involvement, and the citizen is
seen primarily as a private individual with the task of voting wisely for representatives. In
contrast, maximal views favour a more fully participatory approach to democracy. (1992, p. 237)

This more fully participatory approach is based on the assumption that a strong
democracy relies on a robust public sphere and civil society, which in turn rely on the
experiential, (nodding to John Dewey), conscientized (nodding to Paulo Freire), and
emancipatory (nodding to Frankfurt School Critical Theory) knowledge of grass-
roots citizens. Thin approaches to citizenship, by contrast, emphasize didactic and
teacher-led approaches underpinned by an assumption that strong democracy relies
on citizens having instrumental knowledge about how political structures work. The
tension between both thick and thin approaches to civics and citizenship education
has informed much of the development of civics and citizenship education materials.
In Australia, across the political spectrum, a succession of state and federal
government education agencies has placed priority on teaching about the processes
and mechanisms of government and have been criticized for this exclusionary and
narrow approach (O’Loughlin 1997; Heggart et al. 2018). Discovering Democracy, a
citizenship education syllabus that was developed in the 1990s and ran until the
mid-2000s, was one such example. While Discovering Democracy originally sought
to embrace a more activist notion of citizenship education, it was ultimately too
content-heavy and was often delivered in a way that was teacher-centered and
didactic (Heggart et al. 2018). The more recent Australian Civics and Citizenship
Curriculum made some improvements, especially in the way that citizenship was
defined for young people, but it is still limited and does not sufficiently recognize the
diversity of citizenship and citizens within Australia and nor does it foreground the
406 K. Heggart and R. Flowers

ways young people might be active within their communities. Instead, like other
curricula before it, it perpetrates the notion of young people as “citizens-in-waiting”
(Arvanitakis and Marren 2009; Heggart et al. 2018).
In seeking alternative examples to thin approaches, we recommend looking
beyond government developed and mandated approaches to citizenship education
to local school, community, and civil society initiated approaches. In these contexts,
it is possible to find citizenship education examples that are more activist in focus,
more local in context, and more student-centered in practice. We have chosen to
characterize these models in two ways – bottom-up approaches, which are led by
students and are often focused on a single issue that usually develops organically
from a specific context and established curriculum frameworks that are often
deployed in schools, usually with local applications but draw on a predetermined
network of resources and structures.

Thick and Formal Approaches to Citizenship Education: Pop-Up

and Student-Led Examples

If one’s benchmark for a healthy democracy is framed through the lens of old social
movements – where social action campaigns are run by organizations with a head
office – then one would look for capacity to sustain advocacy over a long period of
time. Through such a lens transitory and, especially, one-off, actions would be
regarded less positively. Framed through the lens of new social movements –
where campaigns are run through decentralized networks – locally initiated actions,
even when one-off, are regarded as potentially powerful (Offe 1985). Indeed, like
pop-up restaurants and stores, there are citizenship education initiatives that are
one-off or transitory. A central argument of this chapter is to view citizenship
education through new social movements lens. Here, therefore, we critically discuss
some examples of citizenship education that are not only student-led but have
popped up organically around specific issues.
A key contention within existing literature is that young Australians relate to, and
participate in, pop-up approaches which serve to challenge the traditional notion that
young people are apathetic or ignorant (or both) about politics and civil society.
Anita Harris, Johanna Wyn, and Salem Younes (2010) corroborate this. Their
empirical research suggests that young people are often neither apathetic or activists
but are largely disaffected from a political system that they feel is not responsive to
their needs. Phillipa Collin and Lucas Walsh put a finer point on new ways in which
Australian young people are expressing their interest in politics:

Young people are often more interested in direct, everyday, individualised and networked
forms of participation. Their everyday participatory practices (such as boycotts and sharing
political content via social media), interest-based activities (such as contributing to youth
mental health service design or starting their own online petition or campaign), and creative
and media practices (joining a flashmob, producing a mash-up or a Tumblr account) are
often framed as “taking action” on issues they care about. Surveys or electoral rolls rarely
26 Justice-Oriented, “Thick” Approaches to Civics and. . . 407

pick up these forms of participation. But what they tell us is that taking part in elections is
only one form of participation young people value. (2016, p. 1)

One such example of a direct, networked, and individualized response to an issue

is the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre (ASRC n.d.). We use the term “individual-
ized” here to describe examples that are developed by individuals or small groups of
people but more often than not are undertaken in a collective and participatory
manner. This project began in 2001 when Kon Karapanagiotidis, a teacher moved by
the plight of homeless asylum seekers in Melbourne, decided to start a resource
center with his students at a technical and further education college. The ASRC
began as a student project. Seventeen years later it boasts that it is

supported by a network of more than 1,000 volunteers and 100 staff in assisting around
4,600 people seeking asylum each year. . . [As an] independent, community-led organisation
the ASRC is in a unique position to advocate for the human rights of people seeking asylum,
exempt from the pressures of government or the private sector. For this reason, the ASRC
has been able to take a leading position in the opposition of Australia’s asylum seeker policy,
while offering alternatives to issues faced by people seeking asylum and refugees. (Asylum
Seeker Resource Centre n.d.)

This approach exemplifies the organic or noninstitutionalized nature of many

social justice movements and activist citizenship education approaches (Gosden
2006). While it began as a local collective, the ASRC now has a national – even
international – reach and continues to work to both support asylum seekers and
educate Australians about these matters. This increased profile has inspired other,
more localized activism – for example, the students at Bethlehem College in Sydney
who protested the Federal Government’s asylum seeker policies with a silent sit-in
(McNeilage 2014).
Here we also want to draw attention to the epistemological politics of these two
examples. Although quite different, both ASRC and the work of students at Beth-
lehem College are arguably examples of thick citizenship education in that they are
projects that were activist in orientation and were developed and led by students and
participants. Furthermore, rather than seeking to develop government-mandated
curriculum knowledge, they instead begin from the concerns and understandings
of the young people in question. The knowledge that is privileged is that of the
young people themselves. In the second half of this chapter, we go onto explain how
this is a central feature of justice-oriented approaches to citizenship education.
Another example of a thick approach to citizenship education is the Aussie
Democrazy project, which began just before the Australian federal election in
2010. It took place as part of a Civics class in a Victorian school and made heavy
use of social media as a means to build engagement among students and involve
them in the real-world election as active participants rather than disinterested
bystanders. This project was the idea of Mike Stuchbery, a teacher who was
conscious that despite the looming 2010 federal election, students were, for the
most part, apathetic about the election and the issues related to parliament and
government. Instead of teaching them in a standard way (a minimalist approach)
408 K. Heggart and R. Flowers

by using textbooks and the Discovering Democracy syllabus and resources,

Stuchbery attempted to teach the students about Federal Parliament by actually
involving them in the election campaign – as political commentators, reporters,
and journalists. He describes the change that this caused in the classroom:

As I move around the room, showing them the Twitter account I’ve set up for them, the blog
and a few other gadgets I’ve picked up, they get it. They sit down in groups, working on
questions that they want to direct at politicians. They’re good questions too. There are ones
on trade alliances, school funding and the pressures of public scrutiny. Truth be told, I’m
kind of gobsmacked. One kid asks me whether he and his mate can call a TV station, that
they reckon they might be able to get Julia or Tony if someone reported on what we’re doing.
I nod, smile, and send them off to write a script for the phone call they’ll make. There’s
electricity in the air. It doesn’t feel like school. It feels like something else. The kids are alert,
focused, loving what they’re doing. (Stuchbery 2010)

By making the lessons about citizenship education much “thicker” (i.e., more
student-led and activist), Stuchbery tapped into the interests of young people. This
presents an example of David Gauntlett’s techno-optimistic perspective that Web 2.0
platforms can strengthen democracy because they offer new opportunities for par-
ticipatory action and learning (2015). Aussie Democrazy served as a powerful
example of thicker and justice-focused citizenship education as it taught young
people that it is essential for members of a democracy to challenge their leaders, to
ask difficult questions and to demand transparency. These are the kinds of attitudes
that are often overlooked in thinner, more minimalist approaches to citizenship
education, but they were firmly foregrounded in Aussie Democrazy.

Thick and Formal Approaches to Citizenship Education: Examples

that Established a Place in School Curricula

While thin approaches to citizenship education continue to be dominant, there are,

nonetheless, examples of innovative and thick citizenship education initiatives that
have gained places in school syllabi. The first example we present is from the
Australian Youth Climate Coalition (AYCC) which draws together a range of
youth climate action groups and seeks to place young people in positions of
leadership in the climate change debate. It does this by campaigning, educating,
and agitating for changes to governmental policy. They see the education of young
people, by young people, as central.

We are ambitious and innovative, and we’re not afraid to make mistakes and learn from
them. By giving young people the opportunity to be courageous, we give them the space to
learn. (AYCC 2018)

The AYCC have developed “peer-to-peer education, empowerment and training

programs for high school students” (Partridge 2008, p. 22).
26 Justice-Oriented, “Thick” Approaches to Civics and. . . 409

The second example is RUMAD? (Are You Making A Difference?) developed by

David Zyngier. This program is “values-focused, student-led and at its core starts
from student-identified values and visions” (2007, p. 54). Unlike thin citizenship
education programs which focus only on the learning of political knowledge,
RUMAD? actively seeks to engage and support young people to build and enact
their knowledge in the community through action research projects. It seeks to break
down the walls that exist between schools and communities, and instead, through
school and community participation, equip young people with self-esteem, confi-
dence, and skills to solve real world problems (Zyngier 2011b, p. 140).
One example of a project using the RUMAD? framework is Jessie’s Creek. At a
small primary school in Victoria, students worked with a selection of government
and nongovernment agencies to clean up the local creek. They conducted a biodi-
versity study of the local area, during which they had to engage with the public,
undertake problem-solving activities, and work collaboratively to achieve desired
outcomes. Zyngier (2007) writes:

From the outset they have been at the centre of the campaign to save Jessie’s Creek,
mustering community support by producing brochures, conducting surveys and sending
letters to government bodies linked with management of the creek. (p. 53)

Another example of an established curriculum framework being applied in a local

context is the Global Connects program. This program, developed by Lynette
Schultz et al. (2009), arose out of a recognition of the impact that globalization is
having on young people. While it might be true that young people are having
difficulty processing the rapidly changing nature of the world and their place in it
due to the influence of globalization (Schultz et al. 2009), it is also true that many
young people want to contribute to their society and solve problems of injustice and
inequality, but they are hesitant to do so because they feel they lack the ability to do
so (Eckersley et al. 2007).
The Global Connects program, developed by PLAN International, is an example
of active citizenship-centered, youth-led, global learning. One example involved
middle school children in Melbourne who engaged in conversations over the course
of 6 months with youth groups in Indonesia (Schultz et al. 2009). The two groups
exchanged communication pieces about issues that they felt were of significance to
their lives. These texts included letters and posters, as well as short films. Crucially,
the global elements of technology made this project more feasible than would have
been previously possible and much more relevant and engaging to the young people
involved.
Having begun communicating with each other, the next step of the Global
Connects program was for the two groups to identify common issues and then
establish action plans to address these issues in their local communities. The project
was intended to develop active citizenship skills: “As a result, PLAN expects that
children will undergo more of a personal transformative experience than they would
if they were passive recipients of information” (Schultz et al. 2009, p. 1025). This
appears to have occurred:
410 K. Heggart and R. Flowers

[Students] demonstrated a number of skills and personal changes that have allowed them to
engage as active citizens, within their own communities and in wider national and global
communities, now and in the future. (p. 1027)

While the Global Connects program had a global focus, other examples of
established curriculum frameworks are available which demonstrate a greater
focus on the local. One example of such a local approach is Justice Citizens (Heggart
2015a, b). Based at a school in Australia, this program was established by the authors
and worked within the local community in which the school was based, and sought
to empower students to identify and then challenge sources of injustice in this
community though collaborative film-making. In the next section, we focus on the
structure of Justice Citizens project and argue that it constitutes an example of what
thick citizenship education in a formal setting might look like.
Justice Citizens was a project designed by the authors to explore the concepts
behind justice-oriented citizenship (as defined by Joel Westheimer and Joseph Kahne
2004) as well as to examine how such notions correlated with young people’s own
understandings and practices of active citizenship, both in person and online. We
have, since then, developed the notion of justice-oriented citizenship further (as is
discussed in the second half of the chapter). Justice Citizens was implemented at a
Western Sydney Catholic high school in 2012. The aim of the course was for
students to develop the skills, values, and attitudes required of active citizens. In
particular, it sought to develop critical thinking, digital literacy, research skills, and
collaborative learning practices.
The course was broken into three main sections. In the first section, students were
challenged to consider their own agency. This was done by presenting students with
a range of situations in the form of true/false statements (e.g., “Young people are
capable of organizing nationwide protests”). Students were then presented with real-
world examples where young people had done organized nationwide protests. This
led to discussion about why young people were capable of doing such things, and
whether the participants in Justice Citizens could conceive of themselves undertak-
ing similar actions. In addition, students identified the kinds of skills and knowledge
that were required in order to take this form of action, as well as whether they
possessed these.
In the second part of the course, students worked with journalists from local
newspapers to develop an understanding of research and interview techniques.
Students also had the opportunity to speak to a range of community members
about different topics that the community member felt was important. During this
phase in the intervention and study, a number of issues constantly recurred: these
included racism, the treatment of asylum seekers, the dangers of drug and alcohol
abuse, and bullying and harassment.
The final part of the course involved students researching, planning, shooting, and
editing their films. Students worked in small groups (chosen by themselves), and the
groups ranged from pairs to one group of seven. Students were responsible for
“pitching” an idea for their film to their teacher, then researching it. They then had to
devise a script collaboratively, as well as a storyboard, before shooting their film. For
26 Justice-Oriented, “Thick” Approaches to Civics and. . . 411

many students, this was undertaken during school time (either during the lessons
themselves or during other free time), but some groups used their own personal time
to meet up with participants or people they wanted to film. More than 30 films were
produced.
These films were then shown to the whole cohort, who voted on which ones they
thought were the best; these films were placed on the school’s YouTube channel and
also presented at a local Film Festival. The online space and the actual physical film
festival were important for different reasons. The physical festival allowed students
to invite prominent members of the community to see their films and also engage in
discussion about the topics, while the online space provided a chance for students to
share their films with a much broader audience.

A Threefold Typology of Informal Citizenship Education

with Adults: Examples from Australian Refugee Advocacy Groups

In this section, we illustrate further the features of “thick” citizenship education,

through focusing on justice-oriented approaches to citizenship education drawn
mostly from informal “educational” initiatives with adults. Following Griff Foley’s
(1999) and Tony Jeffs’ and Mark Smith’s (1999) typologies, we define informal
education to refer to education which is neither credentialed (formal) or classroom-
based (nonformal). Informal education is also to be distinguished from incidental
learning because informal education is planned with clear intent to facilitate learn-
ing. Unlike schooling, the informal education space is not regulated, and this means
that there is little consistency of terminology used to describe it.
In order to draw out the distinction between active and justice-oriented learning,
we describe and discuss a threefold typology drawing on Westheimer and Kahne’s
(2004) concepts of passive, active, and justice-oriented learning. Three refugee
advocacy organizations that each work in distinct ways are used to illustrate the
typology (see Table 1). The context is a long and rich history of campaigns led by a
myriad of local, national, and international NGOs seeking to mobilize public support
to bring about change to Australian government policies in relation to refugees who
arrive by boat. One example is “A Fair Go for Families: campaign for family
reunion” led by the Refugee Council for Australia. In order to support the campaign,
people are asked to inform themselves about refugees and relevant laws, sign a
petition, donate money, and host a picnic as an awareness-raising activity. This can
be seen as enabling informal citizenship education where members of the commu-
nity learn about political context and structures. The “learning” takes place not with
the guidance of a “teacher” or “facilitator” but through study of web- and print-based
information prepared by “experts” and provided by the Refugee Council for
Australia. Drawing on Westheimer and Kahne’s (2004) typology, we would describe
this type of education as serving to promote the personally responsible citizen, given
that it involves mainly didactic “instruction” and passive learning and thus corre-
sponds to the first tier of the typology below.
412 K. Heggart and R. Flowers

Table 1 Threefold typology of citizenship education for and with refugees

Passive learning Active and participatory Justice-oriented
learning learning and
grassroots
knowledge
Refugee Citizens (who are not
Council refugees) studying web- and
for print-based material given to
Australia them to inform solidarity-
actions
Chillout Citizens (who are not
refugees) locating materials
for themselves; devising and
writing own materials to
inform participatory
activism
RISE Refugee-citizens
research, plan and
lead actions for
themselves

We would argue that an example of active learning is provided by Chillout, an

NGO that campaigns to promote the rights of children seeking asylum. In addition to
petitions and publication of research reports, Chillout has instigated a number of
actions which require supporters to not only read, donate, and sign but also to
undertake their own research to inform their own initiatives. These include writing
letters to asylum seeker children in detention centers and supporting refugees to
present in school classrooms. Again drawing on Westheimer and Kahne’s (2004)
typology, we would describe this type of informal education as serving to promote
the participatory citizen. This is the second tier of our typology. Here, citizens do not
only learn information in a passive manner (because it is made available to them in
the form of Chillout research reports that is why the column in Table 1 connects to
more than one category) they also learn in an active manner because they are
supported to undertake research for themselves when preparing letters and presen-
tations. The key “curriculum” feature, however, that we want to draw attention to is
not just how participatory the learning is, but to what extent the advocacy and social
action builds on the grassroots knowledge of the frontline citizen-activists.
We now want to present the third type that does not exclude the first two
approaches but extends them, namely, justice-oriented citizenship education. RISE
is, in its own words, the “first refugee and asylum seeker organisation in Australia to
be run and governed by refugees, asylum seekers and ex-detainees” (RISE n.d.).
RISE undertakes petitions, research, and presentations, much like the Refugee
Council of Australia and Chillout, mentioned above. The important difference is
that RISE campaigns are underpinned by the grassroots knowledge of refugees
themselves.
This difference is important because it points to epistemological distinctions.
Westheimer and Kahne call for an approach that places emphasis on learners’
26 Justice-Oriented, “Thick” Approaches to Civics and. . . 413

challenging inequalities to promote the justice-oriented citizen. Here they draw

attention not only to acts of advocacy but also to a structuralist analysis which
seeks to identify root causes and address them. But the argument we are developing
is that it also matters who gets to undertake the analysis, informal education, and
social action. It is one thing when a justice-oriented, structuralist analysis is
researched and presented by “experts” and another when it is undertaken by frontline
citizen-activists themselves.
This is why we focus not only on Westheimer and Kahne’s justice-oriented
process of structurally analyzing and challenging inequalities but also on the epis-
temological politics of John Dewey (1938), Paulo Freire (1970), as well as Lew
Zipin and Alan Reid (2008). Dewey saw democracy and justice being enacted
through curriculum that walked the talk; in other words built on the experiential
and subjective knowledge of learners. Freire, likewise, has been influential in his
case for championing a notion of justice where curriculum is developed from the
perspective of those who are most poor and least powerful and are oppressed in both
material and epistemological terms. Zipin and Reid argue that approaches to citi-
zenship education focusing on personally responsible and participatory citizenship
are inherently individualistic and instrumentalist because they do not challenge
dominant classed, racialized, and gendered epistemological views of political struc-
tures. They see justice being enacted through educators privileging what they call the
lifeworld knowledge of less powerful socio-cultural groups.
When considering frontline citizens and their grassroots knowledge, there is a
difference to be drawn between citizens who are not refugees acting in solidarity for
and with refugees and refugees advocating for themselves. The informal education
that both types of citizen undertake is important, but there are specificities. At the
risk of over-simplifying, we tentatively offer another binary opposition to thin and
thick approaches. We suggest there are “soft” and “hard” approaches to citizenship
education. It is soft and easy to rely on experts devising and delivering citizenship
education. It is hard and challenging to support frontline activists or ordinary citizens
to undertake their own research and plan their own learning. It is even harder when
those citizens are in precarious circumstances, for example, have restricted work and
study rights.

Drawing on Practices of Community Cultural Development

for Justice-Oriented Citizenship Education

To pursue this type of “hard” epistemological politics to do advocacy and informal

education for refugees requires more than an organization like RISE simply having
refugees and asylum seekers as members. It involves deploying strategies that
require sophisticated skill-sets to enable grassroots members to undertake their
own research that will inform ideas and initiatives for informal citizenship education.
Enabling grassroots people, especially those with histories of exclusion, to research,
plan, and implement informal education is easier said than done. For anyone, but
more so for people who are not used to having their voice and knowledge regarded as
414 K. Heggart and R. Flowers

important, to research and present educational “stories” is a process that requires not
just highly developed technical skills but also an epistemological disposition. Paulo
Freire (1974) described this as a process of moving learners through stages from
magic, then naïve to critical consciousness.
It is no coincidence that a good deal of justice-oriented campaigns and citizenship
education initiatives rely on the involvement of arts workers. This is because they have
expertise in researching, producing/making, and presenting “stories” in ways that are
creative. This is a field of practice known as community cultural development (Adams
and Goldbard 2005). An illustrative example is an Aboriginal reconciliation campaign
known as The Torch. The Torch was a partnership between the Brotherhood of St
Laurence and a Melbourne-based theater company and a justice-oriented and informal
education program that sought to facilitate learning with grassroots “citizens” in rural
towns about the history of local interactions between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal
residents. This was done through a story-making process. Writers and actors with the
theater company prepared a skeleton script. The plot involved the local country town
preparing for a visit by the Queen and torch bearers shortly before the 1956 Olympics that
were staged in Melbourne. A major part of the preparations included moving Aboriginal
people living in shanty make-shift accommodation away from the main streets. They
were regarded as an eyesore. The theater workers would spend several weeks in the
respective town prodding and provoking both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people to
undertake research to flesh out the skeleton script. Local stories were unearthed. There
were, as Zipin refers to them, accounts of “dark” knowledge dimensions (2009). For
example, a farmer undertook research about his grandparent’s accounts of Aboriginal
people being shot by police, and an Aboriginal woman investigated the circumstances
surrounding the taking of children by welfare authorities. But there were also accounts of
“lighter” knowledge dimensions, for example, a local football club welcoming Aborig-
inal players and a local pub hosting Aboriginal musicians for more than 30 years. Such
local stories were woven into the script. But the justice-orientation of this approach to
citizenship education for reconciliation went beyond local people including their research
in the script/curriculum. It also included local people being recruited and supported to
assist with stage and costume design and perform on stage, whether it be singing, acting,
or dancing. This process of collaborative storymaking enacts what can be called a justice-
oriented approach to citizenship education. The Torch, of course, is not an isolated
example of this type of practice. Indeed the field of community cultural development
or applied community arts includes various Australian arts organizations; for example,
Chorus of Women, BigHart, Urban Theatre Projects, Somebody Daughter’s Theatre
Company, and the Artful Dodger’s Studio.

Citizenship Education for and with Cyclists

We now turn our attention to efforts to promote more bicycle friendly cities. This is
an arena for informal citizenship education which relies heavily on the campaigning
efforts of grassroots cyclists’ groups. In order to illustrate a justice-oriented
approach, we will compare three different epistemological perspectives. The first
26 Justice-Oriented, “Thick” Approaches to Civics and. . . 415

is an instrumentalist perspective which prioritizes informing current and potential

cyclists about the political structures which make decisions about and fund bicycle
infrastructure. While we acknowledge that in this perspective citizens are learning
passively, this type of informal education practice is, nonetheless, important and
foundational. A second epistemological perspective is interpretive and prioritizes
supporting bicyclists to enact active citizenship. There is, of course, a continuum
from passive to active, then to justice-oriented citizenship. But the act of cycling
itself can be seen as a participatory action and these groups not only encourage more
people to cycle, but also to write petitions and post stories on social media. Through
such advocacy, these citizen-cyclists are educating themselves and others about
creating cities that are less dependent on motorized transport and more reliant on
human-powered vehicle movement.
To continue moving along the continuum, Critical Mass and CycleHack present
examples of even more participatory and justice-oriented citizenship. Critical Mass
began in 1992 in San Francisco and is now active in hundreds of cities across the
world, including Australia. There is no formal organization, no office holders, just
monthly political-protest rides. Typically cyclists ride en-masse through major road
intersections. There are variations. Some groups obey the road rules but make a point
of taking up all road space. Other groups make a point of clogging up intersections
for a short period of time and handing out pamphlets and chanting slogans to car
drivers. And some do actions such as die-ins where cyclists lie on the road with their
bicycles to draw attention to bicyclists being killed by cars, or lifting bikes above
their heads as a celebratory gesture.
The reason we are focusing on epistemology is to draw attention to whose
knowledge and what sort of knowledge is at play. In the Critical Mass actions, it
is the embodied knowledge of diverse grassroots cyclists, as opposed to the author-
itative knowledge of “senior”/expert organizational bike-citizens in information-
based advocacy, which counts. This is participatory, verging on justice-oriented,
citizenship. It is participatory because there is active involvement in collective
decision-making and action. For some participants, it may only be a spectacle
where is neither passive or active learning. But for other participants, it may spur
or require them to research for themselves local issues facing bicycle advocates. And
for some this may embolden them to deepen their learning and sustain their advo-
cacy efforts. In this vein, Critical Mass can be seen as sitting on a continuum
between participatory and justice-oriented citizenship as depicted in Table 2.
If one was to design a movement that was further along the continuum towards
justice-oriented citizenship, one might develop something like CycleHack. Cycle
Hack sits in column 4 of Table 2 indicating how its approach is an example of
justice-oriented citizenship. This movement started in 2014 in Glasgow as a one-off
event to bring together cycle activists, developers, designers, planners, and engineers
to brainstorm the barriers that stifle more bike-riding and collaborate on new ideas.
CycleHack has quickly grown into a movement and there are in 2018 collectives in
over 40 cities across the world. We see this as an example of justice-oriented
citizenship because it directly harnesses the knowledge of bicycle-citizens to develop
substantial “curriculum.”
416 K. Heggart and R. Flowers

Table 2 Threefold typology of citizenship education for and with cyclists: instrumental, interpre-
tive, and critical epistemological perspectives
Passive learning Active, participatory Justice-oriented learning
and instrumental learning and interpretive and grassroots, critical
knowledge knowledge knowledge
Australian Provide But also encourage
Cycle information via grassroots cyclists to write
Alliance meetings, petitions and post stories
brochures, films on social media
and newsletters
Critical Cyclists meet once a Some are emboldened to
Mass month and “occupy” a research and plan further
major road intersection as actions
a protest spectacle
CycleHack Grassroots and expert
cyclists connect to research
for themselves ways to
improve experiences and
infrastructure

As citizens, we are all experts in our own right. We all have countless hours of experience
travelling through our local streets, interacting with other road users & using the products/
services that surround us. . .. Our approach to solving the barriers to cycling connects citizens
and allows them to be part of a positive change where they live. . .. We want to reduce the
number of barriers that surround everything from; how you learn to ride a bike; where you
lock your bike up; how you interact with others; to how cycling can fit into your daily
routines. (CycleHack 2018)

These bike-citizens see themselves addressing the injustice of apathy and hostility
towards measures to make cities less reliant on motorized transport and to feature
more human-powered vehicles. It is not just about their agency and subjectivity, it is
that they have developed a structured process – some call human-centered design –
where they drive the “curriculum.”

Conclusion

In this chapter, we have defined and analyzed justice-oriented and thick approaches
to citizenship education. In doing so, we have sought to extend Westheimer and
Kahne’s definitions of passive, participatory, and justice-oriented citizenship on
various levels. First we have highlighted differences and similarities between thick
and justice-oriented approaches. Second, we have drawn attention to the centrality of
epistemological politics. Third, we have highlighted the value of applying a broad
lens to capturing the scope and multifaceted nature of radical approaches to citizen-
ship education. Through this lens, one can see formal and informal education
initiatives, pop-up and institutionalized curricula strategies. The main implication
of our argument is that a justice-oriented approach to citizenship education requires
26 Justice-Oriented, “Thick” Approaches to Civics and. . . 417

more attention be paid to the question: Does it matter whose knowledge we harness?
The challenge is not only to design and implement “curriculum” – be that in formal
or informal education contexts – that enables learners to pursue a structuralist
analysis and action, but to do this with diverse groups of learners. It is important
to support learners who are already confident of their capacity to be active and
justice-oriented citizens, but also important to support those who are not.

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“Fundamental British Values”: The
Teaching of Nation, Identity, and Belonging 27
in the United Kingdom

Sadia Habib

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 420
English Education Policy: From Teaching Britishness to Fundamental British Values . . . . . . . 421
Britishness: Multicultural Belongings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 421
FBVs: Expectations on Schools and Teachers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 422
FBVs: The Political Policy Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 423
Teaching Fundamental British Values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 424
Arts-Based Education and Critical Pedagogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 425
FBVs, Racism, and Islamophobia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 425
Learning and Teaching about Identities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 426
Classed and Racialized Belongings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 427
Conclusion: Counter-Stories of Britishness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 429
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 430

Abstract
The chapter seeks to problematize the policy requirement to promote “Funda-
mental British Values” in English schools. Historically, research shows British-
ness to be fluid, evolving, and often difficult to define for White British and ethnic
minority young people, as well as for pre-service student teachers, classroom
teachers, and teacher educators. Recent research conducted with pre-service
student teachers is outlined in this chapter to evidence intersections between
nation, identity, and belonging that schools could explore. I analyze the teaching
and learning of Britishness and “Fundamental British Values” as complex pro-
cesses. I recommend for students and teachers to engage in reflective and
collaborative classroom activities about identities and belongings. Critical
pedagogy and arts-based pedagogies are recommended as possible useful

S. Habib (*)
Manchester, UK
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 419
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_15
420 S. Habib

teaching and learning approaches for young people and teachers who explore
identity issues in the classroom.

Keywords
Britishness · British values · Citizenship · Nation · Belonging · Teaching ·
Learning · Multiculturalism · Identity

Introduction

The active promotion of “Fundamental British Values” (FBVs) is a policy require-

ment placed on educational institutions in England. The FBVs directive has been
labelled as a “duty” in government documents, obliging educational institutions –
including schools which are the focus in this chapter – to comply (Habib 2017;
Revell and Bryan 2018) (The 2014 press release – “Guidance on promoting British
values in schools published” – stipulates “All have a duty to ‘actively promote’ the
fundamental British values of democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and
mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs. These values
were first set out by the government in the ‘Prevent’ strategy in 2011.” See https://
www.gov.uk/government/news/guidance-on-promoting-british-values-in-schools-p
ublished.). Research, however, indicates that the concept of Britishness is fluid,
evolving, and often difficult to define for White British and British ethnic minority
young people, as well as for educators. National identity – contrary to political
rhetoric that attempts to fix, essentialize, and reify it through educational policies – is
a concept that is contested and difficult to define (Jacobson 1997; Scourfield et al.
2006; Maylor 2010; Anderson 2006, 2012; Burkett 2013).
As teachers – some who may not identify as British themselves – may be wary of
presenting to their students uncritical content regarding nationalism and patriotism
(Osler and Starkey 2005), important questions emerge about how educators might
respond to policy calls to teach Britishness and FBVs, particularly given that
national identity is an ambivalent term. Evidence suggests that, in the past, English
schools have encountered difficulties in exploring and teaching about a shared
British identity (Ajegbo et al. 2007; Maylor et al. 2007). Maylor (2010), for example,
highlights the multiple ways students define Britishness: being born in Britain,
holding a passport, citizenship, Whiteness, British parentage or family, and historical
heritage dating back to Anglo-Saxon times, while Hussain and Bagguley (2005)
found Bradford’s ethnic minority youth keen on asserting their Britishness by
referring to their rights to belong as citizens. Most recently, the head of OfSTED
(the schools’ inspectorate in England) has complained that the teaching of British
values in schools remains “piecemeal” (TES 2018).
This chapter draws on existing literature and the author’s own empirical research
to problematize the duty placed on schools to actively promote FBVs (Habib 2017).
Throughout this chapter, I draw on distinct critiques of the requirement for schools to
promote FBVs. It is worth remembering that these critiques will have different points
27 “Fundamental British Values”: The Teaching of Nation. . . 421

of origin, and the critics will have various motivations, intentions, and reasons for
highlighting the issues of concern with FBVs. Problematizing the teaching of FBVs
is particularly important in light of concerns that the ways teachers are appraised by
school leaders and OfSTED inspectors in relation to the FBVs duty are complicated
by the relationship between FBVs and Counter Terrorism and Security (Revell and
Bryan 2016). Perceived by politicians as a remedy to cure “vulnerable” youth
“disloyal” to nation, the agendas of Britishness and FBVs that have come to pervade
British society place an unnecessary pressure on schools to mold homogenous and
loyal British citizens. Furthermore, it has been documented that from early years to
higher education, it is Muslim young people (Kyriacou et al. 2017) who are the most
impacted by the way that the FBVs and Prevent policies have become both insep-
arable and an imposition.
Political discourses about the “radicalization” of young Muslim males (Bryant
2009; Zuberi 2010; Jerome and Clemitshaw 2012), the failure of young people to
adopt “British” values (Brown 2010; Berkeley 2011; Sales 2012), as well as the
education of White working-class males (Jerome and Clemitshaw 2012; Stahl 2015)
have resulted in Britishness being elevated as a category of inclusion and as a cure to
what is perceived as fragmented British society. The political desire to teach about
Britishness in contemporary England therefore was presented to school teachers as a
means to end young people’s political disenfranchisement. In the backdrop of the
promotion of Britishness and FBVs lies the Prevent duty.
In 2003, the Prevent policy (explained in more detail below) was introduced to
counter terrorism initially by challenging “violent extremism” and then later in 2009
to tackle “non-violent extremism” too: “The revised definition of Prevent views
non-violent forms of extremism through the prism of British Values” (Miah 2017,
p. 4). By providing an overview of current literature on teaching Britishness and
FBVs, this chapter examines reasons why the promotion of FBVs within schools in
the United Kingdom is problematic for teachers and students who are negotiating
numerous political agendas. In order to resolve some of the problems associated with
teaching FBVs, the final section of the chapter suggests arts-based critical pedagogy
as one possibility for ensuring reflective and collaborative work takes place when
exploring (national) identities.

English Education Policy: From Teaching Britishness

to Fundamental British Values

Britishness: Multicultural Belongings

Contemporary debates about national identity in the United Kingdom are frequently
shaped by political and media discourses that condemn ethnic minority communities
for not sufficiently “integrating” into British society. In these discourses, minority
communities are often criticized for not sharing a sense of collective belonging with
wider society, and ethnic minority young people are often blamed for social dishar-
mony (Vasta 2013). Such discourses of blame, which bring into question the extent
422 S. Habib

to which all citizens have a sense of belonging, also recreate old tensions and new
ambiguities regarding multicultural Britain. On the one hand, some politicians
applaud diversity and integration, while simultaneously political policies are cri-
tiqued for recycling assimilationist rhetoric (Back et al. 2002).
Recognizing that national identity and nationhood are difficult concepts to define
and analyze for both White Britons and minority ethnic communities (Vadher and
Barrett 2009), over the last two decades, formulations of British national identity
have become intimately connected with a range of concerns. Perhaps the most
significant of these concerns is the inclusion/exclusion of ethnic minorities. For
example, the “new McCarthyism” that other British Muslims have created a moral
panic about Muslims disloyal to British values (Fekete 2009), consequently resulting
in the rise of anti-Muslim racism and Islamophobia (Scourfield et al. 2005; Osler
2015). British Muslims, portrayed as the “enemy within” (Abbas 2004, p. 30), are
alienated by news headlines like “Be more British Cameron tells UK Muslims”
(Walters 2014). Such media representation constructs British Muslims as not British
enough and as less than citizens (Gilmartin 2008). Therefore, bearing this in mind,
complexities surrounding the teaching of Britishness and FBVs raise theoretical,
methodological, and pedagogical concerns about how students and teachers might
best respond to political initiatives reminiscent of assimilatory and racist rhetoric of
the past.
Furthermore the complexities and uncertainties surrounding notions of immigra-
tion, identity, multiculturalism, and the United Kingdom’s future were also seen as
potentially resolvable by promoting Britishness in schools and in society (Andrews
and Mycock 2008). The terrorist attacks in the United States on 11 September 2001
(9/11) and in London in July 2005 (7/7) amplified debates about Britishness (Kiwan
2012), and as a consequence, the UK government “began to stress the importance of
education in uniting the nation” (Osler 2008, p. 11). Following the election of the
Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government in 2010, debates about immi-
gration, place, and national identities continued to intensify and influence the ways
in which schools, teachers, and students were expected to understand Britishness and
British values. The then Communities Secretary, Eric Pickles, advocated an end to
“state-sponsored multiculturalism,” instead seeking to popularize “British values”
through the promotion of Christianity and the English language as core to British
identity (Walford 2012; Communities and Local Government 2012; Grayson 2012).

FBVs: Expectations on Schools and Teachers

In 2011 a revised set of “Teachers’ Standards” (to be met by all qualified teachers)
were introduced. These standards explicitly required teachers not to undermine
fundamental British values, both in their professional lives and personal lives (DfE
2011). It is important to note that in referencing FBVs, the Teachers’ Standards
explicitly referenced a key strand of the government’s CONTEST counter-terrorism
strategy – Prevent. The connection between the Teachers’ Standards and the Prevent
policy is significant given suggestions that the latter serves to construct Muslim
27 “Fundamental British Values”: The Teaching of Nation. . . 423

communities as “undermining the secular-neoliberal consensus” and that, thus,

Muslims become perceived as “an ontological threat to the West” (Miah 2017, p. 75).
In 2014, the coalition government announced that schools in England were
expected to actively promote Fundamental British Values (FBVs), defined as
“democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of
those with different faiths and beliefs” (DfE 2014). In addition, the Counter Terror-
ism and Security Act of 2015 and the 2016 White Paper Educational Excellence
Everywhere both place emphasis on teachers’ duties in preventing radicalization
(Revell and Bryan 2016). The White Paper (DfE 2016, p. 94) declares “a 21st
century education should prepare children for adult life by instilling the character
traits and fundamental British values that will help them succeed.”
The school inspectorate (the Office for Standards in Education (OfSTED)),
“Common Inspection Framework,” also stipulates the promotion of FBVs as a key
feature of their inspection of schools: “inspectors will make a judgement on the
effectiveness of leadership and management by evaluating the extent to which
leaders, managers and governors. . . actively promote British values” (2015,
pp. 12–13). Once again, British values are directly associated with preventing
radicalization and counter-terrorism, as the OfSTED document on inspections for
schools states “for a definition of these values, see the Prevent Strategy” (2015,
p. 13). Thus, the FBVs guidance (HM Government 2015) controversially originates
from Home Office documents on “extremism” and counter-terrorism. In Prevent,
extremism is defined by the government as “vocal or active opposition to funda-
mental British values. . .” (HM Government 2015, p. 2). Richardson (2015, p. 1)
highlights how the principal problems with “FBVs” are that they originate from
counter-terrorism strategies “of dubious validity both conceptually and operation-
ally” and the “trigger” for calling on schools to teach FBVs was “the so-called Trojan
Horse letter in Birmingham. . . a malicious forgery” (Richardson 2015, p. 1).

FBVs: The Political Policy Context

While it is accepted that discourses on Britishness in the last two decades have had
various drivers, by 2011, though, “unintegrated” ethnic minorities – particularly
Muslims – were the core target of the FBVs directives (Maylor 2016). In this policy
context, rather than preparing teachers to work with ethnically, racially, and cultur-
ally diverse student demographics, teachers and teacher educators find themselves
negotiating a securitization- and surveillance-driven agenda attached to “upholding”
Fundamental British Values (Lander 2016). Arguably, today in the United Kingdom,
the Teachers’ Standards now act as a political tool to promote government approved
ideology of Britishness (Maylor 2016). Furthermore, the UK government has placed
schools and teachers at the forefront of the championing of British values. According
to then Prime Minister, David Cameron (2014), “We are saying it isn’t enough
simply to respect these values in schools – we’re saying that teachers should actively
promote them. They’re not optional; they’re the core of what it is to live in Britain.”
After Cameron’s speech, the media reported that schools would be made to confront
424 S. Habib

young people, parents, and teaching staff who were deemed to be expressing
extremist or intolerant views, that schools would need to refer students deemed
vulnerable to being radicalized to the counter-terrorist program, Channel, and that
schools might be penalized for not promoting FBVs (The Yorkshire Post 2014).
Some politicians have, however, begun to openly criticize the consequences of
the Prevent strategy. Conservative MP Lucy Allan (2017), for example, commented
how schools and teachers were fearing the consequences of not making enough
referrals under Prevent and pointed to the detrimental relationships of mistrust and
suspicion forming between teachers and young people. A 2018 report from a House
of Commons Select Committee recommended that the government should stop using
the term Fundamental British Values, should instead use the term Shared Values of
British Citizenship, and should very clearly separate the promotion of shared British
values from counter extremism policy (House Of Lords 2018). At the time of
writing, the government’s response has been to state its continued commitment to
the term Fundamental British Values and to suggest that promoting shared values
and tackling counter extremism can usefully draw on the same resources (Ministry of
Housing, Communities and Local Government 2018). Questions, therefore, continue
to be raised by teachers, by researchers, and of course by Britons, about who defines
“British values” and whether religiously and culturally diverse Britons are permitted
to contribute to the conversation on Britishness (Bragg 2006; Berkeley 2011; Miah
2015), particularly if Prevent is operating to undermine the safe spaces that teachers
and young people require to explore multicultural Britishness and belonging.
In summary, within wider discourses and critiques of recent commitments to the
promotion of Britishness and British values, educationalists have argued that the
explicit teaching of British (or now Fundamental British Values) needs to be
problematized, debated, and discussed. In a growing body of research literature,
FBVs policy has come to be seen by scholars of education as contradictory,
burdensome, counterproductive, divisive, and undermining the professional and
personal identities of teachers (Tomlinson 2015; Habib 2017; Elton-Chalcraft et al.
2017). There has been even less discussion on the pedagogic approaches to how it is
taught. Furthermore, it has also been suggested that in the school context often FBVs
policy “is unchallenged and its insidious racialising implications are unrecognised
by most teachers” (Elton-Chalcraft et al. 2017, p. 29). In order to explore the
complexities of teaching and learning about Britishness and FBVs, the chapter
now examines existing literature which presents educator and student teacher per-
spectives on British values.

Teaching Fundamental British Values

Given the complex and contested policy environment, the teaching of British
identity, British values, and FBVs raises significant challenges for educators. In
this section, empirical research undertaken in this area over the last few years is
summarized to identify some of these challenges. In addition, I draw on my own
research on the use of critical pedagogy and arts-based pedagogies to suggest that
these pedagogical approaches offer positive possibilities for educators to explore
27 “Fundamental British Values”: The Teaching of Nation. . . 425

identity issues in classrooms with their students. For example, in my research, one
pre-service Art teacher concluded that exploring British identities through Art could
be “most exciting” if students were given structured and creative opportunities to
“unravel, criticise, re-imagine” Britishness and FBVs (Habib 2017, p. 68).

Arts-Based Education and Critical Pedagogy

It is important to note that the pedagogies offered here as ways to explore identities
in the classroom are not a response to all the aforementioned criticisms of FBVs.
Instead I intend to propose arts-based education and critical pedagogy as one way of
tackling some of the problems with the assimilatory and neoliberal nature of the
promotion of FBVs. Arts-based practice and critical pedagogy can be combined to
challenge neoliberal ways of doing education. The combination between arts-based
practice and critical pedagogy “holds the potential for not only creating critically
engaged students, intellectuals, and artists but can strengthen and expand the capac-
ity of the imagination to think otherwise in order to act otherwise, hold power
accountable, and imagine the unimaginable” (Giroux 2018, n.p.).
In response to the inclusion of FBVs within the Teachers’ Standards, a number of
researchers have asserted that pre-service student teachers may be disconcerted
about having to negotiate politicized FBVs, particularly since pre-service teachers
are often thrust in compromising and uncomfortable positions in the classroom
(Habib 2017; Revell and Bryan 2016) and given the politicization of the teaching
profession, with teachers expected to monitor and report students (Elton-Chalcraft
et al. 2017). My own research shows Art pre-service teachers are wary about
promoting patriotic agendas about Britishness and FBVs; they challenge concep-
tions of FBVs by arguing that some of the values defined as British are universal
fundamental values (Habib 2017). Values such as tolerance and the rule of law were
viewed as far-reaching and global values.
The literature presents pre-service teachers as critical of governmental initiatives
to teach Britishness, contending that student teachers are willing “to teach about
complex issues, while generally refusing to promote simple or simplistic messages
on behalf of politicians” (Jerome and Clemitshaw 2012, p. 39). Throughout this
chapter, the underlying theme is that to empower students to provide their counter-
stories on FBVs and what it means to be British, teachers can use key Freirean
principles. By employing a language of hope and possibility, critical pedagogy
supports students to actively participate in critical reflection, to ask questions and
find solutions, and to explore how they can act for social justice and change (Freire
2000; Brett 2007).

FBVs, Racism, and Islamophobia

The pre-service student teachers in my own research similarly saw themselves as

facilitators of debate and discussion about identity in an open, safe, and respectful
classroom environment, rather than teachers of FBVs. They understood the
426 S. Habib

importance of teaching about identities in schools and about exploring a cohesive

collective identity, but struggled with using terms like “Britishness” or “FBVs.”
They were demonstrating awareness about the complexities of notions of national
identity that they felt connote privilege and cause exclusion (Habib 2017). Never-
theless, there remain concerns for teacher educators. Even if pre-service student
teachers know that “being a professional means not emulating the seemingly relent-
less, sometimes crude and polarising, racist nativist discourse offered by both the
media and politicians,” often it is the case that they are not “educated to resist it”
(Smith 2016, p. 311).
Research also suggests that teacher educators in England have strong reservations
and frustrations about the promotion of FBVs to pre-service student teachers from
diverse cultural backgrounds (Maylor 2016; Elton-Chalcraft et al. 2017). It is also
important to note that, at the same time, teacher educators are having to grapple with
their own personal perspectives and experiences of British values. For Muslim
educationalists, there is a danger that FBVs are what Miah (2017, p. 5) describes
as “structured in opposition to Muslims.” FBVs place Muslims as “racial outsiders”
which is evident to them through “the meta-discourse of Prevent” which emphasizes
British values as British because they are not Islamic (Miah 2017, p. 5). In part for
this reason, some have questioned whether the duty regarding FBVs in the Teacher’s
Standards can be implemented in a way that gives pre-service student teachers the
confidence to challenge stereotypes, racism, and narrow conceptions of Britishness
and the courage to promote a critical consciousness (see, e.g., Maylor 2016). Others
still have highlighted the racist and Islamophobic nature of the relationship between
FBVs and Prevent.

Learning and Teaching about Identities

Given these concerns regarding the framing and teaching of FBVs in recent educa-
tion policy, it is important to highlight possible approaches to exploring Britishness
and FBVs through which an inclusive sense of multicultural Britishness might be
promoted. In my own research, I have examined the potential of arts-based critical
pedagogy as a meaningful approach in this regard. There is much scope for teaching
and learning about identities and belongings to nation by encouraging teachers and
students to experiment with arts-based critical pedagogies (Habib 2017). Celebrating
the creative and experimental potential of using Art to explore cultures and belong-
ings through innovative and imaginative ways is often a core principle for Art
teachers’ professional identities (Habib 2017). By examining the pedagogies
employed by two Art classes in a southeast London school, my own research with
Art teachers and their students, in 2008, aimed to address the implications of
Britishness exploration on young people’s relationships with and within multicul-
tural Britain (Habib 2016). My ethnographic arts-based educational research study
examined (i) the complexities of teaching and learning Britishness and (ii) young
people’s discourses of Britishness and belonging. The research investigated the
reflections of teachers and students regarding the pedagogical processes involved
27 “Fundamental British Values”: The Teaching of Nation. . . 427

in the exploration of Britishness in the classroom, as well as how British identities

might be explored with ethnically, religiously, and culturally diverse students in
multicultural Britain.
My analysis draws on the data of emotive artwork created by students, interviews
with teachers and paired students, and extensive questionnaires, and moving and
personal insights into the significances of everyday racialized and classed belong-
ings were investigated. The key findings showed young people’s experiences of
local and global identities informed their notions of national identity. Students’
senses of Britishness were deeply connected to intersectional and multiple experi-
ences of social class, race, and local attachments. Local identities and transnational
postcolonial identities seemed more prominent than a sense of national identity in
the young peoples’ descriptions of belonging to Britain.
My findings support the idea that Britishness remains an ever-contested concept
(Saeed et al. 1999; Croft 2012; Thurston and Alderman 2014; Mason 2016). However,
amidst this contestation about Britishness, I found also that Britishness continues to be
depicted as synonymous with Whiteness (Swann 1985; Maylor et al. 2007), with some
White Britons advocating racialized Britishness over civic Britishness (Garner 2012).
Thus, Britishness discourses sometimes seek to normalize and privilege Whiteness,
pitting White Britons against others (Wemyss 2009), while simultaneously there is
“over-racialization of visible minorities at the expense of a deracialization of ethnic
majorities” resulting in White identity crises (Nayak 2003, p. 139).

Classed and Racialized Belongings

Furthermore, following Freirean philosophies, my research demonstrates the value

of critical pedagogies in order to guide students to “question answers rather than
merely answer questions” (Brett 2007, p. 4). The students and teachers involved
were able to expose and disrupt “monovocals, master narratives, standard stories, or
majoritarian stories” (that privilege the White male political elite) by contributing
counter-narratives (Solórzano and Yosso 2002, p. 28) about Britishness and belong-
ing. My research with young Art students in a London school revealed young people
engaging with critical pedagogies to assert their personal experiences about British-
ness and belonging while simultaneously engaging with differences and diversities
regarding Britishness. One of the Art teachers, Mr. Martin, explained students
wanted him to tell them, for instance, to “draw a portrait of themselves with a
Union Jack in the background. . . a nice cup of tea. . . and a nice red phone box.” He
had to adapt the lesson to challenge students, reminding them, sometimes to their
frustration, this was not about his knowledge but about their knowledge of belong-
ing to Britain. Critical pedagogy (Freire 2000, 2001; Giroux 2013) approaches
encourage students to become responsible and active participants or citizens,
unafraid to seek social transformation and social justice. Exploring British identities
critically through artwork permitted my research participants to produce new knowl-
edge relevant to their readings of nation and ways of doing pedagogies. One student,
Ellie, commented upon classmates moving away from superficial and stereotypical
428 S. Habib

notions of Britishness: “I think British colours are just colours on a flag. And that’s
not what anyone really did their work about. Everyone did it about something that
was kinda personal to them.”
The apprehension both of the teachers felt prior to teaching soon dissipated as
most students energetically embraced critical pedagogical approaches to Britishness
exploration. Instead of passively accepting a hegemonic narrative of Britishness,
students utilized the space to debate the current discourses on British identities and
revealed personal definitions and experiences from diverse racial, ethnic, and class
positionings. If a democratic goal of education is to inspire morally and socially
responsible citizenry, critical pedagogy helps students to become “critical, self-
reflective and knowledgeable” active members of society (Giroux 2013, p. 3).
Careful deliberation on identity resulted in, for example, student Ellie creating a
stunning portrait about the vicious social stereotypes encountered by White
working-class youth. Ellie, a White female student, depicted struggles encountered
by the stigmatized working classes because of the imposition of the undesirable and
demeaning label chav. Around a decade or so ago, the term chav – synonymous with
the “White trash” of the United States (Tyler 2008) – became a familiar media “buzz
word” to describe the White working classes (Nayak 2009). Ellie’s sense of British-
ness was tied up with stereotypes and judgments (as she powerfully named her
artwork) about social class, belonging, and Bermondsey. Ellie explained that she
struggled to escape the class imprisonment of “stereotypes and judgments,” fre-
quently feeling as though society reminded her of her status and her place as a White
working-class female. Ellie’s poignant artwork reflected deep displeasure and frus-
trated resentment at being labelled unfairly and prematurely. In the artwork, a bar
restrained her eyes, restricting her to a specific identity, enclosing her, confining her,
and repressing her self-identity, like prison bars:

Ellie: “. . . so it’s like you’re caged in and you can’t express yourself how you want to be
perceived because other people do it for you.”

Ellie saw society denigrating her through the chav label, for example, because she
wears a Tiffany chain (a brand label associated with the caricature of the chav in the
popular consciousness). Ellie’s vivid description of the positioning of the Tiffany
chain in her artwork evoked Freirean perspectives, for it reflected her oppressed and
marginalized experiences and her sense of lacking a voice to defend herself: “. . .it’s
like tight around my neck and my mouth. . . so I can’t talk to myself . . . I can’t
breathe. . . I’m like tied up.” Ellie’s artwork on Britishness and belonging, with its
Tiffany chains and Burberry branded bullets, as well as the terrifyingly opened jaws
of the Lacoste crocodile, pointed toward confinement in an unfairly imposed sense
of identity, as she battled social class prejudices.
Ellie’s peer, Chris, a mixed heritage young male, described his identity as “half
Jamaican half English,” “because that’s who I am and how I feel. . . but I feel I
belong more to the Jamaican culture because I only know my Jamaican side of the
family and I grew up with only them”. Chris’ artwork, entitled Jamaican London,
exemplified his view that British identity is composed of cultural diversity.
27 “Fundamental British Values”: The Teaching of Nation. . . 429

Emphasizing his mixed heritage and dual identity through drawing two parts to his
face, Chris juxtaposed London landmarks with Jamaican national colors of green,
black, and gold. Chris, like his peers, expressed ambivalent feelings about British-
ness: while he was “proud” of belonging to Britain, he also reflected, “I don’t feel
part of it.” Chris argued media rhetoric, particularly negative representation of Black
youth, influences his peers into making racial judgments. The “media obsession”
with London Black youth and gangs (Shildrick et al. 2010) impacted upon Chris’
sense of belonging to Britain. Chris referred to his observations of Black youth as
demonized through negative media representation, portrayed as likely to “rob” or
“stab” other Londoners.
Instead of reproducing tired tropes and simplistic stereotypes about belonging to
Britain, the arts-based critical pedagogies encouraged some young people to probe
and interrogate contemporary multicultural Britishness. As a result, the majority of
the Art students became confident in deconstructing their everyday experiences of
Britishness as racialized and classed. The emphasis on student voice, respectful and
caring dialogue, and collaborative communication led to meaningful and engaged
individual and collective critical reflections on students’ own stories of Britishness.

Conclusion: Counter-Stories of Britishness

When it comes to exploring FBVs in the classroom, teachers and pre-service

teachers find themselves in difficult circumstances where their personal and profes-
sional roles and identities are compromised by the demands of school managers,
OfSTED, and government policies. This is as a result of schools in England
becoming “an ideological battleground for competing versions of ‘Britishness’”
causing teaching staff to feel as though they have been “positioned on the frontline
of the ‘war on terror’ at home, with an emphasis on the surveillance and control of
BME students rather than their education” (Alexander et al. 2015, p. 4).
While policy makers may desire to reproduce “a systematic process of
assimilation. . . preparing each successive generation of children for the nation’s
version of adult citizenship” through educational systems and political policies to
fulfil these aims (Rosaldo 1996, p. 239), the political construction and hegemonic
perpetuation of everyday nationalism in multicultural societies is fragmented and
needs critical interrogation, particularly if inclusiveness and diversity are a priority
for the nation’s citizens (Mavroudi 2010). In terms of citizenship, patriotic dis-
courses have historically been problematically gendered, classed, and racialized. If
promoting overly narrow forms of patriotism is “morally dangerous” and harmful to
“the goal of national unity in devotion to worthy moral ideals of justice and equality”
(Nussbaum 1996, p. 4), cosmopolitanism becomes a more preferable goal for the
people of a multicultural nation.
Research has shown that pre-service student teachers who actively choose to
reject what they see as indoctrinating or undemocratic pedagogies prefer instead that
students become independent learners (Jerome and Clemitshaw 2012). Young peo-
ple as independent learners providing their counter-stories on Britishness is
430 S. Habib

preferable to an imposition of FBVs. One way of encouraging students to confi-

dently adopt strategies of autonomy and collaboration in their learning is through
introducing them to the principles of critical pedagogy (Habib 2017).
If neoliberal ideas about multicultural citizenship and national identity marginal-
ize experiences of oppressed groups (Sleeter 2014) by “stifling critical thought,
reducing citizenship to the act of consuming, defining certain marginal populations
as contaminated and disposable, and removing the discourse of democracy from any
vestige of pedagogy” (Giroux 2013, p. 8), then it is crucial that teachers and young
people engage in reflection and dialogue to rethink what it means to belong to nation
and to reassert their right to belong. Further research on the relationship between
Britishness, nation, citizenship, youth, and belonging is required. Currently research
seems to focus on the “elite master-narratives of nationhood that have fascinated
historians, political scientists and quantitative sociologists” (Garner 2012, p. 455),
but we need to describe the ways in which young people are actively constructing
their own counter-stories of Britishness.
When exploring the pedagogy concerning Britishness and FBVs, the pre-service
student teachers, teachers, and students in my research were sensitive to identities as
unfixed and as difficult to capture concretely or definitively. If educators believe that
“identities are never completed, never finished; that they are always as subjectivity
itself is, in process” (Hall 1997, p. 47), this has profound implications for how
teacher educators and pre-service student teachers might teach FBVs or explore
British identities with young people. Teacher educators might find pre-service
student teachers would benefit from engaging in deeply reflexive opportunities to
better know their personal positionality on Britishness and FBVs. More work
urgently needs to be done in England to educate pre-service student teachers
regarding appropriate strategies to actively resist exclusionary and racist discourses.

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Civics and Citizenship Education
in Australia: The Importance of a Social 28
Justice Agenda

Babak Dadvand

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 436
Youth and “the Problem” of Participation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 436
Youth Citizenship: Australian Policy Response . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 438
Youth Citizenship: Beyond the Rhetoric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 439
Citizenship Education: A Spatial-Relational Turn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 440
A Social Justice Agenda for Citizenship Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 443
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 444
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 445

Abstract
This chapter examines how civics and citizenship has been constructed in edu-
cation policy in Australia since the publication of “Education for Active Citizen-
ship in Australian Schools and Youth Organisations” (SSCEET 1989). The
chapter identifies possible tensions and contradictions in citizenship education
policy and highlights how policy discourse often ignores wider issues of inclu-
sion and social justice with the assumption being that all young people can
achieve full citizenship if they acquire formal citizenship knowledge and skills.
The discussions presented in this chapter are informed by recent developments in
Citizenship Studies and Sociology of Youth which have pointed to the need to
broaden the definition of citizenship from “formal rights and duties” to “a lived
experience” grounded in everyday spaces and enacted through social relation-
ships (Lister 2007). Attention to the lived aspect of citizenship requires us to
recognize social exclusion as a barrier to active participation in spaces such as

B. Dadvand (*)
Melbourne Graduate School of Education, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria,
Australia
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 435
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_36
436 B. Dadvand

schools and classrooms. This is particularly important for young people who face
multiple and often interlocking forms of disadvantage. The chapter concludes by
calling for a social justice agenda for civics and citizenship education.

Keywords
Civics and citizenship · Citizenship education · Education policy · Participation ·
Social exclusion · Social justice

Introduction

This chapter examines civics and citizenship education policy in Australia. The aim is
to identify possible tensions and contradictions in the way young people’s citizenship
is constructed in education policy discourse. The chapter also draws on the scholarship
in the fields of Citizenship Studies and Sociology of Youth to highlight the importance
of addressing social exclusion in relation to youth participation. Using the definition of
“citizenship as a lived experience” grounded in everyday spaces and enacted through
social relationships (Lister 2007), it is argued that education policy needs to acknowl-
edge the importance of everyday practices and relationships to the construction of
young people’s civics identities and political subjectivities. This, in turn, requires
paying attention to how social divisions rooted in factors such as socio-economic
status, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, disability, and locale – to name a few – can mediate
young people’s participatory experiences in schools.
The discussions in this chapter are organized into five sections. The first section
looks at what has come to be recognized as “the problem” of youth participation in
many Western democracies. The second section examines recent policy for civics
and citizenship education in Australia and discusses the ways in which young
people’s citizenship has been constructed in policy since the publication of “Educa-
tion for Active Citizenship in Australian Schools and Youth Organisations”
(SSCEET 1989). The third section highlights the tensions in policy discourse, in
particular a tendency to treat citizenship as a “universal” status that all young people
can achieve. Section “Youth Citizenship: Beyond the Rhetoric” reviews develop-
ments in Citizenship Studies and Sociology of Youth to argue that citizenship needs
to be concerned with what participation means to young people, especially those
who face multiple and interlocking forms of marginalization. The final section
provides a synthesis of the discussions by calling for broadening the parameters of
citizenship education to address issues of inclusion and social justice.

Youth and “the Problem” of Participation

It is hard to find a debate about citizenship that does not make a reference to young
people. In many Western liberal democracies like Australia, public and media
commentaries about citizenship participation are abound with references to youth
28 Civics and Citizenship Education in Australia: The Importance of a. . . 437

and their state of political participation. More often than not, these references evoke a
sense of alarm about “a problem” that needs immediate intervention, namely that of
low participation and disengagement. This alleged problem is discussed in the
backdrop of the findings that point to low levels of electoral turn-out and mistrust
of political institutions among young people (Manning and Edwards 2014). This is
believed to have put at jeopardy the (future) health of Western democracies, from the
USA, the UK, and Europe to Australia and beyond. The public perceptions of youth
disengagement have also entered political discussions prompting governments to
embark on youth engagement initiatives through policy.
Australian policy debates about youth participation have long been driven a
“deficit” thesis in which young people are portrayed as a concern for democracy.
In 1988, the Senate requested its Standing Committee on Employment, Education
and Training (SSCEET) to conduct an inquiry into the status of citizenship partic-
ipation among young Australians. The report from the inquiry concluded that youth
participation “amounts to a crisis which Australians cannot afford to ignore”
(SSCEET 1989, p. 6). The report also pointed to an endemic of “ignorance” and
“apathy” among young people, especially in terms of their political knowledge and
engagement with the institutions of government. SSCEET (1989, p. 15) concluded,
rather alarmingly, that the absence of political knowledge translates into:

. . .the young person who cannot make sense of large parts of the daily paper; the citizen who
has no idea what section of the bureaucracy to approach to attend to some pressing matter;
the local council which is making decisions affecting young people in their area without the
benefit of young people’s views; the disadvantaged neighbourhood which suffers from a lack
of amenities because those living there have no idea of how to organise themselves, who to
approach about their problem, and how to press their case; the person who is baffled by the
apparent complexities of State and Federal politics and who resorts to simplistic solutions
such as ‘all politicians are corrupt’ or ‘what has it got to do with me anyway?’; and the large
numbers of people who are vaguely conscious that the fate of their country is somehow
inseparable from what happens in the rest of world but who dismiss the whole question
because ‘there is nothing we can do about it’.

A subsequent report by the SSCEET (1991, p. 36) also pointed to “a curious gap”
between the proclaimed interest of many young people in politics and their actual
knowledge of political structures and processes. A later inquiry by the Civics Expert
Group (1994) confirmed this conclusion, drawing attention to “overwhelming evi-
dence” that many young Australians lack the knowledge that they need to fulfil their
civic duties. This deficit, according the Civics Expert Group (1994, p. 21), was the
main cause for young people’s “feelings of cynicism, estrangement and resentment
about our system of government.” A similar conclusion was later reached by the
Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters (2007) highlighting a prevailing
“sense of disillusionment” about formal politics among young Australians.
A more recent series of poll research conducted by the Lowy Institute since 2012
have also pointed to “ambivalence” among young Australians about the value of
democracy. According to the most recent Lowy Institute survey, support for democ-
racy is “alarmingly” lower among young people with 52% of younger Australians
438 B. Dadvand

aged 18–29 years agreeing that democracy is the preferable form of government
(Roggeveen 2017). Conclusions of this sort support a disengagement thesis of youth
participation. The disengagement thesis points to the generational gap in young
people’s participation and interprets this as evidence of their disconnect from politics
(Bennet 2008). Despite questions about validity of the evidence behind the disen-
gagement thesis (Percy-Smith 2010), perceptions of youth disconnect have acted as
a catalyst for policy interventions from successive Australian governments.

Youth Citizenship: Australian Policy Response

A key “policy solution” designed to address “the problem” of youth civics deficit has
been the provision of formal citizenship education. While education for citizenship has
a long history in Australia, it is only within the past couple of decades that it has
emerged as a key area of education policy. The SSCEET (1989) report titled “Educa-
tion for Active Citizenship in Australian Schools and Youth Organisations” is one of
the earliest government commissioned initiatives which called for a national program
of citizenship education. After highlighting widespread “civics deficits” and “political
apathy” among young people, the SSCEET (1989) report made a series of recom-
mendations to the Commonwealth including: initiating a national program for active
citizenship, designating education for active citizenship as a priority in primary and
secondary education, emphasizing education for active citizenship in teacher educa-
tion programs, and developing teaching resources for citizenship education.
The importance of citizenship education was emphasized in a subsequent report by
the SSCEET (1991). This report made further recommendations to the Australian
Education Council, schools, government departments, and higher education institutions.
Among these recommendations were: the need for a national curriculum framework for
the Social Studies and the Environment, regular national surveys of the political
knowledge, attitudes and orientations of young people, and evaluation of the effective-
ness of the proposed national social education curriculum. Later, the Civics Expert
Group (1994) reiterated the conclusions of the two earlier SSCEET reports calling for
more rigorous citizenship education to address young people’s “ignorance” and “mis-
conceptions” about democracy. For the Civics Expert Group (1994, p. 45), the cause for
concern was that many students lacked “sufficient knowledge and understanding of
Australia’s political and social heritage, its democratic processes and government, its
judicial system and its system of public administration.”
Responding to concerns of similar nature, the Discovering Democracy program
emerged as a major government initiative in education for citizenship. Launched in
June 1997 by the Ministerial Council for Education, Employment, Training and
Youth Affairs (MCEETYA) under the conservative, Liberal-National coalition gov-
ernment of John Howard, the program encouraged “the development of skills,
values, and attitudes that enable effective, informed and reflective participation in
political processes and civic life” (MCEETYA 2015). Fostering “active” and
“informed” citizenship has also been a recurring theme in other education proposals
including the Hobart Declaration (MCEETYA 1989), the Adelaide Declaration
28 Civics and Citizenship Education in Australia: The Importance of a. . . 439

(MCEETYA 1999), and the Melbourne Declaration (MCEETYA 2008) which act as
national “roadmaps” for education across various Australian states and territories.
Two further core federal education policy initiatives connected to civics and
citizenship education under the Howard government were the National Framework
for Values Education in Australian Schools (Curriculum Corporation 2005) and the
Statements of Learning for Civics and Citizenship (Curriculum Corporation 2006).
Both of these initiatives outline a set of core civics values, knowledge, and skills that
all young Australians should have the opportunity to learn and develop as a result of
their education in schools. These two policy documents, which were established by
the Federal government when educational curriculum was almost exclusively deter-
mined by individual states and territories, preceded the development and implemen-
tation of Australia’s first national, Australian Curriculum.
Situated within the broader Humanities and Social Sciences Learning Area, the
Australian Curriculum includes Civics and Citizenship. The Australian Curriculum:
Civics and Citizenship aims to achieve the educational goals identified in the
Melbourne Declaration by “developing knowledge and understanding, and skills –
underpinned by values, attitudes and dispositions to participate in civic life, locally,
nationally and globally” (ACARA 2012, p. 6). Similar to the previous initiatives
outlined above, the Australian Curriculum emphasizes the importance of citizenship
knowledge and skills, particularly in relation to how people “choose their govern-
ments; how the system safeguards democracy by vesting people with civic rights and
responsibilities; how laws and the legal system protect people’s rights; and how
individuals and groups can influence civic life” (The Australian Curriculum 2018).
As this short review shows, what much of the Australian citizenship education
policies since the publication of the first SSCEET (1989) report have in common is a
focus on fostering “active” and “informed” citizenship among young people. Active
and informed citizenship is often framed in terms of the knowledge, skills, and
values that young people need to acquire from their formal civics and citizenship
education. The Australian Curriculum: Civics and Citizenship sets the bar even
higher by linking citizenship with the ideals of equity and social justice (The
Australian Curriculum 2018). Regardless of the multiple and varied meanings that
such terms can take on, one needs to look beyond the rhetoric to identify tensions
and possible contradictions in the way young people’s citizenship is constructed in
policy discourse. This is the topic that I turn to in the next section of the chapter.

Youth Citizenship: Beyond the Rhetoric

As Black (2011) argues, the discourse of “active” and “informed” citizenship in

Australian education policy conceals a more complex reality. While policy discourse
heralds active and informed youth participation, an assumption of “deficit” threads
through much of the education policy response to young people’s citizenship. This is
perhaps the reflection of wider concerns about the state of youth participation which,
as suggested in the first section, have for some time been at the forefront of public
debates in many liberal democracies. Citizenship education policy in Australia
seems to be responding, at least in part, to some of these concerns by framing “the
440 B. Dadvand

problem” of youth citizenship as one of civics deficit and political apathy (e.g.,
Edwards 2007; Print 2007). Such a problem formulation, according to Print (2000,
p. 24), has been a powerful motivating factor in accounting for “the civics renais-
sance” in the Australian education policy since the late 1980s.
In his review of the major contemporary citizenship education policies, Fyfe (2007)
contends that underlying much of the Australian civics and citizenship education
related policies is a perceived social problem that requires immediate attention and
intervention. This perceived problem, which is situated within the wider typologies of
young people “as at risk” or “as risk,” reflects a more general public perception and
concern that young Australians lack knowledge about the processes and institutions of
representative democracy. These concerns surfaced in the recent media commentary
and public reactions to the results of the National Assessment Program for Civics and
Citizenship (NAP-CC). The findings of the NAP-CC which was delivered to
10,480 Year 6 and Year 10 students in 2016 show stagnation and decline in students’
performance in civics and citizenship (Fraillon et al. 2017).
A further assumption that underpins the Australian citizenship education policy
response relates to its developmental and future-oriented tendencies. Such tenden-
cies often disregard young people’s citizenship “here and now.” As McLeod (2012)
points out, citizenship education policy in Australia focuses on the person formation
aspect of education; it emphasizes the role of schools “in shaping young people to
become citizens for and in the future” (p. 14). This futurity discourse values young
people for their later civics contributions. Ailwood et al. (2011) also critique the age-
and stage-based understandings of children in the Australian educational policy and
curriculum for citizenship. Ailwood et al. (2011, p. 641) note that citizenship
education in Australia is a narrative of young people “that is future oriented –
about the adults, workers, citizens they will become in the future – rather than in
enacting and engaging with citizenship in their current context and community.”
Finally, Australian education policy for civics and citizenship is driven by “one-size-
fits-all” assumptions. Citizenship is often framed as a status that all young people
achieve uniformly as they transition to adulthood. Such a one-size-fits-all approach, as
Dahlgren (2006, p. 269) explains, reflects an assumption in the liberal theories of
citizenship that individuals emerge as fully-fledged citizens “devoid of social bonds,
out of some sociocultural black box, ready to play his or her role in democracy.” Viewed
as such, participation gains a level of normativity by creating an expectation that all
students will participate as citizens as part of their curriculum requirements. What is
ignored, however, is that these requirements “are frequently divorced from emotions,
places of meaning and pre-established social relationships” (Wood 2013, p. 50) that
mediate participatory opportunities through axes of class, gender, ethnicity, age, and
disability to name a few.

Citizenship Education: A Spatial-Relational Turn

One of the critiques of the Australian education policy for civics and citizenship is its
emphasis on the acquisition of formal political knowledge and skills as one of the
main, if not the main, aim of citizenship education. While political knowledge can be
28 Civics and Citizenship Education in Australia: The Importance of a. . . 441

a good indicator of young people’s awareness about politics, framing the purpose of
citizenship education merely as one of knowledge acquisition can be reductionist.
Such an approach attributes youth disengagement, whether real or imagined, to their
lack of knowledge and understanding about formal political processes. In so doing, it
perpetuates what Somers (2008) calls a “conversion narrative” whereby young
people become accountable for wider problems and their “disengagement” becomes
divorced from context.
It is also difficult to imagine how educational programs that are driven by a deficit
thinking can engage young people in constructive ways (Osler and Starkey 2003).
Such programs often amount to compensatory interventions that aim to “fix” young
people and produce citizens from “a template.” To create authentic participatory
opportunities, policy and curriculum for citizenship education need to acknowledge
that young people are already implicated in the politics of everyday life where they
actively contribute to their own citizenship learning. Far from being citizens-in-
waiting as some political theorists have suggested (for example see Marshall 1950),
young people experience their political agencies and develop their civics identities
through the day-to-day social encounters in the context of their families, schools,
communities, and the wider society.
Lawy and Biesta (2006) criticize the conception of citizenship as a status towards
which young people should be steered and instead call for a re-orientation from
“citizenship-as-achievement” towards “citizenship-as-practice.” Citizenship-as-
practice offers a relational approach that does not presume “young people move
through a pre-specified trajectory into their citizenship statuses or that the role of the
education system is to find appropriate strategies and approaches that prepare young
people for their transitions into ‘good’ and contributing citizens” (Lawy and Biesta
2006, p. 43; emphasis in original). This understanding of citizenship counters the
discourses of “deficit” and “preparation” which mark education policy in some
liberal democracies. Citizenship-as-practice highlights the lived experiences of
young people in the process of practicing democracy and, in so doing, foregrounds
young people’s everyday experiences as a critical component of their citizenship.
In a study of political participation in the UK, Marsh, O’Toole, and Jones (2007)
pursue a similar line of argument. The authors criticize the strands of youth partic-
ipation research and policy that are driven by a narrow understanding of “politics”
and political engagement. Conceptualizing politics as “a structured lived experi-
ence,” Marsh et al. (2007) emphasize the need for a broader definition of “the
political” in research and policy on youth participation. Such a conception recog-
nizes the multiple ways young people, embedded in a matrix of structural possibil-
ities and constraints, understand and enact participation. In addition, an alternative
approach to politics situates young people’s participation in the context of their
everyday experiences which are conditioned by a range of social divisions and
differences rooted in factors such as age, socio-economic status, gender, sexuality,
and ethnicity.
These and other critiques that point to temporality, spatiality, and relationality in
youth citizenship participation (for example see Wood 2017) help highlight the need
for a context-sensitive approach to civics and citizenship education, an approach that
is not oblivious to the important role that daily practices and relationships play in
442 B. Dadvand

young people’s political socialization. Such an approach, on the one, acknowledges

the political significance of everyday contexts which were previously considered as
apolitical arenas. Schools and classrooms are examples of such spaces where young
people actively engage in the politics of everyday life. On the other hand, alternative
accounts of youth citizenship along the lines delineated above draw our attention to
how the practices and relationships that characterize the social geography of space
can position young people and how such positioning can contribute to their partic-
ipatory experiences.
Fundamental to an alternative account of citizenship is the recognition that
citizenship is not a level playing field in which everyone participates in the same
manner. According to Levinson (2012), both at a conceptual and practical level, it is
reductionist to view civic identity as a homogenous construct. Even though we might
all be citizens theoretically, our “other” identities intersect with our civic identity in
such profound ways that are hard to disentangle (Yuval-Davis 2011). This is where
identity and subjectivity converge with politics. Dahlgren, Miegel, and Olsson
(2007, p. 9) highlight the importance of the subjective dimensions of citizenship
arguing that “in order to be able to act as a citizen, to participate in achieved
citizenship, it is necessary that one can see oneself as a citizen, as subjectively
encompassing the attributes of agency that this social category may involve.”
Therefore, far from signifying a shared experience, citizenship needs to be viewed
as a process involving people who are situated differentially within the grids of
power. Intersecting social divisions rooted in factors such as gender, class, ethnicity,
sexuality, ability, and stage in the life cycle can mediate how members of collectiv-
ities experience their citizenship through participation in everyday life (Yuval-Davis
2007). Reviewing the work of Feminist and anti-racist scholars in the field of
Citizenship Studies, Yuval-Davis (2007, p. 261) contends that in contemporary
political contexts, we need to dehomogenize the notion of citizenship by situating
it in “the wider context of contemporary politics of belonging which encompass
citizenships, identities and the emotions attached to them.”
With the question of citizenship being increasingly re-framed through a socio-
logical lens, real life experiences have emerged as key arenas in which the formal
rights and duties of citizens are understood, expressed, and enacted. There is now a
recognition that citizenship is a “multidimensional” construct in which formal status
and entitlements are tightly entangled with lived experiences and identities (Joppke
2007). As such, any attempt to conceptualize citizenship should not only take into
consideration the formal rights and obligations associated with membership of
particular groups, but also acknowledge the sense of belonging, inclusion, and
recognition that follow from such memberships.
A more nuanced approach, thus, goes beyond the legal and political discourses of
“rights and responsibilities” which have for long provided the framework for
discussions about civics and citizenship education in Australia. This is not to suggest
that the normative aspects of citizenship are no longer relevant or significant. Rather
than discrediting the legal and political basis of citizenship, we need to understand
citizenship as multitiered encompassing both the formal and the informal (Lister
2007). Such an understanding requires us to abandon one-size-fits-all and deficit
28 Civics and Citizenship Education in Australia: The Importance of a. . . 443

mentalities and instead draw on “a surplus model” that recognizes the unique
knowledge, contributions, and experiences of young people in learning and practic-
ing citizenship (Heggart et al. 2018).

A Social Justice Agenda for Citizenship Education

If we accept the thesis that youth citizenship is contingent upon complex relation-
ships between factors in their backgrounds and the place-bound social relationships,
the question that needs to be asked then is: how can we foster a more active
citizenship participation in spaces such as schools and classrooms? This is an
important question whose answer can lead us towards a more inclusive and demo-
cratic education agenda, especially for those young people who face multiple and
often interlocking forms of marginalization. In this section, I build on my earlier
review and discussion to address this question. The argument that drives my
discussion is that to create a truly democratic education that is inclusive of all
students regardless of their needs, differences, and social backgrounds, we should
bring social justice center-stage in debates about civics and citizenship education.
The importance of addressing social justice in relation to citizenship lies in the
ideological association between “equality” as a principle of social justice and
“democracy” as a political ideal (Black 2012). Due to the tightly entwined nature
of equity and participation, social justice is often discussed in terms of “parity of
participation.” Fraser (2010, p. 16), for instance, explains that overcoming injustice
“means dismantling institutionalized obstacles that prevent some people from par-
ticipating on a par with others, as full partners in social interaction.” Similarly, in her
review essay that covers a decade of scholarship on the political geographies of
children and youth, Skelton (2013) highlights the centrality of social justice in
exposing the processes of exclusion and marginalization.
A social justice project which exposes the barriers that stand in the way of a more
active participation is central to an education that pursues inclusion and equity for
young people. As Lister, Middleton and Smith (as cited in Lister 2008) contend, an
inclusionary approach to citizenship education should recognize social exclusion
and disadvantage as real obstacles to active and participatory citizenship. Such an
approach, on the one hand, must provide for the needs and priorities of young people
whose more complex backgrounds and circumstances, coupled with their negative
experiences in the institution, have turned schooling into a disempowering experi-
ence for them. On the other hand, an inclusionary approach to citizenship education
should help young people to contest these obstacles and in so doing contribute to
their political agency.
A social justice project can have three broad, and inter-related, implications for
citizenship education. First, such a project helps us interrogate the adequacy of
formal structures such as Student Representative Councils (SRCs) as the main
medium for student voice and participation. Schools’ commitment to student voice
reflects their broader commitment to issues of inclusion and social justice (Baroutsis
et al. 2016). Nonetheless, reliance on formal structures and processes that replicate
444 B. Dadvand

adults’ modes of political participation can limit the possibilities for equitable
participation. This is because while structures such as SRCs are useful in accom-
modating for certain voices, they can often be tokenistic, only catering for the views
and voices of a small subset of students, namely those who embody the norms and
values of the institution.
Second, a social justice agenda draws attention to the lived dimension of citizen-
ship. As Percy-Smith (2010, p. 111) argues, there is more to participation than
having one’s views represented in decision-making; participation “is also about
having equal opportunities ‘to take part’ and ‘be involved in’ the life of the
community, organization, or project and feel valued for that contribution.” The
question, therefore, changes from “who takes part?” to “who has the opportunity
to take part?” and “what are the impediments to participation?” Traditionally,
questions of this sort have been ignored in much of the youth participation policy
in Australia. Civics and citizenship education has not been an exception to this trend
where “the problem” of disengagement has often been divorced from context and
exclusionary practices and instead been located within individuals.
Finally, applying a social justice lens to civics and citizenship education fore-
grounds the role of “relationships” in youth participation. In the current education
policy climate in which discussions about schools are increasingly framed around
performance and measurable outcomes, one needs to reflect critically on the impact
that performativity-driven agendas can have on the prospect of a relational education
project, one that fosters deep and caring connections between teachers and students,
and among students themselves. Research points to a shift towards reconstitution of
caring relationships along performance and outcomes under recent neoliberal policy
mandates (Dadvand and Cuervo 2018). An implication of this is growing “disen-
gagement” of those students for whom outcome-driven practices and relationships
have little resonance with their more complex needs and circumstances.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I examined policy and research on civics and citizenship education. I
highlighted a tension between how citizenship is constructed in education policy
discourse and how young people practice their citizenship as a lived and embodied
experience. Despite growing emphasis on “active” and “informed” citizenship,
policy for civics and citizenship education in Australia remains oblivious, for the
most part, to the factors that can mediate participatory opportunities of young
people. In education policy discourse, citizenship is treated primarily as a set of
knowledge, skills, and attitudes that need to be inculcated in young people through
formal civics and citizenship education. What is often overlooked is the ways in
which multiple and interlocking social divisions and differences can act as sources of
social exclusion affecting the participatory opportunities of some students.
I argued that marrying discussions of citizenship with those of social justice can
have theoretical and practical contributions for policies and practices in the area of
civics and citizenship education. Such a marriage provides a more robust conceptual
28 Civics and Citizenship Education in Australia: The Importance of a. . . 445

basis for understanding the deep inter-connections between issues of access, equity,
and participation. Bridging the conceptual boundaries of citizenship and social
justice also brings attention to what citizenship actually means to young people; it
shows the dynamic interplay of knowledge, skills, and attitudes with everyday
practices and lived experiences in the formation of political subjectivities. Broaden-
ing the parameters of citizenship education beyond its legal and political accounts
offers an opportunity to bring relationships, mutuality, and positioning center-stage
in discussions about youth citizenship.

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Print, M. (2007). Citizenship education and youth participation in democracy. British Journal of
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lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/are-we-losing-faith-democracy
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13562576.2013.780717.
Somers, M. (2008). Genealogies of citizenship: Markets, statelessness, and the right to have rights.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Canberra: A Discussion Paper, AGPS.
SSCEET. (1991). Active citizenship revisited. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing
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The Australian Curriculum. (2018). Civics and citizenship: Rationale. Retrieved from https://www.
australiancurriculum.edu.au/f-10-curriculum/humanities-and-social-sciences/civics-and-citizen
ship/rationale/
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relational insights. Emotion, Space and Society, 9, 50–58. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.
emospa.2013.02.004.
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Journal of Youth Studies, 20(9), 1176–1190.
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Citizenship Education in the Conflict-
Affected Societies of Northern Ireland 29
and Syria: Learning Lessons from the Past
to Inform the Future

Faith Gordon and Adnan Mouhiddin

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 450
Citizenship Education in Post-Conflict Contexts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 451
Context, Conflict, and Education: Northern Ireland and Syria . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 452
Northern Ireland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 452
Syria . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 456
Citizenship Education: Learning Lessons from the Past to Inform the Future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 458
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 461
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 462

Abstract
The role of education in peacekeeping has been well documented in the academic
literature. While it has been argued that education provided through formalized
structures of school-settings has the potential to create stable environments for
children and young people to learn and to heal, this can be difficult to achieve
when children are displaced during conflict and little formalized structures exist,
as communities navigate loss, trauma, and uncertainty and as they rebuild their
lives. Further, existing literature demonstrates that in light of the existence of
contested or conflicting identities in relation to citizenship, the content and
approaches taken in relation to citizenship education may represent part of the
problem and also part of the solution, for conflict-affected societies. It is against
this backdrop that this chapter explores the nexus between the challenges and
problems that exist for conflict-affected societies, alongside the potential for
solutions and the potential for a long-lasting positive impact of citizenship

F. Gordon (*)
School of Social Sciences, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]
A. Mouhiddin
University of Surrey, Guildford, UK
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 449
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_60
450 F. Gordon and A. Mouhiddin

education on the children of the post-conflict, transitioning generation. To explore

these larger questions, the chapter utilizes the two case studies of the protracted
conflict in Northern Ireland and the ongoing conflict in Syria. In doing so, it will
consider issues such as contested identities and notions of citizenship, dominant
ideologies, division, and school structures, as well as exploring whether there are
lessons that can be learned from the past to inform the future.

Keywords
Post-conflict · Conflict · Transition · Citizenship · Education · Approaches ·
Challenges

Introduction

“[E]ducation can both reproduce the conditions which underlie civil conflict, hence exacer-
bating and perpetuating violence, and help transform society by challenging the deep-rooted
prejudices and inequalities at the heart of the conflict.” (Leach and Dunne 2007: 11)

The role of education in peacekeeping has been well documented in the literature
(see Niens et al. 2006; Smith 2010; Loader and Hughes 2017). As the opening
quotation reinforces, there appears to be a wide consensus that education can play a
vital role in rebuilding communities that have experienced violent conflict and are
crisis-affected (Leach and Dunne 2007). It has been argued that education provided
through the school-setting has the potential to create stable environments for chil-
dren and young people to learn and to heal (ibid). Smith and Vaux (2003) outline
several core reasons why the relationship between education and conflict is signif-
icant. They assert that “education is a fundamental right that should be maintained at
all times, even in the most difficult circumstances . . . education . . . may provide an
important mechanism for the protection of children” (ibid). They also argue that the
loss of education “due to conflict . . . is not just a loss to the individual, but a loss of
social capital and the capacity of a society to recover from the conflict” (ibid).
However, Smith and Vaux (2003) also propose that “education can be part of the
problem as well as part of the solution.”
This chapter explores the nexus between the challenges and problems, alongside
the potential for approaches to citizenship education, which may have long-lasting
positive impacts for children of the post-conflict, transitioning generation. In doing
so, this chapter utilizes contextually, the two case studies of the protracted conflict in
Northern Ireland and the ongoing conflict in Syria. The case studies have been
selected to demonstrate how history can inform the present and can inform the
future. The year 2018 marked 20 years since the signing of the Good Friday peace
agreement in Northern Ireland and therefore it offered an opportune time to reflect on
the current arrangements for citizenship education. Further to this, the ongoing
Syrian conflict, the displacement of children, and the estimation that 1.75 million
children are currently out of school make it a key contemporary case study to explore
how citizenship education could be developed in a constructive and positive way.
29 Citizenship Education in the Conflict-Affected Societies of Northern. . . 451

The chapter will review the current developments in the literature on citizenship
education in post-conflict settings. It will also explore the United Nations’ commit-
ments to education, as well as the role of nongovernmental organizations and their
freedom or lack of freedom to provide alternative discourses. The chapter contextu-
alizes both of the case studies on Northern Ireland and Syria, by outlining the history
to each conflict, including discussions of historical legacies of the militarized nature
of aspects of education in Syria or the involvement of institutions such as the
Church, in shaping aspects of the education curriculum in Northern Ireland. In
addition, it explores the current citizenship education arrangements in Northern
Ireland, the lack of citizenship education for children from Syria, and considers
alternatives to citizenship education when the latter could be counterproductive, if
dominated by one narrative. Another significant issue explored relates to the
contested nature of “citizenship” and the issue of conflicting “identities” in post-
conflict settings, as well as the inclusion and subsequent exclusion of certain sections
of society. The chapter concludes by proposing that realistic expectations and
approaches are needed, when critically considering what citizenship education
may be able to achieve in post-conflict and crisis-affected societies.

Citizenship Education in Post-Conflict Contexts

In recent years, citizenship education has become a key area of inquiry in the existing
international literature (see Goren and Yemini 2017; Rapoport and Yemini 2019).
However, as Quaynor (2011: 33) notes, very few previous “reviews of civic educa-
tion scholarship include research from post-conflict societies.” Conflict-affected and
post-conflict societies face a particular set of complex challenges, and this makes
them unique and interesting contexts in which to explore the role of education as
potentially promoting democracy, social cohesion, rights, equality, social justice, and
as instilling a genuine sense of belonging moving into the future (see Hoskins and
Janmaat 2019). Citizenship education has been referred to as central to the “recon-
struction” of societies following periods of conflict (see Davies 2004, cited in
Quaynor 2011: 34). There are particular challenges for the education systems and
educators working in countries that have experienced conflict, as ideas and notions
of “nationhood,” identity, violence, and dominant narratives, often feature in the
curriculum and can be particularly contested and conflicted when societies remain
divided. Yet it should also be acknowledged that there are often structural and
context-specific restraints on educators in societies that have overgone or are still
experiencing conflict and violence (Reilly and Niens 2014).
According to the international body UNESCO (2014: 9), a global citizenship for
the twenty-first century includes fostering in learners “an attitude supported by an
understanding of multiple levels of identity, and the potential for a ‘collective
identity’ which transcends individual cultural, religious, ethnic or other differences.”
To achieve that goal, it promotes a holistic approach, which demands “formal and
informal approaches, curricular and extra-curricular interventions and conventional
and unconventional pathways to participation” (UNESCO 2014: 11). However,
452 F. Gordon and A. Mouhiddin

recently UNESCO (2019) observes that the implementation of such goals is facing
various challenges in conflict affected societies. In light of this, it strongly
recommended a “renewed understanding of Global Citizenship Education that is
centred on its concept of learning to live together and builds more on the local and
country context” (UNESCO 2019: 10). Using case studies from South Sudan, Kenya,
and Nepal, Barakat et al. (2013) drew the conclusion that education in war-wrecked
societies contributes to the promotion of tolerance, respect, and critical thinking as
well as the stability and the reconstruction process (Penson and Tomlinson 2009).
Lochner (2004) emphasizes the role of education as a human capital investment that
increases future legitimate work opportunities.

Context, Conflict, and Education: Northern Ireland and Syria

While Northern Ireland and Syria initially appear to have very little in common, they
both represent post–World War II contexts which have experienced and endured
(and still are) the impact of armed conflict, trauma, violence, displacement, and the
loss of life. Northern Ireland and Syria have been selected for this chapter as case
studies, as each of the authors was born there and each has conducted extensive
primary, empirical research with children and young people in these countries,
exploring the impact of conflict on their everyday lives, on their sense of belonging,
and on their future prospects. It is evident that the shared issues of dealing with the
past, contested identities, inequalities, belonging, and citizenship are concerns for
children, young people, and their families in both societies. Further to this, as major
structural reforms and changes have taken place in Northern Ireland in particular in
the spheres of education and criminal justice, this chapter proposes that there is
potentially a lot to learn from such societies who have implemented such reforms.
Therefore, in this chapter we argue that countries currently experiencing or in
transition from conflict and violence can potentially learn from the experiences of
societies that have already navigated challenges in relation to issues such as divi-
sions, conflicting identities, conflicting narratives, belonging, and interpretations of
citizenship. In the Syrian scenario, the ethnic and religious diversity of the country
and the sectarian nature of the conflict have resulted in identity crisis and questions.
Sectors that have been impacted in this war (e.g., education, justice system, civil
societies) are exploring the experience of countries that emerged from conflict while
observing local context and customs.

Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland is a society emerging from over 30 years of protracted conflict

(1968–1998). There is an established body of literature, which documents the origins
and impact of the Conflict (see Gillespie 2009). Ruane and Todd (1996: 1) argue that
during the Conflict, violence “damaged the whole fabric of the liberal democratic
state and civic culture.” They note that: “normal” judicial processes were
29 Citizenship Education in the Conflict-Affected Societies of Northern. . . 453

“suspended”; there were “repeated breaches of human rights”; “collusion between

members of the security forces and paramilitaries”; paramilitaries took over the
functions of the police in many areas; and there existed “the demonisation of the
‘enemy’” (Ruane and Todd 1996: 1). Space was divided with “the erection of social
and physical barriers” in Northern Ireland, resulting in “open communities” being
“turned into closed ones” (Ruane and Todd 1996: 1). Jarman (1997: 2) observes that
“it is impossible to ignore the prominent role that historical events . . . continue to
play in the political and social life of Northern Ireland.”
The Belfast/Good Friday Agreement of 1998 remains known as one of the most
significant political developments in the contemporary Northern Ireland Peace
Process. The 1998 Agreement consisted of a multiparty agreement that was signed
by the majority of the political parties in Northern Ireland (the DUP opposed the
Agreement) and also an international agreement between the British and Irish
Governments. Significantly referendums were held in Northern Ireland and also in
the Republic of Ireland on May 22, 1998, with the majority of voters supporting the
Agreement.1 The Agreement identifies and outlines a number of areas in relation to
Northern Ireland’s future, in particular the system of government, the work of North-
South bodies, the relationship between the British and Irish Governments, the
decommissioning of arms and weapons by paramilitary groups, the release of
prisoners, human rights considerations, and the “normalization” of policing in
Northern Ireland. Following the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement a plan to reform
policing was established and in light of the recommendations of the Patten Com-
mission (Northern Ireland Office (NIO) 1999), on November 4, 2001, the Royal
Ulster Constabulary (RUC) became the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI).2
The Hillsborough Agreement (NIO 2010) outlined ways in which Northern
Ireland could progress in relation to issues such as parading, the power-sharing
arrangements in Northern Ireland and other issues that related to the St Andrew’s
Agreement 2006. Following the Hillsborough Agreement 2010, criminal justice
decision-making powers were devolved from the UK government to the Northern
Ireland Assembly in April 2010. In political and media discourse it was represented
as, “the final piece in the devolution puzzle,”3 with Northern Ireland’s First Minister
asserting: “Throughout history there are times of challenge and defining moments.
This is such a time. This is such a moment” (quoted by BBC News, March 9, 2010).4
International figures such as Hillary Clinton, United States (US) Secretary of State,
commended Northern Ireland’s political leadership and described devolution as “an
important step in ensuring a peaceful and prosperous future . . . for generations to
come” (quoted by Guardian, March 9, 2010).5

1
See: http://www.ark.ac.uk/elections/fref98.htm
2
See: http://www.nio.gov.uk/a_new_beginning_in_policing_in_northern_ireland.pdf
3
See: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/8457650.stm; http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/845982
4.stm
4
See: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/8558466.stm
5
See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/mar/09/stormont-northern-ireland-policing-vote
454 F. Gordon and A. Mouhiddin

On January 9, 2017, the Northern Ireland Executive (the government) collapsed,

with the resignation of Martin McGuinness, who was the then Deputy First Minister.
This was due to ongoing disagreements between the two largest political parties, the
DUP and Sinn Féin. This collapse in the power-sharing arrangements led to a long
period of instability for Northern Ireland, and with no functioning government, it
was effectively run by civil servants on diminishing financial and other limited
resources. As reports demonstrate, the lack of an active locally based and locally
elected government had direct impacts upon health, education, and many other
aspects of civic life (see Sargeant and Rutter 2019). The power-sharing was restored
in Northern Ireland in January 2020; however, at the time of writing, the challenge of
Brexit in the United Kingdom has raised a new set of concerns and questions in
relation to identity, cultural diversity, and inclusion.6
The impacts of the protracted conflict and various points of political instability in
Northern Ireland have long affected children, young people, and their families.
Northern Ireland has the youngest population of any jurisdiction in the UK (Save
the Children and ARK 2008) and was recorded as being one of the poorest regions in
the context of the European Union (EU), with more than one-third of children and young
people living in poverty (Save the Children and ARK 2008). Children, young people, and
their parents continue to suffer from conflict-related trauma/intergenerational trauma, with
a high proportion of working-class communities experiencing economic marginalization
and social exclusion (see McAlister et al. 2009). As Scraton (2007: 148) argues, “several
generations have endured pervasive sectarianism, hard-line policing, military operations
and paramilitary punishments.” For many children “the notions of post-conflict or
transition are distant possibilities as sectarianism entrenches hatred for the ‘other’”
(Kilkelly et al. 2004: 245).
As Barber (2009: 126) observes, “children and young people in Northern Ireland
have obviously paid a price for the political violence that has tainted the region.”
Paramilitaries’ violence against children and young people has been endemic within
communities and as a result children and young people have been “refugees, exiles
for anti-social behaviour,” the “victims of punishment beatings” (Hillyard et al.
2005: 190; Gordon 2018), and there have been well-remembered incidents such as
the Holy Cross Primary School dispute. Commencing in September 2001, there was
a 12-week protest by loyalists, which resulted in Catholic schoolgirls from the
nationalist Ardoyne area of North Belfast being subjected to abuse as they walked
to Holy Cross Primary School (Cadwallader 2005). Imagery outside of the school,
the children and their families were the subject of international media coverage. It is
clear that in the context of education, as one community worker summarized, the
“emotional effects of the conflict” have had a major impact on “children’s education,
their mental health and their ability to participate in society” (quoted in Scraton,
2007: 149). Similar concerns were raised by Smyth et al. (2004: 43), who noted that

6
See: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/deal-to-see-restored-government-in-northern-ireland-
tomorrow?utm_source¼bf51b5ed-7630-4f6e-b745-ec9dc4f43cf7&utm_medium¼email&utm_
campaign¼govuk-notifications&utm_content¼immediate
29 Citizenship Education in the Conflict-Affected Societies of Northern. . . 455

those children deeply affected by the conflict had “difficulties in concentration and
the aggressive behaviour that followed their traumatisation was misinterpreted by
others, being seen as deliberately disruptive behaviour.”
The education system in Northern Ireland was divided between Protestants and
Catholics, with churches maintaining their own schools. The government in the
United Kingdom enacted a number of measures to establish “state run schools,”
which would receive state funding in return for state (see Hayes et al. 2007).
Protestant schools did agree to this change, whereas the Catholic Church insisted
on retaining ownership of Catholic schools and this created a system whereby
schools were divided into controlled (Protestant) and maintained (Catholic) schools
in Northern Ireland. While controlled and maintained schools in Northern Ireland
receive funding from the government, the key difference is that the Catholic Church
manages maintained schools, while controlled schools are managed directly by the
government. When the UK government implemented new legislation, the Education
Reform (Northern Ireland) Order 1989, there was an emphasis on the development
of a curriculum that accommodated difference (Schiaparelli et al. 2015).
With the period of relative stability and transition brought forth by the Good Friday
Agreement in 1998, calls were made for the revision of the curriculum in Northern
Ireland to embed and promote “cross-community relations” between Catholics and
Protestants. In particular the learning areas of history and citizenship have been identi-
fied by researchers as subjects that were likely to be “most susceptible to different
treatment in the separate school systems” and along with further revisions to the NI
Curriculum in 2007, there existed more opportunities for educators to select what topics
they would teach (Schiaparelli et al. 2015). In their important study, Niens and McIlrath
(2010) found that interviewees expressed considerable belief that educators should assist
learners to engage and think critically about contested and controversial issues, in order
for learners to avoid the negative impacts of potential indoctrination.
In Northern Ireland integrated education was established since the first integrated
school, Lagan College, was established in Belfast in 1981 by the campaigning parent
group “All Children Together.” As McGlynn (2007) notes, a further 56 primary and
post primary schools were also set up, and there is also a small number of children
who attend Irish medium schools and independent schools. That said, the education
system in Northern Ireland remains largely segregated. This division in the way in
which education was administered resulted in a lack of consensus and learner
experience, with schools responsible for designing and implementing their own
versions of civic education and history (see Schiaparelli et al. 2015).
Segregated education poses considerable challenges for societies in relation to
social cohesion and collective notions of identity and belonging. The division of
learners physically and incompatible perspectives can enhance and prolong
entrenched sectarian divisions in societies such as Northern Ireland. The literature
on the integrated education sector in Northern Ireland has referred to the “anti-bias
philosophy” and “cultures of tolerance” that are enshrined in the principles of
integrated schools (Abbott 2010). However, it is acknowledged that there remains
a lot of work still to be done to continue to promote inclusion, especially in relation
to “newcomers” to Northern Ireland.
456 F. Gordon and A. Mouhiddin

Syria

While schools in Northern Ireland have been historically categorized as controlled

and maintained, it suffices to say that all schools in Syria, whether public or private,
are controlled by the regime and influenced by one ideology, namely that of
Al-Baath. To appreciate the influence of Al-Baath Party on education in Syria, we
may need to revisit the party’s history and how it retained and cemented its
monopoly of political and social power. In 1963, a military coup in Syria delivered
a group of Baathist officers to power. This coup resulted in decades of Al-Baath
(which means “resurrection”) party ruling the country until now. Immediately after
the coup, the party tightened its grip on power in Syria, which has shaped the modern
history in Syria to date, leaving its impact on every sector in Syria, including in the
sector of education. Assuming the role of the leader of both the state and the society,
it is therefore important to touch briefly on the principles and doctrine of the
Al-Baath Party.
Al Baath Arabic Socialist Party was founded in 1947 and according to its articles
of association, the Party is a nationalist, populist, socialist, and revolutionary Party,
which aims at the unity and the freedom of the Arab nations. Its objectives are to
achieve unity, freedom, and socialism.7 In many ways, the influence of fascism and
Nazism on Al-Baath founders remains a debatable matter today (Lee 2018; Hasanov
2008; Saghieh 2007). The Party aims to unite Arabs in one state by capitalizing on
Arab nationalism and downplayed religion. In the heart of Al-Baath ideology is that
Arabs are a noble race, ancient and everlasting and their progression requires their
unconditional faith in the Arab nations across the colonial made up borders and
sacrificial love (Seale 1995). The Party also presents the Arab race as the origins of
civilization. Having said that, the Party did not argue for ethnic purity of Arabs,
which probably distinguishes the party from its contemporary fascist movements.
Establishing “One Arab Nation with an Immortal Message” remains its core objec-
tive and struggle.
In 1970, the late Syrian president Hafez Al Assad, an early Baathist, led a coup
which eliminated the comrades of yesterday. Some were detained until their death,
while some were exiled and others were subsequently killed (Seale 1995). During
the following three decades, and under Assad’s leadership, Al-Baath Party cemented its
power and transformed the education institutions to an apparatus that teaches, promotes,
and disseminates its ideology (Van Dam 1996; Pierret 2013). To appreciate how this has
been achieved, it might be useful to approach the argument here on both structural and
curriculum level. On a structural level, every school in Syria, from primary school to
secondary schools and higher education institutions, has Al-Baath Party Office pre-
sented by a secretary, who oversees the school activities and ensures that the latter as
well as the staff and teachers are in line with the ideology of Al-Baath Party. Every
morning, pupils start the school day by repeating slogans which consists of Al-Baath

7
See the Party’s constitution: http://www.baath-party.org/index.php?option¼com_content&
view¼category&layout¼blog&id¼307&Itemid¼327&lang¼en
29 Citizenship Education in the Conflict-Affected Societies of Northern. . . 457

objectives which were highlighted above. In this sense, school governance emerged as a
form of militarization, premised on fear and insecurity Mouhiddin 2019). These strat-
egies, if anything, underlines the tension between the Syrian ruling party of the
education sector and its institutions as the State sector whose legitimacy stems from
enforced measures and human rights violations, and the principles of education as a
public mission. This will become even clearer when we consider the impact of the Baath
ideology on learning curriculum.
Moreover, ideologizing Syrian students in line with the principles of Al-Baath
Party is vested in two bodies emanating from the party itself. The first is the “Baath
Vanguards,”8 which recruits children in the primary level, and the second is the
“Revolutionary Youth,”9 which recruits teens at the secondary level. Both bodies are
present in public schools and the private ones, although to a lesser degree in the latter
(Mouhiddin 2019). On curriculum level, students are not only taught what does it
mean to be “Syrian” from the view of Al-Baath Party, but also being a citizen of the
Arab nation which the Party aspires to achieve, this inevitably excludes Syrian
students from ethnical minorities such as Kurds, Assyrians, Armenians, and other
ethnical minorities.
Arabic is the official language of Syria. The national curriculum is designed and
delivered in Arabic and education in the country is compulsory from the age of
7 years to 15 years and it is free of charge in public schools for all stages. The state’s
tight control over curriculum content extends to other subjects such as history,
geography, and national education, all of which are written from the point of view
of Al-Baath ideology. Over decades, this has resulted in education being a tool for
political indoctrination and subjects discussing citizenship as well as civil and
human rights are entirely absent from the national curriculum (Al-Hinawy and
Zeno 2018). Hence the majority of Syrian students do not have an adequate grasp
of the meaning of being a citizen in a state that grants equal rights to all its citizens
(Mouhiddin 2019).
Overall, the national curriculum is designed and delivered based on political
decisions and stances. For instance, Russian and Persian languages have been
offered as optional languages in schools in response to the robust support received
by the Syrian government from both Russian and Iran throughout the civil war. At the
secondary level, military class was a compulsory subject and taught to all students
(both boys and girls) until 2003 when the class was abolished from the national
curriculum. Classes provided military lessons and political education in line with the
ideological doctrine of the Al-Baath Party. Furthermore, all pupils at that level were
required to wear military uniform while in school. Recent voices within the Syrian
government have been calling to restore these classes and some even found a link
between abolishing them and the civil war (Jabbour 2017).

8
For an introduction to the role of Al-Baath Vanguards in education, see the website of Al-Baath
Vanguards Organisation: http://www.syrianpioneers.org.sy/node/24.
9
For an overview of the role of the “Revolutionary Youth” in education, see the website of the
Revolutionary Youth Union: http://ryu-sy.org/‫ﻥﺡﻥ‬-‫ﻡﻥ‬/.
458 F. Gordon and A. Mouhiddin

These concentrated efforts by Al-Baath Party did not preclude a group of students
in Dara’a, a Syrian southern city, to write “It is your turn, doctor”10 on their school’s
wall (HRW, 6op’ 2012) on March 18, 2011, in response to the echoes of the Arab
Spring which by then had toppled two Arab presidents, the Tunisian and the
Egyptian (Dabashi 2012; Kaboub 2014; Bayat 2017), and the role of the youth in
shaping the Arab Spring was significant (Rausch 2017). Unfortunately, what started
as peaceful demonstrations in Syria gradually became armed clashes in September
2011 and escalated to an armed conflict and civil war in July 2012. Beside the basic
infrastructure which has been severely damaged (UNDP 2017), the impact of the
war, which is ongoing at the time of writing this chapter, will affect the Syrian
community for generations to come. Millions of children and young Syrians have
been deprived of education, displaced from their domiciles and neighborhoods,
and/or recruited as soldiers in the course of the conflict (HRW 2012).
At the time of writing this chapter, the country remains divided between various
belligerent parties and regional power. If anything, the war in Syria has furthered the
militarization of the society, including schools. Approaching the topic in light of the
ongoing conflict may prove difficult. Every armed and political force (Opposition,
Regime, Kurdish Forces, Al Qaeda, etc.) on the ground across the country has
established its own curriculum, and this control could easily change tomorrow or
by the time this chapter is being prepared for printing. The common factor among all
these curriculums though is that they lack citizenship education and where citizen-
ship is mentioned summarily, it remains subject to the interpretation of the control-
ling force and its ideology, may it be religious or secular. This may partly mirror
controlled and maintained schools in Northern Ireland approach to school’s curric-
ulum, and, as seen in Northern Ireland, this is resulting in conflicting identities and
students learning different values in Syria.

Citizenship Education: Learning Lessons from the Past to Inform

the Future

This section will explore the contested nature of citizenship and the issue of
conflicting identities in post-conflict settings, as well as the inclusion and subsequent
exclusion of certain sections of society. It will draw on the example of Northern
Ireland to explore what can be learned from the past and further to this, it will look to
the future and explore what citizenship education may be able to achieve in post-
conflict and crisis-affected societies, such as Syria. It will call for the inclusion of the
youth voice in all aspects of reform and educational development.
In moving from violence to political stability, societies such as Northern Ireland,
which is a society in transition, face significant challenges (Aughey 2005). In
Northern Ireland, these include challenges for children and young people as a social
group, as they are framed on the one hand as both a threat to the stability of the

10
Referring to President Bashar Al Assad.
29 Citizenship Education in the Conflict-Affected Societies of Northern. . . 459

“peace process” and, on the other, as the society’s greatest hope for the future
(Gordon 2020). These pressures are coupled with the existing inequalities in relation
to educational attainment levels. A series of reports have documented the inequal-
ities existing in Northern Ireland’s education system. One such extended study that
has produced several reports was initiated by the Equality Commission in Northern
Ireland into “Education Inequalities in Northern Ireland.” This study identified that
young Protestant boys from working-class communities are “underachieving” aca-
demically compared to other groups of children (Burns et al. 2015).
There are clearly conflicted notions of the past, of history, and of citizenship in
Northern Ireland. One such example of this is Niens and McIlrath’s (2010: 73)
interviews with nongovernmental organizations, political parties, trade unions, and
the police in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland which found the existence
of clear “differences” in opinion in relation to “national identity and political
conflict,” which they argue “may raise questions for history and citizenship educa-
tion.” Further challenges include the lost trust in politics by those tasked with
designing and implementing citizenship education, the challenges that individuals
may be confronted with in relation to dominant ideological perspectives. In addition,
educators may feel unable to engage with issues or topics areas deemed as “contro-
versial” and structurally and practically may be navigating working within the
confines of a system that has limited resources (see Quaynor 2011).
Teachers working in integrated schools in Northern Ireland interviewed as part of
Donnelly’s study (2004, cited in Quaynor 2011: 41) stated that they made personal
choices to avoid controversial topics, were said to be compromising the learning of
differences and the development of critical thinking skills. Further it was noted that
when students engaged in “interfaith dialogues,” King (2005) reported that they
tended to avoid discussions of controversial issues and did not seek to engage with a
range of different perspectives. Despite this avoidance, those interviewed felt that the
Northern Ireland curriculum needed to include controversial issues and that educa-
tors and learners needed guidance on how best explore these issues. This was
deemed as essential in order for learners to be equipped to engage politically.
While a local context approach has been adopted in Northern Ireland coupled
with a democratically elected local assembly and Department for Education with a
Minister for Education, a local context approach may not be promising in the Syrian
experience. In 2017, the Syrian president Bashar Al Assad admitted that the war in
Syria has resulted in Syria losing its “youth and infrastructure” (SANA 2017).
However, he added that the country has won a “healthier and more generous society”
which eliminated the “sectarian dimension” and affirmed the “national unity of all
the people of one nation” (ibid). This is not the kind of unity promoted by citizenship
education which advocates for “identity, belonging and social cohesion” on national
level (Osler 2013: 39).
At the time of writing this chapter, the end of the war in Syria has started to take
shape. It could be assumed that Assad and his regime will remain in power for the
foreseeable future. It could also be argued that the Syrian society has become a
homogeneous society, as per Assad’s claims. Equally, the Syrian regime has
inherited a broken country and a society whose fabric has been torn on ethnic,
460 F. Gordon and A. Mouhiddin

social, and sectarian levels. The civil war, which started as a peaceful demonstration,
has developed into a sectarian conflict which involved major regional powers that act
as a protector of certain sectarian groups and forces on ground. Although what the
Syrian president meant by homogeneous society is not the scope of this chapter, it is
worth mentioning here that “citizenship education will vary according to how the
ideal citizen is framed” (Cremin and Bevington 2017: 107). The literature and
principles of Al-Baath Party indicates that citizenship is about belonging to one
and united homeland. This element of belonging should neither be confused nor
contradict the belonging on macro level to the Arab Nation. This is a disputable
notion in a very diverse country that remains as such even during the war (Atasi
2015). The official name of Syria as the “Syrian Arab Republic” excludes prominent
ethnical communities of the Syria society such as the Kurds, Armenians, the
Assyrians, the Circassians, and many others.
Furthermore, Al-Baath Party argues that citizenship establishes the notion of
national sovereignty and opposes anything that may threaten that sovereignty. It
then concludes that citizenship (distinguishing the latter from nationality) in con-
temporary Syria is synonym to “uprooting terrorism” (Al-Baath Bureau for Planning
and Culture 2014: 25–26). Labeling those who oppose the Syrian government and its
policies as terrorists is well documented and has been imposed systematically in
Syrian media platforms as well as the public sector, including schools (see Assad’s
statements on Al-Jazeera Dec 12, 201511; and on the Syrian Observer Dec 15, 201612).
In light of Al-Baath supervision of schools and learning across education institutions
in Syria, citizenship education designed and delivered by one narrative could be
counterproductive. Assuming victory in this conflict, citizenship is becoming loaded
with concepts that correspond to the principals of the ruling party. In this sense,
“responsible citizenship” in Syria is measured by loyalty to Al-Baath Party and the
regime it installed in Syria since 1963.
This reality inhabits a hostile environment for a citizenship education which
draws from principles that are centered on learning to live together, rights, sense
of belonging, social cohesion, and other principles outlined earlier in this chapter.
Syria may need to develop long-term and short-term strategies. While emerging
from war and conflict, the Syrian society is dealing with an abusive past which lasted
for six decades. It has been demonstrated earlier in this chapter how the division of
Northern Ireland’s society had been accentuated by the educational divide. In this
sense, citizenship education becomes a societal necessity rather than educational need.
Building the capacity of Syrian citizens and communities through citizenship
programs, community activities, and participation could potentially enable them to
think critically and reflect on their present and past so they may foresee and construct
a better future (Barat and Duthie 2017). Potentially, this could result in a level of

11
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/12/syria-assad-rules-negotiations-terrorists-151211163831365.
html
12
https://syrianobserver.com/EN/interviews/24582/assad_us_supports_terrorists_by_calling_
them_moderate_opposition.html
29 Citizenship Education in the Conflict-Affected Societies of Northern. . . 461

awareness among Syrian community leaders, as happened in Northern Ireland, for

the need to help Syrian students to think critically and avoid indoctrinating children
in schools. This could be achieved in reliance on the civil society which has been
suppressed in the country for decades but is emerging and gaining momentum amid
the civil war. Various civil societies have been involved in extensive work with
young people, adults, children, and vulnerable groups across the country. Vital social
services they provide and their aloofness from politics could explain the regime’s
tolerance of the existence of such organizations.
For the moment, Syrian civil society concerns itself with maintaining community
spirit among Syrians, spreading awareness and providing young people with vital
practical skills as well as peacebuilding approach to disputes and conflict. This has
recently extended to adults too, including parents and the family as a social agency.
The role of parents and their influence on citizenship education (Gallagher et al.
2019) may be a promising factor for the future of citizenship education in Syria.
Peacebuilding programs have become a common feature among programs designed
and delivered by civil societies in Syria. Whether peacebuilding could be the door to
access citizenship education is something the future will tell.
As might be the case, authorities in countries emerging from civil wars concerned
themselves with establishing order and stability in their countries (O’Connor and
Rausch 2007), and Syria does not seem to be an exception. In the short term,
peacebuilding and community spirit may well correspond to the aspiration of the
Syrian government in achieving order and stability. In the long term, implementing
citizenship education in schools remains a necessity; however, while this may not
follow the classical route through structure curriculum, it has promising potential if
undertaken by Syrian civil societies. Plans and reforms in relation to education should
incorporate critical evaluations of the impact of education and learning on a longer-
term basis, taking into consideration periods of change and progress, as well as times
of setback and stagnation, in the road to stability and peace. Citizenship education has
the potential to be utilized as a tool that responds to the needs of the post-conflict
generation and one that can enhance social cohesion and equality in post-conflict
societies, where the conflict has left a legacy of sectarianism and division.

Conclusion

As the case studies of Northern Ireland and Syria demonstrate, citizenship education
is a complex and complicated area, particularly for educators and learners in conflict-
affected and post-conflict societies, where there may be contested identities and
conflicting notions of citizenship. By utilizing the reflections on the challenges in
Northern Ireland in relation to the development of an “appropriate” model of
citizenship education, the Northern Ireland case study shines a light on what
challenges there may be when navigating the development of an appropriate
model of citizenship education for Syrian children. The chapter proposed in light
of the changing power dynamics operating in societies during and following periods
of conflict, the creation of social cohesion is a complex task. Those tasked with
462 F. Gordon and A. Mouhiddin

designing and implementing citizenship education might well be navigating their

own lost trust in politics, they may be challenged by dominant ideological perspec-
tives, and educators may feel unable to engage with issues or topics areas deemed as
“controversial” and, further to this, may be navigating working within the confines
of limited resources (see Quaynor 2011). It is crucial that the meaningful inclusion of
the youth voice in all aspects of reform and educational development is present. In
order to work toward achieving meaningful democratic participation and ultimately
ensuring that the “now” generation of children and young people have the uninhib-
ited freedom to engage, challenge, and form their own views in relation to their
citizenship and identity/identities, there is the need to embrace difference, challenge
stereotypes, and ensure that the education system promotes critical thinking. As this
chapter has argued, a great deal can be learned from the past to inform the future.

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Digital Citizenship and Education in Turkey:
Experiences, the Present and the Future 30
Zafer İbrahimoğlu

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 466
Digital Citizenship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 467
Digitalization and Digital Citizenship Education in Turkey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 469
Digitalization in Turkey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 469
E-Government as an Area of Digitalization of State-Citizen Relations in Turkey . . . . . . . . . 473
Digital Citizenship Education in Turkey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 475
Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 479
Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 480
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 480

Abstract
Since the late twentieth century, the use of technology has become widespread,
affecting social life in different parts of the world, especially in countries with
developed economies. As an economically developing country, the use of com-
puters and the Internet in Turkey has increased rapidly since the 2000s. In this
context, individual and social life is going through a process of digitalization.
This process of technology-based change and transformation has added several
new meanings of the concept and practice of citizenship. Today, which has been
called an age of information-communication technologies, one of the new forms
of citizenship is digital citizenship. This form of citizenship, which includes the
use of Internet-based technologies in an effective, safe, and ethical manner, has
begun to occupy an important place in Turkey’s education system. The process of
developing the technological competences of citizens and equipping them with
the knowledge, skills, and values they need to use this technology correctly,
namely, digital citizenship education, consists of two dimensions: the technical

Z. İbrahimoğlu (*)
Marmara University Ataturk Faculty of Education, Istanbul, Turkey
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 465
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_65
466 Z. İbrahimoğlu

and effective. The technical dimension aims to teach computer and Internet-based
technology knowledge to the students during the education process from primary
school until university. The effective dimension includes focuses on students’
ability to use technological tools, primarily the computer and the Internet, in a
safe and ethical manner within the scope of social studies, the main aim of which
to deliver an effective and democratic citizenship education. In examining the
field, this chapter argues that both dimensions are important and should be
provided to students within their digital citizenship education.

Keywords
Technology · Digitalization · Digital · Citizenship · Citizenship education · Social
studies education

Introduction

Technology is a primary influence upon social and individual life and experiences
and has been among the key factors that have impacted on change, transformation,
and orientation over the last century (Selwyn 2013). The effects of technology on
human life are increasing and are becoming more evident, leading the twenty-first
century to be named as the age of information and communication technologies
(Oladimeji et al. 2011; Büyükbaykal 2015). Due to advancements in technology,
distances have been eliminated which has made it possible to know the unknown
with a single click. Furthermore, processes of globalization have gained momentum,
and, as Mcluhan (1989) suggests, the speed of the world’s transformation into a
global village has increased.
Different standards have been set in order to define social strata within the context
of Internet-based change and transformation processes. Prensky (2001) defines two
main generations in terms of access to technology, adaptation, and use: digital
natives and digital immigrants. Digital native describes people born after 1980
which are adapted easily to technological developments and who tend to use these
innovations in their daily life (Burdick and Willis 2011). Digital immigrants are
those born before 1980 and who tend to have a relatively reluctant attitude toward
changes and transformations based on information and communication technologies
and who have the potential to experience various problems in adaptation to techno-
logical developments (Arabacı and Polat 2013; Eşgi 2013).
As the usage and visibility of technology in daily life have increased, how these
devices are used has become incredibly important, including for how citizenship is
experienced and enacted. Considering today’s developments, it is possible to say that
the effect of technology in our lives will continue to exist, probably increasingly, in
the medium and long term. This reality has brought about a new concept to the
related literature: digital citizenship.
Following this introduction, the next section details a theoretical framework for
understanding digital citizenship, which is argued as emerging as a result of the
30 Digital Citizenship and Education in Turkey: Experiences, the Present. . . 467

reflection/consequence of computer- and Internet-based technological develop-

ments. In the remaining sections, important developments related specifically to
digital citizenship in Turkey will be evaluated within the context of citizenship and
citizenship education policies.

Digital Citizenship

In the last 20–30 years, digital citizenship has emerged as a new way of identifying
individuals who can use technology effectively within the framework of Internet-
based technological developments (Ribble 2009; Hui and Campbell 2018; Emejulu
and McGregor 2019). One of the main topics of discussion has been whether the
digital adjective that expresses technological competence can characterize citizen-
ship or not. In other words, scholars ask whether it is correct to describe the concept
of citizenship, which serves as a political/legal definition tool, within the framework
of technological competences (Bearden 2016). In discussions of how to define
digital citizenship, the concept is generally described through categorizing its dif-
ferent dimensions. In Digital Citizenship in Schools, one of the most important
works in the related field, Ribble (2015, pp. 23–60) examines digital citizenship as
comprising nine dimensions.

1. Digital access: The key concern of digital access is that all individuals and groups
that make up the society should have adequate opportunity to access technology.
Various disadvantaged groups in the society may not be able to have this
opportunity. However, it is important to make access possible for digital citizen-
ship and education (Ribble and Bailey 2004; Jones and Mitchell 2015).
2. Digital trading: One of the important properties that a digital citizen should
possess is the ability to perform conscious and safe online shopping (John 2008).
A digital citizen of the twenty-first century should, therefore, be equipped with
the capacities to be able to conduct online shopping in a safe and conscious
manner.
3. Digital communication: New forms of communication have emerged in the
digital environment, with applications and the use of e-mails increasing signifi-
cantly (Noonan and Piatt 2014; Poushter et al. 2018). Research from a variety of
contexts has evidenced that the use of mobile phones and tablets starts from early
age (Park and Park 2014; Aral and Keskin 2017; Yalçın and Duran 2017).
Therefore, individuals’ ability to use information and communication technology
products properly and effectively in the context of digital citizenship education is
understood as vital for digital citizenship.
4. Digital literacy: An efficient digital citizen should be equipped with the basic
knowledge and skills regarding the technological means at hand. Here the
criterion may be that each citizen should be aware of the information and
communication technologies that can be used in their daily life and be able to
use them effectively when needed (Meyers et al. 2013). Research conducted on
the tools used in education have suggested that teachers who are unable to follow
468 Z. İbrahimoğlu

technological developments have difficulty in carrying some of the properties

needed for effective education to their classes (Çelikkaya 2013; Kubat 2018).
5. Digital ethics: The development and diversification of communication technolo-
gies has not been unproblematic. Issues such as the malicious use of technologies
and improper use of social media are frequently observed. These issues have an
ethical dimension, reminding us that users of technology may exhibit many
unethical behaviors in digital environments, sometimes consciously in bad faith
and sometimes unconsciously due to a lack of sufficient information (Budinger
and Budinger 2006).
6. Digital law: Freedom in the digital world is not unlimited. As with standard
definitions of citizenship, so too digital citizenship is shaped and governed by the
existence (or otherwise) of various legal frameworks. For this reason, the twenty-
first century digital citizen should be aware of legal frameworks when using
communication technologies.
7. Digital rights and responsibilities: Connected with digital law, and again simi-
larly to citizenship in general, digital citizenship involves rights and responsibil-
ities. It is important to note that violations of rights in the digital world may stem
from citizen interaction but may also involve cases such as the obstruction of
Internet access without justified reason or the use of the wrong information
through Internet sites to create public opinion.
8. Digital health: The use of computers and the Internet in violation of human anatomy
and mental health may also have a negative impact on human health (Mustafaoğlu
et al. 2018). Research suggests that children and young people may be particularly
vulnerable from this impact (Ulusoy and Bostancı 2014; Erdal 2015; Kuyucu 2017).
Other evidence suggests that people who spend a long time in front of the computer
show increased risk of various health problems (Fowler and Noyes 2017).
9. Digital security: With the development and spread of Internet-based technolo-
gies, the risks faced by people have also increased, including those associated
with certain fraud methods (Nkotagu 2011; Button et al. 2014; Atkins and Huang
2013). A core part of digital citizenship, therefore, is the possession of sufficient
knowledge and skills to use the technologies securely (Jwaifell 2018).

As these nine dimensions suggest, the concept of digital citizenship is multifaceted

and subject to competing theories aimed at understanding its evolving role. It is
important, therefore, that education systems – which will be formed in an attempt to
raise individuals and citizens who have the required qualifications and capacities for the
twenty-first century information and communication age – should be cognizant of this
multifaceted structure. As one of the countries where computer and Internet-based
technological developments have led to significant impacts, especially in the last
30 years, the remainder of this chapter focuses on the context of Turkey. In this context,
firstly the process of computer-Internet-based digitalization in Turkey will be discussed,
and developments in computer and Internet usage rates will be analyzed. Then, activities
central to e-government as a reflection of the digitalization of state-citizen relations are
examined. Finally, digital citizenship as an aspect of citizenship education in Turkey will
be evaluated.
30 Digital Citizenship and Education in Turkey: Experiences, the Present. . . 469

Digitalization and Digital Citizenship Education in Turkey

Digitalization in Turkey

In Turkey, the first computer was used in 1960 (Engin et al. 2010). The IBM-650
Data Processing Machine, used by the General Directorate of Highways for various
calculations in road construction works, had the capacity to make 78,000 addition-
subtraction and 5000 multiplication per minute (http://www.kgm.gov.tr/Sayfalar/
KGM/SiteTr/Galeri/IlkBilgisayar.aspx). Use of computers in Turkey, which started
with the first computer used in public in 1960, increased rapidly during the second
half of the 1990s.
Digitalization-based technological developments in Turkey are closely related
with computer use. Although technology is not merely comprised of computers, the
use of computers is highly important in terms of digitalizing work and transactions.
Therefore, the history of digitalization in Turkey is parallel to the history of computer
use. The first Internet connection in Turkey was installed in 1993 by the Middle East
Technical University (METU) and then spread to other universities. In Turkey, the
Internet primarily gained prevalence among universities for academic purposes
(Demirdöğmez et al. 2018). However, the rapid spread of the Internet at almost all
levels of society in Turkey took place after 2000s. In a study conducted by the
Institute of Information Technology, while the rate of computer ownership in urban
households in Turkey was only 6.5% in 1997, it was observed that this ratio
increased to 12.3% in 2000 (Turan and Polat 2009) and has increased since. The
implications of this for citizenship, and digital citizenship, are discussed below.
Table 1 shows information technology usage statistics in Turkey prepared by the
Turkish Statistical Institute (TURKSTAT) between the years 2004 and 2018. As can
be seen from the data in the table, the rate of computer use, which was only around
10% at the beginning of 2000s, increased significantly to 2018.
With advances in computer technology, the emergence of laptops and tablets as
an alternative to desktop computers has led to a significant increase in the rate and
number of portable computers. In addition, another important data about digitaliza-
tion in Turkey is the figures of mobile phone usage. The ratio, which was around
50% in 2004, has now reached almost 99%. It can be stated that Internet technology
has a significant contribution to this important increase in mobile phone usage; such
that when Table 2, which shows the Internet usage rates in the same period, is
analyzed, the parallels between the two is notable.
According to Table 2 which shows the computer and Internet usage rates in
Turkey, it is seen that the rate of Internet usage, which was 18.8% in 2004, reached
around 72% at the end of 14 years. The rate of non-Internet users is now around 27.1.
Another data showing the increase in Internet usage is the number of Internet
subscribers. The number of subscribers, which was around 300 thousand in 1998,
has reached around 71 million in 2018. There are 71 million Internet subscriptions in
a country with a population of 80 million (TURKSTAT).
It is seen that the use of computers, Internet, and Internet-supported technological
products in Turkey increased significantly during the last 15–20 years. However, it is
 470

Table 1 Availability of devices in households, 2004–2018

%
Year
2004 2005 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018
Desktop computer 10.0 11.6 24.0 28.1 30.7 33.8 34.3 31.8 30.5 27.6 25.2 22.9 20.3 19.2
Portable computer (laptop, tablet 0.9 1.1 5.6 9.1 11.2 16.8 22.6 27.1 – – – – – –
PC)
Portable computer (laptop, netbook, – – – – – – – – – 40.1 43.2 – – –
tablet)
Portable computer (laptop, – – – – – – – – 31.4 – – 36.4 36.7 37.9
netbook)
Tablet computer – – – – – – – – 6.2 – – 29.6 29.7 28.4
Mobile phone (incl. smart phone) 53.7 72.6 87.4 88.1 87.6 90.5 91.9 93.2 93.7 96.1 96.8 96.9 97.8 98.7
Smart TV – – – – – – – – 7.3 12.4 20.9 24.6 28.5 32.1
TurkStat, survey on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) usage survey in households and by individuals, 2004–2018
– Denotes magnitude null
Z. İbrahimoğlu
30 Digital Citizenship and Education in Turkey: Experiences, the Present. . . 471

Table 2 Percentages of computer and Internet usage by latest usage and sex, 2004–2018
%
Computer Internet
Year Total Male Female Total Male Female
Computer and Internet users 2004 23,6 31,1 16,2 18,8 25,7 12,1
2005 22,9 30,0 15,9 17,6 24,0 11,1
2007 33,4 42,7 23,7 30,1 39,2 20,7
2008 38,0 47,8 28,5 35,9 45,4 26,6
2009 40,1 50,5 30,0 38,1 48,6 28,0
2010 43,2 53,4 33,2 41,6 51,8 31,7
2011 46,4 56,1 36,9 45,0 54,9 35,3
2012 48,7 59,0 38,5 47,4 58,1 37,0
2013 49,9 60,2 39,8 48,9 59,3 38,7
2014 53,5 62,7 44,3 53,8 63,5 44,1
2015 54,8 64,0 45,6 55,9 65,8 46,1
2016 54,9 64,1 45,9 61,2 70,5 51,9
2017 56,6 65,7 47,7 66,8 75,1 58,7
2018 59,6 68,6 50,6 72,9 80,4 65,5
Never used it 2004 76,4 68,9 83,8 81,2 74,3 87,9
2005 77,1 70,0 84,1 82,4 76,0 88,9
2007 66,6 57,3 76,3 69,9 60,8 79,3
2008 62,0 52,2 71,5 64,1 54,6 73,4
2009 59,9 49,5 70,0 61,9 51,4 72,0
2010 56,8 46,6 66,8 58,4 48,2 68,3
2011 53,6 43,9 63,1 55,0 45,1 64,7
2012 51,3 41,0 61,5 52,6 41,9 63,0
2013 50,1 39,8 60,2 51,1 40,7 61,3
2014 46,5 37,3 55,7 46,2 36,5 55,9
2015 45,2 36,0 54,4 44,1 34,2 53,9
2016 45,1 35,9 54,1 38,8 29,5 48,1
2017 43,4 34,3 52,3 33,2 24,9 41,3
2018 40,4 31,4 49,4 27,1 19,6 34,5
TurkStat, survey on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) usage survey in house-
holds and by individuals, 2004–2018

also a fact that usage is not equitable across the population and that certain groups
within Turkish society still cannot benefit from these technologies to the extent
available to others. This pattern of usage both shapes and has important implications
for digital citizenship, as will be explained in the next section.
Resulting from research conducted by TURKSTAT, the data in Table 3 shows that
the occupational group that uses these technologies the least is composed of people
working in agriculture, forestry, and aquaculture sectors. A recent project has been
developed for agricultural sector employees, as one of the disadvantaged groups in
terms of computer and Internet usage. Within the scope of the project, warning
messages on weather-based meteorological forecasts and possible extreme weather
 472

Table 3 Computer and Internet usage of individuals by occupation and sex, 2013–2018
%
Computer users Internet users
ISCO-08 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018
Managers 91,2 93,1 93,7 94,1 95,9 94,5 90,5 93,6 94,0 96,0 97,8 96,7
Professionals 94,7 96,9 97,3 95,1 98,4 99,2 94,5 96,8 97,7 96,5 99,3 99,8
Technicians and associate professionals 92,9 94,8 97,4 95,3 97,0 96,5 92,9 95,0 97,4 97,7 98,9 99,7
Clerical support workers 92,5 93,4 94,6 92,8 94,6 95,4 91,6 93,7 94,7 94,4 97,6 98,2
Service and sales workers 74,5 75,8 78,6 77,0 78,6 81,1 73,4 76,8 80,3 83,9 88,1 92,4
Skilled agricultural, forestry and fishery workers 20,4 21,8 33,1 26,2 27,3 29,1 19,0 22,7 34,5 34,4 38,6 47,9
Craft and related trades workers 72,1 68,0 75,1 73,7 74,0 76,0 70,9 69,8 78,9 84,5 86,0 91,2
Plant and machine operators and assemblers 73,2 74,9 79,9 74,5 77,9 80,1 72,9 76,5 79,3 85,0 90,6 95,0
Elementary occupations 49,4 53,2 52,0 53,2 50,8 56,5 48,7 54,4 55,7 64,2 69,0 75,8
TurkStat, survey on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) usage survey in households and by individuals, 2013–2018
The individuals expression in the table heading refers to the individuals in the 16–74 age group
Z. İbrahimoğlu
30 Digital Citizenship and Education in Turkey: Experiences, the Present. . . 473

events (such as hail and storm) will be sent to farmers’ mobile phones on a daily basis
(https://www.tarimorman.gov.tr/Haber/1656/Tarim-Ve-Orman-Bakani-Bekir-Pakdemirli-
Ciftcimiz-Sabah-Kalktiginda-Bizi-Yaninda-Gorecek). In this context, it is hoped that
farmers will have a more productive period benefiting from technological opportunities
in their agricultural activities. Within the scope of the project, warning messages on
weather-based meteorological forecasts and possible extreme weather events (such as
hail and storm) will be sent to farmers’ mobile phones on a daily basis. In this context, it
is aimed that farmers will have a more productive period benefiting from technological
opportunities in their agricultural activities (https://www.tarimorman.gov.tr/Haber/1656/
Tarim-Ve-Orman-Bakani-Bekir-Pakdemirli-Ciftcimiz-Sabah-Kalktiginda-Bizi-.Yaninda-
Gorecek). Such projects for the transfer of digital technologies to daily life practices can
also help to improve the competence of individuals in digital citizenship dimensions. If
a farmer is able to follow the expectations of the weather on his mobile phone and be
aware of possible risk situations, he will make progress in digital access and digital
communication dimensions; moreover, he will have a gain on the digital trade (econ-
omy) dimension because they can achieve a more secure and profitable agricultural
activity through technological literacy.
One of the examples of the impact of Information and Communication Technol-
ogies on social life and citizenship in Turkey is experienced in the banking sector. In
Turkey, which introduced the automatic cash machine (ATM) in 1987, the first
Internet banking service was started in 1997 (Armağan and Temel 2016). According
to the data of the Banks Association of Turkey, as of 2017, there have been 51 million
customers registered in the Internet banking system.
Another dimension for Turkish citizens effected by the information and communi-
cation technologies – one clearly relevant to digital citizenship and digital citizenship
education – is the holding of public opinion and electioneering. Politicians and political
parties, who try to reach and sway public opinion, also use the latest developments in
information and communication technologies as an important tool in this regard. In
Turkey, Internet environments are being used at an increasing rate especially in the
elections after the 2000s. Within the scope of electioneering by the Justice and Devel-
opment Party, which is the ruling party, Internet-based social media tools have been used
increasingly. The fact that political parties have begun to prefer Internet-based techno-
logical channels to communicate with citizens emphasizes the importance of digital
citizenship competence for citizens. An individual who is not adequately equipped in the
dimensions of digital literacy and digital communication may not be able to engage
fully. Therefore, in the rapidly changing and developing era of twenty-first century
information and communication technologies, digital citizenship education constitutes
one of the most basic dimensions of educating citizens who can guide the future.

E-Government as an Area of Digitalization of State-Citizen Relations

in Turkey

In many countries of the world, the process of conducting government services over
the Internet is spreading rapidly in direct proportion to the access and usage rate of
474 Z. İbrahimoğlu

that country’s information technologies (Rocheleau 2007; Machova and Lnenicka

2016; Chipeta 2018). In this new state form, which has been called e-government,
relations between the state and citizens as well as the relations between the state and
institutions and organizations are carried into the electronic environment. In the
same way, systems are developed in order to execute internal works and transactions
through Internet-based electronic systems.
E-government studies in Turkey started mainly after the 2000s. The spread of the
e-government system reveals many advantages. In addition to citizens’ being able to
complete their transactions with the public institutions and organizations in a faster
and more practical way, it can also be said that this utilization of digitalization-based
technology is a very effective tool in terms of transparency, accountability, and
savings (Erdal 2004; Kuran 2005). Moreover, communication in the traditional
state-citizen relationship is often unilateral; the state can convey the messages it
wants to give to the citizens through its various instruments. However, thanks to the
e-government applications in the digitalized world, citizens can now convey certain
requests, suggestions, and complaints to the relevant units of the state. In Turkey,
BIMER (Prime Ministry Communication Center) and then CIMER (Presidential
Communication Center) were created and operated as a digital platform where
citizens can communicate their messages at the highest levels of the central admin-
istration. In addition to the central administration, many local units (municipalities
and governorates) have developed systems in which citizens can communicate and
trace their wishes and complaints in a digital environment.
The development of the e-government system through moving works and trans-
actions of public administration to the electronic environment has also accelerated
and facilitated processes within the state itself. Within this framework, the informa-
tion needed by the judicial, administrative, and security units can be accessed more
readily through Internet-based systems created on behalf of the institution. This
possibility, on the one hand, carries the internal functioning of the state to a more
systematic and auditable form, and on the other hand, has a positive effect on the
citizen-state relationship. Many examples can be given in this regard. Problems with
data access have been resolved with the new judicial system, with judges and
prosecutors having the possibility to access the information they need faster than
before. Although there are deficiencies with several dimensions and fields that need
to be improved (Güngör 2014), Turkey has carried out significant studies regarding
improvements and developments on e-state applications, especially in the last
10 years (Ekinci 2018).
However, in spite of digitalization and the increase in the usage level of computer/
Internet-based technologies in the relations between citizen-state, some issues
remain. A study by Kara and Yanık (2016) draws attention to variations in levels
of computer and Internet usage based on educational background and sexuality.
Groups trying to accomplish their official dealings on the e-state system may
encounter various problems based on a lack of knowledge of technology usage
(digital literacy) or issues with equal access (digital access). In order to get rid of
such problems, technology integration trainings which include wide segments of the
society should be provided (Yılmazer 2017). Besides, establishing the necessary
30 Digital Citizenship and Education in Turkey: Experiences, the Present. . . 475

infrastructure support is vital for the adoption and usage of e-state applications.
Studies carried out by Daştan and Efiloğlu Kurt (2016) which focus on the determi-
nation of factors that are effective for adaptations to the e-state system reinforce the
importance of infrastructure support, and it is stated that citizens adopt negative
attitudes toward e-state applications which do not have sufficient infrastructure and
which do not work with the desired productivity. Within the scope of infrastructural
works, local governments have important duties as well. It is important that local
government units, which are the first addressees of the citizen in many aspects of
their engagement, update their activities in accordance with technology and perform
certain works or studies to increase the awareness and usage level of citizens (digital
literacy) in this transformation process. In studies that examine the current situation
of mobile apps of metropolitan municipalities in Turkey providing services for their
citizens, Gürses and Engin (2016) state that the current mobile applications fail to
satisfy and need to be improved.
Consequently, it can be stated that e-state systems need to adapt and develop
themselves continuously. In parallel with these development activities toward tech-
nological infrastructure, additional activities to increase the level of awareness of
citizens toward e-state applications are also important. A great majority of citizens
using the current e-state applications express that they are satisfied with these
applications (Ekinci 2018). It is important to reflect this satisfaction to other seg-
ments of society, including those groups who have low levels of accessing computer-
Internet-based technological applications.

Digital Citizenship Education in Turkey

In Turkey, citizenship education is basically taught through a social sciences course.

Social studies, which emerged in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth
century, also began to take part in Turkey’s curriculum in the late 1960s. Social
studies, which is formed by bringing together social and human sciences in a
multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary structure at the student level, has to be closely
related to many other courses in order to achieve the aim of educating citizens with
the characteristics of the twenty-first-century age of information and communication
technologies.
It can be stated that digital citizenship education in Turkey is designed in two
dimensions: technical and effective. The technical dimension includes teaching the
basic technical knowledge of information and communication technologies to stu-
dents. The rate of computer and Internet usage in Turkey increased significantly after
2000s and nowadays especially that the Internet usage has reached high levels.
Various changes, transformations, and improvements have been made in the curric-
ulum of information technologies course in line with this development. In this
context, the computer course, which was added to the curriculum as an elective
course at the primary education level in the late 1990s, was found inadequate as a
result of the differentiation in social dynamics and the increase in the provision of
technology in daily life over time, and the curriculum has been subsequently updated
476 Z. İbrahimoğlu

(Yeşiltepe and Erdoğan 2013). In 2013, with a new regulation in the curriculums
made by the Ministry of National Education, the Information Technology and
Software course took place in the curriculum for 2 h per week as a compulsory
course in fifth and sixth grades and as an elective course in the seventh and eighth
grades of the secondary school (Uzgur and Aykaç 2016). The change has not only
involved the transition of the course as a compulsory lesson by taking it out of the
elective pool, but also current technical developments have been tried to be reflected
in terms of content and teaching method techniques.
In addition to making the information technologies course compulsory at some
levels of education, the FATIH project was initiated by the Ministry of National
Education and brought to a certain point as a larger project for the use of
computers and Internet in schools. The scope of the FATIH project aims to
provide Internet access to all schools and classes and equip classrooms with
interactive boards (Kavak et al. 2016). With the completion of these technical
infrastructure requirements, it is also made possible for teachers and students to
benefit from information and communication technologies in the classroom
outside the information technologies course. This ease and prevalence of tech-
nological access aimed by the FATIH project can also be expressed as an
important step in terms of digital citizenship education. Ribble, in his dimen-
sioning for digital citizenship, puts digital access as the first item. Therefore, one
of the first steps of digital citizenship education is that students have access to
technology. It is relatively difficult for students in disadvantaged areas to access
this opportunity in social life. Within this framework, this project initiated by the
Ministry of National Education aims to provide all students with possibilities
close to each other, although not exactly the same, under the roof of school. The
ability of students to have access to technology is key to the transition to other
stages of digital citizenship education; therefore, within the scope of the same
project, it has been aimed that the classrooms will be equipped with digital
infrastructure, while on the other hand, that teachers get training to integrate
information technologies into their courses (Alkan et al. 2011), and various
courses and seminars have been organized in this framework (Sarıtepeci et al.
2016; Tatlı and Kılıç 2013). Various online portals have been created simulta-
neously with the training process for the services that teachers need to adapt their
information technologies in their lessons and the necessary infrastructure created
to enable teachers to share the materials they produced with their colleagues. The
fact that students and teachers have access to digital access and communication
forms the basis of the necessary infrastructure work for progress in other dimen-
sions of digital citizenship education.
Another reflection of the digitalization process in education was put into opera-
tion with the e-school system. With this system, the Ministry of National Education
has taken an important step for transferring its internal works and transactions to the
electronic environment and thus transition to a more rapid and transparent manage-
ment while establishing an alternative environment for teacher-student and teacher-
30 Digital Citizenship and Education in Turkey: Experiences, the Present. . . 477

parent communication (Demirli et al. 2011). The system has enabled parents to
follow the status of their children’s success and follow up the notes of teachers and
administrators about their children; thus, parent-school cooperation has been
facilitated.
The second dimension of digital citizenship education is effective. The effective
dimension includes how students, who learn how to use Internet-based technological
tools technically in a basic sense in courses such as computer, information technol-
ogies, and coding, can use these tools in a proper, secure, and ethical way. In this
framework, the first issue to be considered is Turkey Qualification Framework
(TQF). The TQF, which contains information on what skills the students are
intended to be equipped with by considering the education process as a whole,
also serves as a guide for the curricular programs. In the context of TQF, eight
competence areas have been determined, and one of these areas is digital compe-
tence. Regarding the digital competence area, the following information is included
in the 2017 elementary and secondary school social studies curriculum (p. 5):

It includes the safe and critical use of information and communication technologies for work,
daily life and communication. Such competence is supported by basic skills such as access to
information and the use of computers for the evaluation, storage, production, presentation
and exchange of information, as well as participation in and communication with the
common networks via Internet.

In the light of the explanations given in the program related to digital compe-
tences, in addition to the ability to use computer- and Internet-based technological
tools safely and properly, it can be stated that carrying these technologies into daily
life and being able to use them actively in social participation issues are highlighted
within the scope of the aim to develop the digital competences of the students.
Some of the specific objectives of the social studies course, whose main objective is
to educate active, democratic, and participatory citizens, have been determined by also
taking into account the competences set out in the TQF. One of the special objectives
of the social studies course is to raise digital citizens. In the 2017 secondary school
social studies curriculum, this objective has been clearly defined, and the following
statements have been included in the 11th article of the course objectives (p. 8): “To
use information and communication technologies consciously by understanding the
development process of science and technology and their impacts on social life.” To be
compatible with this objective, one of the skills that are intended to be taught to
students in the social studies course is determined as digital literacy.
In order to achieve these basic objectives in the social studies curriculum, some
explanations were made for teachers in the implementation of the program. Among
these explanations, there are also sections that draw attention to the issue of digital
citizenship (p. 10):

In recent years, new situations related to citizenship rights and responsibilities (digital
citizenship, e-government, virtual commerce, social media, etc.) and a number of problems
478 Z. İbrahimoğlu

(digital division, identity theft, privacy of personal information, cyber fraud, cyber bullying
etc.) have emerged due to developments in digital technology. In order to improve students'’
digital citizenship competences, the course should include in-class and extracurricular
activities.

This explanation for the implementation of the social studies curriculum of

primary and secondary schools can be understood as an indicator of the importance
of digital citizenship in the social studies course. Teachers are asked to organize
in-class and extracurricular activities to enable students to have the necessary
equipment to use information and communication technologies properly, securely,
and ethically.
In Turkey, social studies course is offered to the students starting from the fourth
grade in primary school until the end of seventh grade in secondary school. When the
2017 elementary and secondary school curricula are analyzed in terms of digital
citizenship, it is seen that there are many benefits aimed at helping students to be
equipped with the knowledge, skills, and values required by the twenty-first century
age of information and communication technologies (Table 4).

Table 4 Digital citizenship in 2017 social studies curriculum achievements

School year Learning area Achievement Remarks
5 Science, Pays attention to the
technology, and principles of academic
society honesty by recognizing that
scientific works are protected
by law
5 Science, Discusses the effects of While teaching this learning
technology, and technology use on area, it should be ensured that
society socialization and social the students acquire the values
relations such as honesty, diligence and
ethics of science, as well as
skills such as self-checking
and digital literacy
Questions the accuracy and Topics such as distance
reliability of the information shopping, secure Internet use,
reached in the virtual and identity theft are
environment discussed
Obeys the security rules The importance of giving
when using virtual references to the sources
environment utilized and protecting the
Acts in accordance with authenticity of the sources is
scientific ethics in his/her emphasized
work
5 Active citizenship Within the scope of the
achievement, the
e-government portal and the
services provided through this
portal are mentioned
(continued)
30 Digital Citizenship and Education in Turkey: Experiences, the Present. . . 479

Table 4 (continued)
School year Learning area Achievement Remarks
7 Individual and Discusses the role of media in A selected communication
society social change and interaction channel (TV, Internet,
smartphones, etc.) is
discussed as to how it changes
the communication between
individuals and also the
culture in social sense
7 Production, Uses his/her rights and The relationship between the
distribution, and fulfills his/her responsibilities right to privacy, freedom of
consumption while utilizing expression and right to
communication tools information, and the freedom
of mass communication is
discussed
7 Production, Analyzes the changes of E-commerce (computer games
distribution, and digital technologies in the virtual/digital products as
consumption production, distribution, and much as real products) is
consumption network emphasized

When the achievements and explanations given in Table 1 are examined, it can be
stated that the social studies course, which is aimed at students becoming digital
citizens, includes key concerns of digital citizenship today, including social rela-
tions, ethics, and security dimensions.

Summary

Internet and computer-based technological developments have had serious effects on

individual and social life forms, especially in the last 30 years. In Turkey, as one of
the countries experiencing the process of technological change and transformation,
increased digitalization has a number of dimensions meaning the digital citizenship
is both complex and varied. The use of smartphones, Internet, and Internet-based
technological tools has increased rapidly, especially after 2000, and the increased use
of technological products is reflected in the relations between the citizens and the
state. In this context, the process of digitalizing the works and transactions of the
public sector has been initiated. The process of transferring the state services into
digital environment, which is called e-government, is continuing rapidly in Turkey
which has implications for how Turkish citizens are educated and how they come to
understand themselves as digital citizens.
In Turkey, and as a response to the rapid change and transformation toward
digitalization, one of the main objectives of the education system is to raise citizens
with the qualifications required by the twenty-first century age of information and
communication technologies. In this context, educational studies that are conceptu-
alized as digital citizenship education and that enable students to use information and
communication technologies in a conscious, secure, and ethical way are of essence.
480 Z. İbrahimoğlu

Under the upper umbrella of digital citizenship education, there are two main
dimensions: technical and affective. Within the technical dimension, the aim is to
provide the students with the technical knowledge to use computer- and Internet-
based technological products during their formal education, while the affective
dimension includes knowledge, skills, and values for using these technologies in a
secure and especially ethical way. That the ideal digital citizens of the future have the
necessary qualifications in both of these basic dimensions can be stated as an
indispensable necessity.

Cross-References

▶ Discourses of Global Citizenship Education: The Influence of the Global Middle

Classes

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The Dilemmas of Americanism: Civic
Education in the United States 31
Campbell F. Scribner

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 484
Civic Republicanism in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Schools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 484
Democracy and Social Science in the Twentieth-Century Classroom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 488
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 492
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 493

Abstract
The following chapter chronicles the history of civic education at the primary
and secondary levels in the United States. While educators advanced broad
notions of what it meant to be an American – embodied by notions of republican
citizenship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and democratic citizenship
in the twentieth – in both eras the quest for broad political consensus rendered
“Americanism” vapid, incoherent, or reactionary. Thus, the chapter argues the
nation’s educators faced the dilemma of encouraging vital membership in a
political body that eschewed their efforts. While the same dynamics continue
today, the chapter concludes with lessons drawn from these earlier paradigms of
civic education.

Keywords
Civics · Citizenship · Social studies · History · Culture wars

C. F. Scribner (*)
University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 483
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_73
484 C. F. Scribner

Introduction

Civic education in the United States has from the beginning been beset by the contra-
dictions of national exceptionalism. Training a unified and active citizenry took on
outsized significance in a democratic republic, where each community member was
expected to vote, deliberate on public matters, stand for office, and defend the interests
of the whole. Yet thorny questions arose, both about the composition of that citizenry
and its relationship to the nation’s founding ideals. For example, how could the
commitment to universal rights in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution
accommodate the enslavement and exploitation of Africans, the theft of indigenous
peoples’ land, the subordination and disenfranchisement of women, or widening gaps of
wealth and political power among freeholders? In a nation of immigrants, what consti-
tuted “American” culture? Did civics require the amalgamation of a “melting pot” and
the abandonment of foreign heritage, or could it admit pluralism and hyphenated
identities? Did political engagement require an adulatory or critical stance toward the
nation’s history and government? Was it a matter of preserving the legacy of the
Founders, gradually expanding their ideals, or overcoming foundational injustices
through moral confrontation and radical change? And how was one to do any of this
in ways that sparked children’s imaginations and won their loyalty? The following
chapter both outlines and discusses how these dilemmas have produced cycles of reform
in American civics. Continuing from the eighteenth century to the present, the chapter
argues that Americans have experimented with dynamic approaches to civic education
(from a variety of disciplinary and philosophical perspectives) only to abandon them as
too divisive, confining most schools to unobjectionable, uninspiring, and inaccurate
portrayals of citizenship. First, the chapter discusses the republican vision of eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century educators, which emphasized individual duty, emotion, and
moral character in preserving liberty and the common good. Next, it explores the
emergence of social studies during the early twentieth century, which by taking a
structural approach to social relations introduced a variety of critical perspectives on
the nation’s history and government. While these approaches stood in contrast, to be
sure, the chapter argues that neither was implemented with sufficient fidelity to realize its
promise. Rather, faced with pressure from organized political interests – and often taking
a dim view of their students’ intellectual capacities – schools backpedaled from any
philosophically coherent approach to citizenship education. Finally, the chapter extends
these lessons to the present, arguing that educators have tried to sidestep cultural
conflicts by deemphasizing facts in favor of skills but, in the process, have lost the
political goals that underlaid earlier reforms and, ultimately, are foundational to any civic
education program.

Civic Republicanism in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century

Schools

In the wake of the American Revolution, the nation’s leaders were understandably
concerned with the education of citizens – as opposed to gentlemen or royal subjects,
as earlier generations had been – and they spent a great deal of effort promoting
31 The Dilemmas of Americanism: Civic Education in the United States 485

systems of public schooling, to be financed and governed by a combination of local

and state agencies, culminating in a national university. These plans drew heavily
from Plato’s Republic, imagining schools that would instill virtue, cultivate loyalty
to the state, and promote a nonhereditary ruling class. Benjamin Rush, a signer of
the Declaration of Independence, famously wrote that proper civic education would
“convert men into republican machines,” while the author and editor Noah Webster
envisioned a society so patriotic that “the first word [an infant] lisps [would]
be Washington” (Johnson 1987; Justice 2013; Koganzon 2012; Moroney 1999;
Pangle and Pangle 1993). Many wanted education to be available not only to men
but to those who would rear them, a vision of “republican motherhood” that excited
young women aspiring to full citizenship themselves (Nash 2005). All of these
proposals for public schools failed, however, as voters rejected the taxes and
centralized government necessary to sustain them. Most states maintained ad hoc
educational provisions for another 50 years.
While the republican vision did not systematize American educational governance,
it did suffuse the curriculum of colleges, academies, and one-room schoolhouses
during the early nineteenth century. One sees its impact clearly in the books and
materials published for students. Older, heavily religious texts (such as the New
England Primer) and anthologies of European literature (such as Lindley Murray’s
English Reader) gave way to textbooks with explicit patriotic themes. Noah Webster’s
blue-backed spellers introduced American spellings of common words (Lepore 2002),
for instance, while Emma Willard’s geography lessons encouraged students to draw
maps as a way of learning (and loving) national and state borders (Schulten 2017;
Balmforth 2019). Civics also snuck into math and science lessons, which used
American landmarks and the names of Founding Fathers in word problems (Cohen
1982). History and literature textbooks were the most explicit, presenting patriotic
figures as moral exemplars for students, albeit with different shades of meaning as the
nineteenth century progressed. At first, students were encouraged to ponder the actions
of great men and, in keeping with the era’s culture of self-improvement, to pattern their
own lives after them. In his widely read History of the United States of America, the
Reverend Charles Goodrich (1827) advised readers occasionally “to pause in our
history, and consider what instruction may be drawn from the portion of it that has
been perused.” In the story of Columbus, for instance:

we are introduced to a man of genius, energy, and enterprise. We see him forming a new, and
in that age, a mighty project; and having matured his plan, we see him set himself vigorously
about its execution. For a time, he is either treated as a visionary, or baffled by opposition.
But, neither discouraged nor dejected, he steadily pursues his purpose, surmounts every
obstacle. . ..While we admire the lofty qualities of Columbus, and look with wonder at the
consequences which have resulted from his discovery, let us emulate his decision, energy,
and perseverance. Many are the occasions on which it will be important to summon these to
our aid; and by their means, many useful objects may be accomplished, which without them,
would be unattained. (1827, p. 17)

Passages like this one called for active deliberation, which in turn required an
evenhanded presentation of historical facts and produced more nuanced depictions
of the Revolution, Indian wars, and other sensitive topics than one might expect from
486 C. F. Scribner

early American textbooks. By midcentury, however, the rise of publicly funded

schools and Catholic immigration seemed to necessitate a more prescriptive patri-
otism, with blander forms of moralization and passive hero-worship (Nash 2009;
Elson 1964). McGuffey’s Reader, popular from the 1830s to the 1890s, became the
source of many patriotic myths – such as the anecdote about young George
Washington cutting down a cherry tree – which were easily digestible but demanded
little in the way of moral discernment (Neem 2018). Because these stories were more
attentive to children’s imaginations and the dictates of public opinion than they were
to historical accuracy, critics sometimes questioned their claims to authority. Indeed,
some authors themselves wondered whether these stories oversimplified the past and
implicitly deceived children about the nation’s complex origins (Knupfer 2019;
Pfitzer 2014). Samuel Goodrich, Charles’s brother and the author of the popular
Peter Parley series of textbooks, came to consider himself “nothing better than a
falsifier of history, one who had relied too heavily on the ‘fictive or merely imagin-
able’” (Pfitzer 2014, p. 43). The tradeoffs confronting nineteenth civics, then, were
the same confronting mass education as a whole: cultural and curricular standardi-
zation not only enshrined white Protestant norms but inhibited serious consideration
of their merits, laying the groundwork for an unreflective, superficial conception of
American identity, what the twentieth-century philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre
(1991) would describe as “counterfeit virtue.”
Probably the most divisive question facing nineteenth-century textbooks was
slavery, an issue that touched directly on the nation’s civic ideals and could hardly
be avoided in its curriculum. As Paula Connolly (2013) observes, between the turn
of the nineteenth century and the Civil War, there were a variety of abolitionist
sentiments presented in history and literature textbooks, beginning with Noah
Webster’s Little Reader’s Assistant (1790), which included excerpts about the
horrors of the Middle Passage and the ways in which white overseers mistreated
enslaved Africans. As the issue gained traction, abolitionists released more special-
ized titles for children, such as The Youth Emancipator (1842), The Anti-Slavery
Alphabet (1847), and The Young Abolitionists (1848). Pro-slavery Southerners and
their sympathizers responded with books of their own, which foregrounded pastoral
plantation scenes, with contented slaves and kind masters. Books with the largest
market share tried to find a middle path between these opposing depictions. In the
Peter Parley books, Samuel Goodrich focused his criticism on slave societies
overseas or on the trans-Atlantic slave trade (outlawed since 1807) rather than on
the ongoing regime of racial violence and oppression within the United States. Of his
own country, Goodrich wrote, “No doubt many good people. . .have slaves.
But slavery is a bad system” (cited in Connolly 2013, p. 38). That position satisfied
no one and became increasingly untenable as the question of slavery pushed the
country toward civil war.
The tension between ideals of republican citizenship and realities of social
injustice was poignantly expressed not only in textbooks but through classroom
oratory, which had long been an ornament of liberal education but took on newfound
importance as a form of civic participation (Reese 2013). Recitation, speechmaking,
debate, and affective gestures were necessary pedagogical techniques in classrooms
31 The Dilemmas of Americanism: Civic Education in the United States 487

lacking uniform textbooks; more than that, however, they were vital skills for
participation in the public sphere, in which speakers were expected to persuade
and inspire their fellow citizens. For both reasons, the study and practice of oratory
became integral to the curriculum (Eastman 2010; Neem 2017; Ong 1974), often
taking the form of patriotic speeches, such as Patrick Henry’s address to the Virginia
House of Burgesses, or poetic renderings of national myths, such as Longfellow’s
“The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” or “The Song of Hiawatha,” which remained
cornerstones of the curriculum for a century thereafter (Rubin 2007). So thoroughly
was rhetorical eloquence associated with citizenship that, in an era when expanding
the rights of white men meant subordinating the rights of others, republican oratory
became a means for diverse groups, including women, African Americans, and
Native Americans, to appeal for full citizenship through their own graduation
speeches, poems, and essays (Eastman 2010; Moss 2009; Snyder 2017).
These appeals rarely succeeded – indeed, as Carolyn Eastman (2010) points out,
schoolchildren were romantically eulogizing Native Americans even before Indian
removal policies began – but they underscore two important lessons about
nineteenth-century civics. First, insofar as republicanism was the era’s animating
educational idea, its tenets bounded debates about citizenship and education. Moral
development and academic knowledge remained the expected outcomes of school-
ing, but they were always framed in terms of duty and the national creed. Ethnic or
religious minorities could invoke republican virtue to gain access to schools and
secure inclusion in the political community – and could accuse opponents of
conceiving of republicanism too narrowly – but in doing so they had to reaffirm
notions of American exceptionalism and individual excellence. Demanding that the
nation live up to its ideals and honor the dignity and contributions of all members of
society did nothing to question the basis of American citizenship or the possibility of
a common culture, meaning that even progressive voices during the nineteenth
century were not “critical” or “multicultural” in the current sense of those words.
As the historian Jonathan Zimmerman (2002) observes, the same trend continues to
the present: campaigns to reform history courses have often been less interested in
challenging the myth of American benevolence than incorporating diversity into
existing, triumphalist narratives.
The second lesson is that, while subsequent generations have enshrined
nineteenth-century civics as an inviolable status quo ante – an object of innocence
and nostalgia standing in stark contrast to contemporary “culture wars” – in fact
the subject had always been contested, always in flux, with sharp questions even at
the time about its portrayal of national heroes, white supremacy, and historical truth.
Since the late 1950s, it has been fashionable for Christian homeschoolers and
others to use reprints of the McGuffey’s Readers instead of modern textbooks in
history or American government. For conservative parents, these books derive
authority from their age: written shortly after the events they describe and presum-
ably before professional educators and historians could pervert the narrative, parents
assume that they reveal truths about American history that were once known and
agreed upon. “Because they are reprints from an earlier time,” writes one mother,
“I trust them to be more accurate than most of today’s revised history books” (Pfitzer
488 C. F. Scribner

2014, p. 9). That is utter nonsense. One can find political bias and many other
shortcomings in contemporary textbooks, but to assume that they are less accurate
than nineteenth-century texts reflects a profound misunderstanding of both eras.
Acknowledging the complicated origins of the United States – and of citizenship
education itself – neither invalidates nor endorses any particular ideological position,
but it does force contemporary critics to refine their lines of argument. For the same
reason that homeschoolers should engage with modern historical scholarship, mod-
ern educators should take time to consider nineteenth-century texts, not as objective
renderings of the past or pillars of ideological orthodoxy, nor as outdated and
oversimplified fictions to be scorned, but precisely for their moments of contradic-
tion, blindness, and unexpected complexity, which can reveal truths both gained and
lost in the century since. Americans should abandon the myths, racism, and assump-
tions of progress that structured nineteenth century schoolbooks, but would do well
to remember the spirit of honor and duty to which they aspired.

Democracy and Social Science in the Twentieth-Century

Classroom

By the turn of the twentieth century, new developments were reshaping civics
education along lines that remain recognizable today. Immigration reached its apex
during this era, with newcomers arriving from Eastern and Southern Europe, the
Caribbean, and East Asia. Just as Catholic immigration had rallied support for
(implicitly Protestant) common schools during the mid-nineteenth century, the influx
of new languages, religions, and customs renewed calls for assimilation and explicit
nationalism (Curren and Dorn 2018). These had significant implications for the
teaching of civics. For example, there was a dramatic expansion of patriotic displays
in the classroom, especially of American flags, which not only hung from the wall
but adorned everything from pencil cases to lunchboxes (Schaefer-Jacobs 2017). In
1892, Francis Bellamy introduced the Pledge of Allegiance, which classes stood and
recited at the beginning of the school day. The pledge was originally performed with
the Roman salute – extending one’s arm at an upward angle, palm-down – but most
schools shifted to the hand-on-the-heart gesture with the rise of Nazism in the 1930s.
During World War I and World War II, several states passed laws compelling all
students to say the pledge, violating the tenets of some Christian sects, which refused
to swear oaths or pledge loyalty to the state. For their principled noncompliance,
children from Jehovah’s Witness families were harassed and expelled from school.
The judiciary at first upheld these mandatory pledge policies. In Minersville School
District v. Gobitis (1940), the Supreme Court ruled that the pledge served a legiti-
mate interest by “[promoting] in the minds of children who attend the common
schools an attachment to the institutions of their country,” and that issues of
citizenship training were ultimately under the purview of state legislature and local
school boards rather than the federal government. Three years later, however, the
Court reversed course with West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette
(1943). “To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are
31 The Dilemmas of Americanism: Civic Education in the United States 489

voluntary and spontaneous instead of a compulsory routine is to make an unflattering

estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds,” wrote Justice Felix
Frankfurter. He continued:

We can have intellectual individualism and the rich cultural diversities that we owe to
exceptional minds only at the price of occasional eccentricity and abnormal attitudes.
When they are so harmless to others or to the State as those we deal with here, the price is
not too great. But freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That
would be a mere shadow of freedom. . ..If there is any fixed star in our constitutional
constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in
politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by
word or act their faith therein. (1943, p. 624)

The Barnette decision marked the Court’s first recognition that children have
rights of speech and conscience in school, characterizing children as citizens and
reminding schools of their duty not merely to local preference but to broader forms
of national citizenship (Driver 2018). The same logic would underwrite civil rights
cases from the 1950s to the 1980s – though despite their highflying rhetoric, courts
continued to constrain students’ rights with a deference to order, local democracy,
and a paternalistic view of education (Schumaker 2019).
Although their ideas did not take hold immediately, and one should not overstate
the efficacy of either the old regime or the new, progressive educational reformers
also introduced radically new conceptions of civic education at the turn of the
century (Cuban 1993; Wineburg 2004). In 1916, the National Education Association
Committee on Social Studies, led by the sociologist Thomas Jesse Jones, proposed a
new, interdisciplinary approach to citizenship, with less emphasis on emulation and
memorization and more on student interest, participation, and inquiry. Rather than
conceiving of citizenship as the cultivation of individual character, social studies
now emphasized collective responsibilities. This change became evident in the
community civics movement and its “expanding circles” approach, in which chil-
dren first learned about membership in their families, before turning to school, local,
national, and international communities as they aged (Fallace 2011). Rather than
imparting prescriptive lessons in patriotism, social studies also presented American
government as a work in progress, with shortcomings to be investigated and solved,
as suggested by the “Problems of Democracy” courses that swept the nation’s middle
and high schools by midcentury (Evans 2004; Fallace 2018; Kliebard 2004). These
changes corresponded with developments in associated academic disciplines.
The professionalization of historical research during this period led to a new
emphasis on interpretive frameworks, such as Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier
thesis,” which ascribed America’s democratic legacy to the availability of land and
questioned the viability of an increasingly urban society; and to critical approaches,
such as Charles Beard’s analysis of the American constitution as a bulwark for
monied interests. Studies like these signaled a shift from history as an exercise in
antiquarianism or moral development to a recognition of its relevance in the present
and from a narrow focus on military and political events to a more holistic under-
standing of social processes (Brown 2009).
490 C. F. Scribner

While scholars have long associated the professionalization of history and

education, respectively, with widening a gap between historians and schoolteachers,
there was an ongoing exchange between their professional organizations through at
least the 1940s (Tyrrell 2005). The shift from history to social studies also incorpo-
rated insights from newly formed social sciences, including sociology, anthropology,
psychology, and economics, Which were not only incorporated as high school
electives but introduced new approaches to culture and political-economic systems
throughout the curriculum (Burkholder 2011). Finally, social studies reflected the
rise of education itself as a field of study. Following the writings of John Dewey and
others, and eager to change the perception that public education was merely prep-
aration for college enrollment, educators decentered academic disciplines as ends
unto themselves and instead prioritized the child’s experience of the world and the
classroom community as organizing pedagogical principles (Kliebard 2004;
Zilversmit 1993). Replacing history with social studies was perhaps their greatest
success in transforming the traditional course of study.
The implicit critical bent of social studies produced a variety of liberal and
even radical approaches. Following World War I, there was a concerted effort at
peace education and international cooperation, with goodwill tours, foreign exchange
programs, and model United Nations programs introduced in middle and high schools
through subsequent decades (Borgwardt 2005; Bu 2003; Osborne 2016; Scribner
2017; Threlkeld 2017.) Starting in the 1920s, the educator Rachel Davis DuBois
introduced a “cultural gifts” curriculum, in which students produced pageants honor-
ing the heritage and contributions of African Americans, Native Americans, and
immigrants, the first serious attempt at multiculturalism in the public schools (Selig
2008). At the same time, the historian Carter G. Woodson introduced Negro History
Week, an outgrowth of the Harlem Renaissance and the “New Negro” movement,
which corrected the erasure of African American accomplishment with lessons ded-
icated to black history and culture (Burkholder 2011; Givens 2019; Zimmerman
2002). During the economic crisis of the 1930s, social reconstruction theorists like
George Counts, John Childs, and Harold Rugg transformed social studies into an
explicitly Marxist – and potentially indoctrinatory – unmasking of capitalism, milita-
rism, and racism in American society (Evans 2004; Fallace 2018; Hartman 2008).
Less prominent but also present were the activist lessons of Communist and socialist
groups, implemented in a range of clubs, study groups, scouting programs, and
summer camps, which also sought to unmask the political and economic underpin-
nings of public education (Haas 2018; Mickenberg 2005; Mishler 1999).
Although social studies courses may have been more inclined to critical interpre-
tations than earlier forms of civic education, they also suffered from contemporary
prejudices. For progressive educators, much of the attachment to participatory
democracy relied on idealized visions of small-town life, with an implicit endorse-
ment of white, Protestant norms (Perlstein 2016). Likewise, many of their lessons on
cultural difference remained grounded in nineteenth-century notions of social devel-
opment, in which entire cultures were arrayed on a continuum from “savagery” to
“civilization,” or in emergent notions of biological difference, which questioned the
mental and moral fitness of immigrants, ethnic minorities, and the poor. According to
31 The Dilemmas of Americanism: Civic Education in the United States 491

either reading, marginalized groups seemed to lack capacity for full or immediate
citizenship. Even well-intentioned reforms, such as the “cultural gifts” movement,
traded in tokenism and cultural essentialism, praising the same ethnic stereotypes
that others criticized. As with vague terms like “democracy” and “social efficiency,”
a common language around “primitive” cultures admitted a variety of usages, from
the literal and nakedly racist to the metaphorical and fairly progressive, but it is the
certainly the case that social studies re-inscribed some of the injustices that reformers
hoped to ameliorate (Fallace 2012; Kliebard 2004; Selig 2008).
Also limiting the critical potential of social studies lessons were organized
pressure campaigns by nativist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and patriotic organi-
zations like the Daughters of the American Revolution, which, while unsuccessful in
attempts to outlaw Catholic education and eliminate foreign-language instruction,
managed to introduce indoctrinatory “Americanism” courses in schools nationwide
(Erickson 2006). These organizations drew funding and logistical support from an
even smaller nexus of business interests – particularly the National Association of
Manufacturers, founded in 1895 – and a patchwork of pamphleteers and grassroots
auxiliaries, which would spark almost every major curricular controversy from the
1910s to the 1980s, most famously the rollback of Harold Rugg’s textbooks during
the 1930s and 1940s (Evans 2004; Hartman 2015; Laats 2015; Nickerson 2014;
Scribner 2016). Although conservative activism followed fairly narrow lines of
influence, one should not ascribe longstanding conflicts over civics education to a
shadowy right-wing conspiracy. The important point is the broader cooling effect of
these campaigns. Public uproar convinced many teachers, principals, and school
boards to avoid any sort of controversy, ensuring that social studies lost much of its
critical bent and became a vehicle for vacuous platitudes, nonacademic life skills,
and disjointed historical facts. As it had during the nineteenth century, citizenship
training floundered when subjected to the democratic politics of mass institutions.
By the late 1950s, Cold War pressures overseas and burgeoning civil rights
campaigns at home made the vapidity of mid-century civics seem unacceptable.
Congress passed the National Defense Education Act (1958) following the launch
of the Sputnik satellite, providing federal funds for curricular development in
strategically important areas. A team of developmental psychologists and disci-
plinary experts leveraged these resources at the Woods Hole Conference, where,
led by Jerome Bruner, they applied scientific methods, constructivist pedagogy,
and systems-based thinking to dramatically reconceptualize the math and science
curriculum. By the mid-1960s, their approaches had spread to social studies,
producing an approach that the education scholar Edwin Fenton (1967) called
the “new social studies.” There was much to praise in this work. Like
Progressive-era reforms, the new social studies was inquiry-based, channeling
student interest into rigorous research projects. It imbued history and politics
with new developments in geography, anthropology, and psychology and encour-
aged multicultural perspectives, including racially diverse authors and comparative
perspectives on foreign cultures. These reforms reached an apex with Man: A
Course of Study (MACOS), a broadly humanistic curriculum that appeared during
the early 1970s (Dow 1991; Evans 2011).
492 C. F. Scribner

Unfortunately, the same academic expertise that made the new social studies
appealing to curriculum reformers handicapped its implementation in schools and
obscured some very real shortcomings. Designed by academics at elite institutions
with little cooperation from teachers in the field, much of the material remained
remote from the local context of schools. Meanwhile, the rigor of applied research
required training and resources that many schools lacked. The new social studies
were also beset by broader Cold War contradictions. Equating citizenship with
critical thinking proved insufficiently patriotic for conservative groups, who
launched waves of protests to ensure that discussions of Communism, world affairs,
and American government remained more or less indoctrinatory. From the other end
of the spectrum, teachers and students, invigorated by the program’s methods,
worried that its thinking was not critical enough and questioned its implicit faith
in science, expertise, and liberal democracy in the face of the Vietnam War and
racial injustice at home. While the new social studies provided an intellectual
framework for debate, it lacked the activist bent that the era seemed to demand
(Scribner 2012). A final critique, perhaps clearest in hindsight, was the way that the
era’s systems-based mindset promoted some disciplinary norms while undercutting
others. Applying deductive logic and comparative perspectives to social problems
encouraged questions, discussion, and evidence-based conclusions – all important
elements of citizenship – but often did so without particular attention to the content
under consideration. Many lessons were based on abstractions and typologies – for
instance, teaching about the relationship between geography and economics with
maps of imaginary countries – and emphasized transferrable knowledge rather than
the incommensurable ways that historians, anthropologists, or others approached
their subjects (Heyck 2015).

Conclusion

This chapter has outlined the central dilemma of civics education in the
United States: namely, the nation’s inability to reconcile competing calls for unity
and diversity, facts and imagination, or criticism and patriotism. These divides are
not static; they have been taken up by innumerable political and social movements
across nation’s history. Yet they seem to be intractable. For a nation whose political
rhetoric and mythology stresses the importance of public deliberation, the United
States rarely tests the vitality of its civic education programs. Broad consensus has
emerged around dynamic visions of citizenship – republican duty in the nineteenth
century, democratic activism in the twentieth – but these visions have usually
regressed to bland platitudes at the first sign of controversy or challenge. Intent on
preserving public legitimacy, public schools have avoided any serious reckoning
about the meaning of being an American.
The same sort of avoidance has persisted since the 1970s. Civic educators have
continued in the critical-thinking paradigm of the new social studies, addressing
some criticisms that dogged that program but merely subordinating others. Attention
to academically rigorous work has aligned well with the accountability regime and
31 The Dilemmas of Americanism: Civic Education in the United States 493

attempts to professionalize teaching, and state curricular standards have codified

general expectations for social studies and government classes. However, following
a contentious debate around national history standards in 1994, in which recom-
mendations for more multicultural representation were denounced as “political
correctness” and met with unanimous condemnation in the United States Senate,
social studies standards have noticeably shifted from content to skills, mandating
general knowledge of government but omitting any specific references to historical
figures or concepts that might be politically divisive. Academic rigor has become
even more closely tied to disciplinary inquiry. Encouraging students to do history,
for example, acknowledges the unique ways in which historians interpret the past,
while at the same time honoring educators’ broader commitments to active learning,
critical thinking, and joint deliberation (Levstik and Barton 2015; Wineburg 2001).
This approach, too, emphasizes skills over content and, by sidestepping public
controversy, has enabled the development of de facto national standards, appearing
briefly in the English Language Arts section of the Common Core Standards, and
more fully in the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Standards (2018), developed
by the National Council for the Social Studies and other groups.
From a purely pedagogical standpoint, there is much to praise in recent develop-
ments, which have undoubtedly rationalized the social studies curriculum and
perhaps improved children’s powers of discernment. As training for citizenship,
however, contemporary reforms leave much to be desired. From the Left, one could
criticize them for being insufficiently political, unwilling to subject structures of
power and inequality to serious scrutiny, as social studies reformers did during the
early twentieth century, and encouraging only shallow forms of participation and
activism. From the Right, one could question whether critical thinking skills ade-
quately ground students in the particular virtues of the American political tradition,
and more so whether they instill the values of pathos, duty, or character to which
nineteenth-century educators aspired. These criticisms draw from different ideolog-
ical positions, of course, but both suggest that citizenship is more than a set of skills;
it is a way of being. Authentic commitment to a just society requires both affective
engagement to the body politic and a willingness to engage the difficult questions
from which American civics has so regularly retreated.

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Towards an Education for Active
Citizenship in Singapore 32
Siva Gopal Thaiyalan

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 498
Conceptions of Active Citizenship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 499
Confucian-Inspired Ideology and Conceptions of Citizenship in Singapore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 501
Citizenship Education in Singapore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 502
Evolution of Citizenship Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 503
Pursuit of More Active Forms of Citizenship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 506
What Kind of Active Singaporean Citizens? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 509
Overemphasis on Volunteerism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 510
Conflicting Conceptions of Confucian-Inspired Ideology and Active Citizenship . . . . . . . . 510
Changing Appetite of Young Singaporeans for More Political Participation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 511
Towards an Education for Active Citizenship in Singapore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 512
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 514
Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 515
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 515

Abstract
Citizenship education, in its various forms, has always been given prominence in
Singapore’s education since its self-governance in 1959. In recent years, the
Singapore government has increasingly drawn on notions of “active citizenship”
in educational policies. This chapter examines this recent pursuit of active
citizenship by the Singapore government, particularly since 2011 which marked
the “student-centric, values-driven” phase in Singapore’s ongoing journey of
educational transformation. This pursuit is analyzed against literature on active
citizenship and in consideration of Singapore’s social, political, and economic
context. As a result, three contradictions are identified in the conceptions of active
citizenship as articulated in Singapore’s educational policies and programs in

S. G. Thaiyalan (*)
Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 497
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_78
498 S. G. Thaiyalan

Singapore. The chapter concludes with three recommendations to harmonize

these contradictions in order to advance towards educating young Singaporeans
as active citizens.

Keywords
Singapore · Active citizenship · Citizenship education · Confucian-inspired
ideology · Twenty-first-century competencies

Introduction

Singapore is a small nation-state that has transformed itself into a First World economy
within the three decades since its independence (Sim 2015). This unprecedented feat is
widely attributed to a strong state governance (Sim et al. 2017). Singapore is founded
on democratic ideals, but its political leadership has been critiqued as being author-
itative, hegemonic, and elitist in its approach to citizenship (Han 2015; Lim 2016; Sim
2015). The ruling party in Singapore, the People’s Action Party (henceforth, “the
government”), has been in power continuously since Singapore’s self-governance
began in 1959 and has benefited from a remarkable political legitimacy resulting
from a successful social and economic transformation within a short span, despite
prevalent socio-political instability in the region. The government, through the strong
hold of single-party rule, has been lauded for delivering economic success and
material well-being to its citizen, who enjoys one of the highest standards of living
in the world (Sim et al. 2017; Tan 2017). Similarly, the approach to nurturing of young
Singaporean citizens has consistently prioritized a neoliberal agenda – that is to
contribute to this enduring economic success (Tan 2017).
At the same time, the government’s Confucian-influenced political ideology has
been critiqued for the limits to democracy it has also imposed, where the government
believes that citizens can and should sacrifice certain socio-political freedoms in
exchange for this the country’s survival and economic prosperity (Sim and
Krishnasamy 2016). Consequently, Singapore has nurtured a delimited civil society,
and the ways that citizens can participate in it are constrained and controlled by the
government. For example, political participation is largely limited to voting, volun-
teerism, and voicing opinions through official channels (Han 2015; Sim et al. 2017).
Such forms of citizenship are not characteristics of active citizenship, in which
citizens are characterized as embodying a justice orientation, seeking to identify
and address inequalities in society (Wood et al. 2013).
With this as a background, this chapter explores how Singapore is pursuing more
active forms of citizenship in recent years, amidst its ongoing efforts of educational
transformation. This chapter firstly examines conceptions of active citizenship in the
literature. This is followed by a brief political background of Singapore which sets
the context for the conceptions, and evolution, of citizenship and citizenship educa-
tion in Singapore. A critique of three contradictions emerges as a result of an analysis
of the pursuit of active citizenship in Singapore, and the chapter concludes with three
suggestions to harmonize these contradictions.
32 Towards an Education for Active Citizenship in Singapore 499

Conceptions of Active Citizenship

Citizenship is a contested concept; there is no single definition because its meaning

varies according to social, political, and economic contexts and reflects different
historical legacies (Lister 2008). Despite this contested nature, citizenship has
traditionally been expressed as a legal status, particularly of the nation-state, and is
encapsulated in British sociologist T. H. Marshall’s (1950) well-known definition
from his essay Citizenship and Social Class: “a status bestowed on those who are full
members of a community. All who possess the status are equal with respect to the
rights and duties with which the status is endowed” (pp. 28–29). Marshall’s (1950)
conception of citizenship highlights the roots of a debate within citizenship studies.
It has been argued that Marshall’s conception reduces citizenship to taking owner-
ship of rights and being active in the formal and public worlds; there is little focus on
an individual’s experiences with citizenship in their personal and private lives.
Moreover, little attention is given to relationships among citizens in creating a better
society; instead, the main relationship that is acknowledged is between the state and
person and a top-down conception of citizenship from the state to citizens through
rights.
In a stark departure from Marshall’s conception of citizenship, more recent
conceptions of citizenship and citizenship education, however, have focused on
young people participating as active citizens. This is fuelled by growing concerns
about perceived civic deficit and apathy among young citizens, hence leading to
increasing prioritization by politicians and education policymakers in many coun-
tries in wanting to nurture young people to be active citizens (Jochum et al. 2005;
Kallio and Häkli 2013; Nelson and Kerr 2006; Ross 2012). Similar to the contested
conceptions of citizenship itself, the idea of active citizenship, too, is not clearly
understood or well defined, particularly around its meaning and theoretical founda-
tions (Nelson and Kerr 2006). This poses a challenge in analyzing conceptions of
active citizenship.
Despite the lack of clarity over conceptions of active citizenship, the notion of
active citizenship used within this chapter is drawn from the work of McLaughlin
(1992) and Westheimer and Kahne (2004b). McLaughlin (1992) conceived of
citizenship on a continuum from minimal to maximal interpretations. In a minimal
interpretation, citizenship is defined narrowly in “formal, legal and juridical terms”
(McLaughlin 1992, p. 236). Citizenship education at this end of the continuum is
characterized by narrow and formal approaches that are didactic, dialogic to a limited
degree, and strongly focused on formal assessment (Sim et al. 2017). In the maximal
interpretation, citizenship is more broadly inclusive of groups and interests in
society. Citizenship education at this end of the spectrum reflects a broad range of
interactive and participatory approaches. There is a primary focus on nurturing
students to “understand and enhance their capacity to participate as citizens” (Sim
et al. 2017, p. 93).
Westheimer and Kahne (2004b), on the other hand, developed a three-part
typology – namely, personally responsible, participatory and justice-oriented citi-
zens – to describe and analyze the kinds of citizens that policies and programs aim to
nurture. Personally responsible citizens are those who act responsibly in their
500 S. G. Thaiyalan

community, for example, by volunteering or participating in recycling programs.

Such citizens are honest, law-abiding, and responsible; for example, they pay their
taxes. Participatory citizens play different kinds of active roles in the community by
leading and organizing community efforts to care for those in need. In this way, they
are actively participating, by taking leadership roles within established systems and
community structures. Justice-oriented citizens are associated with questioning,
debating, and changing established systems and structures that reproduce patterns
of injustice over time. Such citizens critically assess social, political, and economic
structures to see beyond surface causes, seek out, and address areas of injustice and
have knowledge about democratic social movements and how to effect systemic
changes (Westheimer and Kahne 2004b).
Wood et al. (2013) have provided a unifying framework of conceptions of
citizenship participation of both McLaughlin (1992) and Westheimer and Kahne
(2004b), summarized in Table 1, which is useful in considering the merits of these
two conceptions of active citizens through comparison.
In this framework, “minimal citizenship” equates with the “personally responsi-
ble citizen,” who is law-abiding and community minded, and participates in con-
ventional citizenship activities such as voting and helping others. The “justice-
oriented citizen,” who can be placed at the “maximal citizenship” end of the
continuum, is one who is involved in “social change citizenship” (Nelson and Kerr
2006) and “political action” (Thomson and Holdsworth 2003). Typical activities
include initiating petitions and protesting against political injustice. The “participa-
tory citizen,” in the middle of the continuum, is one who is involved in volunteering,
fundraising for social causes, and working with the community to improve society
(Westheimer and Kahne 2004b).
Drawing on the conceptions of active citizenship in this framework, active
citizenship in this chapter is then understood as one that involves a critical disposi-
tion that embodies a justice orientation and seeks to identify and address inequalities
in society. Such a conception of active citizenship leans towards the maximal or
justice-oriented citizenship end of the continuum in the framework of citizenship in
Table 1.
While this understanding of active citizenship is helpful for describing and
analyzing the nature of active citizenship, it is insufficiently nuanced for the specific
context of Singapore for three reasons. Firstly, Westheimer and Kahne’s (2004b)
conception of a “personally responsible citizen” can be interpreted differently in

Table 1 Framework of citizenship participation

Nature of citizenship (McLaughlin 1992) Kinds of citizens (Westheimer and Kahne 2004b)
Minimal citizenship Personally responsible citizens
Participatory citizens
Justice-oriented citizens
Maximal citizenship

Source: Wood et al. (2013, p. 86)

32 Towards an Education for Active Citizenship in Singapore 501

Singapore’s context. For example, in a study of Singapore social studies teachers’

understanding of citizenship by Sim and Chow (2019), it emerged that Singaporean
teachers understand “participatory citizenship” as volunteerism, underpinned by
relationality in the context of the wider community. This is a different conception
of volunteerism than the one in Westheimer and Kahne’s (2004b) framework, which
is linked to a character trait of personally responsible actions, and not concerned with
relationality in wider social contexts. Sim and Chow pointed out that volunteerism,
as conceived in Singapore’s citizenship, is a relational understanding that is partic-
ularly rooted in relationships with others. This involves individuals cultivating
personal dispositions that allow them to relate with sensitivity and reciprocity to
others, a pattern of behavior expanding out towards shaping humane relationships in
wider community relations.
Secondly, ideas such as involvement in “democratic social movements” as
described in Westheimer and Kahne’s (2004b) “justice-oriented citizenship” are a
common feature in the citizenship education discourse in Singapore. This is because
of the government’s beliefs that limits to democracy are necessary for Singapore’s
survival and prosperity, leading to citizens’ participation in civil society being
constrained and controlled, and dissent and activism discouraged (Sim et al.
2017). Sim et al. (2017) and Han (2015) have argued that this is consistent with
how active participation is promoted, understood, and accepted in Singapore. They
argued that, unlike other democratic nations, there are clear out-of-bounds markers
as to what is legal and permissible social action and political participation. Further,
the term “justice” does not feature in the Singaporean citizenship narrative.
Thirdly, the continuum from minimal to maximal interpretations of citizenship, as
conceptualized by McLaughlin (1992), arguably represents a narrow conception of
citizenship that overlooks the diverse everyday experiences with citizenship within
specific social, political, and economic contexts (Wood 2014). As discussed earlier,
citizenship remains a contested and complex concept that cannot be understood or
practiced in a simple or straightforward manner because it can hold different
meanings for different people, even within the same state (Faulks 2000; Kymlicka
2002). Similarly a simplistic continuum or typology will not be sufficient in captur-
ing ideas of citizenship that are influenced by social, political, and economic
contexts in Singapore, and elsewhere.
Together, these three factors made it an imperative to examine the social, political,
and economic context of Singapore in order to understand its conceptions of
citizenship and citizenship education.

Confucian-Inspired Ideology and Conceptions of Citizenship

in Singapore

Singapore’s political ideology, although not declared as an official policy, is

undergirded by a Confucian-inspired pragmatism, in which individuals, communi-
ties, and the state share responsibilities and benefits (Gopinathan 2015). This
Confucian-influenced pragmatism underpins social and education policies as
502 S. G. Thaiyalan

mechanisms to propagate a vision of a strong national identity, including attention to

how Singaporeans learn their roles and responsibilities within the nation and global
community (Lim 2016). This political ideology is manifested and communicated to
Singaporean citizens through education, particularly in citizenship education, using
what is commonly known as the Singapore Shared Values (Lim 2015). The five
values espoused are societal over individual rights, nation before community, com-
munity before family, family before self, family as the basic building block of
society, consensus instead of contention as a way of resolving issues, and racial
and religious tolerance and harmony (▶ Chap. 35, ““Being Rooted, Living Global”:
Citizenship and Education in the Singapore City-State”).
By drawing from the ideals of Confucian-inspired ideology, the government has
justified the delimiting of democracy and the maintenance of a dominant, one-party
rule as the philosophical origin of the country’s economic success, and prides itself
as having constructed a unique model of an Asian democracy (Tan 2017). The
government has adopted an attitude that the economic ends justify the means in
making political decisions, without much room for alternative forms of analysis (Tan
2017). While Singaporeans generally trust and accept this approach, it has created
the conditions for political obedience, acceptance of unpopular policies, and political
apathy (Tan 2017). In essence, it has been argued that Singapore’s meteoric eco-
nomic success has been built upon on a strong state but weak civil society, charac-
terized by passive, responsible, and rule-following citizens (Gopinathan and Sharpe
2004). Also, the government’s paternalistic attitude of governance through which it
takes responsibility for “taking care of its people” is characteristic of a Confucian
ideology, extending the metaphor of the ideal Confucian family to the state (Lim
2016, p. 716). However, these pragmatic policies have also been credited for an
increasingly disengaged citizenship characterized as “self-centered” and “material-
istic,” who generally tend to uncritically agree with the government (Sim 2011,
p. 225). It can be argued that Singapore’s political ideology, therefore, has promoted
a more “passive” form of citizenship, rather than active citizenship as referenced in
Table 1.

Citizenship Education in Singapore

This outline of the political ideology of the Singapore government provides an

important context for the conceptualization of citizenship education in Singapore.
In keeping with the strong hold of the government, education, including citizenship
education, in Singapore is highly centralized, with a strong emphasis on academic
achievement (▶ Chap. 35, ““Being Rooted, Living Global”: Citizenship and Edu-
cation in the Singapore City-State”; Han 2015). At the same time, the structures,
processes, and outcomes of education have a strong neoliberal influence, intended to
serve the economy success of Singapore (Gopinathan 2007). The Ministry of
Education provides a prescribed curriculum, controls curricular material, administers
national exams, employs and deploys teachers, and fully funds all public schools.
Pre-service and in-service teacher education is also largely centralized through one
32 Towards an Education for Active Citizenship in Singapore 503

institution, the National Institute of Education (▶ Chap. 35, ““Being Rooted, Living
Global”: Citizenship and Education in the Singapore City-State”; Sim 2011).
Gopinathan (2007) argued that the government has effectively utilized education
policies to legitimize its economic focus and has played an interventionist role in the
school curriculum by endorsing the government’s “soft authoritarianism” and its
vision of a meritocratic, multicultural, and loyal citizenry (Han 2015). Singapore’s
citizenship education has been critiqued as a “state-craft” that propagates the central
message of Singapore’s success, particularly about Singapore’s modernization
and economic success under the dominant single-party rule (Gopinathan 2012;
▶ Chap. 35, ““Being Rooted, Living Global”: Citizenship and Education in the
Singapore City-State”).
Citizenship education in Singapore largely comprises prescriptive and didactic
approaches to teaching values and moral conduct, such as loyalty to the state and
prioritizing the “common good” (Han 2015). This represents a minimal form of
citizenship when analyzed against the continuum from minimal to maximal citizen-
ship interpretations by McLaughlin (1992). Through such prescriptive and didactic
approaches, the government has used citizenship education to foster a common
Singaporean identity in tension with the need to respect racial, religious, and cultural
differences. This is particularly notable for a unique multi-ethnic, postcolonial
nation-state that does not have the long history, shared traditions, and common
language that are characteristic of other nations (▶ Chap. 35, ““Being Rooted,
Living Global”: Citizenship and Education in the Singapore City-State”). Studies
have shown that students demonstrate strong affiliation to nationalistic values and
that teachers generally do not deviate from the prescribed national curriculum,
predominantly relying on curricular material provided by the government
(▶ Chap. 35, ““Being Rooted, Living Global”: Citizenship and Education in the
Singapore City-State”). The theoretical underpinning of Singapore’s citizenship
education is primarily communitarian, and active citizenship has been associated
with contribution to Singapore society through volunteerism, rather than deep
engagement with political processes (▶ Chap. 35, ““Being Rooted, Living Global”:
Citizenship and Education in the Singapore City-State”). Active political participa-
tion and student activism are strictly discouraged by the government (Han 2015).

Evolution of Citizenship Education

Citizenship education has featured in various forms in Singapore’s education since

its self-governance began in 1959, with a primary purpose of contributing to nation-
building, and has evolved in response to changing national priorities and the
demands of globalization (Deng et al. 2013; Han 2000; Lee 2015). Table 2 summa-
rizes the changes in citizenship education policy and programs in Singapore over
time, underpinned by its purpose of instrumentalization for social cohesion and
economic success (Gopinathan and Mardiana 2013). This evolution is also explained
in further detail by Gopinathan and Chiong (▶ Chap. 35, ““Being Rooted, Living
Global”: Citizenship and Education in the Singapore City-State”), and Sim and
504 S. G. Thaiyalan

Table 2 Evolution of citizenship education in Singapore

Citizenship Phases of
education Singapore’s
initiatives Year education Characteristics
Ethics 1959 Survival- The two decades since independence were
Moral education 1966 driven characterized by social cohesion and nation-
and civics building
training
Education for 1974 Efficiency- The late 1970s and 1980s were focused on
living driven improving the system, with the introduction
(interdisciplinary) of standardized curriculum and industry-
Review of moral 1978 relevant skills
education
Good citizens 1981
(primary)
Being and 1981
becoming
(secondary)
Social studies 1981
(primary)
Religious 1984
knowledge
Civics and moral 1995 Ability-based, With Singapore transitioning into a
education aspiration- knowledge-based economy in the late 1990s,
National 1997 driven there was a shift in focus to developing a
Education broader range of skills, e.g., critical thinking
Social studies 2001 and creativity, and providing for a wider
(upper variety of students’ interests and aptitudes
secondary)
Character and 2011 Student- The aim was to equip students with values,
citizenship onwards centric, character and competencies to meet the
education values-driven challenges of the future
References: Kanagaratnam (2015); Lee (2015); Ministry of Education (2012c)

Lee-Tat (▶ Chap. 48, “The Development of Civic Participation Among Youth in

Singapore”) in the other chapters of this handbook.
The most recent of these educational transformations, which is of importance for
this chapter, is the “student-centric, values-driven” phase since 2011. This phase
marked a response to a changing political landscape in which the ruling party was
seen to be losing its grip, and at the same time more young Singaporeans seemed to
be increasingly interested in politics, and political participation. It was just prior to
this phase that the Ministry of Education also introduced the Framework for 21st
Century Competencies and Student Outcomes (Ministry of Education 2009) (see
Fig. 1). It is also important to note that the introduction of this framework also
succeeded the announcement of the Curriculum 2015 (C2015) in 2008 which
proposed the curriculum, pedagogies, and assessment that was necessary for the
twenty-first century, in response to shifts in the global economy (Tan 2013). C2015
imagined that the central purpose of schooling is to nurture a confident person, a self-
32 Towards an Education for Active Citizenship in Singapore 505

Fig. 1 Framework for 21st Century Competencies and Student Outcomes. (Source: Ministry of
Education (2009))

directed learner, an active contributor, and a concerned citizen, with a focus on

developing the skills and competencies required to live and work in a globalized
twenty-first-century world (Deng et al. 2013). This aspiration was presented as the
Framework for 21st Century Competencies and Student Outcomes produced by
Singapore’s Ministry of Education.
The framework sought to develop skills and competencies that would prepare young
Singaporeans to face the challenges and seize the opportunities of globalization
(▶ Chap. 35, ““Being Rooted, Living Global”: Citizenship and Education in the
Singapore City-State”). This framework was envisioned to be implemented in more
“student-centric” ways, away from traditional and didactic forms of education, and at the
same time not deviating from the core values that had been enshrined in Singapore’s
education. Lee (2013) argued that C2015, and this framework, was a “future-oriented”
approach to citizenship education because it envisioned young citizens as active agents
in society – “active with a sense of belonging, active in the sense of being concerned
about the society, and active in participating in the co-constructing of a better society
together with the state” (p. 256). These educational reforms were indicative of the
government’s desire to pursue active citizenship in the wake of globalization.
However, despite the government’s heightened focus on active citizenship, grow-
ing concerns about young Singaporeans’ civic deficits and apathy, particularly their
self-centered and individualistic nature, have persisted over the years (Han 2015).
This has been further exacerbated by the declining rate of volunteerism and civic
506 S. G. Thaiyalan

Fig. 2 Bathtub effect. (Source: National Volunteer and Philanthropy Centre (2018))

participation beyond the formal schooling years (Ministry of Culture‚ Community

and Youth 2014). At a parliamentary debate in March 2014, it was reported that
volunteerism rates were high among young people aged 15 to 19, that is, while they
were in school. However, volunteering and civic participation declined sharply in
their post-secondary years and as they entered the workforce in their 20s and only
picked up again when they were in their early 30s but never at the same rate as before
(Kok 2015; Ministry of Culture‚ Community and Youth 2014; National Volunteer
and Philanthropy Centre 2014; Wong 2016) (see notable dip for 25–34-year-olds in
Fig. 2). This was described as the “bathtub effect” and gave rise to a pursuit of more
active forms of citizenship and led to efforts to engage young people in social
participation while they are in school and beyond their post-secondary years (Min-
istry of Culture‚ Community and Youth 2014). The concerns about young
Singaporean’s civic deficit and apathy provided the impetus for a heightened focus
on more active forms of citizenship participation among young people in Singapore,
including into their post-secondary years.

Pursuit of More Active Forms of Citizenship

In order to understand the context for the government’s increasing desire to pursue
active citizenship, we need to understand the political context of Singapore partic-
ularly in 2011 (▶ Chap. 35, ““Being Rooted, Living Global”: Citizenship and
Education in the Singapore City-State”). This was a landmark year as the Prime
Minister called on Singaporeans to take up larger and more positive roles in shaping
the country’s future and to effect change in the community as active citizens (Prime
Minister’s Office 2011). This call to action has to be considered in the context of the
aftermath of the 2011 general election in Singapore, which was regarded as a
watershed because it was the worst performance for the ruling party since indepen-
dence (Tan 2017), reflecting a weakened mandate and a party seen by many as out of
touch with citizens’ needs and aspirations (Gopinathan and Mardiana 2013). There
were clear indications that young Singaporeans had a greater desire for and expec-
tation of political participation, with many using social media to be politically active.
This changing political landscape prompted the government to intensify its efforts to
32 Towards an Education for Active Citizenship in Singapore 507

engage its citizens, particularly young Singaporeans (Gopinathan 2012). In this

context, a new approach from government was necessary.
The post-2011 election period was also characterized as the “big bang period” of
education reform in Singapore (Gopinathan and Mardiana 2013, p. 26). A series of
large-scale and systematic educational reforms aimed at promoting a more active
citizenry were swiftly implemented (Tan 2013). It was during this time that the
Ministry of Education (2011b) also announced a transition of Singapore’s education
to the “student-centric, values-driven” phase, discussed earlier. Additionally, while
values education had always featured in Singapore’s education system (Han 2000),
Character and Citizenship Education (CCE) was given prominence and made central
to Singapore’s education system. The then Minister for Education, Mr. Heng Swee
Keat, announced these commitments at his inaugural work plan seminar for educa-
tion officers. The following excerpt from his speech highlights this:

We want to make our education system even more student-centric and sharpen our focus in
holistic education – centred on values and character development. We could call this
Student-Centric, Values-Driven education. (Ministry of Education 2011b)

This announcement was reflective of a range of policy and organizational changes

that represented the government’s commitment to advancing CCE. Importantly, the
Minister for Education included these commitments in his speeches from 2011 to
2015. In addition, a new Character and Citizenship Education Branch within the
Ministry of Education was established in 2012, aimed to unify the ministry’s various
values and citizenship education initiatives, such as Civics and Moral Education and
National Education, and to provide a more coherent, current, and responsive CCE
curriculum in consultation with schools (Ministry of Education 2011a, b).
Despite its lofty vision and unprecedented attention, the new CCE curriculum
remained largely content-oriented, didactic, and textbook-driven (Han 2015). Les-
sons had a continued focus on the teaching of values, social-emotional competen-
cies, and twenty-first-century skills (see Fig. 1), with little room for truly student-
centric learning (Sim et al. 2017). The CCE curriculum was complemented by other
subjects such as social studies, history, vernacular language subjects of Chinese,
Malay and Tamil, co-curricular activities, and special commemorative events such as
Total Defence Day, Racial Harmony Day, International Friendship Day, and
National Day. National Education was still seen as an integral part of CCE but
remained as a didactic teaching of national values as before (Han 2015; Ministry of
Education 2014a, b). CCE also represented a heavy focus on the inculcation of
character, evident from its goal to “nurture Singaporean citizens of good character,”
and there was also an enduring emphasis on the core values from the previous
curriculum – respect, responsibility, integrity, care, resilience and harmony – which
formed the basis of good character (Ministry of Education 2014a, b, 2016) .
Citizenship-related skills in the formal CCE curriculum were limited to community
life, national and cultural identity, sociocultural sensitivity and awareness, and global
awareness (Han 2015). All of these signaled that while the government had intended
to move towards a more student-centric citizenship education, older orientations of
didactic teaching of citizenship still persisted. Such forms of citizenship education
508 S. G. Thaiyalan

continued to focus on “personally responsible citizens” and “participatory citizens,”

but “justice-oriented” type of active citizens (Westheimer and Kahne 2004b).
CCE also continued to be centralized, under the control of the Ministry of
Education, and provided the government with an important ideological tool to con-
tinue to promote nationalistic values such as loyalty, patriotism, a sense of belonging,
and a duty to contribute actively to national development (Han 2015; Sim and
Krishnasamy 2016). Such an approach to citizenship education focused on nurturing
Singaporean citizens of good character who contribute to nation-building in accor-
dance with the government’s vision, as opposed to nurturing young citizens for active
citizenship and political participation in a changing democracy (Han 2015).
Two other significant initiatives that were launched in the post-2011 election
period that are intended to foster active citizenship among young Singaporeans are
the Values in Action program and Youth Corps Singapore (see Table 3), spearheaded
by the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth in
2012 and 2013, respectively. These initiatives signaled the government’s desire to
engage its young citizens from their schooling years to post formal education as a

Table 3 Summary of Values in Action and Youth Corps Singapore initiatives

Initiatives Owner Ages Aims
Values in Ministry of 7 years (primary Values in Action (VIA) is learning
Action Education 1) to 17 years experiences that support students’
(VIA) (pre-university) development as socially responsible
citizens who contribute meaningfully
to the community, through the learning
and application of values, knowledge,
and skills. VIA fosters student
ownership over how they contribute to
the community. As part of VIA,
students reflect on their experiences,
the values they have put into practice,
and how they can continue to
contribute meaningfully
Source: Ministry of Education (2014d)
Youth Ministry of 16–35 years (post- Youth Corps Singapore promotes
Corps Culture, secondary) volunteerism among young people
Singapore Community and through organizing volunteering
(YCS) Youth opportunities and service projects as
well as a structured youth leadership
program. This structured program
includes:
A structured residential training
program
An overseas community project in
one of the regional countries
A community project in Singapore,
undertaken in partnership with an
existing non-profit organization or
community group
Source: Ministry of Culture‚
Community and Youth (2014)
32 Towards an Education for Active Citizenship in Singapore 509

means of addressing concerns about young Singaporeans’ civic apathy and the
bathtub effect already discussed. The Ministry of Education and the Ministry of
Culture, Community and Youth who were in charge of these initiatives pledged to
work together to provide continuity and shared experiences for young Singaporeans’
citizenship education (National Youth Council 2016a).
Values in Action was formed as part of the new CCE curriculum. It aimed at
reframing the former Community Involvement Programme (CIP) to place a greater
emphasis on values education through young people’s formal and mandatory volun-
teer activities (Sim et al. 2017). It involves all students in Singapore public schools
(ages 7–18), from primary to junior colleges and the centralized institute
(pre-university). Values in Action aims to develop responsible citizens who can
contribute meaningfully to the community (Ministry of Education 2014d). Students
are encouraged to choose community matters that concern them, understand the issues
in greater depth, and then decide how they can make a difference in a sustained way
and see themselves as part of the larger community (Ministry of Education 2012a,
2014d). Students therefore “put into practice” the values learned in CCE.
Youth Corps Singapore became the first formal and national program to provide
continuity for young people’s citizenship participation in their post-secondary years
(Ministry of Culture‚ Community and Youth 2014). Highlighting the importance of
this national initiative, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong himself announced this at
his annual National Day Rally Speech in 2013, which was broadcast live on national
television. In his speech, the Prime Minister rallied young Singaporeans: “You are
our future. You are idealistic, full of energy and passion. Go forth, change Singapore,
change the world, for the better. To help you do that, we will set up a youth volunteer
corps” (Prime Minister’s Office 2013).
Despite their intents, Values in Action and Youth Corps Singapore continued to have
an enduring focus on young people’s volunteerism and participation in the community.
These initiatives were seemingly the government’s response to their concerns about
having to “fix” young people’s civic deficit and apathy (Bessant et al. 2016; Biesta
2011). While Singapore’s education is supposed to be in a “student-centric, values-
driven” phase, it is questionable how much of the spirit of this statement has been
translated into actual citizenship education experiences for young people.

What Kind of Active Singaporean Citizens?

The previous sections outlined the government’s heightened focus and efforts to
promote active citizenship among its young citizens from their schooling until post-
formal education years. These efforts are highly contextualized in the changing
global and local social, political, and economic situations. However what counts
as active citizenship can be interpreted in different ways and that also applies to the
case of Singapore. The following sections highlight some of the contradictions that
are inherent in the conceptions of active citizenship in Singapore, as articulated in
educational policies and programs. Following that, three possibilities suggested in
order to harmonize these contradictions so as to advance towards educating young
Singaporeans as active citizens.
510 S. G. Thaiyalan

Overemphasis on Volunteerism

The first contradiction that arises from the analysis in this chapter is a worrying trend
of an overemphasis on public and formal participation, such as volunteerism in the
forms of Values in Action and Youth Corps Singapore, in Singapore’s conceptions of
citizenship education. Such a narrow focus tends to overlook young people’s diverse
experiences with citizenship in their personal and private everyday lives. Education
that promotes active citizenship is concerned with young people being intrinsically
involved in shaping their society, individually or collectively. This can be in a range
of contexts, including schools, homes, and their local neighborhood, as well as in
their wider communities at the national, regional, and international levels (Nelson
and Kerr 2006; Vromen 2003). A simplistic and narrow focus on volunteerism and
public participation alone does not fully capture young people’s diverse forms of
citizenship, and it particularly overlooks the richness of their private, domestic, and
ordinary forms of active citizenship in their everyday lives (Wood 2014).
A related problem to this is that research on Singaporean young people’s active
citizenship has also primarily focused on measuring formal volunteerism rates in the
forms of Individual Giving Surveys and National Youth Surveys (National Volunteer
and Philanthropy Centre 2016; National Youth Council 2016b). Arguably, such
reports only a narrow and partial form of young people’s active citizenship. Even
the assessment in Values in Action is focused on ensuring students adhere to a
mandatory and stipulated hours of volunteerism and community service which
varies for the different grade levels (Ministry of Education 2014c). Such a myopic
conception of citizenship that is focused only on volunteerism has the potential of
leading to a false perception that young people are apolitical, apathetic, and disen-
gaged (Bessant et al. 2016; Wood 2014), resulting in a perception of a “crisis in
democracy” surrounding young people (Bessant et al. 2016, p. 271). Consequently,
such thinking might also wrongly imply deficiencies in citizenship education,
possibly resulting in a knee-jerk response to introduce more citizenship education
in order to “fix” the perceived civic deficit in young people (Bessant et al. 2016;
Biesta 2011). This is, again, problematic because such thinking will continue to
focus too much on the teaching of citizenship and places less emphasis on how
young people actually learn in and through the everyday practices in their everyday
lives (Biesta 2011). Moreover, Jerome (2012), for example, argued that an overfocus
on formal and public forms of political actions may lead to a narrower definition of
active citizenship that might not recognize that democracy is also lived in the acts of
coming together to discuss, resolve, and take action.

Conflicting Conceptions of Confucian-Inspired Ideology and Active

Citizenship

The second contradiction is concerned with Confucian-inspired conception of citi-

zenship that focuses on values such as harmony (Sim et al. 2017), which is
seemingly in conflict with to dispositions such as criticality that is a key feature of
32 Towards an Education for Active Citizenship in Singapore 511

active citizenship where citizens critically assess social, political, and economic
structures to see beyond surface causes, seek out, and address areas of injustice
(Westheimer and Kahne 2004b).
Westheimer and Kahne (2004a) argued that education for active citizenship
should aim to nurture young people to be able to critically analyze and understand
the structural causes of deeply entrenched social and political issues and to be
equipped with the capacity and motivation to participate at local and national levels
to act and effect change. On the other hand, citizenship education in Singapore, and
Asia, has been characterized as one that has traditionally prioritized a relational focus
of cultivating harmonious relationships with the “self, others, the state and nature”
(Lee 2004a, pp. 280–281). This self-cultivation is meant to serve an important and
active role in the “collectivity of the society and nation” (Lee 2004b, pp. 27–28).
Therefore, it has been argued that the Asian conception of citizenship draws a direct
connection between a good person and good citizenship, and as a result, citizenship
education in Asia foregrounds morality over politics (Sim et al. 2017). This is said to
contrast with a “Western” conception of citizenship in general, which has a long-
standing focus on “individualism as rights and responsibilities in a political context”
(Lee 2004b, p. 31). In reflecting a Confucian-inspired conception, values such as
“care” and “harmony” feature as two of the six core values in Singapore’s citizenship
education curricula as (Han 2015).
Sim and Chow (2019), however, argue that while the government has propagated
Confucian ideals of harmony to its younger generation, harmony is seen as an
important aspect of relational citizenship, and it does not necessarily refer to
conformity or a homogeneous identity but involves embracing difference and even
opposition through assuming multiple perspectives and dialogue. However, by
prioritizing this conception of harmony, and in fear of risking harmony in society,
criticality is limited to merely developing an awareness of the needs and diversity in
the community, rather than more critical forms such as acting to question, or
challenge, established norms. If any action is needed at all, it has to be done
graciously, with sensitivity and with restraint in dialogue (Sim and Chow 2019).
This presents a tension between harmony that is promoted in Confucian-inspired
conception of citizenship and criticality that is central to conceptions of active
citizenship.

Changing Appetite of Young Singaporeans for More Political

Participation

The third contradiction is concerned with how young Singaporeans have been
observed to be increasingly engaged in various forms of active citizenship in recent
years that defy traditional conceptions of it. Han (2015) studied groups of young
Singaporeans working collectively in small communities who were using new
technology to push the boundaries of free speech and critical thinking, questioning
the status quo, and, in some cases, openly opposing government policies. She
observed that they were exploring and developing social and political values and
512 S. G. Thaiyalan

were debating current issues while also discovering the boundaries of what was
acceptable in their society. They were seen to have developed the skills and
knowledge required to engage in civic and political activism (Han 2015).
This changing appetite of young Singaporeans’ citizenship expressions and
engagement is in harmony with emerging global trends. Kennelly and Llewellyn
(2011), for example, observed that young people were becoming involved in the
politics in their lived worlds through unconventional means and modes, from
crowdsourcing to online social movements, but current definitions of active citizen-
ship overlooked the varied ways in which young people were increasingly engaging
in contemporary social and political participation because such contemporary forms
diverged from how active citizenship is defined in theory.
More clear evidence of young Singaporeans’ changing appetite for political
participation, from the previously perceived civic apathy, emerged from national-
level focus-group-style dialogues, entitled Our Singapore Conversations in 2012.
This engaged over 10,000 Singaporeans of diverse ages, but with a particular focus
on young people, to understand their challenges and aspirations for the country
(Ministry of Education 2013; Wong 2016). In a recent online newspaper article in
Singapore, it was reported that young Singaporean’s civic participation saw a new
pattern of engagement (Kwek 2019). Young people were going beyond volunteerism
and were starting non-profit groups to support the underserved communities, advo-
cacy groups to push for policy changes, and public campaigns to challenge national
narratives in social issues they care for. The most remarkable of these initiatives was
a social media channel, Telegram, that served as a network of ground-up initiatives
in the country and was subscribed by over 1,800 young people (Kwek 2019).
These contradictions clearly bring to light the need to redefine the current concep-
tions of active citizenship for young Singaporeans and reimagine an education that
serves to nurture young Singaporeans as active citizens. Westheimer and Kahne (2000)
have argued that to become truly effective citizens, young people should learn to “create,
evaluate, criticize, and change public norms, institutions, and programs” (p. 3). Citizen-
ship education that aims to foster maximal forms of justice-oriented citizens requires
critical engagement with social and political issues and involvement in social move-
ments, social transformation, and systemic changes (Westheimer and Kahne 2004a).
Achieving such outcomes could be problematic for Singapore, given that Singapore has
been characterized as a hegemonic state in which the government demarcates social and
political participation of its citizens with clear “out-of-bounds markers” that limit
citizens’ democratic participation (Sim 2011; Sim and Krishnasamy 2016).

Towards an Education for Active Citizenship in Singapore

While there has been an increasing interest in prioritizing active citizenship across
many countries in recent years, conceptions of active citizenship and how it has been
enacted in citizenship education vary significantly, largely influenced by the respec-
tive social, political, and economic situations of the various countries and their
government’s motivation for pursuing more active forms of citizenship (Nelson
32 Towards an Education for Active Citizenship in Singapore 513

and Kerr 2006). This pattern is no different for Singapore which has explicitly
expressed an active pursuit of active citizenship for young Singaporeans in recent
years, with a focus on nation building and driven by its desire to ensure the
continuity of its economic success. Yet this pursuit is muddled with contradictions
and a lack of clarity. In keeping with a Confucian-inspired ideal of harmony, it is
imperative then to attempt to harmonize these contradictions so as to advance
towards an education for active citizenship in Singapore.
The first harmony that needs to be considered is one between didactic and
dialogic pedagogy. Singapore’s citizenship education is largely content-driven with
didactic instructions and comprises lessons accompanied by textbooks that focus on
nurturing values, social-emotional competencies, and twenty-first-century skills
(Sim et al. 2017). In particular, citizenship education is concerned with propagating
a singular narrative of the Singapore’s economic success and what it means to be
Singaporean through curricular uniformity (▶ Chap. 35, ““Being Rooted, Living
Global”: Citizenship and Education in the Singapore City-State”). One way to
harmonize this contradiction is to allow the flourishing of the multiple meanings
of being a Singaporean and how every young person can be an active citizen in
multiple and diverse ways in their everyday lives. This requires a closer connection
between national narratives and the lived realities of young Singaporeans through an
authentic and engaging curriculum and pedagogy that is nonlinear, recursive and
cumulative and that recognizes young people as citizens-now, and not passive
recipients of citizenship teaching (Biesta 2011; Lister 2003). Another way of
achieving harmony is to strive towards a mutually beneficial partnership with
young people themselves in co-creating an authentic and meaningful citizenship
learning experiences that would recognize and include their lived experiences with
citizenship (Bessant et al. 2016; ▶ Chap. 35, ““Being Rooted, Living Global”:
Citizenship and Education in the Singapore City-State”; Hartung 2017).
The second harmony is between formal-public participation and personal-private
participation. Singapore’s communitarian approach to citizenship education has encour-
aged a focus on public participation, such as Values in Action and Youth Corps
Singapore, in order to foster national identity, rootedness to Singapore and commitment
to social cohesion – all of which serves to ensure Singapore’s continued economic
success (▶ Chap. 35, ““Being Rooted, Living Global”: Citizenship and Education in the
Singapore City-State”). Yet this formal participation does serve as a conduit for some
young Singaporeans to gain critical consciousness of social and political issues, which
otherwise could be easily glossed over by these young people living in an affluent
society such as Singapore where most young people are pressured to achieve academic
and career success. Such formal and public participation is crucial to the formation of
young people’s citizenship identities. Yet, in order to enhance these experiences for more
young people, one possibility is to imagine a citizenship education that connects
learning and participation from the formal and public process promoted in schools
into young people’s everyday lives. Such a conception might lead to a continuum of
praxis – sustained, critical, and reflexive forms of citizenship actions and imaginations
that move back and forth on the continuum of the formal-public and the private-
personal. Singapore’s Minister for Education said:
514 S. G. Thaiyalan

A strong sense of citizenship will drive them to come together to write the next chapters of
the Singapore Story. That is why we must sustain our efforts in Character and Citizenship
Education [. . .] Let us work together to shape our education system for the future, to best
equip our children to write a good next chapter of our Singapore Story. (Ministry of
Education 2012b)

However, in a truly empowering sense, writing the next chapter of the “Singa-
pore Story” would mean co-creating it with young Singaporeans themselves. That
means politicians, policymakers, and program developers need a new and rather
radical approach of recognizing and including young people’s everyday experi-
ences with citizenship in the policies and programs that are meant to serve them.
This is a possible pathway towards fostering active citizens who embody informed,
engaged, and transformative citizenship (▶ Chap. 35, ““Being Rooted, Living
Global”: Citizenship and Education in the Singapore City-State”; Wood et al. 2018).
The third and last harmony is between conformity and criticality. One of the
biggest challenges for policies and programs of citizenship education in Singapore is
striking a balance between the perceived need for citizens to conform to social order
and stability and the messiness and criticality that will inevitably be a characteristic
of more active, informed, and critical citizens that the same government is pursuing
(Gopinathan 2015). In the same vein, there is a real need for criticality to flourish in
Singapore’s citizenship education instead of instrumentalizing critical thinking. For
example, “critical and inventive” thinking is one of the core competencies within the
Framework for 21st Century Competencies and Student Outcomes, which underpins
the vision for CCE in Singapore (Ministry of Education 2009). Yet, significant
studies in Singapore have signaled that critical thinking in Singapore is used only
as an instrument for economic productivity in the global knowledge economy
through education (▶ Chap. 35, “”Being Rooted, Living Global”: Citizenship and
Education in the Singapore City-State”). In his research of young Singaporeans’
perceptions of citizenship, Baars (2017) found that nurturing critical thinking in
young Singaporeans was not a priority of the government. He also found contradic-
tions regarding what was articulated by the government as a desired citizen, who is a
critical citizen, and what was experienced by young people in their everyday lives.
These examples suggest that more genuine efforts are required to authentically
nurture critical Singaporean citizens, both in policies and in reality.

Conclusion

The term “active citizen” implies that people will possess understanding and knowl-
edge about civic processes in order to engage in political participation (Wood et al.
2018). In keeping with that understanding, it can be concluded that policies and
programs for citizenship and citizenship education in Singapore reflect a “minimal
citizenship” that focuses primarily on developing “personally responsible citizens”
and “participatory citizens” (Wood et al. 2013). Such conception is driven by the
need to serve the country’s agenda of preparing its citizenship to contribute to its
32 Towards an Education for Active Citizenship in Singapore 515

nation-building project of social cohesion and ensure the continuity of its economic
success. It also emerged, from the analysis in this chapter, that the pursuit of active
citizenship in Singapore has an enduring emphasis on didactic forms of teaching
even in the recent iterations of citizenship education, as well as a continued focus on
public and formal volunteerism. Such approaches are not “student-centric” as
professed in the policies and program outcomes and are a far departure from
nurturing “maximal citizenship,” akin to “justice-oriented citizens” (Wood et al.
2013). Chong et al. (2016) contended that education for active citizenship could
extend beyond volunteerism or community service to include other forms of critical
and active engagements such as lobbying, advocacy, and participation in demon-
strations. That is not the case in point for the conception of active citizenship in
Singapore yet. An aspiration towards active citizenship, and an education that would
nurture active citizens in Singapore, could therefore be possibly be achieved by
harmonizing three contradictions in the conception of citizenship and citizenship
education, namely, didactic versus dialogic pedagogy, formal-public participation
versus personal-private participation, and conformity versus criticality.

Cross-References

▶ “Being Rooted, Living Global”: Citizenship and Education in the Singapore

City-State
▶ The Development of Civic Participation Among Youth in Singapore

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 Part III
Citizenship and Education in Transnational
Contexts
Discourses of Global Citizenship Education:
The Influence of the Global Middle Classes 33
Miri Yemini and Claire Maxwell

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 524
Discourses and Theorizations of Global Citizenship Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 524
The Encroachment of the Global Middle Classes within Local Educational Landscapes . . . . . 526
The Possible Influence of the GMCs Within Education System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 528
International Baccalaureate (IB) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 529
Integration of Cosmopolitan Values Within the Local Curricula . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 530
The Rising Global Middle Classes – a Positive Development for Global Citizenship
Education Goals? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 532
Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 533
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 533

Abstract
This chapter examines the intersections between a growing “global middle class,”
their emplacement within national education systems, and subsequent changes
within provision of education due to the emergence of this new prominent social
group. We begin with an analysis of the discourses that call forth notions of global
citizenship and global citizenship education – concepts often associated with both
the experiences and needs of the global middle classes. We then examine how the
growing presence of global middle-class students and their families across edu-
cational contexts may be shaping the provision of education and potentially
altering its intended purposes in some cases. This argument is illustrated by a

M. Yemini (*)
Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
e-mail: [email protected]
C. Maxwell
UCL, Institute of Education, London, UK
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 523
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_14
524 M. Yemini and C. Maxwell

discussion focusing on the increasing prominence of International Baccalaureate

programs worldwide, the integration of cosmopolitan values in local curricula,
and a consideration of how mobilities reshape the imaginaries of future
destinations.

Keywords
Global middle class · Global citizenship · International schools

Introduction

The rise of multinational corporations, which have come to dominate the global
economy in the last decades, has been accompanied by the emergence of a new class
of globally mobile professionals. This global professional class provides the expert
knowledge and skills needed to facilitate these business and organizations and
consists of highly skilled professionals who circulate the globe – mostly between
key cities such as New York, London, and Hong Kong (Beaverstock 2017;
Devadason 2017; Meyer 2000). In recent years, researchers have begun to examine
this emergent social group which plays a key role in globalization (Beaverstock
2005; Favell 2008), but still relatively little empirical research exists on this group
(Yemini and Maxwell 2017). The published studies, however, highlight two key
features of this emergent class: frequent mobility and the fostering of a cosmopolitan
identity. In other words, critical to conceptualizing this social group is their hyper-
mobility and their tendency to distance themselves from holding a single, rigid
national identity (Savage et al. 2005).
This chapter critically reviews the contemporary literature in the field of global
citizenship education, with a focus on the emergence of global middle classes and
their increasing presence within local education systems. We begin with an analysis
of the discourses and theorizations that call forth notions of global citizenship and
global citizenship education, as these are linked to the kind of identities and
experiences associated with the “global middle classes” and what they are seeking
from educational provision. We then discuss the possible consequences of the
growing presence of global middle-class students and their families across educa-
tional contexts. This argument is illustrated by a discussion focusing on the increas-
ing prominence of International Baccalaureate programs worldwide, the integration
of cosmopolitan values in local curricula, and a consideration of how mobilities
reshape the imaginaries of future destinations.

Discourses and Theorizations of Global Citizenship Education

The increasing globalization of education (Oxley and Morris 2013) has led to the
reimaging of notions of “citizenship” in classrooms across the world. There is
evidence of a shift from a focus on a unitary national identity within citizenship
33 Discourses of Global Citizenship Education: The Influence of the. . . 525

education to the introduction of cosmopolitanism as a core aspect of relations to

those around us (Bromley 2009). The promotion of nationalistic values is now being
replaced, or supplemented, in many schools, with a more cosmopolitan narrative
about belonging, driven by a concern to prepare students for the changing nature of
modern society, which is viewed by a number of scholars as dominated by compe-
tition at a global level for jobs, economic growth, political power, and so forth
(Brown et al. 2011; Dvir and Yemini 2017; Myers 2016).
Taking a more globally oriented approach to the teaching of citizenship is often
referred to as global citizenship education (GCE). Broadly stated, GCE can be
described as curricular inputs that aim to prepare students to maneuver their way
through a global society, by developing an understanding of global issues, being
empathetic toward people of different origins, having an appreciation of the multi-
cultural, and being able to demonstrate a set of skills relevant to work and interac-
tions in the global sphere (Dill 2013; Oxley and Morris 2013; Yemini and
Furstenberg 2017). GCE-related contents may also include knowledge of other
cultures (Veugelers 2011), being proactive in raising awareness for the need to
protect human rights and the environment, and seeing the self as responsible for
issues that affect other people around the world (Schattle 2008). Many countries now
promote GCE as an overarching goal of education, in general, and specifically
through subjects such as civics and social studies, while others offer variants of
GCE, differentially named the “global dimension” and “global awareness” (Goren
and Yemini 2017c; Oxley and Morris 2013).
Oxley and Morris (2013) offer a useful typology of GCE by creating an integra-
tive model of previous conceptualizations (see Osler and Starkey 2003; Veugelers
2011). Their typology categorizes conceptions of global citizenship as either cos-
mopolitan or advocacy modes. While cosmopolitan conceptions refer to identifica-
tion, global consciousness, and understanding of global relations, advocacy-based
conceptions focus more on global problem-solving. Each category Oxley and Morris
(2013) suggest is subdivided into particular aspects of global citizenship – covering
moral, political, cultural, environmental, and other issues. As in previous typologies
(Veugelers 2011; Dill 2013), here also the links between citizenship education and
global citizenship education are reinforced through attention to global human rights
(Gearon 2016) and environmental education (Jimenez et al. 2017).
Meanwhile, Andreotti (2006) offers a broad conception of GCE, differentiating
between soft and critical GCE. Here, soft GCE could be defined as education about
global citizenship (providing students with an understanding of the world and
cultural tolerance). Arshad-Ayaz et al. (2017: 21) expand on this by suggesting
that soft GCE “. . .proposes the idea of a common humanity heading toward a
common ‘forward,’ in which a privileged few are responsible for the many in a
quest to achieve ‘modernity’ and ‘progress’ for all.” Meanwhile, Andreotti (2006)
argues that critical global citizenship requires a deeper engagement with and
unlearning of common understandings (in other words, education that copes with
the world’s complexities and multidimensionality). Thus, critical GCE, shaped by
post-critical and postcolonial frameworks, seeks to provide students with the skills to
reflect upon and engage with global issues that involve conflict, power, and opposing
526 M. Yemini and C. Maxwell

views. Such an approach facilitates an understanding of the nature of colonial,

liberal, and western assumptions and demands that young people strive for change.
Stein (2015) maps the existing discourses that define GCE, concentrating on the
critical angles of these, and suggests a framework that differentiates between entre-
preneurial, liberal-humanist, and anti-oppressive dimensions. While entrepreneurial
GCE focuses on the students’ skills for success in a global market place within a
neoliberal logic, the liberal-humanist dimension addresses the concepts of
intercultural understanding, empathy, and global human rights. According to
Arshad-Ayaz et al. (2017), dimensions of GCE, such as these two, are heavily
inclined toward a Eurocentric point of view, prolonging and embedding the effects
of colonialization and existing power relations. Thus, the anti-oppressive dimension
focuses on identification and analysis of the existing power relations and calls for
action that will lead to the redistribution of power and equality of access to resources.
Additionally, Stein (2015) emphasizes the “incommensurable” dimension through
her analysis, which promotes a questioning of the concept of GCE. This concept
Arshad-Ayaz et al. (2017: 22) argue “points to epistemic racism inherent in the
articulations of GCE that results in an absence of other perspectives, voices, and
positions – especially from the colonized populations and knowledge systems.”
Both academic and political actors have criticized the concept of global citizenship,
arguing that it could weaken nation-states by providing citizens with an alternative
identity or that the concept itself is moot in the absence of any global governance
structures facilitating the “global society” GC seeks to promote (Bates 2012; Bowden
2003). Critics emphasizing global citizenship’s underlying perils note the possibility
that like globalization, global citizenship could ultimately benefit the world’s dominant
social classes while excluding others (Bates 2012; Goren and Yemini 2017b; Rapoport
2009; Stein 2015), thereby further extending the social inequality it arguably seeks to
challenge. Other critiques of GCE emphasize its ambiguity to both latent and explicit
Eurocentric assumptions (Andreotti 2006). In light of these challenges, arguably the
whole essence of GCE might be questioned, and perhaps central to GCE is facilitative
work with young people to engage critically with the concepts of the global, of
citizenship and of the purpose of education itself.

The Encroachment of the Global Middle Classes within Local

Educational Landscapes

Migration, a phenomenon with a very long history, figures centrally as a key social,
economic, and political question in today’s world (Burrell 2010; Kunz 2016).
Diverse motivations drive people’s migratory practices, including war and persecu-
tion in their home countries, the quest for greater opportunities, the prospect of better
living conditions, and the desire to gain educational qualifications. Traditionally,
research on migration has focused on immigrants from less developed countries who
moved to Western Europe and North America (Burrell 2010; Massey et al. 1993).
More recently, researchers have also begun to explore the mobility practices of other
groups, including various economic elites and highly skilled professionals who
33 Discourses of Global Citizenship Education: The Influence of the. . . 527

migrate between more economically developed nations and have been estimated to
total 57 million people in 2017 (Finaccord 2014). For example, Koh and Wissink
(2017) investigated how the mobilities of the global elites are shaped by the role of
professional intermediaries in their surroundings, while Kunz (2016) addressed the
configurations of race, gender, class, and nationality, in such mobilities.
With the “deterritorialisation of capital” (Embong 2000: 991), it has been argued,
comes the emergence of a transnational capitalist class (TCC) (Sklair 2001) – those
whom control global organizations – and a global middle class (GMC) (Ball 2010).
The GMC, as a transnational service class, facilitates the dominance of the TCC by
providing the necessary expertise and management support for those groups control-
ling the resources in a global network of production, consumerism, and bureaucracy
(Ball 2010; Sassen 2000). This global middle class can be understood as primarily
providing the expert knowledge and skills needed for the operation of multinational
organizations and the maintenance of global networks of production, consumption,
and bureaucracy. It consists of highly skilled professionals who circulate the globe –
mostly moving between key global cities – and serve as the financial and legal
specialists, managers, engineers, and other professional roles, required in the global
economy and system of governance (Beaverstock 2005; Sassen 2000).
In today’s world, mobility has become a key dimension of stratification (Urry
2007). It can be argued that the reasons behind the “push” to exit the nation state will
affect the type of mobility that is initially conceived of. It may also be suggested that
these initial conceptualizations will become malleable following the experiences of
migrants who have of lived elsewhere, including the “pull” factors encountered
along the way. Thus, the extent to which mobility is perceived to have been forced
onto a person (provision of a potential employment opportunity that is critical to
promotion, a strong political motivation to exit), will affect how they potentially
struggle to let go of the ties that bind them to “home” or seek to embrace the
opportunity to accumulate additional and even new types of resources on which
they can later capitalize or in words of Savage et al. (2005) develop “elective
belonging” (p. 46). Even families who strategically seek out trajectories of mobility
may differentially conceptualize the costs and benefits of this for themselves and
their children (affected potentially by the ages of the children, the needs of their
particular employment sector, their experiences once they have settled in a new
geographical space, and the extent to which they experience a habitus clivé (see
Soong et al. 2017) and thus develop a range of strategies to mitigate against these
costs and capitalize on the benefits.
Researchers have found that individuals worldwide employ a range of strategies to
increase their mobility rights, practicing varied ways of entering and exiting certain
states (Harpaz 2013). These might include gaining additional citizenships in more
“prestigious” countries or gaining access to positions that allow such mobility. GMC’s
frequent – and legally sanctioned – mobility across borders sets them apart
(Beaverstock 2005). Mobility not only has the power to stratify groups and individ-
uals, but it also shapes subjectivities. The experience of visiting, working, and residing
in different countries can lead individuals to form new conceptions of themselves and
their national and ethnic identity (Ball and Nikita 2014; Harvey and Beaverstock 2017;
528 M. Yemini and C. Maxwell

Maxwell and Aggleton 2016). Studies of mobile professionals with families note the
importance of the “imagined future” that begins to shape motivations and concerns
around their mobility (Doherty and Shield 2012; Favell 2008). Thus, GMC parents
might seek to ensure their children have access to the resources that could facilitate
their continued high-status mobility in the future and in their own work lives and to
guard their futures against increasing uncertainty. Hence, parental strategies might
focus on developing a proficiency in foreign languages and experiences of frequent
travel, potentially a second passport, and developing a cultural openness and cosmo-
politan attitude to interactions with others.
With regard to identity, the literature on these global professionals has suggested
they experience fluidity in their relationship to the concepts of “home” and “belong-
ing” and are likely to maintain multifarious ties with their countries of origin, new
countries of residence, and via their professional and social networks (Ball and
Nikita 2014). The concept of “global citizenship” has emerged as one that could
describe an alternative identity mode for these individuals and their families which
replaces notions of national citizenship with something more global in scope (Goren
and Yemini 2016; Goren and Yemini 2017a, b, c). Some scholars describe mobile
individuals as cosmopolitan, who hold no strong ties to a specific place or nation
(Andreotti et al. 2013). Though Favell’s (2008) research on “Eurostars” – young
professionals moving around the European Union – found that they still articulate a
connection to their home nation, while also celebrating that mobility had “liberated”
them from some of its more oppressive aspects.
Members of the global middle classes, variously defined, have been estimated to
total 57 million people in 2017 (Finaccord 2014). Thus, we can confidently suggest
that there is an increasing presence of students from GMC families in classrooms
across nation states, particularly in larger urban spaces. Given the size of this
population, it is imperative we examine further their schooling choices and educa-
tion practices, but also more specifically how local schools, and, in turn, national
education systems, respond to these demographic changes. How do educators and
educational institutions interact with this dominant social group and respond to their
articulated values and desires? How do the reimaginings of education and desired
futures promoted by the GMCs shape the wants and needs of local populations in
terms of curricula provision, the kinds of relations that are fostered between various
members of the school community, demands for particular educational credentials,
and the kinds of knowledges and skills that are promoted (Maxwell 2018). In the
next sections, we offer some suggestions for the ways the presence of the GMC is
reshaping education provision and specifically citizenship education.

The Possible Influence of the GMCs Within Education System

Given the increasing presence of GMC within local education systems and the
growing engagement over the possible modes of teaching and conceptualizing
global citizenship education in local and international schools worldwide, it would
be wise to consider possible influences of such transformations on schools. Here we
33 Discourses of Global Citizenship Education: The Influence of the. . . 529

highlight two such visible influences, namely, the abundance of IB in local education
provision and the integration of cosmopolitan outlook into curricula and pedagogy.
We carefully outline each of those phenomena, addressing current scholarly contri-
butions and potential future research directions.

International Baccalaureate (IB)

According to the IB website, the IB organization is described as a “non-profit

educational foundation, established in 1968 offered four programs” of “international
education that develop intellectual, personal, emotional and social skills needed to
live, learn and work in a rapidly globalizing world” (www.ibo.org). The IB organi-
zation has grown substantially through the years, now providing programs in 4775
schools for more than a million students worldwide (data for October 2017 from
www.ibo.org).
With a mission “to develop inquiring, knowledgeable and caring young people
who help to create a better and more peaceful world through intercultural under-
standing and respect,” the IB organization’s focus had been transformed over the
years from a previously largely perceived elite, private, international solution for
mobile professionals to a form of provision that seeks to provide a valid alternative
to national education systems worldwide (Yemini and Dvir 2016). The IB organi-
zation continues to hold a dual, some claim, contested role of providing rigorous
academic curricula together with idealistic elements of peace promotion and the
facilitation of mutual understanding (Tarc 2009). According to the IB organization
data, today 56% of the accredited schools are public, and IB is constantly being
engaged with as a valuable curriculum and credential by governments and national
school systems in different places and contexts (Dvir et al. 2017; Prosser 2018).
Moreover, the IB organization has strategically invested in increasing the recogni-
tion of its flagship diploma program (DP) by higher education institutions around the
world, thereby potentially further embedding the appeal it makes to states’ and
individual institution’s developments to their curricula (Resnik 2016).
One of the major criticisms leveled at the IB organization and the governments
who promote the IB provision in state education systems is that it is elitist and
exclusionary, which in turn will reduce efforts to increase equality through education
(Doherty and Shield 2012; Prosser 2018). Critics identify, for instance, the direct
costs of participation in the IB programs incurred by institutions and therefore local
communities (on students’ fees, cost of “buying” the program to the schools and for
training teachers to facilitate the curriculum) (Kotzyba et al. 2018). Others argue that
the IB is disproportionately promoted to more academically able students (usually
from higher socioeconomic groups), who enter more selective and exclusive IB
tracks within local schools or (private) international schools (Goren and Yemini
2016; Resnik 2016; Yang 2016).
However, the relatively recent expansion of the IB beyond its provision in
international or elite schools has demonstrated its attraction as a credential to
middle-class parents more broadly, looking to secure global competitive advantages
530 M. Yemini and C. Maxwell

for their children (Yemini and Dvir 2016). Its perceived high status, international
branding, securing of a high proficiency in English and additional languages, and the
established links between this credential and securing admission to elite higher
education institutions therefore enthuse a broader range of parents to consider IB
schools or IB tracks in local schools. Additionally, the overrepresentation of pupils
from GMCs in these schools/tracks who already possess “cosmopolitan capital”
(Weenink 2008) gained through previous and planned experiences of mobility
appears to fuel the desire for more nonmobile families to take up the IB (Keßler
and Krüger 2018). Thus, the IB’s expansion is likely to continue to be further
demanded by both local nonmobile and mobile/GMC families, often through
knowledgeable exploitation of governmental funding mechanisms in order to
make this possible (Dvir et al. 2017).
The IB’s mission is constructed in global terms – viewing the “world” instead of a
specific nation as the arena in which young people should be educated. If provision
of, and desire for, the IB is growing – how does this affect the provision of
citizenship education not only in IB schools or institutions with IB tracks but also
in other schools who are competing for recognition in their local/regional/national/
international market? How are these schools – even within local, or nationally, set
curricula engaging with what the IB represents – a global education for a global
future? How might a focus on the global undermine an engagement with local
citizenship issues and conflicts, which young people should arguably be engaging
with? These questions have yet to be fully investigated theoretically and empirically.
Specifically, such examinations must attend to how the nature and character of the
global citizenship education that is delivered which might directly or inadvertently
be reenforcing existing power relations at the local, national, and global levels.

Integration of Cosmopolitan Values Within the Local Curricula

Maxwell (2018) argues that the internationalization of education now flows well
beyond the fenced-off domains of elite private schooling, affecting national and
local education spaces. Internationalization processes can be distinguished as focused
on “internationalization at home” and “internationalization abroad” (Nilsson 2003).
Thus we need to carefully untangle the interpretations and outcomes of international-
ization processes within education institutions, spaces, and systems (Yemini 2015).
For instance, the integration of cosmopolitan values and a desire to create globally
oriented curricular materials through local curricula can be understood as an example
of “internationalization at home.” Cosmopolitanism, in such a reading, which for
many is seen as synonymous to the intended outcomes of global citizenship education,
can be defined as a set of skills and values that enable people to maneuver through a
range of spaces and interactions with “others” (Maxwell and Aggleton 2016). It is
often theorized as a form of cultural capital in Bourdieuan terms (Weenink 2008).
However, other scholars would challenge this conceptualization of cosmopolitanism
as a disposition facilitating the development of comfortable social relations with
“others.” Appiah (2006), for instance, has claimed that particularly since the events of
33 Discourses of Global Citizenship Education: The Influence of the. . . 531

9/11 in the USA, cosmopolitanism should involve an obligation to others beyond the
boundaries of national citizenship and emphasizes the need for a commitment to open,
respectful, intercultural understandings and sensitivity. Appiah’s notion of cosmopoli-
tanism is similar therefore to many conceptualizations of global citizenship in that it
encourages individuals to consider themselves cosmopolitans and promotes empathy
and intercultural knowledge; however, it goes beyond most articulations of global
citizenship through its focus on the ethical aspects of being a member of a global society
and seeks not to emphasize the development of practical skills as a necessary aspects of
navigating and competing on a global stage.
Overall, most implementations of global citizenship education arguably conceive
of cosmopolitism as a form of capital. Particularly in more elite or highly resourced
education spaces, cosmopolitan capital is promoted as critical in the “global war for
talent” (Brown et al. 2011: 9; Bühlmann et al. 2013). However, across education
systems the world over, acquisition of cosmopolitan skills and orientations can be
found within curricula (Friedman 2017; Kotzyba et al. 2018; Prosser 2018). Thus,
teaching and extracurricular opportunities are often focused on meeting this goal –
fostered by parents, further embedded through schools (Keßler and Krüger 2018;
Windle and Nogueira 2015). While traditionally it is the upper (middle) classes who
have been demonstrated to successfully capture and transmit the benefits of different
forms of capital through schooling (Lareau and Weininger 2003; Reay et al. 2011),
data is emerging which suggests that other groups are articulating a desire for the
acquisition of cosmopolitan forms of capital – both mobile and less mobile members
of the middle class (see Yemini and Maxwell 2017).
Parental desires for a cosmopolitanism-infused education, as well as national
education systems’ orientation to the global due to the pressures exerted by interna-
tional policy demands such as PISA (Münch 2018; Sellar and Lingard 2014), are
interpreted and differentially facilitated within individual education institutions and
in particular through the practices of teachers (Goren and Yemini 2016). Various
studies have shown that schools teach students the skills and dispositions they
perceive to be relevant to their students’ respective “imagined futures” (Ball 1993;
Doherty and Shield 2012; Goren and Yemini 2017b). Thus, teachers as critical
agents within these spaces are likely to acknowledge and promote cosmopolitanism
for children to whom such dispositions are deemed most relevant to their current and
anticipated future social status – we see this, for instance, in studies in Israel (Goren
and Yemini 2017b) and Germany (Kotzyba et al. 2018).
Linked to the integration of cosmopolitanism in variable ways within local
curricula is the specific teaching of citizenship education. Ichilov (2002) and
Levinson (2005) have argued that in many countries, schools are perpetuating a
civic/citizenship education gap, where students from higher socioeconomic status
backgrounds are being taught to become active and involved citizens, while students
from lower socioeconomic strata are less well informed of their rights, the structural
conditions that reinforce discrimination, or how they own experiences might have
value beyond “the local.” Goren and Yemini (2017b) have found that the teaching of
GCE is differentiated by the perceived future physical mobility and access to
opportunities for global engagement (i.e., imagined futures) of the students in the
532 M. Yemini and C. Maxwell

classroom. In this way, access to national or local curricula ostensibly infused by a

commitment to the development of cosmopolitan values and orientations will be
differentially taken up and experienced by students. In what ways, therefore, does
the promotion of GCE actually increase and embed inequalities within education?

The Rising Global Middle Classes – a Positive Development

for Global Citizenship Education Goals?

The rise of the global middle classes as a dominant social group across various
education spaces requires a closer examination of how they are affecting the
provision and experience of local schooling. Research should be undertaken which
tracks possible changes and transformations at a multi-scalar level – types of schools
and credential frameworks being offered at a local, regional, or national level; kinds
of values, knowledge, and skills being taught; the social relations experienced within
and across school communities; and the imagined futures being fostered. Potentially,
the increasing presence of GMCs within local schools might encourage a more
in-depth engagement with notions of global citizenship, cosmopolitanism, and
mobility (Ball and Nikita 2014; Yemini and Maxwell 2017) – due to the experiences
of these children and young people but also because of GMC parental desires. The
presence of GMC families, and the increasing focus on GCE found in so many
education spaces, should open up the discursive possibilities for all young people to
see themselves as mobile future subjects and consider the broader world as their
frame of reference (Savage et al. 2005). However, some of the research to date calls
into question the extent to which the “encroachment” of the GMC within education
systems (previously usually educated in international schooling enclaves) could
benefit the broader “local” and, usually, less mobile populations.
Three critical questions emerge from our review of the issues. First, as local
communities, especially in urban centers, become more diversified in terms of
socioeconomic status, extent of mobility (mobility in one direction as part of a
migration trajectory which is oftentimes a type of “forced” mobility, compared to
frequent, more privileged, and financially secure forms of mobility), and histories
of “belonging,” what notions of “citizenship” should schools be engaging with and
facilitating discussion about? Are notions of global citizenship accessible or even
relevant to all, compared to making a commitment to fostering local relations of
citizenship? Second, as demand for an IB education grows – partly driven by the
desires and needs of the GMC – to what extent can this be done in ways that
promote access to all for an education that remains relevant to a diverse set of
future trajectories? Third, how can we support teachers to teach “cosmopolitan-
ism” to all their students, regardless of background, that engage with their past
experiences, frames of references, and aspired-for futures? In these ways, the
emplacement of the GMCs in our education systems requires scholars, policy-
makers, and practitioners to critically reflect and further develop our teaching to
connect students to both the local and global, as well as imagine futures and foster
orientations that will enable them to navigate the various intersections of the local
and global they will encounter.
33 Discourses of Global Citizenship Education: The Influence of the. . . 533

Cross-References

▶ Educational Mobility and Citizenship: Chinese “Foreign Talent” Students in

Singapore and Indian Medical Students in China
▶ International Students: (Non)citizenship, Rights, Discrimination, and Belonging

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Contested Citizenship Education in Settler
Colonies on First Nations Land 34
Sophie Rudolph and Melitta Hogarth

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 538
First Nations Sovereignty and Settler Colonies: An Unsettled Citizenry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 540
Silences and Erasures: The Making of the Settler Citizen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 543
Ethical and Political Dilemmas of Citizenship Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 544
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 546
Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 547
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 547

Abstract
Citizenship education in British settler colonies is no straightforward issue. The
history of colonization, imbued with racism, and the ongoing presence of settler
peoples and their institutions and government on unceded First Nations land,
creates deep citizenship dilemmas. For many years British settler states, such as
Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and America, have sought to silence and subdue
First Nations peoples through policies and practices that marginalize Indigenous
languages, knowledges, and histories. The institution of education has played a
key role in these acts of marginalization. This chapter explores the ethical and
political dilemmas of citizenship and education in these contexts. It examines the
citizenship tensions produced by settler colonies occupying First Nations land,
the making of the settler citizen through education systems dominated by white-
ness, and the limit points for citizenship education under these conditions. It is

S. Rudolph (*)
Melbourne Graduate School of Education, The University of Melbourne,
Melbourne, VIC, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]
M. Hogarth
The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 537
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_77
538 S. Rudolph and M. Hogarth

argued that justice and citizenship education may be incompatible and that a
stance of “anti-citizenship” may be the only possibility for a pathway toward
justice in these settler colonial contexts.

Keywords
Indigenous sovereignty · Settler colonialism · Whiteness · Self-determination

Introduction

We want hope, not racialism,

Brotherhood, not ostracism,
Black advance, not white ascendance:
Make us equals, not dependants.
...
Make us neighbours, not fringe-dwellers;
Make us mates, not poor relations,
Citizens, not serfs on stations.
Must we native Old Australians
In our own land rank as aliens?
Banish bans and conquer caste,
Then we’ll win our own at last.
Excerpt from Aboriginal Charter of Rights, Oodgeroo Noonuccal. (This poem can be
viewed in full here: https://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/noonuccal-oodgeroo/poems/
aboriginal-charter-of-rights-0719030)

In the above poem, famous Australian Aboriginal poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal calls
to attention the racism of the settler state and the marginalizing effects of such
racism. The full poem is worth a read. This draws attention to the way in which
“citizenship” is attributed differently to the people held within a settler state and
how certain characteristics have counted toward citizenship recognition. In this
chapter, we argue that these contexts of the settler state raise ethical and political
dilemmas for citizenship education that can have challenging consequences in the
classroom.
Citizenship education has already been proven to be a difficult thing to define. For
example, it may refer to teaching about democracy, governance, and parliamentary
and legislative processes. Smyth describes this as curriculum “about” citizenship and
a kind of learning that is frequently passive (Smyth 2016, p. 308). Other conceptions
of citizenship education focus on “active” citizenship or youth civic and political
action (see ▶ Chap. 57, “Education for Youth Civic and Political Action in Austra-
lia,” in this handbook by Peterson, Black, & Walsh). As Zembylas (▶ Chap. 58,
“Affective Citizenship and Education in Multicultural Societies: Tensions, Ambiv-
alences, and Possibilities,” this volume) points out, an interest in “affective citizen-
ship” has also emerged in recent years. Affective citizenship is linked to the idea of
belonging to the nation and the feelings that are encouraged and experienced in
relation to such belonging (▶ Chap. 58, “Affective Citizenship and Education in
34 Contested Citizenship Education in Settler Colonies on First Nations Land 539

Multicultural Societies: Tensions, Ambivalences, and Possibilities,” this volume).

This present chapter is also interested in the notion of belonging, however, it centers
on the dilemma of belonging within the context of settler colonial states and, in
particular, settler states connected to the British Empire.
What we hope to do in this chapter, therefore, is to firstly in the section following
the introduction illustrate the ways in which settler states produce an unsettled
citizenry due to the tensions produced by invasion and occupation of First Nations
land. Next, we will examine some of the silences and erasures in education systems
in settler colonies that contribute to the making of the settler citizen. In the third
section, we will raise and discuss some of the ethical and political dilemmas for
citizenship education that arise in settler colonies. And we will conclude with a
contention that in order to address these dilemmas, anti-citizenship education is a
possibility worthy of consideration. We will outline what we see as some options for
anti-citizenship education and what this may enable in terms of creating a citizenry
in settler colonial contexts that is more aware of the tensions of belonging and more
able to navigate the knowledge and relationships necessary to shape futures in which
First Nations peoples experience justice.
Citizenship within a settler state is complex because sovereignty and belonging
are contested. As Canadian scholars Eve Tuck and Wayne K. Yang have pointed out,
settler colonialism insists on making a home and asserting sovereignty over land that
has not been ceded by Indigenous communities (2012, p. 5); “settler colonialism is
the specific formation of colonialism in which the colonizer comes to stay, making
himself the sovereign, the arbiter of citizenship, civility, and knowing” (Tuck and
Gaztambide-Fernandez 2013, p. 73). The settler state, therefore, creates a set of
citizenship requirements that overlook the settler relationship to First Nations com-
munities and the laws, lore, and obligations such communities uphold on their land.
The strong ties between citizenship, sovereignty, laws, rights, and belonging, there-
fore, create many tensions to navigate in settler colonial states. As Australian First
Nations scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson has pointed out:

Citizenship is more than a status associated with a bundle of rights; it is also the formal
contract by which the sovereignty of a nation is extended to the individual in exchange for
being governed. Who can and who cannot contract into this status and what rights are able to
be exercised is also shaped by who possesses the nation. (Aileen Moreton-Robinson
(30 May, 2017, para 14), Retrieved from https://www.abc.net.au/religion/citizenship-exclu
sion-and-the-denial-of-indigenous-sovereign-rig/10095738))

Moreton-Robinson has argued that the settler nation is socially, culturally, and
politically constructed as a white possession such that settlers within this nation
derive a sense of belonging from ownership of land/property understood within the
logic of capital (2015).
New Zealander scholars Alison Jones and Te Kawehau Hoskins (one Pakeha and
one Maori), working within these tensions of the settler state, point out that these
conditions and operations of a settler state mean that speaking to (or writing to) an
audience of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people has challenges (2016,
p. 78). This is a dilemma for us here too. For a sense of belonging in a settler state
540 S. Rudolph and M. Hogarth

for a non-Indigenous person rests on the denial of belonging by the settler state for an
Indigenous person. Indeed, even in our writing team, we confront these tensions as
each of us is positioned differently within the settler state and its governing appara-
tus. The first author is a white, settler Australian, who is positioned within the
“Australian citizenry” as belonging to the Australian settler state. She has been
schooled as “fitting in,” speaking the “right” language, and having the right to
speak. However, while officially belonging to the settler state, she also feels the
tension that exists through having been born on and now living and working on
unceded First Nations land. The second author is an Aboriginal woman whose
experience of the settler state is frequently one of denial, silencing of Indigeneity,
denial of sovereignty, and so forth. However, she also must work and act within the
institutions, laws, and governance of the settler state and vote in a system that does
not recognize her peoples’ sovereignty or adequately represent her peoples’ views
and voices. In this chapter we explore the effects of these positionalities and how
education might better attend to and understand the ways citizens are shaped and
how they might imagine new relationships.

First Nations Sovereignty and Settler Colonies: An Unsettled

Citizenry

O Canada!
Your home’s on Mi’kmaw land
True genocidal drive
By all your Queen’s command
...
O Canada, our Nation is still here
O Canada! We stand guard against thee.
Excerpt from Oh Canada! Your Home’s on Mi’kmaw Land by Pamela Palmater

The persistent denial of Indigenous sovereignty and the usurpation of Indigenous

lands by white settler states maintain a narrative of “salvation.” As the poem by
Canadian First Nations poet Pamela Palmater above demonstrates, the sovereignty
and survival of Indigenous peoples continues. Palmater reminds the colonizer that
they are on the unceded lands of Mi’kmaw land. The relationship with, and respon-
sibility to, Mother Earth does not cease because of the presence of non-Indigenous
peoples, their laws, and governing apparatus.
Maaka and Andersen make apparent the complexities produced by colonization
stating that “understanding both historical and contemporary forms of colonization is
essential to understanding Indigenous Peoples, as their place in both national and
global societies has been framed by their displacement by other more dominant
political-ethnic groups, a process commonly referred to as colonization” (Maaka and
Andersen 2006, p. 13). British sovereignty over what it claimed as its colonies
created a situation in which Indigenous sovereignty was overwritten. First Nations
people have never ceded their sovereignty to Britain; however, through domination
34 Contested Citizenship Education in Settler Colonies on First Nations Land 541

and exploitation, British colonists set up a “home” (Tuck and Yang 2012) on
Indigenous land.
This “homemaking” is perhaps most stark in the case of Australia in which the
claim of “terra nullius” was made in order to justify colonial occupation (see
Moreton-Robinson 2011). Colonists in each of the British colonies, therefore,
chose to ignore the rich cultural and educational practices that already existed on
the lands they invaded. While the interactions between colonizers and Indigenous
peoples were different in the various British colonies with some negotiating treaties,
the overarching experience was one in which British systems, knowledges, and laws
dominated, while First Nations peoples, their knowledges, and practices were
oppressed and frequently suffered deep violences. Over time they would make
Indigenous peoples subjects of the British Crown and then enable them to vote
and ostensibly hold the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. However, deep
tensions remained, and violences perpetrated by the settler state toward Indigenous
peoples have not ceased. For example, Indigenous peoples in all of the British settler
colonies discussed in this chapter continue to be overrepresented in the prison
system and experience racism in a range of settler institutions, including schools,
hospitals, and aged care (see Moodie et al. 2019; Blagg and Anthony 2018).
The acts of domination that characterized invasion and occupation in British
colonies created the settler colonies of today in which the presence of First Nations
communities – their survival, strength, and ongoing reminders that they have not
ceded sovereignty – creates tension for the settler state. Settler colonial theorist
Patrick Wolfe has proposed that settler colonialism has relied on a “logic of elimi-
nation” in which Indigenous peoples are seen to be in a process of assimilation into
the settler state, effectively removing their presence (1994). However, while the
settler state may be governed or propelled by this logic, First Nations communities
have defied the settler state and refused to be assimilated, and it is this tension that
illuminates the problems of the authority of the settler state.
Drawing on the notion of self-determination advocated within the United Nations
Declaration on the rights of Indigenous peoples, Indigenous peoples have the right to
“freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and
cultural development” (United Nations General Assembly 2008, p. 4). While the
power of the settler state may make this right difficult to enact, First Nations
communities in British settler colonies have found creative ways to refuse and resist
the settler state’s definition of their status and subjectivity within the settler colony.
For example, Canadian Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson examines the complex
process of political sovereignty and governance practiced by the Kahnawà:ke
Mohawks of the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois Confederacy in North America
(2014). She argues that these sovereign practices exist within the settler colonial
sovereignty and create challenges and tensions over power and recognition
(Simpson 2014). Similarly, Indigenous peoples asserting their self-determination
and resistance are evident with the occupation of Alcatraz Island on the west coast
of the United States. The island was occupied in 1964, albeit briefly by five Sioux
men, and then two occupations occurred in November of 1969 (Johnson 1994). The
initial occupation occurred with a misinterpretation of the 1868 Sioux Treaty
542 S. Rudolph and M. Hogarth

whereby Alcatraz was reclaimed as traditional lands because of administrative

tardiness by settler colonial governmental institutions. Despite only lasting 4 h, the
protesters called for a cultural center and an Indian university to be established. In
doing so, the protesters unsettled the settler state and established their sovereignty on
stolen lands.
Zoe Todd, Métis anthropologist and scholar of Indigenous studies and human-
animal studies, has examined the ways that First Nations people in Canada continue
to use Indigenous legal orders and philosophies to maintain relationships and
responsibilities to place (2018). She recounts how “Paulatuuq is where I learned
about how people and fish, together, work to disrupt, refuse and challenge the ways
in which the Canadian state imposes its understandings of land, property, conserva-
tion, and law” (2018, p. 61). Thus the relationships and responsibilities envisioned
through settler citizenship are disrupted and disputed through First Nations practices.
In similar ways Megan Bang and colleagues explore the urban spaces of what is now
known as Chicago, re-storying the city as Indigenous lands (2014). These creative
First Nations responses to colonization mean the settler colonial logic of elimination
cannot be realized, and this positions the settler state as always less settled than it
imagines it might be.
In Australia, Aboriginal nation-building projects have emerged in recent
decades that assert Indigenous sovereignty. The Ngarrindjeri Regional Authority
in South Australia exemplifies how nations (re)building has been operationalized;
their traditions and knowledges are listened to and respected by countering colo-
nial governance structures and entities through the privileging of their rights as
traditional custodians of Country (see Bauman et al. 2015; Hemming et al. 2017,
2019). Another example of Indigenous nation builiding in Australia is a Wiradjeri
project that utilises digital creativity to strengthen nationhood and bring the past,
present and future together (Akama et al. 2017). These refusals of settler citizen-
ship privileges an Indigenous notion of belonging through responsibilities to
Country.
Further examples of resistance have sought to proffer provocations about Western
education systems illustrating how dominant ideologies and practices become com-
mon understandings through education. Hogarth (2019) calls attention to the prom-
inence of Standard Australian English within the Australian education system. While
Australia does not have an official national language, it is assumed within the public
sphere that all citizens will speak, write, and learn in the colonizer’s language. She
questions the acts of citizenship and the position of the settler state within education
spaces where Standard Australian English is an expectation and measure of success.
These examples demonstrate how unceded First Nations sovereignty in settler
colonies produces a settler state that is constantly unsettled by First Nations resis-
tance and survival. The presence of First Nations communities reminds the settler
state that it is on stolen land and therefore the settler citizenry is unsettled and
uncertain. The First Nations community, which refuses to be defined and captured by
the settler state, but still has to function within their governing practices much of the
time, may also be unsettled by this unresolved tension and the constant struggle for
justice.
34 Contested Citizenship Education in Settler Colonies on First Nations Land 543

The unsettled citizenry that is produced by the largely unresolved tension of

settler states existing on unceded First Nations land raises questions for education
and citizenship education, in particular. For example, what are the options for
asserting belonging and citizenship in Australia for both Indigenous and settler
people? How are these options for belonging and citizenship constrained for both
Indigenous and settler peoples by the unresolved and ongoing colonizing forces of
the settler state over First Nations land? We will explore these questions in greater
detail below. In the next section, we examine what happens in the education system
to enable settler citizenship to be made and maintained.

Silences and Erasures: The Making of the Settler Citizen

And no matter what happens in these times of breaking

No matter dictators, the heartless, and liars
No matter—you are born of those
Who kept ceremonial embers burning in their hands
All through the miles of relentless exile.
Excerpt from For Earth’s Grandsons, by Joy Harjo. (This excerpt can be found on this
website: https://www.americanindianmagazine.org/story/strong-words)

The excerpt from the poem by American First Nations poet Joy Harjo that begins this
section highlights the violence of the colonial process, the losses and the grief, and
yet also the continuing strength of First Nations ancestors. The institution of
education is known to have contributed to the violences of colonialism through
silencing and erasing Indigenous histories, knowledges, languages, and cultures (see
Herbert 2012; Rose 2012). And it is through the systematic denial of Indigenous
sovereignty, cultural, intellectual, and spiritual traditions that the schooling system in
settler colonial contexts became a place to produce the white settler citizen (and not
only through citizenship education).
The settler state thus uses education – in particular schooling, but also other forms
of education – to shape the settler citizen. This can happen through citizenship
education curriculum and in the form of particular civics and citizenship initiatives,
such as “values education” that was introduced into Australian schools by the
Howard government in the early 2000s. (See Battlelines drawn on values (2005,
September 5). The Age. https://www.theage.com.au/education/battlelines-drawn-on-
values-20050905-ge0t1o.html.) However, the school curriculum is also designed to
“normalize” and protect certain kinds of knowledge and values that uphold settler
subjectivity as “superior” to other ways of knowing, being, and doing. This was
evident in the review of the Australian National Curriculum in 2014 in which
(conservative, white, settler) reviewers appointed by the government called for a
renewed emphasis on Judeo-Christian values and knowledge (see Donnelly and
Wiltshire 2014). As discussed in the previous section, American school systems also
bolster the settler state through the silencing of histories such as the reclamation of
Alcatraz Island in 1964 and later by the larger organized grouping known as Indians
of All Tribes (Johnson 1994).
544 S. Rudolph and M. Hogarth

The curriculum in settler contexts is making not only the settler citizen but a
certain kind of settler citizen. By focusing on and defending schools and school
curricula as places for Western knowledge and values, the settler state uses the
education system to bolster white supremacy. White supremacy is shaped through
domination. As North American scholar Zeus Leonardo explains, it is made
through a historical process, and “it does not form out of random acts of hatred,
although these are condemnable, but rather out of a patterned and enduring treatment
of social groups” (2004, p. 139). Thus the historical and sustained treatment of First
Nations communities in settler states as inferior to whites – an idea enhanced through
the education system – means citizenship education, and education more broadly
sees and acts for the white, settler citizen. And in doing this, it also tries to make
those deemed “non-white” fit into its citizenry through assimilation.
Leonardo uses Charles Mills’ theory of the Racial Contract to argue that part of
this contract involves an “epistemological subcontract.” He suggests:

In Mills’ estimation, the RC [Racial Contract] is an agreement among Whites to misinterpret

the world as it is. It is grounded on an epistemology that lacks consistency and defies logic
but does not produce cognitive dissonance because it remains consistent with the RC [Racial
Contract]. (2015, p. 92)

And through this process, it is argued that a “willful white ignorance” is produced
(Leonardo 2015, pp. 92–93). This can be seen in the research discussed by Licho Lopez
Lopez and colleagues in which a school in Melbourne, Australia, enacted curriculum
that privileged a settler perspective, encouraged students to take on a settler subjectivity,
and erased Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination (López López et al. 2019).
Another example of the willful white ignorance used to produce the settler citizen
in schools is research carried out by Gumbaynggirr scholar Lilly Brown, with
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people in New South Wales,
Australia. Here, high school students reported the continued silencing and erasure
of Aboriginal history and knowledge and the violence of colonialism in their
classrooms (Brown 2018). They also reported experiences with teachers who
enacted willful white ignorance, demonstrating the intergenerational power of a
schooling system to maintain the dominance of a white settler citizenry.
These circumstances of settler schooling have resulted in many First Nations
communities calling for schools and universities to be part of a “truth-telling” process
in which students learn about the history of their nation-state that has been willfully
held away from schools and curricula (see, e.g., Appleby and Davis 2018). In the next
section, we demonstrate how this situation creates ethical and political dilemmas for
citizenship education in these contexts and education more broadly.

Ethical and Political Dilemmas of Citizenship Education

So tell us to be quiet and know that we won’t.

This is our language. We are reclaiming it. We will speak it.
Because our bodies weren’t built for silence. We will speak it.
Until every ear drop is bruised. We will speak it.
34 Contested Citizenship Education in Settler Colonies on First Nations Land 545

Excerpt from poem by Ngā Hinepūkōrero. (This poem is performed by a slam poetry group
and can be accessed here: https://www.renews.co.nz/reo-read/)

The poem excerpt that begins this section is by a collective of young Maori women
who perform poetry in Te Reo Maori and discuss the importance of language for
building strong identities and asserting self-determination on Indigenous land,
governed by the settler state. This poem demonstrates their defiance and highlights
the violence that settler citizenship education can do if it does not account for the
issues we have raised above.
The situation that these British settler colonies we have discussed are in, where
the settler state cannot fully recognize the sovereignty of First Nations peoples due
to the risk of unsettling and undermining its imposed sovereignty and governing
power and authority, creates some major challenges for citizenship education in
settler schools. The most basic of these is the question of who is actually consid-
ered a citizen. If the settler institution and curriculum only ever recognize a citizen
as one who has assimilated into the processes and practices of the settler state, then
First Nations students will be marginalized by the citizenship curricula, somewhat
like the students who Lilly Brown spoke to about the history curricula in
Australia (2018).
Citizenship curriculum that is premised on a stable and authoritative settler state
both undermines First Nations sovereignty and, as we have discussed above, rein-
forces white supremacy. This creates a problem for schools that are both trying to
include Indigenous knowledges, histories, and cultures in the curriculum and also
teach citizenship education that denies the value of Indigenous knowledges, histo-
ries, and cultures. This may also point to why the inclusion of Indigenous content in
the curriculum in British settler states has been difficult to achieve in any deep and
lasting way (see, e.g., Maxwell et al. 2018). These unresolved sovereignty matters
even make it difficult to name nations, as to talk of Australia, Canada, America, or
New Zealand is to invoke the colonized land and to talk of a settler state within these
contexts is also to reinforce the dominant frameworks and practices.
Another problem that emerges through citizenship education that focuses on
the settler state and does not address the tensions of ongoing First Nations
sovereignty and knowledges in the current nation-states is that the colonial binary
of “us” and “them” is reinforced. As First Nations Australian scholar Shino
Konishi has shown, subjectivity in settler governed contexts is not often straight-
forward (2019). She points out the challenges of accounting for the diversity of
local histories and the “supple and complex nature of both Indigenous identities
and the ways in which we form connections to country, culture, kin, and new-
comers” (2019, p. 20). At the same time by creating the colonial binary of
us/them, or Indigenous/settler, those who are settlers in these contexts (which is
also an incredibly diverse and complex subjectivity) may decide they do not want
a part in citizenship that continues to do the violence of the settler state.
Citizenship education that does not or cannot engage with these complexities of
subjectivity, identity, and belonging in contemporary First Nations/settler colonial
environments risks reinforcing colonial binaries and continuing the silencing and
erasure of First Nations knowledges and sovereignty. Thus, we suggest citizenship
546 S. Rudolph and M. Hogarth

education that is actively interested in these tensions, complexities, and challenges

should consider teaching also about anti-citizenship. When citizenship is about
upholding the violences of the settler state through the continual denial of First
Nations sovereignty, self-determination, rights, and recognition, we see citizenship
education as unviable in our current moment. Citizenship education asks young
people to foster a sense of belonging to a nation-state that does not take responsi-
bility for its history and allows institutional racism and violence to continue. Anti-
citizenship education is opposed to the requirements of belonging that are written
into the citizenship contract in settler colonial settings.
Anti-citizenship education would therefore open a space for confronting the truth-
telling that First Nations communities have called for, it would highlight the acts of
resistance and refusal from First Nations communities, and it would demonstrate the
limitations of the authority of the settler state. It also gives settler students a way of
standing in solidarity with First Nations communities, rather than their belonging as
citizens resting on the denial of the rights of their fellow community members. In this
way, anti-citizenship education provides a much more likely path to justice and
reconciliation than does citizenship education. It also allows for the tensions of
settler governance on First Nations land to be visible rather than covered over or
pushed aside.
Anti-citizenship education may not be a long-standing educational necessity. It
may instead be a short-term project, in which students are exposed to the histories of
violence that were perpetrated by the settler state (truth-telling) and to the acts of
resistance by First Nations communities that defy assimilationist logics (survival and
endurance). Anti-citizenship education may, therefore, be a door into a future that
imagines citizenship differently; that seeks relationships between Indigenous and
non-Indigenous peoples and between First Nations communities and the state; that
does not repeat the violences of the past, but takes account of those violences
and seeks to remedy them. This would be a future in which belonging was not
predicated on the authority of the settler state but also a future that does not ignore
the history, politics, and complexities of belonging.

Conclusion

This chapter has considered the thorny problem of citizenship education within the
context of British settler states on First Nations Country. It has examined the
complexities that this situation poses for citizenship and belonging. The challenges
that arise through an unsettled citizenry in these contexts were illustrated through
looking at both the ways the settler state maintains its authority and the ways First
Nations communities have refused the confines of settler governance. The way in
which the education system in settler contexts works to shape and maintain a settler
citizenship was demonstrated through examples of curriculum silencing, erasure,
and white dominance. Finally, the chapter explored some of the ethical and political
dilemmas that arise for citizenship education within the contexts of First Nations/
settler colonial spaces. While it is difficult to resolve these challenges easily, it was
34 Contested Citizenship Education in Settler Colonies on First Nations Land 547

proposed that an anti-citizenship element to citizenship education might better

enable the tensions discussed here to be present and explored in the classroom. It
was also suggested that this orientation to citizenship education may enable stronger
possibilities for the inclusion of Indigenous content in the curriculum and the pursuit
of truth-telling initiatives in schools, opening up a better avenue for justice for First
Nations communities in British settler states.

Cross-References

▶ Affective Citizenship and Education in Multicultural Societies: Tensions, Ambiv-

alences, and Possibilities
▶ Education for Youth Civic and Political Action in Australia

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enous peoples. Retrieved from http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/DRIPS_en.pdf
Wolfe, P. (1994). Nation and miscegenation: Discursive continuity in the post-Mabo era. Social
Analysis, 36, 93–152.
“Being Rooted, Living Global”: Citizenship
and Education in the Singapore City-State 35
Charleen Chiong and Saravanan Gopinathan

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 550
Setting the Context: Historical Overview of Citizenship Education in Singapore . . . . . . . . . . . . 551
The “Ideal Citizen” (1965–1978) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 551
“Asian Values” and Social Cohesion (1979–1996) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 553
Coping with Globalization (1997–2011) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 553
Coping with Anti-Globalization (2011–Present) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 554
Managing the Challenges of Globalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 554
Developing National Identity and Rootedness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 555
Balancing Between Autonomy and Control in Teaching and Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 557
Fostering Deep, Genuine Critical Thinking Skills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 558
Building Social Cohesion Amidst Growing Inequality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 560
Recommendations to Improve Citizenship Education Provision . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 561
Reconceptualize “Citizenship” for a Changing Social Reality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 561
Involve More Voices in Reshaping Citizenship Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 561
Develop a Deep, Contextualized Approach to Teaching Citizenship for All . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 562
Develop a Whole-School Approach to Citizenship Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 563
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 563
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 564

Abstract
Singapore was first described as a “global city” in 1972 and remains highly-
ranked today according to various globalization indices, such as openness to
international trade (S.T. [The Straits Times], Singapore jumps two spots to rank

C. Chiong (*)
Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
e-mail: [email protected]
S. Gopinathan
Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 549
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_18
550 C. Chiong and S. Gopinathan

sixth in Global Cities index. The Straits Times. Retrieved from http://www.
straitstimes.com/business/singapore-jumps-two-spots-to-rank-sixth-in-global-cit
ies-index. Accessed 11 May 2018, 2017). Citizenship education in Singapore
partly reflects this global orientation; for instance, preparing its future workforce
for the “global knowledge economy” is a key objective of citizenship education in
Singapore. Yet, seemingly paradoxically, an orientation towards national interests
and the development of national identity is strongly reflected in citizenship
education. Politically, Singapore is described as a “strong,” developmental state
that exercises ideological leadership over society, including the education domain
(Lim, J Educ Policy 31(6):711–726, 2016; Gopinathan, Glob Soc Educ 5(1):
53–70, 2007; Gopinathan, Are we all global citizens now? Reflections on citi-
zenship and citizenship education in a Globalising world (with special reference
to Singapore). Hong Kong: Centre for Governance and Citizenship/The Hong
Kong Institute of Education, 2012).
This chapter synthesizes literature on how the Singapore state is managing
globalizing forces, in and through citizenship education. First, we provide a
historical perspective on this question. Second, we identify and discuss four
ongoing challenges attributed in literature to globalization and globalizing con-
ditions, in the state’s project to develop ideal citizens: (1) developing national
identity and rootedness, (2) balancing autonomy and control in teaching and
learning citizenship, (3) fostering deep, genuine critical thinking in a system
with performative and instrumentalist orientations, and (4) building social cohe-
sion amidst growing inequality. Finally, we draw on literature to develop recom-
mendations on ways to develop forms of citizenship education that are more
responsive to current sociopolitical realities.

Keywords
Singapore · Globalization · Citizenship education · Global knowledge economy ·
Social cohesion

Introduction

The Republic of Singapore has a population of 5.6 million, and a multiethnic

composition of 75% Chinese, 13% Malay-Muslim, and 8% Indian. Singapore gained
independence in 1965, following a short-lived, politically fraught merger between
Chinese-majority Singapore and Malay-majority Malaya. The merger’s abrupt fail-
ure meant that nearly overnight, the Singapore state, headed by the People’s Action
Party (PAP), which remains in power today, became responsible for a small country
in precarious circumstances: a Chinese-majority city-state surrounded by potentially
hostile Muslim-majority neighbors (Rahim 2012), with high unemployment levels
and no natural resources except for a port (Gopinathan 2012). Indeed, the govern-
ment characterized this as the “survival” period. Over the next three decades,
Singapore underwent a rapid transition from a third-world ex-colony to a first-
world economy and “global city” (Sim and Ho 2010).
35 “Being Rooted, Living Global”: Citizenship and Education. . . 551

Yet, Singapore’s relationship with the “global” is complex. The Singapore state
has been described as “conservative,” “soft authoritarian,” “paternalistic,” and
“strong” (see Wee 2001; Lim and Apple 2016); it exercises ideological leadership
over economy and society, including the education domain (Gopinathan 2007).
Much research suggests that despite recognizing the myriad challenges of
inherently-divergent globalization and making “tactical” adjustments (Koh 2007),
the state retains an ultimately nation-centric “convergent” conception of citizenship
education (Sim 2013).
Understanding “globalization” in a specific context is valuable in grasping the
concrete instantiations of “global” trends (Sassen 2007) and how these trends
intersect with a nation’s sociopolitical and historical fabric. In this chapter, “global-
ization” is defined as the spatio-temporal processes of increasing interdependence
and interconnectedness of human activity, in economic (hyper-liberalism), political
(governance without government), and cultural (consumerism and diversity)
domains (Dale 2000; Verger et al. 2011). “Citizenship” refers to a status entailing
rights and responsibilities that define how individuals should relate to specific
polities (local, national, or global) or fellow citizens. Thus, “citizenship education”
refers to education aimed at preparing individuals for this ideal relationship to
particular polities or fellow citizens.
This chapter draws on theoretical and empirical research to understand how the
Singapore state is managing globalization-related challenges vis-à-vis its own
national interests, in and through citizenship education. The chapter has three
aims: firstly, to provide a historical perspective on the question; secondly, to identify
key globalization-related challenges and ways in which the state is managing these
challenges; and thirdly, to summarize recommendations on more relevant (and thus
more effective) forms of citizenship education.

Setting the Context: Historical Overview of Citizenship Education

in Singapore

In order to contextualize Singapore’s current challenges regarding citizenship edu-

cation, this section provides a brief overview of the historical development of
citizenship education (for a more comprehensive history, see Gopinathan 2012;
Lee 2013; Chia 2015). A summary of reforms is presented in Table 1.

The “Ideal Citizen” (1965–1978)

Following independence in 1965, political leaders frequently referenced the small

city-state’s vulnerability. This laid the groundwork for an enduring state-citizen
social compact, whereby the state provides material benefits and security, in
exchange for citizens’ economic productivity, contribution to social order, and
support for the current government (Weninger and Kho 2014).
In the city-state’s early days, then-Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew conceptualized
attributes of the “ideal citizen” as disciplined, hardworking, and submissive to
552 C. Chiong and S. Gopinathan

Table 1 Citizenship education policy reforms. (Adapted from Lee 2013)

Citizenship
Emphasis of policy education
Phase reform curriculum Pedagogic approach
The “ideal citizen” Developing “good” “Ethics” (1959) Didactic/instructional
(1959–1978) citizens “Civics” (1967)
Nation-building and “Education for
civic knowledge living” (1973) Values clarification
“Review of moral (deliberation, debate,
education” arriving at own conclusion)
(1978)
“Asian values” Refining and “Good citizens”
and social clarifying (1981) Emphasizing shared values
cohesion multiculturalism “Being and
(1979–1996) and values becoming”
National solidarity Reasoning, criticality
(1981)
and cohesion “Religious
knowledge”
Multiple process-based
(1981)
teaching approaches
“Social studies”
(primary) (1981)
Coping with National solidarity “Civics and
globalization and cohesion moral education”
(1997–2011) Balancing global (1994)
(economic) and “National
national agendas Education”
(1997)
“Social studies”
(secondary)
(2001)
Coping with anti- National solidarity “Character and
globalization and cohesion citizenship
(2011–present) Balancing global education”
(economic) and (2014)
national agendas
Twenty-first-century
competencies

leaders. Collective (national) responsibilities, rather than individual rights, were

emphasized; such values had a deliberate, distinctively “Asian” flavor (Gopinathan
2012). The choice of English as the administrative language was viewed as poten-
tially corruptive, especially to the Chinese-educated; yet, the largely English-
educated political elite argued successfully that it provided access to Western
knowledge, technology, and markets. The balancing between “Western” and
“Asian” traditions became a crucial, persistent strand in citizenship education
policy debates.
Furthermore, public education – a “common space” – was viewed as a key site for
nation-building. Thus, a centralized system emerged, where schools were expected
35 “Being Rooted, Living Global”: Citizenship and Education. . . 553

to closely implement Ministry of Education (MOE) directives. Citizenship education

programs in this phase focused on fostering national identity, loyalty, and civic
consciousness.

“Asian Values” and Social Cohesion (1979–1996)

As Singapore rapidly modernized, and its interactions with Western economies

intensified – political discourse on “Asian Values” (emphasizing community, duty
and morality) against “Western” (decadent, individualistic) values grew increasingly
prominent (Chia 2011). The political elite were concerned that young, affluent
Singaporeans would become individualistic, materialistic, and “Westernized.” Fur-
thermore, given the plural, immigrant nature of Singapore society, Singaporean
politicians urgently focused on developing a communitarian framework for citizen-
ship education, based on “Asian Values” (Weninger and Kho 2014).
Comprehensive moral education programs focused on nation-building emerged
(Chia 2011). Values/moral education and citizenship education are typically (and
continue to be) conflated in Singapore (Chia 2011; Tan and Tan 2014). The 1991
“Shared Values” White Paper, for example, summarized Singapore’s core values as
“nation before community and society above self,” “consensus not conflict,” and
“racial and religious harmony”; this document shaped the “ideal citizen” citizenship
education was intended to develop.

Coping with Globalization (1997–2011)

With global and regional developments such as the 1997 Asian financial crisis,
emerging challenges generated by globalizing forces became prominent. These
challenges included: growing economic unpredictability, widening income inequal-
ity, managing an immigrant influx into Singapore as per “foreign talent” policies to
increase manpower for the knowledge economy, growing class-based stratification
via schooling policies, religious radicalization and the rise of cultural and identity
politics (which introduced notions of multiple, hybrid identities, against a singular
conception of shared Singaporean identity).
In response, the “Thinking Schools, Learning Nation” (TSLN) policy framework
was launched in 1997 – a marker of serious state engagement with the economic and
noneconomic challenges of globalization (Deng et al. 2013b). Noteworthy features
of TSLN include: (1) developing skills for the global knowledge economy –
especially critical thinking and information technology skills, (2) National Education
(a form of citizenship education), aimed at developing strong national identity and
confidence in Singapore. Social Studies, a subject that remains compulsory for
Singaporeans aged 15–17 years old, was introduced. Its motto: “Being rooted, living
global” conveys the complex global-local relations that continue to operate in
Singaporean citizenship education.
554 C. Chiong and S. Gopinathan

Coping with Anti-Globalization (2011–Present)

In the 2011 General Election, while the PAP retained overall power, it received a
significantly smaller proportion of popular votes than expected. This decline may be
attributed to unpopular immigration policies, fueled by broader discontents
concerning slowing social mobility and high costs of living, and sentiments that
policy-makers were out of touch (Koh and Chong 2014). Young Singaporeans
demonstrated that they were not a passive citizenry in a “strong” state; they actively
attended rallies and voted against the PAP (Zhang 2013).
In the most recent curriculum iteration, Curriculum 2015, the MOE introduced
the “Framework for 21st-Century Competencies” – a compilation of a range of
higher-order competencies students should develop – under the rationale that glob-
alization is a key driving force of the future; as such, “students will have to be
prepared to face these challenges and seize the opportunities brought about by these
forces” (MOE 2015). Accompanying this framework was the “Character and Citi-
zenship Education” (CCE) program, which emphasized familiar themes of national
identity, community relationships, and the common good (Ho 2017).
Overall, we argue the Singapore state has played an active, interventionist role in
citizenship education policy reforms. To an extent this is understandable, given
Singapore’s history and the nation-building imperatives that arose from this. Rapid
reforms between 1965 and present-day demonstrate the state’s anxiety to develop
appropriate civic skills and values, in response to what was often viewed as
supranationally-constituted challenges (Alviar-Martin and Baildon 2016). Most
literature exploring the relationship between globalization and citizenship education
in Singapore focuses on how the state is managing various challenges related to
globalization – which is what the next section examines.

Managing the Challenges of Globalization

Drawing on existing empirical and theoretical literature, this section discusses four
ongoing challenges generated by globalizing forces for citizenship education provi-
sion in Singapore – and summarizes how the state is managing these forces along-
side its own national agenda. There is substantial literature discussing these tensions
at different “curriculum” levels (Doyle 1992):

1. Policy curriculum: ideals articulated in policy documents (e.g., Alviar-Martin and

Baildon 2016)
2. Programmatic curriculum: guidance documents given to schools (e.g., Sim and
Ho 2010)
3. Classroom curriculum: what actually happens in classrooms (e.g., Ho 2013)

Much research on citizenship education in Singapore is critical in nature, pro-

blematizing citizenship education as “state-craft” (Tan and Chew 2004); tellingly,
while “grand theory” is not often drawn upon, an exception is Foucauldian concepts
35 “Being Rooted, Living Global”: Citizenship and Education. . . 555

of “governmentality,” “discourse,” and state “tactics” (e.g., Koh 2007; Koh and
Chong 2014; Weninger and Kho 2014). Most empirical research on citizenship
education focuses on Social Studies. There is some, though less, literature on History
(e.g., Goh and Gopinathan 2005; Han 2007; Chia 2015) and CCE (e.g., Ho 2017).

Developing National Identity and Rootedness

The philosophical basis of “citizenship” in citizenship education in Singapore is

primarily communitarian (Chia 2011; Tan 2013; Tan and Tan 2014; Weninger and
Kho 2014; Chia 2015), built on shared national values and a unified conception of
national identity to foster feelings of rootedness to the nation. While some studies
suggest the additional presence of aspects of civic republicanism, due to the empha-
sis on loyalty and “active” participatory citizenship (Han 2000; Sim 2011b), “active”
citizenship is portrayed mainly as contributing to Singapore society through volun-
tary work, rather than through deep engagement with political processes. This may,
in part, be rooted in memories of student radicalisation and activism in the fifties and
sixties. Moreover, globalizing forces have been viewed by politicians as straining
young Singaporeans’ loyalties (Gopinathan 2007). The state manages this challenge
in two ways – by managing engagement with foreign entities and interests beyond
Singapore and engagement with national values and interests within Singapore.

Managing Engagement with Foreign Values and Interests, Beyond

Singapore
Arguably, strong transnational discourses that call for cosmopolitan values and
universal human rights are shaping curricula in many developed economies
(Abowitz and Harnish 2006). In contrast, current citizenship education curricula in
Singapore offer only limited, superficial engagement with the “global” or suprana-
tional (Ho 2013). While there are some transnational, critical civic perspectives
emerging (Alviar-Martin and Baildon 2016), citizenship education in Singapore
does not deal explicitly with “identity” on global or regional scales. National
Education (Deng et al. 2013b) and Social Studies curricula (Sim 2011b) are driven
by the nationalistically-oriented “ideology of survival,” rather than cosmopolitanism
and global citizenship education discourses.
Various qualitative studies illustrate this orientation towards the “national” rather
than the “global,” at policy, programmatic, and classroom curriculum levels. Sim
(2011b) suggests that the “common good” espoused in Social Studies (program-
matic) curricula is framed by national, rather than global or regional interests.
Through examining curriculum documents, policy statements and official rhetoric,
Alviar-Martin and Baildon (2016) find that citizenship education values and goals
are more nationalistic than global/cosmopolitan, instrumentally focused on nation-
building and economic development.
At the classroom level, Ho’s (2013) interviews and classroom observations
suggest that students possess a stronger affiliation to national, rather than cosmo-
politan values (such as concern for economic, social, and political justice on a global
556 C. Chiong and S. Gopinathan

scale). Furthermore, students shared strong views on the importance of national

survival and their duty to protect their country, expressing distrust in other nations’
willingness to aid Singapore in crisis. Classroom observations suggest that teachers
did not deviate significantly from the national curriculum, relying nearly exclusively
on MOE curricular materials (although some teachers had more cosmopolitan
conceptions than others). Indeed, some studies suggest that any “cosmopolitan”
values are narrowly focused on developing “economic cosmopolitans” – individuals
who can take advantage of economic possibilities created by globalization, to
develop Singapore’s economy (Ho 2013; Alviar-Martin and Baildon 2016). It
could be argued therefore that instrumental, “de-politicized” approach to citizenship
education is viewed in Singapore as “inoculating” nation-states against vulnerabil-
ities created by globalizing conditions (Alviar-Martin and Baildon 2016).

Managing Engagement with National Values and Interests, Within

Singapore
As a multiethnic, postcolonial state without the shared traditions, a common lan-
guage and cultural and historical representations on which nation-states are typically
built, it has been a long-standing project of the Singapore state to use citizenship
education to foster a common identity, while respecting ethnoracial differences
(Sim 2011b).
Research suggests that the Singapore state copes with globalization pressures
through building a strong national identity, based on shared “Asian Values,” while
explicitly preserving cultural difference between ethnic groups (Tan 2013; Tan and
Tan 2014) – an approach described in literature as “Asian Communitarianism,” and
exemplified in the current CCE curriculum (Tan and Tan 2014). In this phrase, the
word “communitarian” emphasizes a national identity built on a homogenous,
unified understanding of Singaporean history and success, and on values viewed
by political elites as shared, “Asian Values” (Chia 2011). The word ‘Asian’ in “Asian
Communitarianism” denotes an ideological framework that may be interpreted as
having close parallels, and possible philosophical underpinnings, in Confucianism
(Tan and Tan 2014; Ho 2017). For instance, values such as diligence, thrift, and
considerateness are valorized (Sim and Ho 2010). Moreover, the Confucian concept
of “harmony” suggests that discrete parts are valued in their own right; however, the
collective is prioritized (Tan 2013) – thus, self-actualization is encouraged, though
not in the individual-liberalist, politically liberal way. Within this concept of “har-
mony,” Singaporean “multiracialism” follows a “hard multiculturalism” model,
whereby there is public affirmation of ethnic differences through celebrating festi-
vals, holidays, and heroes from each ethnic group (Tan and Tan 2014).
However, existing literature has highlighted various tensions within the relation-
ship between the communitarian emphasis on the “common good,” and the multi-
culturalism that celebrates diversity and difference (Tan and Tan 2014). Tan and Tan
(2014) argue that “hard multiculturalism” results in a “surface culture” approach
where superficial, essentializing representations of culture emerge that do not deal
with less observable aspects of culture and often perpetuate stereotypes, especially
amongst younger students. Sim and Ho’s (2010) analysis of Social Studies curricula
35 “Being Rooted, Living Global”: Citizenship and Education. . . 557

suggest a possible reason for this superficial treatment of cultural questions: cultural,
racial, and religious issues are frequently alluded to, in upholding “common good”
values of “social cohesion” and “meritocracy,” but upon deeper analysis, pragmatic,
economistic concerns underpin the pursuit of “social cohesion” and “meritocracy.”
Ironically, such an approach results in shallow, individualistic, and materialistic-
oriented citizenship (Sim and Ho 2010).
Some authors have problematized the seemingly communitarian “Asian Values”
discourse as thinly veiled “Confucian values” (Chia 2011), which maintains the
cultural hegemony of the majority Chinese population. A related strand of critique
views “Asian Values” as state-crafted political and social control, to foster a disci-
plined citizenry that is economically productive and submits to political leadership
(Ong 1999; Sim and Ho 2010). Others draw on Banks’ (2008) argument that in late-
modernity, the younger generation view themselves as possessing plural, over-
lapping, or hybrid identities across gender, class, and race lines; however, current
citizenship education provision does not account for this dynamism and multiplicity
of identities (Gopinathan 2012; Alviar-Martin and Baildon 2016). Finally, another
critique (not directly located in citizenship education literature but with implications
for citizenship education and, specifically, its silences) suggests that post-9/11, there
is overly-vigilant surveillance over Islam due to state anxieties concerning Islamic
radicalization (e.g., Rahim 2012). Thus, we find that existing research identifies
multiple problems with the state’s nationalistic, instrumental “Asian Communitari-
anism” approach to managing globalizing forces.

Balancing Between Autonomy and Control in Teaching and Learning

Citizenship education provision (and the broader education system) in Singapore is

highly centralized. The MOE provides a prescribed curriculum for curriculum sub-
jects and remains largely in control of textbook use and other curriculum materials,
the administration of national examinations, and even teacher employment and
school funding, in most mainstream government schools (Sim 2011a, b; Ho 2012;
Tan and Tan 2014). Teacher education and professional development provision is
also centralized as there is only one teacher education institution, the National
Institute of Education. In the case of citizenship education, one area particularly
critiqued in literature is the singularity of the “Singapore Story” taught in Social
Studies curricula – the state’s version of how Singapore modernized and developed
successfully under PAP leadership; this narrative has largely been unchallenged by
counter-hegemonic narratives (Ho 2010, 2017; Gopinathan 2012).
However, some research indicates that the state has provided more leeway for
pedagogical innovation in curriculum implementation. Partly responding to supra-
national neo-liberal trends, the state has given school leaders and teachers greater
professional autonomy in teaching – particularly in elite, independent schools
(Gopinathan 2007, 2012). Less voluntarily on the state’s part, state-sponsored
narratives in citizenship education are increasingly challenged by social media.
Unlike many liberal democracies where there is declining political participation
558 C. Chiong and S. Gopinathan

among younger generations, Singaporean young people are increasingly politically

engaged, spurred on through social media (Gopinathan 2012; Skoric and Poor 2013;
Zhang 2013). While there is yet to be empirical research examining how social
media is transforming young people’s conceptualizations of citizenship and their
rights and responsibilities – an area requiring further research – studies illustrate that
the Internet is an important source of alternative viewpoints on “citizenship,” in a
nation-state where traditional mass media is largely state-dominated (Skoric and
Poor 2013; Zhang 2013).
Notwithstanding the above, various interview-based studies with teachers and
students suggest that citizenship education practice tends to tightly cohere with state
views. Sim and Print’s (2009a, b) interviews with Social Studies teachers in Singa-
pore suggest that teachers exercised some agency in interpreting and teaching
citizenship – but this agency was exercised in “safe” ways; none exhibited a
“transforming” position challenging the status quo. Ho’s (2010) interviews with
students representing different socioeconomic, ethnic, and academic stream back-
grounds shared similar understandings of key events in Singapore’s developmental
narrative and of what citizenship meant and entailed (i.e., loyalty and service to
the nation). They also either avoided “controversial” topics around meritocracy,
harmony, and progress – or shared state views on these topics. Neither
teachers nor students in these studies contested the meaning of citizenship or the
“Singapore Story.”
This may be due to climate of censorship (Ho 2010) and a centralized education
system where teachers and schools are expected to be implementers of policy (Sim
and Print 2009a). Moreover, high-stakes Social Studies and History examinations
within a meritocratic system, where academic merit is highly valued, constrains
teachers’ and students’ development of reflective, broader perspectives on what
“citizenship” means (Ho 2013).
Sim’s (2011a) study suggests a slightly different finding. Sim (2011a) found that
different Social Studies teachers conceptualized citizenship differently (three con-
ceptualizations of citizenship were identified: nationalistic, socially concerned, and
person-oriented) and enacted a corresponding variety of pedagogical approaches
(e.g., expository and highly controlled, interactive and participative, constructive
and interactional). Thus, despite being state employees, teachers are not mere “trans-
mitters” of a parochial definition of citizenship – despite facing various structural
constraints in exercising this agency.

Fostering Deep, Genuine Critical Thinking Skills

Increasingly, critical thinking skills are perceived as closely connected with mean-
ingful citizenship. States view critical analysis skills as an important form of
intellectual capital, crucial in navigating increasingly complex, interdependent soci-
eties and economies (Ho 2013). There is growing research grappling with what it
means to develop “thinking citizens” in the “soft authoritarian” state of Singapore;
most studies cast doubt on the current system’s potential to develop deep thinking
skills (e.g., Sim 2011b; Lim 2013, 2016), as discussed below.
35 “Being Rooted, Living Global”: Citizenship and Education. . . 559

Obstacle 1: Economic Instrumentalism

The structures, processes, and outcomes of education in Singapore are tightly coupled
with the economy (Gopinathan 2007). Economic development is viewed as the ultimate
end-goal of teaching cosmopolitan values (Ho 2013) and of key Social Studies themes,
such as social cohesion and meritocracy (Sim and Ho 2010). There is substantial
literature discussing the instrumentalization of critical thinking in Singapore, as primar-
ily valuable for economic productivity in the global knowledge economy.
These studies delve into the specific pedagogic approach of teaching critical
thinking. Drawing on ethnographic methods (Lim 2013, 2016), interviews with Social
Studies teachers (Baildon and Sim 2009), and analyses of Social Studies (program-
matic) curricula (Sim 2011b), these studies derive similar conclusions. Exploring
critical thinking at the programmatic (e.g., Sim 2011b) and classroom curriculum
level (e.g., Baildon and Sim 2009; Lim 2013, 2016), these studies suggest that the
dominant pedagogic approach in most schools focuses on teaching technical “skills”
of logic and argumentation. This highly structured, formulaic, and decontextualized
approach is described by all four studies as highly instrumentalist in nature, to prepare
future workers for the global knowledge economy – rather than for active participation
in political processes; indeed, Alviar-Martin and Baildon (2016) argue that the Social
Studies syllabus implies minimal citizen participation in politics.
Emerging research discusses the equity implications of this instrumentalist,
economistic approach. Sim (2011b) and Lim (2013, 2016) agree that such an
approach results in socialization into prevailing sociopolitical norms and the capac-
ity to rationalize, rather than question, these norms. Moreover, Lim’s (2016) study
highlights differences between approaches adopted at a mainstream government
school, compared to the approach at an elite “independent” school (a school that is
granted greater autonomy in school management by the MOE, popularly viewed as
elite). While the mainstream school adopted a more formulaic approach, the inde-
pendent school focused on developing dispositions and competencies for deep
intellectual engagement, and even potential critique, of the existing system. Hence,
we argue that existing research uncovers a strong need to address issues of elitism
and equity in the distribution of civic competencies.

Obstacle 2: Performativity
A smaller body of literature discusses how performative features of Singapore’s
education system form barriers to developing deep, genuine thinking skills. Argu-
ably, the state sends contradictory messages: it supports critical inventiveness
(particularly as vital to global economic competitiveness) – yet maintains a per-
formative system characterized by high-stakes examinations and content-heavy
curricula, premised on a narrow conception of academic “merit” (Baildon and Sim
2009; Lim 2016). These structural features restrict time for fostering critical
thinking and could result in superficial teaching of these skills. Furthermore,
Singapore is unique amongst developed economies in positioning “twenty-first-
century competencies” as reinforcing, rather than supplanting academic content;
hence, to cope with time pressures, teachers often resort to a “hybrid” pedagogy
which more strongly emphasizes transmission and instruction, over constructivist
learning (Deng et al. 2013a).
560 C. Chiong and S. Gopinathan

It is not uncommon in developed economies for the two reform trajectories – a

growing emphasis on higher-order thinking skills and greater education performativity
– to co-exist (Gopinathan 2007). However, these reform trajectories in the Singapore
context should not be interpreted as a surrendering to neoliberal logic, but as “tactics”
to enhance efficiency of governance, to co-opt globalization forces to the state’s own
advantage (Tan 2008).

Building Social Cohesion Amidst Growing Inequality

Singaporean politicians have long-recognized the costs of transitioning towards a

“global city”: widening socioeconomic inequalities, discontent over tightening aca-
demic and job competition (particularly due to the influx of “foreign talent”), and the
unhappiness of the “sandwiched” middle class who lack both the rapidly growing
wealth of elites and the welfare support of the most disadvantaged. As such, there is
clear need to maintain social cohesion and ensure young Singaporeans do not
become alienated, through citizenship education.
On one hand, the state attempts to foster social cohesion through ensuring
curricular uniformity concerning the central, primary meaning of what it means to
be “Singaporean” and in how the “Singapore Story” should be understood
(as suggested earlier). On the other, studies highlight the differentiated nature of
citizenship education for students from different academic streams (Ho 2012; Sim
2013) and between elite and mainstream government schools (Ho et al. 2011b;
Ho 2012). Ho (2012) advances the notion of “differentiated citizenship,” where
there are different imagined future-citizens (and citizenship education curricula),
corresponding to different academic streams:

1. Elite cosmopolitan leaders (for the academically highest-achieving students at

elite schools following the “Integrated Programme” – where students are permit-
ted to by-pass O-level examinations to provide more curricular space for devel-
oping intellectual autonomy)
2. Globally oriented but locally rooted mid-level executives/workers (in the two
academically more competitive “Express” and “Normal-Academic” streams)
3. Local “heartlander” followers (in the least academically competitive “Normal-
Technical” stream)

Differences in curricula include, for high- and low-attaining students respec-

tively: high versus low levels of civic knowledge and efficacy; opportunities for
developing deep critical reasoning and autonomy versus being taught sanitized,
predetermined knowledge and technical skills; engagement with global perspectives
and issues versus engaging with local, domestic issues (e.g., housing, education);
leadership-oriented citizenship versus follower-oriented citizenship (Ho et al. 2011b;
Ho 2012; Alviar-Martin and Baildon 2016). Furthermore, within Singapore’s cen-
tralized education system, students’ understanding of their rights and responsibilities
are similar to the rights and responsibilities embedded in the curriculum of their
35 “Being Rooted, Living Global”: Citizenship and Education. . . 561

academic stream (Ho et al. 2011a). Given the positive relationship between one’s
socioeconomic position and academic performance, such explicitly delineated “dif-
ferentiated citizenship” could exacerbate existing inequalities, weakening social
cohesion (Ho 2012).

Recommendations to Improve Citizenship Education Provision

Most empirical and theoretical literature contains recommendations on how to

enhance citizenship education provision. This section synthesizes these recommen-
dations; each offers ways in which, we argue, citizenship education stakeholders
might more effectively respond to present-day challenges.

Reconceptualize “Citizenship” for a Changing Social Reality

The current conceptualization of “citizenship” promulgated through citizenship

education curricula is instrumental, narrow, economically oriented, nation-centric
(e.g., Sim and Ho 2010), as well as effectively monocultural (Alviar-Martin and
Baildon 2016), despite having a multicultural appearance. Problematically, such a
conception only has the philosophical power to reproduce and “make thinkable” the
ruling elite’s conceptions for Singapore society and nation (Lim 2016).
Apart from the political hegemony critique, another critique highlights the grow-
ing disconnect between students’ lived realities and official curricular discourse. In
an age of greater self-reflexivity and accessibility to ideas (such as global and
transnational discourses that develop a cosmopolitan consciousness), young people
are likely to see themselves as having shifting, multiple or hybrid identities
(Gopinathan 2012). Notwithstanding current discourses of economic and cultural
nationalism, it continues to be a “fact” of social reality that there is political and
economic interdependency between states.
Thus, states should look beyond national boundaries and goals in developing
citizenship education policy (Ho 2013), while simultaneously being attentive to the
constraints of school contexts. If curricular conceptions of citizenship do not
dynamically evolve with fast-changing sociopolitical realities, including the chang-
ing nature of Singapore society – citizenship education risks becoming irrelevant
(Gopinathan 2012; Ho 2013; Alviar-Martin and Baildon 2016).

Involve More Voices in Reshaping Citizenship Education

At present, in spite of increased school autonomy, the Singapore education system

remains highly centralized, adopting a top-down approach in conceptualizing and
enacting curricula (e.g., Tan and Tan 2014). However, Singapore’s state-citizen
social compact (whereby material benefits are provided in exchange for political
compliance) has been weakened by the unpredictability of globalization.
562 C. Chiong and S. Gopinathan

As such, education policy-makers and practitioners should help students feel like
active, genuine stakeholders, with real agency to reshape notions of “citizenship” and
Singapore’s future – instead of viewing students as passive recipients of citizenship
teaching (Sim and Ho 2010; Gopinathan 2012; Lee 2013; Alviar-Martin and Baildon
2016). Providing greater agency in developing and exercising “citizenship” is more
likely to foster strong and affective national ties (Sim and Ho 2010).
Additionally, school educators, academics, policy and curriculum officials, and
civil society organization representatives should be involved in reconceptualizing
“citizenship” and highlighting weaknesses in the existing curriculum (Alviar-Martin
and Baildon 2016). In particular, analytical questioning of the “Singapore Story,”
and allowing alternative conceptions of Singapore’s history to emerge, allows more
authentic engagement with notions of citizenship (Ho 2010; Gopinathan 2012).
Though an alternative literature contesting vital aspects of the “Singapore Story”
has emerged, the state has largely ignored this. While plurality or complexity for its
own sake is not necessarily desirable, the need to develop richer notions of citizen-
ship, built on multiple actors’ viewpoints, is clear.

Develop a Deep, Contextualized Approach to Teaching Citizenship

for All

Instrumental approaches to teaching citizenship fail to develop genuine critical

thinking (Lim 2013, 2016) as well as affective ties to the nation (Sim and Ho
2010) and reinforce political hegemony (Lim 2013, 2016). While socialization into
national and constitutional norms is understandably desirable to states, especially
young states like Singapore, socialization processes should be balanced with genu-
ine independent thinking and active reasoning (Sim 2013). More sociopolitically,
historically contextualized teaching of critical thinking would thus be valuable
(Lim 2013, 2016).
In teaching multiracialism, replacing “surface culture” and “hard multicultural-
ism” approaches with a “deep culture” approach (Tan and Tan 2014), where there is
engagement with heterogeneity within cultures, offers a more promising way
of engaging with diversity. Additionally, the Singapore state must invest in
developing richer programs of citizenship education for those from socioeconomi-
cally disadvantaged and academically weaker backgrounds (Ho 2012). As aware-
ness of inequalities grows, curricular silence on how socioeconomic
background problematizes the core assumptions of “meritocracy” is also untenable
(e.g., Alviar-Martin and Baildon 2016).
Furthermore, in order to develop the active, engaged citizens idealized in citizen-
ship education policy, a detailed examination rather than superficial tinkering of
multiple factors influencing citizenship education policy enactment is required
(Deng et al. 2013b). Factors particularly pertinent in the Singapore context include:

• Wider Singapore society and culture, which emphasizes academic results and
qualifications (e.g., Deng et al. 2013b).
35 “Being Rooted, Living Global”: Citizenship and Education. . . 563

• Structural features of the existing system – such as high-stakes examinations

(e.g., Ho 2013) – constrain in-depth citizenship teaching and learning and shape
institutional features of schools and school communities (Deng et al. 2013b).
• More effective teacher education is crucial in shaping teachers’ pedagogical
beliefs and expertise (Deng et al. 2013b; Tan and Tan 2014).

At present, there is weak convergence between policy visions and classroom

enactment, highlighted through numerous empirical studies of classroom practice
(see Deng et al. 2013a). These policy-practice gaps underscore the need to pay
detailed, specific attention to various curriculum levels (Doyle 1992) and school and
classroom realities (Deng et al. 2013b), in sustaining deep reform.

Develop a Whole-School Approach to Citizenship Education

Meaningful, sustainable citizenship education reform requires a “whole-school,”

“total curriculum” approach (Lee 2013) where attitudes and values are “caught”
rather than “taught” (Sim 2013). This whole-school approach to citizenship educa-
tion is the intended approach of Curriculum 2015, the most recent curriculum
reform. In Curriculum 2015, there is recognition that, in light of the challenges of
globalization, schools should avoid compartmentalizing citizenship education and
take seriously the urgency of developing genuine, rich, relatable citizenship educa-
tion programs (Lee 2013). However, we believe the foremost challenge in adopting a
whole-school approach lies in ensuring this existing policy ideal materializes in
classroom practice.

Conclusion

Overall, existing research suggests that in the “strong” state of Singapore, the nation-
state remains key in understanding citizenship education provision (Gopinathan
2012; Deng et al. 2013b). In managing globalizing forces, the state makes “tactical”
(Koh 2007) adjustments in two ways:

1. Viewing these forces as straining national loyalties, the state seeks to strengthen
national identity and feelings of rootedness in Singapore.
2. Viewing these forces as creating opportunities for greater efficiency and
flourishing of the nation-state – the state seeks to equip students for the global
knowledge economy and provide greater flexibility and autonomy to schools to
encourage innovation and efficiency.

In our view, these adjustments work to tactically “strengthen” the “strong” state of
Singapore – and examples of how this occurs in Singapore citizenship education
research are manifold. For instance, students are encouraged to become “economic
cosmopolitans” (capable of maximizing opportunities in the global knowledge
564 C. Chiong and S. Gopinathan

economy) – but not “political” or “cultural” cosmopolitans. The extent to which young
Singaporeans are encouraged to engage with cosmopolitan dimensions also appears
dependent on their academic stream and school type. Furthermore, even in fostering
“economic cosmopolitans,” aligned with Singapore’s state-centered approach to citi-
zenship education, “economic cosmopolitans” are ultimately encouraged to attract
global capital in order to maintain Singapore’s competitiveness in the global economy.
While the Singapore state’s approach to the governance of citizenship education
has, to an extent, been successful in fostering social cohesion and economic growth
thus far – new challenges have emerged in the last decade or so. The rise of economic
and cultural nationalism suggests that the “globalization wave” may have peaked; as
new contexts of “anti-globalization” emerge, research is required to unpack what this
means in the Singapore context. Furthermore, despite Singapore being a major
trading hub and a prominent member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations
(ASEAN), citizenship education in Singapore remains largely Singapore-centric.
With the rise of regional powers such as China, India, and Indonesia, Singapore’s
regional ties should be strengthened. However, the present curriculum does not
provide sufficiently deep knowledge of the surrounding region and how to relate
to these regions. A parochial, Singapore-centric vision of citizenship education is
increasingly untenable. Even as the Singapore state grapples with anti-globalization
anxieties, there is need to establish a thoughtful, robust balance between national,
regional, and global perspectives.
The task for educators and researchers now is to delineate new forms of curric-
ulum and pedagogy that are responsive to this new environment – specifically: how
should the Social Studies curricula change? What kind of meaningful experiential
learning is required to develop deeper, more authentic understanding of diverse
cultures? What contextual factors require change, to facilitate such learning? Large-
scale, multi-level analysis (Deng et al. 2013b) can offer a broader, more detailed
perspective of pertinent problems in citizenship education, particularly in policy
enactment; current empirical research, while valuable, is almost entirely qualitative
(based on interviews, observations, or curriculum and policy analyses). Ultimately,
more research is required to understand the bigger picture of what “being rooted,
living global” means, in light of recent sociopolitical and socioeconomic transfor-
mations in the Singapore city-state.

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Constructions of “Youth” and “Activism”
in Lebanon 36
Dina Kiwan

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 568
Conceptions of Youth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 570
Conceptions and Practices of Activism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 572
Examples of Youth Activism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 574
Gender Justice Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 575
Trash Protests . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 575
Environmental Activism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 576
Bloggers/Social Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 577
Concluding Thoughts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 577
Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 578
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 579

Abstract
This chapter contributes to the understandings of youth activism through an
examination of constructions of youth and activism in Lebanon. Lebanon pro-
vides an interesting case study given the role of youth in the uprisings in the
region since 2011, as well as the demography of Lebanon and the region, where
youth under the age of 18 make up over 40% of the population. Lebanon faces
challenges as a postconflict sectarian society, with a large Palestinian and Syrian
refugee population. There is high youth unemployment and high levels of youth
alienation, yet there is also a vibrant youth civil society. Civil society organiza-
tions both protest against government and often take over the role of the state’s
welfare provision. Drawing on existing theoretical and empirical research, the
chapter illustrates the need to take a context-dependent approach to understand-
ings of “youth” in contrast to universalized definitions of youth based on age. The

D. Kiwan (*)
University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 567
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_6
568 D. Kiwan

chapter also provides an overview of examples of youth activism in Lebanon –

including gender justice work, trash-related protests, environmental activism, and
the role of bloggers. Drawing on these examples, the chapter argues the case for a
socio-politically nuanced approach with regards to understanding what counts as
“activism” in Lebanon. The arguments presented challenge dominant approaches
to the study of youth and activism in the Arab world typically framed in relation
to Western and international initiatives supporting democracy promotion.

Keywords
Activism · Citizenship · Civic · Lebanon · Youth

Introduction

Across the Middle East, there has been substantial political and academic attention to
“citizenship” and “participation,” which has increased over the last decade, in the
context of the Arab uprisings which began in 2011 (Kiwan 2018). While not the only
participants in the uprisings in the region, youth have played a significant role in
contesting traditional notions of citizenship. This contestation has been witnessed in
various forms, including street protests, artistic representations and graffiti, social
media, and other forms of cultural expression (Kiwan 2015). As such, there is also
keen academic and policy interest in the category of “youth” – of particular rele-
vance given the demography of the Middle East region, with over 40% of the
population being under the age of 18 (Faour and Muasher 2012). Youth unemploy-
ment in the region is the highest in the world, on average 25% (IMF 2012), and high
levels of youth alienation and despair are often attributed to poor educational
opportunities, high levels of unemployment, and denial of political and civil rights
(Teti and Gervasio 2011). The concomitant interest in civic participation and youth
comes both from within the region and internationally, through initiatives funded by
international organizations, NGOs, and foreign governments. Philanthropic support
for civic change in the Middle East and Lebanon which focuses specifically on youth
is a significant area of funding in the region. Such funding, especially by interna-
tional organizations, is often constructed and implemented through partnerships with
local NGOs (Kiwan et al. 2014).
A brief historical and socio-political overview provides a contextualization for
understanding youth activism in Lebanon. Lebanon is typically characterized as a
divided, “postconflict” society, with a “weak” state (Pearlman 2013). The 16-year
long Lebanese civil war ended in 1990, with the Ta’if agreement stating as an
objective the renouncement of political sectarianism. While this failed to gain
approval, the agreement set a basis for modifying the balance of powers between
the different sects (Traboulsi 2007). There was an estimated death toll of 20,000,
76,000 people were displaced, and an estimated 1 million people left Lebanon
during the civil war (Kiwan 2016a). With the end of the Lebanese civil war, there
was an optimistic vision arising in the 1990s that Lebanon could focus on
36 Constructions of “Youth” and “Activism” in Lebanon 569

reconstruction, reconciliation, and revision of its political system, yet this has not
been realized – in part attributed to regional instability and the hardening of sectarian
divisions (Khalaf 2014). With the assassination of Prime Minister Hariri in 2005, and
public protests leading to Syria’s withdrawal, sectarian hostility intensified. With the
ongoing Syrian and regional crisis, these sectarian tensions continue. Furthermore,
Lebanon has undergone significant demographic change, with the influx of approx-
imately 1.5 million Syrian refugees since the start of the Syrian conflict in 2012. This
new refugee population is in addition to the preexisting Palestinian refugee popula-
tion of several generations of approximately 500,000. The majority of these refugee
populations are youth, with 75% of the Syrian refugee population being women and
children (UNHCR 2014).
Formal education for citizenship in Lebanon typically tends to be delivered
didactically and has low status in the curriculum, with an emphasis on knowledge
of political institutions and the inculcation of patriotism. There is relatively little
opportunity for learner-directed civic engagement. Nonformal civic learning and
participation in the form of international and Western initiatives has been framed in
terms of democracy promotion, with funding for youth engagement prioritized to
local NGOs. There is a common assumption – without empirical evidence in support
of it – that Western funding for local NGOs will result in pressure on the government
for reform, and that in turn this will result in political transformation. According to
this logic, civil society is seen as the “magic bullet against Arab autocracy” (Yom
2005, p. 16). However, the priorities of funding reflect the priorities from the
perspective of the donor, rather than priorities from the perspectives of the local
population (Altan-Oltay and Icduygu 2012). These global neoliberal approaches
rationalize the “responsibilization” of citizens and communities emphasizing com-
pliant and rational behavior (Kennelly and Llewellyn 2011). There is an emphasis on
depoliticized identities in postconflict contexts, resulting in the hollowing out of
citizenship (Jessop 2002; Staeheli and Hammett 2013). Yet such attempts to “gov-
ern” citizens do not necessarily go to plan, in particular in nonformal pedagogical
contexts with young people (Clarke 2010; Pykett 2010; Staeheli and Hammett
2013). Pedagogical relationships between educators and learners, and between
learners, are fluid and relational, disrupting a straightforward translation of policy
into practice.
There is an active civil society in Lebanon, where civil society organizations, on
the one hand, protest against government, but also often take over the role of the
state’s welfare provision. A most recent example of this was in 2015–2016, referred
to as the “trash protests.” Protests began when a landfill just south of the capital
Beirut was closed as it had reached capacity, and the government did not extend the
contract of the private company in charge of trash collection and no alternative
landfill or trash collection company had been found. The protests that followed were
not only about a problem of waste management, but were an expression of people’s
despair with political corruption, business interests, and sectarianism (Kiwan 2017).
However, civil society organizations often reflect the sectarian divisions within
society, rather than necessarily being opposed to sectarian politics. Given the
relationships of funding between international organizations and local civil society
570 D. Kiwan

organizations, NGOs have become highly bureaucratized, reflecting the “NGO-

ization” of civil society (Jad 2011).
This chapter challenges traditional constructions of youth and activism, illustrat-
ing the critical importance of taking account of the Lebanese context. The chapter
demonstrates the need for socio-political and historical contextualization through the
illustration of examples of different forms of activism engaged in by youth in
Lebanon. The chapter concludes with the consideration of possible futures for
youth activism in Lebanon.

Conceptions of Youth

Youth is a socially constructed category, and as such is contested (Roberts 2012;

Threadgold 2011; Wyn 2011). It is used to signify an intermediate phase of the
lifecycle between childhood and adulthood; however, in terms of age, there is no
standard agreement and the designated age range often varies, from 14 to 25, 16 to
24, or 18 to 30, for example. Bray-Collins (2016), in her research on youth politics in
Lebanon, operationalizes the category of youth in terms of marital status, rather than
chronological age, where youth corresponds to the unmarried. There is a cultural
expectation and common practice that young people live at home until they are
married, and are commonly considered to be “youth” up until this time. Mulderig
(2011) proposes that youth in the Arab world are being “denied” their adulthood due
to the socio-political realities of poor educational opportunities, high levels of
unemployment, delayed marriage, and delayed sexuality. For example, the social
expectation of marriage and raising a family is a significant economic cost, and with
increasing marriage costs, people are marrying later, which has been referred to as
“waithood” (Joseph 2011). While reflecting a dominant heternormative discourse in
society, this is being challenged by youth – both through individual youth practices
breaking dominant moral codes and through youth activism on LGBT issues. Such
challenges to accepted norms of sexuality and sexual behavior illustrate a challenge
to the authority and the status quo of the state.
Tracing the historical development of youth movements in the Middle East
usefully illustrates the organized and nationalist origins of youth activism. Joseph
(2011) notes that from the 1920s, when nationalist movements were mobilizing for
independence, youth organizations were set up in Lebanon and Syria modelled on
fascist German and Italian youth movements. In the 1950s and 1960s, governments
in the region promoted youth organizations with the policy aims of promoting
economic development. As such, youth represented hope for the future. With the
failure of various nationalist projects in the region and the Lebanese civil war in the
1970s, antigovernment movements, often using force, have arisen involving youth.
Since 2000, with 9/11, the war on terror and the “Arab Spring,” Arab, and in
particular Muslim youth have been conceived of globally as a risk in public
discourse as well as in international and national policies.
In methodological terms, the dominant approach to the study of youth since the
nineteenth century in the West has been psychological, although increasingly
36 Constructions of “Youth” and “Activism” in Lebanon 571

sociological literatures exploring youth and social media/technology, education, and

economics are developing. A review of conceptions of youth between 1964 and
2009 in the United States illustrates changes in the use of language used to denote the
idea of youth (Lesko 2013). “Adolescents” as a term was commonly used between
the 1960s and 1980s and continues to be used in disciplines aligned to psychology
and medicine, while “youth” is the term used more commonly in education and the
social sciences. Sociological literatures are increasingly challenging constructions of
youth as a chronological age-based population, with the particularistic characteris-
tics of middle-class, white and male masquerading as universalistic characteristics
(Lesko 2013).
Youth studies in the Middle East context is largely framed in relation to socio-
political and economic institutional concerns, for example, education and training to
meet the needs of the labor market (Joseph 2011). These foci can be understood
given the region’s recent history as well as the central place of the family unit and the
instrumental economic and social roles the family fulfills within Middle Eastern
cultures (Joseph 2011). In addition, a major challenge faces policymakers in the
region given the mismatch between the potentiality of a large young labor force, and
being the region with the highest youth unemployment rate in the world (currently at
25%). The “mismatch between the skills accumulated through public investment in
education on the one hand, and the available economic opportunities on the other”
(Campante and Chor 2013), has been hypothesized to play a critical role in leading to
political instability. The relationship between unemployment and the phenomenon
of many educated, overqualified, and frustrated young people is significant here
(Kiwan 2014). These points also relate to Joseph’s (2011) notion of “waithood” and
adulthood being on hold.
Key concepts associated with youth globally include the notion of potentiality for
the future in economic and developmental terms (Joseph 2011). On the other hand,
there is a literature and dominant international public discourse of the “dangers” of
youth (Beck 1998), associated with “moral” conceptions of citizenship where youth
reflects a notion of “deficit” (Kiwan 2008). Other conceptions include the concern of
the exclusion of youth and youth’s “vulnerability.” These varying albeit inter-related
conceptions are reflected in international and national youth policies in a wide range
of policy domains from health policy, to education policy, immigration policy, and
well as community cohesion initiatives. The idea that youth is associated with “risk”
or “danger” (Wyn 2011) is also evident in public discourses in Lebanon. Writing
about youth in Lebanon in a postmodernist frame, Khalaf and Khalaf (2011) reflect
on how youth identity “acquires a defiant posture” (p. 12). Yet at the same time, they
note that a sizeable number of young people suffer psychological/behavioral disor-
ders, as well as engage in risky activities or practices. Although defiant, youth also
“need the comfort and solace of religious faith” (ibid., p. 13). Bayat (2011, p. 13)
calls this “creative inbetweenness” in order to describe how youth attempt to
reconcile their “youthful desires. . . within the existing moral order” (p. 13). This
conception reflects the point made by Bray-Collins (2016) that youth activism is not
always progressive – a common assumption – and that in fact, in the Lebanese
sectarian context, youth actually contribute to the reproduction and renewal of
572 D. Kiwan

sectarianism. The following section examines how activism is conceptualized in

Lebanon, situated in relation to the socio-political context, and how this shapes
understandings of youth and youth practices.

Conceptions and Practices of Activism

This section highlights the multiple and intersecting sites for activism in Lebanon,
how activism is practiced through the lens of sectarianism and what counts as
“politics,” and the effect of citizenship status on forms of activism. As noted in the
introduction, there is a dominant international dimension to activism in Lebanon and
the region. Western governments and international organizations have worked
through local NGOs in promoting democracy through youth and gender participa-
tion initiatives. Research conducted on mapping philanthropic support for civic
change has illustrated that civic change in the Arab world is also increasingly
being supported by business leaders and transnational/disaporic organizations, as
well as through Western governments and international organizations (Kiwan et al.
2014). While there is a growing literature on grassroots protests and movements, as
well as more organized forms supporting civic change, the resilience of authoritar-
ian, sectarian, and corrupt practices in politics is also well documented in the Arab
world and Lebanon specifically (Pearlman 2013). The resilience of formal politics
and its associated institutions can in part be attributed to disregard for electoral rules,
co-opting of business elites, and the strength of state security institutions. Emigration
has also been highlighted as playing an important role in perpetuating the structure
and practice of politics in Lebanon, with over 25% of Lebanese nationals living
outside of the country, and about 45% of Lebanese households having a family
member who has emigrated abroad (Pearlman 2013). Effects on national politics and
movements can be seen through the mechanisms of remittances – which contributes
up to a quarter of Lebanon’s GDP, return migration and the shaping of ideological
movements (Pearlman 2013). Pearlman (2013) proposes that emigration contributes
to the resilience of existing politics and practices in Lebanon through ameliorating
socio-economic hardship through remittances. In addition, local challenging condi-
tions and the possibility of emigration provide an “opting out” option for disengage-
ment, as opposed to local conditions contributing to agency and an impetus for
change. Emigration is also a form of “brain drain.” In addition, the diasporic
community directly props up the status quo through contributing financially to
political parties.
In order to analyze the multiple and intersecting sites for activism in Lebanon,
how activism is practiced, and what counts as “politics,” this chapter examines
discourses and practices of sectarianism as a key lens through which to examine
youth activism in Lebanon. While in political terms, sectarianism refers to political
power-sharing between the dominant sects, it can be understood more holistically as
a discourse arising out of a particular history and socio-political context which
pervades contemporary Lebanese society. Bahlawan (2014, p. 28) describes “sec-
tarianism” as being “political, institutional and affective,” best understood as a
36 Constructions of “Youth” and “Activism” in Lebanon 573

“practice” (Makdisi 2000). Antisectarian movements have utilized the concept of

“secularism” to denote politics separate from religion, and in this context is con-
ceived as the means by which Lebanon can reach unity rising above “primitive” and
“tribal” loyalties. Yet the assumed opposition between sectarianism and secularism
is not so straightforward. Rather than being ruled by religious elites, Lebanon can be
seen as a “secular oligarchy deriving its monopoly in politics and economy from the
religious divisions” (Bahlawan 2014, p. 30). The content of sectarianism, as such, is
not fixed, but can be thought of as a category with fluidity, that can be transformed
over time.
Bray-Collins (2016) examines youth activism in three domains: on university
campuses, as youth-led civil society movements, and in youth wings of political
parties in Lebanon. She illustrates how youth contribute to the reproduction and
renewal of sectarianism in politics, arguing against the idea that the resilience of
sectarianism is due to elite manipulation. While activism is typically constructed as
challenging the status quo within a progressive framework, the study of more
“illiberal” forms, as with Bray-Collins, arguably complicates our conceptions of
activism. While certainly there exists progressive forms of youth activism exist in
Lebanon, Bray-Collins (2016) argues that such forms tend to capture the attention of
scholars and the popular press. However, the reproduction of the status quo is not an
exact copy of what has come before, but rather it is adapted to suit the interests and
changing contexts of young people themselves. Even when the university campus
context prohibits sectarian political parties from operating, student politics is orga-
nized very much through the structure of sectarian politics, using various strategies
to work around these rules (Bray-Collins 2016). This sectarianism is also evident in
youth-led civil society movements, where in fact an antisectarian framework was
adopted which paradoxically served sectarian interests. Furthermore, the scope for
autonomy is relatively more restricted within the youth wings of political parties
where youth have been frustrated from introducing more substantive change
(ibid., 2016).
Related to the contestation between sectarianism and secularism is the issue of
what counts as politics. In public discourse, youth are often described as being
politically apathetic, but this is often asserted in relation to narrow definitions of
what counts as politics. In Lebanon, an antipolitics stance is typically equated with
being against sectarianism and corruption (Kiwan 2017). Acting as an individual –
as opposed to being an NGO or political party – is often also a part of this
conception. Antipolitical approaches are criticized by some as avoiding the chal-
lenging issues and instead taking an instrumental or more technicist approach
(Kiwan 2017). More positive accounts of civil society “apoliticality” in the Asian
context, in contrast, propose that it can be understood as a response – usually under
repressive regimes – to addressing social problems and bringing about social change
under these conditions (Heaton Shrestha and Adhikari 2010). Here ethics is given
primacy over politics, not merely that “apoliticality” is avoiding the real issues
(Kiwan 2017).
After the assassination of Prime Minister Hariri in 2005, there was a surge of
youth activism calling for reform and participatory democracy (Khalaf 2014). The
574 D. Kiwan

trend of heightened youth engagement subsequently waned, which Khalaf (2014)

attributes to the dominance, intransigence, and corruption of formal politics. There is
a wider pattern in the region of youth exclusion, as well as the exclusion of women
from formal politics, where politics is typically controlled by family-based elites,
authoritarian political parties, or the military (Joseph 2011; Kiwan 2015). Khalaf
(2014, p. 99) describes as one response to this exclusionary politics how a hedonistic
youth culture of defiance has developed in the form of the themes of “recreation,
pleasure, self-indulgence, having fun and emigration” (Khalaf 2014, p. 99). These
activities can also be seen as defiance of formal politics and the status quo, an
example of the “antipolitical” stance discussed above. Concerns have been
expressed of the dangers of such youth exclusion from formal politics; it has been
argued that this creates a vulnerability which coupled with poor socio-economic
prospects provides motivation and incentive to recruitment to extremist movements.
Activism through education in Lebanon – both formal and nonformal – is
increasingly being recognized as a critical one for socio-political transformation
and civic change (Kiwan 2014). Youth initiatives are a significant domain for
funding, as already noted. With regards to initiatives for refugee youth, the United
Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) has been the main education provider for
Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, with UNRWA operating 69 schools in 12 camps
across the country (UNRWA 2013). Fincham (2013) has examined constructions of
citizenship for Palestinian youth living in the UNRWA refugee camps in Southern
Lebanon, where she highlights how Palestinians are typically educated through the
Lebanese curriculum, yet they are invisible in this curriculum. However, through the
hidden curriculum, Palestinian identity is made visible through symbols such as
maps and flags, as well as rituals, clothing and school activities. Beyond formal
schooling, the mosque, the local community, and social media are nonformal sites
for citizenship learning and activism. Youth encounter the contradictions between
formal education for citizenship with an emphasis on peace-building and promoting
unity and informal learning within divided communities in Lebanon as a postconflict
society. The ongoing Syrian refugee crisis has resulted in over 300,000 Syrian school
age children out of school in Lebanon (Watkins 2013). Educational programs offered
through NGO initiatives for refugees are framed in terms of an “education in
emergencies” paradigm typically focusing access to schooling, psychological
counseling, and community integration.

Examples of Youth Activism

As previously argued, examining youth activism within its socio-political context is

critical in contributing to situated understandings of youth activism, and further our
understanding more universally of youth activism. This section outlines four exam-
ples of contemporary youth activism in Lebanon, across a range of domains. These
include: (i) gender justice work, (ii) trash protests, (iii) environmental protests, and
(iv) bloggers/social media commentators. These examples illustrate the need for
36 Constructions of “Youth” and “Activism” in Lebanon 575

socio-political and historical contextualization in nuancing conceptions of youth and

activism in Lebanon.

Gender Justice Work

“Nasawiya” was set up as a feminist collective, made up of a range of people from

different backgrounds, united through their marginalization, including students and
professionals, single mothers, refugees, migrant workers, sex-workers, those of
nonconforming genders and sexuality. The collective describe themselves as a
“group of young feminists who are working together to recreate a world free from
sexism, and all other forms of exploitations and discriminations that collaborate with
it: classism, heterosexism, racism, capitalism, etc. We see all these problems as
interrelated and equally oppressive, yet we insist on addressing them from a pro-
gressive grassroots feminist perspective” (Nasawiya 2018). Nasawiya has engaged
in a range of initiatives such as training programs for women to learn how to bring
about social change, whether through legal reform, grassroots campaigning, or
becoming involved in formal politics. Another program focused on ICT in promot-
ing women’s careers in technology, as well as learning how to use ICT in support of
feminist change. Resources such as “Sawt al Niswa” is a web-based resource to pool
knowledge, while “Feminist House” provides a physical space for women to meet
for various activities, and the Women’s Resource Centre holds documents, newspa-
pers, and online resources. Nasawiya is also known for its sexual harassment
awareness-raising campaign called “The Adventures of Salwa” in the form of a
series of videos. Nasawiya also takes part in International Women’s Day and the
annual march for secularism.

Trash Protests

In Beirut in July 2015, a landfill just south of the capital Beirut closed as it had
reached capacity, and the government did not extend the contract of the private
company in charge of trash collection. As trash piled up on the streets with no
solution in sight, protests erupted. These protests were not only about a problem of
waste management, but were an expression of people’s despair with political cor-
ruption, business interests, and sectarianism. The trash protests illustrate a tension in
approaches, where some actors focused on the technicalities of waste management,
framing their activism as “nonpolitical.” In contrast, others argued that the trash
problem is the embodiment of the failure of the political system in Lebanon.
Individual activists, NGOs working on gender and LGBTQ issues, refugees’
rights, youth participation, artists, and ordinary members from all social classes of
the general public protested in a variety of creative and emotive ways, including
cultural production, the use of social media, as well as hunger strikes, artistic
interventions, political cartoons, and political songs (Kiwan 2017). Interviewing
activists on their understandings of social change, particular emphasis was given
576 D. Kiwan

to the notion of protest as a process with no quick results. The idea of contributing to
social change and activism was also conceived of as a way of living rather than a
discrete activity (Kiwan 2017). In addition, many activists viewed a range of social
justice issues as interconnected and stressed the concomitant importance of raising
awareness and changing attitudes as well as working within formal structures for
reform. Activism was not solely viewed as acting to ensure a demand is met, but to
redefine how issues are publicly understood – a contribution to the production of
knowledge (Kiwan 2017). The emotional nature of protest was emphasized as
playing an important role, evident in a range of public artistic interventions, for
example, the “Beirut Wall,” so dubbed in reference to the Berlin Wall which was
erected on 24th August after the street protests of the 23rd August. This was mocked
across social media, and in addition, the artist Philippe Farhat responded by painting
pictures of people with their mouths taped shut with the names of the political parties
on the tape (International Business Times 2015).

Environmental Activism

Environmental concerns are a significant area of activism in Lebanon since the end
of the civil war. Activities include nature conservation, youth hiking and camping,
and campaigning for public access to green spaces. Environmental discourse in
postcolonial contexts reflects both anticolonial resistance and attempts at
neo-colonial control. Nagel and Staeheli (2016) examine how environmentalism
in Lebanon is informed by Western-educated activists working in international
NGOs. They highlight how green space is theorized as a neutral site for promoting
intersectarian cohesion and therefore is seen as promoting national cohesion and
citizenship. For example, there has been a campaign to open “Horsh Beirut” one of
the few green spaces in the city. Yet the history of “Horsh” during the civil war has
been a specter over the campaign, with Nagel and Staeheli (2016, p. 255) noting on
interviewing activists that “the park was reportedly used as a dumping ground for
bodies during the civil war, and many of the trees were destroyed during the war
for use as fuel. After the war, the French government sponsored reforestation
efforts, but the park has remained mostly inaccessible to the public, except for
occasional, planned events.” Horsh Beirut is now imagined as a nonsectarian
space. Yet similar to the arguments made by Bray-Collins (2016), Nagel and
Staeheli (2016) suggest that Lebanese environmentalism cannot stand outside of
the frame of sectarianism, despite efforts (in some cases) to dismantle
it. Environmental activists typically frame their activism as “nonpolitical,” as
also seen in the discussion on the trash protests. This attempt to dissociate from
the sectarian political system idealizes the environment as a nonsectarian domain.
Yet activism in this field becomes contested by a range of actors, the government,
activists themselves, and foreign funders, and as such is highly political in that it is
proposing a new political vision (Nagel and Staeheli 2016). Rather than overcom-
ing sectarian politics, environmental activists are enmeshed in its political
dynamics.
36 Constructions of “Youth” and “Activism” in Lebanon 577

Bloggers/Social Media

Blogging is a relatively new phenomenon in the region, with blogging taking off in
Lebanon after 2005 following the assassination of Prime Minister Hariri and a
second wave of blogging after the Israeli war of 2006 (Riegert and Ramsay 2012).
In their study of bloggers in 2010 and 2011, Riegert and Ramsay (2012) identified
several well-known and popular bloggers and found several common themes, nota-
bly the criticism of the sectarian political system, violations of human rights, and
challenging Lebanese social and religious norms relating to gender, sexuality, and the
environment. Also of note are the intersecting sites at the local, national, and
transnational levels, with key transnational themes identified relate to the Palestinian
cause, critiques of Arab leaders as lacking legitimacy, and environmental activism. In
addition, the blurring of entertainment/humor and politics characterizes many of the
blogs. Riegert and Ramsay (2012) propose these blogs construct an “alternative” or
“counter” public allowing for the expression of civic activism. Bloggers describe
their motivations as creating a space to express themselves and expressing frustration
with mainstream media, typically aligned with the different political parties/sects.
Youth-generated media is another arena of youth activism in Lebanon. Focusing
on the July 2006 war with Israel, Khalil (2012) examines how youth blur traditional
and newer forms of media creating their own narratives challenging dominant
political, religious, and social institutions. These include Facebook, Twitter, blogs,
graffiti, songs, and videos. Khalil (2012) argues that these forms go beyond the
concept of “citizen journalism” to provide a medium for collective youth activism.
These examples illustrate a range of dynamic forms of youth activism in Lebanon.
While a dominant theme of the trash protests and of environmental activism more
broadly use a discourse of anti-sectarianism, activists cannot stand outside of the
political frame of sectarianism in Lebanon, even when appealing to “secular” politics.
It is also evident that activism often takes an intersectional form, with a range of
different interest groups joining forces, and a range of new media and technology are
utilized in challenging dominant discourses, often with humor. In considering young
people’s responses to a restrictive political order, another dominant theme can also be
seen in the discourse of “antipolitics,” evident on the one hand in actors focusing on
technical solutions to societal problems, while in other cases, youth seemingly rejecting
politics for leisure, material consumption, and risky acts of “defiance” (Khalaf 2014).

Concluding Thoughts

This chapter has examined youth activism in Lebanon, taking into account the wider
regional context of the Arab uprisings, Lebanon being a postconflict divided society,
having a large youthful population, as well as a large population of Palestinian and
Syrian refugees. Recognizing the socially constructed nature of the concepts of
“youth” and “activism,” this chapter argues for a historically, socially, and politically
contextualized examination of youth activism in Lebanon. As such, this approach
challenges understandings of youth constructed purely in terms of chronological age.
578 D. Kiwan

In addition, given that formal education for citizenship in Lebanon emphasizes

knowledge of political institutions and the inculcation of patriotism, the chapter
highlights that there is more scope for learning about active citizenship through
nonformal contexts in civil society. Yet rather than Western democracy promotion
youth initiatives being the “magic bullet against Arab autocracy” (Yom 2005, p. 16),
such attempts to pedagogically “govern” citizens do not necessarily go to plan
(Clarke 2010; Pykett 2010; Staeheli and Hammett 2013). Young people use the
skills gained through such initiatives and are self-directed in applying this learning to
domains of concern to themselves, as exemplified for example in the campaigning
for civil marriage initiative (Staeheli and Hammett 2013).
While not always conforming to traditional constructions of “activism,” some of
the activities discussed in this chapter can be understood as forms of agency in
resisting the political status quo. Such acts also can challenge commonly accepted
understandings of what counts as “politics.” An expanded construct of politics refers
to those “acts” through which young people construct their subjectivity in the public
sphere, rather than indicating political apathy. Highlighting the importance of under-
standing the transnationality of activism, the assumption that youth is associated
with progressiveness is also highlighted in this context.
The contextualized examples of youth activism challenge dominant approaches to
the study of politics, political action, and activism in the Arab world which has largely
been through the lens of democratization or “transitology” – where events are
interpreted as developing in a linear fashion from authoritarian rule towards liberal
democracy (Cavatorta 2012). The study of youth activism in Lebanon contributes
towards the challenge of this paradigm. Indeed, it is being argued that a new political
subjectivity is emerging, characterized as “reflexive individualism” (Hanafi 2012),
distinct from neoliberal conceptualizations of individualism “predicated on anti-
patriarchal, anti-tribe, anti-community or anti-party sentiments” (p. 198). Both
Khalaf’s (2014) and Bray-Collins’ (2016) work illustrate this reflexive individualism.
In addition, new paradigms of “citizenship after orientalism” offer innovative ways of
thinking about how citizenship is understood outside of Western contexts (Isin 2008,
2012). Isin (2008, 2009) challenges traditional constructions of citizenship in purely
legalistic terms, through his concept of “acts” of citizenship, whereby those who are
socially and legally excluded, such as marginalized youth, refugees, or illegal immi-
grants, “act” in the public sphere whereby they constitute themselves as political actors
(Kiwan 2016b). Through a lens of “acts of citizenship” that challenges traditional
notions of citizenship defined solely in terms of legal and political membership and
traditional forms of civic participation, the contextualized examples of youth activism
in Lebanon challenge our understandings of youth engagement in the public sphere.

Cross-References

▶ Education for Youth Civic and Political Action in Australia

▶ The Development of Civic Participation Among Youth in Singapore
36 Constructions of “Youth” and “Activism” in Lebanon 579

▶ Youth Civic Engagement and Formal Education in Canada: Shifting Expressions,

Associated Challenges
▶ Youth Engagement and Citizenship in England

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Inequality, Civic Education and Intended
Future Civic Engagement: An Examination 37
of Research in Western Democracies

Dimokritos Kavadias, Echeverria Vicente Nohemi Jocabeth, and

Kenneth Hemmerechts

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 584
The Individual Resources Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 585
The Institutional Resources Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 588
A Multi-Layered Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 592
Key Challenges for Further Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 593
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 594
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 594

Abstract
All educational systems socialize young people to become active members of
their society. Schools are expected to teach “active citizenship,” “civics” or
“social education.” The context of this type of socialization may however differ.
Differences in individual resources, institutional and/or contextual settings are at
the core of social inequalities. Existing research suggests that patterns of social
inequality influence the outcomes of civic education. Research has also begun to
report the consequences of inequalities for civic engagement. The effects of social
inequality are visible in a gap between more and less civically engaged pupils that
is already present at secondary school age. The unequal civic engagement in
adolescence tends to linger until adult age. The inability of these civically
disadvantaged groups to actively voice their concerns questions the legitimacy
and stability of democratic systems that aim to be representative and responsive.

D. Kavadias (*) · E. V. Nohemi Jocabeth · K. Hemmerechts

Political Science Department, Free University of Brussels (VUB), Brussels, Belgium
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected];
[email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 583
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_21
584 D. Kavadias et al.

This chapter reviews recent scholarship linking forms of academic and social
inequality, unequal civic outcomes, and civic education for secondary school
students in Western societies. Implications for future research and challenges
ahead are also identified.

Keywords
Social inequality · Civic education · Western Europe · Secondary school · Civic
engagement

Introduction

With the seminal work of Almond and Verba (1963), scholars of democracy became
aware of a key task of modern democracies: to promote and sustain a “civic culture.”
Educational systems in democratic countries have the fundamental task of socializ-
ing young people, preparing them for an adult life as full and equal citizens. Schools
are explicitly expected to equip children with the necessary knowledge and skills to
become active members of their society. In most school systems, schools try to reach
this goal through “active citizenship,” “civics” or “social education” courses and/or
by adopting a cross-curricular approach to reach the same goals (Schulz et al. 2017).
Empirical evidence, however, suggests that some young people benefit more from
civic activities than others. That is, some children have more opportunities and tend
to become more active than their peers. This “civic empowerment gap” can be found
across all domains of civic outcomes: knowledge, skills, and, attitudes and behavior.
This gap runs along most salient social divides in each society (Levinson 2010).
Levinson, for example, has reported extensive differences in participation and
knowledge according to the social-economic “usual suspects,” such as ethnicity,
gender, immigrant background and/or socioeconomic status. As a result, minorities,
immigrants and socio-economically disadvantaged citizens tend to be less civically
engaged than those from dominant and socio-economically advantaged back-
grounds. Brady et al. (2015) corroborated this finding, documenting an
intergenerational pattern of reproduction of unequal competencies.
These differences in civic empowerment and engagement according to social
background have been a source of growing concern in established democracies. That
is, there is concern that those groups which are already disadvantaged by social
structures (e.g., those that have lower status and/or fewer resources), tend, by this
“deficit” in skills, knowledge, participation, attitudes etc., to also lack political
representation. The inability of these groups to actively voice concerns has, however,
implications for the legitimacy and stability of democratic systems that aim to be
representative and responsive (Dahl 2007; Levinson 2010; Lijphart 1997; Putnam
2000; Sloam 2016; Verba et al. 1995, 2003).
This chapter examines recent scholarly literature linking issues of inequality,
citizenship and civic education at secondary school level, in Western consolidated
democracies (the United States and Western Europe). In part, this is a pragmatic
37 Inequality, Civic Education and Intended Future Civic Engagement: An. . . 585

choice, considering the amount and accessibility of research from a global perspec-
tive. The choice is, however, also driven by theoretical concerns. Western democra-
cies share similar country-level factors linked to differences in civic outcomes such
as political regime and economic development (Inglehart and Welzel 2005; Isac et al.
2014; Schulz et al. 2011). Western democracies also experience similar issues that
can lead to unequal youth civic engagement, for example: growing immigration,
segregation, low voter turnout and political disengagement of youngsters in conven-
tional forms of political participation (Delli Carpini 2000; Putnam 2000).
This review focuses on the secondary school level. Although academic and social
inequality can emerge at all educational levels, both forms of inequality tend to
intersect and reinforce each other after grade 6 in most educational systems (Driessen
et al. 2008; Boone and Van Houtte 2013). One of the defining moments is the
emergence of separate tracks according to levels of academic achievement. In some
early tracking (streaming) systems (such as in Austria or some German länder) this
occurs at the age of 9 and becomes more prominent at the transition from primary to
secondary school. In other systems, tracking tends to be organized at the secondary
school level. It is also at the secondary level (after grade 6) that courses specifically
designed to promote civic content are more commonly found. The secondary school
also encompasses adolescence, which is a crucial developmental stage for civic
attitudes and beliefs (Flanagan and Sherrod 1998; Hoskins et al. 2017; Sears and
Brown 2013).
The current review includes only those studies that discuss the interrelationship
between the variables of interest: civic education, inequality and civic outcomes
(knowledge, attitudes and behavior). In general, studies that examine the link
between civic education, inequality and citizenship focus on the effect of different
sources and contexts of inequality on civic outcomes. A way to classify these studies
is to look at the identified source of inequality. Inequality can, after all, be attributed
to a difference in individual resources, but can also be the result of the institutional
setting and differences in the contexts of socialization. The next paragraphs look at
these different approaches.

The Individual Resources Approach

One body of research focuses on the impact of demographic characteristics or social

markers on the degree of civic engagement of youngsters. Differences in “civic
outcomes,” such as participation in elections, are found to be influenced by the
individual resources available to young people. These resources are linked to
socioeconomic status, immigrant background, ethnicity, gender and age (Levinson
2010; Verba et al. 1995). Variations in access to resources such as money, knowl-
edge, networks etc. are at the core of differences in civic engagement among adults
(Leighley and Nagler 2014; Schlozman et al. 2012; Verba et al. 1995, 2003) and
adolescents (Hooghe and Dassonneville 2013; Isac et al. 2014).
Since the sources of inequality in this view depend heavily on “ascribed”
(as opposed to achieved) conditions, civic outcomes tend to be skewed from the
586 D. Kavadias et al.

start (Verba et al. 2003). Not only are the differences in resources and opportunities
to be civically engaged unequally distributed, low patterns of participation also tend
to be reproduced from generation to generation in the disadvantaged groups
(Schlozman et al. 2012). The role of education in overcoming unequal civic out-
comes is limited, according to this view, because early childhood factors are seen as
the most determining influence in the political socialization of youngsters. Institu-
tional aspects, such as factors related to the educational system, are considered only
as proxies for social markers of difference (see Persson 2012).
Research addressing the issue of inequality in civic outcomes has stressed the role
of socioeconomic status (SES) as the most relevant factor explaining, for example,
conventional forms of political participation (Brady et al. 2015; Verba et al. 1995,
2003). Degrees of political participation vary systematically by social class or socio-
economic status; members of the lower social strata tend to be less inclined to vote,
while the propensity to vote increases on the higher rungs of the socio-economic
ladder (Verba et al. 1995). Resources in terms of time, money and civic skills, and
opportunities to learn and exercise these skills, are consequently seen as important
conditions in relation to voting or other forms of conventional political participation
(Verba et al. 1995, 2003). This “civic gap” has also been found for adolescents. Using
the International Civics and Citizenship education Study 2009-data (ICCS 2009),
which surveyed pupils in grade 8 in 43 countries, several studies found that children
with a higher socioeconomic status tend to express more intentions of future electoral
participation (Hooghe and Dassonneville 2013), exhibited a higher intended partici-
pation in political and social activities and reported a higher degree of “civic knowl-
edge” than their low SES peers (Isac et al. 2014; Manganelli et al. 2014).
Studies aiming to test the potential role of schools in mitigating SES-based civic
inequalities have examined Campbell’s (2008) compensation hypothesis of education.
This is the (testable) assumption that schools and elements from the schooling
environment can compensate for the resources offered at home. In a single-country
case study, the presence of an “open classroom climate,” as the degree to which
classrooms are receptive to the discussion of social and political issues, was found to
address some elements of the civic competence gap between high and low SES pupils
in the Czech Republic (Kudrnáč and Lyons 2017). This compensation effect did not,
however, pertain for all civic outcomes. Low SES pupils tended to benefit more from
an open climate classroom, but this improved their chances of matching high SES
civic outcomes only regarding future electoral participation, and did not make up for
lower degrees of civic knowledge and other forms of political participation. While the
compensation hypothesis emphasizes the potential of education to reduce political
inequality, using a cross-national study, Hooghe and Dassonneville (2013) found an
accelerating effect of education. More advantaged pupils benefit more from civic
education, which fosters their intended electoral participation. Further research seems
necessary to determine whether the compensation or the acceleration effect prevails,
under what circumstances, but also for what types of civic outcomes.
A second individual characteristic related to differences in civic outcomes is the
immigrant background of children and adolescents. Analyses using the 1999 CIVED
(US and Swedish sample) and 2009 ICCS (full sample)-data (both samples targeted
37 Inequality, Civic Education and Intended Future Civic Engagement: An. . . 587

at grade 8 pupils), show that immigrant pupils tend to exhibit less civic knowledge
(Barber et al. 2015; Friedman et al. 2013; Isac et al. 2014). This holds true for both
first and second-generation students (Friedman et al. 2013). A more disputed issue is
whether there is a participation gap between immigrant and non-immigrant pupils.
Across the ICCS 2009 participating countries, immigrant students showed lower
levels of intended participation in political and social activities (Isac et al. 2014).
Using the same data, immigrant pupils were found to have on average stronger
intentions to participate in political activities and informal political activities, but
lesser intentions to engage in future electoral activities than non-immigrant pupils
(Friedman et al. 2013). Studies using survey data found that young immigrants in
three European countries (Belgium, Germany and Turkey) tend to be more civically
engaged in less institutional and conventional forms of political participation than
their native peers (Eckstein et al. 2015). US-Survey data found, however, that pupils
of non-white minority groups show higher intentions of future electoral participation
(Cohen and Chaffee 2013).
While the presence of an open classroom climate (for example, a climate which is
student-centred and encourages discussion) has received some attention, the associa-
tion between ethnicity and civic pedagogical practices has scarcely been researched in
the European context. The limited amount of existing research suggests that civic
educational practices foster different civic outcomes for ethnic minority pupils. For
example, a single case-study in Germany found that an open classroom climate was
related to political attentiveness and political trust, but not to the civic engagement or
collective efficacy of minority groups (in this case, the sizeable Turkish community in
Germany) (Jugert et al. 2016). More knowledgeable immigrant pupils were found to
be influenced by their family context (speaking the dominant educational language,
discussing politics at home), while their attitudes were stimulated by certain school
conditions (again, the presence of an open classroom climate for discussion) (Barber
et al. 2015). To conclude, there is a considerable degree of variation in the types of
civic outcomes (knowledge, attitudes, behavior), the ethnicity or origin of the immi-
grant populations (Turks, North-African, other “non-white minority groups”) and the
“host society” (Western-European welfare states, Turkey, international comparative)
that is examined. Patterns of political participation of immigrant youngsters, thus,
need to be further examined considering these substantial differences in predictors,
contexts and generation of the immigrant adolescents. These factors are heavily
influenced by the status of a minority group in the hosting society and related to
differences experienced by different generations (Wray-Lake et al. 2015).
Together with social class, gender-differences have been extensively reported in
the empirical literature on political participation (see Andersen 1975; Campbell and
Wolbrecht 2006; Hahn 1998; Kent-Jennings 1983; Verba et al. 1995). Gender
differences in political participation seem to be diminishing over time in Western
countries (Marien et al. 2010). More recent studies, however, suggest that gender
remains a factor associated with unequal civic outcomes among adolescents. 2016
ICCS data revealed that while girls have higher levels of civic knowledge than boys,
female students have lower expectations of future political involvement than their
male counterparts (Schulz et al. 2017). Similarly, a cross-national study in Europe
588 D. Kavadias et al.

using 2009 ICCS data has found that intentions of future electoral participation are
higher among girls than boys. However, girls are less willing to run as candidates in
elections. Here, an open classroom climate positively contributed to voting inten-
tions, but not to the intention to be a candidate (Hooghe and Dassonneville 2013). It
therefore does not influence the dimension in which girls lag behind in political
participation. The results reveal a gap in political representation along gender lines,
mainly on guaranteeing female inclusion in elected positions Other single-country
studies found no significant differences in civic engagement between boys and girls
(Manganelli et al. 2014).
Studies starting from an individual resources perspective have not reached a
consensus regarding the most important predictor of unequal civic outcomes. This
could be due to the disparate ways in which the social markers of difference are
applied. In addition, there are deficiencies in the methods used to test the effect of
belonging to these social categories. These categories are analyzed in isolation from
each other and are primarily understood as individual features. They are detached
from the wider settings in which they are embedded. However, markers of social
differences are highly dependent on the broader societal, economic and cultural
context. Moreover, instead of being static, these factors are relational and evolve
along with the surrounding context(s)- thus necessitating an analysis that jointly
considers all the social markers and their interactions with different contexts of
political socialization (family, school, neighborhood, etc.). This kind of analysis can
help us understand mechanisms of inequality (Bukodi et al. 2018), but will also
provide insight into how education could compensate for inequalities.

The Institutional Resources Approach

A second approach conceives of inequality as linked to differences generated by the

institutional context. The features of the educational system are considered to be
salient in shaping inequalities between youngsters. This more recent approach has
revealed the school to operate in a context in which different levels and sources of
inequality intersect. These studies have highlighted that structural features of edu-
cational systems can reinforce or mitigate the unequal effects of social background
on civic outcomes. Within this approach, studies can focus on the structure or the
functioning of the educational system as a source of inequality. If they refer to the
structure, they focus on the stratification (tracking/streaming) of the educational
system. If they refer to the functioning of the educational system, they focus on
the level of standardization of curricula and the access to learning practices which
promote civic involvement.
Stratification and studies on educational stratification are longstanding (one
might say since Durkheim 1925, 1938). Marxist scholars such as Bowles and Gintis
(1976) saw the educational system as an essential cog for Capitalist societies, since
schools were tailored to fuel the economy by providing an educated workforce and
by reproducing an ethos fit for the economy. Schools are seen as having an explicit
function to reproduce the system (Bourdieu and Passeron 1999-orig. 1970) or to
37 Inequality, Civic Education and Intended Future Civic Engagement: An. . . 589

sustain the hegemony (Gramsci 1978 – see for an overview Kavadias 2004). These
studies tend to disregard civic education in schools as a field of inquiry, since civic
education is only destined to produce a form of ‘false consciousness’.
Recently the role of stratification and stratification patterns in schools have been
examined in relation to unequal civic outcomes. This body of studies has emerged
mainly focusing on Western Europe, where the tracking system is characteristic of
certain secondary school-systems. Studies in this tradition have attempted to disen-
tangle the effect of tracking on civic and political engagement. They diverge on
whether the effect of tracking is independent from social markers (Hoskins et al.
2014; Janmaat et al. 2014; Kavadias et al. 2017; van de Werfhorst 2017) or whether
it reflects early socialization factors (Persson 2012, 2015). If indeed civic inequalities
are due to the features of the educational system, as the former perspective argues,
then education can have a role in mitigating those inequalities. Those studies seem to
suggest that late tracking (comprehensive secondary school systems) can be bene-
ficial for disadvantaged groups. However, if these inequalities are merely the result
of pre-school factors, as the later perspective suggests, this would imply that
education cannot compensate for these differences between social groups. Children
from less advantaged backgrounds will always perform worse on these indicators.
Cross-national studies along the first line argue that early tracking systems are
stratified contexts that can lead to unequal civic outcomes. Tracks separate
(or segregate) children by academic merit, but achievement is in itself determined
by social background (Hoskins et al. 2014; Kavadias et al. 2017; Witschge and van
de Werfhorst 2016). These studies however, differ in the mechanisms that are said to
explain this civic gap. The features studied include the timing of the sorting into
tracks; the extent of the tracked curriculum; the vocational orientation of the
educational system; the civic-related content and skills (the degree of standardiza-
tion) learned in each of the tracks; the social status ascribed to different tracks; the
overwhelming allocation of low SES pupils to vocational tracks; and their rigid
separation.
Differences in the curriculum (less critical and politically-oriented content in the
vocational tracks) and in peer socialization (disproportionate allocation of low SES
to the vocational tracks/social segregation) between pupils in the academic and
vocational track have been found to explain inequality in civic outcomes. This gap
is present for electoral participation in England (Janmaat et al. 2014) and in 24
European countries for civic engagement (electoral participation, political interest
and political activism) (van de Werfhorst 2017). The findings of these studies imply
that different tracks do not provide equal skills and opportunities to build the
networks that are key for civic engagement.
Cross-national variations in the institutional features of the educational systems
have also been found to impact on the extent of the civic gap between tracks. School
systems differ in the age (timing) when pupils are sorted into tracks and the duration
of the tracking. Systems with early tracking are those when separation occurs in the
transition between the primary and secondary school -such as those in Germany,
Austria and Flanders (Belgium)-, and late tracking if this separation takes place
along the secondary school -such as England or Sweden-. The earlier the sorting of
590 D. Kavadias et al.

pupils (Janmaat 2011; Kavadias et al. 2017) and the lengthier the tracked curriculum
(van de Werfhorst 2017) – which both result in higher levels of school segregation –
the more pronounced the civic engagement gap between tracks has been found to be
(Janmaat 2011; van de Werfhorst 2017). In addition, earlier and lengthier tracking
has been found to correlate with more negative attitudes towards immigrants and
ethnic minorities across European countries (Kavadias et al. 2017).
Educational systems also differ in the status that distinct tracks have within
society. A comparative study in Western Europe (Denmark, England and Germany)
on upper-secondary education found that differences in civic outcomes between
academic and vocational tracks are related to the status assigned to each of the tracks
in the different national contexts (Hoskins et al. 2014). In countries where the
vocational track has high social prestige -such as in Denmark or Germany- the
relationship between vocational education and unequal voting intentions is less
strong. However, in contexts where the vocational track has a low social status
-such as in England- pupils following the vocational track express lower voting
intentions than those in academic track. Previous experiences of inequality in the
educational system may be the mechanism that links feelings of pessimism among
pupils in vocational tracks with a lower sense of general and political efficacy and
lower voting intentions (Hoskins et al. 2014).
The status of an educational track does not depend solely on features of the
educational system, but also on the institutional set-up of the welfare state and
political economy. The negative status associated with vocational education is not
present in countries, such as Germany or the Netherlands, that have extensive
vocational programs (van de Werfhorst 2017), and small income differentials
between graduates of the vocational and academic tracks (Österman 2018). Studies
occupied with examining the durability of the effects of the tracking system have
conducted longitudinal (Janmaat et al. 2014) and panel studies (Quintelier and
Hooghe 2013). Both types of studies have found that political inequality driven by
the tracking system extends after pupils are no longer exposed to it.
Overall, these studies contribute to the argument that inequalities in civic out-
comes, though related to background differences and pre-school socialization fac-
tors, are not entirely explained by these. A main problem of these findings is that
most of the studies did not control for levels of the outcome variable prior to the
sorting into tracks (e.g., Janmaat et al. 2014), though some have overcome data
limitations with qualitative interviews (Hoskins et al. 2014). The studies suggest a
direct effect of tracking because there is no effect of SES on the studied civic
outcomes (Hoskins et al. 2014); the inclusion of SES does not eliminate the effect
of the tracking system on civic outcomes, and/or this civic gap is not only explained
by differences between tracks but also by institutional differences in the degree of
tracking (weaker or stronger) among educational systems (van de Werfhorst 2017).
Nonetheless, with this research design, the net effect of the tracking system is
difficult to disentangle from that of SES (Persson 2012).
Conversely, studies in line with an early socialization perspective have tested the
direct causal effect of the type of education on intended political participation
(Langton and Jennings 1968; Persson 2012, 2015; Sears and Funk 1999).
37 Inequality, Civic Education and Intended Future Civic Engagement: An. . . 591

Differences in intended political participation are present before students

get allocated to distinct tracks. This body of research suggests that differential
civic outcomes are not related to the educational context of the tracks, but rather to
background differences (such as SES) that were present before the allocation to
different tracks in secondary school. These studies, however, draw on a
non-representative sample from a single country and have not yet found extensive
evidence in cross-national studies.
Literature concerned with studying the functioning of the educational system as
source of inequality has further investigated the “civic learning opportunity gap”
argument raised by Kahne and Middaugh (2008). There is increasing concern
regarding how differential access to civic learning opportunities, their content and
level of standardization are related to unequal civic outcomes and their offset.
In this line of inquiry, one perspective has investigated the relationship between
the standardization of the citizenship education curriculum and unequal civic out-
comes. Citizenship education is extremely variable from country to country in terms
of standardization, i.e., the degree of centralization and the accountability of the
educational system. Results from a European cross-national study showed that the
centralization component is linked to less inequality in non-cognitive civic outcomes
(interest in social and political issues and participation in the community). The more
centralized the curriculum, the less differences in non-cognitive outcomes. The
“accountability component,” has been measured by the level of sanctions and
rewards of an educational system for the performances on the civic education
outcomes. Systems with a high external accountability are less equal in cognitive
civic outcomes. Researchers have suggested that more external accountability enhances
the competition between schools, which make differences in school resources more
salient: schools with more resources tend to use those resources to outperform the other
schools (Witschge and van de Werfhorst 2016).
Another perspective in this area concerns access to learning practices which seek
to promote civic participation. Inequality here is related to access to pedagogical
practices that are more relevant for enhancing civic outcomes. From this perspective,
initial civic outcomes are primarily shaped by family SES, creating a civic engage-
ment gap, where low SES pupils tend to be less politically engaged. Education can
compensate or increase this gap, depending on whether disadvantaged youngsters
gain more from civic pedagogical practices. Disadvantaged youngsters are defined
by a low SES and by having less access to political learning resources at home,
inversely advantaged youngsters have a higher SES and more opportunities for
political learning at home and, thus, they are better prepared for political engagement
(Eckstein and Noack 2016; Hoskins et al. 2017; Schlozman et al. 2012). Although
formal citizenship education, an open climate classroom and political activities in
school foster civic engagement of pupils (voting intentions), only formal citizenship
education was found to reduce this gap between SES groups of adolescents in
England (Hoskins et al. 2017). The findings can be explained by the compulsory
nature of citizenship education in England, which does not exhibit an unequal access
by socioeconomic background. The presence of an open classroom climate can be
predicated on the school resources or pupils composition, while the participation in
592 D. Kavadias et al.

voluntary political activities, can be influenced by socioeconomic background of the

pupil. The potential of citizenship education to reduce social disparities in intended
electoral participation found in this study cannot, however, be generalized, since
these strategies, and whether or not they are compulsory, differ across countries. It is
also difficult to discern the durability of the effects, namely whether they will remain
even after pupils are no longer exposed to the pedagogical intervention in question.
Studies analyzing the structural features of the educational system linked to
unequal civic outcomes conclude that education has a role to play in addressing
the civic gap linked to social background. After all, some of the inequality is
explained by the institutional features of the educational system. Existing studies
also show that in educational contexts, unequal civic outcomes do not only depend
on the socioeconomic status of students and they are related to the structure and
functioning of the institutional setting (Bukodi et al. 2018; Hoskins et al. 2014;
Janmaat et al. 2014; Kavadias et al. 2017; Österman 2018; van de Werfhorst 2017).
Policy implications thus converge on standardization of the curricula with higher
levels of centralization (Witschge and van de Werfhorst 2016). These studies also
highlight the importance of compulsory approaches in guaranteeing equal access to
different strategies of civic related education to compensate for a civic engagement
gap between advantaged and disadvantaged pupils (Hoskins et al. 2017).

A Multi-Layered Approach

Recently some studies have amplified the scope of possible factors that lead to
unequal civic outcomes. The predominant focus on individual level variables has
been expanded to consider other settings, beyond the school, where these factors can
intersect, including the neighborhood or the national context. This kind of approach
identifies not only separate sources/contexts of inequality. It also considers a multi-
layered interaction between the different contexts in which youngsters’ political
socialization and civic engagement takes place (Wilkenfeld and Torney-Purta 2012).
These studies, in addition to demographic variables, examine contexts relevant
for political socialization, such as the family, peers, civic learning experiences in
school and the neighborhood. This multi-layered approach embraces a broader view
of the political socialization process, recognizing that the socialization that takes
place both in the family context (primary socialization) and in the school or the
neighborhood context (secondary socialization) are all relevant for civic outcomes
(Corsaro 2010; Lenzi et al. 2012; Mahatmya and Lohman 2012; Rossi et al. 2016;
Wilkenfeld and Torney-Purta 2012).
These studies stress the importance of considering multiple contexts of sociali-
zation and demographic variables in order to obtain a full picture of the primary and
secondary factors that explain different pathways of civic involvement. Within this
body of research, family, school, and neighborhood features were found to be
associated with civic involvement in adolescence in a cross-national study (Lenzi
et al. 2012), a country-study in Italy (Rossi et al. 2016) and in early adulthood in a
US longitudinal study (Mahatmya and Lohman 2012). However, these associations
37 Inequality, Civic Education and Intended Future Civic Engagement: An. . . 593

were either stronger at the contextual level and varied across countries (Lenzi et al.
2012), or were found to depend on neighborhood, gender and ethnicity features
(Mahatmya and Lohman 2012).
By focusing on different levels of analysis and socialization contexts, these
studies are more suitable to identify elements that can be a source of inequality or
can compensate for unequal civic outcomes. This argument is based on the idea that
disadvantage or lack of resources of one type can be replaced by resources of another
type (e.g. civic skills, knowledge, competencies provided by education can com-
pensate for lesser economic resources) or by resources from another source or
context (e.g., peers, school) (Erola and Kilpi-Jakonen 2017).
In a US-study using survey data, pupils with a profile of accumulated disadvan-
tages (poor school, neighborhood and low SES) were found to benefit more from
civic learning opportunities than pupils that are well off: the gap in cognitive civic
outcomes tends to be less pronounced in schools providing more learning opportu-
nities, while they were wider in the schools lacking these opportunities (Wilkenfeld
and Torney-Purta 2012). Schools, thus, have the potential to narrow this gap through
conducive civic learning strategies.

Key Challenges for Further Research

Although a growing body of studies has examined the link between inequality,
education and civic outcomes, the evidence is not conclusive. Differences across
studies draw attention to the methodological challenges and shortcomings. Many of
these studies make causal inferences based on cross-sectional correlations. They do
however not conform to a design appropriate to test causality and the effectiveness of
pedagogical interventions. Ideally, future studies should consider longitudinal, panel
or experimental designs.
Another issue facing these studies is the lack of uniform operationalization of key
explanatory variables (e.g., socioeconomic status) and outcome variables (such as,
political participation). The lack of uniform operationalization of key variables
makes it difficult to identify clearly the mechanisms leading to civic inequality.
Measurements of civic outcomes concentrate on traditional forms of political par-
ticipation, such as intended voting. Fewer studies measure non-conventional forms
of participation, illegal forms of participation or a combination of these (Persson
2012). A disproportionate focus on traditional forms of political participation can be
problematic, since youngsters tend to be underrepresented in these forms of partic-
ipation (Delli Carpini 2000; Putnam 2000; O’Toole et al. 2003) and instead may use
alternative channels as their preferred form of engagement (Amnå and Ekman 2014;
Sloam 2016).
Questions about the external validity of indicators of political participation have
also been raised, for example, in relation to how measurements of intended partic-
ipation materialize in actual participation (Persson 2012). Nonetheless, these con-
cerns are not widely discussed in the literature since there is a shared assumption that
the impressionable years for political socialization are the pre-adult years. However,
594 D. Kavadias et al.

to draw conclusions as to the effectiveness of civic learning practices in promoting

participation, measurements must be validated with reported political behavior in
adulthood.

Conclusion

In reviewing existing literature, this chapter has examined the manifold explanations
that recent scholarship has given for unequal civic outcomes in youngsters. These
explanations have been linked to features at the individual, the institutional or the
multi-context levels. These three approaches share the assumptions that the formative
years are the most relevant for people’s political socialization and that pre-adult factors
and experiences account for differences in adult civic and political engagement. While
in general terms, political and civic knowledge, attitudes and competencies are
understood to be acquired primarily during childhood or adolescence and are viewed
as leading to relatively stable pattern of civic engagement in adult life, the assumed
durability of the effects of these early socialization processes (in the family or in the
school context, for example) is still mostly untested. There are no conclusive findings
in this regard, and most of the studies face the challenge of drawing conclusions from
cross-sectional data that are not suited to perform a longitudinal analysis.
Within the studies surveyed in this chapter, the accumulation or multiplication of
advantages and disadvantages from different sources and contexts in the youngster’s
profile are viewed as central to explain unequal civic outcomes. Studies differ,
however, as to whether education can compensate for the accumulation of disad-
vantages, and how effective education can be in this regard. Therefore, studies in this
area are structured around a restricted number of debates. The debate regarding the
most relevant agents and age for political socialization is linked to the discussion on
the effectiveness of civic education initiatives in mitigating (Niemi and Junn 1998)
or not mitigating (Langton and Jennings 1968) unequal civic outcomes. Overall, the
literature cannot agree on whether education and school-based civic and citizenship
education can help develop more civically engaged youngsters (Campbell 2008).
The dilemma between the school as a keeper of civic equality (Neundorf et al.
2016) and the attribution of life chances based on academic achievement (Durkheim
1925, 1938) has consequences for civic education. Questions remain open, therefore,
regarding whether formal education can meet its role in forming informed and active
citizens, and whether in doing so it can compensate for – or rather exacerbate
–inequality in other spheres of life.

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International Students: (Non)citizenship,
Rights, Discrimination, and Belonging 38
Ly Thi Tran and Trang Hoang

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 600
“Second Class” Citizens, Marginalization, and Discrimination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 602
Discrimination in Relation to Employment Opportunities and in the Workplace . . . . . . . . . . . . . 603
Belonging, Inclusion, and Exclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 606
Protection of Rights, Well-Being, and Belonging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 609
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 610
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 612

Abstract
International students are subject to the condition of transnational mobility that
constructs their legal, social, cultural, and economic status in a unique way. They
have to temporarily move away from their country of citizenship and reside in the
host country where they do not have citizenship status and are accordingly
subjected to restricted entitlements. In policy discourse, international students
are often seen as valuable economic and cultural subjects by host countries and as
important human capital by home countries. However, in reality, international
students (now over five million in numbers) are vulnerable citizens as their
transnational mobility occurs in a world which lacks a coherent and coordinated
mechanism to protect their rights entitlements and well-being. Drawing on the
context of Australia as an illustrative case, this chapter explores how the condition
of non-citizenship has led to international students’ disadvantage, marginaliza-
tion, intimidation, and discrimination from segments of the Australian popula-
tion. The study shows that the growth of international students and their
non-citizenship in the host country triggers anxiety about (un)employment, job
competition, university place allocation, housing, and migration. Using
L. T. Tran (*) · T. Hoang
School of Education, Deakin University, Burwood, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 599
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_23
600 L. T. Tran and T. Hoang

Antonsich’s conceptual framework of belonging, we analyze the nature and forms

of (non)belonging in relation to international students’ (non)citizenship status.
The chapter concludes by discussing implications for the mutual responsibility of
involved parties to create inclusive and favorable conditions to support interna-
tional students in navigating through the transnational space and capitalizing on
new opportunities as well as new life “possibles” created by international educa-
tion and transnational mobility.

Keywords
International students · Discrimination · Rights · Belonging · Citizenship · Non-
citizenship

Introduction

In the twenty-first century, student mobility is not only a geographical and educa-
tional concern but also a social, political, and economical phenomenon. Trends in the
commercialization of education, offshore online international education, migration
policy, post-study work rights policy, and changes in economic, political, and
education policies in both host and home countries impact transnational student
mobility. There are over five million international students undertaking tertiary
education worldwide, and this number is projected to reach eight million by 2025
(OECD 2017). The number of international student enrolments in Australia reached
839,784 in October, 2018 (Australian Government 2018). International education is
the nation’s biggest services export sector, generating over AUD 34 billion between
September 2017 and September 2018 (ABS 2018) and more than 130,000 jobs
(Australian Government 2017). Within this context, international students play a
crucial role in generating revenue for education providers in the host country.
However, international students have been described as “valuable” but “vulnerable”
subjects in the host country (Sherry et al. 2010; Abo 2017; Tran and Nyland 2011).
Our discussion to follow is premised on the officially and widely accepted definition
of international students as individuals who have voluntarily migrated for the
specific purpose of study, and their study-related activities take place in a country
of which they do not hold citizenship or permanent residency (OECD 2017).
International students are said to live constantly in a legal limbo (Marginson
2012; Pejic 2012; Soong 2017) as their citizenship is situated in the conditions of
transnational mobility. Their cross-border condition and non-citizenship status can
place international students in a vulnerable situation and affect their entitlement to
rights, protection, and services that can apply to other residents in the host country.
Marginson argues that international students’ rights vulnerability is a result of
temporarily moving away from their national citizenship and becoming situated in
a transnational condition while entitlements and protection of rights in the current
world are primarily framed nationally (Marginson 2012, p. 11). Echoing Marginson,
Urry (2012) states that existing policies of citizenship framed by the national society
38 International Students: (Non)citizenship, Rights, Discrimination. . . 601

are limited and restricting the rights of citizens, especially those who are moving
across national borders to pursue study or work. Tran and Gomes (2017) argued for
the need to move away from the nation-centered approach to viewing student
mobility, in which international student citizenship is embedded, since “it over-
simplifies the interrelated nature of this phenomenon and ignores the ways in which
student mobility intersects with multiple and transnational logics of social and
economic practices” (p. 16). As international students enter new spaces and navigate
their positionality related to the interaction between different economic, and social
conditions and rules associated with the original and new localities in the home and
host countries, new ways of framing international students and their transnational
citizenship are needed.
Various empirical studies have found that international students are at risk of
intimidation and discrimination from segments of the Australian population due to
their non-citizenship status (Marginson et al. 2010; Marginson 2013; Tran and Vu
2017). Non-citizenship status is often seen by people from the host community to be
associated with the aspiration for citizenship in the host country, especially in cases
when student mobility is from the Global South to the Global North or when interna-
tional students from developing countries pursue education in a developed country. The
presence of international students and their non-citizenship in the host country triggers
anxiety about (un)employment, job competition, housing, and migration for some
segments of the local community. However, when the stigma of international students
as mere “PR hunters” [permanent residency] who are only interested in securing
citizenship in the host country dominates the interaction between international students
and the classroom, workplace or the wider community, then injustice, discrimination,
and marginalization arise. This situation may also be accompanied with the risk of
international students’ skills, knowledge, aspirations, and potential contributions to host
communities being undermined or un-recognized (Tran and Vu 2017). The stigma of
international students as mere “PR hunters” is still prevalent despite official visa data
showing that five out of six international students leave Australia for opportunities
elsewhere after their graduation (The Australian 2018).
While much has been discussed about the financial benefits international students
bring about (Australian Government 2015), their adaptation (Arkoudis and Tran
2007; Tran 2011), their intercultural integration and identity (Soong 2013; Soong
et al. 2015; Tran and Pham 2016), and their well-being (Forbes-mewett and Sawyer
2016), the dynamics and complexities arising from international students’
non-citizenship status and its implication for international education policies and
practices have been less addressed. This chapter aims to critically examine how
aspects of international student’s human rights, well-being, and belonging are
shaped and re-shaped by their (non)citizenship status as a result of engaging in
transnational mobility and international education. It draws on Antonsich’s (2010)
five-factored framework of belonging to analyze the nature and forms of interna-
tional (non)belonging in relation to their citizenship status. The chapter concludes
with some recommendations for related stakeholders to consider in their coordinated
efforts to safeguard the rights, well-being, and belonging of international students in
the host community.
602 L. T. Tran and T. Hoang

“Second Class” Citizens, Marginalization, and Discrimination

Citizenship status impacts the conditions of belonging. A sense of belonging/

unbelonging to the host country then affects international students’ learning, well-
being, career plan, and life aspirations including the decision of whether to stay on
and secure citizenship in that country. Existing literature suggests international
students have been regarded as “second class citizens” (Tran and Vu 2016), “out-
siders” (Tran 2013), or “aliens” (Marginson 2012). International students’ self-
perceived image as “second class citizens” (Tran and Vu 2016) has resulted from
being marginalized in the community and at the workplace. In the report entitled “A
national disgrace: the exploitation of temporary work visa holders,” the Australian
Education and Employment References Committee highlighted two finance-related
factors faced by international students which make them vulnerable in their host
country. International students have to pay rising international student fees, while
their non-citizenship status in Australia restricts their access to some public services.
Also international students have “limited authority to work and a breach of this
restriction could give the employer leverage to exploit them” (2016, 204). Interviews
with international students in Tran’s (2017) and Tran’s (2018) studies echo these
observations, indicating common causes for feeling marginalized and subordinated
are having to pay high tuition fees while not being entitled to public transport
concession, being exploited in the workplace, being excluded from certain domains
of rights such as free public schooling for their children, being treated unequally in
the classroom, and being excluded in peer interaction.
The anti-migration sentiments from a proportion of the local population in
countries like Australia perpetuate the stigma that international students are only
interested in migration, take university places away from Australian citizens, and, as
Kinnaird (2015) contended, are in competition with local people in the labor market.
This situation echoes Marginson’s view that “non-citizen status enables not only
official discrimination but also unofficial Othering by holistic elements in the local
population” (2012, pp. 21–22). There have also been reoccurring reports that
international students are being subjected to both exploitation in the labor market
and racism in the wider community (Bass 2017; Groch 2017; Berg and Farbenblum
2017). Over the past decade, various incidents of abuse and violence against Indian
and, more recently, Chinese students have been brought to the attention of the
Australian public (Gail 2012; Groch 2017; Needham 2017). This has led the Chinese
government to request their Australian counterpart and education providers to take
protective steps to provide Chinese students with a safe study environment. Baas
(2017) pointed out that the claims of violence, racism, and othering, tied to Australia
as a study destination, could potentially damage its international education sector as
the nation’s biggest services export “industry” (p. 197).
Key areas in which international students experience exclusion and/or marginali-
zation as compared to their domestic counterparts include access to standard accom-
modation and employment opportunities, medical services, student loans, schooling
for international students’ children, and subsidized transport (Kuestenmacher 2014;
Poljski et al. 2014; Marginson et al. 2010; McFadden and Seedorff 2017; United Voice
38 International Students: (Non)citizenship, Rights, Discrimination. . . 603

Victoria 2013b; Wall et al. 2018). In a similar vein, the Australian Human Rights
Commission identifies some key domains of rights where international students are
disadvantaged: access to safe, adequate, and affordable housing, personal safety and
security, access to physical and mental health services, safe and fair employment, and
privacy (2012, p. 9). International students may be at risk of discrimination, exclusion,
and exploitation in dealing with the local community, healthcare providers, migration
agents, real estate agents, landlords, employers, and education providers (Szoke 2012;
Pejic 2012). These forms of discrimination are often on the grounds of international
students’ temporary and non-citizenship status in the host country (Tran 2017; Tran
and Nyland 2011) but can also be due to race, color, culture, religion, language, or sex
(Jakubowicz and Monani 2010; Szoke 2012).
Marginalization with regard to access to adequate housing and restrictions when
making housing decisions is often identified as areas of vulnerability due to inter-
national students’ temporary residence status. Existing research points out four
primary inhibitors to their housing decisions (Kuestenmacher 2014). First, many
international students rely on the option of seeking accommodation within walking
distance to campus to save travel costs because they are not eligible for concession
fares on public transport in some states including Victoria and New South Wales.
Second, housing options for under-aged students are restricted to homestays, as
required by student visa regulations, which in some cases results in low housing
satisfaction. Third, some international students are placed in the position of having to
move house due to financial difficulties and rising rentals. Fourth, some international
students have to make housing arrangements from overseas, but there are limited
types of accommodation available for overseas bookings (Kuestenmacher 2014).
Evidence suggests that international students also face difficulties in accessing
primary school education for their children, as well as medical services (SA Health
2013; Marginson et al. 2010). International students (except for higher degree by
research students) and other visa holders have to pay fees for their children to attend
primary school in Victoria. According to the State of Victoria (2012), this is a form of
discriminatory treatment which conflicts with Australia’s obligations under the
international Convention on the Rights of the Child to make primary education
compulsory and freely available. Research by Poljski et al. (2014) shows that female
international students received unequal access to sexual and reproductive health
information and services due to the limitation of their mandatory health insurance.
This situation is at odds with Australia’s human rights obligations which highlight
the importance to take all appropriate measures to eliminate discrimination and to
ensure appropriate services in connection with sexual health (Poljski et al. 2014).

Discrimination in Relation to Employment Opportunities

and in the Workplace

Existing empirical studies suggest that international students value the opportunity to
get some work experience in the host country. For many international students,
part-time work experience is seen as a form of return from investment in
604 L. T. Tran and T. Hoang

international education (Tran and Soejatminah 2016, 2017). According to Tran and
Gribble (2015), instead of merely providing international students with an additional
income, part-time work in the host country helps them to be exposed to the labor
market and develop their professional, social, and communication skills as well as
local networks, which is critical to their employability and career development.
However, it should also be recognized that concerns have been expressed regarding
whether international students are taking jobs away from Australians or are making it
difficult for local youths to get entry-level jobs. One Nation Senator Pauline Hanson,
for example, mentioned:

These people are supposed to be self-supporting when they come into Australia. But they are
given the opportunity to do twenty hours work a week and they can actually have unlimited
work when they’re not studying. That is wrong because that is impacting the other
Australians getting jobs. (SkyNews)

Echoing this view, Kinnaird argued that international students compete with and
take up jobs of local people in low-skilled sections of the labor market. Views such
as those expressed by Hanson and Kinniard are challenged by scholars who argue
that “to assume international students are taking the jobs of locals is narrow and
ignores the role of international education in job creation” (Tran and Gribble 2015,
p. 1). According to an Australian government report, international education and
international student-related activities help to create more than 130,000 Australian
jobs, not only for the education sector but also for ancillary service sectors such as
accommodation, hospitality, and increased travel and tourism (2017).
The presence of international students can enrich the workplace through their
diversity and the potential to develop the intercultural capability and outlook of the
local workforce (Tran and Gribble 2015). However these benefits are often either
neglected or not fully capitalized upon. Instead, being marginalized and treated less
than equally at the workplace seems to be the most common form of discrimination
international students experience in their host country. Existing research suggests
that employers are reluctant to take on international students or international grad-
uates on a post-study work visa because of concerns over these students’ unfamil-
iarity with the host country’s workplace culture, their English proficiency, and their
nonresidency status. In addition, some complexities are associated with international
students’ visa conditions and restrictions in work entitlements, and there is a lack of
recognition of their potential contributions to the organizations (Tran 2013; Tran and
Soejatminah 2016, 2017; Blackmore et al. 2014; Gribble 2014; Patrick et al. 2008;
Tran et al. 2016; Campbell et al. 2016).
In a submission to the Commonwealth Australia’s Education and Employment Ref-
erences Committee, Tham argued that the vulnerable status of temporary migrant workers,
including international students, stems from interrelated structural factors and includes:

Dependence on a third party for the right of residenceLimited right of residence

Limited authority to work
Limited access to public goods. (Parliament of Australia 2016, pp. 143–144)
38 International Students: (Non)citizenship, Rights, Discrimination. . . 605

As already suggested, international students have long been reported as a vulnerable

army of workers in their host countries due to their financial position and profile as
temporary migrants (Tran 2017; Tran and Soejatminah 2018; Reilly 2013). Their non-
citizenship status has resulted in their disadvantage in securing employment in host
countries. Furthermore, international students’ status as non-citizens means that their
scope to participate in the political system that determines their work rights, in addition
to their lack of security of residence in the host country, is limited (Reilly 2013, Nunes
and Arthur 2013). The restrictions placed on international students’ visas have been
identified as among the key factors that position this workforce in a vulnerable and
exploitable situation, since these restrictive conditions can force international students to
accept cash-in-hand jobs and to keep quiet about any injustices and harassment they
may experience at work (Reilly 2013; Li and Whitworth 2016). In addition, language
and cultural barriers possibly encountered by international students, as well as a lack of
awareness of workplace rights in the host country, can make it less likely for them to
speak up and assert their rights against a local employer (Reilly 2013). In a study on
Chinese international students, Jolene (2012) identified the major problems facing
international students within the labor market of the host country, including the potential
exploitation of international student labor through wage payments below the minimum
wage limit, challenges in keeping up with their educational obligations as they balance
work and study, lack of understanding/access to student employment support services
and information, limited local employment experiences which act as a barrier to entry,
the physical demands of work, and workplace discrimination.
In the Australian cleaning industry, for example, international students are work-
ing “for sub-contractors function as a kind of invisible ‘ghost workforce’ at the
bottom of the city office cleaning industry” (United Voice Victoria, 2013a, p. 6). Up
to 56% of Melbourne’s CBD cleaners are international students from India, Sri
Lanka, Bangladesh, and Colombia (ibid). According to United Voice Victoria, the
subcontractors are “shadowy, fly-by-night” employers who ripped off international
student cleaners by up to $15,000 a year in earnings. United Voice Victoria identified
fear, intimidation, and secrecy as the main factors underpinning international stu-
dents’ invisibility and decisions not to speak out.
International students have explored alternative forms of communication in order to
raise awareness in the public about structural inequalities and elements of vulnerability
in their lived experience. Loneliness, racism, and poverty were the themes emerging
from a series of public performances in 2017 and 2018 (Mills 2018), in which
international students in Melbourne acted out their life stories by way of drama and
dance, making headlines on mainstream media such as City of Melbourne’s social
media platforms Facebook and YouTube, ABC Radio Melbourne, and Meld Maga-
zine. In addition, the comedy series produced by Australia’s national television titled
Ronny Chieng: International Student is another representation of international stu-
dent’s marginalization when they feel at odds with the university campus culture while
having to constantly juggle connection obligations from overseas family and their life
aspirations, as well as the practicalities involved in living and studying in Australia
(Australian Broadcasting Cooperation 2017).
606 L. T. Tran and T. Hoang

Belonging, Inclusion, and Exclusion

While “educational outcomes framed in human experiences are much more difficult
to measure on institutional or system scales, [and thus], are neglected or ignored”
(Liyanage et al. 2018, p. 7), it is nevertheless important to apply the frame of human
experience when examining international students in which belonging/non-
belonging plays a crucial part in safeguarding their well-being and educational
outcomes. In alignment with this humanistic approach in education, we apply the
scholarly concept of belonging to further exploration and analysis of the marginal-
ization, exclusion, and disadvantages experienced by the population of international
students discussed in the above sections. Mobility sees international students oper-
ating within transnational spaces and contexts that are very different from the ones in
which they grew up. Therefore, it is important to understand “the structural and
subjective processes that shape the possibilities for individuals to belong” (Wyn
2018, pp. 35–40).
In the following, we provide a summary of theories and theorizations of belong-
ing across disciplinary and interdisciplinary areas. We then turn to examine the
structures and forms of belonging related to international students, focusing on
issues which concern notions of inclusion/exclusion in the case of international
students in Australia. The section ends with a discussion of the relationships between
mobility, international student belonging, and politics of belonging.
Belonging – as a scholarly concept – has been applied as a frame of reference in
various approaches to research. Belonging is used in describing not only psycho-
logical need (Baumeister and Leary 1995; Karen 2000; Walton et al. 2012) but also
human identity formation (Ignatieff 1994; Anthias 2013, 2016; Shanthi 2013).
Belonging is also used as a relational metaphor and is well applied in critical studies
of youth transition (Cuervo and Wyn 2014; Reay et al. 2010; Yuval-Davis 2006), in
which belonging is used to elucidate the quality of relationships and connections as
part of the resources that young people draw upon to build their lives into adulthood.
The common thread running through these approaches suggests belonging, as a
concept, is related to human need; is embedded in ethnic, cultural, and social
identity; and involves several processes and practices in which human beings try
to find bases of security, value, and recognition in their lives and usually in an
unfamiliar context.
Building on our literature review in previous sections, we attempt to describe and
align the structural conditions that create international student’s belonging/non-
belonging against the well-cited five-factored framework of belonging advanced
by Antonsich (2010). Antonsich, from the discipline of human geography, asserts
that structural conditions for creating belonging are founded on five factors: legal,
economic, cultural, relational, and autobiographical. This framework resonates with
influential work from the field of sociology (Pollini 2005) and anthropology
(Buonfino and Thomson 2007), as well as in several other streams of studies in
humanity, social, and political science.
The first factor, legal status, is a formal “structure of belonging” (Fenster 2002)
since this factor ensures an individual is categorized properly, for instance, as
38 International Students: (Non)citizenship, Rights, Discrimination. . . 607

temporary resident, permanent resident, or citizen and is entitled to rights to fully or

partially participate in certain educational and/or social activities, such as to stay
indefinitely, to work, to study, or to obtain certain social benefits (Rubenstein 2000).
Legal status is therefore important in generating feelings of belonging. Legally,
international students are citizens of other countries but come under different
jurisdictions in the host country. International students’ belonging raises concerns
with regard to their legal status because they are under a different resident category
that requires specific administrative control, monitoring, and reporting. They require
student visas (Australia, the UK, the USA), student’s pass (Singapore), or study
permits (Canada, EU) in order to migrate to the host country, primarily for studying
(but also working) purposes. These visas or permits usually consist of strict condi-
tions, and if in breach, the student visa could be canceled, such as specified in the
Australia’s National Code of Practice for Providers of Education and Training to
Overseas Students 2018, Standard 9 (Minister of Education and Training 2018). The
rights and responsibilities outlined in the Act could be seen as a formalized and
legitimized non-citizenship status of international students, whereby non-belonging
is expressed. Enacting the Act would require a process of “differential exclusion”
(Castles 1995, p. 294), meaning that non-citizen minorities are given access to
certain areas but rejected access to other areas, notably welfare and political partic-
ipation (Castles 1995). Echoing this perspective, Paltridge et al. (2012) state that
international students’ temporary status in effect “creates the conditions for social
exclusion, that is, an inability to engage fully in the economic, cultural, social and
political aspects of Australian life” (Paltridge et al. 2012, p. 29). From her extensive
research on international students in Singapore, Gomes (2018) states that they are
conscious of their status as foreigners, subject to visa conditions, and this guest status
constrains their participation in local political discourse, where they generally
choose to remain silent regarding any experiences of racism or hostility. Gomes’
research suggests that non-belonging due to legal status is experienced by interna-
tional students regardless of the sociocultural contexts of the host country.
The second condition for creating belonging concerns the economic factor.
International students in Australia are differently located economically, since they
pay significantly higher tuition fees than domestic students (Wade 2018). The
financial commitments for undertaking their educational program overseas have
more impact on international student’s engagement with both academic work
(Devlin et al. 2008) and nonacademic activities than domestic students (Bista
2018). There is a rich body of literature that challenges the public discourse about
the wealthy Asian middle class and which speaks eloquently about international
students experiencing severe financial difficulties while studying in Australia
(Forbes-Mewett et al. 2009) “with a significant proportion having a nonwage income
less than half the Henderson Poverty Line” (A threshold for measuring a person’s
relative poverty, founded by Melbourne Institute’s founding Professor Ronald Hen-
derson. Henderson Poverty Line, Melbourne Institute, retrieved at https://
melbourneinstitute.unimelb.edu.au/research-programs/labour-economics-and-social
-policy/henderson-poverty-line) (McCrohon and Nyland 2018, p. 19). Further to
this, Tran and Nyland (2011) found in their research that many international students
608 L. T. Tran and T. Hoang

lack knowledge about local work practices, pay rates, or work conditions; thus, they
are under financial pressures as well as experiencing limited employment opportu-
nities while studying, falling vulnerable to exploitation by employers who rely on
part-time and casual employees. Marginson et al. (2010) consider financial issues
and work experiences as the social and economic security of international students,
which is also linked to belonging. When the formal legal framework and institutional
practices restrict international students’ capacity to create a stable economic condi-
tion, it is an illustration of creating non-belonging.
The third factor in Antonsich’s belonging framework is also known as the
structure of social belonging in Pollini (2005) and describes the “sense of affinity,
or we-feeling” (p. 499). This sense of affinity is believed to generate social belonging
and/or non-belonging, but research evidence suggests that it may be a false binary.
While some studies have positively suggested the role of cultural affinity to
co-ethnic groups who are citizens of the host country (González Motos 2016;
Gonzalez and Morrison 2016), other studies have found differing results. Gomes’
(2015) studies of Asian international students in Australia and Singapore found that
many international students have little affinity with their co-ethnic, domestic peers
since “both groups have evolved differently because of varied communal experi-
ences based on time and place” (Gomes 2015; Tran and Gomes 2017, p. 528). Other
studies that resonate with this view also highlight that international students may
encounter ideological barriers in their relationships with students from similar
cultural backgrounds (Richardson and Rosalind 2007). Therefore, cultural affinity
may not always necessarily lead to a sense of belonging as it is generally assumed in
the literature.
The fourth, relational factor deeply impacts international student belonging, as it
refers to the personal and social ties of individuals. The relationships that connect
international students to their transnational family and friends have been found to be
an indispensable part of their daily life. A significant body of research examines how
international students form friendship networks. Findings suggest that international
students struggle to form relationships with local students, yet they endeavor to form
relationships with international students from their home nation or home region
(Wang and Hannes 2014; Gomes 2015; McFaul 2016). Existing research evidence
concerning relationships to the institutional and academic community suggests that
truly meaningful interactions and relationships in the intercultural context have been
a challenge to achieve (Pham and Tran 2015). It is possible to infer from this
perspective that there is a lack of sense of belonging that could have been created
between international students, faculty, academic, and local peers. Previous studies
have found that students with weak English language skills are less likely to
participate in social clubs or extracurricular activities, to build local social networks
(Blackmore et al. 2015). This lack of participation indicates non-belonging to the
local community. Policies regarding institutional support services may also hinder
international students’ perception of belonging. In 2012, a number of universities in
Australia changed their model of service provision from specialized to mainstream in
order to reduce costs. On the surface, the move resonates with the ideal of fostering a
whole campus sense of belonging, when all students are treated as one cohort and
38 International Students: (Non)citizenship, Rights, Discrimination. . . 609

can access the same services. However, both staff and international students have
voiced the tensions and challenges associated with this move (Forbes-mewett 2016).
This is another illustration of perceived non-belonging circumstances, in which
international students have not been adequately informed nor consulted in regard
to policy changes that impact them directly.
The last factor in the structural belonging framework is the autobiographical
factor, which relates to personal experiences, memories, and attachment to a person
or a place (Antonsich 2010). There is a need to rethink the way that the autobio-
graphical factor generates a sense of non-belonging in the case of international
students. Since the early 2000s, literature has focused upon a younger generation
of international students who are the face and driving force of the international
secondary schooling growth (Arber and Blackmore 2010; Abelmann et al. 2015;
Tsong and Liu 2009; Waters 2003, 2005). A growing cohort of international students
is the “third culture kids” (i.e., children of globally mobile families in the pursuit of
business, education, humanitarian missions) (Pollock and Van Reken 2009). Since
this younger generation of international students spend part (or whole) of their
adolescent years living and studying in different cultures, the autobiographical factor
has distinctive meaning for their sense of belonging (Hannaford 2016, 2017). These
third culture kids find belonging in the relationships they form with others who share
a common life experience (Pollock and Van Reken 2009) and have also been found
to be “future-oriented and have plans for an international career and mobile lifestyle”
(Fail et al. 2004, p. 5). Their avenues for belonging lie in their goals and aspirations
more than in their backgrounds. They view themselves as cosmopolitan people who
feel comfortable in a variety of environments, but lack a sense of belonging in any
one. This new trend of “globally mobile youth” (Witherell 2017) speaks to the need
to reconsider the meaning of citizenship and belonging.
The mapping of international student belonging against five foundational factors
illustrates the intertwining nature of belong and non-belonging in international
student’s perspectives and lived experience as well as highlights the systemic
barriers that exclude international students legally, economically, and sociocultur-
ally. Findings from literature throughout this chapter illustrate that international
student belonging and/or non-belonging can have significant implications for their
lived experience in the host country. The protection of international students’ rights
and well-being is central to their sense of belonging to the host country and host
communities.

Protection of Rights, Well-Being, and Belonging

In response to the recurring issues of international student discrimination and

exploitation, the Australian government has made a number of efforts to protect
the rights and well-being of this group of temporary residents. In particular, the
government has reviewed and amended the Education Services for Overseas Stu-
dents (ESOS) Act and the National Code of Practice for Registration Authorities and
Providers of Education and Training to Overseas Students 2007 (National Code)
610 L. T. Tran and T. Hoang

with a focus on strengthening the protective elements in these regulations. National

policy texts on international students including International Student Strategy for
Australia 2010–2014 and National Strategy for International Education 2025 both
stressed the rights of international students (Australian Government 2010, 2017).
The Overseas Students Ombudsman (OSO), a specialist role of the Commonwealth
Ombudsman, was established to protect the rights of international students. Other
significant developments include the commissioning of ISANA (International Stu-
dent Advisers Network of Australia Inc.) to produce videos and materials to raise
international students’ awareness of their rights and responsibilities under the ESOS
Act and the National Code.
As a legislative instrument made under the Education Services for Overseas
Students Act 2000, the National Code 2018 supports the protection of international
students’ work rights and rights with regard to quality education and training. Under
the ESOS National Code 2018, education providers have compliance obligations to
educate international students about work rights and workplace regulations. The
Commonwealth Government (2018) stresses that the ESOS National Code “protects
the rights of international students in Australia . . . [and] covers everything from
financial protections and laws protecting the rights of international students through
to work rights, student welfare and complaints.” The latest action from the govern-
ment is the release of the “Working in Australia Package” by The Fair Work
Ombudsman (FWO). This package comprises (1) working in Australia presentation
slides, (2) working in Australia video, (3) fair work information statement, and (4) a
guide to starting a new job. The resource is designed to assist those who work with
migrant and multicultural communities – including international students – to
educate these communities about workplace laws in Australia (Fair Work Ombuds-
man 2018). These are significant moves from different government bodies to better
protect international students’ rights, enhance their welfare, and empower this cohort
in their participation in different aspects of the host society.

Conclusion

The rich body of literature reviewed in this chapter suggests three main areas that
shape the structural exclusion of international students stemming from their non-
citizenship status. These areas are barriers to access standard accommodation and the
local labor market; difficulties in negotiating education, health, finance, public
schooling, and public transport service provisions; and social disadvantages when
dealing with certain stakeholders and some segments of the local community
that reinforce the “outsider” (Tran 2013a) position of international students. These
structural conditions largely contribute to the vulnerability of international students
as a minor group in a host country’s social, cultural, and educational setting (Sawir
et al. 2012).
Based on our narrative synthesis of scholarly work and national policies in
relation to international students’ visa and citizenship, rights, and their different
aspects of life, we propose some recommendations for related stakeholders to
38 International Students: (Non)citizenship, Rights, Discrimination. . . 611

enhance the well-being, rights entitlements, and belonging of international students.

First, there is a critical need for a more coordinated approach among the involved
parties including institutions; government organizations such as the migration and
visa department, department of education and training, and trade department; human
rights organization; and various professional organizations involved in international
education. Institutions, government agencies, and involved parties must work col-
laboratively not only to develop a more coherent and efficient mechanism to manage
and protect the welfare of international students but more importantly to educate
international students on their rights and enhance their agency in participating in
different aspects of life in the host country. Second, inclusion is reciprocal in nature,
and unless there is a welcoming mind-set from the host population toward interna-
tional students, it is difficult to realize the goal of making international students feel
included and valued in the host society. Therefore, there should be more coordinated
efforts among the related parties to showcase the value of international students and
international education and the various untapped potential to the wider Australian
community.
Third, it is essential to have targeted policies and specific strategies to facilitate
international students’ participation in aspects of the host society and to encourage
different communities in the host society to actively facilitate international students’
participation in their communities. Finally, we advocate for the need to bring in the
principles of social inclusion into policies and practices regarding international
students, to support the structural dimensions of social belonging. Our premise
largely contends with Marginson’s (2012) call for two areas of social inclusion for
international students in terms of public and private discourse as well as institutional
practices and in terms of a global dimension to complement the national regulation.
This perspective is closely related to providing international students’ with access to
a broader range of rights (Jakubowicz and Monani 2010), which equals to “quasi-
citizenship status,” whereby “their rights and entitlements are aligned as closely as
possible to those of local students” (Marginson 2012, p. 11). Within the context of
“Advance Australia’s Fair,” another valuable reference point would be the frame-
work and resources developed by the Australian Social Inclusion Board. These
consist of valuable principles to define and measure the extent of being socially
included, meaning having access to resources and opportunities in order to realize
one’s potential to learn, work, connect with communities, and participate in civic
discussions on decisions that affect them (Australian Social Inclusion Board 2012).
Soong (2015) indicates that despite challenges, many students are able to imagine
a variety of life opportunities and exercise different forms of agency to realize their
aspirations (p. 4). International students are engaged in dynamic and wide-ranging
strategies to navigate through different aspects of life in the host country, overcome
the disadvantages of non-citizenship status, and capitalize on new opportunities as
well as the new life “possibles” created by international education and transnational
mobility. However for international students to fully realize these potentials, it is the
shared mutual responsibility of all, including the involved parties in the host
community, to create the inclusive and favorable conditions for international stu-
dents to participate and make a contribution.
612 L. T. Tran and T. Hoang

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Socialist Citizenship in the Post-socialist Era
Across Time and Space: A Closer Look at 39
Cuba and Vietnam

Hang B. Duong and Le-Ha Phan

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 620
The Formation of the New Human Being and the New Socialist Person . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 621
The Ideal Socialist Citizen and Youth Socialization: The Post-Soviet Decade . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 622
Cuba . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 623
Vietnam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 624
The Ever Newer Citizens, Educational Reforms and Challenges of Citizenship Education
in the Context of Increasing Globalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 625
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 629
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 630

Abstract
This chapter examines the construction and cultivation of socialist citizenship as a
top-down national citizenship project that promotes collective political identities
in Cuba and Vietnam. Focusing on the post-socialist era, it highlights how the
meanings of socialist citizenship have continued to evolve in the educational
contexts of each country since the collapse of the former Soviet Union. The
chapter compares the ways in which Cuban and Vietnamese citizens, particularly
young generations, as constituents of a political community are socialized and
engaged in state-sponsored political and civic activities. The implementation

H. B. Duong (*)
College of Education, University of Lehigh, Bethlehem, PA, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
L.-H. Phan
Department of Educational Foundations, College of Education, Universiti Brunei Darussalam
(Brunei) and University of Hawaii at Manoa (USA), Honolulu, HI, USA
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 619
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_25
620 H. B. Duong and L.-H. Phan

aspect of the socialist citizenship ideals uncovers the increasing challenges that
citizenship education faces and the complexities of changing citizen identities in
each national context. The chapter also provides an analysis of existing research
on the transnational factors that may have shaped the development and current
direction of socialist citizenship in Cuba and Vietnam.

Keywords
Socialist citizenship · Post-socialist · Citizenship education · Cuba · Vietnam

Introduction

The international literature on citizenship studies has covered a wide range of

contexts with differing historical, economic, social, political, and cultural conditions
and educational systems. Likewise, it has also examined varied approaches to do and
promote citizenship education in diverse settings. As a sub-theme within citizenship
studies/education, nevertheless, the literature on socialist citizenship remains rather
limited. This chapter pays particular attention to socialist citizenship in the post-
socialist era. Since the collapse of the Communist Bloc in the late 1980s, China,
Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam have continued to identify themselves as
communist states heading toward socialism. To date, each is governed by a single
party structure that adopts distinctly Marxist-Leninist philosophy as official state
ideology, though they may pursue different economic development models. Within
the scope of this chapter, we shall focus on the cases of Cuba and Vietnam, leaving
the other national contexts for future endeavors.
We adopt Silova’s (2010) view of post-socialism as a conceptual lens. Post-
socialism is neither a temporal marker of a historical period nor a European-centric
focus on a geographic area. Rather, as Silova (2010) argues, it is “a space from which
we can further complicate (not clarify) our understanding of ongoing reconfigurations
of educational spaces in a global context” (p. 20). With globalization studies attracting
increasing attention, post-socialism continues to serve as a relevant resource and
“unique space” to study the diversity of social and educational phenomena in both
former Soviet countries and current communist contexts (p. 4). Indeed, communist
nations such as Cuba and Vietnam have pursued different paths of development since
the late 1980s (Carnoy and Samoff 1990; Bunck 1996). This post-socialist lens,
therefore, could offer nuanced understandings of the complexities of citizenship
developments in (post)socialist education settings that have been subject to multilay-
ered impacts from sociopolitical factors in the context of globalization.
Acknowledging that citizenship can be understood differently, we draw on
(socialist) citizenship as a political identity in particular. Smith (2004, p. 302) sees
political identity as “the collective label for a set of characteristics by which persons
are recognized by political actors as members of a political group.” The formation
and transformations of senses of political identity are both products and instruments
of people-making processes that political leaders seek to engage in to build an
39 Socialist Citizenship in the Post-socialist Era Across Time and Space. . . 621

enduring political community (Smith 2003). Socialist citizenship, like other forms of
identity, is largely constructed and promoted by political actors, who determine how
governing power would be created and exercised to sustain such a community.

The Formation of the New Human Being and the New Socialist
Person

Following the successful revolt against the US-backed Batista government in 1959, Fidel
Castro became Cuba’s new president. Since 1961, Cuba has officially declared a
one-party communist country. Vietnam, on the other hand, underwent significant political
turmoil to gain its entire independence. Specifically, in 1945 Ho Chi Minh declared
Vietnam’s independence after an almost 100 years under French colonization followed
by Japanese occupation during the World War II. However, in 1946 France reoccupied
Vietnam, leading to another 9 years of war, taking place mostly in the North of Vietnam.
The Dien Bien Phu victory against France in 1954 led to the Geneva Accord that ended
France’s involvement in Vietnam and the temporary partition of Vietnam into North and
South. This partition, however, led to the formation of two Vietnams: North Vietnam –
officially known as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) – and South Vietnam –
officially known as the Republic of Vietnam (RV). Like Cuba since 1961, North Vietnam
since 1954 officially adopted and increasingly embraced socialist communist ideals
based on Marxist-Leninist principles as state ideologies. The communist governments
of Cuba and North Vietnam, viewing cultural change as the main and foremost goal that
would come before economic foundations, attempted to transform their people in radical
ways (Laymon 1999; Breidlid 2007). Though approaches to transforming the citizenries
varied in each case, the common ultimate goal was to create loyal and committed
generations for an egalitarian, classless society as the following paragraphs explain.
In both Cuba and Vietnam, education was highly valued and formal education
was structured as a centralized system. Together with other channels of communi-
cation available (radios, posters, newspapers, etc.), education was utilized for its
potential to forge senses of political identity and community. In the context where the
expansion of formal education was linked to the development of modern nation-
states in the twentieth century, citizenship education was seen as a primary means in
the process of ideological formation of young Cubans and Vietnamese, particularly
in the anti-colonial and anti-imperialism struggles for national independence. In
other words, as a top-down national identity project, citizenship education in Cuba
and Vietnam played an important role in the process of nation-building and trans-
forming human mentality (Vasavakul 1994; Pérez 1999). Thus, revolutionary edu-
cation in each national context was intimately connected to various efforts to develop
the economy that ultimately served political imperatives of socialist revolution
(Carnoy and Samoff 1990; Richmond 1990; Vasavakul 1994).
In the case of Cuba, the traditional Cuban, perceived as agrarian and respectful for
culture, was also seen as having “a faith in the power and justice of education”
(Kapcia, cited in Richmond 1990, p. 107). The traditional person was educated to
become a “new human being” (Gasperini 2000, p. 12) who was imbued with a
622 H. B. Duong and L.-H. Phan

communist conciencia (consciousness). This new socialist citizen was to be “selfless

and cooperative, obedient and hardworking, gender-blind, incorruptible, and non-
materialistic” (Bunck 1994, p. 4). In other words, as Ernesto “Ché” Guevara made
clear, the New Man was motivated by self-sacrifice and moral incentives rather than
by individualistic materialism (Breidlid 2007; Malott 2007). For Cuba, cultivating a
new cultural ideological mentality and developing a stable economy were consid-
ered to be important and critical to escape national dependency from the United
States and also to “fire the people’s enthusiasm” to build socialism (Mtonga 1993,
p. 392). Cuba’s expanding education in the 1960s mainly focused on primary and
secondary education because these education levels were considered favorable to
develop socialist consciousness congruent with economic growth.
In the case of Vietnam, guerilla style work-study schools combining labor production
with academic studies had been prevalent in North Vietnam since 1946. Schools served
a special purpose, which was to contribute to economic production aimed at financing
the army. Throughout the ensuing several decades, this school model was gradually
replaced with centralized general education, the new cultural life and the education
system continued to promote the ideal of a patriotic laborer who loved the country, loved
labor, and was committed to the march toward socialism (Vasavakul 1994). The socialist
project promoted by North Vietnam’s communist leadership since 1954 was largely
informed by Marxist-Leninist ideologies and revolutionary morals (Vasavakul 1994) in
parallel with nationalism and anticolonialism ideologies. It aimed to create the new
socialist person and was energetically incorporated in North Vietnam’s formal education
and its comprehensive social engineering agenda at all levels. Through this process,
socialist citizenship was cultivated and sustained. After the end of the anti-American
War (also known as the Vietnam War) in 1975, the new socialist person model became
the official educational goal of the newly unified Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The
Communist Party declared its vision of new culture of socialism to be the superior social
system shaping its new socialist citizenry. In particular, the new socialist Vietnamese
were to have a high degree of political and moral consciousness, work hard, and always
seek to improve themselves to contribute to the goals of the state (Education in
Revolution Vietnam: The New Socialist Person, 1978). Importantly, the new socialist
person was expected to show his or her ultimate patriotism and commitment to socialism
and proletarian internationalism.
In brief, Cubans and Vietnamese in the high communist era of the Cold War were
educated with similar socialist principles and values. Such ideals were integral to
the strengthening of socialist ideologies and the building of solidarity and interna-
tionalism among the socialist bloc members and among communist parties
internationally.

The Ideal Socialist Citizen and Youth Socialization: The Post-

Soviet Decade

The collapse of the former Soviet Union led to political and social economic chaos in
the whole communist world including Cuba and Vietnam, the long-time
Soviet allies. Focusing on individual national context, this section features the
39 Socialist Citizenship in the Post-socialist Era Across Time and Space. . . 623

different socioeconomic landscapes and the evolving foci of socialist citizenship

education in Cuba and Vietnam during the 1990s.

Cuba

The fall of the Soviet Bloc in 1989 was accompanied by the withdrawal of Russian
funding and an intensified US comprehensive blockade for Cuba. Cuba entered an
economic crisis known as “The Special Period” from 1996 to 2004. In 1993, after
legalizing the US dollar and allowing direct foreign investment in a limited number
of sectors, Cuba reintegrated into the global marketplace. While tourism signifi-
cantly helped save Cuba from the crisis, several observers characterized the Cuban
society of this period as becoming “polluted by the capitalism” caused by the influx
of foreign businesses and tourism (Frederik 2005, p. 403). In response to the
situation, the Cuban government reasserted the political will by efforts to strengthen
the economy and political structure, and to develop a citizenry with a “strong sense
of social responsibility” (Martin 1991, p. 99) that drew on Marxist socialist and
Cuban revolutionary spirit.
Specifically, the Cuban government sought to develop the role of youth, partic-
ularly their participation in the construction and leadership of schools, mass organi-
zations, and the society as a whole. With strong “confidence in human beings and
their ability to find solutions to problems,” schools aimed to advance socialist
consciousness as the “truly strategic objective” for the Cuban youth (Martin 1991,
pp. 98–99). As a separate subject, Values Education taught students values, attitudes,
and practices that aimed to strengthen internationalism, national identity, work
morality, solidarity, and defense against external threat (Gasperini 2000). Citizenship
education across the curriculum continued to incorporate ideological education and
was thus considered a form of political indoctrination (Bunck 1994). Indeed, almost
all (social science) subjects of the early grades through university years included
aspects of the Marxist-Leninist ideals and the Cuban revolution (Medin 1990; De
Varona 1992; Lutjens 1996). Yet, as a Marxist scholar Malott (2007) indicated, such
an indoctrinating function of Cuban schools was necessary to create consent among
people in terms of producing labor power with willingness.
In the post-Soviet decade of the 1990s, good socialist Cubans were expected to
participate in at least one mass communist organization. For example, most elemen-
tary school children joined the Union of Cuban Pioneers, while students of higher
levels of education might be members of the Federation of University Students, the
Committees for the Defense of Revolution, or the Youth Labor Army (Rosendahl
1997; Fernandez 1993). As one of the key channels of communicating the revolu-
tionary message, these (party-affiliated) organizations socialized the younger gener-
ation into socialist values, patterns of conduct, and emotions supportive of the
regime (Fernandez 1993). For example, the 1999 campaign “The Battle of Ideas”
mobilized young Cubans, many of whom were members of youth organizations
participating in the defense of the revolution (Kapcia 2005). The students’ member-
ship in these organizations was rigorously evaluated throughout the school year,
reflecting a relevant level of political-ideological integration. The evaluation was
624 H. B. Duong and L.-H. Phan

extremely important because inactive participation was synonymous with low levels
of political integration, which could affect students’ opportunities to enter university.
While Cuba’s basic education system was known for being high-performing and
inclusive, De Varona (1992) noted going to university in this country was a privilege,
rather than a right, based on one’s commitment to state ideology.

Vietnam

Meanwhile, just several years before the Soviet’s entire dissolution, in 1986, Viet-
nam already took on a different path that transformed the Soviet centrally planned
economy to a market-oriented one. The economic reform (Doi Moi) included the
privatization of many state-owned enterprises and expansion of economic coopera-
tion with the world. Indeed, Vietnam overcame the domestic economic crisis and
engaged in economic reforms at a more open and faster rate than Cuba. By the
mid-1990s, Vietnam became the fastest growing economy in the Southeast Asian
region. Despite the fact that the state remained the largest provider of education,
Vietnam’s education transitioned from public financing to a hybrid system that
combined state and non-state elements. Central to this transition was the promotion
of the “socialization” of education (xa hoi hoa giao duc) in which household and
other non-state sectors were called to share financial responsibility and related
resources for education (London 2011; Duong 2015).
In this system, the idealized model of a Vietnamese person had been characterized
by a high level of intellect and morality. In fact, Vietnamese socialist beings were
portrayed in state policy and curriculum as having a pair of fundamental qualities,
i.e. “red mind and expertise” (hong va chuyen) (Doan 2005; Lucius 2009; Phan et al.
2011). While the latter refers to one’s professional capacity, the former – red mind –
represents socialist ideology and values. This set of values were drawn on the
principles and philosophies of Confucianism, Marxism-Leninism, and Ho Chi
Minh’s Thoughts (Nguyen and Nguyen 2014; Lucius 2009). Because of a long-
lasting cultural influence of ancient Chinese philosophies, moral cultivation plays an
important role in Vietnamese people’s character and personality building. Therefore,
a significant part of Vietnam’s citizenship education focuses on moral education
which is also taught as a stand-alone subject in primary schools. Meanwhile, from
secondary schools to higher education, the emphasis has been on socialist morality
in order to develop socialist citizens. In other words, although many aspects of
socialism were diminished as the result of Doi Moi, the socialist citizen remains the
primary outcome of the Vietnamese educational system. Representations of the good
socialist citizen of Doi Moi were for the most part not much different from that of the
pre-Doi Moi period: a person who loves labor and the country, has absolute loyalty
to the state ideology, the regime, and the construction of socialism. In brief, and
similar to the Cuban case, education in Vietnam during the decade from Doi Moi in
late 1986 was explicitly used for the political socialization of youth, whether aimed
at cultivating patriotism and values (Nguyen and Nguyen 2014; Nguyen 2015) or
instilling morality (Doan 2005).
39 Socialist Citizenship in the Post-socialist Era Across Time and Space. . . 625

Another notable feature regarding the socialist citizen ideal in the early years of
Doi Moi is that pursuits for materialistic benefits and individualism were still
considered antithetical to traditional and socialist values. On the one hand, the
state asserted that citizens were encouraged to participate in all forms of economic
sectors, including household businesses, cooperatives, and private businesses. Such
state-socialist rhetoric was in line with the privatizing practices of Doi Moi that
endorsed a multi-sectoral market economy and the national slogan of wealthy people
and a strong nation (Nguyen 2006; Kleinen 2015). On the other hand, Party
members were not allowed to be involved in the operation of the private sector
which was seen as related to capitalism. While many young people were already
excited about and engaged in self-employment and fortune making opportunities,
political leaders faced considerable perplexity to come up with the best model of
citizen in a new time (Pham and Thai 2011).
Unlike Cuba where the work-study program was still promoted in the post-
socialist period, the integration of study with physical labor was no longer present
in Vietnam’s national curriculum in the 1990s. Nevertheless, Vietnamese youth were
involved in various voluntary movements, one of which was the large-scale Green
Summer Campaign. These movements were primarily led by mass organizations for
youth, for example the Ho Chi Minh Young Pioneer Organization, the Ho Chi Minh
Communist Youth League and the Students’ Association, which served as a “trans-
mission belt” between the Party and the youth (Rosen and Marr 1999, p. 177).
Through voluntary work, students were called to contribute to improving living
conditions particularly in poor and remote regions and also to enhancing their own
revolutionary spirit (Doan 2005). While the youth were anecdotally inspired by these
voluntary activities, Nguyen (2006) observed that such campaigns and movements
were not popular beyond state organizations and had limited impact on the youth’s
daily life.

The Ever Newer Citizens, Educational Reforms and Challenges

of Citizenship Education in the Context of Increasing
Globalization

Cuba survived the tough decade of the 1990s, but a parallel economy based on the
dollar has contributed to increasing income inequities and social stratification
(Rosendahl 1997; Lancaster and Sanyal 2012). Social policy reforms of the Special
Period brought the devaluation of traditional labor and its replacement with employ-
ment in the tourism industry. The application of market principles created opportu-
nities for certain groups of people but also brought challenges for the education
sector. For example, education met considerable difficulties because of a declined
budget and a shortage of teachers, many of whom moved to a more lucrative tourism
sector (Breidlid 2007). In addition, commitment to socialist ideals and revolutionary
values, such as solidarity and sacrifice, deteriorated significantly (Lancaster and
Sanyal 2012). As a result, as collective perceptions and representations of life
changed and faced erosion, citizenship education struggled to nurture revolutionary
626 H. B. Duong and L.-H. Phan

spirit in young Cubans who underwent a “sense of loss and anxiety about their
identities” (Martín 1995, cited in Pintado 2005, p. 149).
By the end of the last century, Vietnam had become integrated deeply into the
global economy. Vietnamese people were increasingly exposed to global commod-
ities, including music, fashions, consumer products, and foreign cultural contents
(Rosen and Marr 1999). A growing number of Vietnamese have access to the
Internet and social media, entailing greater influence from Western concepts of
citizenship and democracy (London 2014; Bui 2016). Gaining remarkable economic
and social achievements during the Doi Moi era, Vietnam’s opening-up has also
been accompanied by growing social inequalities and social problems that the
Vietnamese state has perceived as an important challenge in need of address (Thayer
2003; Nguyen 2005; Taylor 2004).
Though emerging problems in Vietnam and Cuba alike should be understood
within a larger context of global disparities, the widening market economy, partic-
ularly in the Vietnamese context, has had a tremendous impact on perceptions of
values concerning individuals’ life goals and ideals (Nguyen 2006; Napier and
Vuong 2013; Wallengren 2017). Specifically, research surveys of youth values in
Vietnam between mid-1990s and 2000s showed modern Vietnamese youth began to
depart from what the state had expected of them. Profoundly transforming the
society, the booming economy gave rise to a new middle class who have access to
jobs and resources without subscribing to the Party’s pronouncements and propa-
ganda. Particularly, young Vietnamese in a market-oriented society, while encour-
aged by the state to start their own entrepreneurs and to get rich, have expressed
increasing alienation to politics and socialist ideals. In other words, they were more
interested in employment and entertainment opportunities than previous generations
(Thai 1995; Nguyen 2006; Pham and Thai 2011). Rosen and Marr (1999) also
remarked that the ideals of young Vietnamese since Doi Moi were “less clear-cut,
less altruistic and more self-centered than those of previous post-revolution gener-
ations” (p. 196). Accordingly, the Party’s grassroots-level organizations had diffi-
culty recruiting new members, among whom high school and college students
accounted for only 1.87% (Thayer 2003). A large-scale nationwide survey with
college students in the early 2000s found abound half of the participants stressed the
importance of revolutionary ideals; yet only 34.7% of them regarded revolutionary
ideals to be necessary in students’ life (Dang 2008).
Meanwhile, the socialization process of Cuban youth through both formal and
nonformal citizenship education appeared to yield mixed results. As Báez (2004,
p. 142) argued, the Cuban people, despite economic hardship, maintained, for the
most part, their support of their government. On the contrary, Bunck (1994) showed
after more than 30 years of failed attempts to establish a revolution culture, Cuban
youth “remained largely resistant and hostile to Cuba’s leaders” (p. 85). In
Fernandez’s (1993) accounts, Cuban youth of the 1990s had not embraced the values
and behavior patterns expected of them. They were deeply disillusioned by the social
realities which were far from promises made by the state. This disillusionment led to
the circumstance that Fernandez (1993, p. 192) called the “desocialization” of Cuban
youth, which gave rise to internal contradictions between ideology and praxis.
39 Socialist Citizenship in the Post-socialist Era Across Time and Space. . . 627

Examining the informal arena of political socialization, Fernandez (1993) claimed it

was the non-state-controlled spaces of daily life that most clearly manifested resis-
tance to state dogma and policies. This was evidenced in situations where Fernandez
discovered that the networks of Cuban youth, many of which originally growing out
of state socialization initiatives, became private spaces where the youngsters devel-
oped practices and identities that transcended state control or even challenged state
orthodoxy. The resulting widespread social disaffection and disconnection between
the Cubans and the state were deemed to fail the ultimate goal of the revolutionary
moral absolute for the nation, suggesting an unfulfilled outcome of socialist social-
ization (De Varona 1992; Fernandez 1993).
In response to rapid socioeconomic changes, political leaders in each national
context have taken steps to manage and direct the youths’ behaviors and practices.
The Cuban state, resisting the globalization of neoliberal capitalism, attempts to
withstand all forms of privatizing education with a view to maintain control over
achievements of the Revolution’s social programs. As a result, since the 1960s there
has been almost no change in the level of stated policy commitment to public
education provision (Malott 2007). However, fears of a creeping capitalism and
individualizing tendencies made the Cuban government introduce a new educational
transformation program in 2001. One of the main aims for this reform was to rebuild
collective participation, particularly to reengage young Cubans in revolutionary
spirit and values (Breidlid 2007; Kapcia 2005). As Breidlid (2007) indicated,
decisions to have smaller class sizes and to turn most upper secondary schools in
the countryside into boarding schools were drawn on both pragmatic and ideological
considerations. In addition to the quality improvement purpose, such changes sought
to facilitate teachers to take more ideological control of the students who were also
expected to receive more focused formal citizenship education by living in boarding
schools (Breidlid 2007).
In the early 2000s, Vietnam continued to developed rapidly though its economy
slowed by the mid-2000s, which many scholars attributed to the limited and cautious
political reforms of the party-state (Nguyen and Pham 2016). In 2002, the country
also implemented a curricular reform that overhauled all textbooks that had been
used during Doi Moi (Salomon and Vu 2007). Producing a socialist citizenry
continues to be the intended outcome of the new national curriculum despite the
country’s ongoing commitment to market-oriented development. New elements of
citizenship have been added, though with modest content. These new elements
include knowledge about human rights and environmental protection at both
national and international levels (Nguyen and Nguyen 2014). In practice, it appears
that the Vietnamese state has adopted a more relaxed approach to managing youth.
For example, the authorities have given youth a greater scope of flexibility in
expressing their ideas and desires. Nguyen (2006), drawing on field studies in
Hanoi, shows how the state and Party have become rather tolerant with students’
unauthorized gatherings and demonstrations, suggesting that the party-state has also
reformed itself to accommodate youth (Thayer 2003).
In both the Vietnamese and Cuban contexts, at the turn of the twenty-first century,
citizenship education faced unprecedented challenges. Critiques of Vietnam’s
628 H. B. Duong and L.-H. Phan

citizenship education include obsolete learning content, political dogma, teacher

shortage, and low quality teaching (see, for example, Nguyen and Nguyen 2014).
Many teachers of citizenship education received dated professional training (ibid).
Notably, like Cuban students, Vietnamese counterparts increasingly found the prin-
ciples and ideologies taught at school to be contradictory to what they aspire and
experience in real life (Smith 2016; Doan 2005). Both local and foreign observers
attribute these challenges to the fact that while education in both nations is persis-
tently attached to the inflexible goals of an authoritarian governance model, educa-
tion has to accommodate young people’s changing needs and identities in a highly
globalized society (Nguyen 2006; Lucius 2009; Nguyen and Nguyen 2014). More
importantly, citizenship education teachers operate in the context of a dilemma as
they attempt to work within the contradictions of state-society relations resulting
from a growing dissonance between received state rhetoric and its practices.
In addition, the contemporary Cuban education system also struggles with “try-
ing, on the one hand, to accommodate students’ interests while, on the other hand,
serving society’s needs” (Blum 2011, p. 115). Still, Cuban education has to cultivate
in students revolutionary morals while attempting to integrate new values and
priorities that help students succeed in a changing society. Lancaster and Sanyal
(2012) summarized the complex dilemmas of Cuba’s values education (which are
also shared by Vietnam’s citizenship education, though with a different degree) in
the following terms:

Values education bears the important responsibility of creating youth that can take on the
task of continuing the socialist system while connecting to students’ individual lived
experiences and perspectives. And while students’ realities often contradict traditional
socialist ideals, they must still learn to see themselves as actors in the service of the larger
socialist society. This process underlines the complexity of values formation and the difficult
task of values education. (p. 43)

During the 2010s, updated conceptions of the new citizen in both national
contexts have emerged. In fact, there has been an ongoing process of redefining
what it means to be a good citizen and what socialist values should be transmitted
through citizenship education or through the education system as a whole. In
Vietnam, state discourse continues to call upon the youth to be the vanguard in the
construction of socialism. Yet it does so through the promotion of a well-rounded
citizen who espouses not only state orthodoxy but also modernity and collective
national identity (Nguyen and Nguyen 2014; Le 2016). In addition, the recent
proposal to revamp the citizenship curriculum, based on a competency approach
and planned to implement throughout Vietnam in 2018, has included components of
the twenty-first century skills, values, and civic virtues that align with Vietnam’s
market economy with socialist orientation and global integration.
In comparison, Cuba’s education system, inspired by the Marxist revolutionaries
in Latin America, continues to advance the spirit of internationalism in support of
national liberation struggles against globalization and imperialism (Blum 2011;
Smith 2016; Sant and Valencia 2018). The Cuban government’s take on internation-
alism stresses global collaboration or solidarity, a core principle of international
39 Socialist Citizenship in the Post-socialist Era Across Time and Space. . . 629

organizations and movements that provide humanitarian assistance or anti-

capitalism support to alliance countries in need. This stems from the fact that
young Cubans learn to perceive the world as divided between the core (wealthy)
capitalists and the peripheral. In this world, the peripheral needs to unite to resist the
former which is considered the cause of social inequities and injustice (Sant and
Valencia 2018). Accordingly, this version of global citizenship in Cuba has resulted
in many well-trained experts in such fields as education, health, or defense having
been sent abroad on internationalist aid missions (Blum et al. 2017; Sant and
Valencia 2018). At the same time, more and more young Cubans, while “jettisoning
the altruistic image promoted in education of national emissaries, [. . .] take advan-
tage, as educated global citizens, of the opportunities capitalist nations are seen as
offering” (Blum et al. 2017, pp. 291–292). This complex sense of self cultivating as a
global Cuban citizen, and the international and global opportunities and aspirations
associated with it, has also posed challenges. Though there is an emergence of a
dynamic process in which “official ideology is flexibly negotiated at the classroom
level to fit the realities of the teachers and pupils” (Lancaster and Sanyal 2012,
p. 38), many highly educated young Cubans, on turning themselves into a worth-
while export, find it hard to reconcile perceived tensions related to the resistance to
and reproduction of power relations in the world. This particular issue is discussed in
detail in another work that the authors of this chapter are simultaneously developing.
To a large extent, present-day Vietnamese and Cubans develop their values
through negotiation and compromise with the authorities as well as the workings
of social change and market forces (Nguyen 2006; Blum et al. 2017). As a result,
many young Vietnamese, appealed greatly by individualistic values, entrepreneur-
ship, and consumerism, still “show a sense of community, interest in politics and
generally youthful idealism” – values used to be upheld by previous generations and
now strongly endorsed by the state (Nguyen 2006, p. 338). Likewise, the combina-
tion of emerging capitalist mechanisms with a socialist system in Cuba seems to
necessitate a type of citizen who embraces doble conciencia (double conscience)
(Blum 2011). Doble conciencia means that the youth, particularly those who do not
totally reject revolutionary values yet face difficulties reconciling the current reality,
have to adopt a dual identity with contradictory ideological values so as to function
effectively in society.

Conclusion

The two case studies of this chapter, Cuba and Vietnam, though taking different
economic and social development trajectories in the post-socialist time, seem to
share common citizenship conceptions and citizenship education aims, emphases,
and challenges. The notion of socialist citizenship, originated in the Soviet Union
and linked to transnational politics of the Cold War, was reinterpreted by the local
communists to attend to local politics and realities. Over the past three decades,
socialist citizenship has continued to fuel state efforts that promote a sense of
collective political identity and direct the goal of the education systems. However,
630 H. B. Duong and L.-H. Phan

existing scholarship on Cuban and Vietnamese citizenship and education has pro-
vided scant evidence regarding how such top-down national citizenship projects
have met their objectives. Instead, the practice side of socialist citizenship, at least in
relation to education, demonstrates a shifting version of socialist realism. It is
evident that young generations in the two post-socialist contexts have navigated
between competing discourses while experiencing a great level of ambivalence in a
complex process of changing citizen identities.
Although the extent to which young people play a role in the mutation of the
dominant discourse around socialist citizenship is not clear, current academic schol-
arship shows citizenship education introduced in Cuba’s and Vietnam’s public
schools has been undergoing profound changes in terms of philosophy and curric-
ulum. In fact, through different ways, both the states and the people in Cuba and
Vietnam are engaging in the reshaping of the meanings and practices of socialist
citizenship. Yet, to better understand the role, the agency, and the engagement level
of citizens, including teachers and educators, it is necessary to explore how they
come to negotiate tensions between the old and the new, aspirations and challenges,
absolutes and pluralities, the prescribed and uncertainties in an evolving and highly
globalized world. In addition, more work should be done to shed light on visions of
citizenship and approaches to citizenship education that Cuban and Vietnamese
people would want to take for the betterment of their countries, and just as impor-
tantly, the impacts of current transnational factors on these visions. Such research
would reveal nuanced and important insights from local actors – those who partic-
ipate in the post-socialist transformation processes in which personal, national, and
transnational elements interact and construct alternative forms of citizen identity.

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Educational Mobility and Citizenship:
Chinese “Foreign Talent” Students 40
in Singapore and Indian Medical Students
in China

Peidong Yang, Mark Baildon, and Jasmine B.-Y. Sim

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 634
International Student Mobility and Citizenship: A Conceptual Scheme . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 635
International Student Mobility and Formal/Legal Citizenship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 636
International Student Mobility and Global Citizenship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 638
Empirical Illuminations: Two Views from Asia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 639
Case Study 1: Chinese “Foreign Talent” Students in Singapore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 640
Case Study 2: Indian Medical Students in China . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 642
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 644
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 645

Abstract
This chapter builds a conceptual framework for understanding the relationship
between educational mobility (with a focus on international student mobility) and
citizenship based on an exploration of existing literature and applies this frame-
work to examine empirical findings. Conceptually, citizenship is conceived on
two varied levels: narrowly as a nationally based legal status and more broadly as
an informal sense of belonging and agency in transnational contexts. It is argued
that citizenship in the narrower definition intersects with student mobility mainly
around the issues of skill formation and population strategies under the frame-
work of the nation-state. In contrast, educational mobility relates to the broader
notion of citizenship through the concept of “global citizenship,” which in turn
comprises two different emphases – the cultural and the political. Having set out
such a conceptual scheme, the chapter uses two recent empirical studies of
student mobilities within Asia – a case of Chinese “foreign talent” students in

P. Yang (*) · M. Baildon · J. B.-Y. Sim

National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 633
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_41
634 P. Yang et al.

Singapore and a case of Indian medical students in China – to provide insights

into how individuals experience the complex and sometimes conflicting relation-
ships between international educational mobility and citizenship. To date, intra-
Asia educational mobility has received limited research attention, and thus
potentially offers a unique perspective on citizenship and education.

Keywords
International student mobility · Educational mobility · International education ·
Citizenship · Global citizenship

Introduction

This chapter attempts to both conceptualize and illustrate the relationship between
citizenship and a key contemporary phenomenon of education in global contexts –
international student mobility (ISM). International student mobility in higher edu-
cation (HE) has undergone significant expansion over the past decades: the number
of students enrolled in tertiary education outside their countries of citizenship grew
from 1.3 million in 1990 (OECD 2013) to an estimated 5 million in 2014 (ICEF
Monitor 2015). This figure has been projected to increase further to 8 million by
2025 (Institute of International Education 2015). This rapid rise in the number of
internationally mobile students in HE worldwide has significant implications for the
question of citizenship.
In line with Peterson and Brock (2017), we take a two-level conception of
citizenship. Narrowly defined, citizenship refers to the formal membership of a
political state (almost always a nation-state) in the form of legal status, which entitles
the citizen to certain rights and privileges, but also obliges them to certain responsi-
bilities in relation to the state. In contrast to this technical/formal/legalistic definition,
citizenship may also be defined more broadly as informal community membership,
inclusion, and participation in a much wider range of contexts and situations. Even in
the absence of legally defined status and rights, it is possible to speak of citizenship as
a form of belonging to, and participation in, certain communities that allow the
“citizen” to feel a sense of agency. We emphasize the notion of agency – or the ability
to act upon the world and potentially make a difference (Isin 2009; Ortner 2005) – to
distinguish citizenship from mere membership, which may be passive. The narrower
and the broader definitions of citizenship overlap with each other, further complicating
the ways in which ISM and citizenship(s) intersect.
We first outline a conceptual framework for understanding the relationship
(s) between international student mobility and citizenship. We then elaborate on
this conceptual structure with reference to existing literature. Subsequently, the
framework is applied to empirical case studies from an Asian context, drawing on
the first author’s two recent studies of international student mobility. Finally, we
conclude by summarizing the chapter briefly.
40 Educational Mobility and Citizenship: Chinese “Foreign Talent. . . 635

International Student Mobility and Citizenship:

A Conceptual Scheme

Building on a preliminary survey of existing scholarship, we argue in this chapter

that there are mainly two ways in which citizenship is implicated in the studies on
International Student Mobility (ISM).
Firstly, given a world in which the sovereign nation-state remains the foremost
source of political authority, international student migration, like other types of
discretionary (im)migration (see Blake 2002), is primarily regulated by national
states. When an international student migrates across national borders, the receiving
state sets out the rules governing the legal statuses of international students, includ-
ing those pertaining to their potential obtainment of citizenship rights. In today’s
knowledge-driven global economy in which nation-states compete with each other
for talent (Kuptsch and Pang 2006), many countries – especially economically more
developed ones – integrate international student policies into broader strategies of
skilled migration and population management (She and Wotherspoon 2013). In
general, international students with advanced qualifications and desirable skills
tend to be favored by immigration systems when it comes to the granting of partial
(e.g., permanent residency) and/or full citizenship (e.g., naturalization). Thus, study-
ing abroad has become a route for immigration, with obvious implications for
citizenship in its formal and legal sense. In fact, the prospect of acquiring such
formal/legal citizenship rights in the destination country can be a major consider-
ation – sometimes even the primary motivator – in some students’ pursuit of
international educational mobility (“A” in Fig. 1). Since the nation-state remains
the principal anchor of formal/legal citizenship (Heater 2002), this first way in which
ISM and citizenship intersect each other entails a notion of citizenship that is mainly
nationally based or defined (“A1”).
A second way in which educational mobility has been linked to citizenship in
existing research has to do with the role study abroad supposedly plays in relation to
global citizenship (“B”) (Lewin 2009). Global citizenship is an ambiguous term
(Lilley et al. 2017), having been conceptualized somewhat differently by different
scholars, as shall be unpacked subsequently in this chapter. Despite this ambiguity, it
is nevertheless clear that global citizenship is not primarily about formal or legal
status, considering the fact that there is no viable global authority to serve as an
anchor for such a status in the same way nation-state does provide a viable basis for
nationally based formal/legal citizenship. Indeed, a scan of academic discourses on
global citizenship reveals broader definitions of citizenship that de-emphasize legal/
technical status in favor of informal participation, inclusion, and agentic belonging-
ness (“B1”) situated in sociopolitical domains and spaces stretching beyond the
national. Suffice it to say here, global citizenship is for the most part a matter of
perspective, disposition, and commitment (Rhoads and Szelényi 2011), short of
legal/formal entitlements and obligations (“B2”). In converse, legal/formal citizen-
ship in relation to a nation-state often also entails informal citizenship in one way or
another (“A2”), although such informal citizenship is not equivalent to global
citizenship.
636 P. Yang et al.

International Student Mobility and Formal/Legal Citizenship

Citizenship in its formal/legal sense is implicated in international student mobility

not only for the obvious reason that foreign students enter and reside in the host
country according to the latter’s immigration/citizenship laws, but also because
international student recruitment has been increasingly linked with strategies of
skill formation and population management in many national contexts. These latter
strategies about skills and population are often materialized through policies and
legislations in the areas of immigration and citizenship incorporation.
Research on the linkage between international student mobility and immigration
began to emerge since the early 2000s. Explaining the background to the rise of this
linkage, Tremblay (2005) observed that by the late 1990s, many Organisation for
Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries faced shortages in
highly skilled labor due to sustained economic growth and the development of
information technology industries. Faced with the additional challenges of low
birth rates and ageing population that typically confronted developed economies,
these countries responded by relaxing immigration laws to attract skilled migrants
from abroad. International students already studying in these countries are naturally
favored because they have the advantage of being familiar with the host country
society and labor market. Conversely, favoring international students as potential
high-skilled immigrants also serves to further enhance the ability of these countries’
HE institutions to recruit more foreign students, which bring in significant tuition fee
revenues as well as talent. Thus, in various developed countries, the recruitment of
international students and skilled immigration became intertwined phenomena.
A number of scholars have examined in detail how this education-immigration
intertwinement manifests in several key countries in the world that receive signifi-
cant numbers of both international students and skilled migrants, such as the USA,
the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and France (She and Wotherspoon 2013;

Nation-state A1 Citizenship narrowly defined

defined/based in formal and legalistic
A citizenship terms
A2
International
Citizenship more broadly
Educational
defined, including informal
mobility
citizenship, e.g.
B2 sociocultural inclusion;
B cosmopolitan belonging;
Global citizenship
senses of participation and
B1 agency
l Cultural-cosmopolitan
l Political-cosmopolitan

Fig. 1 International educational mobility and citizenship

40 Educational Mobility and Citizenship: Chinese “Foreign Talent. . . 637

Tremblay 2005; Ziguras and Law 2006). Among them, it has been said that “Australia’s
immigration and international education policies have become enmeshed to a degree not
(yet?) found elsewhere” (Ziguras and Law 2006, p. 73). Scholars in Australia have
described the system variously as “education-migration nexus” (Robertson 2013), “two-
step migration” (Hawthorne 2010), or “study-migration pathway” (Hawthorne 2013),
whereby it has been observed that many international students went to study there with
the explicit objective of subsequently obtaining permanent residence (PR). Coupled
with Australia’s policy of treating international education overtly as a revenue-
generating “export service industry,” this has led to the mushrooming of substandard
private colleges which were essentially “PR factories” with particular appeal to under-
qualified students (Baas 2006, 2010, 2017). Later on, such problematic developments
triggered a backlash, leading to policy changes that sought to “de-couple” international
student mobility and immigration in Australia (Gribble and Blackmore 2012; Robertson
2011). In the context of some other countries, such as the UK and Japan, the education-
immigration linkage is configured somewhat differently. In the UK, for instance, while
non-EU international students are strongly desired, the state is more reluctant as a labor-
importer and thus imposes more restrictive rules governing the student-to-immigrant
transition (She and Wotherspoon 2013). In Japan, a country noted for its closed and
homogenous notion of citizenship, the state taps into international students as a major
supply of labor to address domestic shortages while remaining highly conservative
towards immigration and citizenship through naturalization (Liu-Farrer 2009, 2011).
Such variation in approaches shows that a certain country’s way of understanding
and managing the relationship between international student mobility on the one
hand and immigration and citizenship on the other is not exclusively determined by
the logic of human capital accumulation. With regard to this, She and Wotherspoon
(2013, pp. 11–12) summarize usefully: “Managing international student mobility as
part of the strategy to manage highly skilled migration goes beyond merely a matter
of skill formation and in fact represents specific social relations and power struggles
in each host nation.” As shall be illustrated in the empirical section of this chapter,
the two cases of student mobility to Singapore and China exhibit, each in its own
way, contextually specific social, cultural, and sometimes political forces that col-
lectively shape what citizenship might mean in relation to the mobile students.
As we asserted in the previous section, in one way or another, formal/legal
citizenship entails or implies some form of informal notions of citizenship. In the
context of educational mobility, this may manifest in the ways in which both the
narrowly defined (formal/legal) citizenship and citizenship more broadly conceived
(informal/social/cultural) are the objects of international students’ aspiration and
desire, such as is the case for youths from China’s urban singleton generation (Fong
2011). Alternatively, it could be expressed through ways in which students’ legal
citizenship status profoundly impacts their educational experiences and their subse-
quent perceptions of inclusion/exclusion within the school community, the education
system, and host country society at large. For example, Torres and Wicks-Asbun’s
(2014) study of undocumented Latino students in North Carolina, USA, unpacks the
poignant manners in which these legally liminal students negotiate a “liminal
citizenship” whereby their legal status relegates them to discrimination and
638 P. Yang et al.

marginalization in school, yet they sought to recoup senses of legitimacy and agency
through their status as successful and meritocratic deserving students. In the
Australian context, Robertson (2011) has shown how international students
exercised forms of “activist citizenship” through lobbying activities such as protests,
in response to perceived discrimination.
Suffice it to say, although international student mobilities are often initiated and
regulated under frameworks hinging on formal and legalistic citizenship, the broader
and multifarious social consequences of such mobilities often entail wider ideas of
citizenship involving the notion of agency at its core.

International Student Mobility and Global Citizenship

Scholarly discourse linking international student mobility to global citizenship gener-

ally revolves around the claim that study abroad fosters global citizenship among
students (e.g. Lewin 2009; Stoner et al. 2014; Tarrant 2010; Tarrant et al. 2014, 2011).
However, scholars do not seem always to define global citizenship in the same way,
except for the commonly held – though often unstated – assumption that global
citizenship is not primarily a matter of legal status or formal rights. The linchpin for
understanding various scholars’ different approaches towards global citizenship seems
to be the notion of cosmopolitanism. According to cultural anthropologist Hannerz
(2006), the protean concept of cosmopolitanism has principally two faces: culture and
politics. When the cultural is emphasized, cosmopolitanism refers to an openness to
and appreciation of cultural “others” and hence the ability to move between cultures
and be at ease with difference. Political cosmopolitanism, on the other hand, derives
from Kantian philosophical ideals about “citizens of the world” and perpetual world
peace based on a commitment to universally valid human values and moral principles
– often manifested in contemporary terms as “human rights” (Vertovec and Cohen
2002). Indeed, we find existing scholarly discussions of global citizenship to fall
roughly under these two categories, which we venture to call respectively the cultural-
cosmopolitan and the political-cosmopolitan.
We use the label “cultural-cosmopolitan” to describe the perspective of those
scholars of international education who generally equate global citizenship with
cultural cosmopolitanism, which in turn refers essentially to intercultural awareness
and practice. For example, writing in the context of UK, Caruana (2014) discusses
global citizenship mainly as an issue of “intercultural sensitivity” and competence
amidst multicultural learning environments and student diversity. Killick (2012,
p. 384) similarly takes “global citizenship learning” to mean the forging of bonds
with “‘cultural’ others” and the formation of identity for international students as
well as their host-country counterparts amidst negotiating differences. Since main-
stream research on the relationship between intercultural sensitivity/competence and
study abroad has been dominated by a positivistic paradigm stressing measurement
and assessment (Deardorff 2006; Williams 2005), one important contribution by
scholars such as Caruana (2014) and Killick (2012) is their qualitative and ethno-
graphic investigative foci on students’ experiences in situ – for instance, in the
multicultural university campus.
40 Educational Mobility and Citizenship: Chinese “Foreign Talent. . . 639

In contrast, political-cosmopolitan conceptualizations of global citizenship tend to

invoke more politically charged vocabularies such as “responsibility,” “commitment,”
“social justice,” and “activism.” Lyons et al.’s (2012, p. 361) following definition of
global citizenship – as a “viewpoint that suggests that global forms of belonging,
responsibility, and political action counter the intolerance and ignorance that more
provincial and parochial forms of citizenship encourage” – serves well as an example.
The civic and political face of cosmopolitanism that is largely obscured in the cultural-
cosmopolitan view on global citizenship is foregrounded here. Synthesizing scholarly
literature on global citizenship thematically, Morais and Ogden (2011, p. 447) provide a
comprehensive conceptual model of global citizenship from this political-cosmopolitan
perspective. They argue that global citizenship encompasses three key dimensions:
social responsibility (including global justice and how it relates to personal responsibil-
ities felt by a “global citizen”); global competence (comprising self-awareness,
intercultural communication, and global knowledge); and global civic engagement
(referring to involvement in global civic/political actions). Such formulations are echoed
by other educational scholars writing about global citizenship from the political-
cosmopolitan angle too (e.g., Davies 2006; Shultz 2007). Interestingly, while educa-
tionalists have written a fair deal about global citizenship as a kind of political cosmo-
politanism, there are far fewer attempts to link it specifically with student mobility. The
few who have done so concentrated on demonstrating the measurability of global
citizenship through conceptual refinement (Streitwieser and Light 2016) or conceptual
framing/modeling (Stoner et al. 2014; Tarrant 2010). What remains missing so far is
more empirically grounded reflections on how global citizenship has been experienced –
if it is deemed relevant in the first place – by international students. In particular,
qualitative or ethnographic accounts seem scarce.
To sum up this survey of literature on ISM and global citizenship, two observations
can be made. First, global citizenship in the educational context has been conceptualized
in close relation with the idea of cosmopolitanism. What we have termed the “cultural-
cosmopolitan” take and the “political-cosmopolitan” take are not mutually exclusive or
conflictual, but represent two different emphases educational scholars have used. While
the cultural-cosmopolitan strand has delved deeper into mobile students’ experiences
through ethnographic and qualitative studies, research in the political-cosmopolitan
strand has remained largely conceptual. Secondly, regardless of which strand, virtually
all the studies mentioned above involved white students situated in developed, Western,
English-speaking countries (see ▶ Chap. 33, “Discourses of Global Citizenship Educa-
tion: The Influence of the Global Middle Classes”). There seems to be little insight into
how internationally mobile students who do not occupy such privileged structural
positions in the world – such as those of less affluent backgrounds from non-Western
developing countries – experience “global citizenship.”

Empirical Illuminations: Two Views from Asia

This section shows how some of the abstract conceptual ideas above are manifested
in empirical data. We do so by offering brief accounts of two cases of international
student mobility in Asia based on the first author’s research. Intra-Asian student
640 P. Yang et al.

mobility has received limited research attention so far due to its relative marginality
vis-à-vis West-bound student mobilities (Yang 2018b). Thus, looking at the
neglected experiences of students moving between Asian countries can potentially
offer unique insights. Yang conducted both studies using an ethnographically
inspired methodological approach, with qualitative interviewing and participant
observation as the main data collection methods. The first study on Chinese youths
recruited as “foreign talent” students by city-state Singapore was conducted mainly
during 2010–2012 (for details see Yang 2016), whereas the second study about
Indian youths pursuing medical degrees in China was carried out more recently
between 2014 and 2016 (for details see Yang 2018a).
In narrating these two cases below, we seek to cover succinctly the general
background and overviews of the form of student mobility in question before
proceeding to key findings and analyses pertaining to the question of citizenship.
Our analyses shall be loosely structured to answer the following broad questions:
What role does formal/legal citizenship play in both cases of student mobility? How
does informal and transnational citizenship factor into the mobile students’ experi-
ences – educational or otherwise? To what extent, and in what ways is global
citizenship – be it the cultural-cosmopolitan or political-cosmopolitan variation –
relevant for both groups of students?

Case Study 1: Chinese “Foreign Talent” Students in Singapore

The case of Chinese students being recruited by the Southeast Asia city-state
Singapore as “foreign talent” instantiates well the intertwinement between education
and the receiving state’s strategies of skill formation and population management.
Not dissimilar to situations confronting developed economies elsewhere, the Singa-
pore state faced with challenges of low domestic birth rates and shortages of skilled
human capital, responded by seeking proactively to attract foreign talent since the
1980s (Quah 1984). As part of a wider range of foreign talent policies, a series of
scholarship schemes were developed in the 1990s to recruit students from Asian
developing countries such as Singapore’s neighboring Association of Southeast
Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries, India, and China (Yang 2016).
In particular, China stood out as a major – possibly the largest – source of foreign
talent students for Singapore, with three scholarship schemes instituted in the 1990s.
Known as the SM1, SM2, and SM3 schemes (with SM standing for “senior
middle”), these schemes, respectively, recruited junior middle school graduates,
second-year senior middle school students, and senior middle school graduates
across dozens of provinces and cities in China. Feeder schools for these schemes
were academically distinguished ones locally and sometimes nationally, and schol-
arship applicants had to undergo a competitive selection process consisting of
written examinations and interviews administered by officials from the Singapore
Ministry of Education. Upon being selected, SM1 scholars would be channeled into
upper secondary schools in Singapore and subsequently junior colleges, with full
financial assistances on tuition and board. SM2 and SM3 scholars would be
40 Educational Mobility and Citizenship: Chinese “Foreign Talent. . . 641

channeled into studying engineering and science courses at public universities, also
with all expenses exempted and living allowance provided. The intake scales of
these scholarship programs increased over time, rising from an estimated 100 stu-
dents per year per program at initial stages to 300–400 students annually per
program in more recent times, although the numbers have dropped slightly in the
past 5 years or so. At the time of writing, the SM1 and SM2 programs are believed to
be ongoing, whereas the SM3 program had terminated after 2011. Cumulatively,
these programs could have brought an estimated total of some 20,000 Chinese
youths into the Singaporean education system – not an insignificant number con-
sidering the compact size of the local system.
From the outset, it is clear that the Singaporean government selected these
Chinese scholars not only as academically competitive talent, but also as potential
future citizens. All three schemes have built in some mechanisms or features serving
to tie the students to the city-state in the long run. As part of the scholarship terms
and conditions, SM2 and SM3 scholars are required to serve a “bond” by working in
Singapore for 6 years upon completing undergraduate studies. Until relatively
recently, SM2 and SM3 scholars had also been automatically issued with invitations
to apply for permanent residency (PR) upon graduation, and application success is
more or less guaranteed as long as they secure employment in Singapore. Although
scholars under the SM1 scheme are not required to serve a bond, they are also given
the option of becoming PR. Because of their younger age, male SM1 scholars who
take up this offer would also be required to register for National Service in the
Singapore military – arguably the ultimate citizenship rite. Furthermore, all these
should be seen in a broader picture wherein the Chinese has consistently had the
lowest reproductive rates among various ethnic/racial groups in Singapore (Yang
et al. 2017), which makes naturalizing ethnic Chinese foreign talent crucial to
maintaining the status quo racial profile of the Singapore citizenry (Yeoh and Lin
2013; Yim 2011). Thus, for these Chinese students on Singaporean scholarships,
educational mobility is not only a privileged pathway to citizenship, it could even be
said that Singapore’s strategies about citizenship and population fundamentally
underpinned this form of mobility in the first place.
Taking a wider definition of citizenship, the Chinese scholars’ experiences are
more mixed. The first author’s work has shown that receiving various privileges
from the Singapore state and institutions sometimes makes them targets of local
society’s resentment and criticism (Yang 2014a, c), which can impede their achiev-
ing a sense of inclusion and belonging. Due to academic competition and differences
in sociocultural backgrounds, the Chinese scholars encounter some instances of
discrimination and marginalization in university life, although it is also found that
they exercise agency through carving out their own social and symbolic spaces to
counter perceived exclusion (Yang 2014b). On a broader societal level, the rise of
anti-immigrant sentiments in Singapore in recent years (Yang 2017a) inevitably
affected how the Chinese student-turned-migrants perceive their ambiguous
positionality in their adopted home (Yang 2017b).
Notwithstanding these mixed experiences, according to Yang’s ongoing obser-
vation, this group enjoyed overall positive life outcomes in terms of career
642 P. Yang et al.

progression and rise in socioeconomic status (Yang 2018b). The academic creden-
tials and professional skills they developed through studying and working in Singa-
pore serve as the basis for them to claim social and economic citizenship in a city-
state that upholds the principle of meritocracy. Culturally, Chinese students and
student-turned-immigrants are in a uniquely advantageous position to be able to use
their native language and culture knowledge to establish social connections with the
Singaporean society, which remains Chinese to a significant degree culturally and
linguistically. Thus, despite embodying marginal identities such as foreign students
and immigrants, this group’s actual experiences turn out to be characterized more
by fulfillment, agency, and inclusion, than by marginalization or exclusion.
Finally, with regard to global citizenship, there is relatively little evidence in
Yang’s research to link the Chinese students’ educational mobility in Singapore and
political-cosmopolitan global citizenship, insofar as the latter emphasizes global
social awareness, responsibility, and civic engagement. As a polity that consciously
distances itself from liberal Western values and ideologies, Singapore does not fully
embrace all the key tenets of global citizenship in the first place (Chua 2017). Indeed,
scholars have argued that global citizenship education in Singapore tends to be
subsumed under nation-centric objectives and agendas, defined largely in neoliberal
and instrumental terms (Alviar-Martin and Baildon 2016). As such, Singapore
hardly represents a conducive environment for the Chinese students to learn
political-cosmopolitanism. However, when it comes to global citizenship in the
cultural-cosmopolitan sense, receiving their pretertiary and/or tertiary education
in Singapore often proves to be transformative for the Chinese students in terms
of exposing them to diverse cultures, peoples, and places that were simply not
accessible in China. Through studying and working in Singapore’s highly multicul-
tural and globally connected environments, and through opportunities for venturing
further afield using Singapore as a springboard, the Chinese foreign talent students
get to hone their intercultural awareness and competence, verily becoming “global
citizens” in a cultural sense (Yang 2017b).

Case Study 2: Indian Medical Students in China

The case of Indian students heading to China for bachelors’ degrees in medicine
(MBBS) contrasts strongly with the above case in many regards.
Since early 2000s, each year hundreds of Indian students have been heading to
China to enroll in English-medium MBBS programs offered by second-tier and
provincial-level Chinese universities (Aiyar 2006). By the 2010s, China had become
the top destination for Indian students seeking medical training abroad (Mishra
2012), overtaking traditionally favored destinations such as Russia and Ukraine.
By 2015, there were a total of 16,694 Indian students in China (CAFSA 2016),
the majority of whom could be safely assumed to be on MBBS programs. One
common characteristic of Indian students who pursue medical education in such
non-Anglophone overseas destinations is that they are typically academically not-
high-performing students coming from not-so-affluent, lower sections of India’s
40 Educational Mobility and Citizenship: Chinese “Foreign Talent. . . 643

emerging middle classes (Sancho 2017; Yang 2018a). This means that neither India’s
affordable but extremely competitive public medical schools, nor the academically
easier-to-enter but prohibitively expensive private medical colleges are accessible to
them. Thus, attending overseas colleges with relatively lax admission criteria and
affordable fees such as that offered in China became a “second chance” for these
students and their families to realize their middle-class aspirations through entering
the esteemed medical profession.
Citizenship in the formal/legal sense does not play as significant a role here as
compared with the Singapore case. From the outset, the Indian students were not
recruited as potential immigrants. This does not mean that international student
mobility is not linked to China’s national strategies and interests in some ways.
Indeed, higher education is one sphere in which China seeks to project its soft power
globally (Yang 2015), with the emblematic example being the active recruitment of
African students (Haugen 2013). However, at least based on the first author’s
investigation at one provincial university in eastern China which had several hun-
dred Indian students enrolled in its MBBS program (Yang 2018a), there was little
evidence that the Indian students were treated as potential bearers of international
good will towards China. Instead, the said provincial Chinese university seemed
primarily interested in the tuition fee revenues and the superficiality of “internation-
alization” that the Indian students brought. The MBBS program suffered from many
issues with regard to admission process/screening, quality of instruction and assess-
ment, student service, and program management in general. Students on the program
typically had low levels of satisfaction. However, being acutely aware of their
own lack of choice, they generally acquiesced into a cynical and resigned state. As
a result, the Indian students typically did not report any meaningful sense of agency
or citizenship in the university campus setting or more broadly. There were also
conspicuous patterns of segregation between the Indian medical students and the
local Chinese students, owing to language barriers and, allegedly, race/nationality-
based prejudices. Although the Indian students tended to have a strong community
bonding among themselves which helped them cope with various practical and
psychological challenges associated with studying aboard, it is nevertheless difficult
to describe their positionality vis-à-vis the program, the university, the city, and
the country they find themselves in, in terms of “citizenship.”
Lastly, when it comes to the question of global citizenship, Yang’s observation points
towards a generally pessimistic picture, but with some interesting “bright spots.” Insofar
as political-cosmopolitanism is defined prevailingly in Western liberal democratic terms,
an experience of educational mobility to China added little to the Indian students’ global
citizenship. However, in fieldwork, Yang often heard praises from his Indian research
participants for China’s superior socioeconomic development compared to that of India,
which were usually attributed to China’s one-party political system and the associated
political stability that the Indian students’ raucous democratic homeland apparently
lacked. Although this is certainly not an instance of political-cosmopolitan global
citizenship to be found in existing literature, it is an example that studying and living
in China has to some degree made Indian students – possibly other foreign students too
– reflect on diverse political systems and their merits.
644 P. Yang et al.

As for global citizenship of the cultural-cosmopolitan variation, it would appear

studying in China benefited the Indian students modestly. While most Indian stu-
dents did learn about Chinese culture and society through some local travel and other
explorations, they seldom established meaningful connections with local society
members, nor indeed with other international MBBS students from the Middle East,
Southeast Asia, and Africa, which were all present on the campus which Yang
studied. Thus, even though traveling afar to China surely widened the horizons of
these youths hailing from small-town/rural India, they were certainly not in as
privileged a position to gain cultural global citizenship as the Chinese students in
Singapore. Exceptions do exist: in his ongoing observations, Yang has also encoun-
tered a minority of Indian students who either achieved high levels of proficiency in
Chinese language or used their social and professional networks in China to launch
transnational professional or business endeavors.

Conclusion

To conclude, in this chapter, we have ventured to address the relationship(s) between

educational mobility (mainly, international student mobility, or ISM) and citizenship.
We conceived of citizenship principally in two ways: as a formal and legal status under
the framework of national states and as an informal sense of belonging and agency in a
variety of contexts and on multiple scales not restricted to the national. We argued that
ISM intersects with these two different notions of citizenship in distinct ways. Drawing
on existing scholarship, we suggested that under the nation-state framework, ISM has
been closely linked to national strategies about skilled migration and population man-
agement. Accordingly, study abroad has often become a pathway for immigration, or at
least a component of the receiving state’s manpower policies or strategies. On the other
hand, concerning the informal and broader definition of citizenship, extant literature
mostly points to the relationship between student mobility and the cultivation of “global
citizenship.” We further differentiated the cultural and political emphases in conceptu-
alizations of global citizenship. Existing scholarship notes that ISM fosters both cultural
global citizenship and political global citizenship; however, we maintained that such
assertions tended to be insufficiently grounded in qualitative and ethnographic data. In
addition, we also noted a lack of attention to less privileged mobile students such as
those from nonelite backgrounds and who move primarily within Asia. To address these
gaps, drawing on recent research done by the first author, we sought to illuminate
the various ways in which student mobility intersects with citizenship using two
empirical cases of intra-Asian student mobility: Chinese “foreign talent” students in
Singapore and Indian medical students in China. Taking an implicitly comparative view,
our accounts have sought to highlight the contrasting experiences of “citizenship” by
these two groups of Asian students under contrasting circumstances. Notwithstanding
various nuances, on the whole, the Chinese “foreign talent” students are found to have
somewhat more positive experiences of “citizenship” when compared with the Indian
medical students thanks to the former’s more privileged structural positions.
40 Educational Mobility and Citizenship: Chinese “Foreign Talent. . . 645

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Bringing the Citizen Back In: A
Sociopolitical Approach to Global 41
Citizenship Education

Quentin Maire

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 650
Delineating the “Global Citizen” in GCE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 650
Reshaping the Structure of GCE Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 652
Examples of International and Nongovernmental GCE Models and Frameworks . . . . . . . . . . . . 654
UNESCO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 654
OECD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 655
Oxfam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 656
General Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 657
The Scope of Global Citizenship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 659
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 660
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 661

Abstract
Global citizenship education has gained prominence in educational research in
recent years, mirroring a comparable trend of expansion in education systems
internationally. The vitality of the field of global citizenship education research
has been marked by the use of a wide range of approaches in a variety of contexts.
However, this expansion has come at the price of mounting confusion in defining
key analytical terms, starting with the concept of “global citizenship.” After
reviewing the challenges raised by this conceptual laxity, this chapter proposes
to return to the concept of citizenship to provide solid theoretical foundations for
the field. From a sociological point of view, citizenship can be defined as a
relationship between a social group and a state. This relationship is based on
four key constitutive elements: membership, rights, duties, and legitimate

Q. Maire (*)
Centre for International Research on Education Systems, Victoria University,
Melbourne, VIC, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 649
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_52
650 Q. Maire

political participation. Theoretical labor on the concept of citizenship offers the

triple benefits of distinguishing global citizenship education from related but
distinct forms of education, facilitating the construction of a rigorous conversa-
tion on global citizenship education, and opening new avenues for research on
global citizenship education. The analytical implications of bringing the concept
of citizenship back in are then illustrated in the cases of the UNESCO, OECD,
and Oxfam frameworks for global citizenship education. A sociopolitical
approach to citizenship also highlights the importance of specific social processes
and struggles in shaping the contours of a global form of citizenship.

Keywords
Global citizenship · Global state · Rights · Duties · Membership · Participation ·
Cosmopolitanism · Political education

Introduction

In recent years, “global citizenship education” (GCE) research has made a place
for itself in educational research. In 2018, the British Journal of Educational Studies
released a special issue on GCE, and Ian Davies et al. (2018) edited The Palgrave
Handbook of Global Citizenship and Education. This field of research is very
diverse. Rather than being a unified conversation centered on key concepts and
research questions, GCE research is best conceived as a loose space bringing
together a range of research traditions, approaches, and interests having in common
the use of the term “global citizenship.” In the introduction to the aforementioned
special issue on GCE in the British Journal of Educational Studies, Yemini et al.
(2018) classified the main strands of research as “GCE skills and pedagogies,”
“cosmopolitanism,” “educational for sustainable development,” and “multicultural-
ism and internationalization.” Throughout the field, the dispersion of meanings
associated with “global citizenship” is a standout feature.
This chapter argues that a rigorous definition of citizenship is a prerequisite to
the progressive development of our scientific understanding of GCE. The chapter
offers a sociologically constructed definition of citizenship and draws the implica-
tions of this approach for GCE research. It then illustrates how this definition can be
applied to specific frameworks or models of GCE and concludes by emphasizing
specific points of analysis that a sociologically informed model of GCE can focus on,
starting with the state as the framework for citizenship.

Delineating the “Global Citizen” in GCE

In GCE research, the use of the term “global citizenship” suffers from substantial
terminological imprecision. Surveying the field a few years ago, Oxley and Morris
(2013, p. 302) concluded that “both GC and GCE are used ambiguously and
41 Bringing the Citizen Back In: A Sociopolitical Approach to Global. . . 651

understood differently both within and across contexts.” This lack of clarity and
precision in the use of “global citizenship” does not facilitate the consolidation of
GCE as an integrated research space. Dill (2018, p. 559) recently reiterated this
verdict, arguing that the core concept of GCE has become “a site for contested and
confused dissonance.”
Other authors have explored the notions often associated with (and not always
distinguished from) global citizenship. For Dvir et al. (2018, p. 458), “‘international
mindedness,’ ‘intercultural competences,’ ‘global consciousness,’ etc.” come close
to the meaning of global citizenship. In the field, cosmopolitanism is often used as
a synonym to global citizenship (Bowden 2003), even though it has been found that
in various contexts, dispositions and values are typically considered as cosmopolitan
function as cultural capital rather than as citizenship attributes (e.g., Friedman 2017;
Weenink 2008). In the same vein, the OECD explicitly associates global citizenship
with global mindedness (OECD 2018b).
Variation in the lexicon associated with GCE is also evident among teachers,
students, and families. Goren and Yemini (2016) report cases of school teachers
in Israel considering that GCE means providing students with “global competen-
cies,” while Yemini (2018, p. 283) finds that GCE is taken to mean “the integration
of multicultural, multilingual, and global dimensions into education” in a London
school. Western expatriates enrolling their children in local schools in Hong Kong
have been found to rely on “an imaginary of what it means to be a ‘global citizen’”
(Groves and O’Connor 2017, p. 2), in which global citizenship largely operates
as a metaphorical signifier. Meanwhile, Rapoport (2010, p. 186) found that teachers
in Indiana, USA, believe in the need to “infuse global dimensions into all aspects of
citizenship education” despite being unclear about the meaning of global citizenship.
What emerges from this brief overview is that a range of terms is used to describe
ideas, practices, values, feelings, and dispositions that are somewhat related but not
identical. This implies that researchers may use the same term to refer to different
things, complicating the work of accumulation of scientific findings on the “global
upscaling” of citizenship education. The potentially adverse implications of the lack
of clear engagement with the concept of global citizenship have been noted by Goren
and Yemini (2017, p. 180) in their systematic review of empirical GCE research,
warning that without “specific definitions and taxonomies, the term GCE could
become simply a token term, arbitrarily chosen from a list of similar generic terms
(i.e., cosmopolitanism, global mindedness, global consciousness, transnationalism,
global competencies, global education etc.).” Semantic arbitrariness is particularly
troublesome when it has to do with a – and perhaps the – foundational concept of
a field of research, making terminological clarity in the use of “global citizenship”
that much more essential.
In an attempt to bring order to the field and clarify the meaning of global
citizenship, Oxley and Morris (2013) built a typology of theories of global citizen-
ship in GCE research based on an extensive review of GCE publications. They
distinguished between the cosmopolitan types of definition of global citizenship,
encompassing political, moral, economic, and cultural models, from the advocacy
types, bringing together the social, critical, environmental, and spiritual conceptions.
652 Q. Maire

But while this categorization can be useful to map the field, it remains descriptive
and provides little guidance for assessing the respective merits of different defini-
tions and engaging in the labor of conceptual elaboration. Nevertheless, this exten-
sive typology suggests that improved clarity in the use of the concept of global
citizenship may be an important avenue to improve GCE research. A useful starting
point for doing so may be to reconsider the concept of “citizenship.”

Reshaping the Structure of GCE Research

To bring some order to the conceptualization of GCE and thus facilitate both
research and educational practices, a return to the core concept of citizenship is
essential to the development of a rigorous use of “global citizenship.” The simulta-
neously political and analytical uses to which the concept of citizenship has been put
partly explain its contested meaning. Yet, from a sociological point of view, the use
of the term should be informed by social reality and citizenship as it has actually
existed historically. From this perspective, citizenship can be understood as “mem-
bership of a particular kind of political community – one in which those who enjoy a
certain status are entitled to participate on an equal basis with their fellow citizens in
making the collective decisions that regulate social life” (Bellamy 2008, p. 1). This
specific political status is the core of citizenship, which cannot be conceived without
consideration of the associated political structures, political opportunities, and polit-
ical power relations that make citizenship a reality and define the regime of inclusion
into and exclusion from the citizen body. Moreover, in modern times, citizenship is
simultaneously a political and legal status, suggesting the need to reflect on the
relationship between nation-state citizenship and global citizenship.
As a specific form of citizenship, global citizenship too gains from being con-
ceived as a political (and legal) status. GCE, in turn, can thus be defined as education
for global citizenship (either toward its advent, if global citizenship does not yet
exist, or toward its fuller realization if global citizenship is already partially accom-
plished). However, what could help researchers determine whether specific educa-
tional practices promote global citizenship? Here, social scientists’ reflections
can help.
Citizenship as a political status has not been a continuous and ever expanding
reality since its birth in Ancient Athens. It has receded in certain places and times
and re-emerged in others. In Western Europe in the Middle Ages, for instance, as
new political forms and social relationships developed, “citizenship was temporarily
almost lost as a political concept” (Heater 1990, p. 20), even though reflections on
political organization and membership certainly did not disappear. Citizenship
appears to have been a reality primarily when and where states have existed, may
they be city states, nation-states, or other realizations of the state. This has led
a number of social scientists to define citizenship as a relationship between social
agents and a state (Bourdieu 2014; Tilly 1996, 1997). Accordingly, global citizen-
ship equally benefits from being conceived as a relationship, a link between social
agents and a state, although the latter may not necessarily be a nation-state (e.g.,
41 Bringing the Citizen Back In: A Sociopolitical Approach to Global. . . 653

a hypothetical “global state”). GCE research, if it is committed to being rigorous

in its use of the term “global citizenship,” can draw important implications from such
a definition for the analysis of GCE in schools and other educational spaces.
What are the essential features of this specific political relationship that charac-
terizes “citizenship”? What kind of social agent-state relationship is distinctive of
citizenship? The four components generally mentioned are membership, rights,
duties, and specific forms of political participation (O’Bryne 2003; Wiesner et al.
2018). Membership refers to the criteria determining who belongs and who does
not belong to the community; rights to what the state owes its citizens; duties to what
citizens owe the state; and political participation to the modalities of citizens’
legitimate political expression. Researchers are, therefore, best equipped to analyze
GCE based on a rigorous concept of global citizenship when they consider the
following four key research questions:

1. How does education for global citizenship approach the question and modalities
of membership to a global political community of citizens?
2. How is the topic of the rights of global citizens addressed in global citizenship
education?
3. How is the theme of global citizens’ duties considered in learning for global
citizenship?
4. What place and role are given to the forms of legitimate global political expres-
sion in the learning experiences aimed at developing global citizenship?

According to the definition of global citizenship presented above, these four

research questions could play a key role in structuring the field of GCE research
(as opposed to being addressed more or less tangentially depending on the definition
of global citizenship at hand). In addition to bringing order and clarity to the field,
two other benefits could emerge from this clarification of “global citizenship.” The
first would be the possibility to articulate more clearly the relationships that exist
or could exist between GCE and other forms of education, such as education
for multiculturalism, multilingual education, education for “global mindedness,”
education for “global competency,” and “sustainability education.” In what ways
(if any) are these other forms of education contributing to GCE? To what extent does
GCE contribute to these other educational agendas?
The second would be the opportunity to elaborate a rich discussion between
GCE and research into other forms of citizenship education. For instance, what are
the common points and differences between GCE and the citizenship education
experiences of expatriates, refugees, or asylum seekers living outside of their
country of citizenship? What tensions and common points can be found in nation-
state citizenship education and GCE? What is the distribution of forms or types
of citizenship education across various educational spaces (e.g., nation-state schools,
“international” schools, community education, vocational education, university edu-
cation, etc.)? What can GCE research learn from supranational citizenship education
research, such as research on European citizenship education? Can GCE gain insight
from the experiences of students who underwent citizenship education in schools
654 Q. Maire

in more than one country? As this list of question suggests, elaborating GCE
research on a rigorous definition of global citizenship has the potential to vastly
enrich the agenda of the field in at least three ways: by offering new lenses for
exploring GCE, by proposing original and often unexplored research areas, and
by fostering the ability to establish a meaningful dialogue between GCE research
and adjacent fields.
To illustrate how this conception of GCE can be applied to specific approaches
to GCE, the following section reviews three prominent international and non-
governmental policies, programs, and curricula dedicated to GCE: the PISA Global
Competence Framework by the OECD, the UNESCO GCE agenda, and Oxfam’s
Education for Global Citizenship.

Examples of International and Nongovernmental GCE Models

and Frameworks

Influential international and nongovernmental organizations have invested the space

of GCE. A number of them have developed their own models and frameworks for
GCE, often expecting or enjoining state school systems to implement some or all of
their agendas. In this section, the potential benefits of adopting the sociopolitical
approach to global citizenship outlined above are illustrated with the case of three
important programs: the UNESCO, OECD, and Oxfam GCE frameworks.

UNESCO

In 2014, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

(UNESCO) released a blueprint for GCE entitled Preparing learners for the chal-
lenges of the 21st century. In this document, UNESCO (2014, p. 10) argues that,
beyond disagreements, GCE ought to be about “how to promote universality (e.g.,
common and collective identity, interest, participation, duty), while respecting
singularity (e.g., individual rights, self-improvement).” At first sight, this model
seems to pay attention to the questions of rights, duties, and participation, i.e., three
of the key four components of citizenship. Only the question of political membership
is not explicitly raised. However, looking at the UNESCO blueprint more closely,
these different building blocks of citizenship are seldom articulated at the global
level, so much so that it is hard to see what makes UNESCO’s definition of
citizenship distinctively “global” and how this differs from what the authors consider
simply as good and virtuous “globally aware” citizenship.
Part of the challenge is that the document generally does not engage with the
political and legal aspects that would underpin global rights, duties, membership, and
participation. In fact, UNESCO (2014, p. 14) argues that “there is a common under-
standing that global citizenship does not imply a legal status” and, instead, “refers more
to a sense of belonging to a broader community and common humanity, promoting a
‘global gaze’ that links the local to the global and the national to the international.” This
view is at odds with the fact that modern citizenship is precisely a legal-political
41 Bringing the Citizen Back In: A Sociopolitical Approach to Global. . . 655

category (Bellamy 2008). While the preferred politico-legal structures to underpin the
status of “global citizen” are national to some and supranational to others, GCE cannot
ignore the legal and political facets of citizenship. UNESCO (2015b, p. 66) claims that
the role and place of the state in the constitution of citizenship is “being increasingly
challenged by the emergence of transnational forms of citizenship,” but this largely
ignores the relational nature of citizenship. While citizenship can certainly exist beyond
the nation-state, the realization of global citizenship is likely to depend on the emer-
gence of a global state, understood as a global monopoly holder of “the legitimate use
of physical and symbolic violence over a definite territory and over the totality of the
corresponding population” (Bourdieu et al. 1994, p. 3), a status that no supranational or
international institution can assume to date.
The UNESCO (2014) version of GCE is driven by the goal to foster competencies
in learners (i.e., an attitude of tolerance, an understanding of alterity, knowledge of
“global issues,” and cognitive and social skills) as opposed to reflection on the
political, legal, and social conditions of possibility of the conduct and attitudes that
UNESCO expects to see in global citizens. The stated objective of their model of
GCE is in line with their expressed desire to progress toward “a global common
good” (UNESCO 2015b), but the educational means imagined to accomplish this
outcome are not well aligned with the objectives.
At a more practical level, the UNESCO GCE framework is operationalized
into specific topics and learning objectives in a related document listing different
domains of learning (cognitive, socio-emotional, and behavioral), key learning
outcomes, key learner attributes, topics, and learning objectives by age or level of
education (UNESCO 2015a). This operationalized framework comes closer to
critical elements of GCE listed above. In terms of knowledge, the UNESCO brand
of GCE wishes to enable learners to “develop an understanding of global governance
structures, rights and responsibilities” (UNESCO 2015a, p. 16), albeit as they
currently exist as opposed to how they would have to be to make global citizenship
a reality. Interestingly, the nine key topics include “local, national and global systems
and structures,” “different communities people belong to and how these are
connected,” and “actions that can be taken individually and collectively,” which
have the potential to build clear bridges toward some of the four constitutive
elements of citizens. Yet, while critical reflection on the reality of nation-state
citizenship around the world and the way power and political structures and systems
shape the supranational relationships between nation-state citizens is addressed,
consideration of the possibilities and modalities of membership to a global political
community of citizens remains feeble. In other words, while this curriculum has the
potential to raise learners’ awareness of the gap existing between the current
international order and the realization of global citizenship, the opportunities given
to students to imagine the change required to enable global citizenship are limited.

OECD

In line with its interest in shaping education policy and practice across the world
and as part of its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the
656 Q. Maire

Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD 2018b) recently

released its Preparing our Youth for an Inclusive and Sustainable World GCE
agenda. This document proposes a “PISA Global Competence Framework” and is
associated with a “PISA Global Competence Questionnaire” (OECD 2018a)
constructed to evaluate the extent to which GCE is implemented and successful
in countries participating in PISA.
Inspired by the Delors report (1996, p. 15), in which it was claimed that
“people need gradually to become world citizens without losing their roots and
while continuing to play an active part in the life of their nation and their local
community,” the PISA Global Competence Framework wishes to “prepare young
people to become global citizens” without relinquishing their existing nation-state
citizen status (OECD 2018b, p. 6). Here, the global community of citizens is
imagined as coexisting with the global order of nation-states. This raises the impor-
tant question of the hypothetical relationships that could emerge between the
institution of nation-state citizenship and the institution of global citizenship.
As with UNESCO, the OECD considers “global competence” as the cornerstone
of global citizenship. The four dimensions of global competence include (1) learners’
capacity to examine issues of “local, global and cultural significance,” (2) their
ability to consider “different perspectives and world views,” (3) their ability to
interact with different people, and (4) their capacity to take action toward “sustain-
able development and collective well-being” (OECD 2018b, pp. 7–8). Here, too, it is
the individual learner equipped with specific knowledge, skills, attitudes, and dis-
positions who makes global citizenship a reality, irrespective of the political and
social structures that are required for citizenship to manifest itself. Unlike the
UNESCO brand of global citizenship, however, the OECD pays little attention to
the existing polities of the world. The fact that the current global order is an
international order is largely absent from the OECD model of GCE, and so are
reflections on global citizen membership, rights, and duties. At the same time,
reflections on political participation for global citizens are also largely unexplored.
From the point of view of a rigorous conception of global citizenship, the OECD
framework is thus significantly frailer than the UNESCO model.
The PISA 2018 Global Competence Questionnaire confirms the shortfalls of the
corresponding framework. In the questionnaire, the “global” is defined in cultural,
linguistic, ethical, and economic terms but almost never politically. The nation-state
polities that organize the world – let alone the idea of a global state – are mostly
ignored in what the OECD deems essential for global competence and, ultimately,
global citizenship. The focus on “global issues” is prominent, but the reason for
making these global issues a core feature of GCE remains unclear once the politico-
legal nature of global citizenship is considered.

Oxfam

The Oxfam charity has proposed its own model of GCE in Education for Global
Citizenship (Oxfam 2015). Designed as a guide for schools, it lists a set of attributes
41 Bringing the Citizen Back In: A Sociopolitical Approach to Global. . . 657

that define the global citizen. As with the previously reviewed frameworks, Oxfam’s
identifies a range of skills, attitudes, dispositions, knowledge, and values that make
up a global citizen, and as with the OECD framework, Oxfam seldom focusses on
existing nation-states and nation-state citizenship.
To implement its conception of GCE, Oxfam (2015, p. 8) proposes a curriculum
structured around 21 key elements (7 in each of the categories of “knowledge and
understanding,” “skills” and “values and attitudes”) including “globalisation and
interdependence,” “human rights” and “power and governance.” The hypothetical
rights of global citizens are conceived in terms of human rights (as opposed to state-
bound rights), while global citizens’ imagined duties are articulated in moral or
ethical (as opposed to legal and political) terms. Here, the rights of global citizens
are conceived as being immanent in their humanity (as opposed to being determined
by global citizens’ membership to a specific global political community), while
citizens’ duties are also divorced from a specific global political framework. As with
the OECD framework, the specificity of what political participation could mean
in the context of global citizenship (as opposed to nation-state citizens acting
“globally” or responding to “global issues”) remains unclear, but the dimension
of global citizenship most conspicuously absent from Oxfam’s model is the question
of global polity membership based on political equality and structured around a
citizen-state relationship.
Oxfam comes closer to the UNESCO model than the OECD in the extent of
attention paid to the political sphere. For instance, its curriculum expects students to
“learn about power and governance, and analyze the causes and consequences of
unequal power relations” (Oxfam 2015, p. 12). Yet, this learning outcome is not
contextualized as part of the existing international order, and the political conditions
of possibility for realizing global citizenship are under-examined. In other words,
consideration of the forms of political expression of power relations and the political
means by which legitimate political action is and can be exerted at the supranational
scale is too scarce. Even though the document describes a detailed curriculum with
specific indicators for each learning outcome across year levels, nation-states
are only mentioned twice, when stating that learners should understand “state
obligations on human rights” and “how unequal power relations between nation
states affect global issues” (Oxfam 2015, p. 17). The need for reflection on nation-
states’ possible relationships with a global polity that would make global citizenship
a reality is never explicitly mentioned.

General Remarks

As the section above shows, a clear definition of global citizenship based on the four
key components listed above enables researchers to identify the strengths and
shortfalls of various models of GCE. Importantly, these four essential questions
for GCE are also applicable to educational practice in schools, higher education, and
other educational spaces. In the same way, these questions can assist researchers in
revealing the gaps or divergences that may exist between prescriptive frameworks or
658 Q. Maire

models of GCE (as embodied in curricula or examination structures) and GCE as it is

effectively practiced in the spaces governed by such frameworks and models.
What trends are discernible across the three international or nongovernmental GCE
framework briefly analyzed above? While the focus on curriculum and the organiza-
tion of learning is central for Oxfam and UNESCO, and while the OECD instead
places a clear emphasis on assessment and evaluation through its PISA evaluation
regime, common points exist across all three frameworks. First, all three have the
explicit desire to promote the advent of global citizenship through education, and all
three expect nation-state school systems to be the main vehicles through which GCE is
to occur. Second, the major political transformations required to make global citizen-
ship a reality enshrined in political and legal institutions are largely absent from these
frameworks, as is the reflection on the different global political structures required to
enable global citizenship. These frameworks thus provide limited structured opportu-
nities for learners to reflect on the gap that exists between the current global state of
affairs and the global state of affairs required for global citizenship to exist de jure.
Third, and relatedly, it is clear that out of the four key elements of citizenship described
earlier, consideration of the contours and conditions of membership to (and exclusion
from) a global polity of citizens is the most common missing link.
Lack of attention to the conditions for becoming a member of the global commu-
nity of citizens is a major limitation of the three models examined in this chapter.
Again, this appears to be based on a rather naïve conception of global citizenship
as a universally inclusive political group. Social scientists examining the empirical
reality of citizenship, however, have been at pain to emphasize that citizenship is
necessarily an exclusionary political category. Bellamy (2008, p. 12), for instance,
insists that citizenship involves “membership of an exclusive club,” and Balibar
(2004, p. 76) concurs that “every institution of citizenship involves the institutional-
ization of exclusions, following different historical modalities.” If history is to be
trusted, a global polity of citizens would not erase the exclusionary nature of citizen-
ship, for belonging is, in itself, a principle of discrimination between those who do and
those who do not belong (Lordon 2015, p. 276). Yet, consideration of the modalities of
global exclusion that would be necessarily associated with global citizenship (i.e., who
is refused the status of global citizen, and what relationships does that imply between
those who are global citizens and those who are not?) is nowhere to be found in the
models reviewed here. This suggests that such frameworks for global citizenship rely
on an idealized view of citizenship rather than one grounded in historical reality.
Among the four defining features of citizenship, Oxfam, UNESCO, and the
OECD focus primarily on citizen rights and duties. While the question of political
participation is frequently discussed, there remains a clear deficit of attention to the
specific political spaces or arenas in which global citizenship is to be performed.
Here, Bourdieu’s (2014, pp. 355, 357) reflections on the emergence of parliaments in
constituting nation-state citizenship are relevant:

Alongside the appearance of a juridical space as a set of citizens bound by rights and duties
towards the state and towards one another, you have to take into account the appearance of
parliament as site of an organized consensus, or rather, the site of a regulated dissension.
41 Bringing the Citizen Back In: A Sociopolitical Approach to Global. . . 659

[. . .] The state as juridical space and parliament, are in a sense the foundation of citizenship.
To have the citizen in the modern sense of the term, you need to have these two things that
are in no way automatic.

What are the implications of this argument for the question of the political
participation of global citizens? Would a global parliament be a requirement for
the emergence of global citizenship? Whether the answer is yes or no, these are
important areas to consider in frameworks and practices of global citizenship
education.
Finally, while all three frameworks consider that global citizenship can and
should coexist with nation-state citizenship, critical scrutiny of this assumption
and its implications are largely absent. How is national citizenship to coexist with
global citizenship? History suggests that non-nation-state citizenship receded and
eventually disappeared as nation-state citizenship became a dominant political
organizer. Indeed, the increasingly dominant role of nation-states in the global
(i.e., international) order since the French Revolution has been matched by a parallel
decline of other forms of citizenship (i.e., guilds, cities, and local communities) (Prak
2018). If this is to be trusted, reflecting on what the advent of global citizenship
would or could imply for nation-state citizenship is primordial in GCE.

The Scope of Global Citizenship

Since insight from historical and sociological analysis is important for understanding
the empirical reality of citizenship, it is also a precondition for imagining global
citizenship. This is important not only in identifying the defining features of citizen-
ship and the rise and decline of different forms of citizenship or for examining the
relationships that develop as various forms of citizenship coexist. It is also essential
for perceiving the changing scope of citizenship, in particular as regards rights and
duties, and feeding off this reflection to ponder the idea of global citizenship.
The nature and extent of the rights and duties associated with present-day
citizenship in different nation-states is a relevant starting point for educating toward
global citizenship. It can facilitate reflection on the duties and rights that could link
the global citizens with their (global) political community. These issues probe at the
core of the meaning of global citizenship. In current societies, the most common
duties of citizens include conscription, participation, and taxation (Isin and Nyers
2014), while since the publication of Marshall’s (1950) typology, citizen rights have
typically been characterized as political rights, civil rights, and social rights. The
social rights, civil rights, and political rights of global citizens and their enforcement
by a legitimate political authority are central themes of reflection for GCE. Similarly,
the global duties of taxation, participation, and conscription for global citizens, and
the question of who would ensure these demands made on global citizens are met,
are just as essential.
Historical variation in the scope of rights and duties of citizenship can be an
important source of knowledge and imagination for GCE. At the same time, the
660 Q. Maire

social sciences can also contribute to explaining how the perimeter of rights and
duties associated with citizenship changes. Instead of the moral and ethical concep-
tion of duties (and rights) often seen in models of GCE, they suggest that it is
political struggle that primarily determines the contours of citizens’ rights and
duties. Tilly (1997, p. 600), for instance, explains that “military service, eligibility
for public office, voting rights, payment of taxes, public education, access to public
services, and protection of rent-producing advantages – all frequent items in con-
tracts of citizenship – have engaged serious struggle for centuries.” Isin and Nyers
(2014, p. 2) add that “the combination of rights and duties is always an outcome
of social struggles that finds expression in political and legal institutions,” empha-
sizing the connection between (global) citizenship and (global) institutions. There is
little doubt that the topic of political struggle – including the very struggle for
establishing a global polity of citizens – would benefit from being at the forefront
of educational models and practices for global citizenship. This would enable
learners to reflect not only on the gap existing between nation-state citizenship and
global citizenship but also on the path that could lead from one to the other.

Conclusion

This chapter has explored a possible way out of the terminological confusions and
ambiguities in GCE research. Its starting point has been the fact that, although they
do not mean the same thing, concepts such as “global education, cosmopolitanism,
cosmopolitan and world citizenship, transnational citizenship, global mindedness,
and others are intertwined within the discourse of GCE and often used as synonyms”
(Goren and Yemini 2017, p. 181). This chapter has argued that precision in the use of
key concepts (e.g., global citizenship, cosmopolitanism, global mindedness, etc.) is
crucial to enable researchers to engage in a rigorous conversation about GCE and
related forms of education and learn from one another’s findings. If the idea of
“global citizenship” is different from “globally minded” citizenship, as Bowden
(2003) points out, how can the field of GCE research be built on solid and specific
foundations? From a theoretical perspective, paying greater attention to “global
citizenship” as a concept provides one way of doing so.
The definition of global citizenship presented in this chapter outlines four
key ingredients of citizenship and argues that, although it may be unlike its nation-
state counterparts, a global state is a required condition for global citizenship.
Accordingly, I argue that a good GCE model should help learners consider four
key questions:

1. What would be the modalities of inclusion into and exclusion from a global polity
of citizens?
2. What rights are to be associated with global citizenship?
3. What responsibilities are to come with global citizenship?
4. What forms and spaces of legitimate political participation could structure global
citizenship?
41 Bringing the Citizen Back In: A Sociopolitical Approach to Global. . . 661

This set of questions has been put to the test by taking the example of three
prominent international and nongovernmental models of GCE, suggesting that
participation and, above all, rights and duties are more often considered than the
question of membership. The validity of this provisional finding would certainly
gain from being challenged, qualified and/or confirmed based on empirical research
on other conceptions and practices of GCE. This could assist researchers interested
in GCE in forming a comprehensive yet context-sensitive view of the strengths and
limitations of GCE as currently conceived and practiced across contexts. At the same
time, the limitations of the conception of global rights and global duties found in
these three frameworks have been revealed, highlighting their lack of political
foundations and the overall inattention to the question of a “global state” associated
with global citizenship. This also suggests that important global citizenship themes
may be largely unexplored in current GCE.
This chapter has understandably left many important questions for GCE
research unexplored, including those aiming to explain the kinds of GCE existing
in frameworks, curricula, and classrooms. In a relevant inquiry, Peterson et al. (2018,
p. 10) revealed the existence, in countries like Australia and New Zealand, of a gap
between policy rhetoric and curricula in GCE partly caused by the desire of
“preparing students for economic life.” This disconnect is also manifested in the
selective interest displayed toward the various components of global citizenship, and
it is reasonable to hypothesize that this may be an element of explanation for the
kinds of models of global citizenship embodied in the three frameworks analyzed
in this chapter. In particular, it is plausible that the specific demands of preparation
for economic life placed on schooling and educational institutions more broadly
contribute to explaining the relative erasure of core GCE themes, starting with the
role of political struggle in the making of (global) citizenship and the conceptuali-
zation of citizenship as relationship between a group of social agents and a state.
A major implication of this state of affairs is that it is likely to provide few
opportunities for learners to imagine the realization of global citizenship and the
path that could lead to such a transformation of the global order.

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Global Citizenship Education Between
Qualification, Socialization, 42
and Subjectification

Sara Franch

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 666
Global Citizenship or Globally Oriented Citizenship? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 667
Global Citizenship Education: Diverse Purposes and Pedagogical Frameworks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 669
GCE as Qualification: OECD PISA Global Competence Framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 670
GCE as Socialization: UNESCO Global Citizenship Education Framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 671
GCE as Subjectification: Global Citizenship Education Otherwise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 674
Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 675
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 677

Abstract
Today there is a renewed interest in a global notion of citizenship, particularly in
“global citizenship” or “cosmopolitan citizenship.” While the concept of global
citizenship is contested, ambiguous, and conceptually vague, education is one of
the fields where this idea is most seriously used, particularly in the literature that
theorizes the need for a globally oriented citizenship education. Global citizen-
ship and especially its “associated construct,” global citizenship education
(GCE), have become prominent concepts in educational discourses and policies.
This chapter discusses different perspectives on global citizenship and its rele-
vance in terms of a reconfiguration of citizenship education. Three different
pedagogical frameworks are presented that construct GCE in terms of the qual-
ification, the socialization, and the subjectification function of education. The
chapter argues that GCE can provide educators with the perspectives necessary to
help young people make sense of the contemporary world and take conscious
decisions about the role they want to have in it. It highlights that GCE practice
tends to focus mainly on qualification and socialization, thus merging a discourse

S. Franch (*)
Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 665
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_68
666 S. Franch

centered on global competences with one emphasizing the qualities of “good

global citizenship.” GCE demands that teachers and educators foreground also a
subjectification approach centered on a political perspective grounded in social
justice and the critical deconstruction of the dominant discourses that shape our
understanding and actions.

Keywords
Citizenship · Citizenship education · Global citizenship · Global citizenship
education · Cosmopolitanism · Postcolonialism

Introduction

The world has evolved into a globalized system characterized by high levels of
interconnectedness but also dominated by great poverty, inequalities, and transnational
challenges such as migration, climate change, rising nationalism, xenophobia and
racism, radicalization, and violent extremism. In this context, the last two decades
have witnessed a resurgence of interest in a global notion of citizenship. Global
citizenship has become a popular term in academia (Goren and Yemini 2017) but
also a buzzword in a variety of sectors, including private companies, educational
institutions, international organizations, governments, and nongovernmental organi-
zations (NGOs). Indeed, a quick search on Google of the term global citizenship
clearly illustrates how it is “subject to a wide range of interpretations in the diverse
contexts in which it is appropriated and promoted” (Oxley and Morris 2013: 301–302)
and “reflects different ideologies and ideas of what is and ought to be desired of
citizens” (Pashby 2016: 70). The concept of global citizenship is therefore ambiguous
and conceptually vague. The difficulty in conceptualizing global citizenship is linked
to the fact that the key components of this construct, global and citizenship, are
“contestant concepts that spark vigorous debates” (Rapoport 2015: 28). The words
global and citizenship represent contested discursive fields (Pashby 2016). Language
and in this case the words global and citizenship do not just describe reality but rather
“construct (different) realities” (Andreotti 2010: 240). A concept like global citizen-
ship is therefore not universal but, as Andreotti (2010) underlines, is rather situated in
a specific culture, era, and/or geopolitical context, is partial and liable to be seen
differently by others, is contingent as its understanding and use depend on the context,
and is provisional because its understanding and use can and do change.
Education is one of the fields where the concept of global citizenship is most
seriously used. Global citizenship and particularly its “associated construct,” global
citizenship education (GCE), have “taken on the status of a ‘global’ or ‘travelling’
educational policy” (Oxley and Morris 2013: 301–302). From its emergence in the
1990s, GCE has rapidly become a prominent concept in Europe and in the Americas in
educational discourses (Andreotti de Oliveira and De Souza 2012) and in international
educational policy (Tarozzi and Torres 2016). This chapter discusses different per-
spectives on global citizenship and its relevance in terms of a reconfiguration of
42 Global Citizenship Education Between Qualification, Socialization. . . 667

citizenship education. It critically presents three different pedagogical frameworks that

construct GCE in terms of the qualification, the socialization, and the subjectification
function of education (Biesta 2009). It highlights that GCE practice tends to focus
mainly on qualification and socialization, thus merging a discourse centered on global
competences with one emphasizing the qualities of “good global citizenship.” The
chapter ends stressing that GCE demands that teachers and educators foreground also
a subjectification approach centered on a political perspective grounded in social
justice and the critical deconstruction of the dominant discourses that shape our
understanding and actions. This is necessary to help young people acquire a critical
understanding of the contemporary world and of global interconnectedness and
develop the ability to understand and interact responsibly with others while being
self-critical of their own perspectives and positions (Pashby 2011).

Global Citizenship or Globally Oriented Citizenship?

The tension between different views on global citizenship indicates that, from a
sociopolitical perspective, global citizenship is an essentially contested concept. For
some scholars global citizenship implies universality and a deep commitment to a
broader moral purpose. Others underline that global citizenship is more than a global
ethic, or a moral imperative, and offer a political conceptualization (Dower 2000).
Global citizenship in this view “is a key element in the quest for a new language of
politics which challenges the belief that the individual’s central political obligations
are to the nation-state” (Linklater 2002: 317). Dower (2000) maintains that scholars
have worked with “a false dichotomy between a merely moral definition of global
citizenship (commitment to a global ethic) and a fully-fledged institutional definition,
where the appropriate institutions are already in place” (Dower 2000: 567). He
maintains that global citizenship may be defined in terms of intentions and aspirations
and suggests that because of the nature of today’s global situation and challenges,
there is a need for global citizens who work for global goals. This requires “using
existing institutions appropriate to this and creating and strengthening institutions to
the same end” (Dower 2000: 567). Global citizenship is therefore necessary to
institutionalize moral commitments to outsiders and is desirable in order to democra-
tize the already existing and emerging global governance institutions (Dower 2000).
Other scholars contest the concept of global citizenship and emphasize that
citizenship makes sense only in a given political community within defined territo-
rial boundaries, essentially “within a bounded territorial space, in which citizens see
themselves as part of a common demos” (Leydet 2014). Miller (2011), one of the
main critics of the concept of global citizenship, underlines that citizenship is a
political idea, whereas global citizenship is essentially apolitical, a “ghostly shadow”
of real citizenship (2011: 2). Citizenship, according to Miller (2011), is a political
relationship between co-citizens, and as such it involves weak and strong forms of
reciprocity. He underlines that these forms of reciprocity do not characterize global
citizenship. They are neither in the growing networks of international organizations
and groups that pursue political objectives at the global level, what is generally
668 S. Franch

referred to as “global civil society,” nor are they present in the “everyday global
citizenship” expressed by people who try to live in a way that recognizes the equal
rights and claims of all the world’s population. Miller (2011) believes that global
citizenship is not an alternative to local or national citizenship as we cannot have a
citizen to citizen relationship to all our fellow human beings and concludes that
“what we can do is identify with them, show ethical concern for them, arrange our
institutions to avoid global harms . . . we can have citizenship that incorporates
global concern” (Miller 2011: 21). He concedes that we do need to reconceive
citizenship, although not by changing the central arenas in which it is practiced:
“not the global citizen, but the globally concerned citizen, is the ideal we should be
aiming to promote” (Miller 2011: 23). Similarly, Bowden (2003) and Parekh (2003)
believe that the notion of a global citizen or citizen of the world is not a viable one
and support the idea of “globally minded” or “globally oriented” citizens, who are
first citizens of a particular state.
So, as stated by Gaudelli (2016), global citizenship can be understood in a
“totalizing manner” (2016: 13), meaning that an individual will have the rights
and privileges of citizenship everywhere. Or, more pragmatically, global citizenship
can be seen as the development of an individual’s identity, as “rooted in a particular
community but with a sense of connection, responsibility and concern for people
elsewhere” (2016: 13). From an educational perspective, scholars use the term global
citizenship, but they generally mean globally minded or globally oriented citizenship
(Gaudelli 2016; Peterson 2016; Pike 2008a).
Pike (2008a), for example, underlines that the concept of citizenship has been very
adaptable overtime; has changed to meet various geographical, political, and cultural
pressures; and has moved from an exclusionary force toward ever greater inclusion. In
a context characterized by ever-increasing interdependence, Pike (2008a) underlines
that “it is time for our understanding of citizenship – and citizenship education – to
shift once more, to expand as an ideal that more closely benefits the world we have
created” (2008a: 47). But, for Pike, expansion does not mean “dismantling the present
construction of citizenship” (2008a: 48); he does not call for an end to national
citizenship nor for the institution of a world government. Rather he takes a pedagog-
ical approach and in particular a new perspective on citizenship education. He urges
educators to help students explore the implications of global trends in terms of “their
rights and responsibilities, their allegiances and loyalties, and their opportunities for
meaningful participation” (2008a: 48). For Pike, citizenship, in a constitutional sense,
will remain national; it is the state that will continue to provide citizens with their
primary sense of belonging, but the challenge is to develop also an ethos of global
citizenship, i.e., “to imbue the concept of citizenship with an ethos – a set of moral
principles and codes of conduct – that is global in scope” (2008a: 48). Similarly,
Peterson (2016) talks about the need for citizenship to be shaped by, and to in turn
shape, “a global imagination” (2016: 259). He talks about focusing citizenship
education on a “globally oriented citizenship” that “is intimately intertwined with
other forms of citizenship, (whether local, regional or national), which are mutually
reinforcing” (Peterson 2016: 261). He maintains that a global-oriented citizenship is in
fact political and will occur primarily through the political structures and processes of
the nation-state (2016: 258). For Peterson:
42 Global Citizenship Education Between Qualification, Socialization. . . 669

rather than being “post-national”, global citizenship only makes sense when conceived in
relation to one’s other loci of citizenship, including the national. It is, at least in part, the
relationships and structures, as well as the skills and capacities, either provided or restricted
by our special duties as national citizens, which make it possible, challenging or impossible
. . . to meet our global obligations. (2016: 259)

A global orientation to citizenship is generally constructed as an expansion of

national citizenship, so while the nation-state remains the main site of political
organization, the key tenets of citizenship – rights, duties, participation, and identity
– are reimagined, from an educational perspective, “in new and multiple ways that
are not limited to the spaces defined by the nation-state” (Pashby 2008: 23). But
citizenship, or “the project of citizenship” as Pashby (2016: 73) calls it, is caught in
“a paradox of belonging”: it is “complicit with perpetuating inequalities and
reinforcing who does and does not belong” (Pashby 2016: 74). Pashby (2011)
therefore raises the question of whether a global orientation to citizenship does
indeed constitute a new theory of citizenship. Constructing global citizenship as an
expansion of national citizenship may in fact reinscribe the exclusionary nature and
the privilege of earlier applications of citizenship and retrench rather than transform
power inequalities:

global citizenship is often conceptualized as an expansion of national citizenship and it is

unclear whether or not a revised democratic citizenship education that “expands” to take up a
politics of difference in a global orientation or that adds a global orientation to a national
model of citizenship actually alters the status quo. (Pashby 2011: 428)

In conclusion, in the context of increasingly culturally diverse societies and a

global world, scholars are stressing the need for a globally oriented citizenship
education. Global citizenship education (GCE) is presented as a new “educational
agenda for schooling for citizenship in a global era” (Pashby 2008: 23).

Global Citizenship Education: Diverse Purposes and Pedagogical

Frameworks

Global citizenship education is essentially an alternative to nation-centric

approaches to citizenship education. As an ideal, GCE facilitates the acquisition of
“a sense of global-mindedness that encourages students to develop a consciousness
of global connectivity and responsibility” (Pashby 2008: 17) and become “active
national citizens with an informed global conscience” (Pike 2008a: 48). This means
students having a dialogic, complex, and dynamic understanding of their own
identities and the ability to understand and interact responsibly with others while
being self-critical of their own perspectives and positions (Pashby 2011). Globally
conscious citizens have a critical understanding of globalization, are aware of global
interconnectedness and the ways they and their nations are implicated in local and
global problems, are conscious of the role of humans for the future health of the
planet, and engage in constructive actions to promote social change at the local,
regional, national, and transnational levels (Pashby 2011; Pike 2008a).
670 S. Franch

However, inheriting the contested nature of citizenship, the opacities of global

citizenship, and the complexities of fostering citizenship through education, GCE
“becomes a complicated idea that is infused with various meanings” (Pashby 2016:
71). It operates as a “nodal point in policy discourse – a floating signifier that
different discourses attempt to cover with meaning” (Mannion et al. 2011: 443):

“education for global citizenship” (EGC) is functioning as a nodal point . . . As a “nodal

point” . . . it works as a privileged reference point (or signifier) that attempts to partially fix
meaning and bring together different discourses. A nodal point is also malleable and unstable
discourse, varying depending on the context and how power is gained in organising a socio-
discursive field. (Mannion et al. 2011: 444)

As the ideas behind theoretical conceptualizations, policy initiatives, or educational

programming are never a neutral endeavor, the “discourses of global citizenship, as an
institutionalized way of speaking about citizenship and education, are being engaged
in ways to establish particular meaning and practices” (Shultz et al. 2011: 3). Different
agendas and theoretical frameworks construct different meanings to the words global,
citizenship, and education, and this implies different curricula and education practices
(Andreotti de Oliveira and De Souza 2012). Drawing from Biesta’s (2009) work on
the functions and purposes of education – qualification, socialization, and sub-
jectification – Sant et al. (2018) identify three discourses within GCE: GCE as
qualification, GCE as socialization, and GCE as subjectification. The following
section critically presents and expands these three GCE discourses and provides
examples of pedagogical frameworks broadly in line with each of them. The chapter
argues that these three discourses within GCE (qualification, socialization, and sub-
jectification) should not be seen as entirely separate. On the contrary, in both peda-
gogical frameworks and in practice, they are deeply intertwined and overlapping.
While synergy is certainly possible and indeed has the potential to facilitate a
comprehensive approach to GCE, one should note that there are also contradiction
and potential for conflict between the three discourses, particularly between the
qualification and socialization dimension on the one hand and the subjectification on
the other (Biesta 2009). So, a GCE practice that blindly supports qualification and
socialization without analyzing the current global dynamic, questioning its tenets, and
exploring alternative perspectives will likely depoliticize citizenship practices there-
fore undermining a GCE approach pursuing subjectification.

GCE as Qualification: OECD PISA Global Competence Framework

In an approach centered on qualification, the purpose of education is to facilitate the

acquisition of a certain set of knowledge, skills, and dispositions to “do something” and
to “function” in society (Biesta 2009). In terms of GCE, these knowledge and skills
pertain to the acquisition of global and intercultural competences (Sant et al. 2018). GCE
as qualification is clearly associated with a discourse that foregrounds the global
competences that students need to acquire “for life in a global society and work in a
global economy” (Marshall 2011: 418). Equally important in this discourse is building a
pool of human resources with the competences that a country needs to position itself in
42 Global Citizenship Education Between Qualification, Socialization. . . 671

the global market and be a competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy (Sant
et al. 2018). This perspective responds to the technical-economic instrumentalist agenda
of GCE identified by Marshall (2011) and has the purpose of creating economically
competitive citizens who are advantaged because of particular knowledge, skills, and
attitudes. Within this framework, education institutions emphasize that in an increas-
ingly interconnected and competitive global market, a knowledge of the world, of
foreign languages, and skills such as adaptability and cross-cultural sensitivity are highly
beneficial to students, as they “foster a kind of border-free mobility seen to enhance
individual (economic) success in the world” (Jorgenson and Shultz 2012: 3). This
understanding of GCE tends to permeate the educational discourse of many third-
level education institutes (Jorgenson and Shultz 2012; Pike 2015), although this global
competences approach is a dominant discourse also in schools (Dill 2013; Marshall
2011; Standish 2014). This perspective can be criticized as it is not so much about
fostering a global citizen committed to social justice but rather a global entrepreneur that
reaps the benefits of the current global society.
An example of GCE as qualification is the new OECD PISA 2018 Global
Competence Framework (OECD PISA 2018), which stresses that global compe-
tences are required by students to learn to live in the interconnected, diverse, and
rapidly changing world of the twenty-first century. The OECD PISA framework
provides a definition of global competence on the basis of a prescriptive set of
knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values and a set of tools and criteria to assess and
certify adolescents’ global competences. Schools have a key role to play in helping
“students cope and succeed in an increasingly interconnected environment” (OECD
PISA 2018: 5), and global competences are required by students so that they can live
harmoniously in multicultural communities, thrive in a changing labor market, use
media platforms effectively and responsibly, and support the sustainable develop-
ment goals (OECD PISA 2018).
The OECD PISA global competence framework can be criticized from a peda-
gogical perspective. Bamber et al. (2018) underline that “when reified, frameworks
tend to become reductive and somewhat hegemonic ‘regimes of truth’” (2018: 205),
which encourage unreflective and performative attitudes that are antithetical to a
transformative education. Moreover, the “outcome-focused audit discourse” that
characterizes frameworks such as the OECD PISA results in an excessive focus on
measures, metrics, and league tables. This results in giving visibility and normalizing
certain educational processes and outcomes, while “offering a reductive account of
both transformation and indeed ‘education’ itself as a political and philosophical
project” (Bamber et al. 2018: 205).

GCE as Socialization: UNESCO Global Citizenship Education

Framework

In an approach pursuing socialization, the purpose of education is to impart certain

norms and values to become members of particular cultural, social, and political
“orders” (Biesta 2009). In terms of GCE, these norms and values relate to becoming
“good citizens of the world.” The main emphasis here is on fostering citizens that are
672 S. Franch

committed to a world culture based on human rights, pacifist values, cohesiveness,

and sustainability (Sant et al. 2018). GCE as socialization has points in common with
the global consciousness interpretation of GCE identified by Dill (2013), which
draws from humanistic values and assumptions, and aims to provide students with a
global orientation, cultural sensitivity, a vision of oneself as part of a global
community of humanity, and a moral conscience to act for the good of the world.
The OECD PISA Global Competence framework includes this perspective and
therefore merges GCE as qualification with GCE as socialization, but a more fitting
example of GCE as socialization is the UNESCO GCE pedagogical framework
(UNESCO 2015). While deeply situated in a socialization perspective, the UNESCO
GCE framework pursues also qualification through the promotion of particular
global and intercultural competences. These are framed within a perspective that
focuses on humanistic and cosmopolitan values (human rights, tolerance, peace) and
a clearly identified positive identity of the “good global citizen” as somebody that
demonstrates understanding and commitment to those values. The “good global
citizen” is defined by UNESCO in relation to three domains of learning (cognitive,
socio-emotional, and behavioral). The “good global citizen” is “informed and
critically literate, socially connected and respectful of diversity, ethically responsible
and engaged” (UNESCO 2015: 23–24). Despite being constructed around the three
domains of learning, the socio-emotional domain is the most relevant as the “learn-
ing outcome” of this domain is substantially a repetition of UNESCO’s global citizen
definition: “Learners experience a sense of belonging to a common humanity,
sharing values and responsibilities, based on human rights” (UNESCO 2015: 22;
see also 2015: 14). This focus on universal human values, according to Bamber et al.
(2018), is problematic because it fails to “recognise the liquidity, historicity and
evolution of difference” (2018: 207).
UNESCO’s GCE framework recognizes the unfairness and unsustainability of the
current global system, but the approach is essentially about a better distribution of
resources within the system to alleviate poverty, rather than a fundamental
questioning of the system, or political action to achieve social justice. While at
first sight the UNESCO framework combines the political analysis of global issues
and governance systems and structures, with motivation, willingness, and capability
to act effectively and responsibly at local, national, and global levels, the emphasis is
on humanistic values such as peace and sustainability, rather than social justice. So,
according to Eis and Moulin-Doos (2017), the intended “actions” envisaged within
the UNESCO framework “tend to be reduced to non-politicized ‘actions’ within civil
society such as ‘community work’ and ‘civic engagement’” (Eis and Moulin-Doos
2017: 56). The behavioral domain of the UNESCO framework is “dominated by the
social – individual and interpersonal – ‘behaviour’ and not the political ‘action’ and
power struggles of communities” (ibid). The primary focus is therefore on individual
ethical behavior and action, rather than systemic change to disrupt the way global
inequalities are reproduced by political decisions and everyday economic activities.
Postcolonial scholars such as Andreotti (2016) emphasize that UNESCO’s GCE
work reproduces colonial ontological and epistemological assumptions and depolit-
icizes citizenship practices:
42 Global Citizenship Education Between Qualification, Socialization. . . 673

UNESCO have adopted the rhetoric of GCE in ways that still reinforces ethnocentric,
paternalistic, ahistorical and depoliticised practices based on a single onto-epistemic gram-
mar that naturalises modern institutions, cognitive frames, structures of being and economic
models. (Andreotti 2016: 105)

Pedagogically, GCE as socialization reproduces the main shortcomings that

characterize mainstream approaches to citizenship education. First of all, GCE as
socialization understands global citizenship as a “problem” of individuals and their
behaviors and therefore sees the “solution” in terms of knowledge, skills, values, and
behaviors that young people need to acquire. But this perspective is problematic.
Talking about citizenship education, Biesta and Lawy (2006) underline that citizen-
ship learning is “situated within the lives of young people” (2006: 73). It depends
upon the perspectives that young people have developed through previous learning
and meaning-making. But it is also determined by the wider social, cultural, eco-
nomic, and political order that influences and impacts upon young people’s lives.
Applying Biesta and Lawy’s idea of citizenship learning to GCE means that a
“problem” of global citizenship cannot be attributed only to an individual but rather
concerns “the individual-in-context” (Biesta and Lawy 2006: 74). Hence it should
address the knowledge, skills, values, and dispositions of young people but also, and
more importantly, the social, cultural, and economic situation in which they live and
act. And the context where young people live is not conducive to being globally
conscious and responsible. Young people are immersed in a context characterized by
a dominant legend. Pike (2008b) uses the term “legend,” what others call the “single
story of progress, development and human evolution” (Andreotti 2015: 222), to
describe the dominant postindustrial and scientific revolution legend of “the world.”
This legend is shaped by patriarchy and colonialism, is driven by the free market
forces of capitalism, and is based on the “short-term exploitation of the earth’s
resources, the confident reliance on technological solutions, and the relentless
pursuit of economic growth” (2008b: 226).
The second problem with GCE as socialization arises from the assumption that
global citizenship is the outcome of an educational process. This perspective assumes
that global citizenship is an aim that young people need to achieve. Seeing global
citizenship as an outcome suggests that before “being educated,” young people are not
global citizens (Sant et al. 2018). This perspective fails to recognize that young people
are implicated in the wider social, cultural, economic, and political world and already
engage as citizens with these global dynamics. Young people do not learn about global
citizenship only in school but rather from their life experiences and practices. Global
citizenship as an outcome is also problematic because it assumes that what constitutes
“good global citizenship” is something already defined once and for all by policy-
makers, scholars, and educators. This raises the question: By whom and for whom is
GCE being developed? Pashby (2011) underlines that in the GCE literature, it is
generally conceptualized as a Western education for a western citizen subject:

the assumed subject of GCE pedagogy is the autonomous and European citizen of the liberal
nation-state who is seen as normative in a mainstream identification as citizen and who must
work to encourage a liberal democratic notion of justice on a global scale by “expanding” or
674 S. Franch

“extending” or “adding” their sense of responsibility and obligation to others through the
local to national to global community. (Pashby 2011: 430)

Pashby (2011) stresses the importance of drawing from a range of epistemologies

and ontological traditions so that “multiple ‘global citizen selves’ are conceptualized
not solely through the Western norm, but also through diverse perspectives that
challenge Western humanism and that employ non-Western ontologies to define
global citizenship” (2011: 439). From a pedagogical perspective, similarly to what
Biesta and Lawy (2006) recommend for citizenship education, the definition of
global citizenship, and what constitutes “good global citizenship,” should not be
assumed a priori and taken for granted by educators but should rather become an
integral part of GCE. The meaning of global citizenship should be the object of
continuous interrogation by students in relation to their contexts and life
experiences.

GCE as Subjectification: Global Citizenship Education Otherwise

In an approach that pursues subjectification, the purpose of education is to facilitate

independence from “existing orders” and support “those educated to become more
autonomous and independent in their thinking and acting” (Biesta 2009: 8). In terms
of GCE, this means promoting “a global citizenship from below” and a space for
“counter-practice,” i.e., “education on non-dominant knowledges and values” (Sant
et al. 2018). Andreotti’s (2010) postcolonial and postcritical GCE, or “global
citizenship education otherwise” (Andreotti 2015: 221), is an apt example of GCE
as “counter-practice.” The post-traditions, in particular poststructuralism and post-
colonialism, according to her, have in fact the potential to provide educators with
conceptual tools that will help them “pluralize epistemologies and possibilities for
thinking and practice” (2010: 245). Andreotti (2010) advocates “decolonising the
imagination” of teachers and students involved in GCE who have been:

cognitively shaped by Enlightenment ideals and have an emotional investment in univer-

salism (i.e. the projection of their ideas as what everyone else should believe), stability
(i.e. the avoidance of conflict and complexity), consensus (i.e. the elimination of difference)
and fixed identities organised in hierarchical ways (e.g. us, who know, versus them who
don’t know). (Andreotti 2010, 246–247)

Andreotti’s postcolonial and postcritical GCE does not provide learners with
normative ideals of democracy, freedom, rights, and justice that are presented as
universal but rather is meant to facilitate “the emergence of ethical, responsible and
responsive ways of seeing, knowing and relating to others ‘in context’” (Andreotti
2010: 239). A postcolonial and postcritical GCE (Andreotti 2010) stimulates
learners “to imagine otherwise” (Andreotti 2015: 221) and is based on four types
of learning: learning to unlearn, learning to listen, learning to learn, and learning to
reach out (Andreotti de Oliveira and De Souza 2008). Learning to unlearn is about
learning to perceive that what we consider “good and ideal” and “neutral and
42 Global Citizenship Education Between Qualification, Socialization. . . 675

objective” is only one perspective, a worldview that is related to where we come

from socially, historically, and culturally. We carry a “cultural baggage” that affects
who we are and what we see (Andreotti 2010; Andreotti de Oliveira and De Souza
2008). Learning to listen is about learning to recognize the effects and limitations of
our perspective and to be receptive to new understandings and conceptual models
(Andreotti 2010; Andreotti de Oliveira and De Souza 2008). Learning to learn is
about learning to receive new perspectives and to rearrange and expand our own. It is
about “going into the uncomfortable space of ‘what we do not know we do not
know’” (Andreotti 2010: 247), engaging with different “logics,” thinking outside the
box, seeing through other eyes, and rearranging our cultural baggage (Andreotti
2010; Andreotti de Oliveira and De Souza 2008). Learning to reach out is learning to
apply/adapt/situate/rearrange this learning to our own contexts and in our relation-
ships with others while continuing to reflect and explore new ways of being,
thinking, knowing, doing, and relating (Andreotti 2010; Andreotti de Oliveira and
De Souza 2008).
Andreotti’s GCE otherwise is a fascinating alternative to the mainstream GCE as
qualification and socialization dominant in educational theory and practice. How-
ever, a number of pragmatic concerns limit its translation into pedagogical practice.
Marshall (2011) raises three concerns: (1) The critical reading of current GCE
practice is sometimes overcritical and therefore not helpful for those teachers
striving to make their classrooms more sensitive to global issues and trends that
affect their students by incorporating global citizenship activities and curricula.
(2) Some of the postcolonial and postcritical theorizations of GCE incorporate a
seemingly relativist, anti-universalist position, which contradicts teachers’ pedagog-
ical need to work with notions of right, wrong, and truth. (3) The postcolonial
theorization and critique underestimate the embedment in schools of hegemonic
and traditional pedagogy, curriculum, and exam-oriented practice.
In sum, postcolonial and postcritical GCE “can become preoccupied by theory,
abstraction and by an alternative educational ideal, without fully taking into account
the economic contexts, and pedagogic and curricular realities and traditions within
schools” (Marshall 2011: 424). It may not move beyond experimentation by indi-
vidual educators and teachers as, according to Marshall (2011), a more systematic
translation in curricula may currently be unrealistic and unworkable given that
schools are located in wider societies, which are “reproducing powerful corporate
cosmopolitan ideals entrenched in a set of neo-liberal and knowledge-economy
norms” (2011: 424).

Conclusions

The growth of extremism, rising populism, the threat of neofascism, and assaults on
basic human rights, coupled with ever-increasing inequality both within and across
countries and with environmental issues like climate change that threaten our very
survival, seem insurmountable. So, what role can education and GCE play in this
scenario? Is it naïve to think that education can contribute to addressing some of
676 S. Franch

these challenges? Young people are particularly in danger of accepting the inexora-
bility of the dominant global world order and seeing todays’ sociopolitical and
environmental challenges as insurmountable. Seeing no alternative may result in
uncritical adaptation and urge to “fit in” and “thrive” in todays’ global world or in
hopelessness, despair, and possibly violent radicalization as a result of marginaliza-
tion and exclusion.
In this context, GCE is essential. Focusing on a global outlook is a concrete way
to overcome the limitations of a national citizenship perspective. GCE can provide
educators with the perspectives necessary to help young people make sense of the
contemporary world and take conscious decisions about the role they want to have in
it. In much of GCE practice, teachers and educators tend to focus on qualification
and socialization, thus merging a discourse centered on global competences with one
emphasizing cosmopolitan values and “good global citizenship.” A qualification
approach to GCE allows teachers to focus on the knowledge, skills, and dispositions
essential for global citizenship (knowledge and understanding of global systems,
structures and issues, and skills required for civic literacy). A socialization concep-
tion of GCE with its focus on humanistic and cosmopolitan values allows educators
to bring to the fore human rights, our common humanity, and shared values. But
GCE demands that teachers and educators foreground also a subjectification
approach centered on a sociopolitical analysis of the root causes of global poverty
and inequality. A political perspective grounded in social justice is in fact necessary
if GCE is to take political agency seriously. Moreover, a subjectification conception
of GCE is required to facilitate the critical deconstruction of the dominant discourses
that shape our understanding and actions. Educators and teachers do not need to
situate their practice completely in a qualification, a socialization, or a sub-
jectification approach to GCE but can rather merge the perspectives. While synergy
is certainly possible, teachers and educators should also be cognizant of the potential
for conflict between the three dimensions, particularly between the qualification and
socialization dimensions on the one hand and the subjectification on the other. A
GCE practice that blindly supports qualification and socialization without analyzing
the current global dynamic, questioning its tenets, and exploring alternative perspec-
tives will likely depoliticize citizenship practices, therefore undermining a GCE
approach pursuing subjectification. By foregrounding political knowledge and crit-
ical thinking skills (qualification) and human rights (socialization) while drawing
also from voices that have been silenced by colonial epistemic violence, GCE can
become a space that helps young people become more autonomous and independent
in their thinking and acting (subjectification). GCE can thus help young people
acquire a critical understanding of globalization, awareness of global interconnec-
tedness and the ways they and their nations are implicated in local and global
problems, and consciousness of the role of humans for the future health of the planet
(Pashby 2011; Pike 2008a). It will also help them develop the ability to understand
and interact responsibly with others while being self-critical of their own perspec-
tives and positions (Pashby 2011).
42 Global Citizenship Education Between Qualification, Socialization. . . 677

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UNESCO. (2015). Global citizenship education. Topics and learning objectives. Paris: UNESCO.
Existing Research on Italian Migrants in the
USA and Australia: A Critical Overview 43
Simone Marino

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 680
Studies of Italian Migrants in the USA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 680
Studies of Italian Migrants in Australia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 684
Conclusions and Reflections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 687
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 688

Abstract
This chapter provides a brief overview of the literature on Italian migrants in the
USA and in Australia and the theoretical reference points on which different
research studies are based. US literature was historically characterized by con-
cepts of social change and assimilationist approaches whereby immigrant groups
were expected to merge into general American culture. Some academic assump-
tions were maintained by later American sociologists studying Italian groups,
although with new terminology, including urbanization, adaptation, accommoda-
tion, and social adjustment. In Australia, the rise of multicultural policies in the
1970s contrasted with the laissez-faire attitude to ethnic pluralism in the USA and
led Australian literature to focus more on issues of cultural transmission and the
construction of Italian ethnic groups. Australian studies, ranging across different
disciplines, have examined the social organization of Italian migrants, mainly
those from a working-class background and with a focus on domestic and family
dynamics. More recently, both US and Australian studies have touched on matters
of transnationalism, looking at issues such as the contemporary migration to the
USA referred to as la fuga dei talenti (“the flight of the talented”), coexisting
transnational contexts, gender, globalization, and matters of citizenship.

S. Marino (*)
School of Creative Industries, University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 679
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_71
680 S. Marino

Keywords
Italian migrants · Transnationalism · Australia · USA · Migration

Introduction

Research into Italian immigrant groups remains substantial and interdisciplinary

touching on many different themes, including language, culture, and ethnicity.
Consequently, this chapter focuses only briefly on some of the more significant
works and approaches to the study of Italian migrants and immigrant groups in
Australia and the USA.
Research on immigration to the USA was traditionally characterized by a focus on
social change, with many authors working within assimilationist approaches which
predicted that minority groups would merge into mainstream American culture.
However studies have expanded well beyond these ways of thinking, particularly
in the past few decades. Section “Studies of Italian Migrants in the USA” gives a
concise review of previous research on Italian migrants undertaken primarily in the
USA (although it includes some studies related to Canada), taking very much a
historical view to show the changes in theoretical approach over time.
Section “Studies of Italian Migrants in Australia,” on the other hand, summarizes
a few of the more significant studies of Italian immigrants in Australia. While early
research had an assimilationist stance, the development of multicultural policies in
Australia in the 1970s brought Australian literature to focus strongly on matters of
cultural transmission and the formation of Italian ethnic groups. This section on
Australian research is structured principally by field of study, to give an idea of the
range of research approaches that have been taken within different disciplines
looking at diverse topics, including issues such as transnationalism, coexisting
transnational contexts, globalization, citizenship and belonging, gender, and the
contemporary migration referred to as la fuga dei talenti (“the flight of the talented”).
Finally, the chapter concludes by considering some of the limitations of previous
studies and reflects on the ways in which the current literature of Italian migration to
Australia and the USA can be extended to provide a holistic view of Italian
migration.

Studies of Italian Migrants in the USA

According to Devoto (1993), Italians began migrating to the Americas in massive

numbers after the reunification of Italy in the 1870s, a period of great social and
political upheaval. This migration reached its peak in the decade and a half between
the turn of the century and World War I, when each year approximately 250,000
migrants arrived in the USA from Italy, and their presence had an impact on the
social life of the country.
43 Existing Research on Italian Migrants in the USA and Australia: A. . . 681

Early sociological studies on immigrants conducted in the USA, such as Thomas

and Znaniecki (1927/1966), and the studies reproduced in Coser and Rosenberg
(1969) focused on the immigrants’ ability to adapt to “the American way of life.”
The research by Thomas and Znaniecki has been considered the most innovative
piece of sociological research and theoretical analysis ever undertaken and served as
a model for many other studies undertaken in the inter-war years (Chiro and Smolicz
1998). Their book, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, analyzed the
assimilation of Polish immigrants in the USA, particularly focusing on social matters
of control and change: “The idea of social theory is the analysis of the totality of
social becoming into such causal processes and a systemization permitting us to
understand the connections between these processes” (p. 36). American sociological
research of ethnic groups at this time was thus characterized by the concept of social
change and the adaptability of immigrant groups (although, as Chiro (2008) has
noted, assimilation theory is not peculiar to the USA and is to be found in some form
in all immigrant-receiving English-speaking countries). However a rival theory, that
of the “melting pot,” gained adherents among those who were disturbed by the
elements of racism and forced compliance to an ideal of Anglo-conformity in
assimilation theory.
US scholars such as Forester (1919), Mariano (1921), and Rose (1922), advocat-
ing assimilation and melting pot theories, all stressed the need for Anglo-conformity
and the desirability of maintaining the institutions of the traditionally English-
speaking USA (which were inherent in the legacy of the American Revolution).
The English language and English-oriented cultural patterns that were dominant and
standard in American life were considered to be the patterns that would be followed
in the USA (Gordon 1964), even as it was assumed that all traditions and cultures
brought into the USA by the many immigrant groups would eventually meld into a
new American society. Both melting pot and assimilation theories thus assumed a
mainstream perspective and tended to emphasize the ease or otherwise with which
the new groups could merge into general American culture. These academic assump-
tions were maintained by later American sociologists studying Italian groups, who
focused on processes of assimilation, although often proposing their own terminol-
ogy. Thus Ware (1935), Whyte (1943), and Child (1943/1970), for example, devel-
oped their ideas by stressing matters of urbanization, adaptation, accommodation,
absorption, social adjustment, and integration.
This focus on assimilation had implications for citizenship. To explain the
dynamics by which nationality and immigration laws conferred different rights on
the citizens of a country and noncitizens (foreign nationals), and to understand the
effects of such policies, literature began to examine immigration and citizenship
policies. This included speculation on related matters and in particular questions
about “what it means to be a citizen” in different contexts and in different times.
Unpacking the meaning of citizenship (as a marker of entitlement or belonging,
within a specific area of residence) led to reflections on whether it is the key axis of
advantage or disadvantage among individuals within and across the borders of
nation states (Shutes 2016; Helbling 2016).
682 S. Marino

An important study focused on Italian communities was conducted by Gans

(1962). In his research on the social structure of an urban Italian community, Gans
stressed the distinct ethnic-historical characteristics of migrants and ethnic groups,
pointing out that southern Italian peasants had different values and characteristics
from northern Italians. This led to a focus in the American sociology of migration on
features such as religion, politics, criminal and economic systems, and patriarchal
family orientation.
However, despite Gans’s work, there was still a tendency to consider the Italians
as a homogenous ethnic group, with a continued focus on the cultural systems of “the
Italians.” There were studies that focused heavily on the family and its ties, notions
that were considered to be outmoded in general society (e.g., Campisi 1948; Covello
1944/1972; Gross 1973). The ethnocentric interpretation of scholars who lacked an
emic orientation toward the subject of the study was sometimes displayed in
negative attitudes toward the group, characterizing it in terms of “traditional values”
such as collectivism and cohesiveness or focusing on omertà (the “code of silence”).
Other scholars, such as Banfield (1958), Vecoli (1964), and Tomasi (1972), focused
more on the importance of religion in the family structure of Italians in the USA.
Their research pointed out the different patterns of leaving and the processes of
acculturating from the old world to the new, such as urbanization and a fusion of
diverse elements.
American sociologists and anthropologists really only began to dedicate attention
to issues such as intergenerational conflicts between immigrants and their descen-
dants from the 1940s. Scholars such as Child (1943/1970), Covello (1944/1972),
and Gambino (1973) examined intergenerational conflicts within Italian-American
communities, characterizing them as resulting from a dislocation between the
so-called traditional (sometimes referred to as familistic) values of the old country
and the modern (individualistic) values of the advanced capitalistic state. Such a
disjuncture between country of origin and cultural expectations has implications for
how citizenship is conceived and negotiated. If, for migrants, legal citizenship does
not lead to a sense of full incorporation into mainstream society, the gap between
legal citizenship and personal identity has implications for both governmental
policies and theorization in relation to the nature of citizenship. However, as claimed
by Dejaeghere and Tudball (2007), views of citizenship have changed over the last
few decades, from an idea of national loyalty where one has only one citizenship to a
notion of “global citizenship,” and this does, of course, affect Italian-Americans as
much as any other migrant group.
Gabaccia (1984) and Orsi (2010) approached issues of intergenerational conflicts,
and also gender, using concepts from both anthropology and psychology; for
example, Gabaccia (1984) highlighted the psychological dilemma of the descen-
dants of Italian-American immigrants, who in her opinion seemed to be undergoing a
significant identity crisis. These new sociological and anthropological approaches
stressed the social and historical aspects of ethnic groups without reifying them as
objects of study. Gambino (1973) emphasized the disequilibria and psychological
struggles that affect immigrants and their descendants, pointing out that blame is
heaped upon those parents who continue to bear their childhood burden of wearing
43 Existing Research on Italian Migrants in the USA and Australia: A. . . 683

two masks. On the other hand, Gabaccia (2016) analyzed aspects of gender and
migration over the centuries in depth, by demonstrating that variation in the gender
composition of migration reflects not only the movements of women relative to men
but larger shifts in immigration policies and gender relations in the changing global
economy. She also suggests that children of the first generation, by maintaining the
precarious balance of conflicts that had become their lifestyle, accentuate the cultural
isolation and social loneliness that many third-generation Italian-Americans experi-
ence when they attempt to enter the mainstream of American life. A different focus,
more related to “traditional values” vis-à-vis collectivism and education, was devel-
oped by Cohen (1982) who claimed that the large Italian migrant community in
Manhattan, with respect to the education for their children, preferred to take them out
of school as soon as possible to put them at work.
In addition to anthropological or sociological studies of Italian-Americans, there
have been some studies from a more strictly sociolinguistic perspective, where
researchers have approached migratory discourses by focusing on the language
systems. For example, Biondi (1975), largely from an acculturation approach,
investigated the ways in which monolingual and bilingual children of the Italian-
American community of North End (Boston) speak English.
The bulk of the evidence from the studies on Italian-American ethnic groups
discussed here, and many others, indicates that neither assimilation theory nor the
melting pot theory has operated in practice. Despite the social adjustments and
cultural adaptations that most ethnic groups have needed to make in order to adjust
to their new reality, their ethnic group identity and ethnic traditions have proven to be
quite resilient. In fact the assimilationist mindset naturally had an impact on Italian
(and other) migrants, since it assumed a fundamentally monolingual point of view.
A variety of studies of Italian-Americans have criticized US assimilationist and
melting pot policies, which they claim have contributed to the alienation of gener-
ations of American ethnic groups (e.g., Caporale 1986; Crispino 1980; Gabaccia
1984; Gallo 1974; Orsi 2010). Other studies (see De Jong 2013) criticize those
policies because of the monolingualism of the education they produced. Specifically,
assimilationist policy “for the education of migrants” had created, in many instances,
collusion; as suggested by De Jong (2013), language in education policy has
changed substantially over time and has shaped its forms with discourses that
might largely be defined as assimilationist and pluralist (or monolingual and multi-
lingual) views of the role of linguistic and cultural diversity in schools.
Other studies have focused on the ethnic identity of Italian-Americans and the
ways in which the Anglo-American majority has stereotyped ethnic minorities (e.g.,
Alba 1985; La Sorte 1985; Nelli 1983). Moreover, the changing political climate in
the USA, in particular with the rise of the civil rights movement and the black power
campaigns of the 1960s, led Americans to experience an ethnic revival and to search
for their historical roots (Lopreato 1970; La Gumina 1979; Rolle 1972).
The USA still represents the fourth most popular destination for emigrants, after
Germany, the UK, and France (Tirabassi 2015), and Italians with different levels of
education continue to emigrate to the USA. Some more recent US literature is
focusing on this contemporary migration, sometimes referred to as la fuga dei talenti
684 S. Marino

(“the flight of the talented,” seen from the Italian point of view). According to Fiore
(2012), there are three main categories of new Italians in the USA: those with
relatively low qualifications (e.g., workers in the food business); those with high
academic qualifications (seen as a “brain drain” from Italy); and those with some
qualifications who are seeking chances that may be attainable but are not automat-
ically certain (students, artists, temporary workers in the service sector). These more
recent migrants, particularly those in this final category who left Italy since the
1990s, are sometimes referred to as “new Italians,” a term in which “new” is
intended to serve as a time qualifier indicating their recent relocation (Ruberto and
Sciorra 2017).
In the last decade or so, some North American (and Australian) studies have
focused on the experiences of Italian immigrants through the investigation of an
abundance of micro-narratives. The focus of these studies can be characterized as
reflecting transnational approaches, rather than national, emphasizing the ongoing
dialogue between “home” and “host” communities (Ruberto and Sciorra 2017;
Tamburri 2014; Gardaphe 2012). Over the last decade, the application of theoretical
concepts such as diaspora (see Luconi 2011) to the Italian migration phenomenon
and broader comparative and transnational approaches to studying Italy’s migrants
have begun to challenge and deprovincialize Italian migration studies in a range of
contexts, including the USA (e.g., Gabaccia 2013).

Studies of Italian Migrants in Australia

As with Italian migration to the USA, the settlement and social incorporation of
Italian migrants in Australia have been researched over an extended period through a
large number of studies. Pioneering Australian studies of immigrant groups often
reflected the approach of assimilation research in other English-speaking host
countries, discussed more fully for the USA (see section “Studies of Italian Migrants
in the USA”), focusing on how Italian immigrants assimilated into the dominant way
of life. For example, Borrie (1954) suggested that because of the diversity of the
immigration program, Australians would be compelled to consider their attitudes
toward the non-British, and his work offers a significant understanding of the
dominant attitudes of “old” Australians toward their new, non-British neighbors.
Another important early study is Price (1963), which focused on southern Italians
in Australia, noting the patronizing attitude of local Australians who felt hostile
toward the “dago.” He explored ethnohistorical features of immigrants’ values and
introduced the concept of chain migration, which he identified as a three-step model:
“the arrival of the sole man, the calling out of wives, and the subsequent calling out
of elderly parents once the family was established in Australia” (Price 1963, p. 59).
Despite the early similarities in research programs between the USA and
Australia, however, Australia in the 1970s saw the rise of multicultural policies
that allowed for the management of ethnic difference among immigrants; this
contrasted sharply with the USA, where a laissez-faire attitude to ethnic pluralism
was adopted, as a variety of scholars have noted (e.g., Castles 2000). As a result,
43 Existing Research on Italian Migrants in the USA and Australia: A. . . 685

much of the research literature in Australia from this time became more concerned
with issues of cultural transmission (including through education; see below) and the
construction of Italian ethnic groups. Research on the first generation of Italian
migrants peaked in the 1980s and 1990s, with much subsequent research from a
range of disciplines focusing on their children as well.
Among the pioneering sociological research on Italian-Australians was Severino
and De Corso (1985), which focused on the working-class experience and particu-
larly on the children of immigrants, finding that young Italian-Australians had low
self-esteem compared to their peers from Anglo-Saxon backgrounds. Many other
studies have examined aspects of the lives of Italian-Australians from sociological
and anthropological approaches (e.g., Baldassar 2001; Baldassar and Gabaccia
2011; Baldassar and Merla 2014; Bertelli 1987; Marino and Chiro 2014; Marino
2018, 2019; Sala and Baldassar 2017). One specific issue which has seen a great deal
of research is that of gender, particularly in relation to the second generation, the
children of Italian migrants to Australia (e.g., Vasta 1995; Baldassar 1998, 2001).
Some research has been undertaken in the field of the sociology of religion; for
example, Pittarello (1980) stressed the cultural strategies of the minority group,
drawing attention to the differences between the religious value systems of the
minority and those of the Anglo-Celtic cultural institution. Other work has been
interested in cultural values more broadly. Smolicz and his associates published
numerous papers on the cultural and linguistic systems of ethnic minority groups.
The key ideas of Smolicz (1981) and later Chiro and Smolicz (1998) were that every
ethnic group has a nucleus of values that are fundamental to the cultural group’s
existence and which act as distinctive values symbolizing membership of the group
(see also Chiro 2008). In advocating that every ethnic group has a nucleus of values,
however, core value theory would seem to objectify cultural groups.
From the 1970s, with the emergence of multicultural policies, many studies have
investigated aspects of Italian language and culture in Australia, with in-depth
analyses of sociocultural practices, patterns of language usage, and interaction
with the dominant culture. A notable background reference is Australia’s Italians:
Culture and Community in a Changing Society, edited by Castles et al. (1992); the
various chapters examined the Italian community in Australia from historical,
sociopolitical, and economic perspectives. Other works have similarly focused on
the history of Italians in Australia (e.g., Ricatti 2013, 2018; Cresciani 1986) or
looked at particular issues from the perspective of political studies (e.g., Battiston
2005; Mascitelli and Zucchi 2006).
There has been a great deal of research specifically focused on issues of language,
in fields such as linguistics and narrative analysis. For example, Bettoni (1981)
examined code-switching among Italian-Australians in North Queensland, while
Tosi (1991) carried out a sociolinguistic study of Italian in English-speaking coun-
tries; and there have been many other language-focused studies (e.g., Bettoni and
Rubino 1996; Kinder 1990; Marino et al. 2013; Rubino 1989, 2010; Scarino and
Mercurio 2004).
When it comes to the field of education, much of the Australian research on
migration has revolved around Australia’s multicultural policy and the changes that
686 S. Marino

Australian immigration policy has experienced over the last 50 years, from its early
expectations that immigrants would assimilate to models of multiculturalism, intro-
duced by Immigration Minister Al Grassby in 1972, and the incorporation of
immigrant minorities and their children into society (Inglis 2009) – with the very
high number of migrants from Italy to Australia over this period, many general
studies on migration have often included a large contingent of Italian migrants.
There have been many studies on so-called ethnic or community schools in
Australia, set up by specific migrant communities, with government funding, to
ensure cultural transmission and specifically language maintenance (e.g., Smolicz
et al. 2001; Clyne 1991; Scarino 2014). Chiro and Smolicz (2002) focused on Italian
values in Australian schools, where specific “family values” and ethnic identity
where shared among a group of tertiary students of Italian ancestry in Australia. The
authors highlight how, in the students’ personal narratives, the participants comment
on their past and present experiences with respect to their Italian culture maintenance
efforts and their attitudes toward Italian cultural values. Interestingly, the study
follows in the humanistic sociological tradition, seeking to understand the relation-
ship between structure and agency through an analysis of both the activation of
cultural values and their evaluation by active and reflective social agents.
In addition to these, Cahill (1988) conducted a sociopsychological study of the
family environment and the bilingual skills of Italian-Australian children. Cahill’s
work consisted in an investigation on the potential and prospective issues of
intellectual impairment gravitating around bilingual children. Studies have also
looked at the strong expansion of higher education in postwar Australia and its
effects on social mobility (e.g., Forsyth 2015), and this is reflected among the Italian
community as well; for example, Baldassar (2001) pointed out that there have been
strong increases in the rates of Italian-Australians attending tertiary education with
the change from first, second, through to the third and fourth generations and a
correspondingly lower percentage of the community involved in manual trades.
The majority of Australian research on Italian migrants and their descendants in
all disciplines has been carried out on non-differentiated “Italian-Australians.”
However, some studies have looked more precisely at specific communities. Two
such works, both with an anthropological approach, are Cronin (1970) and Huber
(1977). The former compared the social organization of southern Italian migrants
from Sicily, while the latter investigated two groups of Italians from Treviso in
northern Italy who had settled in Australia. Cronin (1970) found that there was
evidence of some change toward egalitarianism in the husband-wife relationship and
a separation of the world of adults from the world of children. Huber (1977) stressed
the relevance of social class and examined the patterns of acculturation.
In more recent research, an awareness of globalization has provided new para-
digms for interpreting transnational histories and the impact on immigration. Studies
highlight that in today’s globalized era, what is new about migration is that people
are no longer “one-way trip” migrants, as migration often involves a circular pattern
of returning to visit home (cf. Hugo 2014). As Baldassar and Pesman (2005) point
out in their study of granting belonging, “doing belonging,” and second-generation
transnationalism, the Italian migration process does not end with the first generation;
43 Existing Research on Italian Migrants in the USA and Australia: A. . . 687

it needs to be considered as a continuous process, rather than considering it in the

traditional way as consisting of a departure and a permanent settlement. Robertson
(2014) has noted that migrants to Australia are becoming more professional and
skilled, corresponding to the current migration agenda, where an array of new
“temporary visas” have taken pride of place in migration policy, replacing a focus
on family migration.
Global and transnational approaches have resulted in the development of a solid
and innovative research program in Australia (see Iuliano and Baldassar 2008;
Ricatti 2018), where concepts such as transnationalism and diaspora have been
used in interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary approaches, proposing new theoretical
ideas through a critical use of transcultural, decolonial, gendered, and anthropolog-
ical theoretical reference points. For example, while Marinelli and Ricatti (2013)
provided a reinterpretation of Italian transnational spaces and “the emotional geog-
raphies of the uncanny,” Vanni’s (2016) theorization of “the transcultural edge” and
Marino’s (2019) theory of institutional positionality are essential new tools for
understanding “transculturation” and ethnic identities. Recent Australian research
literature is characterized by a multidisciplinarity that goes beyond economic,
assimilationist, or objectifying factors. For example, Baldassar et al. (2007) focused
on Italian families in transnational contexts in a way which interconnects gender,
globalization, and aged care, in response to matters of (trans)national links, while a
study by Marino et al. (2013) investigated the relevance of intra-ethnic networks
among migrants and their descendants within the diasporic society by focusing on
the role played by nuclear, extended, or comparatico family alliances. Marotta’s
(2014) study of the transcultural subject challenges previous theories of accultura-
tion characterized by the tendency to reify groups. By highlighting the “the dark
side” of transculturation, Marotta’s transcultural subjects are seen not as abstract
entities, but agent entities.

Conclusions and Reflections

Research has looked at Italian migrant communities in both US and Australian

society, although the literature has followed different paths. Initially much of the
research was strongly characterized by the concept of social change and consider-
ations of the ways in which immigrant groups were expected to merge into the more
general culture. Such academic approaches were maintained for longer in the US
literature, although American sociologists developed new terminologies and ideas,
such as urbanization, adaptation, accommodation, absorption, and social adjustment.
This academic ethnocentrism was gradually replaced in the USA by approaches
that focused on the psychological struggles that affect immigrants and their
descendants and also the lived experiences of Italian immigrants, including micro-
narratives. Recent US literature has turned to examine contemporary Italian migra-
tion and la fuga dei talenti (“the flight of the talented”). Transnational approaches
emphasizing the ongoing dialogue between “home” and “host” communities have
begun to challenge and deprovincialize Italian migration studies in the USA.
688 S. Marino

In Australia, after pioneering studies of immigrant groups characterized by

assimilationist approaches, the rise of multicultural policies in the 1970s led research
to be focused more on issues of cultural transmission and the construction of Italian
ethnic groups. This research peaked in the 1980s and 1990s, by which time there was
an additional focus on the second generation, the children of the Italian immigrants.
As in the USA, more recent transnational approaches have resulted in the
development of a solid and innovative research program in Australia, with interdis-
ciplinary studies looking at concepts such as diaspora, gender, and decolonization.
What is lacking in research, though, is a consideration of the impact of the transna-
tionalism of Italian migrants in the field of education – Zembylas et al. (2012) have
demonstrated that the entanglements of transnationalism have important conse-
quences for educational policy, but this has not yet found its way into research on
Italian migration in Australia or the USA.
While there are exceptions, in both US and Australian research, there is still a
tendency to consider the Italians as a homogenous ethnic group. Approaches often
place a great deal of emphasis on traditional values, language, and family, and this
ethnocentric interpretation lacks the emic orientation essential to a holistic under-
standing of contemporary global patterns of migration. Little comparative and
qualitative analysis among Italian minority groups has been conducted from a
small-scale ethno-anthropological perspective involving extended periods of
fieldwork.
Within the framework of citizenship, Castles and Davidson (2000) investigated
the sociopolitical complications of globalization, emphasizing the implications for
the notions of citizenship and belonging. Although with no specific reference on
Italian migrant communities, they reflected on the fact that in contemporary democ-
racies, citizenship is usually institutionalized as a means of “ensuring individual
rights and of balancing them with community obligations” (Castles and Davidson
2000, p. 1).
Despite the growing multidisciplinary literature, notions of transnationalism often
seem to be analyzed from a historical perspective that divides the migratory history
of Italians into groups or classes, creating a narrative that ignores the complexities of
transculturality. However, emerging transnational approaches to Italian migration
may encourage scholars to look beyond the local and make connections across
Italian migrants in a broad range of international settings.

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Advancing Diversity Through Global
Citizenship Education and Interfaith 44
Dialogue

Mehmet Aslan and Mark Van Ommen

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 694
Global Citizenship Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 695
Challenges in Implementing Global Citizenship Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 696
Interfaith Dialogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 698
Considerations when Facilitating Interfaith Dialogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 698
Interfaith Dialogue and Global Citizenship Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 700
Discussion and Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 702
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 703

Abstract
Global citizenship education (GCE) has been the response of governments and
educational systems around the world to address issues resulting from globaliza-
tion in contemporary society. Some of these issues include a lack of social
cohesion, parallel living, and religious intolerance. While GCE is viewed by
many as a vehicle to develop students as empathetic and caring global citizens,
the effective implementation of GCE programs for students remains a challenge.
Interfaith dialogue (IFD), which can be understood as a structured conversa-
tion designed to foster respect and cooperation among individuals of different
faiths, offers a way to address some of the challenges in implementing effective
GCE for students. Both IFD and the global consciousness approach to GCE
have similar intended outcomes, with dialogue seen as important learning expe-
rience in GCE. Similarities between the intended outcomes of both GCE and IFD

M. Aslan (*)
School of Humanities and Social Inquiry, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]
M. Van Ommen
School of Education, University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 693
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_75
694 M. Aslan and M. Van Ommen

will be noted, as this information may add further weight to the hypothesis that
both concepts are complementary. Finally, an IFD experiential framework and
example will be presented as a way to respond to some of the challenges of GCE.

Keywords
Global citizenship education · Interfaith dialogue · Globalization · Diversity ·
Peace

Introduction

We live in a time where globalization is shaping our lives in new and profound ways.
Globalization is a multifaceted phenomenon (Hanson 2010) which can be under-
stood as a homogenization of economic, cultural, social, and political areas locally
and nationally (Guttal 2007). The hopes and dreams of migrants, transnationals, and
displaced peoples have, in theory, provided the conditions for greater connectedness
and communication between people from different language and cultural back-
grounds (Dabrowski 2015). In addition to this, the advent and use of the Internet,
social media, and mass media is seen as a key factor in creating a feeling of
connection to more remote parts of our world (Rizvi 2008).
While interconnectedness is more prevalent in our contemporary lives, the
authentic integration of our communities has not always been successful. There
continues to be friction, division, and conflict between different individuals, groups,
and countries (Michaelides 2009; Orton 2016). Often these disagreements arise
from religious, cultural, and linguistic distinctions which have resulted in an apathy
for others locally and globally (Dabrowski 2015). Locally, this has resulted in a
separation of communities in some countries into enclaves. The consequence of this
separation is that people may live alongside each other but never interact in
a meaningful way. This phenomenon of people living separate lives despite being
in close geographical proximity to each other is termed “parallel living,” a phrase
first suggested to describe the disturbances in a number of British towns in 2001
(Cantle 2001).
The phenomenon of parallel living due to religious affiliation is supported by the
research that suggests people in the world today still identify with a particular
religious group. The Pew Research Centre (2012) found that globally, more than
eight out of ten people associate themselves with some religious group. There has
been a shift over time in religious affiliation in some parts of the world, but not
necessarily increased secularization. As Turner (2011) argues, some may see West-
ern Europe as becoming more secular, but it is more accurate to say that Europe is
becoming de-Christianized. Australian religious affiliation has also transformed in
the last 50 years, with census data showing a decline in those who identify as
Christian and a rise in those who categorize themselves as nonreligious
(Australian Bureau of Statistics 2017). This rise in the nonreligious population is
significant if Australians are to see themselves as global citizens. The rationale is that
44 Advancing Diversity Through Global Citizenship Education and. . . 695

to connect with other people globally, Australians must acknowledge and try to
understand the role that religion and other belief systems play in their lives.
Global citizenship education (GCE) and interfaith dialogue (IFD) are two
approaches being used to combat the climate of mistrust and friction resulting from
globalization. Education, particularly school education, has a critical role in raising
awareness of global issues (Lapayese 2003). Education and schools can reinforce
dominant norms and the status quo, but they can also be an effective and sustainable
way of connecting individuals, cultures, and communities across borders (Hanson
2010). GCE, the pedagogical response to globalization, develops the consciousness of
students to prepare them for the opportunities and challenges of a global society (Dill
2012). IFD, another response to the challenges of globalization, is viewed as vehicle
which can facilitate cultural diplomacy (Biljana et al. 2017) and build more cohesive
communities (Orton 2016) through transformative conversations (Heckman et al.
2008). Communal cohesion, the facilitation of empathy, and the fostering of peaceful
relations underpin key beliefs in most of the world’s faith traditions. Islam’s concept of
brotherhood, Buddhism’s notion of humanism, South Africa’s philosophy of ubuntu
(or humanity toward others), dharma in Hinduism (Dabrowski 2018), and “love thy
neighbor” for Christians are examples of key beliefs from different faith traditions and
cultures that promote human connectedness.
Despite the potential for a connection between GCE and IFD, as a response to the
challenges of globalization, there is very little research into how the two concepts
can complement and enhance each other. This chapter will argue that IFD and GCE
are complementary concepts. A review of the literature around the definitions,
intended outcomes, and approaches to and the challenges in implementing GCE
and IFD will be presented. Similarities and divergences in definitions, approaches,
and outcomes will be noted. Using this information and viewing both GCE and IFD
through the lens of student experience, we present the case that IFD should be a
component of GCE. Furthermore, we will argue that a process for IFD could be used
as a way to facilitate GCE.

Global Citizenship Education

Global citizenship education (GCE) has emerged out of the global citizenship
movement. Global citizenship dates from the time of the ancient Greeks, with
some ancient Greek philosophers stating all human beings as having the same
worth, respect, and dignity regardless of political boundaries (Dabrowski 2015;
Schattle 2008). Today more individuals are seeing themselves as belonging to and
connected with the global community (Dabrowski 2015). Consequently, global
citizenship is defined as “awareness, caring, and embracing cultural diversity
while promoting social justice and sustainability, coupled with a sense of responsi-
bility to act” (Reysen and Katzarska-Miller 2013, p. 858). GCE, which emerges
from the broader concept of global citizenship, is seen as a pathway for policy
makers and governments to promote action on social justice and shared responsibil-
ity through the education of young people.
696 M. Aslan and M. Van Ommen

This paper adopts an expanded definition of GCE that is based on the intended
outcomes of global citizenship. A global citizen can be described as someone who
understands interconnectedness, respects and values diversity, has the ability to
challenge injustice and inequities, and takes action in a way that is personally
meaningful (UNICEF USA 2018). Schattle (2008) suggests similar qualities but
includes the concept of empathy for those who are suffering beyond one’s immediate
surroundings. Reysen and Katzarska Miller (2013) include environmental sustain-
ability as another outcome of global citizenship. Therefore, we define GCE as
a pedagogical response to globalization that results in students being motivated to
act to:

• Promote the interconnectedness of all life

• Respect people of different cultures and countries while maintaining their own
identity
• Advocate for those beyond their own surroundings who are suffering.

There are two main approaches to GCE, the global competencies approach and
the global consciousness approach (Dill 2013). The global competencies approach
involves a neoliberal perspective of globalization. In this neoliberal globalization
perspective, the individual is a global traveller who wants to access the political,
social, environmental, and economic benefits of being a global citizen through the
acquiring of skills that can be transferred across national boundaries. The global
competencies approach to GCE occurs through dialogue and participation in
programs such as “student exchange, teacher exchange, and international student
participation” (Shultz 2007, p. 251). The global consciousness approach can
be understood to have two perspectives on globalization. The first perspective is
the radical/conflict approach which adopts a “strong ethical position on social
justice” (Shultz 2007, p. 253), challenging economic globalization and building
solidarity across marginalized groups to fight oppression and suppression. In this
radical/conflict perspective on globalization, GCE is seen as a proactive effort with
civic engagement constituting a central element of institutionalized programs, at
both the global and local levels (Caruana 2014). The second perspective is critical/
transformationalist which acknowledges that globalization has often facilitated
complex relationships that have resulted in the exclusion/inclusion of groups locally,
nationally, and internationally. Through the critical/transformational globalization
perspective, GCE is a seen as a vehicle to address issues such as inequity, margin-
alization, and poverty (Shultz 2007) by transforming not only institutions and
systems but also personal and cultural mind-sets (Andreotti 2006).

Challenges in Implementing Global Citizenship Education

Although the global consciousness approach to GCE should address the issue of
parallel living through improved interconnectedness, respect, and advocacy between
people, the reality is that GCE programs do not always meet their intended
44 Advancing Diversity Through Global Citizenship Education and. . . 697

outcomes. There are three reasons for this. The first is that although GCE is taught,
opportunities for engagement with those from different cultural, religious, and
social-economic backgrounds are not always part of the GCE experience. The use
of verbs such as dialogue, participation, effort, engagement, and fostering suggest
that GCE programs involve action on the part of the student to engage with people
from different cultural, political, and social backgrounds. Massey (2014) found that
the inclusion of the global education component in a Canadian year 12 geography
class fostered in the students a stronger global awareness and sense of belonging to
the wider world. But when asked about acting as a global citizen, student responses
were limited to such actions as buying fair trade products, being a volunteer, or
making a donation to a charity. This suggests a lack of understanding either that GCE
should involve interaction with someone from another culture or that opportunities
for this sort of interaction are limited. Similarly, Al-Maamari (2016) sought to
examine how the social studies curricula could enhance diversity or develop preju-
dice in the Sultanate of Oman on the Arabian Peninsula. By examining 12 textbooks,
which were the main teaching tools used by teachers, he found that although there
were many intercultural elements prevalent in the teaching units, due attention was
not given to conflict, democracy, and human rights. In summary he states that that
intercultural education cannot be solely left to curricula to be effective in fighting
prejudice. Rather there is a great need for different pedagogical approaches including
dialogue, which are more student-centered. Again, this study points to a need that
GCE needs to be taught as well as experienced by the students to realize its intended
outcomes.
The second challenge to the implementation of GCE is that the concept itself can
be problematic which can result in the philosophical ideals of GCE not being fully
addressed by those seeking to implement policies and curricular and environmental
factors. Abdi and Shultz (2008) argue that the global citizen is a “problematically
concocted figure” where a “greater focus on developing an ethic of care and an
ethical global space” (p. 49) will help realize the ideals of GCE. Global citizenship
has the potential to spur on the global economy with economic competitiveness
(Rizvi 2008). However, if the goal of GCE is to facilitate economic competitiveness,
this could be also viewed as a barrier because GCE would lose its moral imperative
as it would be driven by the external “forces of globalization” (Standish 2014,
p. 167). An articulation of human rights beliefs and the concept of moral universal-
ism would greatly benefit those working in (the global consciousness approach)
to GCE to have a voice in framing the conversation and policies regarding its scope,
methods, curriculum, and direction (Landorf 2009). To address philosophical issues,
Goren and Yemini (2017) suggest that a starting point for any discussion on GCE
is the adoption of a theoretical framework and the identification and definition
of GCE terms like cosmopolitanism, cosmopolitan and world citizenship, transna-
tional citizenship, and global mindedness. However, these concepts are often
overlooked.
Third, GCE cannot be divorced for contextual factors. For example, in many
industrialized countries, increasingly nationalist thinking and narrowing of interna-
tional perspectives are prevalent. This is further compounded by the fact that GCE
698 M. Aslan and M. Van Ommen

has been sidelined in the school curriculum and funding has been minimalized to
support GCE in schools since 2014 (Buchanan et al. 2018).
Considering the barriers to authentic GCE, there is increasing momentum from
the United Nations and its agency UNESCO for educational authorities to promote
global citizen education. In Australian secondary schools, there is limited evidence
that the nature of student learning achieved by programs or projects in GCE is having
an impact (DeNobile et al. 2014). By impact we refer to GCE achieving its intended
outcomes. Therefore, we need to ask ourselves how we can design programs and
experiences so students will have the best chance to realize the outcomes of GCE.
Interfaith dialogue could be seen as an integral component of GCE and could
provide a way to bridge the gap between the rhetoric and reality of GCE.

Interfaith Dialogue

Interfaith dialogue (IFD) is defined as “an intentional encounter between individuals

who adhere to differing religious beliefs and practices in an effort to foster respect
and cooperation among these groups through organized dialogue” (Agrawal and
Barratt 2014, pp. 571–572). The use of the term “dialogue” rather than conversation
is deliberate. Dialogue is defined as an encounter between two or more persons or
groups of different views with the primary purpose of learning and transformation
(Ingram and Yagi 1992; Massoudi 2006; Michaelides 2009). Thus, authentic IFD is
characterized by cooperation, respect for difference, and desire to overcome conflict
(Seljak 2009).
The terms interfaith and interreligious are often seen as interchangeable in the
literature (Michaelides 2009), but some authors view these as different concepts
(Agrawal and Barratt 2014; Biljana et al. 2017). Firstly, there is not a consensus
about the groups each encompasses. For example, the Archdiocese of Chicago
presents interfaith as referring to relations among adherents of the Abrahamic faiths
of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, while interreligious relations refer to relations of
these faiths with other world religions, including Hinduism and Buddhism (Chicago
2012). The World Council of Churches presents the opposite, indicating that
interreligious is between Christian denominations and interfaith referring to relations
between different faiths (Biljana et al. 2017). For this paper, the importance is on the
intended outcomes of IFD. If, in some instances, interreligious dialogue has similar
outcomes, then both concepts could be viewed as the same.

Considerations when Facilitating Interfaith Dialogue

Since IFD is an intentional encounter, it has an organized and structured process

(Massoudi 2006). There can be formal and informal encounters with people from
different religious affiliations (Biljana et al. 2017). Examples of the informal include
encounters at schools and places of work and relations between neighbors. However,
44 Advancing Diversity Through Global Citizenship Education and. . . 699

IFD is a formalized conversation (Agrawal and Barratt 2014); therefore it has a

deliberate process. Considering interfaith dialogue as having a certain structure
allows the facilitators to effectively plan the pre-dialogue, dialogue, and post-
dialogue phases so that the participants experience truly transformative conversa-
tions (Krebs 2015; Orton 2016). This formal approach is used to ensure that all
aspects of the dialogue are addressed. Massoudi (2006), using a systems approach,
suggests there are three phases to the process of IFD:

• Pre-dialogue: agreement on basic dialogue guidelines involving evaluating one’s

views while being open to the views, perspectives, and opinions of others
• Dialogue: being attune to one’s emotions and having courage to see and change
previously held opinions
• Post-dialogue: reflect and review what one has learned from the interaction and
plan the next dialogue. (pp. 427–432)

In the pre-dialogue phase, consideration should be given to who is involved,

who is missing, what is the dialogue for, and what are the conditions required for
effective dialogue (Orton 2016). Thought should also be given to the location of
the dialogue, different dialogue formats (weekly discussions, coffee and conver-
sations, book clubs, sacred text studies, and interfaith retreats), experiential oppor-
tunities, religious literacy, and the inclusion of a secular viewpoint (Krebs 2015).
One example of how the dialogue phase could be structured is through Cambridge
Scriptural Reasoning (CSR). The CSR assists people to read together the sacred
texts from the Abrahamic faiths (Islam, Judaism, and Christianity) so that, in
conversation with others, bonds and mutual understandings between different
religious backgrounds are enhanced (Saragih et al. 2018). Considering interfaith
dialogue as having a certain structure allows the facilitators to effectively plan the
pre-dialogue, dialogue, and post-dialogue phases so that the participants experi-
ence truly transformative conversations (Krebs 2015; Orton 2016). To achieve
authentic learning and transformation through IFD remains challenging. Orton
(2016) suggests barriers to authentic dialogue including our past experiences of
people from different faiths, worldviews, personal and community agendas, and
status in society. Sometimes being engaged in interfaith dialogue can come at a
high personal cost due to isolation from our own faith community, especially in the
eyes of the more fundamental or radical sections of that community. Another
barrier is the religious literacy of the organizing organization, which can result in
an age or gender bias (Weller 2009). Sometimes the male elders of a religious
group are included rather than the youth or females. Ironically, Michaelides (2009)
believes that youth involvement in interfaith dialogue is crucial for sustainable
peace and harmony.
These challenges could be alleviated if interfaith dialogue is seen as a structured
process, requiring consideration of certain elements at each stage. However, dia-
logue is an encounter between people who bring different lived experiences to the
conversation, which can result in a certain amount of unpredictability.
700 M. Aslan and M. Van Ommen

Interfaith Dialogue and Global Citizenship Education

There is a strong case that IFD should be seen as an important component of GCE
and the processes of IFD could serve as a model to facilitate GCE. The rationale for
this is threefold. First, the intended outcomes of global consciousness approach to
GCE have strong parallels with the outcomes of IFD. Second, both concepts involve
action on the part of participants. Third, IFD provides the framework for people from
different faiths to engage in dialogue, thus providing a situation of experiential
learning, experiential learning being one of the barriers or challenges of GCE.
Both IFD and GCE education are viewed by governments as ways to combat many
of the issues that face society today. Lack of social cohesion, parallel living, and
religious intolerance are global challenges facing many countries and communities
within countries. GCE is the pedagogical response to issues of globalization: migra-
tion, global social problems, and cultural difference (Dill 2012). The global conscious-
ness approach to GCE which aims to provide students with a global orientation,
empathy, and cultural sensitivity, stemming from humanistic values and assumptions
(Dill 2013), has outcomes of promoting peace and harmony between peoples
(Dabrowski 2018). IFD, as an intentional encounter between people of different faiths,
is seen by governments as a way to combat conflict and division between different
religious groups in an increasingly globalized world by building more cohesive
communities (Orton 2016). Therefore, although both concepts are defined differently,
they have very similar intended outcomes of peace, mutual understanding, and respect
for difference. This is not surprising since global citizenship borrows heavily from the
traditions of different religions and cultures (Dabrowski 2018).
To realize the ideals of GCE and IFD, participants are required to act. This is
another similarity between both concepts. A global citizen “takes action in a way that
is personally meaningful” (UNICEF USA 2018). Dialogue is the action that is
suggested in both the global competency and global consciousness approach to
GCE. Similarly, IFD involves action on the part of the participants because by
definition, dialogue involves communication through discussion (Massoudi 2006).
Other forms of engagement that should be considered so that IFD initiatives have
more impact are field trips for students to places of worship. Actions from educa-
tional authorities that can lead to IFD having an impact include the embedding of
IFD in schools’ syllabi and programs, included in preservice teacher training, and
providing ongoing professional development in IFD. As noted by Ghiloni (2011),
“while it is one thing to hold religiously inclusive sentiments, it is quite another to
formally develop curricula around such views” (p. 476). A study of teacher and
student training of the Islamic Religious Community in Italy by Abu-Nimer
and Smith (2016) describes some of these curricular developments. The study
identified pedagogical strategies and learning opportunities which lead to successful
IFD experiences for students. These strategies and opportunities included training on
how different religions have contributed to art, culture, and knowledge both in the
past and the present. Fields trips were also organized to places of worship, thus
making them a place of learning. This approach shifts the focus from comparing and
contrasting doctrines, history, and tradition to meaningful and human engagement.
44 Advancing Diversity Through Global Citizenship Education and. . . 701

The benefit of IFD in realizing the goals of the global consciousness perspective
of GCE is that it provides an experiential framework with which to engage with
people from different cultural backgrounds, absence of a theoretical framework
(Goren and Yemini 2017) being one of the identified issues in GCE. Experience
has two aspects, the objective and subjective (Botturi 2012; Csikszentmihalyi 2006;
Riva 2012). Using this conceptualization of experience in simple terms means that
our “environment” (objective) shapes how we “feel” (subjective) which results in
our responses to situations. Using the systems approach (pre-dialogue, dialogue,
post-dialogue) to IFD presented by Massoudi (2006) could be applied to facilitate
GCE. Consider immigration in Australia:
Pre-dialogue phase:

• Students discuss their own perspectives on immigrants.

• Learn about living in different parts of the world through the Internet, social
media, and mass media (Rizvi 2008).
• A field trip, recommended to increase the impact of IFD (Abu-Nimer and Smith
2016), could be organized to a community center for immigrants.
• The selection of questions to ask during dialogue with immigrants.

Dialogue phase:

• Formal discussion with immigrants either in small groups or as a class.

Post-dialogue phase:

• Reflective exercise looking at initial perspectives and feelings and post-dialogue

personal perspectives and feeling
• Ways to address some of the challenges immigrants face in living in Australia
• Discussion on what needs to occur for immigrants to return safely to their country
of origin

IFD creates the environment to present different perspectives. By learning and

empathetically reflecting on the viewpoints of others, we may alter our feelings
about people from different faiths and cultures, resulting in changes to how we act in
certain situations. Thus, dialogue is a vehicle to develop empathy which is one of the
central outcomes of both GCE (Schattle 2008) and IFD (Seljak 2009).
There is potential to overlap some of the drivers of globalization with IFD.
Consider the IFD framework suggested by Massoudi (2006). In developing the
parameters for pre-dialogue, it would be important to have some religious literacy
and knowledge. Gaining a deep knowledge of cultural norms from different parts of
the world, the reasons for these norms and exploring the historical drivers behind
these variations can give an empathetic insight into other faiths. But the same
knowledge can also be applied to other cultures and the reasons why people live
the way they do in other parts of the world. An initial understanding of ways of living
in different parts of the world can occur through the Internet, social media, and mass
702 M. Aslan and M. Van Ommen

media (Rizvi 2008). Ideally, though, students would be exposed to experiences of

different cultures and religions through mandated curricular opportunities. Using
these technology media and providing intercultural experience can set the basis for
the pre-dialogue phase of IFD as a way to develop empathy for the challenges and
realities of people from different cultures. Another consideration in the pre-dialogue
phase could be to consider the moral imperative. Maintaining the moral imperative,
when economics can drive global citizenship, has been identified as a challenge for
GCE (Standish 2014). If participants understand the ethical and moral considerations
of IFD before they enter into the process, then there is a greater chance of the
dialogue meeting its intended outcomes. Again, the side effect of this learning can be
a deeper knowledge of different cultures, which can facilitate GCE.

Discussion and Conclusion

The phenomenon of globalization and advances in technology and communications

would seem to have provided greater opportunities for interconnectedness and
empathy for the way people around the world live their lives. However, this has
not always been the case with friction, division, and conflict between nations and
peoples within local communities. One approach to addressing the issues arising
from globalization is GCE. However, for students to understand interconnectedness,
respect and value diversity, challenge injustice and inequities, and take action in a
way that is personally meaningful (UNICEF USA 2018) remains problematic. The
lack of experiential opportunities, problems with the concept itself and contextual
factors can be a barrier to successful implementation of GCE programs. Needless to
say, there is a collective will from stakeholders from both government and non-
government institutions to overcome the obstacle of embracing diversity in our
communities, and while there has been a substantial amount of work already done
to raise awareness and promote education around our identities, it is clear that we
need to find new ways to develop empathy and respect for diversity.
IFD could serve as a way to rethink GCE initiatives. Considering that eight out of
ten people globally still identify with a religious group (Pew Research Centre 2012),
GCE should incorporate some understanding of the religious views and resulting
lifestyle implications of other people. IFD is seen as a vehicle to facilitate cultural
diplomacy (Biljana et al. 2017). Both IFD and the global consciousness approach to
GCE are similar in intended outcomes. Dialogue, as strategy that is suggested for all
approaches to GCE, is an action that leads to experiential learning for those involved.
The systems approach to IFD could be applied to a deeper understanding of societal
and global issues such as immigration.
The potential that IFD offers to address some of the challenges in the effective
implementation of GCE needs further investigation. The development of GCE pro-
grams in schools that incorporate IFD into a single cohesive education program would
be a good starting point. However, for this to occur, there needs to be clarity around the
concept of GCE and the approach to GCE used as this will shape the intended goals
the educational institution is hoping for. Different models of IFD may need to be
developed based on the age of the students and the affiliation of the educational
44 Advancing Diversity Through Global Citizenship Education and. . . 703

institution. Government and educational institutions have a pivotal role to play here. If
they truly believe that GCE is a way to transform society to become more tolerant,
empathetic, and harmonious, then they need to devote resources and provide oppor-
tunities to make this happen. Opportunities must include experiential encounters with
people from different cultural and religious backgrounds. Our suggestion is that
providing opportunities for IFD for students is one way to possibly achieve these
outcomes so that diversity in our global communities is recognized and celebrated.

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Civic Theory and Educative Processes in
Informal Spaces: A Case Study in Three 45
Italian Realities

Mauro Giardiello

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 706
The Concept of the Public Sphere . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 707
Informal Learning, Civilization, and the Public Sphere . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 708
Educational and Civic Practices in Informal Contexts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 709
The Crisis in Public Space: “Decivilization” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 711
A Case Study in Three Italian Realities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 712
Crisis in the Civic Dimension of Public Space in Italian Adolescents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 713
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 716
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 717

Abstract
This chapter presents a reconsideration of the formation of civic practices within
public spaces, using the works of Habermas (The structural transformation of the
public sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. Polity Press,
Cambridge, 1989) and Dewey (The public and its problems. Holt, New York,
1927; Experience & education. Touchstone, New York, 1997) in relation to an
elaboration of a civic theory to explain civic behavior, in particular in new
generations. This localizes the concept of public space within a reflection on
informal educational processes, overcoming a concept that is excessively con-
fined to urban studies. More specifically, the intent is to understand if institutional
spaces, such as schools, and primary social spaces should be considered environ-
ments of socialization and civilization processes exclusively or if other relational
and civic contexts where citizenship practices are experienced should also be
included. It is a question of considering the mechanisms through which learning
processes for social skills, like trust and civic values, are determined and whether

M. Giardiello (*)
University of Roma Tre, Rome, Italy
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 705
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_62
706 M. Giardiello

they can be acquired through non-institutionalized pathways, where there

can be a generative exchange between different places and spaces, both
formal and informal.

Keywords
Adolescents · Civic dimension · Informal education · Public spaces

Introduction

A broad discussion about the privatization process of public space is ongoing. This
phenomenon has been defined as Disneyfication and implies the transformation of
places into semblances, the hyper-realities dominated by the logic of consumption,
and the construction of safety through surveillance (Sorkin 1992). More recently the
transformation of public space in common spaces has been defined as domestication
by cappuccino, based on the diffusion of new spaces like bars, restaurants, and so on,
characterized by control and the exclusion of citizens who are not consumers
(Atkinson 2003). The privatization of public space does not necessarily imply a
direct desire for profit, but it does reinforce models of spatial segregation that are
evident in the marginalization of peripheral areas in gated communities. What is
interesting to highlight is that the economic and spatial privatization process is also
configured on a social plane that assumes the characteristics of a minimal social
reality, more and more restricted into specific self-referenced affective and relational
fields that exclude diversity and heterogeneity. This all translates into an analysis
primarily of public space. Studies that focus on the relationship between space and
the process for building civic practices and the consequence that the crisis of public
space has on introjection processes in civilization are far less frequent (Giardiello
2017). For this reason it is necessary to expand the study of civic education in school
to include experiential and nonformal types of learning, not only focusing attention
on formal learning processes but also on how the civic dimension for youth is
modeled by spatial encounters.
To this purpose the conceptual field of the civic dimension is extended to a
research direction based on the idea of associating the introjection of civic-
mindedness, common rules respecting common property, and institutional spirit
with practices that develop within the informal spaces in the city or community.
In this case, the concept is a civic culture founded on the possibility to practice
spatial citizenship intended as a complex phenomenon that extends beyond the
formal definition of citizenship (Maestri and Hughes 2017, p. 629) as it involves
“the dialectis of space, citizenship and identity” (Sbicca and Todd Perdue 2014,
p. 310). It is expressed through the socio-spatial processes of recent social and
political movements that are based in opposition to the privatization and economic
homologation of public spaces but also through the various alternative forms of
youth citizenship linked to the daily activities that take place in the micro-territories
45 Civic Theory and Educative Processes in Informal Spaces: A Case Study. . . 707

where they operate and live (Harris and Wyn 2009; Baker 2015, p. 1000). In this
sense spatial citizenship is often associated with the condition in which the individ-
ual experiences a good level of social, territorial livability, emotional well-being, and
sustainability (Rowntree Foundation 2011, p. 15). These elements highlight how the
quality of the growth process of a citizen and his/her relationship with institutions
and the civil/social quality of the public space are closely correlated. The general
presumption of this chapter is that the relationship between public space and the
civic dimension (Civic dimension “can be defined as a set of competences which
have to do with knowledge, values, attitudes and behaviors and that allow citizens’
active participation in the political, social and civil spheres of a society” (Azzolini
2016).) produces citizens, but the continuous erosion of the relationship also gener-
ates limits in the development of social and civil skills in youth and an increase of
self-referencing in the modern individual. The transformation of public space into a
space dedicated to the education of civic-minded mentality raises important theoret-
ical questions about the pedagogical and civic role of spaces and places (Giardiello
2017), and more in general about the need to reformulate civic theory to a form that
acknowledges the connection between the formal level of institutions and social
mentality, and focus attention on the fact that the modus vivendi of a society is
created from the ground up, from the total of deeds and actions (Butler 1997) by
individuals in the different spaces in where social interaction, conflict and partici-
pation take place.
The chapter is organized into seven sections. The first section introduces the
concept of public sphere, while the second describes the relationship among infor-
mal learning, civilization, and the public sphere. The third section develops the
concept of educational and civic practices in informal contexts. The fourth section
highlights the crisis of public space as a process of decivilization. The fifth section
introduces hypotheses and methodology of a case study about civic practices in
informal contexts of adolescents in three Italian realities. The sixth section illustrates
the results of the case study. The last section is about the concluding remarks about
the topic of the chapter.

The Concept of the Public Sphere

Literature on civic participation demonstrates the growing crisis in democracies

caused by the reduction of critical thinking in the public sphere, which
continues to take on a more private and monopolized character based on the
culture of consumption (Atkinson 2003; Barber 2007; Bauman 1998; Furlong
2013). According to a critical perspective, the reduction of this aspect is only
apparent because it has often represented not the universal sphere but also the
place where factions and exclusionary practices are generated (Fraser 1992). Despite
its evident problematic nature, the presence of an active and aware public sphere
is considered an essential element for a democratic country. This is because theo-
retically the public sphere represents a place where based on its discursive nature
708 M. Giardiello

individuals meet freely to discuss problems and issues of general interest, peacefully
and heatedly, through a rational and democratic process. It can certainly be affirmed
that the public sphere is the arena, where, from a sociological perspective, the social
mentality that legitimizes the institutional frameworks of the state/nation, in partic-
ular the constitutional democracy, is formed. Among the most meaningful reflections
in this scope, we can certainly cite the work by Habermas Storia e critica
dell’opinione pubblica (Habermas 1989), which considers the birth of the bourgeois
public sphere as an integral part of a wider construction of the state/nation.
According to Habermas, the public sphere was born in French, English, and German
historical contexts from the eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century, with
the formation of a public of readers with significant critical skills, directed not only
toward the reading of classic works but also a rational analysis of the surrounding
reality. It “may be conceived of above all as the sphere of private people coming
together as a public” (Habermas 1989, p. 27) governed by rational communication.
Its fundamental characteristic is being governed and having a potential for emanci-
pation that can promote civic participation and cooperation (Susen 2011, p. 45).
The central theme is constituted by the preoccupation with the development of
a public sphere conceived of as the necessary condition for the constitution of
a true democracy, apparent as the product of debating the values and standards
that go beyond their function exclusively as part of a formal judicial framework
(Douglas 2000; Lo Schiavo 2010). The critical analyses that evolved in response
to the scarcely plural nature of the public sphere of Habermas should definitely
be considered (Fraser 1992; Calhoun 1992). They open up a different perspective
on the various public spheres and raise questions about which public participates
actively, which is excluded, and which is in decline.
In light of the important rethinking offered in the works of Habermas (1989) on
the transformation of the public sphere in the modern era, we cannot deny that
the public sphere is undergoing colonization by a part of the consumer market, which
in the commercialization of social relations degrades the critical potential in this
same relational space, transforming it into “a decorative appendage of a disen-
chanted world” (Susen 2011, p. 50). From the point of view of the socialization
process toward civilization, this affirms a certain “civic privatism” (Corchia 2007,
p. 142) where the citizens “are abandoned to a world of anonymously in between
systemically generated options with their preferences interconnected networks
in which they must choose between systemically generated options with their
preferences” (Habermas 1999, pp. 124–125).

Informal Learning, Civilization, and the Public Sphere

The education of homo civicus, founder and custodian of the common good, in
contrast to “the idiot of the Greeks, who lives isolated in his own private world”
(Cassano 2004, p. 21), experiences a long and dynamic process of civilization within
the modern public sphere characterized by a gradual passage from the model of
social constraint no longer centered on hetero-constraint, but rather self-constraint
45 Civic Theory and Educative Processes in Informal Spaces: A Case Study. . . 709

(Elias 1988). It is a profound informal and nonformal, non-scholastic educational

process based on an implicit, unintentional experiential dynamic, which caused
the introjection of rationality as a specific aspect of the mentality and structure of
the personalities of modern individuals. This favored the formation of a public
sphere based on the combination of “for me” with “for everyone” (Perone 2012b,
pp. 111–127) where the dimension of the universal interest also includes the interest
of the single. This means that the public sphere must be conceived of as the place
where through discussion, “an order in relations is instituted starting from the
subject” (Pagano 2012, p. 45). The theoretical basis referred to in the elaboration
of the concept of the public sphere as an educational sphere is not articulated only
along the model of civic virtue and social relations but also along the idea of informal
learning based on relational practices that materialize in meeting places and spaces.
According to this line of thought, the public sphere cannot be conceived of in an
abstract framework but must instead be traced back to a factual dimension, within
which the spoken practices that are part of the process of civilization take place. The
spatial translation of the public sphere is fundamental to civic practices, from the
moment that it can be assumed “a positive and incremental relationship between
space and the public sphere which above all links the variety and openness of the
former to the emancipatory and democratic character of the latter” (Cremaschi 2008,
p. 1). Confirmation of the mutually constitutive character of the public sphere and
public space can be traced back to a common thread that connects public space to the
education of citizenry and the creation of a common civic culture (Jacobs 1961;
Sennett 2002). In this context, it is important to bear in mind how the development
of spatial reality over the last several years in the field of social theory has resulted
in a growing interest in issues concerning the relationship between public space and
democracy. Parkinson (2012) shows that democracy in a surprising measure depends
on physical and public space, especially in a digital world, where evolution in a
democratic sense requires anchoring in space, an incorporation of social structures
and relational power within the constructed space and environment.
On the basis of these fundamental concepts, it is assumed that the public sphere
is configured as a cognitive phenomenon, based on the possibility to create discur-
sive relationships among individuals and groups in places that are spatially and
temporally contextualized. From this perspective, recent international research
has demonstrated how the public space not only promotes physical, psychological
well-being, and quality of life (Dines et al. 2006), but also determines the socializa-
tion of civic values that are considered precursors to the development of citizenry.

Educational and Civic Practices in Informal Contexts

The civic dimension not only assumes a micro character as it develops in the daily
practices within the defined temporal spaces but also recalls a prelegal (or, rather,
precontractual) conception of the formal civic contract, encoded into standards
and rules. This assumption defines a perspective where attention on the practices
enacted by the subjects in a specific space focuses interest not only on the role
710 M. Giardiello

that their cooperative action plays in reproducing civic culture but also on the
possibility of recognizing the process that reproduces specific educational experi-
ences (provided that not all experiences can be associated with educational practices)
(Dewey 1997), with the objective of generating knowledge and producing common
educational practices. This point requires critical and reflexive thought, considered
by Dewey to be fundamental in conscious cognitive processes, because the subject
proceeds with production of knowledge not through a priori forms but through
the “active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form
of knowledge” (Dewey 1933, p. 6). Continuing in this perspective, the experience
becomes the “place where the living organism develops methods of intelligence,
or the method that determines the choice of values based on co-evolutive trans-
formations of the subject and the environment” (Burza 2007, p. 24).
These considerations lead to Dewey’s concept of the public sphere, with a frame-
work that is less demanding than that of Habermas, since it is “composed simply of
those who are directly or indirectly involved in the consequences of an event, who are
interested in regulating it collectively and who take action for this purpose” (Pellizzoni
2005, p. 22). According to this meaning, the public sphere “consists of describing
actions and their consequences that derive not so much from presumed metaphysical
and ontological causes, but more from cooperative practices and trust based on a
constant process of experimentation and exploration” (Cuceu 2011, p. 104). From this
point of view, according to Pellizzoni, “it is the sharing of a problematic situation, as
opposed to political values, a framework of rights and duties, reciprocally acknowl-
edged, that constitutes the public sphere” (2005, p. 22).
It is the nonformal and experiential character of the educative process that
allows the conceptualization of the public space as a realm of educational practices.
The public space involves informal educational processes that develop through
interactive practices within a given situation because to which and through which
diverse populations form public space. From this perspective, Dewey offers
an illuminating insight into the formation of democratic institutions and the
corresponding mentality for these to be conceived of in a non-abstract manner
but instead as the product of a configuration of practices centered on constant
experimentation of reality. At this point it is important to consider a question that
has emerged within social sciences about the identification of the fundamental
environments for socialization to the civic dimension (Biesta et al. 2014; Giardiello
2017). More specifically, the problem is understanding if these are only institutional
environments and primary social relations or also include other relational and
civic contexts where the practices connected to civic culture are experienced. The
issue is to comprehend the mechanisms through which learning processes for social
skills are generated, fostering the ideas of trust and civic values, which can then
be inserted into non-institutional pathways for learning, with the presence of an
energetic exchange among different places and spaces, both formal and informal.
In this context, it should be pointed out that recent research focusing on micro
spaces (Harris and Wyn 2009) has demonstrated the presence of a different variety
of alternative ways in which youth learn through experience how to practice
citizenship.
45 Civic Theory and Educative Processes in Informal Spaces: A Case Study. . . 711

The Crisis in Public Space: “Decivilization”

Habermas’s conception of the public sphere is considered not very attentive to the
evident pluralization in modern society (Fraser 1992; Calhoun 1992). This critic
once again raises the question of which public actively participates, which is
excluded, and which is in decline. Recent international literature regarding the use
of public space has demonstrated a decline in its use, especially among adolescents
(Dee 2015). This category appears to be less able to appropriate the space, to actively
participate in the formation of public opinion, configuring themselves not as citizens
but as consumers in a privatized, mercified public space.
In light of the important rethinking offered in the works of Habermas (1989) on
the transformation of the public sphere in the modern era, we cannot deny that the
public sphere is undergoing colonization by a part of the consumer market, which
in the commercialization of social relations degrades the critical potential in this
same relational space, transforming it into “a decorative appendage of a disen-
chanted world” (Susen 2011, p. 50). In this context, privatization, according to
Barber, “is more than just an economic ideology. It acts in league with the ethos
of infantilization to embrace and reinforce narcissism, personal preference, and
puerility. It misconstrues liberty and thereby distorts how we understand civic
freedom and citizenship, often ignoring and sometimes undermining the very mean-
ing of public goods and the public will.” (Barber 2007, pp. 127–128).
It should be acknowledged that relationships among adolescents and public
space are structured similarly. That latter transforms more and more into simulated
versions of reality due to the “Disneyfication” effect (Sorkin 1992) or into places
for consumption based on the diffusion of so-called “domestication by cappuccino”
(Atkinson 2003). In this context lies the fundamental problem of the civilization
process, which can be weakened and overturned into decivilization, also where it
is normally diffused, primarily assuming (but not exclusively) two characterizations:
diffusion of the infantilist ethos (Barber 2007, pp. 3–37), which subverts the ethos
of responsibility, and withdrawal of the state, followed by the decay of public space
and citizenship. It follows that civilization of space may be subject to different
intensity levels of forms of decivilization. All of the above is the basis for a
fundamental consideration about the nature of the civilization process, which must
be conceived of as a resource that is continuously regenerated, because to perform
its necessary functions, it is not enough that it is rooted in a specific society. It must
instead be continuously recreated. In this regard, the possibility to generate or
consume the civilization process depends greatly on the quality of the existing
interconnections and practices (educational and civil) that the various subjects
who make up society implement in their own life contexts.
As it is easy to see, these considerations are aligned with the reflections developed
by Dewey (1933), who conceives of the formation of state (and also democracy)
as an experimental process and not as the product of idealistic providentialism.
In particular, in a society where the more the conditions of action and investigation
in the production of knowledge are continuously evolving, the more the state
continuously needs to reinvent itself. The result is a vision of the constructivist
712 M. Giardiello

social subject who based on their specific vocation and field of intervention
produces (or consumes) the bases of the civilization process. It should also be
acknowledged that this practice generally activates in those contexts where the
place of the civilization process holds within itself a capacity for reactivating
generative processes.

A Case Study in Three Italian Realities

The international literature has revealed a decline in the use of public space,
especially among adolescents, due to significant privatization and connected safety
policies (Dee 2015). One of the consequences of the decline is the weakening
of public space civic functions. It should also be acknowledged that the recent
international debate not only focuses on the role that public space plays among the
younger generations in the development of civil activities and instilling a social
climate characterized by free movement but also highlights how the decline in
public space is equally common in large cities and small communities (Batsleer
2008, p. 55).
Despite the important resonance that the scientific debate on the decline of
public space has assumed at an international level, in Italy the discussion has
remained in the confines of urban studies, primarily focused on the transformation
of the city. Except for a few exceptions (Forni 2002; Perone 2012a; Mazzette 2013),
public space has never been considered as a place for educational processes for
leaning about civil systems among adolescents (Giardiello 2017). This knowledge
deficit is even more evident when the study is circumscribed to the concept of public
space as a place for socialization of civilization practices among the younger
generations. For this category the spatial crisis translates into deprivation of the
opportunity to use the city (erosion of the right to the city), decreased autonomy,
increased fear, blocked exploration, participation, and increased surveillance. This
crisis generates a blockage in the transition process toward adult life and active
citizenry and a reflux into the private realm symbolized by the fortress home that
protects the person from society, an unpredictable and unsafe place, the place of
diversity.
Based on these considerations, an empirical analysis of the mechanisms that
reproduce civic practices among adolescents in three territorial contexts was carried
out in Bari, Rome, and Benevento. It was presumed that the civic dimension must be
understood as the expression of civic values, trust, and social cohesion structured
into a mental idea, interiorized by social subjects and groups, and rendered imma-
nent within the public space through socialization practices. In line with this
definition, several hypotheses were formulated on the processes that reproduce
civic practices linked to the civic view of adolescents.
The first hypothesis (Hyp. 1) focuses on the value orientations of adolescents:
reproduction of values seems mainly characterized by civic and universal values of
a restricted form of social relations, where the home is dominant, as a privileged
space, with the family as the significant realm of social relations.
45 Civic Theory and Educative Processes in Informal Spaces: A Case Study. . . 713

The second hypothesis (Hyp. 2) regards the type of assessment that adolescents
express about social spaces and institutions, both private and collective: the rela-
tionship between adolescents and public spaces is characterized by erosion in civic
practices in favor of consumption.
The third hypothesis (Hyp. 3) regards the level of social cohesion and its quality
among adolescents: the relation between adolescents and social cohesion is
expressed through social practices and close connections that generate domestic
social cohesion, self-referencing as opposed to inclusive.
Verification of these hypotheses was based on the results of a pilot qualitative-
quantitative research study carried out during the 2011–2012 academic year among
adolescents from 11 to 14 years old, in three territories in southern Central Italy.

Crisis in the Civic Dimension of Public Space in Italian Adolescents

The diffusion of a private conception of social life in adolescents and the consumer
takeover of public space that impedes its educational dimension is widely confirmed
in the study’s quantitative data. This aspect was analyzed by focusing attention on
the field of values, on the meaning connected to practices implemented in the places,
and on the quality of social relations and social cohesion.
The dominating tendency of family values to the detriment of collective values
(Hyp. 1) was analyzed through posing the question: “What are the most important
values in life?” Even though values are a complex concept dealt with in a contro-
versial body of literature, it is still possible to identify, especially in sociology,
scientific accord in the idea that values “are general criteria that concern the
desirability of action” (Sciolla 2010, p. 54) able to offer one or more basic value
structures for illuminating the direction of our individual or collective action.
From this point of view, analysis of adolescents is easier understood in light of
the study of the realm of values that guides their social practices. This is even more
relevant in the case of studying processes that generate civic mentality among
adolescents, because “it has much to do with the way in which the individual
immersed in a specific socio-cultural context thinks about the world and construct
their hierarchical values” (Di Donato 2014, p. 74). It is the affirmation of a universal
syndrome affecting values, mostly family-oriented, that determines the level of
civic-mindedness among the social practices of adolescents.
In light of these considerations, the study focused on the value structure of
adolescents through the reconstruction of the semantic space within which the values
used for analysis on the principle components were grouped. More specifically,
based on how they fall along the scale of importance, some areas of similarity
can be defined in the three territories in question (see Fig. 1).
The results demonstrate on the one hand the presence of values like family
and love falling within the maximum importance area and, on the other hand,
civic and social values falling within the “little” or “sufficient” importance area.
From this perspective, it is relatively easy to claim that the results of the research
confirm Hypothesis 1, with a structure of values primarily based on family
714 M. Giardiello

Bari
3 sufficient

2
culture
traditions

1 work
country sports
success equality
wealthy life democracy
0
fun
study
family
-1 love high
low
realization
-2
competition none
-3
-5 -4 -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 4

Rome
4
sufficient
3

success democracy
sports
1 work
wealthy life culture equality
realization fun
0
country study
low high
-1 love
traditions family
-2
competition none
-3
-5 -4 -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 4 5

Benevento
3 low

2
traditions

1
democracy fun
sports
love
culture success family
0
wealthy life
realization
study high
sufficient country
equality
-1 competizione
work

-2

none
-3
-5 -4 -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 4

Fig. 1 (a) Level of importance of values in the Bari sample. (b) Level of importance of values in
the Rome sample. (c) Level of importance of values in the Benevento sample
45 Civic Theory and Educative Processes in Informal Spaces: A Case Study. . . 715

and intimacy over social and civic values prevailing and subsequently profiling
a socialization process that develops around a domestic, self-referencing center.
These results are aligned with the IARD study on the state of Italian youth
(Buzzi et al. 2002) and the study of values in the Italian adult population, which
recorded a percentage lower than the European average for public involvement,
as well as for interpersonal trust (Janmaat 2006). In addition, this is evident in the
historical reconstruction relative to the understanding of the formation of the Italian
social mentality, demonstrating how it is composed of a family-based view of the
world (Aiello 2015).
With the intent to link value structures to concrete practices, the interviewees
were administered a qualitative scale to identify the subjective definition of places
and measure their attendance. This analysis was designed to corroborate the hypoth-
esis (Hyp. 2) according to which a process is underway where the practices of
adolescents are trending toward self-referencing spaces of consumption, to the
detriment of public spaces, with subsequent loss of the educational aspect of public
space in the formation of civic practices.
Examining Fig. 2, which reproduces the relationships of adolescents to
social places in three territories on a diagram, it is evident that there is a common
phenomenon in assigning meaning to space. In this context, space is divided into
two social spheres with two different meanings. The second and third quadrants
in the left of the diagram clearly demonstrate that places like the home, sports
centers, shops, bars, and shopping malls were defined by adolescents from all
three analyzed areas as the places where they form intense, positive, fun relation-
ships. In the first and fourth quadrant, a second trend is evident that speaks to the
crisis in the relationships between adolescents and institutions, like the municipality,
the church (described as boring or indifferent), as well as other public spaces,

3
church-S
boring
church-B school-S

2 school-R
house-S/B
church-R
intense school-B
1 town-hall-B
sport centers S/B/R town-hall-S
street-B
town-hall-R
0
house-R
shopping centers- S/R street-R
bar-R ugly square_B
shops-S/B/R
-1 bar-S square_R
street_S indifferent
funny
square-S
bar-B
shopping center-B
-2
-3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 4

Fig. 2 The meaning of places in the three territories (S, Benevento; B, Bari; R, Rome)
716 M. Giardiello

especially streets and town squares (with the exception of the adolescents in Bene-
vento, who gave a positive meaning to the town square). Comparative analysis
demonstrates a general framework in the world of adolescents where a consumerist
pseudo-integration process emerges, as opposed to a civil process, where adolescents
become part of the public sphere not as citizens but as consumers. It should also
be noted that the research data confirm the second hypothesis, according to which
a consumerist, self-referencing space prevails in the world of adolescents, to the
detriment of public space with subsequent drop in civic practices.
The research data analyzed up to this point seem to corroborate the hypothesis
of a weak process generating the civic dimension among adolescents, highlighting
a progressive crisis in civic value and an affirmation of domestic and consumer
spaces around which self-referencing practices are constructed. The research also
demonstrates the presence of a process of generative corporative practices and
offshoots that constitute a domestic social cohesion, within which adolescents
develop a mental concept based on distrust and on self-referencing solidarity
(Hyp. 3). Data analysis clearly demonstrates that public space is no longer a place
for social cohesion where different perspectives come to reciprocally learn about
one another, since the generative process that is produced is conservative or
limited to the confines of an extremely introverted dimension. These results confirm
the tendency to privatize the public sphere, highlighted by Habermas, and the
consequent crisis of its educational practices and the emergence of the decivilization
process, as illustrated in sections two and three of the article. In the three areas
examined in the study, social cohesion does not represent the basis for public life,
because it is confined within a domestic system, both fragmented and weak. Social
cohesion is the fundamental basis for the civic dimension in which “every citizen
feels part of a project that transcends one’s own individual interests” (Di Donato
2012, p. 42); however this research demonstrates a fragmented social fabric formed
of micro-territories and social relationships unable of acting within socialization
processes designed to reinforce a sense of trust and solidarity. This brings us to a
preliminary, brief consideration, based on which the adolescents in the study were
found to have scarce or lacking interiorization of social mechanisms that generate the
civic dimension, as well as a crisis in the places where informal education can
actually occur.

Conclusion

Theorization of space as an educational place is rarely considered in sociology,

despite recent research carried out within the scope of youth studies that has
indicated space as an environment for emotions and relationships (Woodman and
Wyn 2015, pp. 144–145; Giardiello 2017). Nevertheless, it should be pointed
out that the process of constructing a civic culture undoubtedly cannot be fully
defined within the relationship between the public sphere and spaces, but it is
also true that this problem assumes an important role in the field of studies on the
formation of a social and civic mentality among the younger generations. Another
45 Civic Theory and Educative Processes in Informal Spaces: A Case Study. . . 717

essay would be necessary to thoroughly analyze the socialization process toward

civic practices and critically debate the crisis in educational practices in public
spaces. What is important in this study is the idea that the educational process toward
a civic dimension is learned through educational practices within social contexts.
This is evident in an articulated explanation of the birth of the public sphere
proposed by Habermas and Dewey with an approach to public space from which
the direct implication with the civic dimension emerges clearly and therefore with
the formation of the citizen and his/her ability to exercise. Nevertheless, this process
is not generated in an abstract context, since public space is the product deriving
from the action of social actors, both in individual and aggregated terms, who
through the exercise of civic practices negotiate the processes of inclusion and
exclusion, reproducing the modus vivendi of civic cohabitation.
The nonhomogeneous nature of the process of civilization was also highlighted,
in particular in a context like Italy. It is within these contexts that an analysis
was made to demonstrate how the practices of adolescents in public spaces could
be considered as educational experiences that regenerate the civic education process
or an affirmation of a progressive process of consumerist appropriation and micro
feudalism (Di Donato 2010, p. 33). The research data reflect the limits of a
quantitative-qualitative and explorative study, which cannot produce empirical
generalizations but can eventually create a theoretical basis, outlining research
hypotheses useful for the development of subsequent research. In spite of these
limits, the research makes it possible to delineate important consideration about
the quality of the civilization process among adolescents. In general terms, the
study demonstrated a diffused mental mindset, an expression of family-based values
that create a cohesive domestic framework in spaces that are more and more
circumscribed to the home or spaces mainly dedicated to consumers. These are not
so much civic practices as a form of pseudo consumerist integration into a public
space that continues to be more asocial and emptier, placing adolescents outside
of civic participation processes.
In conclusion it is important to acknowledge the need to reconsider an
educational policy that prioritizes cognitive learning based on individual and
community-based experience, rendering public space a co-educator that intervenes
and participates together with the other entities dedicated to socialization and
the difficult process of cultivating citizenship. In this perspective, the fundamental
value of public space must go beyond, to become an educational space with the duty
to act as an experiment in the education of citizenship through practical experience
within the public space (where space being used transforms into educational space).

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 Part IV
Youth Advocacy, Citizenship, and Education
Undocumented Students and Youth
Advocacy in the USA 46
Ana K. Soltero López and R. Joseph Rodríguez

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 724
Perspectives on Citizenship and Education Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 725
Undocumented Students’ Education in the USA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 728
Research on the Activism of Undocumented Youth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 729
Legal Dimensions Toward Citizenship in California . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 731
Plyler v. Doe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 732
Leticia A. v. UC Regents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 732
Assembly Bill 540 (AB 540) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 732
California DREAM Act . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 732
Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 733
Youth Advocates and Allies for Citizenship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 734
Socially Responsible Biliteracies in Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 736
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 739
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 740

Abstract
This chapter focuses on conceptions of citizenship as they relate to undocumented
student characteristics. In particular, and with a specific focus on the Californian
context, it examines undocumented youth activism for access to higher education,
including key legal dimensions and allies of students, as well as the use of social

A. K. Soltero López (*)

Department of Literacy, Early, Bilingual, and Special Education (LEBSE), California State
University, Fresno, CA, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
R. Joseph Rodríguez
Department of Literacy, Early, Bilingual, and Special Education (LEBSE), California State
University, Fresno, Fresno, CA, USA
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 723
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_37
724 A. K. Soltero López and R. Joseph Rodríguez

biliteracies via media in English and other world languages. The body of litera-
ture on undocumented students challenges conceptions of citizenship by
highlighting the resilience of this student population through their activism and
determination to traverse the legal, social, and educational barriers and opposition
they face. After a summary of the literature in these areas, the chapter identifies
practices through which undocumented youth have enacted advocacy for them-
selves and others through civic identities and responsibilities for citizenship and
education. While much of the existing literature focuses on access and opportu-
nity, some literature on advocacy provides impact evidence of key legislation that
promote higher levels of access and equity for marginalized youth. These include
the California DREAM (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors
Act) (2011), which provides eligible youth state aid, and the Deferred Action for
Childhood Arrivals (DACA) (2012), which provides a conditional protective
order from deportation and access to work permits. Some features of advocacy
include undocumented student education, socially responsible biliteracies, and
youth empowerment for the making of citizens and the interpretation of citizen-
ship. Where pertinent, such features are elaborated upon further with contextual-
ization; for instance, activism and advocacy for access to higher education may
differ according to citizenship status, thereby creating specific challenges for
undocumented youth in civic communities.

Keywords
Activism · Advocacy · Citizenship · DACA · DREAM Act · Higher education ·
Latinx · Legal residency · Postsecondary education · Socially responsible
biliteracies · Undocumented students · Youth empowerment

Introduction

This chapter focuses on the youth activism and advocacy of undocumented students in
California. Drawing from citizenship and education studies research on undocumented
students, the goal of this chapter is to provide an overview of the characteristics of the
undocumented student population, political activism, and fight for educational access
and offer suggestions for educators and allies working with students identified as
undocumented. In the context of this chapter, undocumented students refer to youth
who were not born in the USA, but reside in the country without proper US legal
citizenship status. The chapter’s emphasis is on youth between the ages of 12 and
21 years and in pursuit of postsecondary education, or higher learning.
In 2001, the Texas Legislature passed Senate Bill 1403, a law to permit in-state
tuition and state financial aid for undocumented students, thereby making college more
affordable for many families who no longer faced international student fees. Other
states enacted similar laws with California passing Assembly Bill 540 the same year.
However, since then, a number of bills have been introduced against undocumented
46 Undocumented Students and Youth Advocacy in the USA 725

youth pursuing higher education, with the most recent example being the Arizona
Supreme Court, which denied DACA students in-state tuition in a 7–0 ruling (Romo
2018). Research has established that many undocumented students find out about their
immigration status in adolescence while attempting to get a driver’s license, find a job,
and apply for college. Asking their parents for their social security number elicits the
devastating news that causes students to experience a myriad of emotions from anger
and shame to depression and hopelessness – each of which impact their schooling
(Perez 2009, 2012, Perez and Cortes 2011; Gonzales 2016).
The terms undocumented students and undocumented youth are used inter-
changeably in this chapter to refer to school-aged people who are in the USA without
authorization, may be with or without their parents, and who face the challenges of
public education and immigration law in need of reform. Pabón López and López
(2010) note that to classify undocumented youth as “immigrants” would be incor-
rect, since under immigrants are noncitizens lawfully permitted to enter and remain
in the USA on a permanent status under US immigration law. The terms “alien” and
“illegal” are not used due to the harsh connotation of bias, dehumanization,
and pejorative treatment. Citizenship in US society calls for legitimate proof and
document-based evidence, which Chang (2018) calls “hyperdocumentation, an
excessive production of documents, texts and papers in an effort to compensate for
a feeling of unworthiness. [and] undocumented immigrant status” (p. 3). In short, the
requirement for “hyperdocumentation” for both residency and citizenship calls for
strict surveillance of both underdocumented and undocumented students through
state-sanctioned authorities. A second goal of the chapter is to present the socially
responsible biliteracies of the undocumented student population as a means to
improving their educational experiences in the K–20 pipeline. Socially responsible
biliteracies consider English and another world language, which influence identity
and power to “critique, question, and respond to issues of social injustice and
inequality to take action” and also to “emerge as ‘good citizens’ who engage in
the critical participation demanded of citizenship” (Selvester and Summers 2012,
p. 4). The chapter is organized in the following order of content and contexts
pertaining to undocumented students: (1) perspectives on citizenship and education
studies; (2) undocumented students’ education; (3) research on activism of undoc-
umented youth; (4) legal dimensions toward citizenship in California; (5) youth
advocates and allies for citizenship; (6) socially responsible biliteracies in action;
and (7) conclusion on youth activism in the pursuit of US citizenship.

Perspectives on Citizenship and Education Studies

As a result of continuous globalization, international migration, changing immigra-

tion laws, and perceptions and reception of immigrants, the concept of citizenship
continues to be reconceptualized and theorized in academic scholarship. The tradi-
tional definition of citizenship suggests lawful recognition of a person’s social and
726 A. K. Soltero López and R. Joseph Rodríguez

political membership to a nation (Bosniak 2000). However, scholars of undocu-

mented immigration problematize this conception for its failure to recognize undoc-
umented immigrants as citizens of a nation due to a lack of documentation, such as a
green card or citizenship certificate, despite full integration and contribution to
society. Menjívar’s (2006) scholarship on Guatemalan and Salvadoran undocu-
mented immigrants documented their efforts to gain residency in the USA and posits
that the complexities of immigration laws perpetuated a “legal limbo” or gray space,
which leave immigrants in a constant state of precariousness.
Similarly, Coutin’s (2000) work examined restrictive immigration policies and
suggested varying degrees of citizenship and its afforded benefits based on catego-
rizations such as US citizens, permanent residents, and undocumented immigrant.
For example, when Central American immigrants are granted temporary legality,
they can legally work and live in the USA but are unable to receive social services.
This places immigrants in a liminal legality – an ambiguous space, where they are
neither undocumented nor documented but have characteristics of both. Moreover,
when these permits expire, undocumented immigrants are once again relegated to an
undocumented status that makes them susceptible to deportation. Menjívar (2006)
argued that this position explicitly excludes them from being viewed as citizens and
affects their sense of belonging in the host society, an issue that impacts not only
adult immigrants but youth as well.
Solis’s (2008) work on undocumented youth conceptualization of citizenship
complements Menjívar (2006). Through ethnographic research in a community
organization serving Latina/os in New York City, Solis (2008) found that in sharing
each other’s understanding of citizenship, youth rationalized their definitions of
citizenship based on their positionality as immigrants in a societal-historical context.
For instance, in the study, 12-year-old Karina maintained that length of time in
country established citizenship. In her perspective, it was a minimum of 10 years.
Her 14-year-old brother, David, challenged her ideas and argued that birthplace
established citizenship. He explained to Karina that their youngest sibling who was
born in the USA is a citizen. After debating their ideas and including their family’s
immigration status, these two siblings concluded that undocumented immigrants
were citizens too. Solis’s (2008) work features the sense-making process and
countering of societal definitions by youth, thus sustaining the idea that undocu-
mented and immigrant youth who have been raised in the USA view themselves as
citizens despite their immigration status. As he debated with his sister, David
explained, “Karina, I didn’t say I was a legal citizen!” (Solis 2008, p. 10). This
clarification emphasizes that “illegal” citizen is a more accurate descriptor of him,
but that he was, nonetheless, still a citizen.
Moreover, in the context of education studies, citizenship has been viewed
through the political engagement of students (Figueroa 2017; Rogers et al. 2008).
Figueroa (2017) argues that it is crucial to examine the impact legal status has in the
schooling experiences of immigrant students in order to better understand their
outcomes. Rogers et al. (2008) chronicle the civic development of undocumented
46 Undocumented Students and Youth Advocacy in the USA 727

high school youth and their parents in Los Angeles and argued that public schools
are a fundamental site for civic engagement. Formal education, the authors
explained, sustains democracy via academic and civic preparation for the next
generation of leaders. Denying undocumented children education (see “Plyler v.
Doe” subsection) prevents them from being part of the social and political fabric of
the country Figure 1: (Fairey and Majorado 2018).
Rogers et al. (2008) found that education provided opportunities for undocu-
mented youth to learn, practice, and develop skills toward causes they cared about.
For example, the Lopez family featured in their work. Leticia, a high school student,
was a campus leader who founded a tutoring club and was actively engaged in
causes, such as youth incarceration, that impacted her peers. Her parents, Gracia and
Arturo, were active in the school community and advocated for resources that would
benefit immigrant students in particular. Undocumented students face numerous
hurdles and challenges in the pursuit of public schooling and higher education that
include transparency about their legal status and knowledge of financial aid for
postsecondary studies.

Fig. 1 We the people defend

dignity poster, 2018.
A collaboration between artist
Shepard Fairey and
photographer Arlene
Mejorado, Fig. 1 captures the
original image of Maribel
Valdez González to advance
social equality, equity, and
justice via the We The People
Campaign. (Image courtesy of
artist Shepard Fairey and
photographer Arlene
Mejorado. Used
with permission, https://
obeygiant.com/people-art-
avail-download-free/)
728 A. K. Soltero López and R. Joseph Rodríguez

Undocumented Students’ Education in the USA

Presently, it is estimated that approximately 11.3 million undocumented immigrants

reside in the USA, accounting for roughly 3.5% of the country’s population
(Krogstad et al. 2017, Pew Research Center). Of the 11.3 million, 1.8 million are
believed to be undocumented youth under the age of 18 (Krogstad et al. 2017, Pew
Research Center). It is projected that every year approximately 80,000 undocu-
mented youth reach the age of 18, of which roughly 65,000 graduate from high
school (Oliverez et al. 2006; Passel 2003; Passel and Cohn 2008). Moreover, it is
estimated that roughly 200,000–225,000 undocumented students are enrolled in
higher education (Súarez-Orozco et al. 2015). Scholars from various disciplines
have addressed the multitude of challenges faced by undocumented students, as
these challenges pertain to their educational experiences throughout the K–20
pipeline (Perez 2009, 2012; Perez and Cortes 2011; Gonzales 2016).
The youth were brought to the USA by their parents who were seeking a better
life for themselves and their children. Recent research suggests that most undocu-
mented youth entered the USA before the age of five. Given the false and widespread
assumption that illegal immigration is a Mexican issue, combined with the heavy
policing of the US-Mexico border, one limitation to existing research is that the vast
majority highlights the plight of Mexican and Central American youth (Súarez-
Orozco et al. 2015), though there is a steady growth documenting the experiences of
other race/ethnicities. The settlement patterns of undocumented immigrants in Cal-
ifornia, for example, suggest reunification with established family members and
friends from the native country. It is common for enclaves from the same country,
state, and town to live together in cities throughout California. For example, areas of
Los Angeles have a critical mass of Guatemalan, Salvadoran, and Mexican enclaves.
Due to their status and with limited access to community resources and public
services, undocumented communities live at or below poverty level, and children
and adolescents often attend under-resourced, overcrowded schools, which impact
their academic prospects and life chances (Perez 2009, 2012; Perez and Cortes 2011;
Gonzales 2016).
Perez (2009, 2012), Perez and Cortes (2011), and Gonzales’ (2016) extensive
scholarship indicates that undocumented youth are highly motivated, exemplary
students who are in college-bound courses, participate in extracurricular activities,
such as student leadership and sports, and have aspirations to pursue prestigious
careers. For the most part, the K-12 educational journey of many of these students is
smooth until they approach high school graduation. Perez (2009, 2012), Perez and
Cortes (2011), and Gonzales (2016) have documented the shared experience of when
undocumented youth find out about their immigration status. Several personal
accounts – including those recounted in the studies by Perez and Gonzales, reveal
that as youth begin preparing for the joys of rites of passage such as college
admissions and their first job, they ask their parents for their social security number
and are shocked to find out that they do not have one; they learn firsthand that they
46 Undocumented Students and Youth Advocacy in the USA 729

are undocumented. Shaken by the news, many experience shame, anger, depression,
anxiety, and hopelessness for their futures. This life-changing news negatively
impacts their academics and contributes to students’ social and emotional well-
being (Gonzales 2016; Perez 2009, 2012; Perez and Cortes 2011).
The high school experience is pivotal to the success of undocumented students. It
is crucial to ensure that undocumented students have proper academic and guidance
counseling that includes accurate and updated information about legislation that
benefits them, such as (and in California) Assembly Bill 540, the California DREAM
Act, and DACA (see “Legal Dimensions Toward Citizenship in California” section).
Having counselors, teachers, and staff that can educate students on their options can
circumvent some of the hurdles undocumented students’ experience. One of the
biggest challenges for undocumented youth is the cost of higher education (Perez
2009, 2012; Perez and Cortes 2011; Gonzales 2016). As a result, youth who decide
to continue their education post-high school, often choose to attend a community
college due to its affordability or attend 4-year universities and colleges (Teranishi
et al. 2011; U.S. Department of Education 2015). In their transition from high school
to higher education, undocumented youth are often confronted with increased
financial responsibilities that include contributing to the household, paying bills,
and paying out of pocket for their education. The financial demands cause many
students to attend school part-time or to withdraw in order to work, thus prolonging
or reducing degree to completion rates for this student population (Terriquez 2015).
Moreover, beyond the financial burden, students also find themselves feeling iso-
lated and frustrated when campus faculty and staff do not know how to cater to their
needs. For example, financial aid and registrar personnel commonly tell students
they must pay out of state tuition or reject scholarship applications based on the
students’ immigration status.
The inability to properly help and guide students through their college careers
results from ill-informed educators (Perez and Cortes 2011). Such experiences
become additional unnecessary hurdles that inhibit their college retention and
completion rates (Perez 2009, 2012; Perez and Cortes 2011; Gonzales 2016).
Despite the many obstacles they face throughout their educational journeys, undoc-
umented students within the education system typically demonstrate high levels of
determination and persistence that make them extraordinarily resilient despite the
odds stacked against them (Gámez et al. 2017). One area which illustrates the
determination of undocumented students is political and social activism.

Research on the Activism of Undocumented Youth

As a result of the additional hurdles undocumented youth encounter as they progress

through the educational pipeline, California youth have been at the forefront of
several struggles that have significantly improved their access to higher education.
In fact, the strategic mobilizing and activism of undocumented youth is credited for
730 A. K. Soltero López and R. Joseph Rodríguez

the passage of state legislation that benefited this student population (see “Legal
Dimensions Toward Citizenship in California” section). Seif’s (2004) ethnographic
research chronicled a youth community-based coalition involved with Get Smart! a
group affiliated with a Nongovernmental Organization (NGO). Seif reports the case
of one participant, David, who, despite the marginality of undocumented youth,
became an active member of Get Smart! and lobbied for the passage of California’s
Assembly Bill (AB 540). David and his high school peers mobilized their South Los
Angeles community to fight for the access to higher education for undocumented
students. Their activism caught the attention of the California Latino Legislative
Caucus, who helped them on the journey to successfully passing AB 540 in 2001,
which granted higher education in-state tuition privileges for eligible undocumented
youth in the state. This made the cost of a college education more affordable, and
thus increased access to public colleges and universities.
Despite being undocumented, the leadership skills of the Los Angeles-based
youth Seif (2004) followed represented a challenge to the perception of citizenship.
She asserts that this victory challenges two assumptions: (1) that activists are adult
citizens, and (2) that legislators only serve citizen voters. Seif (2004) traces this
activism back to the Chicano Movement of the 1960s that saw an uprising in
political activism among Latina/os who similarly fought for a better education and
societal inclusion. The legislators and staff members that worked in solidarity with
the youth of Get Smart! were part of the Chicano Civil Rights Movement of the
1960s, additional and local movements for social justice, and shared characteristics
such as working-class origin, immigrants or children of immigrants, first-generation
college students. These commonalities and their shared interest in advocacy and
leadership empowered both parties to move forward with pushing for the signing of
AB 540 and celebrating its passage into law for the immediate benefit of undocu-
mented students and families in pursuit of higher learning.
Nicholls (2013) documents the start and growth of the national DREAMer
movement and their leading role as the face of the ongoing immigration debate.
His book discusses the DREAMer movement in the context of the larger immigra-
tion rights movement which helped politicize youth across the nation and helped
train them on mobilization techniques and creating support and advocacy groups that
became powerful in national and state level efforts to push for legislation such as the
federal DREAM Act, California’s Assembly Bill 540, and the California DREAM
Act. Managing to work in solidarity, the DREAMer movement differentiated them-
selves from the immigrant rights movement by drawing attention to intersecting
issue that were unique to undocumented youth, such as sexual orientation and
generational differences.
Seif’s (2004) and Nicholls’ (2013) work demonstrates the significance and power
of the undocumented youth movement to gain access and opportunity in California
and to serve as a model for youth and communities in other states across the country.
Although many of these youth were ineligible to vote due to immigration status
and/or age, their leadership and advocacy extend conceptions of citizenship
46 Undocumented Students and Youth Advocacy in the USA 731

and civic engagement to be more humane and inclusive in the pursuit of higher
learning success.

Legal Dimensions Toward Citizenship in California

According to the US Department of Homeland Security, California is the state with

the largest immigrant population in the country (DHS 2016). In 2015, California had
10.7 million immigrant residents; of these, 4.3 million were under the age of
18 (Zong and Batalova 2017). As a result of the critical mass of immigrants in the
state, California legislators and youth activist have been at the forefront of
establishing policies that benefit undocumented students in the state. Highlighted
below are examples of Californian legal cases and legislation that have helped
advanced access to education for undocumented students and their fight towards
citizenship Figure 2: (Stanley 2017).

Fig. 2 Eduardo is a dreamer

poster, 2017. In Fig. 2, the
portrait of Eduardo, a DACA
recipient, appears as
illustrated by the artist Pablo
Stanley to increase public
awareness about his story as
well as more than twenty
others in the series titled
Dreamer Stories: Portraits of
American Dreamers. (Image
from the collection Dreamer
Stories: Portraits of American
Dreamers and courtesy of
artist Pablo Stanley. Used with
permission, https://www.
dreamerstories.com)
732 A. K. Soltero López and R. Joseph Rodríguez

Plyler v. Doe

The 1982 Plyler v. Doe is recognized as the landmark case of undocumented student
education in the USA. The Supreme Court struck down a statute that sought to deny
education funding for undocumented children in K-12 public schools. Justices argued
that excluding undocumented children from public education would maintain an
underclass of citizens that would prevent social and economic integration in society
that did not align with the 14th amendment (Lopez 2005; Madera et al. 2008).

Leticia A. v. UC Regents

In 1985, undocumented students filed a lawsuit against the University of California

and California State University systems upon learning that they were required to pay
nonresident tuition due to their immigration status. Central to the case was the
interpretation of the 1983 California Education Code section 68062(h), which states
that an alien may establish California state residency, unless the Immigration and
Nationality Act prevents them from establishing residency in the country. Since its
creation, code 68062(h) has posed problems of interpretation for college admissions.
The plaintiffs of this case had all graduated from a California high school and had
7 years of continuous residence in the state and were not permitted to demonstrate
proof of long-term residency. The Alameda County Superior Court decision was the
first major challenge to the California Education Code section 68062(h) and ruled it
unconstitutional for violating the equal protection clause of the California Constitu-
tion. The court sustained that immigration laws and student residency requirements
were distinct issues (Madera et al. 2008; Rosas 1995).

Assembly Bill 540 (AB 540)

In 2001, California passed Assembly Bill 540 (AB 540) and granted eligible students to
pay in-state tuition at higher education institutions in the state. Eligibility criteria requires
applicants to have: (1) 3 years of consecutive attendance and graduation from California
high school or its equivalent, (2) 3 years or more of full-time high school coursework,
and elementary and/or secondary school attendance, (3) fulltime attendance at an
accredited institution of higher learning in California, and (4) file affidavit with col-
lege/university stating they have or will file an application to legalize their immigration
status when eligible (Madera et al. 2008; California Assembly Bill 540 (2001)).

California DREAM Act

In 2011, the California DREAM Act was passed, which provides eligible students
with state financial aid such as University of California and State University grants,
46 Undocumented Students and Youth Advocacy in the USA 733

Cal grants, and Board of Governors fee waivers. Some colleges/universities also use
the DREAM Act application to award private scholarships. Eligible students must
(1) have attended and/or graduated from a state public or private high school for at
least three consecutive years or 3 or more years of cumulative attendance at a state
elementary or secondary school, (2) have graduated or graduating from a state high
school or completion of General Education Development (GED), High School
Equivalency Test (HiSET), or Test Assessing Secondary Completion (TASC), and
(3) file an affidavit with college/university stating that they have or will file an
application to legalize immigration status. Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals
(DACA) recipients need to file the Dream Act Application even if they have a Social
Security number (California Student Aid Commission; U.S. Congress 2011).

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)

In 2012, President Obama announced Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals

(DACA), an executive order that granted eligible undocumented youth with a
work permit and protection from deportation available for renewal every 2 years.
Similar to the state policies and legal cases described above, the force of the national
mobilization of undocumented youth resulted in the DACA announcement, benefit-
ting youth across the country. Eligibility required applicants to: (1) have proof they
arrived in the USA before the age of 16 and were younger than 31 years of age when
the program began in August 2012, (2) have 5-year consecutive residency in the
country, and (3) have enrolled in high school, GED or have high school diploma.
Applying for DACA required a lengthy application process and a fee of $465. Once
approved, recipients had to separately apply for a social security number, driver’s
licenses, and bank accounts (Gámez et al. 2017; Gonzales et al. 2014).
Echoing Menjívar’s (2006) concept of liminal legality, Gonzales et al. (2014)
argue that DACA is limited because it is not a pathway to citizenship and must be
renewed every 2 years.
Thus, DACA is a perfect example of liminal legality – youth are neither citizens
nor undocumented, but fall in an in-between gray space. DACA’s inability to provide
lawful status excludes the opportunity to apply for federal financial aid.
Through the National UnDACAmented Research Project (NURP), Gonzales
et al. (2014) collected surveys from 2,684 DACA recipients and young adults
who were eligible and were awaiting a response or chose not to apply. Their
findings on DACA recipients suggest that this executive order relieved some of
the social and economic barriers for well-resourced beneficiaries, such as finding
legal employment. On the other hand, those with less resource gained less from
DACA. The NURP survey revealed that over one fifth secured internships,
almost half opened a bank account, a third got a credit card, and over half
received a driver’s license. All of these afforded benefits improved their social
mobility, via educational and employment prospects, thus increasing college
going and completion rates.
734 A. K. Soltero López and R. Joseph Rodríguez

Although DACA assisted with the social and economic mobility of its beneficia-
ries, President Trump announced in September 2017 that the program would be
phased out, and in April 2018, he declared that resources for this program would
be redirected to build a wall at the USA-Mexico border.

Youth Advocates and Allies for Citizenship

The success of undocumented youth is contingent on advocates and allies in every

facet of their journeys to attain higher education and gain US citizenship. Undocu-
mented youth face additional barriers that can overwhelm and stifle their success.
Specifically, in the realm of education, there are practical and policy modifications
that can be made to improve the educational advancement and experiences of this
student population.
Fear and mistrust of school personnel can greatly limit opportunities for relationship-
building with teachers and counselors who have power over coursework options, student
grading and reporting, college admissions information, and scholarship and grant
funding opportunities. Figueroa’s (2017) ethnographic research uncovered that undocu-
mented students may face consequences if and when they decide to disclose their
immigration status in elementary school. She argued that children start making decisions
about the information they share early in their education, and these choices affect how
they participate and experience school. Moreover, these decisions are influenced by the
culture of schools and teacher pedagogy. Figueroa (2017) profiles Lupe and Ruth, two
fifth-grade students who were strategically selective about addressing immigration status
and citizenship during the school day. Her findings suggest that a child’s immigration
status affects what they disclose about themselves and their families in school. Thus,
Figueroa (2017) argues that the curriculum and pedagogical choices teachers make are
opportunities for conscious efforts to support children in deepening their understanding
of immigration and citizenship in the context of history and politics. For example, in the
classroom she studied, the teacher incorporated topics such as belonging, identity, and
social change in language arts and social studies lessons. Conversely, assignments,
activities, and teacher comments can also have the unintended consequence of making
students uncomfortable, such as expressing anti-immigrant views. However, student
responses of resilience and fear can also serve as learning opportunities for educators
who may not otherwise be aware or knowledgeable about the day to day struggles of
undocumented families.
Educator preparation and empathy must be present for all students to ensure their
academic success. For undocumented students in particular, it is pivotal that teachers
and counselors attend professional development opportunities to become aware of
their unique challenges and stay up to date on policies, legislations, and resources
specifically tailored for undocumented students in all grade levels to support undoc-
umented families in the pursuit of public schooling and higher learning. Gamez et al.
(2017) and Stableton and Aleixo (2015) underscore the important role of mentors for
46 Undocumented Students and Youth Advocacy in the USA 735

undocumented youth in and outside of school. Their studies highlight the ways that
mentorship helped undocumented students stay on track and what students wished
educators did to provide the additional guidance and support they need to succeed. For
example, one of their participants, Laura, an undocumented student throughout her
undergraduate and graduate studies, credited her academic success to her high school
librarian with whom she had disclosed her status and concerns. The relationship that
transpired from her sharing her story led her librarian to deeply understand what it was
like to be undocumented and resulted in the librarian doing research on the topic and
circumstances to work with, understand, and support more students like Laura. In
addition, the librarian sought scholarships and established relationships with commu-
nity organizations that helped Laura leverage her education.
Drawing on Stableton and Aleixo’s (2015) research, we provide another
example confirming that relationships and allies benefit undocumented students in
postsecondary studies, too. Once in college, finding support from professors early on
goes a long way, as was the case of Tatiana who shared:

One of the professors that we had just coming into college was our Chicano Studies
professor, – I don’t know I just love her. She’s kind of like my tia or my grandma, and
she was always so welcoming to all of us – she respects who you are and she values your
experiences. In her class, we’re able to share what it’s like to be an immigrant. Or just even
through the literature that we read, we saw so much of ourselves reflected in it because
you’re reading about all these people who came from México, or all these other countries
and they’re kind of dealing with the same things that we are – and so she’s always drawing
parallels with our lives, not necessarily like immigrants because not everybody in our class
was. I hold her (the professor) really high in esteem – she makes you want to strive to do
better’. (Stebleton and Alexio 2015, p. 267)

Suarez-Orozco’s et al. (2015) nationwide research on improving the experience of

undocumented undergraduate students provided student participants the opportunity to
offer recommendations to help 2- and 4-year public and private college and universi-
ties create “undocufriendly” campuses. The ten recommendations they offered were:

1. Listen and learn

2. Train staff
3. Endorse publicly
4. Equitable treatment
5. Empathy
6. Respect privacy
7. Safe spaces
8. Information
9. Financial aid
10. Counseling (p. 449)

The overarching theme that emerged from these ten recommendations was the
importance of recognizing and validating the presence of undocumented students
736 A. K. Soltero López and R. Joseph Rodríguez

Fig. 3 Adie is a dreamer

poster, 2017. (Image from the
collection Dreamer Stories:
Portraits of American
Dreamers and courtesy of
artist Pablo Stanley. Used with
permission, https://www.
dreamerstories.com)

and their challenges. Students suggested that faculty, staff, and administrators attend
trainings on immigration laws and policies, related rallies/protest, community and
campus student-led workshops and meetings, and attentively listening to the stories,
concerns, and recommendations of students that are open about their status. Taking
such steps can help demystify students’ experiences and help eliminate stereotypes
among school administrative leadership.
The second theme focused on resources. Students stressed the importance of
having sympathetic and well-prepared staff and mental-health counselors, increase
in available scholarships and workshops on changing immigration laws, policies,
and financial aid options that affect them, as well as creating a safe space, or center,
on campus where students can gather to support each other (Fig. 3).

Socially Responsible Biliteracies in Action

In the quest for documentation, higher education, legal status, and citizenship in
the USA, undocumented students meet numerous allies in their schools and univer-
sities of study and in the greater civic community. Nonetheless, in their quest, youth
46 Undocumented Students and Youth Advocacy in the USA 737

meet opposing forces and numerous barriers to gain access to basic services,
including education, and citizenship. Wong et al. (2018) note the dramatic rise of
both discrimination and attacks on US immigrant communities, including division
and dehumanization, during times of upheaval and war with examples from
World War I and World War II to the attacks on the World Trade Center and
the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. They argued:

The labeling of immigrants as “illegal” is a distortion and violation of their personhood and
shared humanity. The discursive processes of representation into “us” and “them” serve to
divide newer immigrants from people born in the USA and to divide working people
who have the most to gain by uniting. Through the process of “othering,” dehumanization
occurs (p. 4).

To challenge the dehumanization process and rhetoric, many undocumented youth

engaged in social and political activism to tell their goals, plights, and stories as
contributors to American society and how they challenge misrepresentation and
marginalization. Their approach can be described as the practice of “socially
responsible biliteracies” with bilingual versatility in English and an additional
world language to challenge bigotry, dehumanization, and misrepresentation in
the quest for higher education and US citizenship (Rodríguez 2017). In additional
to knowing English, youth make use of additional world languages they know to
communicate their concerns and to be heard in communities beyond their imme-
diate one. Some of the world languages they put into practice to advance their
stance and US citizenship goals include Arabic, Korean, Spanish, and Urdu,
languages relevant to the US economy and global influence (New American
Economy 2018).
As an example of socially responsible biliteracies in action, an immigrant youth
activist named Ireri Unzueta organized young people to share solidarity and to bring
public awareness about immigrants in plight and on the margin due to their citizen-
ship status and limited access to public resources. Unzueta described her rhetorical
literacies approach with a blend of ethos, logos, and pathos, and she shared one of
her strategies as follows:

We started shouting. “No papers, no fear, immigrants are marching here!” And then
alongside hundreds of people, we finally chanted loudly and proudly, “undocumented and
unafraid, undocumented and unafraid!” (Muñoz 2015, p. 1)

The rhetorical literacies of undocumented youth seeking citizenship include var-

ious media to communicate their life narratives, ranging from the graphic, literary,
and performing arts to social media and public campaigns, protest demonstrations,
and messaging platforms. Their purpose is to inform the public about their every-
day circumstances and to utilize various modes of persuasion to gain citizenship in
US society (Caminero-Santangelo 2018; Vargas 2018). The socially responsible
actions of the youth reflect efforts to sway public opinion in their favor and to
reduce the mischaracterization that appears in articles, statements, and
738 A. K. Soltero López and R. Joseph Rodríguez

photographs, which can malign them as criminal with the intent to cause greater
civil disobedience and public unrest (Jordan 2017).
The most recent example maligning immigrant youth occurred during a White
House meeting with local California officials on May 16, 2018. US President Donald
Trump stated the following about populations of undocumented immigrants: “These
aren’t people. These are animals” (McCarthy 2018). Such misleading rhetoric at the
executive level of government further dehumanizes people in the USA seeking
improved life chances and opportunities. In fact, it is a reminder of past and current
US immigrants who become scapegoats and targets of violence and deportation as
they lawfully seek citizenship and a democratic way of life via DACA and as
DREAMers.
A growing body of literary works and criticism provide new ways of understand-
ing and supporting undocumented youth and introduces perspectives not heard
often in mainstream media and reflected in the US literary canon (Delacre 2017;
Sánchez 2017; Rodríguez 2018). Contributions by artists and authors follow what
Mahiri (2017) noticed about race, ethnicity, and immigration, including citizenship
status, for “‘writing the wrongs’ of hierarchy and hypocrisy perpetuated by
how these children are socially constructed in U.S. society” (p. 2). In the pursuit
of higher education and US citizenship, Nicholls (2013) argued that DREAMer
youth were also:

“coming out” and demanding that they be recognized as human beings who belonged in the
country. They were “good” immigrants who deserved permanent residency status, but they
were also human beings who had the right to a public and political life. No longer would they
accept their fate silently. They were asserting their “right to have rights”: the right to have
public existence in a country that had banished them to the shadows. (p. 1)

Families immigrate to the USA due to the instabilities created by an international

superpower and other countries in the parts of the world that future US immigrants
currently inhabit (Mignolo 2000). Vargas (2016) described his immigrant journey
as follows:

I struggled with conflicting realities of belonging and exclusion and still do. My mother and I
have not seen each other in person for over 20 years, not from deportation, but from an
equally unyielding US immigration policy that prevented her, a single parent with limited
means, from legally joining me in California when my grandfather smuggled me over from
the Philippines at age twelve. I weathered the transition as best I could (pp.xi-xii).

Vargas’s perspectives about belonging, inclusion, and exclusion are prevalent in the
life narratives of undocumented and underdocumented youth seeking citizenship
and new conceptions of it in the USA. The challenges faced by youth are ongoing
across the country and within their own families as well as in schools and civic
communities as undocumented noncitizens.
46 Undocumented Students and Youth Advocacy in the USA 739

Conclusion

Much of the research on undocumented students focuses on students’ citizenship

status and means of gaining greater participation in US society, such as through
higher education and gainful employment (Perez 2009, 2012; Chang 2018). This is
certainly the case with research on the conceptions of citizenship for undocu-
mented students that includes various characteristics and legal dimensions, espe-
cially in the context of California. Both undocumented students and their allies
continue to challenge conceptions of citizenship and obstructionist policies
through activism, messaging, and policy changes as they face numerous barriers
across in the executive, judicial, and legislative branches of government at local,
state, and national levels. Their stories and dreams become more humanized and
vivid as they are displayed via socially responsible biliteracies and in movement-
led demonstrations and rallies held across the country. The rhetorical literacies of
undocumented students permit bilingual messaging and increase public awareness
about their plight and call for citizenship that is dignified, equitable, humane,
and just.
Although youth struggle daily in gaining their civic identities and education,
undocumented youth face uncertainty and stagnant policies that affect their social
and emotional learning and participation. The quest for citizenship becomes a
question about equity and justice in gaining legitimate proof and document-based
evidence of deserving citizenship as Nicholls (2013) argued. The research shows
the positive aspects of citizenship for undocumented youth is strongly focused on
their contributions to the greater good and to “establish a more perfect union” and
to “promote the general welfare” as written in the Preamble (1787) to the US
Constitution. The legal dimensions of gaining citizenship are called into action via
artifacts that include undocumented students’ inalienable rights and rulings that
include state law and the US Supreme Court. To further elaborate on Chang’s
(2018) “hyperdocumentation” argument, the state guarding its citizenship and
students seeking citizenship must produce documentation leading to full rights as
citizens.
A positive institutional approach to providing access to higher learning for
undocumented youth occurred through in-state tuition and also through additional
academic advising and counseling for students who are undocumented in many
states across the country. Furthermore, the emphasis on social activism and rhe-
torical biliteracies of undocumented youth for a public voice and to change public
opinion gained greater momentum in recent years in higher education settings and
state legislatures. Future research may benefit from an increased focus on how
undocumented youth are influencing definitions of citizenship, the adoption of
socially responsible biliteracies, and the manifestations of becoming a citizen in
the USA and in state of increased incarceration, obstruction, surveillance, and
xenophobia.
740 A. K. Soltero López and R. Joseph Rodríguez

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Informal Educational Infrastructure:
Citizenship Formation, Informal Education, 47
and Youth Work Practice

Ben Arnold Lohmeyer

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 744
Youth Work: Boundaries and Tensions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 745
Informal Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 747
Citizenship Formation and Democratic Participation in Youth Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 749
Informal Education in Australian Youth Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 752
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 754
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 755

Abstract
This chapter examines the literature surrounding Informal Education and Youth
Work, discussing the implications for citizenship of the “educational infrastruc-
ture” (Jeffs and Smith, Informal education: conversation, democracy and learn-
ing. Educational Heretics Press, Nottingham, 2005) within social services. The
chapter introduces the principles of Informal Education and how it has influenced
the development of Youth Work practice in Australia. As an educational infra-
structure, Informal Education is located on the “Structural” (Wong, Youth Stud.
Aust. 23: 10–16, 2004) end of the Youth Work practice spectrum. This location
has implications for the formation and participation of young people into active
citizenship within Youth Work practice. This chapter highlights tensions within
the Youth Work literature around young people’s democratic rights and partici-
pation. Furthermore, this chapter considers the potential for the principles of
Informal Education to enhance the emancipatory goals of Structural Youth

B. A. Lohmeyer (*)
Flinders University, Adelaide, SA, Australia
Tabor, College of Higher Education, Adelaide, SA, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 743
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_39
744 B. A. Lohmeyer

Work practice. The chapter concludes with a brief example of the implementation
of Informal Education in the Australian Youth Work context.

Keywords
Youth Work · Informal Education · Democracy · Dialogue · Rights · Participation

Introduction

Jeffs and Smith (2005) argue that “democratic systems require an educational
infrastructure” (44). Education is essential, they argue, for forming knowledgeable
and committed citizens who can debate issues and select suitable representatives.
However, a significant amount of learning takes place outside of formal education
settings. Furthermore, in 1950, Marshal proposed a three-part model of citizenship.
The three elements were civic, political, and social citizenship. He argued, “educa-
tion systems and social services” are the “institutions most closely connected” with
the social element of citizenship which should ensure the ability to “live the life of a
civilized being” (Marshall 1950, 11). This chapter provides an overview of the
“educational infrastructure” within Youth Work practice outside and alongside the
formal education system, that is, through Informal Education. Informal Education is
underpinned by Paulo Freire’s critique of the “banking model of education” (2005,
72) and, as will be explored in this chapter, has implications for the formation of
young people into active democratic citizens. It should be noted from the outset that
there is debate surrounding an exact definition of Informal Education. A useful
starting point for this chapter is to think of Informal Education as “the learning that
flows from the conversation and activities involved in being members of youth and
community groups and the like” (Jeffs and Smith 2005, 5).
This chapter introduces the principles of Informal Education and how it has
influenced Youth Work practice. As an educational infrastructure, Informal Educa-
tion is aligned with the “Structural” (Wong 2004) end of the Youth Work practice
spectrum. This alignment has implications for citizenship formation within Youth
Work. Youth Work continues to be a profession with flexible professional boundaries
(White et al. 1991). Historically, youth workers have leaned away from imposing
boundaries regarding practices that are, and are not, Youth Work (White et al. 1991).
Furthermore, Youth Work has been slow to professionalize, with some practitioners
and academics arguing professionalization risks the problems of regulation and
exacerbating power asymmetries between young people and youth workers (Quixley
and Doostkhah 2007).
Despite the diversity of Youth Work practice, Informal Education is a framework
that has had international influence. This framework encourages young people’s
active participation in democratic dialogue and approaches young people as full and
capable citizens (Jeffs and Smith 2005; Batsleer 2008). However, the blurry and
contextual boundaries of Youth Work also allow space for paternalistic practices
which position young people as risky, incapable, and not yet citizens (Bessant 2011).
47 Informal Educational Infrastructure: Citizenship Formation, Informal. . . 745

Furthermore, the influence of neoliberal social policy in countries like Australia

further positions young people in these deficit terms (Brennan 2009; Lohmeyer
2017b).
The implications of Informal Education in Youth Work for young people’s
participation and citizenship formation will be explored in this chapter by first
providing an overview of the boundaries and tensions within Youth Work and its
distinction from the teaching profession. Following this is an introduction of Infor-
mal Education as a practice of intentional conversation without a set curriculum with
the distinct purpose of developing critical consciousness. Subsequently, the impli-
cations of this educative practice for citizenship formation within Youth Work will
be discussed. Finally, this chapter concludes by considering the current application
of Informal Education in Youth Work in the context of the modern Australian
neoliberal social policy landscape.

Youth Work: Boundaries and Tensions

The exact boundaries of Youth Work – as a distinct professional practice – are blurry
and contested. Youth Work practice varies between international and national con-
texts. For example, Australia currently has (at least) three different Youth Work
professional associations and codes of ethics operating in six different states, with
one state holding an antiprofessionalization position. The variance within Youth
Work ethics and practice has implications for young people’s citizen formation and
democratic participation. White, Omelczuk et al. (1991) argue that the diversity in
Youth Work practice is in part because of the historical development of the work and
a disinclination to define who is and who is not involved in Youth Work. Bessant
(2011) agrees that the straightforward answer to “what is youth work?” (52) (i.e.,
those who work with young people) is not as straightforward as it seems. Not least
among the concerns with a simplistic answer to this question is the long-standing
sociological debate regarding who should be included in the socially, politically, and
biologically mediated period called “youth” (White et al. 1991; Wyn and White
1997; White and Wyn 2011; Nilan 2015). In spite of the complexity of the category
“youth,” White et al. (1991) suggest that Youth Work can be defined by firstly
identifying the target group (young people); secondly, describing the specific ways
of working with young people (content of practice); and thirdly, defining the self-
identity of practitioners (the consciousness of a specific field of practice). This
approach to defining Youth Work aligns with a definition offered by Sercombe:

Youth work is a professional relationship in which the young person is engaged as the
primary client in their social context. (Sercombe 2010, 27)

In this definition, it is possible to broadly identify the target group (young people),
the way of working (through relationship), and the identity of the practitioner (as a
professional). However, this definition is not prescriptive about the way of working
with young people. The vagueness of working through “relationships” allows space
746 B. A. Lohmeyer

for a range of practices including Informal Education. Furthermore, this definition

allows space for a range of contexts in which Informal Education and Youth Work
takes place including refugee or indigenous services, disability support, legal ser-
vices, casework, employment, training, community development, and recreation
services (Bessant 2011). Jeffs and Smith (2005) argue that this diverse range of
services makes up the broader educational infrastructure required for democracy.
In contrast to Sercombe’s definition of Youth Work, other attempts to define the
profession do not fit as well with the formula offered by White, Omelczuk, and
Underwood. Martin (2002) defines the distinction between Youth Work and other
professions that work with young people in this way:

Other professionals will build a relationship in order to effectively deliver a service. A youth
worker will offer a service in order to build a relationship. (Martin 2002, 15)

Martin makes a distinction between Youth Work and other professionals who
work with young people. However, Martin’s definition does not fit White,
Omelczuk, and Underwood’s formula. The target group (young people) in Martin’s
distinction is present in the broader context of his writing. Martin’s emphasis on
the relationality of the work leaves considerable space for variations in practice.
Finally, this definition does not prescribe a professional identity for youth workers.
However, one thing is clear in Martin’s definition, not all professionals who work
with young people are youth workers. Youth Work requires prioritization of the
relationship between the youth worker and the young person. This definition of
Youth Work makes a clear distinction between youth workers, who might utilize
principles of Informal Education, and teachers in formal educational roles. Corney
(2010) states that there are tensions between the pedagogical and ideological
approach of youth workers and teachers. Corney identifies a range of areas in
which these professions are at odds. Critically important is the notion of “primary
client” and a distinction between teaching as “formal education” with a set
curriculum and Youth Work as “informal education” without a set curriculum
(Corney 2010, 298–304).
The Fairbridge Code of Youth Work Ethics, an influential code in the Australian
context, describes this commitment to prioritizing the relationship with the young
person as a commitment to “primary client.”

Many people working in the youth field do not recognize the young person as their primary
client, but see them as one of many stakeholders. That’s okay; it just means they are not a
youth worker. (Youth Affairs Council of Western Australia 2003, 4)

This prioritization of primary client and the contrast between formal and informal
education provides some clarity around the boundaries of Youth Work. Corney
(2004) also points out that some youth workers in schools operate out of a welfare
model which focuses on making the young people fit into the mainstream education,
“rather than changing or reforming the school itself” (299). Corney (2004) is
highlighting two contrasting practice modalities in Youth Work. Wong (2004)
47 Informal Educational Infrastructure: Citizenship Formation, Informal. . . 747

describes these two distinct approaches to Youth Work as (1) Personal Youth Work
and (2) Structural Youth Work.
Wong defines Personal Youth Work as an approach that ultimately is focused on
transforming the young person. Personal Youth Work is about providing young
people with the skills and knowledge to fit into mainstream society. In contrast,
Structural Youth Work is focused on engaging with young people to transform
society. This approach is interested in supporting young people to take control and
make decisions about things that affect them (Wong 2004). The principles of
Informal Education align with the Structural Youth Work paradigm.

Informal Education

Informal Education is often contrasted with formal education. Formal education

takes place in schools, colleges, and universities and usually involves a prescribed
curriculum, a nominated teacher, and results in a formal qualification (Sapin 2013).
In traditional classrooms, the teacher provides information through a monologue and
students are required to remember this information and then repeat it back in a formal
assessment process (Batsleer 2008). Paulo Freire described this kind of education as
a “banking model of education” (2005, 72) in his groundbreaking work Pedagogy of
the Oppressed. Freire argues that in this model the learner is required to file and store
information and as such is robbed of the opportunity to “become collectors or
cataloguers” (2005, 72) of knowledge. Furthermore, he argues that this model also
sacrifices the learner’s creativity, the possibility for personal and social transforma-
tion, and ultimately their humanity.
Freire offers a “problem-posing” alternative which has come to inspire the
modern concept of Informal Education (Beck and Purcell 2010, 28). Freire (2005)
describes a process of “conscientization” (65) whereby the learner and teacher
participate in a dialogue about social structures to raise their collective level of
critical consciousness.

In problem-posing education, people develop their power to perceive critically the way they
exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world
not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation. (Freire 2005, 83)

Beck and Purcell (2010) describe Freire’s problem-posing education as a process

of “questioning answers rather than merely answering questions” (80). It is a mutual
conversation or dialogue around “generative themes” (Freire 2005, 105). Generative
themes are ideas of “immediate significance” that guide conversation because they
have a “life-giving” (Batsleer 2008, 8) quality. Both the learner and educator engage
in the conversation voluntarily because it is relevant to their lives.
This problem-posing conversation can take place in a formal education setting
(Jeffs and Smith 1997, 2005, 2011). However, it is most likely to take place
spontaneously in informal settings and without a set curriculum (Jeffs and Smith
1997, 2005, 2011). Jeffs and Smith (1997, 2005, 2011) argue that the problem-
748 B. A. Lohmeyer

posing conversation is driven by “being with others.” This conversation is not task
driven but emerges through responding to feelings, experiences, and relationships.
Informal Education can be utilized by professionals such as teachers, nurses, or
social workers but is likely to take place at the margins of their central activity
(Batsleer 2008). Batsleer (2008) argues that professional informal educators are
unlikely to have a job title that reflects this profession and instead are likely to
have a title associated with their client group or project. These titles might include
Youth or Community Worker, as well as Arts, Sports or Health Development Worker
(Sapin 2013). These kinds of roles can be designed to achieve a range of social,
physical, and emotional outcomes. However, Jeffs and Smith (2005) point out that
there is always a larger purpose to their work. The larger purpose of Informal
Education is “fostering democracy and enabling people to live a life worth living”
(Jeffs and Smith 2005, 7). Jeffs and Smith’s emphasis here reflects the underpinning
Freirean (2005) principles which conceptualize education as ideally a humanizing
and participatory process.
Informal Education has – at its center – the aims of developing participatory and
democratic educative relationships between educators and learners. Corney (2010)
argues that informal educators “work with people – not for them, let alone on them”
(301). Informal educators are “facilitators of learning” (Batsleer 2008, 5) enabling
people to become “creators not consumers of their society and their world” (12).
Informal Education is a conversational learning process that democratically engages
participants as active and capable citizens to change their world.
There is contestation regarding the term Informal Education and other similar
terms including formal education, nonformal education, and informal learning.
Sapin (2013) describes informal learning as “unintentional learning from life’s
experiences” (243). Informal learning is distinct from informal education, as infor-
mal learning happens “without being consciously organized” (Jeffs and Smith 2005,
8). Jeffs and Smith (2005) go on to add “incidental learning” and “self-education” as
parallel processes that occur spontaneously alongside informal learning (9). They
argue informal educators are interested in these processes, which are a starting point
for conversation and further exploration but are not the same thing as Informal
Education. Coombs and Ahmed (1973) define nonformal education as an “orga-
nized, systematic, educational activity” (8) that takes place outside of a formal
education system. While nonformal education occurs outside the formal education
system, it is still driven by an organized curriculum, making it distinct from the
curriculum-free informal education. However, Coombs and Ahmed’s definition of
informal education does not make a distinction between it and informal learning.
In contrast to Jeffs and Smith, Coombs and Ahmed consider informal education
as simply any learning that occurs outside of formal and nonformal education
settings. Even when these ideas are carefully defined, they can still overlap in
practice. For example, formal education could incorporate (at least at the margins)
elements of informal learning and informal education, but not Coombs and Ahmed’s
definition of nonformal education. Coombs and Ahmed’s definition of nonformal
education logically could include practices from Jeffs and Smith’s understanding of
informal learning and Informal Education, but not formal education. Informal
47 Informal Educational Infrastructure: Citizenship Formation, Informal. . . 749

Education as defined by Sapin can occur in any of these spaces but has a distinct
purpose. Likewise, informal learning can happen continually. Despite the complex-
ity here, there are three important points of distinction. The first distinguishes
between learning in a formal or informal setting. The second identifies the role of
a curriculum as the driver (or not) of learning. The third differentiates between
spontaneous or intentional learning. In general, learning occurs from Informal
Education outside of the formal system, without a set curriculum, but is intentional.
In addition to the overlapping terms in-/nonformal education/learning, there is a
range of terms used to describe essentially the same practice (Informal Education) in
different global contexts. In the UK, Informal Education can be referred to as
“community education,” “community learning,” or “popular education” (Batsleer
2008, 1). Popular education is the preferred term utilized in South America (Batsleer
2008; Beck and Purcell 2010). In other parts of Europe, this practice has been
referred to as social pedagogy or “animation” (Jeffs and Smith 2005, 6). Still in
other contexts, Informal Education is referred to as “life-long learning” (European
Commission and Council of Europe 2011; European Commission 2015).
There are likely to be nuances and minor variations in principles and practices
between these different terms. Moreover, these differences are likely to reflect local
and national contexts. Academics, policymakers, and practitioners need to be con-
scious of the variation in language and seek to understand the underpinning princi-
ples and practices. To summarize, Informal Education in this chapter refers to the
practice of engaging in democratic dialogue without a set curriculum, to develop
critical consciousness and to pursue a more just and peaceful world.

Citizenship Formation and Democratic Participation

in Youth Work

Central to Structural Youth Work and to Informal Education is a commitment to

democratic participation and valuing young people as active capable citizens. Jeffs
and Smith (2005) articulate this commitment to democracy as being built on the
foundational belief that all human beings have the right to self-govern and that, in
turn, Informal Education “fosters democracy through experiencing it” (95). Hence,
Jeffs and Smith (2005) argue that Informal Education is underpinned by explicit
values: respect for persons, the promotion of well-being, truth, democracy, fairness
and equality.
Discussion about young people’s right to democratic participation commonly
starts with the United Nation’s Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989)
(UNCRC) (Batsleer 2008; Harris 2009; White 2010; White and Wyn 2011; Fox
2013). The articles of the UNCRC enshrine particular rights for young people to
participate in civic life. Article 12 describes the young person’s right to participate in
decisions which affect them, and Article 29 defines the right to education. Harris
(2009) argues that the UNCRC was drafted and ratified after a growing interest in
youth participation in the 1970s and 1980s. She goes on to describe a shift in the
following decade from youth participation to youth citizenship, which stressed the
750 B. A. Lohmeyer

development of “civic and political knowledge and responsibilities” (302). Finally,

Harris describes a further shift in the 2000s where civic engagement became the new
focus.
The shift from youth participation to citizenship then to engagement has impli-
cations for educational practices like Youth Work. For example, Van de Walle et al.
(2011) argued that at times “participation” in Youth Work practice (e.g., young
people participating in recreational or educational activities) has represented “a
marker of cultural aptitude” (224), rather than practices that promote young people’s
control in decision-making processes. Van de Walle et al. (2011) are referring to a
divergence between two types of Youth Work in the Flemish context post-WWII.
One approach focused on promoting participation in recreational pursuits, while the
other was focused on young people’s political participation. The former, they argue,
was driven by the concerns of the middle class and a desire to prepare young people
for “entering the real world” (224). White and Wyn (2011) point out that citizenship
is regularly taught in schools as a means to prepare young people with the “skills and
understandings they will need in the future as citizens” (109). This approach tends to
focus on the civil and political element of citizenship that involves the activities of
voting and compliance with the law.
Practices that focus on educating young people for compliance and voting
processes position them as “not-yet-adult[s]” (Tait 1993; Wyn and White 1997;
Sercombe 2010; White and Wyn 2011). Fox (2013) argues that the shift from
youth participation towards youth engagement reflects the attempt to “train” (987)
young people and to ensure they have the appropriate “skills” (987) to be the right
kind of citizens. The right kind of citizen, Fox argues, embodies the behaviors and
values that “society wants” (987) and who do not challenge the status quo.
White and Wyn (2011) critique citizenship education in schools on the basis that
it overlooks the third element of Marshall’s (1950) model: social citizenship. How-
ever, Marshall also states that children are by definition not citizens. He asserts that
children have the right to education “because the aim of education during childhood
is to shape the future adult” (Marshall 1950, 25). In contrast, Hannam (2000)
describes this kind of citizenship education as being like “reading brochures in
prison.”

Unless you are about to be let out or escape, [it’s] quite frustrating and seem[s] pointless.
(Hannam 2000, quoted in White and Wyn 2011, 109).

The issue here is summed up in what White and Wyn (2011) describe as the
“futurity” of youth (105). This approach values young people as future citizens and
“ignores the important role that young people play in society – as youth” (117). In
contrast, Structural Youth Work and Informal Education explicitly approach young
people with the intention to value their current contribution (Bamber and Murphy
1999; Cooper 2012).
Alongside the UNCRC, the case for young people’s civic participation is built on
a broad understanding of citizenship. As mentioned above, Marshall’s (1950) model
describes citizenship as containing three elements: civil, political, and social. The
47 Informal Educational Infrastructure: Citizenship Formation, Informal. . . 751

civil element describes the rights of an individual (i.e., legal rights). The political
component refers to participation in political processes (i.e., voting). The social
element refers to a broad range of “social heritage” (11) in the life of social beings.
These three elements are also discernible in the description of citizenship offered by
Peterson and Brock (2017) as legal membership which endows rights and respon-
sibilities within a political state.
These broad conceptualizations of citizenship underpin Structural Youth Work
and Informal Education. However, broad definitions also raise questions about
education for, and lived experience of, citizenship. Coady (2015) argues that histor-
ically the “two most important criteria for citizenship in the modern state were being
male and being adult” (380). Particular social groups have historically been excluded
based on perceived incompetence and vulnerability. Some groups have challenged
their exclusion (i.e., women and indigenous groups). However, children are still
excluded from formal politics (Coady 2015; Smith 2015). Coady (2015) describes
narrow conceptualizations of citizenship as “identification” (378) models. She goes
on to argue for an alternative broader “participation” (378) model of citizenship.
Within an identification model, citizenship is attached to association with a particular
country. Coady argues that citizens are guaranteed protection (rights) within a
country’s legal system, but not necessarily participation. Participation, she argues,
is only offered if the citizen can fulfill certain responsibilities. Thus, young people
under the age of responsibility (typically 18 years in western countries like Australia)
are protected under the law but deemed ineligible to participate in the formation of
law (i.e., voting).
Structural Youth Work and Informal Education attempt to enable a full citizenship
experience for young people by “embod(ing) the fundamental values of democracy,
justice and equality” (Bamber and Murphy 1999, 227–28). As mentioned above, the
process of dialogue in Informal Education where teachers and students engage as
equals “fosters democracy through experiencing it” (Jeffs and Smith 2005, 95).
Furthermore, Corney (2010) describes the well documented links (Azzopardo
1998; Stacey 2001; Corney 2004) between Paulo Freire’s concept “conscientization”
(2005, 65) and what he describes as “empowering” (Corney 2010, 299) models of
Youth Work.
Despite the similarities between Structural Youth Work and Informal Educa-
tion, Batsleer (2008) points out that some youth workers have turned away from
using Informal Education as a model for practice as a result of the association
with empowerment. Empowerment as a principle for Informal Education in Youth
Work implies a disempowered a-priori state for young people (Batsleer 2008;
Lohmeyer 2017a). Batsleer (2008) argues that this reflects understandings of
empowerment and the concept “knowledge is power” (9) as something akin to
“qualifications give access to status” (9). Furthermore, she argues that in social
and health services empowerment has on occasion been reduced to simply
representing “consumer choice” (9). This focus on choice and the acquisition
of power, she argues, is a misunderstanding of the complexity of power dynamics
and a loss of the “democratic and collective moorings” (9) of Informal Education
and citizenship.
752 B. A. Lohmeyer

In contrast, Batsleer (2008), as well as Beck and Purcell (2010), defends the use
of the term empowerment in Informal Education and Youth Work practice. They
draw on the Foucauldian conception of “power-knowledge” (Foucault 1979, 2000,
2008) in which power is not something that is held but rather is a feature of
relationships. Batsleer (2008) argues that in democratic dialogue between equal
citizens “sparks fly in conversation and understandings shift and change” (9). On
this view, Informal Education is a mutual conversation between equals, through
which both parties learn from each other (Jeffs and Smith 2005; Batsleer 2008; Beck
and Purcell 2010). In the context of a mutual conversation between equals, empow-
erment makes little sense as the outcome of transferring power or knowledge from
the teacher to the student. Instead, empowerment might be conceived as a process
through which all participants become more cognizant of the operations of power-
knowledge.
A central shared principle within Informal Education and Structural Youth Work
is the valuing of young people as citizens with rights and the capacity to contribute,
in part, because they are young. This shared principle is informed by the history of
rights of the child and a broader conception of citizenship that includes civil,
political, and social rights. In this view, education is less a process of forming future
citizens and more an experience of citizenships and democratic participation. Citi-
zenship formation occurs in Youth Work through equal participation in democratic
and educative processes, rather than citizenship representing an outcome of com-
pulsory education.

Informal Education in Australian Youth Work

Informal Education has been primarily influential in Youth Work in the UK and
Nordic countries. The influence of Informal Education in Australia has been much
less. In particular, Informal Education has been prominent in both the UK and in
Nordic countries in the form of “detached” Youth Work. Detached Youth Work
broadly represents work that is conducted on the street or other locations where
youth workers meet young people where they are rather than requiring young people
to come to a youth service/center (Beck and Purcell 2010; Sapin 2013). Informal
Education also underpins the “youth club,” a drop-in style recreation-based one-
stop-shop (Kiilakoski and Kivijärvi 2015; Hart 2016). Both detached Youth Work
and the youth club have an emphasis on less formal interaction with young people
through recreational pursuits and a commitment to more radical and critical forms of
Youth Work (Beck and Purcell 2010). This view is contested. As Forkby and
Kiilakoski (2014) have argued, the youth club is a product of social policy.
Kiilakoski and Kivijärvi (2015) argue that it is important to remember that the
youth club has its origins in the welfare state. As such the youth club can be
understood as an instrument of citizenship formation (i.e., developing skills and
knowledge), but also at the same time, a means for a critical social educational
practice (Forkby and Kiilakoski 2014).
47 Informal Educational Infrastructure: Citizenship Formation, Informal. . . 753

In Australia, Youth Work is heavily influenced by the country’s colonial legacy

(Bessant 2011). As a result, Bessant (2011) argues that there has been greater
emphasis on “child saving practices” (54) and welfare models of intervention
(White et al. 1991). Youth services in the 1970s and 1980s were primarily funded
and staffed by religious organizations (Bessant 2011). Staff were mostly untrained
volunteers who were motived by religious moralities or a sense of altruism. During
the 1980s, there was a shift towards formal qualifications for youth workers and
formal funding arrangements between governments and non-government agencies
(Sercombe 2004). This shift in funding was arguably the result of the broader
transformation of government from the welfare state to the neoliberal state.
Before the modern influence of neoliberalism, in the wake of World War II,
countries like Australia began providing support to families in light of the “com-
plexity of modern life [which] exceeded the capacity of the family . . . to remedy
social problems” (Fawcett et al. 2010, 16). However, Fawcett et al. (2010) contend
that countries like Australia, UK, Canada, and New Zealand are typically classified
as “liberal welfare regime[s]” (17) as their welfare systems are designed to prefer-
ence market solutions and only intervene when the family and market breaks down.
This approach contrasts “social-democratic welfare regimes” in which welfare is
“coupled to citizen’s rights” (17). Fawcett et al. (2010) argue that Nordic countries
provide social entitlements to all citizens, rather than interventions based only on
“demonstrated need” (17). However, Fawcett et al. (2010) also argue that Australia is
“exceptional” in that it could better be described as a “radical fourth world of welfare
capitalism” (17) due to the degree of marketization of welfare services driven by the
desire to reduce costs to the taxpayer. Australia’s prioritization of market solutions to
ensure “maximum services” at “minimum cost to the taxpayer” (17) is an exemplar
of neoliberal welfare service provision.
Following the tenants of neoliberal policy, governments in Australia
(as elsewhere) have moved from being the “provider of services to a purchaser of
services” (Healy 2009, 402). In this neoliberal context, to be competitive in a
marketplace of service providers contesting for government grants (Skelcher 2000;
Roberts and Devine 2003), youth service providers increasingly promise to do more
for less (Lohmeyer 2018). For some, this leads to a situation in which efficiency is
prioritized over justice, participation, and equity (Skelcher 2000; Taylor 2000;
Lohmeyer 2018). As a result, young people are not encouraged to participate as
equals in decision-making processes as they would be in Informal Education and
Structural Youth Work. Under neoliberal social and education policy, teaching and
Youth Work become practices that produce “future economic citizen[s]” (Brennan
2009, 355). Structural Youth Work practice and Informal Education are squeezed out
in a climate of “methodological pragmatism (what works)” (Taylor 2000, 48).
Wilkins (2018) provides a detailed discursive analysis of neoliberalism, citizen-
ship, and education describing the influence of neoliberalism as a “form of govern-
ment” (4) and the resulting reorganization of welfare in Western social democratic
countries. A prime example of this reorganization of welfare and social services
through neoliberal principles in Australia is the “Youthpass” program. Piloted in
Victoria (Australia) in 2016 Youthpass is a European Informal Education strategy
754 B. A. Lohmeyer

“for recognition and validation of nonformal learning that takes place in the youth
work context” (2018). Youthpass was the keynote attraction at the Victorian Youth
Workers’ Association 2016 conference “Youth Work & Non-Formal Education:
Evidencing Outcomes for Young People” (Youth Workers’ Association 2018), and
Youthpass continues to feature as the example of Information Education in Youth
Work in Australia by the Youth Workers’ Association (2018). Underpinned by the
principles of Informal Education, Youthpass is designed around eight key compe-
tencies that support “personal fulfillment, social inclusion, active citizenship and
employment” (2018). Regarding language, competence is defined as developing
“knowledge, skills, and attitudes” (2018). By mixing the language of Informal
Education, informal learning, and nonformal learning, as well as promoting the
value of the program through assessable outcomes, Youthpass represents a mix of
Structural Youth Work, Personal Youth Work, and Informal Education. Also emerg-
ing in the mix of language is a justification of the program within the neoliberal
social policy context through its capacity to fulfill accredited education and employ-
ment outcomes.
As a result of the need to justify the program’s outcomes in terms of the neoliberal
education/employment agenda, the Youthpass citizenship education program argu-
ably fits better in Harris’ (2009) “engagement” model of citizenship, rather than the
“participation” model. The program is ultimately justified by equipping young
people with the right skills to engage with modern society, rather than being targeted
towards enabling young people’s participation and control over decision-making
processes and social life. This education infrastructure shapes young people into a
particular type of citizen. Youthpass might not be essentially neoliberal, but the
policy context places pressure on youth services to compromise on core principles in
favor of outcomes that are valued by neoliberal funding arrangements. The funding
of youth services under neoliberal social policy prioritizes economic engagement
over empowerment and participation. As described by Van de Walle et al. (2011),
Structural Youth Work, such as Informal Education, enables young people’s social
and civic emancipation “precisely because it [does] not have to focus on (economic)
outcomes” (226). In contrast, the strain on youth services to conform to neoliberal
discourses is visible in the attempt to justify Youthpass through education and
employment outcomes.

Conclusion

This chapter has provided an overview of the influences of Informal Education on

Youth Work practice and considered the implications of education systems and
social services for the promotion of citizenship and civic life. Youth Work is an
important feature of the “educational infrastructure” (Jeffs and Smith 2005, 44) that
enables young people’s participation in democracy. The principles and practices that
make Youth Work distinct from other professions that work with young people
locate it outside of the formal education system. While youth workers may work in
or alongside schools, their practices are likely to be informed by the principles of
47 Informal Educational Infrastructure: Citizenship Formation, Informal. . . 755

Informal Education. Informal Education has an explicit values orientation, and this
highlights tensions within Youth Work practice that have implications for the
citizenship formation and democratic participation of young people.
Youth Work that is informed by Informal Education is aligned with a “Structural
Youth Work” (Wong 2004) paradigm. This kind of Youth Work approaches young
people as capable and active citizens who have something valuable to contribute now
and because they are young. However, not all Youth Work is practiced this way.
Youth Work, particularly in Australia, is shaped by neoliberal social policy, by
Australia’s colonial legacy, child saving practices, and by the need to “protect”
young people who are vulnerable or at risk. These social, historical, and political
realities continue to present challenges for citizenship formation and participation in
educational and social services. Nonetheless, practices like Informal Education,
which draw on broad and participatory conceptions of citizenship, create space for
youth workers to resist exclusionary and economically driven citizenship models.
Young people can be engaged in citizenship formation as co-learners through
democratic dialogue in the pursuit of critical consciousness and a more just and
peaceful world.

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The Development of Civic Participation
Among Youth in Singapore 48
Jasmine B.-Y. Sim and Lee-Tat Chow

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 760
What Is Civic Participation? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 761
Non-political Participation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 762
Political Participation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 763
Historical Overview of Youth Participation in Singapore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 764
1950s to 1970s: Turbulent Student Activism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 764
1980s: The Ideal Citizen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 765
1990s: National Education and Community Involvement Program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 766
Differentiated Participation in National Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 769
2014 and Beyond: Character and Citizenship Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 770
Recent Times: Social Media Activism in the New Media Age . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 771
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 773
Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 774
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 774

Abstract
The development of active participation in citizens hallmarks the endeavor of
formal citizenship programs, equipping citizens with the relevant knowledge,
skills, and values to participate in their communities. Such attempts to formulate
an ideal citizenry are especially apparent in Singapore, a small city-state whose
success owes much to the role that formal citizenship education played and
continues to play as an instrument of state formation. This chapter will discuss
the development of youth participation in Singapore, specifically within the
education context, and more generally among the youth. We will trace how the
Singapore government has carefully molded what began as a politically bustling

J. B.-Y. Sim (*) · L.-T. Chow

National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 759
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_8
760 J. B.-Y. Sim and L.-T. Chow

arena of activism among youths during the pre-independence era into a perva-
sively depoliticized understanding of participation in Singapore’s young citizenry
today. We highlight how several key aspects of education in Singapore – namely,
National Education, the Community Involvement Program, Character and Citi-
zenship Education, and the Values in Action initiatives – have attended to civic
participation in reformulating the notion of an ideal citizen. Finally, we will
briefly discuss the shift in civic participation brought about by the New Media
Age in more recent times.

Keywords
Civic participation · Active participation · Youth activism · Citizenship
education · Singapore

Introduction

The phase of youth marks a definitive stage in a person’s development, a time when
young people seek a sense of purpose, exploring identities, causes, beliefs, and
commitments and connecting with like-minded others in organizations or social
groups (Erikson 1968). In this exploratory phase, youths’ political ideologies are
passionately formed and pursued – a period most ripe for the birth of activists who
strive for social change (Flanagan and Levine 2010).
However, the habit of active participation in youths does not occur as a matter of
course; more often than not, it is contingent on youths’ exposure to multiple
perspectives, as well as feeling impelled to address and take a stand on social issues
they believe in (Flanagan 2009). The exploration of multiple perspectives and
development of motivation for civic participation, in turn, requires political space
for youths to contest for change. In Singapore, which is a constitutionally democratic
society, these conditions – especially the availability of political space – may not be
present as the authorities increasingly proscribe the space for young Singaporean’s
active engagement in society, as will be discussed in this chapter (Huang 2006;
Zhang 2013). Cherian George, a former journalist with The Straits Times,
Singapore’s mainstream newspaper, and now Professor of Journalism in Hong
Kong, wrote “[w]inter is here” (George 2017, p. 58). George argued that since the
2011 general election, a chill has descended on political debate in Singapore, and
dealings by the government with the press, the Internet, academia, the arts, and civil
society have shown signs of tightening.
Since Singapore’s independence in 1965, the People’s Action Party (PAP) has
been the ruling party governing the nation. In less than three decades, Singapore was
transformed from an economically developing to an economically developed coun-
try, with its citizens enjoying one of the highest standards of living in the world (Lee
2000). This success owes much to the deployment of education as the primary
instrument for state formation. Through education, the PAP government (henceforth,
referred to as the government) has not only trained a technically adept citizenry for
48 The Development of Civic Participation Among Youth in Singapore 761

economic development but, more significantly, a citizenry that is inculcated with a

common sense of identity, committed in attitude and motivation for national devel-
opment (Gopinathan 2007; Green 1997). Indeed, the government often reminds its
citizens of the roles they need to play in order to sustain the country’s stability and
survival (Chan 1971; Gopinathan 2007; Han 2007; Hill and Lian 1995). To this end,
participation in Singapore’s context largely emphasizes the practice of consensual
politics among its citizens; “active participation” is depoliticized and reduced to
grassroots volunteerism, or alternatively, providing feedback to the authorities for
the purposes of fine-tuning pre-existing policy initiatives (George 2017; Goh 1979;
Ho 2000; Sim 2011). However, youth participation in Singapore did not start out
depoliticized in nature; the 1950s to 1970s was marked by fervent and political
student activism; it was through the governments’ subsequent efforts to reshape civic
participation that the latter took on a depoliticized nature. As Lee Kuan Yew, the first
Prime Minister of Singapore, once remarked:

The two factors in the formative influences of a young man or a young woman’s life are the
home and the school. We cannot do very much about the home, but we can do something
about the school. (Lee 1966, p. 1)

As with states around the world, education is not neutral, often designed and
utilized to direct its citizens toward particular agendas. In Singapore, the mission of
the education service is “to mould the future of the nation by moulding the people
who will determine the future of the nation” (MoE 2018, n.p.). This chapter traces
the development of youth participation in Singapore, specifically within the educa-
tion context, and more generally among the youth. We discuss several key aspects of
education that attend to participation, namely, National Education, the Community
Involvement Program, Character and Citizenship Education, and the Values in
Action initiatives. Through these discussions – by drawing on existing research –
we wish to highlight that the survivalist rhetoric which frames youth participation in
Singapore, while containing positive social and educational consequences (e.g.,
greater social cohesion in a multiracial society), does not hold the democratic
principles adequately with its depoliticized rendering of civic participation for
youths. In this chapter, we use youth participation and civic participation inter-
changeably and broadly to mean the same thing.

What Is Civic Participation?

The active participation of citizens is crucial to the sustenance of a healthy demo-

cratic society. A recurring consensus among scholars settles on the importance of an
active citizenry and the need for civic education to equip citizens with the relevant
knowledge, skills, and values to participate in their communities (Hahn 1998;
Torney-Purta et al. 2001; Parker 2003). However, with disagreements in the aca-
demic literature about what a good citizen actually is, the ways in which civic
participation is understood and what it ought to be remain a contested issue (Davies
762 J. B.-Y. Sim and L.-T. Chow

2010). To further complicate matters, the term civic participation casts a broad net
over a large range of meanings, encompassing a variety of goals, values, behaviors,
attitudes, actions, knowledges, and motivations (Brady et al. 2012; Checkoway
2010; Youniss et al. 2002). Some conceptual clarification on the subject of civic
participation is thus necessary.
Fundamentally, a conceptual schism can be traced in the debates between the ways
in conceiving civic participation as political or non-political, along with the normative
claims attributed to them. Proponents of non-political participation tend to conceive
civic participation as nurturing youths to become active citizens by serving the com-
munity, especially through volunteerism, emphasizing the need to sustain social har-
mony and loyalty to the community. On the other hand, proponents of political
participation stress the importance of a critical citizenry, actively involved in the
political processes of a democratic society, emphasizing the need to challenge the
status quo and address social injustices at a structural level. It should, however, be
noted at the outset that this distinction is never so simple nor binary in reality (Ishizawa
2015). For instance, non-political participation can lead to indirect political socializa-
tion (Youniss et al. 2002) or serve as a catalyst in eliciting skepticism and dialogue
(Pykett 2010). What we hope to accomplish with this distinction is to provide a
conceptual road map that emphasizes the main aspects of civic participation and utilize
it as a context for tracing the development of participation among youth in Singapore.

Non-political Participation

Westheimer and Kahne (2004) conceive the personally responsible citizen as one
who behaves responsibly by contributing to society through individualized rather
than collective efforts. Typical instances of participation for these citizens
include “picking up litter, giving blood, recycling, obeying laws, and staying
out of debt,” as well as participating in volunteer efforts such as charity drives for
the underprivileged (p. 241). Akin to the personally responsible citizen,
Westheimer and Kahne observe, is the participatory citizen who goes a step
further by initiating and coordinating collective- and community-based efforts.
Where personally responsible citizens participate in charity drives, participatory
citizens organize them.
Between these two types of citizens, the participatory citizen constitutes a defin-
itive goal for many citizenship youth programs and education policies. Driven by the
agenda of fostering greater connection between youths and their communities, the
production of participatory citizens is commonly identified as a remedy to an
increasingly individualized society, by “[forging] a sense of belonging among
young people to something wider than their individual selves” (Brady et al. 2012,
p. 13). Active civic participation in this sense stresses the need for youths to be
instilled with care and concern toward the community, manifesting typically through
community service. Here, active “participation” is non-political to the extent that it
operates at the level of “personal lives and local communities” while eschewing
attention toward deeper power structures (Boyte 1997).
48 The Development of Civic Participation Among Youth in Singapore 763

Non-political civic participation thus places emphasis on developing the charac-

ters of its citizens. This form of participation conceives the need for change on an
individual rather than structural level, pinning social problems to the shortcomings
in individuals’ characters (Westheimer and Kahne 2004). In this sense, social
problems – including a lack of social engagement – are reduced to deriving from
deficits in individual character. In turn, resolutions are sought through the shaping of
individual characters via the inculcation of desirable knowledges and values. Nota-
bly, this approach often operates within the norms of the community, enacting
prevailing values that are “. . .common sense, unarticulated and often
unchallenged. . .” (Buire and Staeheli 2017, p. 176; Pykett 2010).
In such cases, the prevailing norms and values of the community constitute a
dominant narrative. Knowledge is conceived to be objective, where the learning
process for youths involves an assimilation into a “correct” stream of knowledge
(Westheimer and Kahne 2004). Youths are viewed with a “deficit” mentality that
does not treat them as resources until they reflect the prevailing values of society
(Brady et al. 2012; Harris et al. 2010).

Political Participation

In theorizing about acts, Isin (2008) distinguishes between activist citizens and active
citizens; while the former “engage in writing scripts and creating the scene,” the latter
“follow scripts and participate in scenes that are already created” (p. 38). The
distinction between political and non-political participation is analogously similar:
although both are “active” in the sense of dedicating additional effort outside of one’s
routine activities toward the community, non-political participation operates within the
established framework of existing structures, while political participation aims to turn
participants’ attention toward these structures, particularly for the purposes of
unraveling and addressing structural inequities. In contrast from non-political partic-
ipation (i.e., the personally responsible citizen and the participatory citizen), political
participation typified through the justice-oriented citizen de-emphasizes the imperative
for charity and volunteerism and emphasizes instead for the need to dissect the root of
social issues and effect systemic change (Westheimer and Kahne 2004).
Critical scholars have problematized non-political participation, especially in the
form of community service, for its potential to obscure the development of important
democratic priorities, as well as failing to prepare youths for the complexities of a
world riddled with diversity and tensions (e.g., Boyte 1997; Buire and Staeheli 2017;
Kahne and Westheimer 1996; Westheimer and Kahne 2004). Overemphasis on the
non-political aspect of participation, Boyte (1997) contends, “lacks a vocabulary that
draws attention to the public world that extends beyond personal lives and local
communities” (p. 766). As a consequence, volunteers are seldom equipped to
critically reflect on the structural causes of inequities and address the real issues
beyond a symptomatic level. In effect, the rhetoric of altruism potentially serves to
“back a conservative political agenda that denies a role for government,” eschewing
the need to address structural injustices (Kahne and Westheimer 1996, p. 596).
764 J. B.-Y. Sim and L.-T. Chow

Where non-political civic participation adopts a deficit view toward its citizens –
seeking the development of character at an individual level to reenact the “correct”
values of society – proponents of political civic participation remain critical of the
overemphasis on the individual’s role at the expense of deeper structural issues. For
instance, Edwards (2007) problematizes the youth deficit approach toward youth
participation, arguing that refusal to engage youths as resources by seeking to change
their characters according to prevailing norms disenfranchises them and relegates
their inefficacy as citizens to an individual rather than structural issue. Similarly,
other scholars have contended that the overemphasis on developing individual
characters detracts from the need for collective and public mobilization to effect
change at on a structural scale (Harris et al. 2010; Mirra et al. 2013). Granted, the
social aid delivered through the development of caring and concerned citizens,
though important, constitutes a transient solution for injustices and potentially
veils the need to address the root causes of problems at the level of policy and
politics (Barber 1992; Boyte 1997; Schram et al. 2010; Westheimer and Kahne
2004).
Political participation thus stresses the need for citizens to be part of the political
process, definitive of a democratic society. This form of participation recognizes the
diversity of interests in a society and the tensions that stem from it, highlighting the
need for dialogue and negotiation. Knowledge in political participation is then
constructed rather than fixed; it recognizes that values are constructions, prone to
fallibility and revision (Appiah 2008).
In sum, while being “active” is equally advocated within non-political participa-
tion and political participation, the difference hinges on how activity is construed.
Where non-political participation focuses on cultivating an ideal citizenry by
instilling its participants with desirable (and often prevailing) values and traits,
political participation stresses the need for its participants to challenge social injus-
tices and address them structurally. In Singapore, political participation that chal-
lenges the status quo and power structures is treated by the authorities with heavy
caution, especially when viewed through the ideological construct of national
survival and vulnerability. Consequently, civic participation in Singapore finds itself
almost exclusively within the domain of non-political participation, promoted
through numerous initiatives and citizenship education programs, and serving as a
catalyst to bolster national and social stability. We will here proceed to trace the
journey that youth civic participation in Singapore takes in its transformation from a
political to non-political form of participation.

Historical Overview of Youth Participation in Singapore

1950s to 1970s: Turbulent Student Activism

Huang (2006) noted that political activism was apparent among the youth in
Singapore in the pre-independence era. With the end of World War II, and the
beginning of the decolonization process, the 1950s saw students taking keen interest
48 The Development of Civic Participation Among Youth in Singapore 765

in political matters. Specifically, there were two major student protests in 1954, first
by Chinese-educated youths, followed by English-educated youths, against the
colonial government. Both groups approached a young lawyer for legal advice –
this lawyer was Lee Kuan Yew, who subsequently went on to form his own political
party with supporters. Lee and his People’s Action Party (PAP) grew in power,
forming self-government in 1959.
From self-government to early independence, a new wave of political activism
was set off among Singaporean youth. Much of this revolved around educational
changes instituted by the ruling party’s government, most particularly the phasing
out of Chinese medium schools, as well as lack of support for newly established
Nanyang University. The latter was in part due to problematic academic standards;
more importantly, the newly established university was perceived to be a seedbed for
communism (National Library Board 2018). As Huang (2006) noted: “Students
from different institutions often banded together to launch manifestos, classroom
boycotts, hunger strikes and street marches so as to protest against government raids,
arrests, expulsions, and dissolution of student unions and publications” (p. 404).
In 1974, student leaders in the University of Singapore Student Union (USSU),
Tan Wah Piow and Juliet Chin, brought campus activism to new levels, with students
campaigning against various social causes. Tan was arrested while Chin was
deported along with four others. This prompted widespread protests and agitation
by students from various tertiary institutions. The official narrative attributes these
activities to Communist motivations. Immediately following the student protests, the
government amended the constitutions of all student organizations at the universi-
ties. Among other things, the amendments curtailed the scope of activities of these
bodies. Specifically, The University of Singapore (Amendment) Act, passed by
Parliament on 20 November 1975, ended the autonomous status of USSU; its
finances were reallocated under the university administration, and the constitution
of any student organization was subject to the approval of and revision by the
administration. Most importantly, the structure of USSU was modified to decentral-
ize student leadership, compartmentalize student power, and limit political partici-
pation (Liao 2010). Youth activism since that time has not been politically oriented,
causing one historian to remark that 1975 signaled “the end of student activism”
(Turnbull 1989, p. 309). However, there continued to be intermittent political
activity involving some youths, such as the Marxist Conspiracy of 1987, where
16 people (including a few students) of a Christian social group were arrested for
being part of an alleged secret Communist network (Huang 2006).

1980s: The Ideal Citizen

Rapid industrialization in the 1970s and 1980s raised concerns among the govern-
ment that the adoption of science and technology and the increasing use of English
were causing young Singaporeans to become too “westernized.” The perceived
threat came in the form of “Western” individualism that was thought to deculturize
and destabilize society, thereby jeopardizing social cohesion and national progress
766 J. B.-Y. Sim and L.-T. Chow

(Hill and Lian 1995). This perceived threat urged the government to refocus its
notion of the ideal citizen, presented through two key education reports in 1979, the
Goh Report and the Ong Report. We quote the former at length:

What kind of man and woman does a child grow up to be after 10-12 years of schooling? Is
he a worthy citizen, guided by decent moral precepts?. . .[The] litmus test of a good
education is whether it nurtures citizens who can live, work, contend and co-operate in a
civilised way. Is he loyal and patriotic? Is he, when the need arises, a good soldier, ready to
defend his country, and so protect his wife and children, and his fellow citizens? Is he filial,
respectful to elders, law abiding, humane, and responsible? Does he take care of his wife and
children, and parents? Is he a good neighbour and a trustworthy friend? Is he tolerant of
Singaporeans of different races and religions? Is he clean, neat, punctual, and well-
mannered? (Goh 1979, pp. iv–v)

Citizenship education programs – Being and Becoming, Good Citizen, and the
short-lived Religious Education and Confucian Ethics – were consequently intro-
duced. These programs emphasized the acquisition of moral values, especially
“Asian values,” as a “necessary ballast against the inroads of undesirable Western
influence” (Singapore Parliamentary Debates, 22 February 1977, col. 369, 370,
cited in Yeow 2011, pp. 390–391; see also, Teik 1999). Values such as communi-
tarianism, hardwork, thrift, and self-sacrifice were heavily emphasized. Conceived
this way, these values provided the groundwork to prescribe a specific understanding
of civic participation leading into the 1990s. It perceived a lack on the youths’ part –
in morals and character – and sought a resolution by compensating them with the
“correct” stream of knowledge and values.

1990s: National Education and Community Involvement Program

From the 1990s onward, youth activism tended toward government-sanctioned

activities, retaining a depoliticized texture; in this sense, civic participation encour-
aged by the state focused heavily on servicing the prevailing structures in the
community while simultaneously diminishing the importance for political dissent
and democratic opposition among the citizenry. Tarulevicz (2010) attributed this to
the twin strategies by the ruling party – one being the encouragement of young
citizens to be consumers of Singapore’s growing globalized charms and the other
being the effective policing of youth behavior, such that the young are ensured not to
challenge the existing power and political base. He wrote:

Encouraged and disciplined by the People’s Action Party (PAP) to behave, to conform, and
to consume, the youth of the nation ultimately confirm the PAP’s role in guiding the nation
into the future. (p. 24)

Numerous scholars have attested to the official narrative in Singapore that

was constructed around the nation’s fragility and the need for a strong govern-
ment to maintain stability and security (Rodan 2006; Tarulevicz 2010; Chua
48 The Development of Civic Participation Among Youth in Singapore 767

2010). The central ideas in this narrative feature strongly in Singapore’s

National Education initiative (Sim 2011). National Education (NE) sought to
educate a generation of youths to be cognizant of “the Singapore Story,” a
state-endorsed version of Singapore’s history. Its scope covered Singapore’s
global, economic, social, and political position vis-a-vis the world, presented as
“understanding Singapore’s unique challenges, constraints and vulnerabilities,
which makes Singapore different from other countries” (MOE 2012, n.p., cited
in Sim 2013, p. 71).
While previously the government had adopted strategies to “mould the young”
and “transmit values” through individual subjects or programs, the introduction of
NE in 1997 signaled the advent of a more structured and comprehensive approach to
infuse both the formal and informal school curriculum with appropriate citizenship
attitudes, skills, and values in schools (Weninger and Kho 2014). NE approached
citizenship education with a youth deficit model; the impetus was young
Singaporeans’ lack of knowledge and apparent disinterest in Singapore’s recent
history and nation-building issues, suggesting that young people took peace and
prosperity for granted (Sim and Print 2005). Then Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hsien
Loong argued that an understanding of historical knowledge was essential to commit
young people to such ideals as meritocracy, multiracialism, and the Singaporean way
of life (Lee 1997).
With an agenda of securing national cohesion and economic development, NE
focused on imbuing Singaporean youths with, as Lee (1997) put it, “the instinct for
survival” (p. 3), reproducing a survivalist and nationalist discourse by instilling in
the young “the core values of our [Singapore’s] way of life” (p. 6). Six NE messages
framed how young Singaporeans should view the nature of citizenship responsibil-
ities in Singapore:

1. Singapore is our homeland; this is where we belong.

(We treasure our heritage and take pride in shaping our own unique way of life.)
2. We must preserve racial and religious harmony.
(We value our diversity and are determined to stay a united people.)
3. We must uphold meritocracy and incorruptibility.
(We provide opportunities for all, according to their ability and effort.)
4. No one owes Singapore a living.
(We find our own way to survive and prosper, turning challenge into opportunity.)
5. We must ourselves defend Singapore.
(We are proud to defend Singapore ourselves; no one else is responsible for our
security and well-being.)
6. We have confidence in our future.
(United, determined, and well-prepared, we have what it takes to build a bright
future for ourselves and to progress together as one nation.)
(MOE 2012, n.p., cited in Sim 2013, p. 71)

Integral to NE was youth participation through the Community Involvement

Program (CIP). Launched in 1997, the CIP involved a mandatory program for all
768 J. B.-Y. Sim and L.-T. Chow

students from primary school to preuniversity, making it compulsory for students

to fulfill a minimum of 6 h of community service as part of their graduation
requirements. The type of volunteer work varied according to age group. Primary
school pupils were engaged in activities such as peer group tutoring, tending to the
eco-garden, maintaining school facilities, and making handicraft to raise funds.
Secondary school students helped out in public libraries, welfare homes, or self-
help groups, as well as teaching senior citizens computer skills or adopting a
community project such as maintaining a section of a beach or park. Older
students in preuniversity (Preuniversity education comprises 2 years of junior
college or 3 years in a centralized institute course which prepares students for
the Singapore-Cambridge General Certificate of Education Advanced Level exam-
inations.) may assume leadership roles in youth groups or camps for younger
students or help out at grassroots events (National Library Board 2018). The intent
was that through active participation and involvement in community service,
young people would become “good citizens,” developing a strong social con-
science, a sense of civic duty, belonging, and commitment to the nation
(Koh 2006).
Noteworthy was the absence to develop students democratically, that is, to
be skillful and effective in fulfilling the National Pledge of Allegiance, to
“build a democratic society, based on justice and equality” (National Library
Board 2014). With NE, active participation emphasized distinctly personal and
social dimensions through volunteerism, echoing Isin’s (2008) conception of
the “active citizen” who reenacts the pre-existing status quo, as opposed to the
“activist citizen” who engages in reshaping existing structures (p. 38). Congru-
ent with Boyte’s (1997) contention with volunteerism, the themes of helping
“personal lives” and contributing to the “local communities” featured heavily in
NE in Singapore. While these are desirable traits, they are not inherently
democratic (Westheimer 2015). In fact, as Westheimer argues, volunteerism
and kindness have been used to avoid thinking about politics and policy
altogether. Under these conditions, which could be applied to Singapore, the
political development crucial for a critical and democratically active citizenry is
avoided, inadvertently risking the promotion of mere civility or docility rather
than democracy (Boyte 1997; Kahne and Westheimer 1996; Westheimer and
Kahne 2004).
Zhang (2013) notes that participation for Singaporean youths was actively
shaped by the government. Where the older generation of activists who partici-
pated in oppositional politics were portrayed by the authorities as “being radical,
antagonist, and unsuccessful,” young activists were “expected to be different”
(p. 256). Young activists were continuously circumscribed to maintain the “spirit
of promoting social change,” while “the practicalities of being oppositional [were]
neutralized” (p. 256). In this regard, Koh (2006) criticizes that the “dominant
ideology” transmitted by NE, which mutes opposition, “may produce parochial
citizens who reproduce current government policy and ideology,” instead of a
critical citizenry capable of making informed judgments on Singapore’s long-term
issues (p. 367).
48 The Development of Civic Participation Among Youth in Singapore 769

Differentiated Participation in National Education

Weninger and Kho (2014) saw the influence of NE as changing the meaning of civic
participation itself:

. . . NE is a continuation of a disciplinary strategy whose aim is to ‘nurture’ responsible

citizens via regimented participation in socially charitable and morally upright behaviour.
But engagement itself needs to be understood as a regulatory mechanism deployed by the
state to control political participation. In other words, the new political rationality of
consensus that has supplanted a purely economic pragmatism has necessitated the regulation
of the range of legitimate activities that make up participatory politics. (p. 621)

Weninger’s and Kho’s (2014) contention on the state’s “regulation” of participation

finds resonance in Singapore’s centralized student tracking and the dissemination of
differentiated citizenship curricula to youths. Justified by meritocratic principles,
students are sorted based on their academic performances into various tracks at the
secondary level; these include the elite Integrated Programme (Students who are
academically strong may opt for the Integrated Programme which exempts them
from the prerequisites of the GCE “O” Levels (ordinarily required for entry into
preuniversity); instead, students in the Integrated Programme undergo a 6-year track
that leads them directly to the GCE “A” Level examinations. Curricula in the
Integrated Programme are often more project-oriented and student-centric; students
here are also not required to follow the state-mandated curriculum.) track, the main-
stream academic track, and the vocational track. Each track is in turn lined with
different citizenship curricula that prepare students for different citizenship roles
(Ho et al. 2011; Ho 2014). Accordingly, while the minority of students in the elite
track (10–15% of the cohort) are envisioned as “cosmopolitan leaders,” students
within the mainstream academic track (70%) are “globally oriented but locally rooted
midlevel executive and workers” and students in the vocational track (13–15%) “local
‘heartlander’ followers” (Ho 2014, p. 31; see also Han 2000, pp. 65–66).
Students in each track subsequently undergo different and hierarchically framed
citizenship programs. Only students in the Integrated Programme are exempted from
adhering to the mandated national curricula and, as such, “are taught to critique
government policies, analyse societal problems, and conduct research into fairly
controversial topics” through programs autonomously crafted by their schools (Han
2000, p. 65). In contrast, students in the academic and vocational tracks are required
to complete the national social studies curricula, culminating in a high-stake exam-
ination for those in the academic track. Adhering to the mandated curriculum, the
civic exposure afforded to students in the latter tracks take a qualitatively different
path, where “democratic principles are not explicitly incorporated in the curriculum
or the textbooks” and bear a heavy inclination toward “issues such as social cohesion
and economic development” (Ho et al. 2011, p. 217). Particularly noteworthy is the
emphasis which “focuses exclusively on Singapore and promotes a set of relatively
conservative values (e.g., loyalty and compliance)” among students in the vocational
track (Ho 2014, p. 32).
770 J. B.-Y. Sim and L.-T. Chow

A study conducted by Ho et al. (2011) found that the majority of students

remained unaware of their roles as democratic agents – knowledge of political rights
and democratic processes – instead preferring a strong government and cohesion for
political and economic stability. Students in the vocational track were further
removed from the democratic equation when they, under the hierarchically differ-
entiated educational structure, demonstrated a lack of interest and confidence to
affect change in society owing to their (perceived) diminished intellect and, along
with it, their “right” to participate (pp. 222–223; see also, Alvar-Martin et al. 2012).
This self-perception echoes Edwards’ (2007) argument that the apparent lack of civic
interest among youths stems from disenfranchisement at a systemic, rather than
individual level.
Students in the elite minority subsequently comprise the remaining political life-
force of Singapore’s society. Yet, within a highly monitored political environment,
education in the elite track does not guarantee a sufficient understanding of demo-
cratic priorities. Interviews with elite students found that while they demonstrated
better mastery in civic knowledge compared to the majority of students, were more
empowered by the system, and displayed an active desire to participate in the
community, they nonetheless avoided the political in their conceptions of civic
participation and eschewed the importance of activities which challenge existing
structures such as lobbying or non-violent protests (Sim 2012). Active civic partic-
ipation in Singapore thus revolves around the domain of the participatory citizen,
ultimately functioning within the logic of preestablished power structures without
necessarily addressing the deeper issues at play. Han (2000) wrote:

. . .the notion of active citizenship, as used in Singapore, is among the more passive among
the various uses of the term, particularly with respect to the degree to which the citizen is
encouraged to participate in the political process at a national level. (p. 70)

It is noteworthy that while this quote was taken from Han’s article published more
than 15 years ago, it retains its relevance in present times. This “more passive”
notion of citizenship participation continues to persist in Singapore today, charac-
terized by involvement in social movements which largely protect the status quo,
rather than actively seeking to challenge it.

2014 and Beyond: Character and Citizenship Education

More recently in 2014, Character and Citizenship Education (CCE) was

implemented by the Ministry of Education. Unlike NE which was nation-centric,
CCE is comparatively more student-centric and values-driven, focusing on devel-
oping students holistically in five core values – Respect, Responsibility, Resilience,
Integrity, and Care and Harmony (Ministry of Education 2014). The practical aspect
of CCE is applied through Values in Action (VIA), a reframing of the former
Community Involvement Program (CIP) to give greater focus on acquiring values.
Like CIP, the kind of participation encouraged is volunteeristic in community
48 The Development of Civic Participation Among Youth in Singapore 771

service, with the emphasis on putting values into practice. Students are directed to
reflect on their community service experiences, the values they put into practice, and
how they can continue to contribute meaningfully. Such an approach is driven by the
objective to develop students to be socially responsible and foster student ownership
over how they contribute to the community.
It is noteworthy that a shift has taken place in CCE where the value of the
individual has been afforded greater attention. For instance, principles such as
“self-worth” and “the intrinsic worth of all people,” recognizing that “he [the citizen]
has a duty to himself,” and demonstrating “moral courage to stand up for what is
right,” are articulated when defining the core values. The adoption of multiple
perspectives on issues and the civil sensibility to “graciously agree to disagree”
have been encouraged (Ministry of Education, Pre-University CCE Syllabus, 2014,
p. 18). However, despite these changes, political participation continues to remain
muted, with participation still retaining a depoliticized texture. Here, the “active”
citizen is limited within the context of community work, as one who “demonstrates a
sense of responsibility towards the community,” “is civic minded,” and “contributes
through community- and nation-building activities” (ibid, p. 7).
However, given that CCE is still in its early years of implementation, there will be
several revisions to update the curriculum. One important aspect for consideration and
revision within the curriculum remains the notion of participation, particularly given
that the local landscape has evolved dramatically in recent years, with greater social
class differences and the emergence of new lifestyles, reflecting greater affluence and
individualizing tendencies. Youths today are better educated, more widely traveled,
and technologically savvy: they harbor diverse needs and aspirations, with many
wanting more control in personal spheres and more say in the decision-making
processes in the collective arena (Loh 2013; Sim and Print 2009; Varma 2015). A
healthy and sustainable society requires youths who are passionately invested in its
future, limiting the young’s opportunities and abilities to speak out and collectively
wrestle with issues which shape the future risk of their disenfranchisement or, worst,
their departure. In order to secure Singapore’s future and survival, it is thus, arguably,
imperative to engage Singapore’s youth more politically or risk some of these young,
skilled, and mobile Singaporeans emigrating overseas (Teng 2014).

Recent Times: Social Media Activism in the New Media Age

With the launch of a high-speed broadband network by late 1998, digital technology
has made steady inroads into Singapore. By 2006, for example, about 71% of the
population was already using the Internet at home, and by 2010, 84% had at least one
computer at home (Infocomm Media Development Authority 2017). Youths grow-
ing up in the era of digital technology are more media-savvy and sophisticated when
compared with youths from the earlier generations. In a number of countries, the
young have taken up the spaces afforded by social media to carry out activism
projects, most particularly of a political nature (Tufekci and Wilson 2012;
Valenzuela et al. 2012).
772 J. B.-Y. Sim and L.-T. Chow

In Singapore, young people participate in online activities such as blogging,

putting up posts on Facebook and Twitter, as well as looking for information on
political sites such as The Online Citizen. In a paper examining activism trends in
Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia, Weiss (2014) wrote, “The availability of new
media has thus far reshaped activism itself more than Singapore’s political culture or
policy outcomes” (p. 98). She contended that the Internet offers space for critical
public debate, thus supplementing the constrained spaces in print media in the form
of letters to the editor, as well as the “semi-free” physical space of the Speakers’
Corner at Hong Lim Park. For Weiss, the very act of making a commentary online on
an opposition party, for example, is already activism:

Simply presenting otherwise-suppressed information online represents more transgressive

an act in Singapore than in either Malaysia or Indonesia. Reporting and activism merge. . ..
(p. 96)

Using Weiss’ relatively loose standard as a yardstick for youth activism in

Singapore, it can be argued that young people here do engage in activism. However,
this participation is also more likely to focus on social activism and advocacy, such
as LGBT causes or environmental issues, rather than political issues that “directly
challenge the ruling power” (Zhang 2013, p.267; see also, Weiss 2014). Few
politically oriented activists have come to the public’s notice, but one who did was
24-year-old Nicole Seah, who contested in the 2011 Singapore elections as a
candidate for the opposition National Solidarity Party (NSP). Seah was popular
with the public as a “straight-talking young woman who has impressed Singaporeans
through her dealings with the media. . . and comparative substance” (Russell 2011).
However, Seah ultimately failed to win a seat and has since maintained a low profile,
giving up all connections with politics. The bright but all-too-brief presence that
Seah impressed upon Singapore’s political horizon highlights the fragile state of
political contestation among youths in the country; political participation aimed at
fruitful structural change requires sustained effort and, for this reason, needs to be
habitually developed from a young age.
Two other instances involving young people on social media are worth noting. In
November 2014, a 33-year-old blogger, Roy Ngerng, was found guilty of defaming
Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong when he published an article on his blog that
questioned the management of the Central Provident Fund (CPF). Ngerng had to pay
$150,000 in damages to PM Lee.
In 2015, several days after former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew had passed away, a
16-year-old blogger, Amos Yee, uploaded an 8 min video entitled “Lee Kuan Yew is
dead.” In the video, Yee denounced Lee as a negative influence for Singapore and also
compared Lee and Jesus Christ in what was considered to be an offensive manner. Many
Singaporeans were shocked by the video and several filed police reports. Yee was
arrested, tried, jailed, and later also sent for psychiatric counseling. While some political
commentators have labeled Yee as “just an attention-seeking teenager” (Tan 2016,
p. 246), it cannot be denied that Yee’s loud and unrestrained production jolted the public
consciousness to reflect, even a little, on the hegemonic nature of Singapore’s politics.
48 The Development of Civic Participation Among Youth in Singapore 773

Both these cases received a fair share of attention within Singapore and also
abroad. There was much concern over the curtailment of freedom of expression and
also over the treatment of the two youths in general (Tan 2016). The heavy hand
dealt – by society and the authorities – to Ngerng and Yee sets a stern tone for
independent youth political participation in Singapore, particularly when the latter
seeks to directly challenge political power in a confrontational manner perceived to
threaten the country’s stability.

Conclusion

We began by thematically tracing the distinction between non-political and political

participation to contextualize the development of youth civic participation in Singa-
pore. We visited the hotbed of youth activism that defined the pre-independence era
in Singapore, where youths politically agitated against the colonial powers. This
political fervor continued into the post-independence years, as university students
actively stood up against perceived social injustices. However, the grip on activist
action subsequently tightened, accompanied by the articulation of the ideal citizen at
a curricular level which sought to inculcate desirable character and morals in youths.
By the end of the 1980s, youth activism had simmered down.
In the 1990s, the government initiated NE and CIP formally focused on devel-
oping good citizenship attitudes, skills, values, and practices in the young. During
this time, youth activity was depoliticized, reallocated, and promoted non-politically
as community service through government-sanctioned channels. Tailing this redef-
inition of participation, student tracking, and differentiated citizenship education
limited political participation to the elite student minority, which even then eschewed
democratic activities in the form of, for example, lobbying or non-violent protests.
This trend carried on into the revamped CCE and VIA which retained its limited
notion of civic participation. Finally, we discussed the age of new media where
young activists are engaging the community largely via social media, albeit centered
on social issues rather than political change, reflecting a limited space for political
contestation.
In Singapore, political activism has a particularly narrow definition, being con-
fined to any opposition party politics that attempts to challenge the ruling PAP’s
dominance (Chua 2017). While non-political participation is amply emphasized for
youths in Singapore, the development of a democratically competent citizenry
capable of engaging in political dialogue – especially oppositional dialogue with
the authorities – and challenging the structural inequities beyond, leaves much room
for improvement. The promotion of civic participation as an almost exclusively
non-political endeavor fails to equip the young with critical skills to positively
challenge and reshape structural problems, instead encouraging them to perpetuate
the existing social logos through temporary volunteer efforts. It is thus crucial for
Singapore’s youth to be provided the space – especially political space – to rationally
and passionately explore their views on the one hand and be exposed to a more
nuanced and meaningful notion of what it means to actively participate beyond the
774 J. B.-Y. Sim and L.-T. Chow

non-political. It is only then that we can say we have taken a step toward the goal in
our National Pledge of Allegiance, where citizens pledge “to build a democratic
society based on justice and equality” (National Heritage Board 2018).

Cross-References

▶ Constructions of “Youth” and “Activism” in Lebanon

▶ Education for Youth Civic and Political Action in Australia
▶ Youth Civic Engagement and Formal Education in Canada: Shifting Expressions,
Associated Challenges
▶ Youth Engagement and Citizenship in England

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Rural Youth, Education, and Citizenship in
Sweden: Politics of Recognition and 49
Redistribution

Susanna Areschoug and Lucas Gottzén

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 780
Representations of Rural Youth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 781
“Natural” Childhoods and Urban Youth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 781
Othering the Rural . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 782
The Postindustrial Standard Narrative and the Mill-Town Mentality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 783
Recognizing and Countering (Status) Injuries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 783
Lived Experience Among Rural Youth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 784
Rural Youth and Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 785
Mobility, Employment, and (Un)desired Trajectories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 786
Recognizing Young Rural Citizenship(s) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 786
Material Conditions and Economic Incentives in Youth’s Spaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 787
Decentralized and Deregularized School System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 788
The Labor Market . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 788
Appropriation of Local Culture in Marketing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 789
Concluding Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 790
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 791

Abstract
When young people are studied in relation to citizenship and education, geo-
graphical location is not always considered. When the emplacement of youth is
addressed, a disproportional focus on schools and civic youth practices in city
settings further mirrors an unreflected urban norm within the field. There is
however a burgeoning literature that examines youth, education, and citizenship
in rural settings that speaks to issues of the inclusion and participation of young
people in society. The current chapter reviews Swedish literature on rural youth
and tracks its theoretical and political underpinnings. The areas covered move

S. Areschoug (*) · L. Gottzén

Department of Child and Youth Studies, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 779
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_40
780 S. Areschoug and L. Gottzén

from stereotypical representations of rurality to rural youths’ experiences and

participation in formal and nonformal education to the ways in which neoliberal
market logic results in an uneven distribution of educational and employment
possibilities for young people on the countryside. The chapter argues that a
divided empirical and analytical focus in previous research results in inconclusive
arguments regarding the remedies suggested for overcoming geographic inequal-
ity. It is posited that a call for the cultural recognition of rural youth’s experiences
of marginalization as a remedy for justice needs to be complemented with an
argument for economic redistribution.

Keywords
Youth · Rurality · Spatiality · Inequality · Identity politics

Introduction

A growing body of work interested in youth, citizenship, and education is bringing

attention to the role of place in young people’s lives and has pointed out that a
disproportional – and at times unreflected – focus on schools, youth centers, and
leisure activities in city settings mirrors what seems to be an underlying, but often
unpronounced, urban norm within studies of youth and education (Cairns 2012; Pini
et al. 2016). Spatial hierarchies render the rural and its inhabitants peripheral, and
while such marginalization results in complex experiences of citizenship (cf. Weller
2004), the emplacement of youth is seldom discussed in relation to their experiences
of social disengagement.
Furthermore, the recent orientation toward space and place in youth studies has
resulted in a small but growing literature in Sweden that examines young people,
rurality, and education, which speaks to issues of citizenship and particularly the
inclusion and participation of young people in society. This scholarship points to
important questions of representation and of youth’s experiences, opportunities, and
identity work in places continuously marked as being in the geographic, economic,
and moral periphery. In this review, we track the theoretical and political imperatives
that underline this recent Swedish research on rural youth.
This review does not represent all scholarship on youth and rurality in Sweden.
Instead, the literature included has rather been chosen as it in different ways talks to
rural youth’s citizenship, as defined in public policy, formal and informal institu-
tional practices, and by rural youth themselves. In Swedish previous research, these
have been divided into ones related to the negative stigma associated with rurality
and those with political and market-related dimensions (e.g., access to education,
employment, and leisure-time activities; cf. Helve 2003). The current chapter fol-
lows this rationale and first highlights spatial hierarchies through a focus on repre-
sentations of rurality, urbanity, and young people. Second, research examining how
the lived experiences of rural youth are informed by both cultural and structural
conditions is discussed. Third, the chapter focuses on structural and material
49 Rural Youth, Education, and Citizenship in Sweden: Politics of. . . 781

conditions on the countryside, often informed by economic perspectives and atten-

tive to the distributive effects of national policy making.
In a concluding discussion, these three areas of research are discussed in relation
to the recent increase in use of Honneth’s (2007) theory of recognition as a means for
remedy. Honneth argues that a fundamental human need in Western societies is to be
acknowledged as an individual – to have one’s status as a subject recognized – in
relation to different social spheres (i.e., within jurisdiction, the work force, and in
intimate relationships). Some scholars have argued that many young rural inhabi-
tants have their citizenship status continuously misrecognized, which may lead to
new populist political collectives. Acknowledging the voices of marginalized rural
youth would enable geographical justice and avoid this gloomy trajectory (e.g.,
Vallström and Svensson 2018). While agreeing with this claim, this chapter argues
that the repeated insistence on the recognition of young people’s (rural) identities
and experiences as a remedy for justice obscures economic issues as well as the
historical contingency of subject formation that may also play a role in spatial
injustice. Studies that are attentive to the structuring forces of (neoliberal) economic
incentives may contribute to arguments for a politics of redistribution (Fraser and
Honneth 2003) and offer the economic security needed for marginalized rural youth
to navigate educational and employment possibilities and practice participatory
citizenship.

Representations of Rural Youth

In Sweden, and internationally, rural studies have primarily focused on rural-urban

migration and the labor market, often leaning on theories of economic profit
maximization where urbanization is seen as an inevitable consequence of societal
development (Tinagli et al. 2007; cf. Ceccato et al. 2000). As a response to this
research, scholars have started to explore rurality from a cultural perspective,
especially focusing on representations of the countryside and its inhabitants in
media and policy discourse (Eriksson 2010; Lundgren and Johansson 2017; Nilsson
and Lundgren 2015; Rönnblom 2014). The aim is often to scrutinize common
stereotypes of rurality and rural youth and to promote more nuanced representations
of young people (Svensson 2017). This line of research has focused on the relation
between nature and childhood, the othering of the rural and notions about post-
industrial rural mill towns.

“Natural” Childhoods and Urban Youth

Representations of rurality are diverse and often somewhat contradictory, as the rural
is simultaneously idealized and stigmatized. In a Swedish setting, ideals of a “good”
childhood are informed by the Rousseauian connection between the child and
“untamed nature,” as opposed to the equally strong connection between “the
adult” and “civilized culture” (Halldén 2011). In accordance with this romantic
782 S. Areschoug and L. Gottzén

idea of nature as a beneficial milieu for children, the countryside is often understood
as an ideal site for family formation and child rearing. In public discourse, “the rural
idyll” represents play and freedom as well as a sense of security, community, and
belonging (Cedering 2012; Hjort and Malmberg 2006).
While the city is often understood as an unsafe and unsuitable place for younger
children (Joelsson 2013), there is a strong connection between urbanity and
youth lifestyles, as cities offer more opportunities for consumer culture and diversity
in identity expression (Eriksson 2010, 2017; Waara 1996). This link has in part
been reproduced within research in Sweden, which has been characterized by an
unrecognized urban norm or, when taking a spatial perspective, has focused on
young people, education, and urban segregation (e.g., Bunar and Sernhede 2013;
Jonsson 2007). The rural is often understood as authentic in relation to the rather
“artificial” values of urban lifestyles, and connections between rurality, (heterosex-
ual) family formation, and idyllic childhoods might be arguments for migration to
the countryside, but the rural is also seen as a place that young people should leave in
order to fulfil themselves (Kåks 2007; Svensson 2017).

Othering the Rural

Sweden is internationally renowned for its social welfare and gender equality
policies (e.g., Hausman et al. 2012). This image of Sweden as a center for modern
and progressive values and an exceptionally egalitarian nation has been largely
critiqued (Hübinette and Lundström 2011; Pierre 2015) and argued to be dependent
on the construction of rural areas and its inhabitants as morally inferior others that
instead are characterized as inherently backward and reactionary (Eriksson 2010).
These representations are both classed and gendered. For example, it has been
argued that middle-class women are often portrayed as the future of rural commu-
nities as they are seen as bearers of modernity (Dahl 2007). But rural women can also
be stigmatized when embodying “unrespectable” working-class positions, evident in
discourses of “white trash” trajectories (Sohl 2014) or in narratives where racialized
female migration to rural areas is reconfigured as exploitative prostitution (Dahl
2007; Nordin 2007). However, rural men in Sweden are more generally understood
as archaic in relation to their progressive urban counterparts (Nordin 2007). Recent
research has documented how rural men are often described as backward,
uneducated working class and portrayed as reactionary, homophobic, and sexist
(Stenbacka 2011). More recently, they have also been accused of racism, where
right-wing currents are argued to primarily be found in the peripheral provinces of
Sweden (Gottzén 2014). Eriksson (2010) therefore argues that rural masculinity in
particular constitutes an exception to the Swedish national self-image; in order to
present Sweden as a progressive and modern center in a globalized world, rural men
who are not seen to fit these standards are marginalized and described as radically
different others (Eriksson 2010). This discourse may have aggravated effects in
relation to young rural men. In public representations, youth are often presented as
characterizing progression (Lindgren 2002). As a result, “traditional” or
49 Rural Youth, Education, and Citizenship in Sweden: Politics of. . . 783

“reactionary” youth constitute something of an oxymoron, and their (lack of)

aspirations are often rendered unintelligible in public discourse (cf. Vallström 2011).

The Postindustrial Standard Narrative and the Mill-Town Mentality

A common narrative that stigmatizes rural youth is what Vallström and Svensson
(2018) call “the postindustrial standard narrative.” This narrative speaks in part of
the boom in industrial manufacturing that employed large portions of the (male)
working-class after WWII but also emphasizes the benefits of recent developments,
particularly the rise of knowledge economies in a globalized world. While often
presented as a success story, the narrative also contains elements of failure as many
industrial regions in the global North have been severely affected by the economic
decline and subsequent structural transformations of the labor market in the late
twentieth century, through which large parts of industrial production have been
outsourced to the global South. In Sweden, where much manufacturing was located
in rural areas, young men growing up on the countryside are often considered to
become particularly affected due to their vulnerable positions on the labor market
(Kåks 2007; Svensson 2006; Vallström 2011; Vallström and Svensson 2018).
This narrative is found in many Western societies, but in Sweden it draws
particularly on the well-spread notion of “mill-town mentality” (Swedish,
bruksandan), which refers to a culture said to prevail in smaller towns and rural
areas previously dominated by one single industry (i.e., mill towns). While the term
has some positive associations, including community bonds, security, and loyalty, it
mostly implies that members of such communities lack motivation, entrepreneurial
skills, and flexibility – traits that are idealized in contemporary postindustrial
societies (Vallström 2014). Mill-town mentality also denotes strong social cohesion
and a “monoculture” suspicious of newcomers and new influences, which is argued
to explain everything from sexism to resistance to education (Forsberg 1997;
Forsberg et al. 2012; Gottzén and Franzén 2019).

Recognizing and Countering (Status) Injuries

As mentioned, the literature that troubles stigmatizing stereotypes of rurality, par-

ticularly in reference to young rural men, can be seen as a response to mainstream
research that emphasizes urbanization and profit maximization. As a response,
critical scholars have therefore developed cultural analyses that demonstrate how
representation matters for geographic inequality as well as offering more nuanced
perspectives of rural life. For instance, Forsberg et al. (2012) trouble the perception
of rural villages and small towns as uniform, monocultural, and predominantly
white, arguing that the Swedish countryside is not necessarily ethnically homoge-
nous (since it has a long tradition of immigration) and that racism is not exclusively
a rural issue. Similarly, Ekman (1997) argues that the strong cohesiveness at times
found in rural areas is not necessarily inherent of the local community. Instead,
784 S. Areschoug and L. Gottzén

spatial identity can be strengthened when a community perceives itself to be under

attack by, for instance, industry shutdowns, dismantling of welfare systems and
negative representations.
Focusing on young people, Vallström and Svensson (2018) discuss how
neoliberal market logics result in state and corporate withdrawal from rural
areas since they are considered less competitive. In addition, population decline
has major negative effects on small rural communities since it enforces increased
taxes and decreases the ability to attract corporate investors and to offer welfare
services and education. Yet, the main impetus for spatial inequalities is argued to
be urban-centered norms and attitudes (Svensson 2017). The postindustrial
narrative is seen as the base for these developments as its verdict of geographic
(and individual) deficiency informs policies and investments (Vallström 2011;
Vallström and Svensson 2018). While research that attempts to trouble urban-
centered norms and negative representations of rurality can be understood as
political, not all researchers explicitly discuss remedies needed for overcoming
geographic inequality. However, with reference to Honneth’s (2007) theory of
recognition, Vallström and Svensson (2018) posit that a first step toward coun-
tering the (status) injuries that rural areas suffer from is to acknowledge the ways
in which rural youth and the places they inhabit are misrecognized within the
hegemonic urban-centered narrative and to allow for counter-narratives to be
recognized in public discourse. The next section is concerned with research that
aims to do this.

Lived Experience Among Rural Youth

Another strategy to nuance the dominant narratives about rural youth in Sweden has
been to highlight young people’s own perspectives, suggesting they negotiate
negative representations of the rural in their everyday lives (Kåks 2007; Waara
1996). When emerging in the 1990s, this research often problematized the “individ-
ualization thesis” (e.g., Giddens 1991), which argues that late modernity is charac-
terized by the “disembedding” of social and spatial relations and that we are
becoming less bound by tradition based on, for example, class and place. For
instance, Trondman (1995) argues that boys in the countryside are still highly
influenced by structural conditions as they lack the specific cultural capital
demanded in society. While working-class boys adopt different strategies in relation
to education and employment, the ones who stay often cultivate identities that may
provide momentary affirmation but simultaneously make them marginalized in a
globalized society. Trondman asserts that both cultural norms and spatial and
material conditions work to reproduce stigmatized working-class rural identities.
Structural conditions, including geographic inequalities, affect young people’s
chances to fulfil educational expectations, but youth are simultaneously held indi-
vidually responsible – and often hold themselves responsible – for their failures
(Andersson and Beckman 2018; Svensson 2017).
49 Rural Youth, Education, and Citizenship in Sweden: Politics of. . . 785

Rural Youth and Education

Although education is not a guarantee for future employment for rural youth (Lundh
Nilsson and Westberg 2015), there has been an enhanced public emphasis on
formalized merits. As a result, the gendered educational pattern has caused public
anxieties as the mill-town mentality is said to affect particularly boys’ attitudes
toward formal education and cause lower academic achievement (Ivener 2014).
Differences between what are considered to be female and male professions affect
rural youth’s attitudes to education and future employment. Girls often experience
pressure to perform well in school, while boys may see themselves in future
occupations that do not demand academic achievement (Härnsten et al. 2005;
Trondman 2001). It should however be noted that this has partly to do with the
fact that occupations that are traditionally coded as feminine, such as work in health
care and primary education, now demand a university degree, in contrast to tradi-
tionally male occupations where upper secondary education is sufficient. In Sweden,
upper secondary education is not compulsory, but labor market demands on profes-
sionalized work force have increased attendance at this educational level. Both
vocational and academic secondary educational programs enable further studies
at university level. It is often necessary to move to urban areas for higher education
that is why migration patterns mirror these gendered educational and employment
tendencies (Forsberg et al. 2012). Waara (1996) notes that while the young people in
the northern border country between Sweden and Finland in his study challenged
pre-given gender positions, many argued that staying in the area implied the need
to conform to traditional gendered patterns of education, work, leisure, and (hetero-
sexual) family formation. A more recent study nevertheless found that rural youth –
particularly working-class girls – chose formal education and work trajectories that
did not follow traditionally gendered scripts, implying that these may be in a process
of reconfiguration (Rönnlund et al. 2018).
Some researchers have problematized the so-called anti-school culture that is
considered particularly prevalent in industrial and farmland regions. For instance,
while rural working-class boys are often positioned as “unwilling, unaccustomed,
and weak readers” (Asplund and Pérez Prieto 2018, p. 1061) in their reading
practices, it has been documented that young rural men may interpret literature in
less gender stereotypical ways than young urban men (Asplund and Pérez Prieto
2013). Similarly, Ivener (2014) analyzes working-class men’s life histories and
relations to education in a mill town severely affected by the economic crises of
the late twentieth century. She argues that they are not resistant toward learning but
the embodied knowledge they value, such as craftsmanship and workplace collab-
oration, is not easily validated in a labor market that rather cherishes formal
education. Similarly, in a recent ethnography with boys involved in the rural
“greaser” subculture, Joelsson (2013) shows that while they developed advanced
practical skills and knowledge about motors and driving, their knowledge was
seldom appreciated. Instead they were continuously constructed as being a risk to
their communities and to themselves.
786 S. Areschoug and L. Gottzén

On a structural level, rural youth seem inclined to follow traditional gendered and
classed lines of education, work, and leisure-time activities. However, qualitative
studies of youth in formal and informal education in rural settings suggest that young
people’s learning experiences are complex and diverse and build on ideals that are
not always recognized as valuable in public discourse.

Mobility, Employment, and (Un)desired Trajectories

As a consequence of young people’s patterns of education, rural-urban migration is

also largely gendered, classed, and connected to (heterosexual) family formation.
As noted, middle-class youth (particularly girls) generally seem more inclined to
move to cities for work and higher education than young people (particularly boys)
from the working-class. However, young people themselves rather link migration to
individual identity processes and coming of age than to structural realities enforcing
them to relocate (Svensson 2017). Kåks (2007) argues that small-town youth draw
on two different life scripts to evaluate their decisions. While both scripts revolve
around establishing a (heterosexual) family, what differentiates a desirable script
from an undesirable one is when and where settling down takes place. Desirable life
scripts include moving away for higher education and postponing parenthood, and it
is only the ones that have aligned with this trajectory that see themselves as
autonomous and as having made proper individual choices (Kåks 2007).
Migration patterns are clearly gendered, but Forsberg et al. (2012) suggest they
may not be as differentiated as often assumed. Although women seem to realize their
plans to move at a relatively early age, men however tend to follow later. Women
also tend to move back to a somewhat larger extent than men. In addition, there is a
continued gender-segregated labor market in rural industrial municipalities – also
among young people – which reproduces a considerable wage gap where men tend
to earn more regardless of whether they have stayed or moved (Forsberg et al. 2012).
However, a study with young unemployed rural men show that they wanted to work
in caring professions, which were easier to obtain without having to move. This
suggests that traditionally gendered lines of professions might be transgressed in
order to stay close to family and friends (Andersson and Beckman 2018).

Recognizing Young Rural Citizenship(s)

The norm of rural-urban migration affects local policies, as municipalities privilege

the young people who have moved from the community. Moving from the country-
side is seen as an active choice; individuals who relocate (primarily young middle-
class women and men) are therefore considered to be self-sufficient and driven
people, and, hence, former inhabitants that rural municipalities want to return
(Svensson 2006, 2012). In contrast, municipal discourse often constructs young
working-class men and women who stay as passive – both with regards to their
own and the community’s future – and as liabilities rather than assets. This latter
49 Rural Youth, Education, and Citizenship in Sweden: Politics of. . . 787

group may want to develop their local community, but they seldom feel appreciated
(Svensson 2006; see also Reay 2005; Skeggs 1997, for discussions on institutional
reassertion of working-class practices in the UK context). Instead, they are margin-
alized and often ashamed over their rural domicile and their inability to leave. This
may also cause young people in the countryside to lose their faith in the democratic
system and embrace populist and right-wing sentiments (Swedish National Board of
Youth Affairs 2010).
At the same time, rural political and citizenship activism may also be progressive
and rural youth might be empowered by the use of social media and create positive
counter-narratives of life in rural areas (Lundgren and Johansson 2017; Svensson
2016). Forsberg (2017) offers new ways of understanding – and politicizing – the
question of rural migration by discussing how her young (working-class) inter-
viewees spoke of their future in terms of a struggle to stay and claiming their
“right to immobility” (p. 323).
Rural youth’s experiences and political identities are, as we have seen, gaining
attention within academic discourse. Different expressions of citizenship practices,
such as rural youth’s use of digital media, have in some research been understood
as “struggles against placeist representations” and as a fight for “reappropriation” of
rurality (Lundgren and Johansson 2017, p. 80). Such attempts of resignification of
the rural are often seen as linking youth together and having “their experiences and
opinions acknowledged and their rural identities not only re-constituted, but recog-
nized and valued” (Lundgren and Johansson 2017, p. 81). By offering narratives that
counter the urban norm, it is argued that rural youth may create a renewed sense of
pride and recognition of their ways of life could make the rural worthy of political
investment (Vallström and Svensson 2018).
As discussed, research attentive to the lived experiences of rural youth has
highlighted the workings of social class, gender, age, and place when discussing
youth’s educational and employment trajectories, migration patterns, and citizenship
practices. This literature emphasizes that both spatial and material conditions
and cultural norms work to reproduce stigmatized working-class rural identities.
However, the focus on lived experience tends to posit spatial and material conditions
as rather static and determining “backdrops,” while cultural norms, such as the
postindustrial narrative, are perceived as possible to change and therefore deserves
to be questioned. This results in an overemphasis on the recognition of rural identity,
experience, and citizenship as a remedy for geographic justice, while arguments for a
politics of economic redistribution, both to rural areas and the working-class, are
much less pronounced.

Material Conditions and Economic Incentives in Youth’s Spaces

While arguments for a politics of recognition may be valuable to rural youth and
their citizenship, they mainly work at a cultural and discursive level and partly
obscure the economic and material characteristics of geographical injustice. The
following section therefore focuses on research that analyzes some of the marketized
788 S. Areschoug and L. Gottzén

arenas that rural youth participate in and that structure their everyday lives: the
school market, labor market, and the marketing of the countryside.

Decentralized and Deregularized School System

Educational reforms of the late twentieth century brought extensive decentralization

and deregulation that affected the supply of rural schools in Sweden. They were
partly based on the democratic argument that citizens had the right to greater
influence over schools and other local welfare institutions. Consequently, munici-
palities were given freedom to locally organize educational investments and content
(Andræ Thelin and Solstad 2005). The reforms were also founded on a neoliberal
economic logic, mainly evident in the marketization of education through the
introduction of the voucher system (Swedish, skolpeng), which made it radically
easier to start and run private schools (Swedish, friskolor), as they also could now
receive public financing for their students. As a result, within a few years, Sweden
went from having a relatively centralized and completely public school system to
having one of the world’s most liberal educational systems. This would allow
parents to choose the best education for their children through market-oriented
competition which, in turn, would result in better teaching and increase Sweden’s
ability to compete internationally (Holm 2013).
These neoliberal reforms did not benefit schools in the countryside but rather
augmented existing inequalities (Beach 2018). Since municipal budgets primarily
consist of tax revenues from their citizens, rural communities suffering from depop-
ulation often struggle to provide welfare services of the same quality as well-
populated areas. Municipalities have therefore been forced to centralize education
and close down smaller village schools (Cedering 2012). This has created longer
commutes (or boarding solutions) for rural students, which have been shown to have
negative effects on their physical health and their ties to their community (Andræ
Thelin and Solstad 2005). Another consequence is that some rural youth do not
afford travel or accommodation and in practice therefore have difficulties “freely”
choosing upper secondary schools outside their local municipality (Holm 2013). It is
however important to note that research on small rural schools in Sweden does not
support the idea that the quality of education and students’ academic performances
are lower in rural areas compared to schools in urban areas. Small rural schools often
manage to compensate structural obstacles, such as difficulties in attracting highly
educated staff, with smaller student groups and more teacher time per student
(Åberg-Bengtsson 2009).

The Labor Market

As mentioned, the mill-town mentality is often used to explain young men’s

resistance toward formal education and the lack of entrepreneurism. However, this
could not be explained solely by cultural representations but is also as a result of
49 Rural Youth, Education, and Citizenship in Sweden: Politics of. . . 789

historical economic changes. According to Bergström (1997), Swedish industry

grew during the industrial boom of the postwar era not only due to increased demand
for Swedish-manufactured products but also because wage and taxation politics
stimulated large industries to reinvest their profit. This allowed for high employment
rates in industry towns but also locked up capital in the companies, which
had a conserving effect on many rural and industrial communities. In addition,
supported by national regulations, the basic industries rewarded workers’ loyalty
by offering safe employment and high salaries. Consequently, Bergström posits that
mill-town mentality cannot only be seen as an inherited mental state but also a
product of particular industrial relations and national policies.
It is also questionable whether Sweden could be described as a postindustrial
society. Numerous manufacturers have indeed moved their production to other parts
of the world, but many industries remain in the country where it is rather techno-
logical development, mechanization, and rationalization that account for large parts
of the increased unemployment rates (Westholm 1997). Swedish industry is not
downsizing, but the corporate structure has changed. The share of international
companies without ties to the local communities where the production is based has
increased, partly due to Sweden’s relatively generous corporate taxation policies.
The basic industries do not offer employment to same extent as before, and their
revenues are not disposed locally due to globalized corporate structures (Lundberg
1997). This does not only affect the possibilities for many young people in rural
areas to gain employment and to practice participatory citizenship (Andersson and
Beckman 2018) but could also be used as an argument for economic redistribution to
rural industrial areas (and rural inhabitants) as national policy contributed to these
developments.

Appropriation of Local Culture in Marketing

Decentralization of the school system and the globalization of manufacturing indus-

tries have affected many rural municipalities in Sweden negatively. As municipal-
ities are increasingly dependent on tax revenues from their inhabitants, those
suffering from depopulation are forced to compete with each other for potential
migrants. Municipalities promote themselves through emphasizing what is consid-
ered attractive with their local region, rather than directing attention toward the
negative effects of current distributive politics (Svensson 2017). Such marketing
strategies, based on neoliberal values of competitiveness and growth, tend to repro-
duce urban/rural binaries, for instance, through making use of the image of rurality
as idyllic and traditional (Eriksson 2010). In some parts of northern Sweden, which
are associated with depopulation and high unemployment rates and where the Sámi
people live, both municipalities and travel agencies exoticize this indigenous culture
in their marketing. In contrast to otherwise negative representations of these areas,
Sámi culture has become an asset in tourism and has “transformed ethnicity and
exotic cultural difference into an ‘easily approachable form of colonialism’”
(Eriksson 2010, p. 93). Such marketing strategies may obviously enable positive
790 S. Areschoug and L. Gottzén

place identity and provide job opportunities but also obscures the fact that the
indigenous people have lacked civil rights historically, which produced the structural
inequality that underpins Sámi youth’s living conditions today (cf. Viken 2006).

Concluding Discussion

During the last decades, Swedish research on rurality, youth, education, and citizen-
ship has problematized how norms and values structure geographies and construct
rural places as stagnant, outmoded, and unsuitable for political, corporate, and civic
investments. Dedicated to unveiling how cultural representations produce these
spatial hierarchies, scholars have demonstrated the negative effects that such imag-
inaries have on identity formation and self-understanding among rural youth. It is
important to let marginalized voices be heard, but the continued emphasis on rural
identity and the call for a politics based on the recognition of these experiences may
simultaneously serve neoliberal interests.
Rural youth scholars are of course well aware of how neoliberal market logics
have constructed rural areas and inhabitants as irrelevant (Vallström and Svensson
2018) and at times develop both social and economic critiques (e.g., Vallström
2014). But as demonstrated in this review, they tend to focus on cultural represen-
tations and misrecognition of young people’s everyday lives. Neoliberalism is
analyzed as a subjugating discourse (as in the postindustrial standard narrative),
and capitalism is primarily addressed in terms of rural youth’s classed experiences
(e.g., Vallström and Svensson 2018). Exploring marginalized positions based
on place, class, gender, and age is important, but when neoliberal and urban norms
are primarily (and sometimes only) addressed as “placeist” discourse, misrepresen-
tation is presented as the primary origin of rural youth’s subordination. This
approach, often legitimated through reference to Honneth’s (2007) theory of recog-
nition, argues for the need to make rural youth’s experiences and choices culturally
intelligible. Implicitly and explicitly, emphasis is thus put on the “performative”
power of verbalizing rural experience (cf. Lundgren and Johansson 2017). Some
also call for conscious-raising practices among rural inhabitants in order to
create citizenship mobilization built on rural identity (Vallström and Svensson
2018).
Cultural recognition is important, but this type of identity politics also needs to
be problematized. Firstly, neoliberalism is not only a set of systemized economic
policies but something that goes beyond the market. Neoliberal discourse, epito-
mized in the postindustrial standard narrative, subordinates individuals and makes
some actions and aspirations culturally valued and others devalued. However,
inherent in neoliberal governing is also the imperative of profit maximization
(Brown 2005), which to an increasing extent structures spaces that rural youth
inhabit. While, for instance, Svensson (2017) argues that deconstructing the urban
norm may lead to the state protecting the rural population from “the market’s
misrecognition” (p. 53, authors’ translation), much responsibility is implicitly put
onto local civic organizations and individuals to provide rural youth a sense of
49 Rural Youth, Education, and Citizenship in Sweden: Politics of. . . 791

security and belonging (c.f. Rönnblom 2014). A claim for cultural recognition must,
therefore, not obscure the need of economic redistribution in order to make this
support possible (cf. Fraser and Honneth 2003).
Secondly, the “identity” and political collectives based on shared feelings of rural
marginalization need to be troubled, as the (rural) subject to be acknowledged is
diffuse. By questioning the postindustrial narrative, Svensson and Vallström critique
the individualized and neoliberal idea of the enterprising self (Svensson 2017;
Vallström 2011; Vallström and Svensson 2018). While such recognition troubles
this neoliberal narrative, it does not problematize that the subject to be recognized
is still characterized by qualities idealized within neoliberal discourse. As Brown
(2006) points out, the ideal neoliberal citizen is a liberated entrepreneur and con-
sumer capable of making autonomous and rational choices. Rural youth who stay in
their communities despite limited opportunities are to be recognized as making
“deliberate” choices (Svensson 2016, p. 447), but by emphasizing rational and
autonomous choices, the urban citizen is still the blueprint for liberated action.
If “rural identity” is to be made culturally recognizable, it runs the risk of (re)
producing neoliberal citizenship, that is, exploitable, consuming subjects seen as
worth financial investment.
Finally, it has been argued that new political collectives could be created through
conscious-raising practices of shared experience of exclusion and rediscovered
communalism among rural inhabitants (Vallström and Svensson 2018). But, rural
identity and rural experience do not naturally exist “out there”; they have to be
continuously created. Since identity is often constructed through difference, we have
no way of guaranteeing who or what will serve as a differing “other.” Acknowledg-
ing rural identity and experience thereby runs the risk of enhancing already visible
antagonisms. Experiences of marginalization, but also of care and communalism, are
important features of racist and xenophobic mobilization (Mulinari and Neergaard
2014). The question then is what separates rural identity politics from right-wing
and populist collectives and how one can surely be said to be desirable and the other
not (cf. Edenheim 2017). Youth politics arguing for endurable lives on the country-
side can not only be based on the performative power of recognition as it may
continue economic dispossession and provide the basis of future precarious alli-
ances. A call for the recognition of rural youth as citizens also needs to encompass an
argument for economic redistribution and an awareness of how our historical and
geographical moment affects the subjectivities imaginable.

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Youth Civic Engagement and Formal
Education in Canada: Shifting Expressions, 50
Associated Challenges

Mark Evans, Rosemary Evans, and Angela Vemic

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 796
Early Developments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 797
More Recent Developments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 800
Additional Issues and Challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 805
Concluding Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 807
Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 808
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 808

Abstract
In this chapter, we explore shifting expressions of youth civic engagement in
Canada and the variant ways in which educating for youth civic engagement has
been envisaged and approached in formal education (K-12). Attention is also
given to those personal and contextual factors propelling these changes over time.
We contend that while expressions of youth civic engagement have been for the
most part moderate, varied, local, institutional, and tempered historically through
a filter of personal and social responsibility, there has been a gradual shift of
emphasis towards less formal, digital, and rights-based representations.

M. Evans (*)
Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education,
University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
e-mail: [email protected]
R. Evans
University of Toronto Schools, Toronto, ON, Canada
e-mail: [email protected]
A. Vemic
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 795
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_4
796 M. Evans et al.

Educating for civic engagement through formal education in Canada has also
undergone a gradual transition. This transition has moved from an emphasis on
civic duty, deference, and formal political structures and processes as they are to
more recent characterizations that encourage more informal, exploratory, and
critical understandings of engagement with public issues, from the local to the
global. Interwoven in these understandings of engagement are themes such as
identity, cultural diversity, pluralism, and issues of social justice and equity.
Indicators of these changes are found in spheres of Canadian educational
research, curriculum policy reform, and strengthened pedagogical practices.
Moving towards these broadened and more complex characterizations of civic
engagement through formal education has proven to be complicated. Curriculum
ambiguity, undertones of compliance, an avoidance of controversial concepts and
issues, and varied understandings of engagement among students with differing
identity affiliations, for example, all signal uneven and fragmented access to
particular learning experiences. These complications are further exacerbated by
a variety of factors associated with educational change that have mobilized and/or
inhibited steps forward.

Keywords
Youth civic engagement · Youth activism · Youth participation · Citizenship
education · Civics · Formal education · Pedagogy · Canada

Introduction

Today, youth worldwide are civically engaged in a variety of community activities

and with a range of public issues. While the focus of this engagement remains for the
most part local, youth voices are increasingly evident in national and international
matters (e.g., democratic governance, racism, indigenous rights, sexual assault and
harassment, gun control, refugee settlement, environmental and social justice).
Expressions of youth civic engagement reveal significant variation and shifting
patterns, guided by cultural and historical traditions and influenced by changing
local and global pressures including globalization, changing forms of democratic
governance, populist nationalism, and the rise of digital media (Davies et al. 2014).
Recent studies highlight a range of personal factors also affecting youth engagement
and disengagement (e.g., different socio-cultural understandings of participation,
living in contexts where poverty and/or violence predominate, deficiencies in civic
education, youth mistrust of politics and politicians), illuminating the intricacies
involved in better understanding these variant expressions and shifting patterns
(Ménard 2010; Sherrod et al. 2010).
According to Kahne et al. (2016), patterns of youth engagement, in general, are
shifting toward more informal, participatory forms of political activity (e.g.,
volunteering with community groups and organizations, service to community pro-
jects, blogging and circulating political news online) and less so toward formal,
50 Youth Civic Engagement and Formal Education in Canada: Shifting. . . 797

institutional ones (e.g., voting, political party membership, working on a political

campaign). New digital tools have provided an expanded range of opportunities for
youth across the political spectrum to circulate information, articulate personal
political viewpoints, and mobilize social networks in ways that exert pressure on
issues of public concern (Vromen 2017). We have seen evidence of this, for example,
in the form of movements such as Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, and Me Too.
This expanded range of opportunities for youth, according to Kahne et al. (2016), is
different from institutional politics in that they are “peer-based, interactive acts, and
not guided by deference to traditional elites and institutions” (p. 1). They “empower
individuals and groups to operate with greater independence in the political realm,
circumventing traditional gatekeepers of information and influence” (p. 3).
Not surprisingly, there has been increasing attention paid to, and deliberation
about, the role formal education is playing and ought to play in assisting youth
develop a deeper understanding of public issues and the capacities needed to
meaningfully engage in and respond to often complex and conflictual civic ques-
tions. Educational stakeholders worldwide are increasingly encouraging careful
consideration of the curricular and pedagogical shifts that would be helpful in
facilitating effective and equitable civic engagement in teaching and learning. In
this chapter, we explore shifting expressions of youth civic engagement in Canada
and the variant ways in which educating for youth civic engagement has been
envisaged and approached in formal education (K-12). Attention is also given to
forces propelling these changes over time and to some of the associated challenges
that are currently confronting educational stakeholders. Lastly, we offer our con-
cluding reflections.
Biesta’s (2011) reminder that democratic learning in schools “represents a small
proportion of the environment in and from which young people learn” (p. 14)
acknowledges that a good deal of civic engagement learning takes place in less
formal contexts outside of education (e.g., through family activities, interaction with
peers, community teams and organization, TV and social media). In light of this, we
acknowledge that this chapter presents at best an introductory and partial sketch of
the relationship between youth civic engagement and education in Canada.

Early Developments

Canadian political culture, influenced by European, North American, and Indige-

nous beliefs and practices, has continued to evolve gradually and pragmatically.
While contrasting theories and debates over the nature of Canadian political culture
have been evident, constitutional law, a federal, parliamentary, democratic system of
governance, personal rights and freedoms (e.g., women, visible minorities, Indige-
nous), dualism (French and English), cultural pluralism, regionalism, a mixed
economy, and continentalism have been prominent themes in this evolution, tem-
pered by traditions of (neo) liberalism, conservatism, and social democracy
(at different times and to varying degrees). Public issues related to topics such as
environmental concerns, discrimination protections, poverty and welfare, health
798 M. Evans et al.

care, alcohol and drug use, electoral reform, hate speech, guns in Canada have posed
ongoing governance questions and challenges. Within this context, Canadians have
tended to participate moderately in formal political processes although principles of
political efficacy and support through electoral participation (e.g., voting, joining a
political party, volunteering) have been valued.
Expressions of civic engagement among youth in Canada have also been mod-
erate and varied, tempered historically through a filter of personal and social
responsibility. Youth civic engagement in the early part of the twentieth century
was characterized by personal responsibility and more compliant modes of engage-
ment, closely linked to the broader colonial project of encouraging and supporting
nation-building, social and political initiation and, outside of Québec, a pro-British
assimilationist orientation. Expressions of youth civic engagement often occurred
outside of formal education in organizations like Boy Scouts and Girl Guides and
through church affiliations. Civic learning in schools during this same period
reflected a similar orientation. Schools were expected to pass on understandings
that youth would need to be productive members of the newly emerging Canadian
society. Attention to formal civic structures and processes and civic duty and
obedience, for example, were key features of civic learning (Clark and Case 1997;
Evans 2006). Civic learning intentions included “deference to authority, limitations
to the freedom of individual and family norms, devolution of their authority to the
demands of the state, and the development of an orderly and compliant public culture
in the public space of the school” (Llewellyn et al. 2007, p. 7). More directive and
less active forms of learning and teaching were the norm. Teachers were expected to
transmit certain content and students were expected to receive it (McLeod 1989).
Osborne (1996) describes this period in the development and implementation of
civic learning in Canadian schools as the “Canadianization of children as a vehicle of
assimilationist nation-building” (p. 36).
Repercussions of the First World War, a sense of growing national autonomy and
patriotism, difficult labor conditions, and other factors led to a deepened emphasis on
personal responsibility, an extension of civic entitlement (e.g., the declaration of
women as “persons” under the British North America Act in 1929), and dutiful
expressions of civic engagement. This shift in emphasis, according to Osborne
(1996), served to depoliticize forms of engagement by paying limited attention to
political concepts such as conflict and power. He states, for example,

one could serve through volunteer work, through charity, through church membership, and
other forms of non-political activity. In this view, a good person, defined as someone who
was kind, neighbourly, law-abiding, and so on, was by definition a good citizen, thus
ignoring the long philosophical tradition that holds that good citizenship demands more
than this (p. 43).

Civic learning and teaching continued to support personal responsibility and

more compliant modes of engagement, national intentions of coherence and social
harmony, and knowledge about government institutions and processes through
Social Studies curricula and the introduction of student councils. Predictably,
50 Youth Civic Engagement and Formal Education in Canada: Shifting. . . 799

teaching practices focused on knowing about the mechanisms of government and

one’s responsibilities to others and to Canada. While provincial curriculum policies
developed incrementally, attention to learning experiences that encouraged more
active and critical expressions of civic engagement was minimal (Tomkins 2008). It
should be noted, however, that not everyone accepted the civic message of schools
during this time and various groups, including First Nations’ peoples, Québecers,
and trade unions, often voiced concerns (Strong-Boag 1996).
Shifting circumstances and issues arising during the second half of the twentieth
century fostered a renewed interest on citizenship and civic learning across Canada.
Escalating American influence over the Canadian economy, increasing ethno-
cultural diversity, the Quiet Revolution in Québec, and First Nations land claims,
for example, prompted increased youth engagement in both formal and less formal
political contexts. For a brief period during the late 1960s and early 1970s, university
campuses across Canada became sites of protest and conflict (e.g., rallies, marches,
sit-ins) as student activism reached heightened levels, influenced by developments
mostly south of the border (e.g., civic rights movement, racism, the American war in
Vietnam, the New Left). Although these developments helped to politicize a gener-
ation of citizens and offered a critique of existing political structures and decision-
making processes across Canada, expressions of engagement among youth soon
returned to more moderate forms. Around the same time, recommendations from the
Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (1963–69), the Constitutional
Act and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982), and the Canadian
Multicultural Act (1988), in particular, assisted in re-shaping notions of citizenship.
Themes such as cultural diversity, pluralism, human rights, civic conflict and
controversy, global perspectives, and democratic engagement became gradually
more intertwined in the public rhetoric and policy about citizenship.
These developments created a renewed interest in civic learning across Canada.
Schools were “most often recognized as the public institution best positioned to
reach the majority of young Canadian citizens” (Llewellyn et al. 2007, p. 9).
Attention to civic learning in formal provincial and territorial curricula began to
reflect this broadened civic mandate, constituting what Osborne (1996) referred to as
“the beginning of a trend” and “a new conception of citizenship education” (p. 52).
Recommendations from the Report of the Commission on Canadian Studies
(Symons 1975) led to the provincial development of new “Canadian Studies”
curricula, creating more opportunities for teachers and students to explore
Canada’s expanding cultural diversity, the complexities of French-English relations
and Canadian-American relations, and Canada’s emerging role in a global commu-
nity. (Many countries speak of national education systems within nation-state con-
texts. It should be noted that education in Canada is the responsibility of provincial
and territorial governments operating within a federal system. This means that each
of the ten provinces and three territories has developed its own distinctive education
system and administers its own educational curricula and programs, although some
degree of commonality exists across them (e.g., some shared policy development by
region).) Civic engagement was gaining attention as a curricular goal (e.g., local
inquiries, critical thinking, province-wide simulations like the Southern Ontario
800 M. Evans et al.

Model Assembly) although implementation in classrooms and schools remained

embryonic and uneven. Engaging in civic matters usually meant increased aware-
ness of aspects of participation related to formal politics (e.g., voting, joining a
political party) and the possibility of some minor form of involvement in school
governance (e.g., student councils) (Broom 2016; Hodgetts 1968; McLean et al.
2017) as curriculum priorities increasingly focused on employability skills and
preparing students to be productive workers for an emerging global economy
(Osborne 2001).

More Recent Developments

From the late 1990s onwards, a variety of issues and contextual pressures (e.g.,
globalization, issues of inclusion and exclusion, the rise of populist nationalism,
increasing attention to Canada’s enduring colonial legacy and the Truth and Recon-
ciliation Commission of Canada (2008–2015)) prompted ongoing conversations
about citizenship and its purposes and practices in Canada. While expressions of
civic engagement among youth remained moderate and varied (A few recent
examples include the Youth Impact Summit/Studio Y– MaRS Ontario (https://
studioy.marsdd.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/MaRS-YIS-Public-Report-2.pdf),
the 2017 Youth Action Gathering/Canadian Council of Refugees (http://ccrweb.ca/
en/youth/welcome), and the Canadian Roots Exchange Conference on Truth and
Reconciliation (2107/ 2018) (http://canadianroots.ca/conference/).), a variety of
empirical studies reported important concerns about and shifts in how and why
young Canadians were engaging in civic matters (Ménard 2010; Turcotte 2015a, b;
Llewellyn et al. 2007; Llewellyn et al. 2010). On the one hand, these studies reported
increasing disengagement in formal political contexts among youth (e.g., voting and
membership in political parties). Some of the contributing factors cited included a
general mistrust of politicians among youth, not seeing how formal political deci-
sions affected youth directly, an increasing sense that youth have little impact on the
decision-making process, and experiencing a lack of connection to election plat-
forms or attention to issues important to youth (Ménard 2010). On the other hand,
these and other studies also reported an increasing level of youth engagement in
what is referred to as informal or nonelectoral or participatory political activities in
areas of personal interest (e.g., antiracist initiatives, environment, Indigenous peo-
ples’ concerns, LGBTQ rights, access to higher education), enhanced by the emer-
gence of social media platforms which have facilitated the development of rights-
based interest groups in particular.
Turcotte’s (2015b) study, based on data from the 2013 Statistics Canada General
Social Survey (GSS), for example, corroborated that while younger people (15–24)
in Canada have been less likely to vote than older individuals during the past
decade, “these trends in electoral political engagement conceal a relatively high
degree of engagement in other (nonelectoral) activities” (p. 11). This shift is
characterized by,
50 Youth Civic Engagement and Formal Education in Canada: Shifting. . . 801

(1) an emphasis on specific causes and issues (for example, the environment, access to
education or gender equality) as opposed to the more general political issues discussed in an
election; and (2) participation in social groups or movements that are less hierarchical and
less officially organized (for example, interest groups) as opposed to involvement in
traditional political organizations, such as political parties or unions (p. 7).

“Younger people,” according to Turcotte, are “less likely to vote than older
individuals. . . and tend to be less interested in politics than the older counterparts”
(2015b, p. 6). They are, however, more likely than older people to participate in
nonelectoral civic and political activities (face-to-face and online). In 2013, “74% of
youth aged 15 to 19 and 64% of youth aged 20 to 24 were part of a group,
organization or association. This compared with 65% of individuals aged 45 to
54 and 62% of individuals aged 65 to 74” (2015b, p. 9). Forms of involvement
included volunteering, engaging in community projects, and/or joining various
community groups and/or NGO organizations operating outside of formal politics.
In most instances, these studies also revealed that while engagement remains mostly
face-to-face, there is evidence of increasing online engagement with a broader range
of civic issues, from local and indigenous to international and global (Depape 2012;
Friedel 2015; Tossutti 2007; Tupper 2014). Not surprisingly, these shifting patterns
and understandings of youth civic engagement in Canada raised questions for
educational stakeholders in terms of what formal education is doing or might do to
support the types of learning needed to assist young people meaningfully engage in
civic matters.
Attention to civic learning in formal education contexts continued to increase
gradually in Canada during this period. Broadening understandings of civic learning,
often associated with “western” liberal and civic republican traditions, became
increasingly evident in different spheres of Canadian education (Bickmore 2014;
Osborne 2001; Sears 2004). Civic engagement experienced heightened consider-
ation, motivated in part by research undertaken in Canada and internationally
revealing increasing disengagement among youth in formal political activities and
increased interest in informal, participatory, and digital expressions of engagement
(e.g., Hughes and Sears 2008; International Association for the Evaluation of
Educational Achievement (IEA), Torney-Purta et al. 1999; Torney-Purta 2002;
Rothwell and Turcotte 2006).
Next, we explore briefly this heightened consideration of civic engagement in
relation to formal education as evidenced through educational studies, curriculum
policy reforms, and strengthened pedagogical practices undertaken within the Cana-
dian context in recent years. Doing so reveals a gradual transition from a focus on
engagement primarily as personal and social responsibility and learning about
formal political structures and processes as they are more so than what they could
be towards characterizations that encourage more active and critical expressions of
engagement through public issues, community service, and other more informal and
participatory expressions of engagement.
Educational studies. From the early 1990s onwards, notions of civic engagement
received increased attention in educational studies, in both Canadian and
802 M. Evans et al.

international scholarship. Internationally, McLaughlin’s (1992) “minimalist” and

“maximalist” frame, Parker’s (2008) “traditional,” “progressive,” and “advanced”
continuum, Westheimer and Kahne’s (2004) distinction among “personally respon-
sible citizen,” “participatory citizen,” and “social justice-oriented citizen,” and, more
recently, Banks’ (2017) “failed,” “recognized,” “participatory,” and “transformative”
model provided contrasting understandings of civic engagement within broader
theoretical citizenship education frameworks. In Canada, Sears (1996) distinguished
“elitist” from “activist” conceptions of citizenship education. The “elitist” concep-
tion prioritizes prevailing narratives of nationhood and government, voting as a key
mechanism for citizenship participation, and preparing students to communicate
common facts and values, whereas the “activist” conception privileges students as
those who construct knowledge about citizenship and who learn to question the
function of institutions and structures in determining social organization. Strong-
Boag (1996) critiqued what she interpreted as elitist conceptions of citizenship
education that tended to exclude “pluralist” and “inclusive” elements of engagement
such as feminists, First Nations peoples, working-class groups. Shultz (2007) drew
attention to differences between neoliberal, radical, and transformationalist orienta-
tions within transnational contexts. More recent scholarly inquiry into educating for
civic engagement in Canada has focused more closely on the interconnections
between and among civic engagement and youths’ ethno-cultural and national
identities, issues of social justice, students’ lived experiences and concerns, learning
practices, and in some instances, transnational considerations (Bickmore 2014;
Broom 2016; Eidoo et al. 2011; Llewellyn et al. 2010; Peck et al. 2010).
Curriculum policy reforms. Broadened and more nuanced notions of citizenship
and civic learning have also become more evident in provincial and territorial
curriculum policy reforms (Bickmore 2006, 2014; Evans 2006; Hughes and Sears
2008; Llewellyn et al. 2007; Sears 2004). While earlier conceptions of citizenship
and civic learning remain, more recent reforms have encouraged greater attention to
some of the emerging connective themes mentioned earlier (e.g., cultural diversity
and pluralism, issues of social justice and equity, indigeneity education, democratic
engagement with conflict, global interdependence). Bickmore (2014) noted that,

although they still generally embed mainstream liberal individualist assumptions, Canadian
social sciences and citizenship curriculum policy documents reveal an increasingly nuanced,
inclusive picture of Canadian society and citizenship, rather than a simple master narrative of
nationalistic political history (p. 261).

While civic engagement as a learning goal has received continuing attention

through history, social science, and civics curricula, increased attention to youth
engagement has also been evident through other subject areas, cross-curricular
policy documents (related to such areas Character education, Equity education,
Sustainability education), and day-to-day school-based governance, discipline, and
community service guidelines.
In Ontario, for example, a Citizenship Education Framework was introduced in
2013 to provide general curriculum guidance (K-12) to “bring citizenship
50 Youth Civic Engagement and Formal Education in Canada: Shifting. . . 803

education to life, not only in Social Studies, History, and Geography, but in many
other subjects as well” (The Ontario Ministry of Education 2018, p. 10). Four main
themes of citizenship education are highlighted in the Framework: (1) active
participation (work for the common good in local, national, and global communi-
ties), (2) identity (a sense of personal identity as a member of various communi-
ties), (3) attributes (character traits, values, and habits of mind), and (4) structures
(power and systems within societies). This framework is complemented by a range
of core learning goals and specific topics for each grade and subject (Ontario
Ministry of Education 2013, p. 7). This deepening attention to civic engagement
has also been evident in broader system-wide policy documents such as Achieving
Excellence: A Renewed Vision for Education in Ontario (Ontario Ministry of
Education 2014) where creating “actively engaged citizens” (p. 1) is identified as
a fundamental purpose of Ontario’s schools.
While an increasing commitment to civic engagement in education policy
across Canada is evident, a variety of concerns have been voiced. Provincial policy
guidance is often viewed as strong in rhetoric but vague in terms of what goals are
to be given priority and/or what depth of coverage is expected. Such uncertainty,
coupled with teachers’ considerable autonomy in how curriculum is interpreted,
leaves teachers to choose what types of civic learning are experienced by students.
Consequently, learning experiences remain uneven and fragmented. Learning
intentions that intersect with understandings and practices of civic engagement
such as identity, power, social justice, and controversial issues are given low
priority and are often avoided and/or omitted in practice altogether (Bickmore
2006; Evans 2006; MacDonald 2013; MacDonald et al. 2015; Priestley et al.
2012).
Some scholars have also pointed to continuing undertones of harmony building,
compliance, and a privileging of certain kinds of knowledge. Llewellyn et al. (2010),
for example, suggest that civic engagement,

is almost always preceded or coupled by concepts of the informed, responsible, and dutiful
citizen (Llewellyn et al. 2010, 11–12). The implication is that only when students have
“procedural knowledge” and “legislative knowledge” (know how to do something), they are
ready for civic engagement (p. 798).
Only occasionally do government documents interrogate courses of action that confront
complex relationships of power that are fundamental to the democratic process. Even rarer
are occasions when guidelines explore student aptitude for civil disobedience, protests, or
boycotts; actions that are often considered unpatriotic, regardless of the political stakes at
play (p. 803).

Llewellyn et al. (2007, p. 31) have noted that behavioral codes of conduct (e.g.,
Ontario Schools Code of Conduct),

tend to envision ideal civic behaviour as being compliant and obedient. The critical-thinking
skills enumerated in all of the curriculum guidelines do not appear to apply to the regulations
governing students’ behaviour in schools. The behavioural guidelines, then, tend to be
consistent with the vision of personally responsible citizenship. . .while civic education
guidelines tend, occasionally, toward more participatory visions. . . (p. 32).
804 M. Evans et al.

The intent here seems to be to guide youth behavior both in school and in the community,
generally in relationship to adhering to laws, and respecting others – conforming to human
rights codes.
In their study analyzing the ways newly mandated civics course guidelines in the
provinces of Alberta, British Columbia, and Ontario interpreted active citizenship, Kennelly
and Llewellyn (2011) found that active citizenship is consistently coupled [in course doc-
uments] with cautions about the importance of compliant behavior (i.e., ethics, duty, and
responsibility) and is distanced from seemingly inappropriate participation in civic dissent.
These concerns have been further complicated by questions being raised about colonialism,
aspects of difference, about whose knowledge counts, and whose interests are being served
through curriculum policy reforms and schooling practices (Abdi 2014; Dei 2014; Kennelly
2009; Peck et al. 2010).

Strengthened pedagogical practices. Although a continuing focus on civic engage-

ment in relation to formal politics in local and national contexts is evident, a variety of
classroom, schoolwide, and community-based resources have been developed by edu-
cators that support more informal and participatory civic learning experiences. These
resources often reflect a variety of inquiry-oriented, interactive, and sometimes, experi-
ential learning approaches and practices that often take students beyond the classroom
into the community and in some instances, internationally (through online and first-hand
experiences). (Three examples of interesting work underway to support inquiry and
participatory-oriented civic learning experiences in schools are Maximum City (https://
maximumcity.ca/); Leave Out Violence Everywhere (LOVE) (https://leaveoutviolence.
org/); The Social Innovation Student Symposium (2015) (https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=P1yTuXhTrAs). It should be noted that these examples represent only a small
proportion of pedagogical work underway and offer varying perspectives about and
approaches to the types of learning to be encouraged.) Public issue/action projects,
model town councils, peace-building programs, public information exhibits, community
participation activities, online international linkages, involvement in day-to-day school-
based governance, and youth forums, for example, are some of the practices that have
been developed to assist students to become better informed, to promote inquiry, and to
engage in a range of current civic themes and issues (Bickmore 2014; Chen and
Goodreau 2009; Evans 2008; MacDonald 2013; Molina-Girón 2013). A wide range
of stakeholders, including teacher federations and provincial subject councils (e.g.,
British Columbia Teachers’ Federation, Ontario History and Social Science Teachers’
Association), organizations and NGOs (e.g., CIVIX, Samara Centre for Democracy,
War Child Canada), the education divisions of local and national media organizations
(e.g., CBC, TVOntario, Toronto Star), and various government departments (locally,
provincially, and nationally), have supported this direction.
Widespread implementation of these types of approaches, however, remains lim-
ited. Various studies point out that classroom teaching and learning practices continue
to be largely teacher-directed, mostly emphasizing knowledge acquisition and skill
development (e.g., political structures and systems, governmental history, legislative
processes, improving skills in communication and collaboration), suggesting that
teaching and learning practices continue to focus more on knowing about and thinking
about rather than engaging in (Faden 2012; Hughes and Sears 2008; Kennelly 2009;
Llewellyn et al. 2010; Molina-Girón 2013; Sears 2004). Engaging in, if practiced at
50 Youth Civic Engagement and Formal Education in Canada: Shifting. . . 805

all, is linked to increased awareness of aspects of participation related to formal politics

(e.g., voting, joining a political party), community service (which may or may not
enhance participation of civic engagement), and/or the possibility of some minimal
form of engagement in school governance (e.g., student council). Bickmore (2014) has
noted that there is often little attention to, or consideration of, how school-based
citizenship learning opportunities implicitly communicate students’ lived citizenship
curriculum in the form of patterns of discipline, conflict management within the
school, school councils, and community service programming.
Results from various studies have found that civic learning experiences for Cana-
dian students remain varied among students with differing identity affiliations (e.g.,
race, class, culture, gender, religion, region), signaling variable learning opportunities
(Bickmore 2014; Claes et al. 2009; Kennelly 2009; Kennelly and Llewellyn 2011;
Peck et al. 2010; Tupper et al. 2010). These studies have shown how Canadian
students’ civic learning experiences are often not responsive to and/or are discon-
nected from their lives and own ideas of democracy and citizenship. In their three-year
study, Tupper et al. (2010) examined “the relationship between formal citizenship
education programs and students’ perceptions of themselves as citizens, especially as
these relate to issues of equity and difference” (p. 337) in two Saskatchewan urban
high schools. Jackson is a school in a diverse working-class neighborhood with a
sizeable indigenous population, and Mackenzie is a school in a mostly white, middle
class neighborhood. Results revealed that while students articulated similar “official”
liberal notions of “universal” citizenship at an abstract level, their experiences varied
given their social location. The authors concluded that,

Students at Mackenzie are better able to take up citizenship in uncomplicated, less ambiv-
alent ways because of their social location: their experiences, visions for the future, and
understandings of themselves fit with the official discourses articulated through citizenship
education in the curriculum . . . Students at Jackson understand in similar ways the rights and
responsibilities of the citizen but their social locations complicate their ability to take up
‘good’ citizenship: their experiences, visions for the future, and understandings of them-
selves do not fit with the discourse of citizenship available in officially sanctioned curricu-
lum. Because of this, citizenship becomes a site of ambivalence for these students (p. 357).

While on the one hand youth are often seen as playing a leading role in
contributing to re-defining and authoring the meaning and scope of civic engage-
ment and forms of civic engagement, they continue to be predominantly regarded as
passive recipients within formal education spheres of an education intended to
prepare them for a particular (more formal) form of civic engagement.

Additional Issues and Challenges

In relation to the shifting expressions of youth civic engagement in Canada and the
variant ways in which educating for youth civic engagement has been envisaged and
approached in formal education (K-12), different studies have provided further
explanation and clarification of some of the subtleties associated with emerging
806 M. Evans et al.

understandings and foci of youth engagement and disengagement (Kennelly 2009b;

Llewellyn et al. 2007, 2010). Some of these studies, for example, illustrate how
youth civic engagement and/or disengagement is distinctly nuanced, linked to a
variety of factors including, for example, gender, race, cultural background, educa-
tion, household income, family civic participation influences, and contextual cir-
cumstances (Broom 2016; Dlamini et al. 2009; Eidoo 2016; Hanvey and Kunz 2000;
Hall et al. 2001). Some highlight a growing disconnect between youth’ and politi-
cians’ values and interests and democratic institutions, while others consider the
availability of new approaches to civic engagement, including the increasing use of
the internet and social media (Loader and Mercea 2011; Raynes-Goldie and Walker
2008; Uldam and Askanius 2013).
Accurate understandings of how young Canadians are engaging in civic matters
are further complicated by the lack of comprehensive data on young Canadians’
engagement in civic matters beyond voting and ongoing discussions about what
should be considered as civic engagement. According to Llewellyn et al. (2007),
research studies often “conflate involvement in charitable direct-service
volunteering, community organizations and even sports with involvement in polit-
ical interest groups” (p. 14). Their study found that involvement in charitable and
co-curricular activities is high but also found little evidence that these activities
translate into increased engagement in civic matters. Some scholars of youth civic
engagement have indeed advocated for a broader definition of civic engagement that
includes engagement with emerging institutions and activities that achieve the same
purpose as larger, longstanding “normal political” organizations (Ho et al. 2015;
Turcotte 2015b).
Additional issues are also evident in relation to formal education contexts. Studies
conducted with youth across Canada have suggested that many students have
developed only initial and partial notions of civic engagement and its value. For
youth themselves, notions of civic engagement are often associated with good
behavior such as volunteering in community, cleaning up parks, assisting the elderly,
and voting (Chareka and Sears 2005, 2006; Llewellyn et al. 2010; Llewellyn and
Westheimer 2010). In one study, students from various backgrounds from two high
schools in Regina were invited to create and explain visual images depicting their
perceptions of “good” citizenship. The majority of these students reproduced main-
stream citizenship notions such as national pride, official multiculturalism discourse,
and caring for the environment, family, and neighbors. These young people tended to
understand citizenship in individual rather than social or political terms and reported
believing that democracy and social justice had been already realized (Tupper and
Cappello 2012).
Additional studies also reveal that teachers report concerns about their own
preparedness for teaching citizenship and civic engagement and identify a need for
ongoing professional learning support (Bickmore 2005; Evans 2006; Hughes and
Sears 2008; Peck et al. 2010). Teaching and learning practices that attend to the
critical purposes of civic learning and engagement, including inquiry, equity and
social justice themes, controversial issues, experiential civic engagement activities,
are complicated to implement. Learning about and having opportunities to practice
50 Youth Civic Engagement and Formal Education in Canada: Shifting. . . 807

civic engagement can also be very controversial and many teachers are concerned
about the broader implications in terms of how, for example, parents and community
members will respond (MacDonald 2013). While some professional development
opportunities and resources have been developed in Canada to support teachers’
work in this area, concerns continue to be raised about the provision of suitable
professional learning in initial teacher education and in-service professional learning
programs to effectively address the complexities of teaching and learning for
democratic engagement in classrooms and school communities. Lastly, these issues
and challenges are further exacerbated by a variety of factors associated with
educational change that can either mobilize and/or inhibit steps forward in schools.
Inadequate financial/resource support, low curricular status/priority, the hierarchical
nature of formal education, and other factors influence the extent to which steps
towards engaged citizenship for all students can be realized (Claes et al. 2009; Stolle
and Cruz 2005).

Concluding Considerations

This chapter has briefly explored shifting expressions of youth civic engagement in
Canada and the variant ways in which educating for youth civic engagement has
been envisaged and approached through formal education (K-12). We have
contended that while expressions of youth civic engagement have been for the
most part moderate, varied, local, institutional, and tempered historically through a
filter of personal and social responsibility, there has been a gradual shift of emphasis
towards less formal, digital, and rights-based representations. This shift of emphasis
has been influenced by a variety of personal and contextual factors over time.
We also considered how understandings of educating for civic engagement
through formal education in Canada have also undergone a gradual transition,
moving from a focus on civic duty, deference, and formal political structures and
processes as they are to more recent characterizations that encourage more informal,
exploratory, and critical understandings of engagement through public issues, from
the local to the global. Interwoven in these understandings of engagement are themes
such as identity, cultural diversity, pluralism, and issues of social justice and equity.
Indicators of these are found in spheres of Canadian educational research, curricu-
lum policy reform, and strengthened pedagogical practices.
Moving towards these broadened and more complex understandings of educating
for civic engagement through formal education have proven to be problematic,
complicated by a variety of associated challenges. Curriculum ambiguity, under-
tones of compliance, an avoidance of certain controversial concepts and issues, and
varied understandings of engagement among students with differing identity affili-
ations, for example, all signal uneven and fragmented access and learning experi-
ences. Systems-wide implementation remains mostly random and minimal. These
challenges are further exacerbated by a variety of factors associated with educational
change that can both mobilize and/or inhibit steps forward.
808 M. Evans et al.

As research undertaken in Canada and internationally continues to reveal deep-

ened understandings of youth civic engagement, it is imperative that educational
stakeholders acknowledge and be responsive to the disconnects between the ways
that youth are participating in civic affairs (and the reasons why) and the learning
opportunities they are provided in formal school contexts to make meaning of these
experiences and to propel deeper civic engagement in public affairs across local,
national, and international spheres, while at the same time keeping in mind, as Biesta
(2011) has reminded us, that a good deal of civic engagement learning takes place in
contexts outside of formal education.

Cross-References

▶ Constructions of “Youth” and “Activism” in Lebanon

▶ Education for Youth Civic and Political Action in Australia
▶ The Development of Civic Participation Among Youth in Singapore
▶ Youth Engagement and Citizenship in England

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Supporting Active Citizenship Among
Young People at Risk of Social Exclusion: 51
The Role of Adult Education

Nathalie Huegler

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 814
Active Participatory Citizenship: Concepts and Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 815
Active Citizenship and Adult Education in Contexts of Neoliberalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 816
Redistribution, Employability, or Influencing Values: Framing Active Citizenship
as Response to Social Exclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 818
The Role of Adult Education in Promoting Active and Participatory Citizenship Among
Young Adults: Perspectives from a Recent European Research Project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 820
Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 820
Perspectives on the Meanings of Active and Participatory Citizenship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 821
‘Activating’ Individuals to Make Contributions or Creating Level Playing Fields:
Selected Instances of How Promoting Participation May Be Framed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 822
Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 825
Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 826
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 826

Abstract
This chapter examines different conceptualizations and perspectives from the
literature and reflects on findings from a recent European research project while
considering the role of adult education in promoting active and participatory
citizenship among young people considered at risk of social exclusion. Promoting
active citizenship (alongside equity and social cohesion) is an objective of the
European Union’s lifelong learning strategy, but the concept is not clearly
defined, and there are a range of different interpretations, framings, and dis-
courses associated with it. Critical analyses suggest that contemporary contexts

N. Huegler (*)
UCL Institute of Education, London, UK
School of Education and Social Work, University of Sussex, Falmer, UK
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 813
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_67
814 N. Huegler

of neoliberalism support limited versions of active citizenship which focus on

adaptation and accommodation to economic imperatives, casting adult education
mainly in the role of promoting skills and knowledge for “employability.” The
chapter explores the links between discourse types of social exclusion suggested
by Levitas (The inclusive society? Social exclusion and new labour. Palgrave,
Basingstoke, 1998) and framings of active citizenship, as well as considering
implications for the role of adult education. Selected findings from a recent
EU-funded international research collaboration which involved educational
programs in 20 European countries are analyzed, identifying instances of how
promoting active participation may be framed differently, for example, as focus-
ing on the responsibility to make contributions or as emphasizing equality and
rights.

Keywords
Adult education · Active and participatory citizenship · Social exclusion · Young
people and young adults · Europe · Neoliberalism

Introduction

This chapter explores the role of adult education in supporting active participa-
tory citizenship, focusing on programs aimed at young people considered at risk
of social exclusion in different European countries. “Active citizenship” is a
broad concept which features in policy documents on education and lifelong
learning of the European Union (EU), such as the ET2020 Strategic Framework
European Council (2009) and the subsequent Joint Implementation Report
(European Union 2015). However, while adult education has a tradition of
being linked to social justice and democratic participation, its contemporary
role and function as a vehicle toward inclusion and active citizenship is subject
to debate (Field and Schemmann 2017; Martin 2003; Olssen 2006; Mikelatou and
Arvanitis 2018).
The chapter will start with definitions, key concepts, and discourses, before
moving on to reflections on a recent European research project, “Adult Education
as a Means to Active Participatory Citizenship” (EduMAP), conducted between
2016 and 2019 across several EU countries and Turkey. (EduMAP, in which the
author was involved as a researcher, was funded under the European Union’s
Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation program (EduMAP, H2020-YOUNG-
2014-2015/H2020-YOUNG-SOCIETY-2015), Grant Agreement number 693388.
The research involved academic and industry partners from Finland, Estonia,
Germany, Greece, Hungary, Turkey, and the UK. https://cordis.europa.eu/project/
rcn/200113/factsheet/en. This chapter expresses the author’s own views.) This
research focused on a variety of educational programs for young people and
young adults considered at risk of social exclusion – a concept which will be
discussed in this chapter.
51 Supporting Active Citizenship Among Young People at Risk of Social. . . 815

The definition of adult education used in this chapter is broad, referring to both
formal and informal learning activities beyond compulsory (school) education which
take place in a variety of settings and contexts. This may include, for example,
courses at centers or colleges aimed at supporting basic skills (e.g., literacy, language
courses); so-called “second chance” education aimed at obtaining qualifications
(e.g., school leaving certificates); vocational education and training; through to
more informal programs, projects, and initiatives, such as sociocultural and youth
education (Kersh and Toiviainen 2017). While higher education may be considered
as part of adult education in its broadest sense, this is not a focus in this chapter.
Lifelong learning is sometimes used interchangeably with adult education in the
policy and academic literature, but as discussed in this chapter, the former term has
been critiqued for its ideological connotations (Biesta 2006; Desjardins 2013;
Mikelatou and Arvanitis 2018).
Furthermore, definitions of “young people” and “young adults” are diverse in
terms of their starting and end ages. One of the widest ranges (13–30) is reported by
the Council of Europe and EU (2019) joint Youth Partnership for the purposes of
youth policy, while Eurostat (2019) uses the range of 15–29 for statistical report
purposes. Such wide age ranges have some obvious implications given the multitude
of life contexts within such a “cohort,” adding to the many other factors of diversity
characterizing the experiences and situations of young people and young adults in
Europe. Acknowledging this diversity, this chapter follows the age range of the
earlier mentioned EduMAP research program, which considered educational pro-
grams for young people and young adults between 16 and 30 (Kersh and Toiviainen
2017).

Active Participatory Citizenship: Concepts and Models

Concepts of active and participatory citizenship are diverse, owing not least to the
variety of traditions and notions of citizenship across different geographical, histor-
ical, and ideological contexts. Peterson and Brock (2017) suggest that citizenship
can be seen both as a (legal) relationship between individuals and the state and as a
wider relational practice of active human engagement with their communities, thus
taking place at a variety of levels. Hoskins et al. (2012), undertaking to develop a
clearer definition of what constitutes the idea of participatory citizenship within the
European Union, also highlight the importance of framing the concept beyond legal
perspectives and consider the influences of liberal, communitarian, civic republican,
and critical traditions. They find that recent models of participatory citizenship in
countries such as the UK and the Netherlands have blended liberal and communi-
tarian models, emphasizing community volunteering in combination with reduced
state involvement, while France is typically cited as a key context for the civic
republican model, focusing on democratic structures and processes. Critical models
of citizenship highlight issues of social justice and power dynamics, and as such they
correspond less to national traditions but rather to critiques thereof. Hoskins et al.’s
(2012, p. 17) proposed definition is to consider active and participatory citizenship as
816 N. Huegler

involving “[p]articipation in civil society, community and / or political life, charac-

terized by mutual respect and non-violence and in accordance with human rights and
democracy,” which may involve activities ranging from volunteering through to civil
protest.
Jochum et al. (2005) delineate different domains to map active citizenship
practices, such as formal versus informal engagement and individual versus collec-
tive forms of action. They outline three main dimensions: the political level denoting
the relationships between citizens and the state; the social level concerning the
relationship between individuals and communities and/or wider society; and
the individual level, where themes of agency (e.g., the choice to get involved or
not) and subjectivity (of defining specific acts as citizenship practice) become
apparent. A model highlighting different dimensions of active and participatory
citizenship was also used as part of the EduMAP research project, distinguishing
between socioeconomic, sociocultural, and politico-legal dimensions (Toiviainen
et al. 2019; Schmidt-Behlau 2019). These refer, respectively, to participation in
systems which contribute to meeting individual and communal material needs; to
interactive practices taking place across diverse communities and societies; and
to participation in decision-making processes at formal and informal levels, based
on an understanding of rights and values underpinning democracy.
Various models consider the interaction of agency, opportunities, and structure in
either promoting or posing barriers to participation. Rubenson and Desjardins
(2009), in the context of participation in adult education, describe a model of
bounded agency which focuses on the interactions between structural conditions
(set through the nature of welfare, economic, and educational policies in particular
countries) and individual capabilities and situations. They argue that regimes based
on the “Nordic” welfare state model are more likely to foster conditions which help
resolve barriers both at structural and institutional levels or in the situational contexts
of individuals. Boeren (2017) considers participation through a model of three
levels: the micro-level of individual agency, circumstances, and capabilities, the
macro-level of state policies, and the meso-level of available participation opportu-
nities and institutions providing them, including their flexibility and accessibility.

Active Citizenship and Adult Education in Contexts

of Neoliberalism

The range of models highlights the complex multilevel and multifaceted character
of citizenship participation. Implicitly underlying many models is the notion of
active citizenship as an emancipatory practice linked to fostering social inclusion.
However, there are also perspectives raising concerns about the risk that
active citizenship is liable to be instrumentalized as a form of governance or
governmentality in the context of neoliberalism, where individual responsibility is
emphasized without structural conditions fostering equality (Olssen 2006; Mikelatou
and Arvanitis 2018; Biesta 2006; ▶ Chap. 10, “Neoliberalism, Citizenship, and
Education: A Policy Discourse Analysis” by Wilkins). Neoliberalism has spread
51 Supporting Active Citizenship Among Young People at Risk of Social. . . 817

globally from the 1970s and 1980s onward as an ideology which transfers the logic
of economics, specifically in market-oriented forms, across domains of
everyday life.
Wendy Brown (2015, 2016) argues that in its most unbridled contemporary form,
neoliberalism resembles the business model of an investment bank, affecting both
the governance of states and expectations on the self-governance of individuals – a
shift from political to economic conceptualizations of citizenship. These processes
are riddled with paradox, as part of which neoliberalism leads new binds which tie
individuals into the fate and logic of corporations and state organizations following
profit- and growth-maximizing strategies. As a result, Brown argues, the needs of the
individual are liable to be sacrificed if they conflict with interests such as national
economic growth. Examples in recent years include the rhetoric of austerity and the
rollback of the welfare state in various European countries. Neoliberalism bundles
individual agency and blame in a way that forces people to “fend for themselves”
(Brown 2016, p. 10), potentially facing blame not just for their own misfortune or
lack of success but also bearing responsibility for the role they play in promoting or
“downgrading” the health of their national economies. At the extreme, citizenship
under neoliberalism “is stripped of substantive political engagement and voice, and
citizen virtue becomes uncomplaining accommodation to the economic life of the
nation” (ibid.).
In the field of (adult) education, neoliberalism affects policies and practices in a
number of ways. Education becomes a key policy tool for influencing productivity
and competitiveness, described by Biesta (2006) in the term learning economy,
leading to a greater emphasis on formal education perceived as promoting the skills
levels and qualifications required for economic growth (Desjardins 2013). Thus,
while EU lifelong learning policy documents include the promotion of active
citizenship and social inclusion as stated aims, at operational levels they focus on
employability and adaptability to economic demands (Field and Schemmann 2017;
Mikelatou and Arvanitis 2018; Biesta 2006).
The discourse shift from education as a right to learning as an individual
responsibility, or citizen duty, has implications in a range of areas: on the one
hand, it leads to a focus on programs deemed to promote employability, rather
than being based on the aspirations and needs of individuals and communities.
Martin (2003) describes this as an overemphasis on “learning for earning” as
opposed to learning for yearning. Potential adult learners are positioned as respon-
sible for their own self-management, development, and adaptability, with a view to
maximizing their chances to compete on the job market, reducing reliance on welfare
systems and thus contributing to national economic growth as worthy citizens
(Walker 2009). Not participating in learning and employment, on the other hand,
constructed as attributable to individual failings or self-exclusion, becomes “tanta-
mount to non-citizenship” (ibid., p. 346). Young people who neither engage in
education, training, or employment are labelled through the negative acronym
“NEET,” a term which (having spread from its initial UK policy context to other
European countries) emphasizes what they are not doing (Yates and Payne 2006;
Thurlby-Campbell and Bell 2015). In the context of their individualized
818 N. Huegler

responsibilization (Brown 2016), they are not only seen as disturbing their own
future prospects but constructed as a collective threat to the economic success of
nations or supranational entities such as the EU.
There is widespread consensus that neoliberalism is not a singular concept, but
rather heterogenous, diverse, and interacting with a range of other factors and
influences in different contexts and locations around the world (Brown 2016). This
includes “softer” forms which may formally emphasize values such as social inclu-
sion and participation but still retain the key tenets of a market-oriented ideology,
with the effect of privileging economic profitability over social justice concerns such
as universalizing and equalizing access to public resources (Walker 2009; Mikelatou
and Arvanitis 2018). At the same time, despite the widespread character of neolib-
eralism, there is also resistance toward its ideology. Thus, while both active citizen-
ship and adult education are significantly affected by contexts such as austerity,
individual responsibilization, and the dominance of economic concerns across life
domains, responses to these contexts are more diverse than Brown’s bleak picture of
uncomplaining accommodation.
Before turning to perspectives from professionals and young adults in selected
adult education programs in Europe, the following section considers the framings of
active and participatory citizenship and of adult education as responses to social
exclusion. As a conceptual pair which gained prominence in European policy
discourse from the 1980s onward, social inclusion and exclusion feature in
the lifelong learning policy documents of the European Union alongside active
citizenship, considered as related and interacting (Mikelatou and Arvanitis 2018).
However, as the framework by Levitas (1998) discussed below indicates, discourses
of social exclusion are varied and in their intersections with neoliberalism may
emphasize, respectively, the need for processes of redistribution of power and
resources, integration through labor market participation, or focus on the modifica-
tion of individual behaviors and values. These competing and overlapping dis-
courses can be linked to different conceptualizations of active and participatory
citizenship, with implications for the role of adult education.

Redistribution, Employability, or Influencing Values: Framing

Active Citizenship as Response to Social Exclusion

Levitas’ (1998) framework of three ideal-type discourses of social exclusion was

developed in the context of the then New Labour government in the UK in the late
1990s, which placed particular emphasis on social exclusion in public policy
debates. As part of this, a dedicated Social Exclusion Unit was established which
in its subsequent form (the Social Exclusion Taskforce) continued until its disband-
ment under the incoming Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government in
2010, at which point the policy language shifted to other terms (notably the “Big
Society” and austerity). The European Union similarly adopted social in- and
exclusion as key policy concerns as part of the Lisbon process (Levitas 2004).
51 Supporting Active Citizenship Among Young People at Risk of Social. . . 819

The first discourse (which Levitas termed redistributionist or RED) arose from
the field of critical social policy and maintains a strong conceptual link with poverty.
It focuses on the processes through which people are shut out (fully or partially) from
participation in systems which could bring about their social integration in a society
(Walker and Walker 1997). While poverty may be one reason for exclusion, other
factors such as inequalities and discrimination are also significant (and overlapping).
Thus, the contrast to exclusion is a “version of citizenship which calls for substantial
redistribution of power and wealth” (Levitas 1998, p. 7), implying resistance to the
trends and processes which Brown (2015, 2016) outlines as being central to neolib-
eralism. Applied to adult education policies and practice, this discourse type empha-
sizes the transformative power of education to bring about greater social justice and
promote resistance against inequalities – a “critical and progressive adult education
[. . .that is] part of the process of fighting back and showing that there is never no
alternative” (Martin 2003, p. 577). Similarly, in his discussion of the role of
citizenship in further education in the UK, Hopkins (2014) argues that active
citizenship goes beyond uncritically following established norms and beliefs but
rather involves recognition of the possibility of social change and action toward it.
The second type of discourse emphasizes social integration through the labor
market, positioning paid work not only as the key remedy against poverty but also as
a form of social and cultural integration (Levitas 1998). In doing so, the social
integrationist discourse (SID) downplays inequalities and exclusion which may
persist or even worsen through paid employment (such as wage exploitation or
potentially negative impacts on health or care responsibilities). SID thus links with
softened versions of neoliberalism, such as inclusive liberalism (Walker 2009),
which emphasize social integration but maintain the dominant status of economic
perspectives. In the context of adult education and active citizenship, this discourse
type promotes a focus on employability as a route to socioeconomic participation but
focuses less on capabilities of “controlling conditions of existence [. . .than on]
choice within existing conditions” (Brown 2015, p. 206). Integration thus becomes
a form of adaptation to optimize life chances.
The third discourse, termed, perhaps somewhat provocatively, moral underclass
discourse or MUD by Levitas (1998), focuses on issues such as dependency on the
welfare state or other forms of deviance from key cultural norms (e.g., involvement
in crime, unemployment) and attributes this to problematic behaviors or deficient
moral values of individuals or groups, as infamously coined in Murray’s (1990, p. 5)
claim that the underclass represented “a subset of poor people who chronically live
off mainstream society. . .without participating in it.” MUD easily becomes gen-
dered and racialized, through tropes such as single (teenage) mothers as long-term
benefit recipients, while in multiethnic societies the exclusion of migrants and
minority groups may be blamed on their own failures to assimilate rather than on
discriminatory structures and practices. The individualizing of responsibility and
blame reflected in this discourse links with Brown’s (2016) characterization of
neoliberalism in its most unbridled forms, although the language chosen by Levitas
for this discourse also alludes to the double value standards inherent in English
Victorian society. Both active citizenship and adult education viewed through this
820 N. Huegler

lens emphasize adherence to and active promotion of values and behaviors based on
models of virtue, which may or may not be framed in nationalized terms. In England,
the requirement of publicly funded educational institutions to actively promote
“Fundamental British Values” may be seen as an example of assimilatory practice
aimed at preventing perceived deviance particularly among Muslim young
people (McGhee and Zhang 2017; ▶ Chap. 27, ““Fundamental British Values”:
The Teaching of Nation, Identity, and Belonging in the United Kingdom” by
Habib, in this volume).
The variable manifestations of neoliberalism and their intersection with a variety
of contexts geographically and over time mean that the discourses, while competing,
also appear in ways that are enmeshed and overlapping. It is also important to point
out some significant limitations of the social exclusion concept overall, highlighted
by Levitas (2004) as (1) the dichotomy of insiders and outsiders, casting the latter as
a minority and the former as the mainstream; (2) the neglect and subsequent
legitimization of inequalities among those seen as “included”; and (3) the failure
to focus on what sets the very rich apart from the “mainstream” (i.e., ownership of
productive property). Notwithstanding these limitations, social exclusion and inclu-
sion have maintained currency in policy and academic discourses, which may be
attributed in part to their conceptual elasticity (ibid.), and in a broader view, Levitas’
framework of discourses can be applied to delineate a range of perspectives on
participation and its barriers.

The Role of Adult Education in Promoting Active

and Participatory Citizenship Among Young Adults: Perspectives
from a Recent European Research Project

Background

The EduMAP research considered the perspectives of young adult learners, educa-
tional practitioners, and policy makers involved in 40 educational programs in
20 countries (Schmidt-Behlau 2019; Tacchi et al. 2019). The research followed a
qualitative framework and was conducted through semi-structured individual and
focus group interviews, reaching over 800 participants, including 475 young people
and young adults. The programs ranged from formal (including vocationally
focused, “second chance,” basic skills and language programs) to informal contexts
(e.g., sociocultural, mentoring, or youth work-based programs). The life contexts of
young people and young adults participating in the programs were diverse and
included having experienced public care over the course of their childhood and
youth; having left formal education without or with limited qualifications; unem-
ployment; experiences of migration, including as refugees; belonging to an ethnic or
other minority group (e.g., young people from Roma communities); homelessness;
experiencing health difficulties or disabilities; or being in prison. Thus, their situa-
tions were liable to being considered by professionals and policy makers as poten-
tially vulnerable or at risk of social exclusion, even though this was not necessarily
51 Supporting Active Citizenship Among Young People at Risk of Social. . . 821

the young people’s own view of their situation (EduMAP 2017; Schmidt-Behlau
2019; Tacchi et al. 2019).
The research focused on the conceptualization and operationalization of active
citizenship and related concepts in adult education contexts; on perceptions and
experiences of barriers, vulnerability, and social exclusion; and on the ways in
which the selected programs promoted competences and skills relevant to participa-
tion. For the latter aspect, the research differentiated between socioeconomic, socio-
cultural, and politico-legal dimensions of citizenship (Schmidt-Behlau 2019).
Interviews with young people and young adults focused on exploring their life
situations and experiences, not least because few of them directly related to abstract
terms such as “active citizenship.”
Overall, it is important to stress that the full findings of the research were rich and
wide-ranging, indicating diversity across contexts as well as some common themes,
and it is far beyond the scope of this chapter to report on these in any detail. Instead,
the following focuses on particular instances of framing participation, which do
not necessarily correspond to the overall approaches of programs, nor can they be
taken as representative for the perspectives of professionals and young adults
involved with these programs. Further publications related to findings from the
research can be found both on the project website (https://blogs.uta.fi/edumap/)
and on the European Commission’s project platform (https://cordis.europa.eu/pro
ject/rcn/200113/results/en).

Perspectives on the Meanings of Active and Participatory Citizenship

Even setting aside the multitude of linguistic contexts across the countries and
communities in the research, the vocabulary and conceptualizations of active citi-
zenship were found to be diverse and context-dependent. These contexts include,
similar as in Boeren’s (2017) model of participation, the macro-level context of state
and international policies relating to adult education, citizenship, and social inclu-
sion; the meso-level of institutions and organizations involved in the particular field
of adult education; and the micro-level of the specific program and of young adults’
individual experiences.
A key finding was that for the young adults involved in the research, ideas related
to active and participatory citizenship were rooted in their everyday life contexts and
linked with their aspirations, goals, needs, and participation barriers they had
experienced (Schmidt-Behlau 2019; Tacchi et al. 2019). For example, for many
young adults who had overcome situations of adversity with the help of someone
they considered a role model, active citizenship involved qualities such as being
helpful and supportive to others or aspiring, themselves, to act as role models.
Attributes of personal agency such as autonomy and self-responsibility were signif-
icant aspects of active citizenship practice for many young adults across country and
program contexts. Socioeconomic dimensions of citizenship participation, particu-
larly employment, were emphasized by many learners and educators, not just in
vocationally related programs (e.g., Schmidt-Behlau and Endrizzi 2018; Zarifis et al.
822 N. Huegler

2018a; Sabiescu 2018; Kuusipalo and Niiranen 2018a; Huegler et al. 2018a; Lawson
2018). One argument for this, provided by an educational practitioner in the UK, was
that meeting basic socioeconomic needs may be a prerequisite for considering other
forms of citizenship participation, following the logic of Maslow’s “hierarchy of
needs”:

. . . first of all I would imagine you have to have a roof over your head and you have to have
employment, and then maybe you’d want to think about citizenship [. . .] The bottom part
needs to be addressed first . . .. (Huegler et al. 2018b, p. 8)

Views on sociocultural dimensions were more diverse: for example, young adults
in Roma communities in Spain and Romania emphasized the significance of their
immediate family and community contexts which provided a source of strength and
security, mitigating against experiences of discrimination and marginalization in
wider society to which they felt less connected (Sabiescu 2018; Gordano 2018).
For many young people, ideas of active citizenship linked with a sense of belonging,
often at a local level, to a community or neighborhood. Concepts of identity and
belonging linked to national citizenship were more complex: for example, individual
young people in programs in the UK connected citizenship to a sense of national
pride, while ethnic minority young people and some professionals interviewed in
Ireland spoke of an ambivalent relationship with the term “citizenship” itself, often
grounded in experiences of hostile bureaucracies within immigration systems
(Huegler et al. 2018a; Huegler 2018a).
The greatest diversity of perspectives (among young people, but also among
professionals) existed in relation to political participation, and there are indications
from the research that this dimension is most sensitive to the context, settings,
content, and pedagogies of specific programs (Schmidt-Behlau 2019). While partic-
ipation in the job market or in groups or communities seemed to be accepted almost
universally as key aspects of citizenship practice, involvement in processes or
structures linked to democratic decision making or influencing societal conditions
held lower levels of priority among some. In some instances, this translated into a
disinterest in voting or expressed distrust in politicians and political systems (Zarifis
et al. 2018b; Huegler et al. 2018a; Schmidt-Behlau 2019). However, for other young
people, engaging politically and seeking to influence social change took a central
role – often in program contexts which actively supported political participation
through their content and the methods and pedagogies involved (e.g., informal
education program using democratic and participatory structures and approaches).

‘Activating’ Individuals to Make Contributions or Creating Level

Playing Fields: Selected Instances of How Promoting Participation
May Be Framed

Similar as with conceptualizations of active citizenship, perspectives on the role of

adult education in promoting participation also varied. Young adult learners were
51 Supporting Active Citizenship Among Young People at Risk of Social. . . 823

often focused above all on concrete aims such as gaining skills or a qualification
(if the program offered this), finding employment, or improving their life situations
in other ways. Among educational practitioners and policy makers, providing
support with integration and adaptation (e.g., learning how to find and keep employ-
ment for unemployed young people, or learning the local majority language for
young refugees and migrants) were key themes in some programs (Schmidt-Behlau
2019), with some perspectives linking to what Levitas (1998) described as the social
integrationist discourse on social exclusion. This took the form of focusing on skills
for employment, on further participation in adult education or making contributions
to the community. The following views from an educational practitioner and a local
policy maker, respectively, in a program in the Netherlands demonstrate this focus:

I think to be part of the society, to be an active and effective member of the society, you must
have a job. I think [this program] aims at integrating you in the society through job
creation. . .. (Lawson 2018, p. 5)
Whether you have a job or whether you’re on social support, you should be able to
contribute to the community. Because if you are on social support, it’s the taxes of a lot of
people that [are] coming to you, right, then, how would you be able to kind of give [a] hand
or help. (Lawson 2018, p. 4)

The onus in this perspective is mostly on individual learners to increase their

levels of “choice within existing conditions” (Brown 2015, p. 205) through work or
other contributions to the community. However, in the second quote, there is also
clear suggestion that the right to welfare support should come at the price of
community involvement (e.g., through volunteering), as repayment in lieu for
having received tax moneys paid by other citizens. This perspective juxtaposes
“active” citizen involvement with concerns about “passive” receipt of welfare
support and dependency, pointing to an intersection with Levitas’ (1989) “moral
underclass” discourse. A similar concern is also evident in the following view from a
local policy maker in the UK:

I do not want to create a dependency culture for learners on this program. We need to
develop them into active citizens, which is also about independent learning and taking
responsibility. And many people actually know all their rights but don’t always recognise
what their responsibilities are. (Huegler et al. 2018b, p. 13)

The perspective that it was up to young people to take responsibility for their
learning and life paths sometimes went hand in hand with a view that young people’s
own values, beliefs, or behaviors played a significant, or perhaps even the most
significant, role in their experiences of exclusion. Young people not in education,
employment, or training were a key example, with perspectives among some
educational practitioners and policy makers that problematized cultures of
entrenched worklessness, life path expectations from school to dole, or chaotic
lifestyles among some communities or young people (Huegler et al. 2018b). Another
example was perspectives on refugee integration in which specific groups, such as
single young men, were considered at risk of marginalization because their perceived
824 N. Huegler

norms and values were seen to conflict with those dominant in the “host” societies
(Kuusipalo and Niiranen 2018b).
While contributing to social change and social justice were part of many pro-
grams’ broad aims and visions, explicit reference to strategies for influencing
societal structures and conditions was less common. For example, two programs in
Ireland addressed issues of discrimination and racism experienced by ethnic minor-
ity young people, in one case through sports-based projects and in another through a
project which culminated in the production of an awareness-raising video resource
by young people (Huegler 2018a, b). In both cases the programs used informal and
youth-led approaches aimed at creating networks of solidarity, with educators acting
as facilitators rather than knowledge experts. The issues to be tackled through the
programs were based on young people’s own definitions and experiences, and
exclusion was above all considered through the prism of structural barriers and of
discrimination perpetuated by majority groups against minority groups, highlight-
ing, for example, the discrimination experienced by hijab-wearing young women in
employment contexts, sports, and public spaces. In both programs, young people,
supported by educational practitioners, advocated for equal access to opportunities
and resources and an even playing field, for themselves but also for future genera-
tions. A young woman on one of the programs explained how her realization that
other ethnic minority young people were facing similar issues influenced her moti-
vation to raise awareness on issues of discrimination:

I thought it was just me who faced it, or it was where I was living [. . .]. But the more people I
talked to, the more I realised it was actually like everybody had felt, or dealt with it, in
different ways. So that was one way I think it really impacted me, I was like ‘no, what
happened to me doesn’t necessarily need to happen to the next generation.’ (Huegler 2018b,
p. 10)

In another programe, based in the UK, a director highlighted the role of adult
education in relation to redistributing opportunities and resources. Referring to the
image of two banks of a river that is deep and fast-flowing, she described, on
one side, the range of participation opportunities, including further or higher educa-
tion, while on the other side, there were communities and individuals who felt
incapable of accessing them:

. . . on the other side of the river are some of our communities who don’t have access, don’t
believe they have access because [. . .] they still feel quite a distance between what that is,
there’s a river, it’s quite deep, it’s fast flowing and the conditions. . .[. . .] they think that is not
for them. Poverty in particular immediately impacts confidence, self-esteem. So for me, you
need to build a bridge between active citizenship and where actual communities are and not
be arrogant to think ‘why are you not coming across, you’ve got all this funding and stuff to
do.’ (Huegler et al. 2018b, p. 12)

Adult education, in this view, is considered as a possible means to bridge the gap
between opportunities and resources for participation on the one hand and individ-
uals and communities on the other. Facilitating this form of redistribution, however,
51 Supporting Active Citizenship Among Young People at Risk of Social. . . 825

requires policies and programs to be flexible and accessible, taking into account the
concepts of bounded agency by Rubenson and Desjardins (2009) and Boeren (2017)
discussed in this chapter. This is complicated by the fact that, through a multitude of
factors, adult education programs and educational practitioners themselves experi-
ence the constraints of bounded agency in contexts of neoliberalism.
Overall, what emerges from looking at these instances of how active participatory
citizenship may be framed by professionals and young adults is that adult education
as a potential means to promoting participation is subject to an array of contestations
regarding its role, purpose, and its own constructions of young people as agentic
citizens. At a time when adult education is facing a multitude of constraints,
pressures, and limitations in many countries (not least of funding, in contexts of
austerity), it is faced with – albeit limited – choices about which models and forms of
citizenship, participation, and inclusion it supports. The starting points for these
choices link to examining the range of discourses and meanings which abstract
concepts and policy statements may harbor.

Conclusions

This chapter has debated different conceptualizations of active and participatory

citizenship and their implications for the role of adult education. While lifelong
learning policy documents at European level make reference to promoting active
citizenship and social inclusion, the meanings of these concepts for different actors
and at different levels have remained underexplored. In contexts of neoliberalism,
adult education risks being reduced, first and foremost, to a strategy to enhance
employability and productivity. There are also justified doubts about whether
“active” and “participatory” citizenship is necessarily linked to ideas of greater
social justice or focuses predominantly on integration into existing systems or
remedial interventions for those considered particularly at risk of social exclusion.
Reflecting on the findings of recent European research on the roles which adult
education may take in promoting active and participatory citizenship among
young adults highlights the diversity and contextuality of understandings and
approaches. The young people and young adults in the research across programs
in 20 European countries related to active participation and citizenship above all in
the context of their own aspirations, goals, and experiences. Similarly, the very
different contexts of the programs researched have led to highly diverse approaches,
and discussing these with the level of detail in which they deserve to be considered
goes far beyond the scope of this chapter. While it is not suggested that distinct
discourses are representative of the approaches of specific programs or of individual
educational practitioners, the chapter has identified selected instances of how pro-
moting participation may be framed in adult education contexts. These instances
include (1) supporting the capacity of learners to make optimal use of available
(albeit potentially limited) opportunities and maximize choices as a result (especially
in relation to employment); (2) promoting specific attitudes, behaviors, and values
which support learners’ adaptation to societal norms and expectations in order to
826 N. Huegler

increase their participation; and (3) facilitating participation based on strategies that
aim to equalize and redistribute opportunities and resources, often starting with
processes of awareness raising. In the former two instances, active participatory
citizenship is more likely to be viewed as a responsibility, while the latter perspective
focuses on participation as a right.

Cross-References

▶ “Fundamental British Values”: The Teaching of Nation, Identity, and Belonging in

the United Kingdom
▶ Neoliberalism, Citizenship, and Education: A Policy Discourse Analysis

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Youth Citizenship in Sierra Leone: Everyday
Practice and Hope 52
Alice Chadwick

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 830
Youth: Age and Marginalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 831
Agency, Citizenship Practice, and Hoped-For Alternatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 832
Sierra Leone: Historical and Sociopolitical Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 833
Case Studies of Youth Citizenship in Sierra Leone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 836
Navigation of Informal Labor: Youth Citizenship Practice and Hope in Freetown . . . . . . . . 836
Navigation of Youth-Based Civil Society: Realizing Citizenship in Rural
Sierra Leone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 837
Navigation of Crisis: Volunteering During Ebola and Changing Narratives of Youth
Citizenship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 839
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 841
Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 842
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 842

Abstract
This chapter draws upon existing theoretical and empirical literature to explore
youth agency and citizenship in Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone’s young population,
alongside a history of civil-conflict, has led to anxieties about young people and
their role within society, making Sierra Leone an important case for exploring
how youth citizenship is conceived in a context in which young people’s inclu-
sion became a key focus of development agendas. First, some definitions of the
key terminology are provided making use of existing theoretical literature
followed by a brief outline of the relevant historical and sociopolitical context.
The chapter then engages with three case studies that provide insight into
how young people engage with citizenship in Sierra Leone; firstly, through an
exploration of informal employment and citizenship in Freetown – the country’s
A. Chadwick (*)
University of Bath, Bath, UK
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 829
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_46
830 A. Chadwick

capital; secondly, through an examination of the growth of youth-based civil

society after the civil-conflict; and finally through an examination of how the
Ebola epidemic (2014–2016) shaped young people’s enactment and experience
of citizenship through volunteering. Through these case studies, an argument is
made for the need to interrogate how young people navigate the gap between
experiences of citizenship and expectations or hoped-for alternatives, acknowl-
edging young people’s hope for a different future, while appreciating the diffi-
culty for young people of everyday citizenship encounters. The gap identified
raises questions about the contradictions between often unobtainable global
citizenship ideals and the difficulty of the everyday practice of citizenship.

Keywords
Sierra Leone · Sub-Saharan Africa · Youth Agency · Citizenship · Employment ·
Civil Society · Volunteering

Introduction

There has been a huge growth in research, both academic and policy, regarding
how young people in Sub-Saharan Africa understand and experience citizenship.
Research in this area has been ignited both by the young populations of Sub-Saharan
African countries, alongside questions of what this abundance of youth means for
society. Two sides of this argument can be characterized: the “youth bulge” and the
“youth dividend.” The former considers youthful populations as inherently unstable
and problematic, while the latter, not necessarily rejecting this claim, suggests that
youthful populations can be harnessed to promote and achieve economic develop-
ment and growth. Given the connection often made between youthful populations
and instability, research and theory in this area has particularly been concerned with
young people’s participation and citizenship within conflict and post-conflict set-
tings, given that conflict is often caused by a breakdown or failure of the citizen-state
contract. Conceptions and practices of citizenship in Sub-Saharan Africa are also
impacted by how global citizenship ideals and discourses are understood and
interpreted. Acknowledging this wider regional context, this chapter considers the
case study of youth citizenship within Sierra Leone, a country with both a youthful
population and contested understandings of belonging and citizenship – resulting
from the slave trade, colonial domination, civil-conflict, and post-conflict develop-
ment agendas. By reviewing both theoretical and empirical research, the chapter
argues that citizenship among young people in Sierra Leone moves beyond defini-
tions based upon membership and relations with a political state and towards
understanding citizenship through the everyday interactions between young Sierra
Leoneans and the authorities and institutions that shape their lives and sense
of identity. This is in line with Peterson and Brock’s (2017) conceptualization of
citizenship as the practice through which humans actively engage within their
communities. This definition brings forward the relationship between agency and
52 Youth Citizenship in Sierra Leone: Everyday Practice and Hope 831

citizenship. Young people, in Sub-Saharan Africa especially, are often presented

in binary fashion as either autonomous agents or as a group dependent on and
controlled by others (Durham 2000). However, and as this chapter seeks to do,
agency in citizenship practice also needs to be considered in terms of the relational
and contextual constraints that shape young people’s ability to navigate citizenship
claims within the social milieu in which they live.
This chapter first provides definitions of the concepts of youth, agency,
and citizenship within the contexts of Sub-Saharan African and Sierra Leone
specifically. Next, it outlines the historical and sociopolitical context of Sierra
Leone relating to youth identity, agency, and citizenship from colonial experiences
to the civil-conflict in the 1990s and the post-conflict focus on youth development.
Then, tapping into contemporary empirical work, it discusses three case studies,
exploring how young Sierra Leoneans show agency in navigating the informal
networks and institutions that are necessary for the everyday practice of citizenship,
while maintaining and identifying with hoped-for imaginaries of how citizenship
should or could be. Finally, it discusses how interrogating this gap between the
informal or everyday mechanisms through which young people enact, contest, and
experience citizenship and the hoped-for alternatives can support academic and
policy development of youth citizenship discussions that start from the basis of
how citizenship is experienced and imagined by young people themselves as
opposed to how it is conceptualized within global development discourse.

Youth: Age and Marginalization

Youth relates to chronological age, with global institutions and national governments
using age brackets to categorize youth, for example, UN 15-24 (UN 2013) and Sierra
Leone government 15-35 (GoSL 2003). However, scholars and practitioners in
youth development have argued for an appreciation of youth that extends
beyond age and reflects social and economic status and experiences of marginaliza-
tion. Examining youth in this way allows for an appreciation of the category
as socially constructed and flexible, with definitions of youth shifting between
contexts (Durham 2000; Lovell 2006; Philipps 2014). The category of youth in
Sub-Saharan African has been described as “a moveable feast” (Argenti 2002,
p. 125). The same individual is an adult in one context and yet a youth in another
– rendering the achievement of adulthood as neither fixed nor secure (Shepler 2010;
Waage 2006). In this way, “age interacts with status, which in turn is tied to access
to material resources and social and political connections” (Boersch-Supan 2012,
p. 31). This understanding allows for an appreciation of youth as a category of
marginalization.
In Sierra Leone, a youth is often “any individual who is unmarried, landless and
lacking political and economic power” (Manning 2009 cited in Tom 2014 p. 329),
although this is not as true in urban contexts. This definition shows the connection
between youth and marginalization from economic or social resources and networks,
and it positions youth as a negative category – defined in terms of what it lacks or
832 A. Chadwick

what it is not. Increasingly, scholars argue for the need to understand young people
and youth as a valuable stage of life in and of itself, positing youth identity and
experiences as meaningful for what they are rather than what they lack (Christiansen
et al. 2006; de Boeck and Honwana 2005). Moving away from seeing youth in terms
of deficiency is important for an exploration of youth citizenship practice within
Sierra Leone, where for the marginalized achieving the status of adulthood is by no
means guaranteed.

Agency, Citizenship Practice, and Hoped-For Alternatives

For the purposes of this chapter, a definition of citizenship adapted from Peterson
and Brock (2017) is used which puts forward two views of citizenship. Firstly,
citizenship is theorized as a legal categorization representing membership of a
political state and suggestive of certain responsibilities on both the part of citizens
and the state body. Secondly, this approach acknowledges that citizenship is often
conceptualized in a broader framework as a practice – how people engage with other
citizens and institutions in a given context. This framework of citizenship practice is
relevant for an exploration of youth citizenship in Sierra Leone, where the everyday
practice of citizenship works alongside hoped-for conceptualizations of citizenship.
As recognized by Luisa Enria (2018), in Sierra Leone, people’s expectations of
the state are shaped both by their experiences and comparison between these
experiences and how people feel the state should function – what Enria calls
“citizenship imaginaries.” In this sense when defining citizenship, a distinction can
be drawn between the everyday practice of citizenship in terms of community
networks of belonging and identification, and the hoped-for relationship that people
feel they should have with state or state-like structures, which is more aligned with
the theorization of citizenship as membership of a political state.
The definition of citizenship as a practice is linked to agency, as it suggests people
enacting citizenship through both their everyday interactions and the cultivation
of hoped-for alternatives. Agency can be linked to ideas about “the autonomous and
self-sufficient neo-liberal subject” and as such is connected to conceptualizations
of the free-will of the individual (Bordonaro and Payne 2012, p. 367). However, this
reading can conceal the social and contextual constraints in which individuals are
operating. Furthermore, attempts to inculcate agency through policy and practice
are not neutral but suggestive of an understanding of how society should or ought to
be organized (Ahearn 2001). Therefore, agency needs to be considered as both
relational and contextual. Relational in the sense that individual freedom to act can
be both constrained and bolstered by social networks and institutions in which
people are embedded. Contextual in the sense that what is considered as agency is
often dependent upon the hegemonic norms of “positive” or “correct” behavior that
operate within a certain society.
To address the contextual and relational constraints of youth agency, Henrik Vigh
developed the analytical device “social navigation” (2006a, b, 2009). “Social nav-
igation” allows for an appreciation of the fluidity of the environments within which
52 Youth Citizenship in Sierra Leone: Everyday Practice and Hope 833

people are moving and how people interact with them and adapt their actions
accordingly, enabling an assessment of “the way people not just act in but interact
with their social environment and adjust their lives to the constant influence. . . of
social forces and change” (Vigh 2009, p. 433). The framework is useful for consid-
ering young people’s agency in navigating citizenship practice and their social
environment in a context where the variables impacting change are outside their
control. Theorizing youth agency as contextual and relational acknowledges how
citizenship is understood both through the “social navigation” of everyday practice
with the contextual constraints it embodies, and through the inculcation of meaning
through cultivation of hope for better conditions in the future.
After a consideration of the historical and sociopolitical context of Sierra Leone
in relation to youth agency and citizenship, three empirical case studies are pre-
sented, exploring young people’s everyday practice of citizenship and hope in
relation to employment in an urban setting, youth-based civil society organization
in rural settings, and finally citizenship experiences and claims during the Ebola
epidemic (2014–16).

Sierra Leone: Historical and Sociopolitical Context

Any analysis of citizenship needs to be rooted in a discussion of the historical origins

that have shaped current practice, experience, and hoped-for alternatives. In terms of
Sierra Leone, Luisa Enria and Shelley Lees describe its historical and contemporary
experiences as a “testing ground for what it means to be a political subject” (2018,
p. 34). Sierra Leone’s history is made up of series of contested ideas about what it
means to belong and be a citizen or subject. These contested ideas stem from
regional migratory practices, the slave trade, colonial domination, and then post-
independence resource accumulation by both local elites and external entities. These
experiences are crucial for understanding citizenship practice and claims in Sierra
Leone.
Sierra Leone was involved in global trade prior to colonial domination by the
British through regional and global trading networks in both commodities, and then
from the 1400s and increasingly in the mid-1700s, through the Atlantic slave trade
(Howard 2017). The slave trade was externally driven but played a role in shaping
regional and local political structures – especially concerning the power and dom-
ination of the marginalized by elite groups (Lovejoy 2000). For example, the return
of slaves from the Americas and elsewhere in the late 1700s to Sierra Leone created
a division between the elite settler population in Freetown (the capital), the Krios,
and the native population elsewhere. The establishment of Freetown as a crown
colony (an area under direct colonial rule by the British) in 1808, only served to
intensify these divisions, with the extension of the colonial state outside of Freetown
relying upon indirect rule, eventually leading to the establishment of the protectorate
in 1896 (Fanthorpe 2001, p. 379; see also Mamdani 1996). The division between the
colony and the protectorate led to citizenship being conceived of and experienced
differently in Freetown in contrast with the rest of the country. In Freetown, the
834 A. Chadwick

colonial apparatus provided employment and some citizenship rights, especially for
the Krio elite, whereas the protectorate was indirectly ruled through colonial offi-
cials’ relationships with chiefs, through whom the colonial state ruled its subjects.
This system remained intact, to a large extent, following independence – Richard
Fanthorpe and Roy Maconachie state that:

Successive post-colonial governments have conserved institutions characteristic of colonial

‘indirect rule’ to a remarkable degree, using chieftaincy and customary law as instruments
for maintaining political control over the countryside. (2010, p. 253)

The adverse impact that this exploitative and often gerontocratic form of governance
had on young people particularly, especially when it came to obligations within
chieftaincies around forced labor, led to the widely supported assessment that:

Youths, disenfranchised by customary traditions and law, in dire need of empowerment

resorted to armed rebellion to revenge against a system that oppressed them and blocked
their upward social mobility, aiming to gain respect, power and status over the ‘big men’ and
also as a survival strategy. (Tom 2014, p. 330)

The causes of the civil-conflict (1991–2002) have been much debated, with
external factors and economic grievances both being cited (Enria and Lees
2018). However, arguably contested ideas of belonging and the dissatisfaction of
young people as regards their inclusion within governance structures were factors.
This led to the war being characterized as a “crisis of youth” (Fanthorpe and
Maconachie 2010; Maconachie 2014; Peters 2011), with young people’s lack of
economic and educational opportunities, alongside barriers to political participa-
tion, resulting in a revolt of youth (Abdullah 1998; Bangura 2016; Finn and
Oldfield 2015; Richards 1996). This diagnosis of the civil-conflict’s cause played
a large part in subsequent post-conflict development efforts initiated by external
actors, with a focus on youth employment, political participation, and citizenship.
These policies and programs were deeply embedded within normative assessments
of youth as a threat to social stability but also embraced the idea that youth had the
potential to be mobilized towards positive developmental ends. Youth-focused
institutions were established to reform the exclusionary governance structures
that had led to youth disaffection; this included the Ministry of Youth Affairs in
2003 and the National Youth Commission and District Youth Councils in 2009
(Bangura 2016). These institutions aimed to open up the governance process to
young people. Despite the appearance of progress in terms of young people’s
political inclusion, scholars have argued that the establishment of these institutions
has not necessarily led to tangible changes in the lives of young people, their
ability to participate in society, and to have a say over the issues affecting their
lives (Bangura 2016; Fanthorpe and Maconachie 2010). Young people are still
very much a marginalized group in Sierra Leonean society, with some going so far
as to say that there has been a re-marginalization of youth through the reassertion
of traditional authorities’ power, particularly in rural areas, as argued by Patrick
Tom:
52 Youth Citizenship in Sierra Leone: Everyday Practice and Hope 835

The chieftaincy system has remained an integral part of the local government system in the
country with chiefs continuing to be central actors in the chiefdoms and also having a lot of
influence on daily lives of rural Sierra Leoneans. (2014, p. 332)

Alongside the changes in governance structures, there has been a vast growth in
youth-focused civil society organizations since the end of the conflict (Boersch-
Supan 2012; Fanthorpe and Maconachie 2010). Many of these organizations are
concerned with citizenship education exemplified by the rise in “sensitization”
workshops for young people across the country focusing on raising awareness of
citizen rights and responsibilities and the creation of “active” and engaged citizens
(see Bolten 2012; Shepler 2005). Sensitization forms part of participatory develop-
ment agendas that aim to create responsible and “active” citizens working towards
their own development. This focus on civil society and citizenship education stems
from the theorization that bolstering these areas will lead to greater inclusion within
the political and social sphere, enhanced accountability of state institutions, and the
strengthening of the citizen-state contract (Datzberger 2015; Mamdani 1996; Remi
Aiyede 2017). The post-conflict concern with youth led to the category of youth
becoming a means of resource accumulation, making being a youth an “aid taker
category” in and of itself (Vigh 2006b, p. 17). It has been argued that the youth-
focused development agenda, alongside the flexibility of youth as a social category,
has led to the co-option of youth development by elite actors (Boersch-Supan 2012;
Tom 2014). In this sense, being a youth contains citizenship claims and demands for
rights and resources whether they are through civil society and NGO structures or
through the state. Although, arguably these rights and resources can and often have
been, co-opted within existing elite power structures.
Additionally, Catherine Bolten has argued that the “sensitization” approach,
which was key to post-conflict development, did not engage with a discussion of
the realities of people’s experiences of war or marginalization but rather could be
considered as social marketing of a certain discourse of peace (Bolten 2012, p. 497),
situating youth sensitization and empowerment within the discourse of the liberal
peace promoted internally and externally post-conflict. As argued by Tom (2014),
this discourse of peace has led to a conceptualization of a disciplined and self-
governing youth citizen, sensitized to the language and practice of post-conflict
development agendas and working tirelessly to fulfil this vision. This discourse of
youth citizenship is found within the Sierra Leone Blueprint for Youth Development
(2014), in which the Ministry of Youth Affairs in the country states that a program of
youth development aims to create “2 million active young citizens” by 2018
(Ministry of Youth Affairs 2014). The idea that active citizens can be externally
formed is emblematic of the categorization of perceived “right” and “wrong” ways in
which young people should show agency and participate in society.
Another outcome of the civil-conflict was mass migration into Freetown from
other areas of Sierra Leone, as people sought to escape from rebel-controlled areas.
Freetown is now a much larger city than it was prior to the civil-conflict, and inward
migration from other areas of the country especially for young people in search of
work continues (Peeters et al. 2009; Peters 2006). This movement into Freetown has
836 A. Chadwick

changed the fabric of the city, which is now more diverse and youthful. The altered
demographics have also deepened connections between urban and rural areas,
enhanced by improvements in transport and communication.
From this brief historical overview, citizenship among young people in Sierra
Leone is shown to be laden with external and elite observations of how young people
should behave, a view deeply rooted in constructions of young people as a potential
threat to social stability, and as a group needing to be formed and shaped into
productive citizens or assets. To enhance this contextual basis, this chapter now
turns to empirical case studies to try to tease out young people’s everyday citizenship
practice and the institutions and networks that these everyday claims are connected
to, alongside how young people cultivate hope for alternatives. The first case study
will focus on Freetown, and the subsequent one will look at young people in rural
areas, while the final case study will explore how the Ebola epidemic has shaped
youth citizenship claims and experiences.

Case Studies of Youth Citizenship in Sierra Leone

Navigation of Informal Labor: Youth Citizenship Practice and Hope

in Freetown

This case study considers how young people working in the informal economy in
Sierra Leone’s capital Freetown enact and experience citizenship both in terms of
connections to the state but also concerning parallel links with other powerful
networks and authorities. It then goes on to explore how this everyday practice
of citizenship works alongside citizenship imaginaries. Luisa Enria (2018) argues
that work is at the center of citizenship claims among young people working in the
informal economy in Freetown. Citizenship claims are enacted in terms of demands
and hopes around the right to employment. A key part of post-conflict development
efforts coalesced around the need to provide young people with adequate employ-
ment to prevent them becoming a threat to social stability. In post-conflict develop-
ment, employment programming often took the form of skills-based training and
livelihood interventions. However, this approach has been criticized for not
reflecting the economic context of the country, with a failure to accompany training
with private sector engagement around job creation (Fanthorpe and Maconachie
2010; Peeters et al. 2009). Arguably, employment programming has led to not
enough jobs being available in certain sectors for which lots of people have been
trained by NGO interventions – e.g., mechanics and tailors. The paucity and
stagnancy of the domestic formal employment market means that most young
people are employed in informal and ad hoc ways (Finn and Oldfield 2015). In her
ethnography of youth employment in Freetown, Enria (2018) talks to motorbike
(okada) drivers, sellers of second-hand goods ( jewman dem), and petty traders – all
informal and insecure forms of employment. She investigates the role of
employment-based associations in shaping young people’s experiences and interac-
tions with authorities, proffering that associations act as mediators between young
52 Youth Citizenship in Sierra Leone: Everyday Practice and Hope 837

people and the state, while also providing some state(like) services, including
managing disputes and social welfare. However, importantly, power in these asso-
ciations was seen by young people as the preserve of “big men,” due to the co-option
of employment-based organizations into politics and the lack of agency of young
people, as a marginalized group, to have a voice in shaping these organizations and
their agendas. It is worth noting that just as “big men” are nearly always men, youth
in this context of informal employment often becomes synonymous with male
youth, with female youth often being less publicly visible and less of concern to
development agendas focused on avoiding or preventing violence. Additionally,
Enria found that due to the devaluation of informal labor, many young people in
these positions saw their situation as a stop gap, with plans and hope for an
alternative more desirable career. This hope meant that these youth often did not
fully invest in their employment identity, seeing it as a temporary situation, which
meant a lack of incentive to organize and create alternative associational forms
representing young people’s interests (Enria 2018).
However, young people in informal employment in Freetown are not without
agency in their enactment of everyday citizenship, but rather their agency is enacted
through the development of a personal identity and cultivation of expectations and
hopes for how citizenship should be, in counter-distinction to the status quo. Enria
states how:

Showing oneself as respectable and as being within the law was a key aspect of young
people’s search for the recognition they felt was denied to them by their engagement in
marginalised economic activities. (2018, p. 174)

It seems that it is in the everyday presentation of oneself as a good citizen and as being
pro-development that young people’s agency can be found. In many cases, the
cultivation of this identity runs concurrently with the daily reality that for many
young people working in Freetown’s informal economy, the state is more of a threat
than a support (Enria 2018). This threat is not imagined, as operations to clear up
Freetown have involved limiting the areas in which okada drivers can operate and
clearing petty traders from streets (Finn and Oldfield 2015). Young Sierra Leoneans in
the informal economy balance the everyday practice of negotiating a livelihood and
navigating through networks, both governmental and nongovernmental, controlled by
“big men,” with the hoped-for materialization of a better situation both for themselves
and their country. Through this process of navigation, they balance the immediate
constraints of making a livelihood with the co-option of global discourses of devel-
opment and citizenship which provide an identification with a different future.

Navigation of Youth-Based Civil Society: Realizing Citizenship

in Rural Sierra Leone

This case study of young people’s citizenship in rural settings explores how engage-
ment with youth-based civil society is closely tied to citizenship practice and
838 A. Chadwick

livelihood rights, as well as the cultivation of hoped-for citizenship alternatives. As

discussed in the context section, the post-conflict development environment in Sierra
Leone was heavily pro-youth – with this focus of donor funding creating incentives
for associational development (Fanthorpe and Maconachie 2010). The development
of rural youth-focused civil society, as argued by Tom, “has created new opportu-
nities and alternative social spaces for youths (and other marginalised groups such as
women) to challenge and negotiate with traditional authorities” (Tom 2014, p. 334).
Furthermore, the language and discourse of empowerment and human rights has
“not only generated a language of resistance and self-confidence for youth, but also
initiated a shift in intergenerational relations” (Boersch-Supan 2012, p. 46). These
changes in youth-based civil society raise questions about how young people in rural
areas of Sierra Leone are developing and enacting citizenship claims.
In his research about youth relations with rural chieftaincies, Tom found that
“youths have. . .registered their grievances through collective action using
non-violent protests including boycotting communal labour (e.g. road rehabilitation
projects) in chiefdoms, as a tool to effect positive changes in chiefdom governance”
(Tom 2014, p. 333). Additionally, as argued by Joanna Boersch-Supan, youth-based
organizations have been “crucial in unifying and representing youth as a social group
in the community” providing “mediation, community service provision, and repre-
sentation” (2012, p. 34). In research within the diamond mining district of Kono,
Roy Maconachie (2014) found evidence of youth-based civil society organizations
engaging in activism around exploitative extractive industries – highlighting the link
between citizenship rights and livelihood rights. These forms of organization are also
utilizing mass media and technology as a tool for accountability and connection to
international advocacy networks (Fanthorpe and Maconachie 2010). So, through
youth-based civil society, young people are demanding citizenship rights (including
the right to a livelihood), providing a route towards participation and accountability.
Although undoubtedly changes have occurred through the emergence of youth-
focused civil society organizations in rural areas of Sierra Leone, as with associa-
tional bodies in Freetown’s informal employment networks, there are concerns about
who has access to such associations and which groups they serve. Fanthorpe and
Maconachie (2010) have argued that given the lack of material change in living
conditions in Sierra Leone, it is not surprising that the aid economy post-conflict
became entwined with patrimonial obligations. This view is supported by Boersch-
Supan, who argues that “many youth organisations are deeply enmeshed in local
patronage politics and often induce only limited change to the power asymmetries
between youth and elders” (2012, p. 36). These political dynamics bear similarities
with the elite and political co-option of employment-based associations discussed
in the urban case study. Thus, it seems there is a need to distinguish between what
Fanthorpe and Maconachie have described as “the real-world efficacy of youth
agency in Sierra Leone from that constructed within the political imaginary of
international development and human rights,” which has focused uncritically on
the flourishing of youth-based civil society without adequate engagement with how
the economy of aid and the resources that come with it have made “youth” a valuable
category for resource accumulation (2010, p. 272). The co-option of youth
52 Youth Citizenship in Sierra Leone: Everyday Practice and Hope 839

development agendas does not mean that young people are necessarily excluded
from civil society organizations but rather that their agency needs to be understood
through how they navigate the everyday practice of citizenship. This process of
navigation of local power structures leads to youth-based civil society being itself a
valued livelihood strategy. This is especially true for those educated and versed in
global discourses of citizenship and human rights.
So, young Sierra Leoneans are enacting citizenship through the navigation of
youth-based civil society organizations, which are enmeshed within local power
dynamics due to the potential of youth as a category of resource accumulation. But
alongside this young people are actively engaging with global discourses of human
rights and citizenship which open up livelihood opportunities within development,
while also providing identification with a different future.

Navigation of Crisis: Volunteering During Ebola and Changing

Narratives of Youth Citizenship

This final case study considers how the Ebola epidemic (2014–2016) in Sierra Leone
has shaped how young people understand and imagine citizenship.
The enormity of the Ebola epidemic has undoubtedly impacted the social,
economic, and political landscape of Sierra Leone. The outbreak in West Africa
(2014–2016) became the most widespread and deadly since the virus was discovered
in the 1970s. The virus is thought to have arrived in Sierra Leone via its border with
Guinea. The first reported case was in May of 2014 in Kenema, the second largest
city in the East of the country (Maconachie and Hilson 2017). The virus spread
quickly and by April 2016, there had been over 14,000 cases and around 4000 deaths
in Sierra Leone (Centers for Disease Control 2017). The speed and extent of the
outbreak’s spread caught governments, international institutions, and communities
off guard. This was due to a combination of factors including: Ebola had never been
seen before in the affected countries (Piot et al. 2017); the weak healthcare infra-
structure of the region (Boozary et al. 2014); failures of the global health apparatus
(Rashid 2017); and inequality within the affected societies reflected in a small
Western elite pitched against the majority of citizens (Wilkinson and Leach 2014).
The crisis highlighted the poor relationship between state institutions and citizens
in Sierra Leone, exemplified by how the official narrative of the cause of the
outbreak blamed its spread on the citizens of Sierra Leone. An instance of this is
the intense focus on people’s funeral practices within the narrative of how the disease
was spreading (Rashid 2017). Corpses in Sierra Leone are usually washed by close
relatives – this meant that relatives came into contact with the disease as corpses of
those who have died from Ebola remain infectious. Focusing on burials fed the
narrative that people’s behavior, and their unwillingness to change it, was to blame
for the disease’s spread. This understanding of the crisis produced divisionary
practices within the Ebola response and competing subjectivities, with those who
resisted the technologies of the response being physically contained through quar-
antine and militarized operations, whereas in counter-distinction those who accepted
840 A. Chadwick

the causal narrative and took part in sensitization of others, were framed as respon-
sible and model citizens (Enria 2017) – this included Sierra Leoneans who
volunteered to take part in the response.
Young Sierra Leonean volunteers were a crucial part of the Ebola response, taking
on roles including but not limited to: medical positions, cleaning treatment centers,
burying bodies, tracing people who had come into contact with the disease,
enforcing quarantine, and community sensitization. However, the Ebola “crisis”
exacerbated the “high rates of unemployment and scarce opportunities to be
involved in meaningful work” that already existed in Sierra Leone (Kingori and
McGowan 2016). In this context, volunteering, especially for young people, became
a means of navigating increasingly restricted livelihood options, which in turn led
to the perception that volunteers were benefitting from the crisis. In a blog, Enria
(2015) describes how in the Northern District of Kambia there is a distinction
between those who are seen to have benefitted from the tragedy of Ebola, through
employment or volunteering positions within organizations involved in the response,
and those whose lives have been destroyed by it. This distinction was exacerbated by
the hazard pay and stipends which many volunteers received during the outbreak.
Enria has argued that young people made claims for inclusion during the crisis
through volunteering (2018, p. 236). But equally young people’s involvement with
volunteering can be seen as a form of responsibilization shaping young people into
the right kind of citizens, demanded by the crisis and the global response. In this way,
volunteering during Ebola was not just a form of economic navigation but also
served people’s self-identification as modern, rational citizens in a context in which
the knowledge and behaviors of the majority were being questioned as causal of the
Ebola virus’ spread (Chadwick 2017). Arguably, young people volunteered during
Ebola as both a means of navigating a constrained livelihood context, alongside
identification with the responsibilities of citizenship, patriotism, and compassion for
fellow citizens. During the Ebola crisis, young Sierra Leoneans enacted citizenship
through volunteering, which in some instances provided an immediate economic
benefit. However, alongside the economic benefits volunteering offered visions of
citizenship described through discourses of inclusion and responsibility, allowing
young people to identify with a different future outside of the context of the Ebola
crisis (Chadwick 2017).
The three case studies demonstrate how young people in Sierra Leone navigate
the realities of constrained citizenship ambitions through the cultivation of relation-
ships with powerful networks and institutions, whether they are related to em-
ployment, civil society, or voluntary practice. Young people’s enactment and
understanding of citizenship in such settings arguably serves a dual purpose, fulfill-
ing what Morten Bøås has described in the context of youth in West Africa as a
“double” (2013). Engagement with employment associations and youth-based civil
society provides everyday support for young people navigating insecure and infor-
mal livelihood contexts and in need of support that the state is not able to offer, even
if they are often co-opted by elders or elites. This was especially pertinent during the
Ebola outbreak, when forms of stipend-rewarded volunteering provided a means of
navigating an extremely constrained socioeconomic context. Additionally, the forms
52 Youth Citizenship in Sierra Leone: Everyday Practice and Hope 841

of citizenship described in these case studies provide a means of identification with

global citizenship discourse, whether it be through employment, youth-focused civil
society, or volunteering, offering a space for the enactment and cultivation of
citizenship alternatives. Young people adopt and adapt the discourse of youth
empowerment within the reality of their marginalization – tapping into local and
global discourses to create new forms of identity and meaning. In this way, young
people’s citizenship practice operates as both an immediate strategy for the “social
navigation” of constrained livelihood opportunities, while also offering the possi-
bility of identifying with and participating in a different future.
These case studies of young people’s citizenship practice and hope for alterna-
tives in Sierra Leone evidence the importance of understanding the local meanings
ascribed to global citizenship discourse. Citizenship does not have a fixed meaning
in time and space but rather is ascribed with context dependent layers of meaning by
different actors showing resourcefulness and agency in utilizing the discourses and
practices available to them to create their own sense of meaning and value. What
young people’s conceptualization of citizenship in Sierra Leone can offer broader
scholarship is the need to not only investigate the lived experience of citizenship
claims in comparison with idealized understandings held within global citizenship
discourse, but also to interrogate how such hoped-for citizenship alternatives work
alongside everyday practice and serve their own purpose in young people’s cultiva-
tion of meaning and identity.

Conclusion

Young people in Sierra Leone show agency in navigating the everyday practice of
citizenship, by negotiating with informal networks, state institutions, and civil
society organizations that often still exclude them. But alongside this everyday
practice, young people also show agency in their identification with how they
think citizenship should be experienced – their conceptualization of how they should
be participating in society and how the state should be engaging with them. Young
people, the majority of whom are striving to build livelihoods in informal settings
(whether urban or rural), are balancing this hoped-for desired state of citizenship
with the everyday practice which they must engage with to get by in their daily lives.
This act of balancing is shown in how young people in Freetown need to engage with
the politics of informal employment networks but at the same time identify with
developmental futures and the desire for an improved state for themselves and their
country. In other parts of Sierra Leone, young people’s participation within youth-
based civil society offers a means of negotiating with local power structures and
resources, while utilizing the language of youth development programming
to advocate for their own interpretation of human rights and citizenship
claims. Finally, youth volunteering during the Ebola epidemic (2014–16) shows
how volunteering during a crisis both serves as a means of navigating a constrained
livelihood context and a means of identification with citizenship based upon inclu-
sion and responsibility. By interrogating how young people navigate the gap
842 A. Chadwick

between experiences and expectations of citizenship, and acknowledging the con-

tradictions this gap contains, citizenship education in Sierra Leone and sub-Saharan
Africa more broadly can work to engage with young people’s hope for a different
future while acknowledging the difficulty of everyday citizenship encounters. Such
discussions about citizenship should neither idealize unobtainable citizenship rights
nor ignore the difficulty of everyday citizenship practice. Furthermore, approaches to
citizenship education should acknowledge the meaning that hoped-for citizenship
alternatives offer young people in terms of their identification with an improved
future state for themselves and their country while they go through the everyday
struggle to maintain a livelihood. It is in this space between the ideal and the
everyday where conversations about youth citizenship can become more productive.

Cross-References

▶ Constructions of “Youth” and “Activism” in Lebanon

▶ The Development of Civic Participation Among Youth in Singapore
▶ Youth Engagement and Citizenship in England

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Youth Engagement and Citizenship
in England 53
Ian Davies

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 846
Background: The Meaning of Key Terms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 846
Background: The English Political Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 849
Youth Activism in England: The Educational Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 851
Levels, Styles and Engines of Engagement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 853
Making Explicit Connections Between Education and Youth Engagement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 856
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 857
Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 858
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 858

Abstract
Drawing on and analyzing existing theoretical and empirical research literature,
this chapter explores the relationship between youth engagement and education in
England, principally during the period 1998 to 2017. Following some general
remarks about the meaning of key terms, there are contextual comments about
recent political developments and the history of educational initiatives relevant to
youth engagement. The chapter then examines several issues that influence the
ways in which young people’s engagement is framed. It discusses ways in which
a positive relationship between youth engagement and education could be devel-
oped and concludes by raising some questions about what work in this area needs
to be done.

Keywords
Youth engagement · Education · England policy · Professional practice

I. Davies (*)
The University of York, York, UK
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 845
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_1
846 I. Davies

Introduction

Drawing on and analyzing existing theoretical and empirical research literature, this
chapter explores the relationship between youth engagement and education in
England, principally during the period 1998 to 2017. While the importance of
youth engagement and education has formed a core part of policy and practice
during this period, the relationship is one which has been characterized by different
approaches at different times. These differing approaches have frequently been
influenced by the particular agendas of key actors – including governments, repre-
sentatives of nongovernmental organizations, and schools. In order to provide a
foundation for the argument in this chapter, I make some general remarks about the
meaning of key terms related to youth engagement, provide some contextual com-
ments about recent political developments, and outline the history of educational
initiatives relevant to youth engagement. The chapter then examines several issues
that influence the ways in which young people’s engagement is framed with refer-
ences to levels of engagement, styles of engagement, and engines of engagement. I
provide an overview of some of the research about young people’s engagement in
England (in amount and type) and the factors that are seen to be associated with such
engagement. It is argued that while there is some clarity in understanding about the
extent, nature, and cause of engagement, there are also some indications that
research that has led to that understanding has been ignored through a party political
process in which ideological considerations are emphasized. Finally, I discuss ways
in which a positive relationship between youth engagement and education could be
developed and conclude by raising some questions about what work in this area
remains to be done.

Background: The Meaning of Key Terms

In England, since about 2008, there has been less official interest in citizenship
education than existed in the previous decade. The central government department
responsible for education has devoted less time and energy to citizenship education
(the ways in which that has happened and the reasons for it are discussed below).
That said, there is nationally and internationally significant work still being done in
this area. The continued attention to young people’s engagement with citizenship
beyond official policies may be seen in initiatives taken by international bodies (e.g.,
Carnegie – see http://carnegieendowment.org/specialprojects/civicresearchnetwork/
), academia with recent issues of the journals Citizenship Teaching and Learning
(Sears 2017), and the Journal of Social Science Education (Davies et al. 2014), and
new networks (e.g., Partispace, see http://partispace.eu/). These various activities, in
some ways, relate very positively to earlier government policy developments that
were aimed at developing active citizenship (e.g., DfEE/QCA 1998 and http://www.
parliament.uk/citizenship-civic-engagement). However, it should be noted that
much of the work in citizenship education and, more precisely, education that
encourages understanding of contemporary society and engagement in it, remains
53 Youth Engagement and Citizenship in England 847

contested and controversial in England, as elsewhere. As such, it is necessary to

clarify the meaning of key terms.
The quotation below gives an overarching sense of what is involved when
engagement in contemporary society is referred to. According to Marquand
(2004), engagement is:

...a dimension of social life, with its own norms and decision rules... a set of activities,
which can be (and historically has been) carried out by private individuals, private charities
and even private firms as well as public agencies. It is symbiotically linked to the notion of
public interest, in principle distinct from private interests; central to it are the values of
citizenship, equity and service...It is ... a space for forms of human flourishing which
cannot be bought in the market place or found in the tight-knit community of the clan or
family. (p. 27)

Therefore, in short, engagement in general terms means participating in one’s

social communities beyond the immediate family. Of course, further clarification
is needed about many things including, referring to the above quotation, the
distinctions to be made between “public” and “private,” and the meaning of
“social life.” It would be unwise to suggest that engagement does not occur
within family or other personal groups and indeed those contexts are often the
places where identity is given clearest expression through power-related inter-
personal action.
One of the principal debates about the meaning of engagement is focused on
location. In other words, there are questions about where one may take part, and,
more generally, this raises issues about the boundaries between legally framed
characterizations of engagement and affectively oriented perceptions of thinking
and action. Some academics, such as Tarrow (2005), emphasize the significance
of transnationalism, whereas Crick (2000, pp. 136, 137), for example, cites
Hannah, Arendt, to assert that “a citizen is by definition a citizen among citizens
of a country among countries.” Furthermore, there are many contemporary
contexts (e.g., Catalonia; Corsica) in which it is hard to identify the preferred
formulation of the country in which one may take part. Indeed, such formulations
are not always fixed, as the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence and
continuing discussion about the border between Northern Ireland and Eire
shows within the UK context.
In reference to citizenship and engagement, these arguments about the role of
place connect with discussions about the degree to which pluralistic societal coher-
ence may be achieved. Much of the debate which manifested in educational policy
documents about young people’s engagement in England since the late 1990s has
focused on engendering a sense of togetherness through:

a society in which there is a common vision and sense of belonging by all communities; a
society in which the diversity of people’s backgrounds and circumstances is appreciated and
valued; a society in which similar life opportunities are available to all; and a society in
which strong and positive relationships exist and continue to be developed in the workplace,
in schools and in the wider community. (DCSF 2007, p. 3)
848 I. Davies

This said, some of these overarching goals as stated in policy documents tend to
hide the different meanings of community within which engagement may occur.
Annette, for example, has pointed to the different meanings of community:

as a place or neighbourhood . . . as a normative ideal linked to respect, inclusion and

solidarity . . . as something based on a politics of identity and recognition of difference . . .
as a political ideal linked to participation, involvement and citizenship. (2003, p. 140)

It is important to recognize these different meanings in order to be able to make

judgments about what sort of fundamental issues are at stake. Heater (1999, p. 77),
for example, has explained that certain characterizations of community can mean
something that is very challenging:

Communitarianism extracts from the republican tradition the concentration on a feeling of

community and a sense of duty, though omitting from its programme the strand of direct
political participation and, some would argue, crucially, the central republican concern for
freedom.

Of particular significance to my view of engagement are political issues. In this

regard, the following definition can be viewed as particularly apt: “Youth activism
refers to behaviour performed by adolescents and young adults with a political
intent” Hart and Linkin Gullan (2010, p. 67). In order for the connection between
youth activism and the political sphere/discourse to be considered meaningfully
there is a need to give a fairly simple – but nevertheless dynamic – characterization
of the terms “politics” and “citizens”:

Politics then can simply be defined as the activity by which differing interests within a given
unit of rule are conciliated by giving them a share in power in proportion to their importance
to the welfare and the survival of the whole community. (Crick 1964 p. 21)

Citizens may be described in the following terms:

Individuals are citizens when they practise civic virtue and good citizenship, enjoy but do not
exploit their civil and political rights, contribute to and receive social and economic benefits
do not allow any sense of national identity to justify discrimination or stereotyping of others,
experiences senses of non-exclusive multiple citizenship and, by their example, teach
citizenship to others. (Heater and Oliver 1994, p. 6)

A focus on politics allows for engagement to be centrally about power, to

recognize the primacy of the individual in human rights discourses, to see the vital
importance of groups acting in a range (geographically based and other) of diverse
communities, to value the rights and responsibilities of a legally framed status of
citizenship and to embrace the dynamism offered by considerations of politics in
everyday contexts. The focus on politics allows for a helpfully precise characteriza-
tion of what I think is important in engagement. Moreover, the risk of embracing too
many things and achieving only a rather woolly sense of what engagement means
53 Youth Engagement and Citizenship in England 849

might well be avoided by interpreting all that we do through the lens of the
fundamental concepts of politics.

Background: The English Political Context

In the UK, successive Prime Ministers have consistently argued for young people to
engage in society. (In the United Kingdom, certain legislative powers remain with
the central UK Parliament, while others – such as education – are devolved to the
Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly, and Northern Ireland. On these devolved
powers, the central UK Parliament legislates for England.) During his period in
office, Labour Prime Minister, Tony Blair (1997–2007), was committed to what he
considered a communitarian approach. Broadly, this approach consisted of the
attempt to steer a middle course between the excesses of both unfettered neoliber-
alism, with its commitment to solving everything through market forces, and certain
forms of socialism in which opportunities for individual or private group–based
activity were not encouraged or allowed. In this approach, Blair was influenced by
sociologists, including Giddens (2000) and Etzioni (1995), who had also influenced
other politicians including Clinton in the USA. A commitment to youth engagement
and activism was also explicitly stated by Blair’s successor as Labour Prime
Minister, Gordon Brown (2007–2010), who argued that:

It is my ambition to create a country in which there is a clear expectation that all young
people will undertake some service to their community, and where community service will
become normal part of growing up. (Brown 2009)

Leader of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition (2010–2015) and Con-

servative (2015–2016) governments, Prime Minister David Cameron seemed to
continue, broadly, this approach, creating the National Citizen Service and also
focusing on what he called “the Big Society” which, in part, was designed to engage
people in their communities. According to Cameron:

The Big Society is about a huge culture change, where people, in their everyday lives, in
their homes, in their neighbourhoods, in their workplace, don’t always turn to officials, local
authorities or central government for answers to the problems they face, but instead feel both
free and powerful enough to help themselves and their own communities. (Cameron 2010)

It is possible that the intention for the Big Society was for citizens to feel free,
able, and empowered to help their communities, but the Big Society also linked to
the desire for a healthy economy (in that engaged people create wealth). The nature
of the desired enterprise was of a particular type, while the sort of action Cameron
was looking for was driven by certain agendas which had their limits. One agenda
can be seen, for example, in certain reactions to the 2011 riots in English cities, as the
following critique highlights:
850 I. Davies

Mr Cameron will also blame “children without fathers; schools without discipline; reward
without effort; crime without punishment; rights without responsibilities; communities
without control”.
Mending that “broken society”, Mr Cameron will say, is his fundamental aim in politics.
(Kirkup et al. 2011)

The above indicates some of the challenges of, and different ways of framing,
arguments for engagement. Successive governments in England have wanted to
promote particular sorts of engagement that emerge from particular ideological
perspectives. As has been suggested above, a broad-based communitarian agenda
shaped the desire for youth engagement under Blair and Brown, but after the General
Election of 2010, the agenda became more precisely focused on a political project in
which young people’s action that was not contributing to established norms was not
accepted.
The current Prime Minister (January 2018) Theresa May, while opposing votes at
16, is also in favor of the more limited form of youth engagement which has framed
government discourse since 2010:

people can get engaged in politics in a whole variety of ways and I would encourage young
people to do so.
I think it is important young people watch politics, pay attention to politics, get to think
about their own views and where possible start to get involved. (Stone 2017)

The hesitation and caution of May in suggesting young people think about things
and “where possible start to get involved” mean that low-level traditionally framed
actions to support established systems and processes are being promoted. The
government’s position here is not an open-ended commitment to democratic engage-
ment. One of the most obvious ways in which the more limited commitment to youth
engagement can be seen is to consider politicians’ actions about perceived radical-
ism. It is likely that the determination to achieve youth engagement in a society in
which law and order is emphasized is connected to fears about the rise of perceived
radical groups (Kyriacou et al. 2017). The complex relationship between engaged,
cohesive, and inclusive democracy and attempts to achieve more precisely focused
predetermined “good” actions is thrown sharply into relief by the above. While it
would be naïve and simplistic to suggest that there are unsophisticated divisions
between conservative and radical conceptions of engagement, what is evident from
official sources in recent years is an emphasis on what is deemed as good behavior
and an absence of encouragement for critique. Furthermore, unwanted behavior in
the form of radicalization has been presented principally, and overly narrowly, as a
concern with certain groups in society – particularly Muslims (Qurashi 2016).
The financial crisis since 2008 has been significant for changing attitudes and
opportunities, and this has been particularly noticeable in European matters. Hoskins
and Kerr (2012) note that:

the global economic and financial crisis . . .. has been allied with a change in the political
philosophy of governments across Europe in the past few years. This has seen more
53 Youth Engagement and Citizenship in England 851

governments favouring support for community activity, as opposed to conventional political

participation, with a smaller perceived role for government in society overall. The combined
consequence of the economic crisis and the smaller perceived role of the state have meant
that the field of Participatory Citizenship has fallen from prominence as a policy priority at
national and local level and, as a consequence, there has been much less funding for the
whole domain including through national, local and private sector contributions. The strains
of the cuts in funding have been noted within civil society across Europe and at the European
level. (p. 8)

A significant feature of the current political landscape in England relates to the

departure of the UK from the European Union. The sort of transnational citizenship
that was narrowly rejected by voters in the 2016 referendum on membership of the
European Union probably occurred in light of fears about migrants taking jobs and
putting pressure on public services, as well as an attempt to take back control in a
context where there was anger expressed against elites (see https://ec.europa.eu/
epale/en/blog/brexit-and-its-implications-citizenship-education-across-europe). The
populism that fed the Brexit campaign is, of course, clear evidence of a sort of
engagement. And that campaign took place in the context of negative attitudes
towards immigrants:

Existing evidence clearly shows high levels of opposition to immigration in the UK. In
recent surveys, majorities of respondents think that there are too many migrants, that fewer
migrants should be let in to the country, and that legal restrictions on immigration should be
tighter. (Blinder and Allen 2016, p. 4)

The 31st NatCen Social Research British Social Attitudes survey was reported as
indicating that “British attitudes harden towards immigrants” (https://www.
theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jun/17/immigration-british-attitudes-harden-benefits)
and the campaign itself saw allegations of xenophobia in, for example, the activities of
the UK Independence Party and the murder of a member of parliament by a member
of an extreme right wing group. This general picture is not necessarily to suggest that
young people hold such views and take such actions. The fact that 71% of young
people aged 18–25 in the UK voted to remain in the EU is perhaps an indication, first,
of divisions in society and, second, about differences concerning to what outcomes
societal engagement should lead.

Youth Activism in England: The Educational Context

Within England there have been many attempts historically to align youth engage-
ment with their formal education. For example, the work of Henry Morris in the
Cambridgeshire village colleges in the 1930s, the work of Leicestershire Community
Colleges, and Eric Midwinter’s and others efforts to establish urban community
schools, all illustrate an approach to education in which engagement in communities
was promoted.
852 I. Davies

The types of education explicitly relevant to youth activism and engagement have
seen extreme variations. The general neglect of an explicit approach prior to the
1960s was followed in the 1970s by an emphasis on political literacy (skills and
issues about politics in everyday life), a string of educations about and for peace, the
globe, anti-sexism, anti-racism, and so on in the 1980s and promotions of youth
volunteering in the early 1990s. The highly influential Final Report of the Advisory
Group on Education for Citizenship and the Teaching of Democracy in Schools
(known commonly as the DfEE and QCA, 1998) which led to the statutory inclusion
of Citizenship education in the National Curriculum for secondary (11–16-year olds)
schools emphasized social and moral responsibility, political literacy, and commu-
nity involvement. From 2010, there has been a return to civics, financial literacy,
volunteering, and character in government discourses and policies on youth
engagement.
Legislation has been passed to ensure that a version of professionally responsible
engagement is maintained. Sections 406 and 407 of the 1996 Education Act insist on
the duty to secure balanced treatment of political issues. The Equality Act (2010)
with associated Advice for Schools and the Prevent Strategy (June 2011) (which sees
British values as democracy; the rule of law; individual liberty and mutual respect;
tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs) are relevant to these matters. An
official document on Promoting fundamental British values as part of spiritual,
moral, social, and cultural education in schools (DfE 2014), as well as the School
Inspection Handbook (Ofsted January 2015) carry significant guidance for schools
and teachers. Teachers are required to insist on the sort of engagement that has been
explained above: an opposition to perceived radicalization and a commitment to
young people starting to get involved in a context which is influenced by anti-
immigrant views.
Citizenship education is currently, in early 2018, part of the National Curric-
ulum but there have been very recent dramatic changes. Up to 2014, there was a
strong conceptual core (democracy and justice; rights and responsibilities; iden-
tities and diversity). The work was inspired by political literacy, emphasizing
communities at local, national, and global levels and which is contemporary,
public, participative, and reflective. The current National Curriculum for Citi-
zenship (since September 2014) emphasizes civics (knowledge of constitutional
politics and the legal system), volunteering, and personal money management
together with a nonstatutory character education that highlights perseverance,
resilience, and grit. This emphasis on character, which has been explored by
Kisby (2017), may be part of a neo-conservative moral agenda. While character
education may have positive potential, there are reservations about its nature
which are acknowledged in attempted rebuttals by its proponents (e.g.,
Kristjansson 2013).This moral agenda may also be connected with adult fear of
young people (Halsey and White 2008). In addition, it has been argued on the
basis of empirical research that increasing levels of mental health issues follow-
ing the 2008 recession may make engagement more difficult (Katikireddi et al.
2017).
53 Youth Engagement and Citizenship in England 853

Levels, Styles and Engines of Engagement

The need to understand engagement (its levels and styles) is the subject of wide
ranging debate, with many academics coining phrases and framing characterizations.
Fallahzadeh (2016) has summarized a range of work such as “mundane citizenship”
(Bakardjieva 2012), “self-actualizing citizen” (Bennett et al. 2011), “networking
citizen” (Loader et al. 2014), “critical citizen” (Norris 1999), and “everyday-maker”
(Bang and Sorensen 1999). These formulations are placed against overarching
characterizations of engagement which make use of, for example, models of micro
and macro participation. The micro emerges from the relationship between individ-
ual citizens and the state in which, for example, engagement would be revealed by an
individual parent approaching a teacher to request (or demand) help for their own
child. The macro includes collective action, such as voting and trade union or
pressure group activity. Either implicitly or explicitly, these models may connect
with bonding capital (i.e., people with similar characteristics) and bridging capital
(i.e., people with different characteristics) in the interests of promoting engagement.
It is not straightforward to identify the level of youth engagement in terms of civic
action that is taking place. In part, this is because there is developmental disconti-
nuity rather than a clear and simple process as people age (Sherrod et al. 2010). In
other words, the nature of engagement may develop variously, and the meanings,
interpretations, and perceptions about engagement may shift. There are also hard to
interpret differences between people’s social capital. It has been argued that young
people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are less likely than others to engage
in certain forms of civic action (Andrews 2009). Those with low levels of social
capital are less likely than others to engage in established associational activity. High
status charitable bodies, for example, may not be approached by young, working
class men and women from some ethnic groups. Cremin et al. (2009) have empha-
sized the key determinant of engagement as being “whether or not the young person
has the knowledge, networks, and skills to be able to act upon a civic issue of
concern.”
Of perhaps greater significance than the challenges of identifying clear patterns of
engagement is the issue of the characterization of engagement itself. Many surveys
take fairly crude measurements of engagement to indicate that approximately half or
more of young people have experience of volunteering (see Davies et al. 2013 for a
fuller exploration). However, this may include involvement in sports and exercise,
hobbies and recreation, youth and children’s services, and health and social welfare,
which may be regarded as not fitting easily alongside the political essence of civic
engagement. Nevertheless, using a broad interpretation of engagement, there are
positive indicators:

. . ... many young people of all types and backgrounds are involved in informal voluntary and
community action. Studies show around three quarters of young people have been involved
in ‘constructive social participation’ through community networks, neighbourliness,
campaigning or informal political action. (Gaskin 2004, p. iv)
854 I. Davies

And even when these activities are described with a little more precision, there
exist some encouraging data for those who think that levels of youth engagement
are positive, including that “42% of young people aged between 10 and 20 years
participated in ‘meaningful social action’ in the UK – this is slightly broader
than volunteering” (http://www.ivr.org.uk/ivr-volunteering-stats/177-how-many-young-
people-volunteer, accessed 11 September 2016). However, perhaps the key challenge is
to interpret these statements by knowing more precisely what is meant by
“engagement,” “volunteering,” and “meaningful social action.” Perhaps,
depending on one’s definition and preferred measurements, it is almost impossi-
ble not to engage in society. If that is the case, then survey data about engagement
may merely indicate levels of acceptable, or social class defined, involvement.
The possibility thus exists of unhelpful circularity in an exclusionary process
(where, for example, working class people cannot be engaged in “real” activity).
As such, when connections are made between engagement and health, life
satisfaction and educational level, this may only be deemed to be a reasonable
interpretation when engagement is seen as the effect of positive lifestyle rather
than the cause.
What facilitates participation for young people in England? In addition to those
factors already referred to above (perhaps especially distribution of social capital),
evidence suggests that there are broad engines of engagement. There are general
societal factors that help or hinder engagement. In their work outside the English
context, but which is highly apt to it, Amnå and Zetterberg (2010) argue that there
are various perspectives on what promotes involvement including modernization
(as people become better off, they want more of a say in public affairs); the public
institutional hypothesis (the design and performance of democratic systems may
facilitate or hinder engagement); the social capital hypothesis (the connections
between individuals facilitate or hinder engagement); and civic volunteerism (the
resources – especially time and money – available to people determine their capacity
to engage). Within these perspectives, there are significant trends that may explain
engagement. For example, consumerism (including decisions to buy or not buy
certain products and although dismissed by some as mere “clicktivism,” e.g.,
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/sep/24/clicktivism-changed-political-
campaigns-38-degrees-change) may be one of the major ways in which public
expression occurs, and there are many NGOs which deliberately emphasize this
approach.
Engagement may emerge not from broad societal factors as above but in relation
to the possibility of personality traits and emotion. In this sense, it is possible we
have moved some way from resource mobilization theories in which money, com-
munications, and public support are seen as key factors. Emotion in the identification
of common enemies; establishment of personal relationships; and performance of
group rituals are seen as significant (Edwards 2014). Russo and Amnå (2016)
identify different personality traits and relate them to the likelihood of engagement.
Briefly, and not necessarily applied to people in England, those who are agreeable
and conscientious are perhaps less likely to take political action than those who are
extravert and open to experience.
53 Youth Engagement and Citizenship in England 855

Several research projects including the National Foundation for Educational

Research’s Citizenship Education Longitudinal Study (see https://www.nfer.ac.uk/
research/projects/cels/) suggest that practical factors may be significant for individ-
ual and group engagement. These include, peer group advocacy, publicizing oppor-
tunities, an inclusive ethos, a welcoming physical environment, a willingness to deal
realistically and honestly with issues that affect individuals and communities in
contemporary society. In addition, youth workers who use high-level interpersonal
skills to create a positive process of participation and maintaining realistic commit-
ments for young people and the adults who work with them may determine the
nature and amount of young people’s engagement. There are mixed reactions to the
motivational force of rewards (certificates, academic credit, work experience, salary,
etc.), but it would seem potentially naively idealistic to ignore these matters (Davies
et al. 2013).
For individual action there may be a range of facilitators. There are many (e.g.,
Byram 2008) who focus on the achievement of language as an essential indicator
not only of identification but also of likely action. Acquiring language aids the
functional aspects of citizenship (completing tax returns is perhaps a rather mun-
dane example). It affects identity (it may be the case that I am what and how I
speak), and it has a powerful impact on skills and dispositions (advocacy and
representation are just some of the things that are achieved through language). The
Linguistic Ethnography Forum (see http://lingethnog.org/) is devoted to exploring
these issues. These issues and possible processes and outcomes about language
have particular explicit resonance in diverse communities (e.g., see Szczepek Reed
et al. 2017) but are important in all communities insofar as language has instru-
mental value, is an aspect of culture into which and through which people are
socialized, and is a form of social contract in which there are opportunities for
democratic or other types of dialogue.
Social media are seen as having huge potential, but this is contested. There may
be reservations about the positive potential for youth engagement (e.g., see Davies
et al. 2012). Social media may not be available to all. Furthermore, it may be used in
ways congruent with the development of democracy which may lead only to an
emphasis on traditional teaching and learning styles. Despite the claims associated
with social media use, there are strong critical accounts of what is happening to
youth engagement as a result of new technology with some suggesting that less
rather than more democracy is likely (e.g., Taplin 2017). Even in the context of
widespread use, it is not apparent that the amount of usage is sufficient for social
media to impact for all on global citizenship education. Therefore, there remains
lingering questions regarding the ways in which social media are used as they may
not necessarily be aligned with democratic citizenship and its educational potential is
at the very least under-developed (Davies and Sant 2014).
Perhaps the most traditional form of civic engagement is voting. There have for
many years been concerns expressed at low youth turnout at general elections. The
debate in England has focused in recent years around the merits of allowing voting at
16. There is uncertainty about the wisdom of lowering the voting age (Stone 2017).
Some feel that in relation to attempts to increasing turnout young people may “grow
856 I. Davies

into” voting and that, in any case, not voting does not necessarily imply disengage-
ment. Politicians may want young people to vote to secure short-term electoral
advantage (and to weaken young people’s rights to receive state support). There
may be a novelty value that would soon disappear (increases in turnout have been
followed by decreases in, for example, the Isle of Man and Austria). Voting at 16 in
light of rights held by young people in other spheres is seen by some as a spurious
argument. For example, Russell (2014) sees those rights as “minimal, irrelevant, and
diminishing,” and he also claims that comparing young people in this context with
women’s campaigns for the vote or referring to changes to lifestyle regulation is
inappropriate. What, however, seems clear is that the context for engagement is
influenced by discussions over voting.

Making Explicit Connections Between Education and Youth

Engagement

In general terms, there has been a strong connection made between education and an
enriched civic culture. In their classic work that has been generally influential in
many countries, Almond and Verba (1989 [1963]) suggest that:

educational attainment appears to have the most important demographic effect on political
attitudes. Among the demographic variables usually investigated – sex, place of residence,
occupation, income, age, and so on – none compares with the educational variable in the
extent to which it seems to determine political attitudes. The uneducated man or the man
with the limited education is a different political actor from the man who has achieved a
higher level of education. (pp. 315–316)

There are distinctions regarding levels of education in relation to civic participa-

tion. Campbell (2009) argues that an absolute level of one’s own education (in other
words, the value of education itself and not compared with that achieved by others)
is relevant to membership in voluntary associations, institutional trust, and voting.
But sorting (one’s educational position relative to others) may also be important and
when education is, at least in part, a status symbol this may be relevant to societies
which experience political conflict. A cumulative effect (i.e., increases in the average
level of education) is good for interpersonal trust and as a result a wide-based
engagement may develop. Beyond these general considerations, there has been a
large amount of research in England (complementing international studies) that
make a clear connection between certain types of citizenship education and engage-
ment (e.g., Keating et al. 2010; Ofsted 2010). Whiteley’s (2013) research, for
example, shows that:

citizenship education had a positive impact on three key components of civic engagement:
efficacy, political participation and political knowledge. This . . . is likely to help offset some
of the trends in civic participation among young people which have shown a sharp decline in
key activities like voting and voluntary activities over time. (p. 1)
53 Youth Engagement and Citizenship in England 857

Generally, education occurs when the two tenets of constructivism are met:
“learning as an active process of constructing knowledge rather than [only] acquiring
it; and instruction is a process that involves supporting that construction rather than
of [only] communicating knowledge” (Duffy and Cunningham 1996, p. 171). In
order to apply that general insight to specific ideas and issues about citizenship
education, it is interesting to look at research from the National Foundation for
Education Research (https://www.nfer.ac.uk/research/projects/cels/) and reports
from the Office for standards in education (OfSTED) (https://www.gov.uk/govern
ment/publications/citizenship-consolidated-a-survey-of-citizenship-in-schools).
Those reports suggest that effective citizenship education will be achieved by
establishing a clear rationale and characterization of educational engagement widely
understood by “teachers” and “learners,” through explicit and focused consideration
of key concepts, with recognition that certain areas (government, politics, and voting
as well as diversity, identity, and global issues) present difficulties for teachers and
learners, and with an appreciation that while assessment is difficult, good work may
be achieved through open discussion in a positive educational “climate.” There is
less research on nonformal or informal forms of education for engagement but these
surely are very relevant and worthy of further research. This means that despite all
the very many debates in this field, we actually already know what to do and what
not to do: education for engagement should not be narrowly academic, left to chance
or constructed narrowly around morality (in the form of character education) or law
(in the form of civics).

Conclusion

As in other countries, there are significant concerns and challenges about youth
engagement and education in the English context. These challenges and concerns are
long-standing. Since 2010 – a period which has witnessed the effects of the global
financial crisis; General Elections in 2010, 2015, and 2017; and referenda about
Scottish independence (2014) and membership of the European Union (2016) –
England has experienced something of a revolution in education. Schools are now
less supported by local government, have greater autonomy (e.g., most schools are
now not required to follow the National Curriculum), and typically focus on a
limited number of centrally imposed targets (principally maths, English, and science
rather than citizenship). Officially, there is a perceived need for civic knowledge,
greater discipline, and increased individual volunteering. Research and evidence
from the schools’ inspectorate about the value of citizenship education for civic
engagement has been rejected by the government. Although the House of Lords is
currently looking into the possibilities of reviving the educational focus on civic
engagement (see http://www.parliament.uk/citizenship-civic-engagement), it is
unfortunate that citizenship education in England has been characterized as being
party political – essentially Labour Party – property and it is unlikely currently to
regain its former prominent position.
858 I. Davies

The difficulties in the policy context for connecting education and civic engage-
ment are significant. In many ways, England is witnessing a return to the period in
the mid-1990s before the Crick Report when much of the key work was left to
interested professional and funding bodies and individual academics. But that does
not mean that little work is taking place. Internationally, the Council of Europe, the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (http://carnegieendowment.org/
specialprojects/civicresearchnetwork/), and Leverhulme (as evidenced by their sup-
port for the project referred to in the acknowledgements below of this chapter) are
promoting relevant work. There is a wealth of work in several countries taking place
in which efforts are being made to understand the nature and types of engagement
and their links with education. For example, Johnson and Morris (2010), Westheimer
and Kahne (2004), and Veugelers (2007) divide citizens into the adapting citizen, the
individualistic and/or the critical democratic citizen. There is exploration of the ways
in which “new” technology may be shaped to provide the opportunities to move
from the dutiful citizen to the self-actualizing citizen (Bennett 2008). In such a
complex and contested field, interested parties need to continue to work to be clear
about the meaning of key terms (while allowing for dynamic and flexible work). In
addition, there is a need to pay attention to the context in which work takes place in
order to review what seems to be relevant to the levels and types of engagement by
young people and to see what is being done educationally, formally, and otherwise.

Cross-References

▶ Constructions of “Youth” and “Activism” in Lebanon

▶ Education for Youth Civic and Political Action in Australia
▶ The Development of Civic Participation Among Youth in Singapore
▶ Youth Civic Engagement and Formal Education in Canada: Shifting Expressions,
Associated Challenges

Acknowledgments I wish to acknowledge the support offered through a funded Leverhulme

International Network project (IN2016-002).

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“You’ve Got the Skin”: Entrepreneurial
Universities, Study Abroad, 54
and the Construction of Global Citizenship

Sam Schulz

Contents
Introduction: Contextualizing Study Abroad . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 864
“Capturing” Global Citizenship Via the Camera . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 866
“You’ve Got the Skin”: Constructing Global Citizenship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 868
Discussion and Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 873
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 875

Abstract
This chapter locates an Australian university study abroad venture in India within
the contours of the worldwide transformation of higher education. This framing
provides space to discursively analyze how “white” Australian participants con-
tribute to the construction of global citizenship through beliefs and dispositions
mobilized to make sense of lived experience. All study abroad ventures are
nowadays enmeshed in international circuits of capital and neoliberal discourses
that present as “race neutral,” natural and necessary such that those involved are
positioned and influenced by dynamics that obscure the inequities on which these
ventures are often grounded. Pre- and posttravel interviews and in situ photo
diaries form the basis for analyzing participants’ experiences. These materials are
read against a historically constituted field to shed light on the cultural, institu-
tional, and geopolitical dynamics shaping and framing participant accounts. The
chapter demonstrates how a majority of participants in the study at the heart
of this chapter remain “innocently” implicated in reproducing hegemony. It links
these findings to the way in which global citizenship and study abroad ventures
alike are being shaped by the neoliberalization of higher education.

S. Schulz (*)
College of Education, Psychology and Social Work, Flinders University of South Australia,
Adelaide, SA, Australia
e-mail: samantha.schulz@flinders.edu.au

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 863
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_66
864 S. Schulz

Keywords
Global citizenship · Study abroad · Visual discourse analysis · Whiteness ·
Entrepreneurial universities · Neoliberalism

Introduction: Contextualizing Study Abroad

Study abroad (also known as international service, international experiential learn-

ing, outbound mobility, global work-integrated-learning, or global education) has
flourished in the West in recent years (Grantham 2018). This has occurred in tandem
with at least two related phenomena; that is, the rise of voluntourism (or “volunteer
tourism”) as an endeavor similarly geared toward enriching the lives of Westerners
by creating opportunities for them to travel to (mostly) “less white” global regions
for charity work and adventure (Mostafanezhad 2014). And secondly, study abroad
has grown simultaneously to young people in the West being pressured to comport
themselves entrepreneurially (Spohrer 2011).
Charles (2017) argues, young people are now enculturated to think like “shape
shifting portfolio people” whose understandings of success and failure are not
informed by socio-cultural or structural critique, but viewed as products of
the hard-working, agile, or “deviant” Self. Fueling these dynamics is the rise of
neoliberalism as a worldwide, monolithic force (Smyth 2017). Wilkins explains
(▶ Chap. 10, “Neoliberalism, Citizenship, and Education: A Policy Discourse
Analysis”), neoliberalism has emerged as one of the most cited concepts of the
last 30 years. Neoliberalism – or “neoliberalization” to flag its processual (Canaan
2013) – has been invaluable for explaining the organized retraction of government
spending on vital social services in Western democracies for several decades. But more
than this, “neoliberalization” denotes an ideological shift, and hence form of
governmentality by which our view of our own and others’ agentic capacities are
systematically reduced to a decontextualized understanding of “individual will” (Davies
and Bansel 2007). Canaan (2013) says, neoliberalism contracts the “horizons of the
thinkable,” leading us to perceive critical public issues in de-historicized personal terms.
For a complexity of reasons – including neoliberalism’s support of the notions that
individuals be responsible for themselves, and that any intensification of existing
social inequalities along race, class or gender lines be blamed on irresponsible
individuals who are spoiling a traditional (read: patriarchal, “white”) way of life –
writers like Bauman (2016) draw explicit correlations between the rise of neoliberal-
ism and whitelash populism, Brexit, xenophobia, economic nationalism, and the
election of Donald Trump. These phenomena are all shaped by the increased flow of
bodies, capital and commodities that globalization and neoliberal restructuring have
ushered, as well as the synchronous firming of national borders to halt the flow of
“Others” as necessary “safety precaution” (Patel 2017). Amidst these tensions, race is
invoked “to silently reference those who threaten the fiscal wellbeing [. . .] or the social
security of the nation” (Goldberg as cited in Cameron 2018, p. 94). This occurs,
paradoxically, under ostensibly “race-free,” state-sanctioned rhetoric that vindicates
the overtly racialized policies and populism to follow.
54 “You’ve Got the Skin”: Entrepreneurial Universities. . . 865

Furthermore, these and other writers have illuminated parallels between the
growth of neoliberalism, the rise of the global super-rich, and the divide fast growing
between global rich and poor (see Oxfam 2018). Discourses of neoliberalism would
have us believe that we are all individuals whose achievements are the product of
unfettered entrepreneurial spirit. For example, “successful” billionaires are not
viewed as individuals whose wealth and achievements are built on unearned raced,
classed, or gendered privileges (see, e.g., Schulz and Hay 2016); rather, they are
positioned as role models to which all should aspire. Indeed, as Monbiot (2016)
argues, neoliberalism has created a heroic narrative of extreme wealth, while con-
versely, individuals or collectives in need of sustained welfare support are framed as
“living within a culture of dependency, with implicit suggestions of their persistent
deviance” (Stanford and Taylor 2013, p. 477). In short, discourses of neoliberalism
create a “victim blaming” culture that brackets existing privileges and disadvantages
from view. Consequently, “good” neoliberal citizens are expected to think “individ-
ualistically” and this way of thinking is framed as “commonsense,” while neoliberal
forces simultaneously reduce what is “thinkable.”
Higher education institutions were once seen as victims of these neoliberal
processes. However, universities across the West are now increasingly “adopting,
if not embracing, neoliberal values, goals, and processes” (Fraser and Taylor 2016,
p. 4) by, among other means, defining the relationship between students and their
institution in primarily economic terms: i.e., the student as “entrepreneurial individ-
ual” and “consumer” (Giroux 2005). As universities (in Australia, for example)
continue to endure inequitable Federal funding cuts, public universities for public
“good” are quickly transforming into corporations ruled by a mode of aggressive
managerialism to guard against “risk” and promote economic growth. This is
changing the way we think about education: from social good to private investment.
Within what might be termed “entrepreneurial” universities, academic subjects are
increasingly valued to the extent that they hold exchange value on the market. Those
less amenable to outside funding are increasingly devalued, especially those of
a critical nature that question power and expand our critical-contextual awareness.
The citizen at the heart of these relations is thus essentially molded to be autono-
mous; no longer required to think and act in social terms but as an individual and
“rational economic actor whose behaviors, both economic and noneconomic, are
determined by a cost/benefit analysis” (Lemke as cited in Saunders 2011, p. 23).
Within this formulation that is heavily focused on free-market logic, some study
abroad ventures have found fertile ground. Increasingly, universities “advertise
international mobility programs as opportunities for students to develop marketable
skills and to access real world job training for the globalized economy of the
21st Century” (Grantham 2018, p. 61). Study abroad programs can be used to
generate “good news” stories about the institution while enhancing domestic
enrolments (Jorgenson and Shultz 2012, p. 6). University advertising of this nature
will typically promise “a whole world of opportunities” and “life changing experi-
ences” that will enable students to “help where needed” while “boosting their brand”
(Schulz 2019). And while university strategic plans will often frame study abroad
ventures as vehicles by which they produce graduates “equipped to make a differ-
ence in the world as respectful and ethical global citizens” (Flinders University 2019,
866 S. Schulz

p. 12), what are called the public and private transcripts (in other words, the front and
backstage “rhetoric”) of neoliberal universities tend to be worlds apart.
As Greenhouse (2005) explains, domination dramatizes itself with public
transcripts as the open performance of power; however, “the hidden transcript
is the other side of that power, reworked as its negation” (as cited in Smyth
2017, p. 47). What strategic plans of entrepreneurial universities “dramatize”
with respect to global citizenship is an orientation that appears akin to “thick”
global citizenship (Andreotti 2006). In other words, an orientation grounded in
critical, contextual awareness and self-reflexivity. Ethical orientations to global
citizenship of the kind prefigured in these public transcripts stress the need for
collective, informed political action rather than individual responses to complex
structural issues, in which the West is deeply implicated. Ethical orientations
thus demand that we move beyond a logic of individualism to permit structural,
interconnected understandings of social life (Jorgenson and Shultz 2012, p. 3).
However, given the way in which neoliberal universities are systematically
closing down spaces for critical thinking and devaluing critical education topics
while demanding that academics demonstrate increased levels of productivity in
compressed timeframes, in practice they are creating the conditions for “neoliberal
citizenship.” According to Wilkins (▶ Chap. 10, “Neoliberalism, Citizenship, and
Education: A Policy Discourse Analysis”), neoliberal citizenship conceptually sig-
nals the relationship between neoliberalism and citizenship in the field of education.
At the heart of this construct, “is a narrow, rational, utilitarian view of citizens as
consumers” (p. 2). Moreover, neoliberal rationalities bracket socio-historical and
contextual relations from view; thus, a “neoliberal” orientation to global citizenship
is unlikely to broaden students’ field of vision to take in present-day impacts of past
and ongoing modes of global coloniality, racism, or the West’s implications in
poverty, pollution and transnational environmental issues. Put simply, neoliberal
citizenship undermines the capacity for reflexive global citizenship.
To prepare students to apprehend the world reflexively takes time. It requires
supporting them, not only to cross the physical borders of international travel but to
negotiate “invisible” borders of culture and race (Gómez-Peña as cited in Townsin
and Walsh 2016, p. 218). Education of this nature essentially demands a long-term,
strategic commitment from all levels of the institution; however, this orientation to
global citizenship is unlikely to be embraced by entrepreneurial universities when
their remit is to develop globally competitive, work-ready graduates in limited time.
Those involved can effectively be caught at the crossroads between discourses of
global neoliberalism and ethical global citizenship. The study at the heart of this
chapter is caught in this bind.

“Capturing” Global Citizenship Via the Camera

The study on which this chapter reports explores the experiences of 18 Australian
undergraduate students taking part in a 4-week study abroad experience in India
delivering sport development programs to school-aged students. The design and
54 “You’ve Got the Skin”: Entrepreneurial Universities. . . 867

particulars of the study have been published elsewhere (see Schulz and
Agnew forthcoming). Of interest to this chapter is that the majority of participants
were studying a double degree in “teaching” and “sport, health and physical activity”
(SHAPA), all but one were in their mid-twenties and all were “white” – in other words,
drawn from Australia’s middle-class, Anglo-dominated mainstream. Notwithstanding
that the category “white” is complex and mutable, here it is used in a general sense to
signal members of the most privilege group in a race-structured society.
Most Australian teachers are in fact white; this is a product of the nation’s
colonial heritage. Indeed, Australia has historically assumed an imperial role in the
Indo-Pacific (Rizvi 2011). Consequently, a portion of funding for students’ trips
was derived from the Australian Government New Colombo Plan, which aims to
enhance Australia’s geopolitical standing by, among other means, supporting
Australian undergraduates to experience “transformational” people-to-people
encounters in Indo-Pacific countries (DFAT n.d.) – effectively, participants in New
Colombo ventures are placed at the frontline of efforts to reconcile the nation’s
regional belonging. The present study has endeavored to understand how partici-
pants make sense of their experiences, how these experiences are transformational
and, more broadly, to illuminate dynamics at play in the making of Western global
citizens via short-term, university-led study abroad ventures like this one.
Pre- and posttravel interviews and in situ “photo-diaries” were used to capture
participants’ experiences. Modes of “visual” and “critical” discourse analysis were
then applied to these materials hence grounding the study in the poststructuralist notion
that discourse is about more than language; “discourses are articulated through all sorts
of visual and verbal images and texts” (Rose 2012, p. 136). Photographs, in this sense,
are not viewed as passive objects capturing empirical Truth, they “act” in the world by
engaging viewers in processes of representation and interpretation that provide pro-
ducers and consumers of visual media with multiple means of constructing reality.
Analyzing photographs from a critical standpoint is therefore about illuminating
ways in which power runs through them. Historical archives show countless examples
of the photographic classification of raced bodies in Australia and India, which high-
lights how racialized power has historically functioned in this contact zone. This signals
aspects of the legacy of white citizenship that participants in the study have inherited and
underscores ways in which Westerners’ experience of citizenship in their home countries
shapes their orientations to global citizenship (Clost 2015). For example, if participants
have grown up as members of the dominant group in a settler society like Australia that
is resistant to reconciling with its colonial roots, this can limit students’ ability to be
“race cognizant” (in other words, to be mindful of colonization and its ongoing impacts)
within the scope of their own lives. Put differently, reflexivity as a global citizen first
requires reflexive awareness of one’s positionality “at home.”
Students contribute to these relations in multiple ways. According to Clost
(2015), their contributions are linked to the “authoritative knowledge” gathered
about the host destination prior to departure, but they are also linked (in this case)
to whiteness as a structure of authority that is ascribed to “white” subjects. In this
sense, relations between Self and Other are constantly negotiated, resisted and
transformed through raced, classed and gendered processes of representation,
868 S. Schulz

imagination and interpretation that occur before, during, and after an overseas
placement – students can thus reproduce or resist racial hegemony, but their impulses
are always influenced by the social, historical, and institutional environments in
which they are immersed. The following analysis explores how the study abroad
participants “made sense of” their overseas experiences and the orientations to
global citizenship that were forged along the way.

“You’ve Got the Skin”: Constructing Global Citizenship

In pretrip interviews, one of the first questions asked of participants was why they
had chosen to take part. Tiessen (2012, p. 3) notes, understanding participants’
expectations and motivations is an under-theorized yet vital area of inquiry for
improving the management, satisfaction, and impacts of participants on study abroad
placements. Participants’ expectations, whether realized or unmet, play a significant
role in shaping their perceptions and any knowledge that is carried forward. When
exploring participants’ motivations from a poststructuralist perspective, this enables
movement beyond a logic of individualism to apprehend desire as a discursive
construct in which subjects choose to invest. Participants’ desires thus serve as
resources for analyzing society by indicating the discourses on which they draw to
re-construct lived experience.
Similar to Tiessen’s (2012) findings, students’ overarching reasons for taking part
in the study abroad venture to India included frequent recourse to three broad
themes: “career” (i.e., boosting their CVs and testing their teaching or coaching
skills); “travel” (i.e., experiencing “culture” or appeasing boredom); and “helping”
(being a role model, nurturing children or improving the lives of those in need). With
respect to helping, “Eve” noted:

. . . I have a real passion for making a difference and helping people and I guess that sort of
drives me.

Charlie reflected:

I am keen to get out and explore new opportunities; get outside my comfort zone; keen to
travel; see the world; make a difference – like I thought India would be a really good
opportunity to you know [. . .] make a difference.

When asked why he thought India, specifically, would provide scope for making
a difference, Charlie explained that being a “Third World” country, India would be
“unbelievable”:

. . . I want to expose myself to those conditions that will really put me outside my comfort
zone. I think the main thing is just the challenge and the comfort zone and just probably
personal development.
54 “You’ve Got the Skin”: Entrepreneurial Universities. . . 869

Although blatant in this excerpt, the oft-cited and frequently critiqued helping
imperative (see, e.g., Tiessen and Huish 2013) is usually framed by Western partic-
ipants in terms of what they will “do for others,” hence imbuing them with a selfless
pretense. However, as Heron (2007) contends, and Charlie illustrates, the desire to
help can be as much about “Self” as the more patently “self-interested” motivations
linked to career and travel. Binding the participants’ desires was thus their grounding
in a neoliberal “self-enterprising” discourse centered on enhancing individual cap-
ital, which was expressed in the interviews in the absence of any reference to social
justice, collaboration, long-term commitment, or activism.
In place of the latter, self-serving impulses featured far more prominently mean-
ing that the focus was “nearly exclusively centered on the students’ desires rather
than the needs or requests from host communities” (McDonald and Tiessen 2018,
p. 6). Tim remarked, travelling to India would be “another thing that I can put on my
resume to [. . .] differ me from the next person that’s applying for a job.” Floyd
said, study abroad would be “a potential CV stocking filler.” Simon described it as
“something that just popped up [. . . that I can] put on the resume.” While Stewart,
Laura, Nate, and indeed the far majority of remaining participants cited “travel to
India” to experience culture or escape the boredom of everyday life in Australia as a
primary motivating force. In Lucas’ view, “to go over there and experience Indian
culture [. . . is] something that everyone needs to tick off their bucket list,” thus
positioning the marginalized situation of many people in India as a novelty worth
going to see. Not dissimilarly, Ben explained, “Australia doesn’t really have much
culture,” which piqued his desire to experience culture “over there.”
As suggested earlier, to be reflexive as a global citizen requires reflexive appreci-
ation of one’s positionality “at home.” Despite that more than half the participants had
undertaken at least one critical education topic as part of their degrees – (in this case,
an Indigenous pedagogies topic that asks students to reflect on their privileges along
various axes of oppression while appreciating that Australia is a race structured nation)
– none advanced a nuanced understanding of Australian national identity in their
interviews or photo diaries. Instead, references to “Australian culture” were articulated
via benign stereotypes such as “summer, soft drinks, sunscreen and beach cricket”
(Charlie, preinterview); in other words, normative images of “Australian-ness” that
naturalize the nation as a White possession (Hage 2000). References to Australian
national identity typically mirrored comments like Ben’s, which frame White Australia
as “cultureless,” and as a corollary, the white Self as “just ordinary.”
To discursively link “Australia” with “no culture” and white subjectivity
with ordinariness equates whiteness with the power of normalcy, while denying Indig-
enous sovereignty. When white identity is understood this way, whiteness is negated as a
system of historical, cultural, and social mechanisms that repeatedly return unearned
material and psychological benefits to those positioned as “white.” Although merely
signaled in the examples included in this analysis, the far majority of participants in the
study exhibited cultural lenses with this lacuna: i.e., blind spots relating to their privilege,
which colored their experiences overseas. For instance, when asked in postinterviews to
describe what “being white” meant in India, participants frequently marveled at being
“stared at,” “targeted for money” or “asked for autographs,” but rarely did they
870 S. Schulz

acknowledge whiteness as a system of benefits that sustains their lives. Articulating one
of the most common themes, Ben, Tim, and Lucas remarked:

Probably the most memorable [part of the trip] was yeah just getting flocked by people to
sign autographs and take photos. [. . .] It was pretty crazy to think just because we are white
people that these guys want our autographs. (Ben)
Everyone was wanting autographs [. . .] a million autographs and selfies and it’s like we were
famous, but we were just white. (Tim)
They thought we were superstars, rock stars, sort of thing, and they would literally line up
just to get our autograph when we’re just ordinary Australians. (Lucas)

In each of these excerpts (where emphasis is added), whiteness is articulated

as innocence. There is little recognition that their capacity to travel overseas is a
product of their whiteness, an option that is unlikely to be a two-way street for those
living in poverty in India. Australia’s historical role as an imperial presence in India,
and the ongoing impacts of this past, is thus erased from view when whiteness as a
source of unearned privileges that still accrues to white subjects is overlooked.
Instead, whiteness assumes a naturally elevated status, which was in turn reflected
in students’ photo diaries, particularly when those in the host destination were
positioned as a homogenous group in relation to a single white subject whose status
was consequently elevated (Clost 2015, p. 241). Common examples of the latter
included: “fielding autographs amidst a crowd,” “coaching a mass of students,”
“hugging primary schoolers,” or, as pictured, “leading the class”:

In an unusually sophisticated analysis, Joe nevertheless indicated movement

toward reflexivity when describing an encounter that deepened his appreciation of
what it means to be white:

I went to a club, a nightclub with somebody I met from Mumbai [. . .] and I’d recently taken
off a button-up shirt and given it to a friend because they were leaving, I just had a t-shirt. We
started entering this club and I realized everyone was wearing button-up shirts and I said to
54 “You’ve Got the Skin”: Entrepreneurial Universities. . . 871

this local Mumbai friend, “I should’ve kept my button-up shirt.” And he said, “it’s okay,
you’ve got the skin.”

McKinney (2005, p. 24) suggests, turning points are important junctures in white
peoples’ lives that signify moments of consciousness of whiteness when white
subjects gain insights into the racialized nature of their existence. Turning points
usually result from interactions with others who McKinney calls agents of epiphany;
people who prompt a radically new way of thinking about aspects of our lives in
a reflexive or self-analytic manner. Joe used this turning point experience at the
nightclub to rationalize that his ostensibly elevated status as a “white” person in
India, far from proving individual qualities of character, was a product of colonial
relations that he’d, realistically, done nothing to earn. Applying this awareness to his
teaching, Joe then reflected; “I suppose it’s pretty easy for me to sit back and expect
the rest of the world to learn English but . . . if I don’t try and learn something from
their language I’ll be limited to my understanding of my own language.” In this
sense, Joe exhibited awareness of the need to decenter whiteness and his capacity
(to a small extent) to do so pedagogically.
The development of reflexivity is, nevertheless, a complex and ongoing task and
“how to be” reflexive is not always clear-cut. Notwithstanding Joe’s realization that
whiteness is more than skin deep, when subsequently asked how he negotiated
encounters with poverty in India, the rationalities on which Joe drew restored his
complicity with hegemonic whiteness and hence, neoliberal citizenship:

If someone came up and asked me for money, towards the end it was a no. I justified that
within myself by saying that this will be for the betterment of them in the long run. [. . . But]
how do you still show kindness [. . .] How do you support the person at the same time? That
is a good question and I don’t know the answer to that yet. But in terms of dealing with
poverty, the behavior I’m not going to reinforce just by giving them money.

Despite permitting a structural understanding of social life when recounting the

nightclub story, in this excerpt Joe secures the relational basis of whiteness through
projecting fantasies of an Other who is caught in a self-induced cycle of dependency – in
keeping with neoliberal rhetoric, poverty is viewed as a product of individual “poor”
behavior. From this perspective, “that some of us are better off because others are and
historically have been poor, and that this is structured by the intersections of race, class,
and gender, is almost unrecognized” (Heron 2007, pp. 41–42). Instead of acknowledg-
ing these dimensions in the way that a “critical” global citizen might do, Joe drew on
discourses that positioned him as a benevolent white man while reproducing the moral
rationalization of the civilizing mission: an entitlement and obligation to intervene
(Spurr 1993, p. 113), where intervention was limited to “showing kindness.”
When detailing their encounters with poverty, some of the respondents articulated
more patently racist dispositions. For instance, in a remarkably frank disclosure,
Lucas explained that when approached by extremely poor people seeking money,
he would “start looking on my phone hoping they’d go away [until eventually I’d
say], ‘driver, can you just tell them to piss off’.” In comments like these, albeit that
they were rare, the student’s complicity with domination is obvious insofar as
872 S. Schulz

positioning those who are structurally disadvantaged as “deviant” and disdainful. In

contrast, Joe’s deployment of a helping narrative was arguably more insidious
and was far more common across the interviews, given the way in which “helping”
secures innocence and the story of the moral subject (Heron 2007, p. 121). This
standpoint is particularly problematic for moving Western subjects towards “critical”
orientations to global citizenship given that doing so would in fact require
“relinquishing moral narratives of Self” (p. 143).
Innocent, brave, benevolent, worldly, or otherwise affirmative self-constructions
were commonplace across the photo diaries, illustrating how immersion in a
developing context can enable Western subjects to “discover” themselves through
encounters with an Other (Mathers as cited in McDonald and Tiessen 2018, p. 7).
For many of the participants, this inflated sense of Self that traveling to a developing
context granted them piqued further desire for travel. For example, Stewart
explained, having travelled to India he was ready for the next step:

I definitely want to travel solo next time because [. . . now that I’ve been to India] I can go by
myself [because] a lot of people have said India’s really up there on the scale.

By describing India as “up there on the scale,” Stewart references the carnival-
esque, and indeed, India was often constituted in students’ accounts in carnivalesque
terms: a dangerous or exotic world that excites the appetite of cultural tourists by
allowing them to eagerly realize their desires beneath the sign of the Other (Del
Cooke 2006). Many of the photo diaries included pictures of Western students
alongside Indian crowds or in relation to (what they perceived to be) outlandish
sights in ways that accentuated their “intrepid traveler,” “caring teacher,” or “rock
star” status. At other times, however, the host culture was erased altogether. The
latter was noticeable, for instance, in travel shots sanitized for display on social
media, as in the following example which Tim captions, “Boy meets world”:
54 “You’ve Got the Skin”: Entrepreneurial Universities. . . 873

By framing these trips as, in part, about holiday-making – as in voluntourism –

this too can allow an “innocent gaze” (Heron and Tiessen 2012). The term “boy”
in Tim’s caption is therefore significant. Boys, opposed to men, are innocent and
it is not the work of boys to advance a decolonizing agenda. An innocent stance
on the part of Western participants can consequently reproduce rather than
challenge superficial orientations to global citizenship while, nonetheless,
enhancing their employability, framing their trips a “success” and imparting a
“worldly” demeanor that can be “cashed in” back at home in return for social and
professional kudos.
The global citizen who emerges from these analyses might therefore be described
as “white,” largely non-reflexive and chiefly concerned with self-enhancement. This
raises questions about the capacity of study abroad ventures to live up to the public
transcripts of university strategic plans and produce graduates equipped to make a
difference in the world as respectful and ethical global citizens, given the many
challenges to this goal.

Discussion and Conclusion

In reality, study abroad ventures are diverse and multiple and so too are the students
who take part in them. This chapter has particularized its focus to one venture
administered by an Australian university undergoing significant neoliberal change.
Although aspects of this program are unique, other details speak to dynamics that are
shaping higher education and university-led study abroad programs more generally.
For example, myriad details from the participants’ stories indicated ways in which
students can remain implicated in reproducing center-periphery relations borne of
colonization. In this sense, the analysis illuminated how residues of the colonial
era remain at work in postcolonial contexts like India, such that white subjects of
colonial heritage remain unfairly if “naturally” privileged. However, Indo-Pacific
hosts are not passive in these relations. Moreover, it would be short-sighted to reify
the locus of whiteness to individual students themselves.
To be fair, a complex “ensemble” (Foucault 1991, p. 102) of providers, depart-
ments, authorities, policies, and personnel make up the governmentality of “study
abroad.” An overarching impact on these programs, one that shapes the dispositions
and choices of all involved, is the contemporary neoliberalization of both higher and
pretertiary education. For example, at the university where this study was carried
out, undergraduate degrees in areas like Education are no longer staffed by a critical
mass of critical educators. Students’ exposure to topics that allow them to apprehend
their reality as social beings with social consciousness is, therefore, curtailed.
Yet, developing critical awareness of this kind requires time, students need ongoing
exposure to sociocultural discourses, and they also require scaffolded engagement
with reflexive ways of thinking. Consequently, when questions of race or whiteness
or critical global citizenship are relegated to topics such as Indigenous Education
or one-off modules on cultural awareness, this can have the adverse effect of
entrenching the covertly racist belief that such issues be ignored elsewhere (Schulz
and Fane 2015).
874 S. Schulz

Although participants in the present study were required to complete a “cultural

awareness training” module in preparation for their trips; moreover, although most
had undertaken a critical Indigenous Education topic as part of their degree, the
analyses indicate that knowledge of this kind can be abandoned in favor of more
hegemonic logics and practices that present as “commonsense.” In place of demon-
strating hallmarks of what might be termed “critical intercultural competence” – in
other words, “dispositions and skills that are cultivated over time, which then
become the critical knowledge and understanding needed to cultivate creative
solutions to complex challenges collectively with citizens across the world”
(Townsin and Walsh 2016, p. 218) – participants reverted to shallow understandings
their study abroad ventures, with the upshot being “shallow” articulations of global
citizenship characterized chiefly by “white innocence.”
Compounding the issue was that to satisfy funding and program imperatives
inside a university whose central remit is to produce “agile global competitors,”
participants were also led to undertake units on “career development” and “entrep-
reneurism” – factors that circumscribed the efforts of the small number of academics
designing and delivering the program, academics who were themselves working
under compressed timeframes with little support. That the students were collectively
wedded to discourses of “self-enterprise” and “personal growth” is therefore unsur-
prising – these are dominant discourses within and beyond their university.
Tiessen and Huish (2013) argue that the rapid growth of study abroad programs
across the West has “far outpaced our ability to evaluate and understand [their]
impacts” (p. 4). But more than this, entrepreneurial universities are co-opting study
abroad ventures as marketing tools. As such, universities are far more likely to favor
“good news” stories about study abroad than to allow critical research into these
programs, which might tarnish the university’s brand. Indeed, neoliberal governance
mechanisms are actively undermining, underfunding, and negating critical research
in favor of that which is quantifiable and marketable (Cowden and Singh 2013), and
this managerialist logic has worldwide reach.
For example, the Indian schooling system where the Australian students in this
study were variously placed is deeply enmeshed in “doing neoliberalism” to survive,
which means scaling national school rankings systems and actively engaging
in image-maintenance practices like universities in the West. In this respect, Indian
schools advertising that they are hosting “visiting Australian teachers and sports
coaches” can have the (arguably) problematic effect of reinforcing Australian stu-
dents’ elevated self-perceptions, which reduces the need for reflexive self-critique.
Thus, Western students not only feed into and off these dynamics when unintent-
ionally using study abroad primarily as a vehicle for self-benefit, they are also
written into these relations by their hosts, by their institutions of higher learning,
by the overarching corporate machinery that is fast turning study abroad into an
extension of global capitalism, and by preparation programs that favor modules on
“career development” and “entrepreneurship.”
Throughout the participants’ interviews and photo diaries, dysconsciousness of
social relations thus had the effect of legitimating their voices “as individuals,” while
negating structural or reflexive critique. If Western subjects of colonial heritage are
54 “You’ve Got the Skin”: Entrepreneurial Universities. . . 875

nonetheless to adopt a reflexive orientation to global citizenship, and in so doing live

up to the “public transcripts” of neoliberal universities, greater levels of socio-
political awareness and reflexivity must be developed. Western students need to
have more than “white skin” to be critical global citizens; they require genuine “skin
in the game” that underpins a long-term commitment to global equity. Neoliberal
universities are arguably undermining this project; this should give all involved in
study abroad serious pause for concern.

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Youth Participation, Movement Politics,
and Skills: A Study of Youth Activism in Italy 55
Ilaria Pitti

Contents
Introduction: Activism, Socialization and Skills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 878
The Research: Case Study and Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 880
Hard Skills and Character Skills in Participative Trajectories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 882
Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 886
Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 887
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 887

Abstract
Studies of youth participation in social movement organizations (SMOs) have
largely focused on the influence of upbringing on the development of activism.
Other analyses have considered how young people use competencies acquired
through their involvement in SMOs in their wider political activities in more
institutional political settings, as well as in their private lives. While young
activists’ paths “toward” and “after” movement politics have been considered
within political socialization and civic education studies, there is a need for
deeper analyses on young people’s paths “in” SMOs. The chapter intends to
contribute to this debate by analyzing the specific skills a young individual is
required to have to be recognized as a “promising” activist and progress in the
SMOs’ hierarchies. The chapter surveys existing literature and, drawing on data
collected through an ethnography conducted on one Italian radical-left SMO,
analyzes the importance of hard and character skills in young people’s trajectories
within movement politics.

I. Pitti (*)
Department of Social, Political and Cognitive Sciences, University of Siena, Siena, Italy
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 877
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_61
878 I. Pitti

Keywords
Young people · Social movements · Political socialization · Youth participation ·
Skills

Introduction: Activism, Socialization and Skills

Research on youth civic and political participation has shown a growing interest for
the analysis of the processes leading young people to develop participative conduct
(Flanagan et al. 2012). A vast literature has developed around the concept of
“political socialization” (Hyman 1959; Merelman 1986; Neundorf et al. 2013),
which describes and analyzes processes of transmission and negotiation of political
behaviors and norms between parents and children and, more generally, between
adult and young people. These researches have demonstrated, for example, how
growing up in politically supportive families and being exposed to certain political
norms and behaviors in early childhood and adolescence impact on people’s political
attitudes throughout their lives (Neundorf et al. 2013). Growing up in politically
active families would result, for example, in higher levels of interest for political
issues and political involvement (Torney-Purta and Amadeo 2011; Amnå 2012;
Wray-Lake and Flanagan 2012; Martínez et al. 2019).
More recently, the debate on “civic education” (Sears and Levy 2003; Fischman
and Haas 2014) has expanded the perspective of classic theories on political social-
ization (Torney-Purta and Amadeo 2012). The civic education model has contributed
to broadening scholars’ attention beyond the time of primary socialization (Gordon
2008). As pointed out by Petrovic et al. (2014: 8), “more attention is nowadays given
to the balance between what citizens learn during their youth and what is learned
over the rest of the life course [and] the possibility of political socialization as a
lifelong learning process has been considered.” In this perspective, the civic educa-
tion model has contributed to encouraging analyses focused on agencies of social-
ization for politics which are alternative to the family – such as the peer group – as
well as on the processes through which people acquire citizenship skills, knowledge,
and expertise during their youth, adulthood, and old age (Fillieule 2013).
The prevalence of a constructivist paradigm within the civic education field has
led scholars to abandon the idea of socialization as a one-way process where adults
are in charge of teaching participation to young people. Of particular importance, the
appreciation of civic education as a wider form of lifelong learning has challenged
what has been defined as the “deficit model” of political socialization (Andolina
et al. 2003; Torney-Purta and Wilkenfeld 2009; Kahne and Sporte 2008), that is, the
idea of young people as “empty glasses” that adults have to fill. In so doing, the civic
education model has recognized that “political socialization is something that [young
people] do for themselves” (Earl et al. 2017). As suggested by Youniss et al. (2002),
involvement in families, schools, and adult-led participative environments
can provide young people with “raw materials – knowledge, models, reflective
matter – and various forms of feedback, but it is ultimately the youth themselves
55 Youth Participation, Movement Politics, and Skills: A Study of Youth. . . 879

who synthesize this material, individually and collaboratively, in ways that make
sense to them.”
Within research that has focused more specifically on youth participation in social
movement organizations (hereafter SMOs), the political socialization and civic
education models have been mostly applied, respectively, to (a) highlight the
influence of upbringing on the development of activism and (b) shed light on the
civic competencies that young people can acquire through their engagement in social
movements.
Concerning the first point, social movement studies have analyzed the biograph-
ical paths leading young people to become active in movement politics, the influence
that growing up in politicized milieus (families, schools, urban areas) has on the
involvement in movement politics in later life and the biographical consequences of
this involvement (Fillieule 2013; Giugni and Grasso 2016; Filleule and Neveu 2019;
Walther et al. 2019). Research has shown how activists’ personal histories often
entail an upbringing marked by the witnessing of the intense activism of their
parents. Parents would transmit a “propensity to activism” to their children through
their example and through a series of daily behaviors oriented by their political
values (Torney-Purta and Amadeo 2012). Moreover, the networks parents are
involved in would become a socializing agent themselves as highlighted, for exam-
ple, in a study conducted on the life stories of “red diaper babies” who have grown
up American communist milieus during the 1950s by Kaplan and Shapiro (1998)
and in the analyses realized by McCurties (2011) on the political attitudes and
behaviors of the children of the “old left.”
In relation to the second point, SMOs have been considered as spaces of “civic
development” through which young people acquire a series of competencies and
knowledge that are relevant for the formation of their civic identity and the exercise
of their rights as citizens (Ginwright and Cammarota 2007). From this perspective,
SMOs help young people in discovering themselves as active citizens (van Dam
et al. 2015) through different processes and mechanisms that foster a shift in the
focus from the “I” to the “We” (Martínez et al. 2012). They teach young people to
recognize and identify with collective values and beliefs that link one’s conditions to
a past and a present (Youniss and Yates 1997) and to a larger social and cultural
scenario (Furrow and Wagener 2003). They also teach young people collective
problem-solving (Kirshner 2007), encouraging them to work effectively together
to have an impact on their and others’ lives. As suggested by Van Dyke and Dixon
(2013), participation in social movements allows individuals to acquire an “activist
human capital” through the relationships they develop with other activists. The
interaction occurring between activists would result in the acquisition of a series of
tangible competencies in terms of organizing strategies, leadership skills, and group
management that would contribute at sustaining their participation and that would
result useful in their private lives as well.
These perspectives develop the ideas that participation in social movements
requires certain values and ideological perspectives developed in the home and
also require skills, knowledge, and competencies that can be developed through
such action (Petrovic et al. 2014: 10). However, this brief review of the literature
880 I. Pitti

highlights how scholars’ attention has been mainly placed either on the acquisitions
of those skills through processes occurring before the beginning of involvement in
movement politics (i.e., the socialization in the family) or on the effects that
socialization to politics through SMOs can have in terms of acquisitions of skills
that are expendable elsewhere. In other words, the analysis appears largely focused
on the “before” and the “after” the actual moment of the involvement in social
movements, while the study of the “now” is still substantially underexplored.
Indeed, there is a need for more analyses of the specific skills that are valued,
cherished, and cultivated by SMOs themselves and of the knowledge and compe-
tencies that emerge as functional for effective participation in SMOs (Fligstein 2001;
Van Dyke and Dixon 2013).
This chapter intends to contribute to this debate presenting the results of a
preliminary analysis of the paths of involvement of a group of young activists within
a left-leaning radical SMO based in Bologna (Italy). Leaning on Guzman-Concha
(2015), I define radical SMOs as characterized by three distinctive elements: they
pursue an agenda of drastic changes which would affect elite interests and social
positions; they perform a repertory of contention characterized by the employment
of unconventional means; they progressively adopt countercultural identities that
frame and justify unconventional objectives and methods. Despite advocating in
favor of radical political and social changes and using unconventional (and some-
times unlawful) means of action, radical social movements do not seek to over-
thrown democracy and its institutions.
In particular, the chapter is interested in the analysis of new members’ “partici-
pative trajectories” within the observed SMO which will be considered to answer the
following research question: what skills are needed to be recognized as a “promis-
ing” activist? The concept of participative trajectories refers to the progression
(or not) of the new members in the group’s internal hierarchies. Young people’s
participative trajectories will be used to highlight which skills are considered
relevant and need to be acquired to be considered a good activist.
The chapter starts with an introduction of the case study followed by the analysis
of the skills which emerge as important in determining one’s possibility to access the
SMO and progress in its informal hierarchies. The relevance of a series of “hard”
(i.e., education) and “character” (i.e., optimism, vision, risk tolerance, etc.) skills is
presented, and results are discussed in relation to their broader implications for the
study of youth activism and social movements.

The Research: Case Study and Methodology

The data considered for this chapter have been collected between 2015 and 2018
through an ethnography conducted in one radical SMO which will be fictionally
named “Lucha.” The materials considered for this chapter have been collected within
the research project “Youthblocs.” The project has received funding from the
European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie
Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement no 701844. Between 2016 and 2018, Youthblocs
55 Youth Participation, Movement Politics, and Skills: A Study of Youth. . . 881

has investigated young people’s practices and trajectories of activism in radical

SMOs. The research has been conducted through participant observations and
biographical interviews with activists involved in different leftist SMOs in Italy
and Sweden and has explored how youth conditions in the two countries contribute
at shaping the contents and the forms of youth participation. A more extended
presentation of the project’s result can be found in Pitti (2018).
The story of Lucha begins in late 2012 when a group of young people decided to
occupy an abandoned former barrack located in the center of the city of Bologna.
The building became the “headquarter” of the organization, but also served as
accommodation for many of the activists. Over the following 5 years was trans-
formed in a “social center” where different projects were developed for and with
local inhabitants. In the Italian context, the term centri sociali refers to a specific kind
of political experience. Social centers are usually abandoned buildings which are
squatted and turned in self-managed and countercultural spaces where political and
social initiatives are proposed (for more, see Mudu 2012; Genova 2018). Within
Lucha, one could find a self-managed shelter for migrants, a weekly farmers’ market,
a microbrewery, an organic garden, a pizzeria, a library and a study room, a bike
repair shop, and a kindergarten along with seminars, workshops, self-training activ-
ities, and cultural events (i.e., concerts, art exhibitions).
Lucha was largely appreciated by local inhabitants of Bologna, but the relation-
ships between the social center, local political institutions, and police authorities
have been marked by strong contrasts due to the unlawful position of the centro
sociale. The confrontation with authorities has resulted in the eviction of the SMO
from the occupied barrack in August 2017. After the eviction, a demonstration has
been organized, and more than 10.000 people have gathered in the street of Despina
to ask for the reopening of Lucha. Authorities have refused to consider the possi-
bility to maintain Lucha within the occupied barrack but have granted the group with
a new space where some of the old projects were restarted along with new ones. For
a more detailed presentation of the story of the case study and of the activities
organized by the young people in Lucha, see Pitti (2018).
At the beginning of its history, the observed SMO was composed by a group of
about 20–30 young activists with strong expertise in contentious politics. However,
in August 2017 about 150 people, mostly aged between 20 and 25, were engaged in
the activities of the social center. For the purpose of this analysis, it is particularly
important to stress that many of these members were inexperienced. In fact, many of
the young people involved in Lucha have started their path of activist into the
observed SMO not through the engagement in protest actions (i.e., demonstrations,
boycotts, etc.) but participating as “volunteers” in one of the abovementioned
projects.
For many of them, the involvement in the activities of the self-managed shelter
for migrants, of the school of Italian, or of the organic brewery was their very first
experience of participation in movement politics. In fact, “calls for volunteers” were
launched regularly to recruit new participants outside the movements’ scene in order
to involve in Lucha not only those who were already active in the radical left-wing
politics. This characteristic makes it possible to analyze who of the new
882 I. Pitti

“inexperienced” members had the possibility to progress in the hierarchies of the

group and which skills made the difference in their paths.
The analysis is enriched by the in-depth perspective I have acquired on the case
study thanks to the conduction of extended observations throughout a period of time
encompassing more than 2 years. I have started to engage in the activities of Lucha
as one of the many volunteers involved in the self-managed shelter for migrants, and,
over the years, my engagement in the group has progressively increased to the point
of being now a member. Although I have specified from the very beginning my
professional role, the sustained involvement and the similarity (in terms of age,
political views, and social backgrounds) to the young activists have led to the
development of strong relationships of friendship and trust with Lucha’s activists.

Hard Skills and Character Skills in Participative Trajectories

Through the analysis of the activists’ trajectories of participation in Lucha has been
possible to understand what skills influence possibilities to progress within the
SMO’s informal hierarchies. In particular, the analysis of the collected data has
highlighted the relevance of education a series of character skills on the paths of
participation of the young activists.
For what concerns the kind of SMO considered in this chapter, it must be noted
that – on a general level – radical-left SMOs are settings of participation distin-
guished by low barriers of access. Ideological frameworks that value and promote
inclusion correspond to inclusive practices when it comes to the recruitment of new
members. For example, the observed SMO adopted a very inclusive recruitment
policy for new members, who were invited to take part in the activities of the group
through the aforementioned “calls for volunteers.” In the calls, the willingness to
take action on specific topics and donate one’s time to the SMO’s campaigns and
projects was the only criterion defined to be welcomed.

If you think that from everyday concrete actions together with others is possible to build a
fairer world for all, if you think that borders should not exist, if you are tired of cuts to
fundamental rights disguised as “reforms”, if you want to commit yourself actively, then
participate to our call for volunteers! (Lucha’s call for volunteers, 2016)

This openness resulted in the inclusion of members having very diversified

backgrounds in terms of age, gender, ethnic origins, and educational levels and
turned Lucha in a multiethnic and intergenerational meeting spot. Moreover, in line
with the analysis conducted by Quintelier (2010) on unconventional forms of
political participation, Lucha’s “open recruitment policy” fostered a massive engage-
ment in the group of subjects – such young people and women – who frequently
remain at the margins of more formal participatory processes.
Despite the substantial lack of entry barriers to the group, the relevance of a series
of “hard” and “character” skills – such as education, optimism, flexibility, etc. –
55 Youth Participation, Movement Politics, and Skills: A Study of Youth. . . 883

emerges clearly if we focus our attention to the progressions of the new members
within the hierarchies of the group.
On an official level, Lucha was a horizontal organization devoid of a formal
hierarchical order. Indeed, the main decisions were always discussed in a weekly
assembly based on the logic of consensus. Despite the absence of a formal hierarchy,
an informal hierarchical order developed spontaneously within Lucha: a limited
number of activists emerged from the base and assumed roles of greater responsi-
bility, prestige, and visibility. This hierarchy was mirrored in the internal distinction
of the members between “volunteers” and “activists.”

Lucha’s members name themselves “volunteers” or “activists”. “Volunteers” are the new
members, who have no previous experience of participation in SMOs. “Activists” are either
experienced members (who have a long history of militancy in radical left social move-
ments) or volunteers who have been “promoted” after some months of participation in the
group. On a daily basis, there is no major distinction in their activities within the squatted
barrack and everybody can take part in the decision-making processes. However, the
“agenda setting” is largely in the hands of the “activists.” (Fieldnotes, May 2016)

Looking at the stories of those new members who emerging from the base of the
“volunteers” have managed to become “activists” and reach central positions in the
group’s power structure is possible to notice that very specific hard and character
skills have determined the outcome of their paths of participation.
Concerning hard skills, activists’ educational level emerged as a relevant
factor in defining one’s possibilities of progression within the group hierarchies.
None of the activists were required to possess a diploma or a university degree to
participate in the activities of the social movement which – in terms of class
background – was mostly composed of young people belonging to lower middle-
class families, but the prevalence of university students and university graduates
among those who assumed positions of visibility cannot be interpreted as just a
chance.
The assumption of coordination roles by activists who own a higher educa-
tional degree appears favored because it guarantees to the group the internal-
ization of competencies that may be relevant for the specific activities carried
out by the movement (Fligstein 2001). For example, in the case of Lucha,
students of law schools, educators, and social workers reached more frequently
roles of coordination and visibility as they provided the SMO with the neces-
sary competencies to run the shelter for refugees, the school of Italian, and
other projects developed to foster migrants and asylum seekers’ inclusion in the
Italian society.

Martina and Clara have quickly distinguished themselves from the other volunteers involved
in the self-managed shelter for migrants and, after some months, they are de facto coordi-
nating the activities of the shelter. Everybody refers to them as “activists” now. [. . .] They are
about to graduate in educational studies and international cooperation and have expertise in
providing services to migrants thanks to their studies and traineeships in NGOs so they have
competencies which are highly valued in Lucha. (Fieldnotes, December 2016)
884 I. Pitti

Moreover, a high educational level usually goes hand by hand with the possession of
communicative, dialectical, and argumentative skills. These skills acquire central
importance in the interaction with the institutions and in the activity of voice and
claim enacted by any social movement. In the case of Lucha, students of political
science, philosophy, communication studies, and sociology were encouraged to
engage as spokespersons during press conferences or at taking care of the commu-
nication campaigns and social media profiles of the group.
The emerging relevance of educational level for participation in movement
politics is in line with the tendencies highlighted by Bovens and Wille (2017) in
their study on education-based inequalities in participation. The authors argue that
education-based inequality represents the most worrying form of inequality in
contemporary societies also for its effects on political influence. Bovens and Wille
(2017) have coined the expression “diploma democracy” to describe how political
influence is becoming accessible only to people having high educational credentials.
In this context, movement politics appears to have a paradoxical role: at the same
time, it fosters the involvement of politically marginalized social groups (including
individuals with low educational credentials) and reproduces education-based
inequalities in its internal hierarchies (Quintelier 2010).
Education becomes a relevant factor for progressing into the observed SMO,
but the analysis of the collected materials underlines that the possibilities of
advancement within the group are strongly determined also by the other skills,
which sociological and psychological literature clusters under the concept of
“character skills.” The term “character skills” describes a series of personal
attributes that represent desirable qualities for certain activities (Heckman and
Kautz 2014; Maccarini 2016). Widely used by scholars studying educational
and work careers, the concept of character skills refers to a wide spectrum of
abilities and traits that complement the so-called hard skills. While the latter
refers to the technical abilities and the factual knowledge needed to accomplish
a given task, character skills are a series of personal, social, and communication
competencies that allow subjects to effectively use their technical abilities and
knowledge.
When asked what skills a participant needs to be considered an activist, Lucha’s
members persistently mentioned a series of character elements. Indeed, having the
“right character” or the “right attitude” were expressions constantly used by the
observed young people to explain why some people succeed in becoming activists
and others do not.

I discuss with Federica, one of the activists, about Andrea, a new volunteer. Federica says
she thinks Andrea has the “right qualities” to “be more active”. She thinks he can aspire to be
more than a simple volunteer and become an “activist”. “He is intelligent, has big ideas, he is
committed, etc. He has the right character” she says. (Fieldnotes, February 2018)

In particular, optimism, vision, sociability, constancy, autonomy, self-motivation,

risk tolerance, and flexibility emerged as the most valued skills. These resources
were described as crucial for performing activism and played a relevant role in
55 Youth Participation, Movement Politics, and Skills: A Study of Youth. . . 885

determining new members’ permanence in the group and progression in the SMO’s
hierarchy structure.

Talking about a member who has left Lucha after being very active for a long time, Serena
tells me that the problem was her lack of optimism and flexibility. “She was too much
argumentative and pessimist” Serena says, adding that “she always puts down new ideas
because she thinks they will not work. In the long run, you stop the group: it doesn’t matter if
you are the best at doing something if you don’t have the right character.” (Fieldnotes, May
2017)

Analyzing these elements in terms of “character skills” – instead of personality traits,

personal attributes, and individual qualities – entails a paradigmatic change in the
way we look at paths of participation and processes of socialization in movement
politics.
On a first level, looking at optimism, constancy, risk tolerance, and other personal
qualities in terms of “character skills” means giving full recognition to the role
played by social skills in the lived, everyday practice of participation. The concept of
character skills sheds light on a series of taken-for-granted capabilities that individ-
uals continuously activate in any form of social interaction and which are crucial for
the efficient accomplishment of a task, including a political task.
Existing literature on (youth) participation has discussed the influence that
ascribed personal characteristics (i.e., gender, ethnic background, educational
level) and networks have on individuals’ political behaviors (Verba et al. 1995;
Gallego 2007; Schäfer 2013; Schlozman et al. 2018). These elements allow us to
understand why some people participate more than others, but they do not manage to
completely explain why some people are simply more “at ease” than others in
specific participatory settings.
Analyzing character skills means considering the personal resources that individuals
rely upon to “navigate” the social challenges of participation. As argued by Fligstein,
some activists are more socially skilled than others inasmuch as they are “better at making
sense of a particular situation [and at producing] shared meaning for others” (Fligstein
2001: 113). The analysis of participative trajectories of Lucha’s activists shows how
character skills such as optimism, vision, and sociability are able to make a difference in
movement politics inasmuch as they determine one’s ability to attain cooperation.

Before meeting with a representative of the Municipality to bargain on the permanence of the
Lucha in the occupied barrack, the activists discuss who should speak on behalf of the group.
“I think it should be Daniele or Simona” says Tiziano and adds “They are more sociable. We
have to avoid conflict this time.” (Fieldnotes, September 2016)

On a second level, considering these attributes as skills means understanding them as

something different from unmodifiable personality traits. While the concept of
personality traits conveys the idea that optimism, vision, sociability, and persistence
are largely inborn characteristics of an individual, the concept of “character skills”
acknowledges the idea that these character elements can be acquired throughout life
and recognize individual’s incessant work on their self.
886 I. Pitti

“It’s not like I was born activist” Marco tells me. “I was interested in political stuff since I
was a teen, but I started to get involved in politics late when I was 20”. I ask him what has
changed, and he replies: “I changed. I was too shy, too introvert, and too angry before. You
know, being an activist is also about having the right character. You have to work on it.”
(Fieldnotes, March 2017)

In other words, it means considering them as competencies that can be acquired and
transmitted through socialization and social interactions.
For what concerns Lucha, for example, micro-processes of socialization to
character skills could be noticed in the interaction between more experienced
activists and new “promising” volunteers.

Martina, one of the volunteers at the homeless shelter, is very active in Lucha and everybody
thinks she is a great resource for the group. However, she does not deal very well with the
pressure: since she is taking more responsibilities in relation to the shelter, she is very
nervous. [. . .] More experienced activists give her suggestions and feedbacks which rarely
concerns how things should be done. They are mostly advices concerning how she should
handle the pressure (Fieldnotes, June 2016)

Moreover, the participation of some of the “promising” volunteers to specific events

– such as big and risky demonstrations and sit-in against authorities – was encour-
aged by more experienced activists because it could help in “building their
character.”

“You learn something in these events. You learn to deal with the risk, you learn to coordinate
yourself with others under pressure, you learn to stay calm when the police provoke you. It’s
like a school for character” tells me Stefano. (Fieldnotes, May 2017)

Conclusions

Through the analysis of the participative trajectories of the young activists taking
part in an Italian SMO, the chapter has sought to underline the relevance that skills
have in shaping youth paths of participation in movement politics. In particular,
education and character skills have emerged as factors able to determine young
members’ possibilities to progress within the observed SMO. Analyzing trajectories
of participation in social movements through the lenses of skills has interesting
implications for the understanding of both youth activism and social movements.
First of all, this approach of analysis contributes to reinforcing the idea that
movement politics is an activity that requires specific skills to be accomplished. In
so doing, the study of skills in SMO contributes at questioning a still diffused
“romanticized” representation on activism that sees involvement in movement
politics as something “naturally” emerging from a combination of vocational and
ideological aspects. While the romanticized perspective on movement politics sug-
gests that every young person can become an activist if he has the right cause to fight
for, the study of skills implies acknowledging that an efficient performance of
55 Youth Participation, Movement Politics, and Skills: A Study of Youth. . . 887

political militancy requires a relevant investment in terms of energies and formation

on behalf of the young participants.
On a second level, analyzing skills in movement politics implies recognizing
SMOs as sources of alternative knowledge production (Hill 2004) which are able to
transmit to their members a series of competencies that are needed for the existence
of the movement itself. This approach of analysis can fruitfully contribute to the
debate around the functioning and structuring of SMOs understanding them as
alternative learning sites and informal educational organizations (Walther et al.
2019).
Lastly, considering SMOs as contexts where sedimentation of knowledge and
competencies occurs contributes at criticizing the idea that young people’s engage-
ment in SMOs is just a temporary and transitory form of engagement which will give
space to more “conventional” ways of being active in the future. Analyzing how
skills are produced and reproduced in movement politics means acknowledging that
activism for many young people is not just a “phase” or the simple effect of a
“biographical availability” that will disappear with adult life. It means, in other
words, recognizing social movement as contexts of lifelong learning (Foley 1999).

Cross-References

▶ Civic Theory and Educative Processes in Informal Spaces: A Case Study in Three
Italian Realities
▶ Constructions of “Youth” and “Activism” in Lebanon
▶ Informal Educational Infrastructure: Citizenship Formation, Informal Education,
and Youth Work Practice

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Online Citizenship Learning of Chinese
Young People 56
Jun Fu

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 892
Citizenship Learning in Formal School Setting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 893
Citizenship Learning from the Viewpoint of Social Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 894
Learning Digital Citizenship Through Online Participation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 895
Learning Chinese Citizenship Through Online Participation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 897
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 899
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 900

Abstract
This chapter examines Chinese young people’s citizenship learning through
their participatory activities on the Internet. The discussions presented in this
chapter are informed by recent developments in citizenship studies which
maintain that citizenship learning is a lifelong process of participation in
different formal and informal communities and practices (Biesta et al. 2009)
and in the meaning-making activities reflected in various forms of social
participation (Hoskins et al. 2012). Two intertwined forms of citizenship learn-
ing were identified from Chinese young people’s online activities. The first is
young people’s learning about online citizenships through engaging with dif-
ferent virtual communities. Their learning of online citizenships is illustrated by
their understanding of the norms and communal practices shaped by the shared
language, values, attitudes, and joint enterprises for mutual engagement in these
virtual communities. The second is their internet-mediated learning about
Chinese society. The Chinese internet, in this case, offers a new way of

J. Fu (*)
Youth Research Centre, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne,
Melbourne, VIC, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 891
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_64
892 J. Fu

engaging with and learning about Chinese society. The outcome of these two
forms of learning constitutes the landscape of practice upon which their notion
of Chinese citizenship is drawn. This chapter draws attention to the digital and
constitutive nature of young people’s social engagement in defining new forms
of citizenship which are meaningful and relevant to their everyday lives (Lister,
2007; Wood, 2014).

Keywords
Citizenship, Learning, Young people, Internet, China

Introduction

This chapter examines the learning of citizenship by Chinese young people

through their participation in different online activities. Its aim is to extend the
research realm of citizenship learning of Chinese young people beyond formal
school settings and to draw attention to their learning of citizenship in non-
traditional school settings, the Chinese Internet in this case. Informed by recent
developments in citizenship studies which maintain that citizenship learning is a
lifelong process of participation in different formal and informal communities
and practices (Biesta et al. 2009) and in the meaning-making activities reflected
in various forms of social participation (Hoskins et al. 2012), this chapter
identifies two intertwined forms of citizenship learning from Chinese young
people’s online activities. The first is learning of digital citizenship in online
communities. The outcome of this learning is their understanding and practice of
the shared language, values, attitudes, and joint enterprises for mutual engage-
ment in different online communities. The second is their learning of Chinese
citizenship through their engagement with Chinese society as represented online.
The internet, in this case, offers Chinese young people a new way of engaging
with and learning about Chinese society and social relationships. These two
forms of learning mutually constitute the landscape of practice upon which
their notion of Chinese citizenship is based.
The discussion in this chapter is organized into five sections. The first section
briefly reviews citizenship education/learning of Chinese young people in formal
school settings and discusses the limitations of restricting the study of citizenship
learning of Chinese young people to the realm of formal education. The second
section theorizes citizenship as social practice which informs my review of the
online citizenship learning of Chinese young people. Sections three and four
address the two intertwined forms of citizenship learning identified from Chinese
young people’s online activities. The final section provides a synthesis of the
discussion. It calls for a broadening of our understanding of citizenship educa-
tion/learning to acknowledge the significance of young people’s everyday online
participation in enabling their learning of citizenship in both the virtual and
physical worlds.
56 Online Citizenship Learning of Chinese Young People 893

Citizenship Learning in Formal School Setting

Being well aware of the role education can play in creating citizens, many govern-
ments around the world have chosen to implement compulsory citizenship education
programs in the formal school sector (Brooks and Holford 2009). China is no
exception in this regard. Since its establishment in 1949, the government of the
People’s Republic of China (PRC) has implemented many initiatives in citizenship
education. In their earliest iterations, a politically orientated citizenship model which
advocated citizenship values such as collectivism, patriotism, nationalism, and self-
sacrifice (Rosen 1983; Zhu and Camicia 2014) was adopted. Although this iteration
did make progress in terms of legalizing citizenship rights and duties, and integrating
concepts of equal rights and the rule of law into education, it did not make substantial
progress (Law 2006) since it was frequently interrupted by political movements that
arose between 1957 and 1978 (Wang and Huang 2008).
The reform and opening-up policy adopted by the state in 1978 marked a new era
of citizenship education in China. The notion of citizenship demonstrated in educa-
tion policies and school curricula was increasingly depoliticized, becoming a diver-
sified and accommodative concept reflective of the social and economic
transformations brought about by rapid modernization and globalization post 1978
(Goldman and Perry 2002; Law 2006). Studies of citizenship education in the
Chinese school sector mainly focus on citizenship education policies, curriculum,
teaching approaches and methods, and evaluations of the effects of policies and
curricula. These studies illuminate the change of content in citizenship education on
two different levels. On a social level, elements such as understanding of the law,
China’s political institutions and the concept of negotiated democracy, awareness of
social engagement, and values such as rights, freedom, and responsibility were
emphasized in citizenship education (Fairbrother 2004; Law 2011; Wang and
Huang 2008). On an individual level, the curricula of citizenship education attached
more weight to development and well-being, individual rights, self-esteem, charac-
ter-building and self-management, personal achievement, global perspectives, and
psychological health (Keane 2001; Lee and Ho 2008; Wang 2008; Zhong and Lee
2008).
These studies of citizenship education in formal-school context shed precious
light on the citizenship learning of Chinese young people, but they cannot paint the
full picture of citizenship learning in China. This is partly because these studies only
show what students were taught at school in order to become a citizen; they do not
explore what students actually learned as a result of this teaching. This is especially
the case given that the education Chinese students receive before tertiary level is
generally exam-oriented. Their highly regulated schedules at school leave little space
for their citizenship learning through participatory activities with communities in
and out of school (Lau 1996; Wang 2013). Moreover, citizenship learning these days
is generally grounded in people’s everyday engagement with other individuals,
families, sociocultural communities, and political institutions (Lawy and Biesta
2006; Lister et al. 2003; Harris et al. 2010). Hence, study of school-based citizenship
learning cannot fully reveal the forms of citizenship experienced by young people in
894 J. Fu

their everyday social and cultural participation. In view of this limitation, a practice-
based understanding of citizenship is needed to examine young people’s citizenship
learning that is embedded in their everyday lived experience.

Citizenship Learning from the Viewpoint of Social Practice

Marshall (2009) defined citizenship as “a status bestowed on those who are full
members of a community” (p. 149). The civil, political, and social citizenship rights
outlined by him laid the foundation for the contemporary understanding of citizen-
ship. The status view of citizenship in this definition is rooted in people’s under-
standing of citizenship. Terms such as “citizens-in-training” (Anagnost 2008),
“partial” citizens (Chun 2013), and “citizens-in-waiting” (Kennelly 2011) all imply
that citizenship is still understood by people as a status. This is especially the case on
a policy level. In their study of citizenship education in Britain, Lawy and Biesta
(2006) suggest that the concept of citizenship articulated in official policies and
practice discourse still largely hinged upon a status of “good citizen.” The role of
citizenship education is to help young people to achieve this status and become
capable of enacting a particular kind of citizenship. They argue that this status has
denied young people’s eligibility to citizenship by asserting a status differential
between citizens and not-yet-citizens; hence, young people’s informal and individ-
ualized social engagements in their everyday lives are not acknowledged as citizen-
ship practices, and their claims to citizenship are negated. As people’s citizenship
practices shape their citizenship learning (Brooks and Holford 2009), their learning
about citizenship through these informal participatory activities cannot therefore be
examined through this theoretical lens.
In view of this limitation, scholars have sought to understand citizenship from the
viewpoint of social practice. Citizenship can thus be conceptualized as a practice
threaded in people’s lives and transformed over time through their participation in
the actual practices which constitute different elements of their life. For our purposes
we understand practice as a set of interconnected doings and sayings specific to time
and space. It consists of people’s everyday “intentional and voluntary” activities
(Schatzki 2012) through which people achieve purpose and derive meaning. These
activities are mediated by a person’s understanding of the power relations, rules,
norms, and discourses of a social context. Practice is created in response to the social
order, not as an outcome of it (Wenger 2010). In this sense, it is not merely a process
of adapting or adjusting oneself to a practice but also a process of “invention and
improvisation” of a new practice (Bourdieu 1990, p. 13).
From this perspective, citizenship learning is a process concurrent with young
people’s social engagement. Their everyday engagement with the practices of
family, peers, school, work, and the media serves as a broad, fluid, and inclusive
avenue through which to explore and make sense of the communities to which their
citizenship relates (Hoskins et al. 2012; Smith et al. 2005). Children and young
people are citizens who experience and learn about their citizenship like any other
citizens in our society (Lawy and Biesta 2006). They become citizens through social
56 Online Citizenship Learning of Chinese Young People 895

participation and their engagement in democratic practices (Baker and Blaagaard

2016; Lawy and Biesta 2006). Through this participatory process, young people
learn the practices of the communities by which their citizenship in these commu-
nities is defined while simultaneously contributing to constituting these practices
(Wenger 2010).
This inclusive view of citizenship offers a grounded perspective through which
young people’s citizenship learning in informal settings can be examined. The study
by Lister et al. (2003) shows that young people often experience multiple citizen-
ships simultaneously through actively engaging in civic activities in local commu-
nities. These activities demonstrate a broad, fluid, and inclusive citizenship
experienced by young people in their everyday lives. This view of citizenship
provides a helpful lens through which to examine the process of young people’s
socialization and subjectification, the key to them becoming a citizen (Wood 2014).
Understanding citizenship as practice also proves useful in examining the con-
stitutive nature of everyday politics and sociocultural participation in young people’s
practices and learning of citizenship (Wood 2012, 2015). Studies of young people in
Australia show young people are actively practicing and experiencing citizenship in
informal and modest youth cultural spaces such as family, school, peer networks,
and the Internet (Harris and Wyn 2009; Harris et al. 2007, 2008, 2010; Wyn et al.
2011). Informal citizenship learning was also seen in Chinese young people’s online
activities in forming new identities free from institutional control and maintaining
identities in their physical life (Fu 2018a; Wang 2013). The individual political
actions and practice of prefigurative politics in their everyday lives consist another
significant sector of Chinese young people’s informal learning of citizenship (Ash
2013; Fu 2019). The spaces and relationships experienced by young people outside
of school therefore become major sites where the “hidden curriculum” of citizenship
learning is absorbed (Brooks and Holford 2009). As Lawy and Biesta (2006)
explained, young people are not educated into citizenship, but learn to be citizens
via their engagement with the political and sociocultural practices of communities
which make up their everyday lives. In the next section, I will draw on the theoretical
understanding of citizenship learning as a social practice to examine Chinese young
people’s learning about citizenship through their online activities.

Learning Digital Citizenship Through Online Participation

The internet (especially social media) has provided new tools and spaces for
people’s interaction. Communities spawned online become important sites for peo-
ple’s identity formation and citizenship practice (Buckingham 2008; Harris et al.
2008). As a result, their engagement with the practices of these communities
becomes the defining mechanism of the learning of their digital citizenship in
relation to these communities (Bennett 2008). Chinese young people use the internet
in a similar fashion for their learning of digital citizenship. China had 802 million
internet users by mid-2018, with almost half of this population being under the age
of 30 (China Internet Network Information Centre 2018). Chinese Internet users
896 J. Fu

(especially younger users) have made this medium into a vibrant cultural space
characterized by a highly diversified community and intense contention (Yang
2009). Their mutual engagement on the internet generates communities and prac-
tices which give birth to new forms of digital citizenship and enable learning of these
new digital citizenships through the same process.
In delineating different forms of online activism in China, Yang (2009) argues
that the online activities of Chinese internet users have spawned a contentious online
culture which showcases internet users’ protests against social injustice and their
struggle for recognition. This culture constitutes an essential part of the practice of a
new citizen activism or “unofficial democracy” (p. 226) in China which is associated
with a struggle for material distributive justice and aspiration for recognition and
belonging. The evolution of this culture is marked by a series of digital practices
consisting of rituals, genres, styles, and languages (Latham 2012; Meng 2011; Yang
2009; Yang et al. 2014). People’s engagement with this culture represents the
learning process through which they absorb these practices and begin to act as
insiders. Moreover, their online activities enable them to make meaning of the shared
enterprises of this contentious culture and to understand their roles as agents for
maintaining and developing this culture. These two dimensions of learning are
fundamental to the process of their becoming digital citizens in the online space in
China.
The highly diversified Chinese online culture is not merely an illustration of how
the norms and practices in different online communities are shaped by Chinese
internet users’ mutual engagement; it also testifies to Chinese internet users’ learning
of these norms and practices through their engagement with these communities,
which constitutes the very process of their learning of digital citizenship in relation
to these communities. Zimuzu (subtitle/fansubbing group) is an online collaborative
community which produces and distributes Chinese subtitles for foreign media
content online. Studies illuminate the practices of this online community from
different perspectives. Meng and Wu (2013) examined its commons-based peer
production practice in a commercial media environment. Kung (2016) investigated
how members’ discursive engagement and meaning-making participatory work
make Zimuzu a community of practice in which norms and values are formed and
practices about mutual engagement and engagements with texts and cultural mate-
rials are developed. The development of these practices, as a result of people’s
engagement with this community, is also the process through which interested
internet users make sense of these practices and become a citizen of this community
through their engagement.
A complex process of citizenship learning was also illustrated in Meng’s (2018)
study of “Facebook Expedition,” a collective action of Chinese young patriots which
flooded the Facebook page of the pro-independence leader of the Democratic
Progressive Party in Taiwan. The study delineated how these young people swiftly
organized and carried out a political action in a playful manner with the purpose of
enhancing intercultural communication between people in Taiwan and mainland
China. Shared memes and templates were used, and guidelines for action circulated
and followed within the online community throughout the event. The high level of
56 Online Citizenship Learning of Chinese Young People 897

media literacy and intelligence demonstrated in young people’s participation in this

event, such as in their competency in using a similar repertoire of popular cultural
symbols and enacting shared protocols for engagement, illustrated a complex and
effective process of learning about the cultural practices of the community.
Fu (2018b) examined citizenship practices of young Chinese on Weibo
(A Twitter-like microblogging service and one of the most popular social media
platforms in China). He showed that young people learn about the cultural practice
of the Weibo community through their everyday interaction with others on Weibo.
This cultural practice on Weibo is characterized by the language practices which
share tacit meanings among Weibo users and underpinned by the values, attitudes,
and joint enterprises to establish an equal and tolerant space rich in reliable infor-
mation and diverse opinion, a space which can nourish informed and active public
discussion and support learning about Chinese society. On Weibo, young people’s
learning of citizenship is a reciprocal process through which they make meaning of
and contribute to shaping the cultural practices of this virtual community. Their
learning of digital citizenship hence is not a passive process but a formative one in
which new forms of citizenship practice are generated. Similar citizenship learning
occurs in other online social and cultural communities, such as in young people’s
learning of cultural citizenship in online discussions of a popular Chinese talent
show (Wu 2013), in young mothers’ learning of community practices in parenting
discussion forums (Wang 2003), and in Chinese gamers’ experience of forging
cultural identity in online gaming communities (Lindtner and Szablewicz 2011).
The reciprocal process of citizenship learning and practice of Chinese young
people reviewed above, while occurring in the online space, is also deeply interlaced
with the physical space (Valentine and Holloway 2002), constituting the reality
experienced by Chinese young people in which they learn about their Chinese
citizenship on a broad canvas. In the next section, I will examine young people’s
learning of their Chinese citizenship through online participation.

Learning Chinese Citizenship Through Online Participation

The internet is not merely a space in which digital cultures and citizenships are
spawned; it has also become a key medium through which people engage with the
physical world. This form of Internet-mediated social engagement offers Chinese
young people a new way to make sense of the content and possibilities of their rights,
duties, and identities and a new avenue for the formation of their subjectivity in a
dynamic and fast-changing Chinese society. This process makes their citizenship
learning possible on a broader social scale.
This form of citizenship learning is firstly demonstrated by the role the Internet
plays in Chinese people’s accessing of information and news. Internet users in China
spent 27.7 h per week on average on the Internet (China Internet Network Informa-
tion Centre 2018). Searching for information and accessing online news are the
second and third most used functions (instant messaging being the first), with 656.9
million and 662.9 million users, respectively. The smartphone has become people’s
898 J. Fu

major access point for information with 619.6 million users accessing news and
624 million users searching information on it. The high penetration of the Internet in
people’s information consumption demonstrates that it has become a crucial medium
through which people are informed of different social issues. Although the authen-
ticity of the online representation of our social reality is still a controversial issue,
people’s engagement with this (mis)representation of Chinese society represents two
essential elements of their citizenship learning in this digital age: (1) becoming
informed about the multiple facets of social issues and (2) being capable of reading
media information critically.
Online participation also provides a new channel through which people can
understand their position in and relationship with Chinese society. Studies of online
activism in China show that contentious activities are shaped by a conflictual
relationship between the state, the national/transnational capitalist market, the inter-
ests of China’s subaltern classes, and cultural traditions (Yang 2009; Zhao 2008).
Participation in these activities provides opportunities for people to engage with
complex power relations on a daily basis and to learn how these power relations play
out in their lives at a mundane level. Fu’s (2018b) study of Chinese young people’s
activities on Weibo demonstrates the role of the internet in enabling young people to
participate in public discussion and engage with Chinese society with ease. Although
mediated by the Internet, this social participation is beneficial for young people’s
informed understanding of social issues and for their meaning-making of the general
social context and practices which is essential for their effective citizenship practice.
Their participation on Weibo plays a significant role in the formation of their
identities and political subjectivities, which are essential features of their Chinese
citizenship.
Online participation is also an important avenue through which people can
explore the possibilities of their rights, duties, and identities in a fast-changing
Chinese society when other channels of formal civic and political participation
are relatively restricted (Leib and He 2006; Zheng and Pan 2016). The signifi-
cance of online participation is evident in studies of online activism for citizen-
ship rights and social change. Studies of environmental activism in China show
that the Internet has played a key role in providing a platform for people not only
to access information and discuss local environmental issues but also to mobilize
offline collective action to stop industrial projects threatening to endanger the
local environment (Huang and Yip 2012; Lang and Xu 2013). Similar usage of
the online space can be found in Chinese citizens’ struggle for equal rights for
migrant labor, HIV/AIDS and hepatitis-B carriers, and LGBTI groups (Yang
2009; Yang 2018). Other cases include activism in online backpacking commu-
nities seeking to address immediate social problems, seeking social justice, and
improving well-being within their sphere of influence (Zhang 2014); consumers’
participation in virtual communities through which they solve consumption
issues and learn about new modes of consumption (Huang 2012); and Chinese
gamers’ efforts to promote their rights against the pervasive discourse of internet
addiction supposedly driven by participating in online gaming communities
(Lindtner and Szablewicz 2011).
56 Online Citizenship Learning of Chinese Young People 899

People’s participation in these online activities can educate them about different
aspects of social issues while developing their capacity to participate in public
discussion (Hung 2012; Svensson 2016), all crucial elements of citizenship learning.
More importantly, these online activities provide opportunities for Chinese citizens
to learn about the possibilities of their citizenship through interacting with institu-
tions, sociocultural discourses, and other individuals within a Chinese context (Yang
2018; Zhao 2008). This way, the horizons of citizenship learning for ordinary people
is significantly expanded in the sense that it affords new opportunities for them to get
hands-on experience of being agents for social change and to discover the potential
of their Chinese citizenship through shaping new political identities and notions of
citizenship on an individual level (Liu 2013; Wang 2013; Yang 2009).
In sum, online participation is a process through which Chinese people keep
themselves informed by accessing diversified information, learn about general social
practices, and explore different aspects of their rights, duties, and identities in
relation to different social communities. This process is essential for their becoming
informed and active citizens capable of pursuing effective civic and political partic-
ipation. This part of their citizenship learning is especially meaningful given that the
education they receive in formal school settings is largely concerned with students’
performance on standardized tests and fails to offer a democratic space for citizen-
ship practice either inside or outside school (Wang 2013; Ye 2011).

Conclusion

In this chapter, I first reviewed the citizenship learning of Chinese young people in
formal school settings. In doing this, I highlighted the necessity of extending the
scope of studies of Chinese young people’s citizenship learning from formal school
settings to their everyday lived experience. I then presented a framework of citizen-
ship learning based on young people’s social practice, one which enables us to
examine their citizenship learning as it is embedded in their everyday lives. Using
this theoretical lens, I identified two forms of citizenship learning from Chinese
young people’s highly diversified online activities. The first is their learning of
digital citizenships as defined by the social and cultural norms and practices of
different online communities. This learning occurs simultaneously as they absorb
and contribute to (re)shaping these norms and practices through their participatory
activities. The second is their learning of Chinese citizenship through their social
participation, mediated by the Internet. In this dimension of learning, the Internet
provides a representation of Chinese society which affords a convenient and acces-
sible avenue for young people’s social surveillance and engagement. This mediated
social engagement represents a process of young people’s learning about their social
position and relationships in Chinese society. More importantly, it affords a vital way
for young people to learn the possibilities of their rights, duties, and identities in a
fast-changing Chinese society when formal channels of civic and political partici-
pation are limited and restricted. These two forms of citizenship learning
900 J. Fu

demonstrate that the online space, as a new venue for Chinese young people’s
citizenship practice, enables their learning of citizenship in a digitized Chinese
society.
This chapter showcases Chinese young people’s diverse sociocultural participa-
tion online through which they learn about their citizenship in an integrated space of
the virtual and physical. This process of citizenship learning as a form of social
practice is not only about making sense of existing social norms and practices and
aligning one’s behavior with them in order to be recognized as a member or citizen; it
is also about understanding the possibilities of one’s citizenship by contributing to
and reshaping the practices of the online communities of which they wish to be a
part. This view of citizenship learning can not only broaden our view of citizenship
education/learning but also do greater justice to young people’s active citizenship
practices in their everyday lives by acknowledging their work in generating social
and cultural communities and constructing new forms of citizenship.

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Education for Youth Civic and Political
Action in Australia 57
Andrew Peterson, Rosalyn Black, and Lucas Walsh

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 906
Changing Patterns of Youth Action/Engagement? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 908
Barriers to Participation: Disadvantaged and Marginalized Students . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 910
Why Participate? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 912
New Technologies, New Forms of Action? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 913
Some Tenets of Effective Practices? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 915
Conclusions and Areas for Further Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 916
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 916
Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 917
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 917

Abstract
Surveying and synthesizing existing theoretical and empirical literature, this
chapter examines education for youth civic and political action in Australia.
Recognizing the concern of developing greater levels of active citizenship is a
core goal of education and youth policy in Australia, the chapter examines
various central issues that impact on and shape the civic and political activism
of young Australians. While not ignoring policy discourses and provisions, the
chapter takes as its main focus a range of empirical studies – predominantly

A. Peterson (*)
Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK
e-mail: [email protected]
R. Black
Deakin University, Geelong, VIC, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]
L. Walsh
Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 905
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_7
906 A. Peterson et al.

published over the last 10 years – which explore how young people’s civic and
political activism is interpreted, enacted, and experienced in practice. As such, the
chapter analyzes several key considerations regarding educating for youth civic
and political action in Australia: the changing patterns of youth participation,
barriers to participation for disadvantaged and marginalized youth, why youth
participate, the role and use of new technologies, and key tenets of effective
practice. In the conclusion, the main arguments are summarized, and some areas
for further research are identified.

Keywords
Youth action · Australia · Civics and citizenship · Digital citizenship ·
Engagement and barriers to participation

Introduction

Surveying and synthesizing existing theoretical and empirical literature, the aim of
this chapter is to examine how education for youth civic and political action is being
interpreted, enacted, and experienced in Australia. While the chapter makes some
reference to policy discourses and provision, its main focus is on actual practices of
youth civic and political action in Australia. As such, it takes as its primary scope
relevant (mainly empirical) studies about the Australian context published over the
last 10 years, which predominantly, though not exclusively, inform us of how young
people conceive and enact action within their political communities.
From the outset, it should be recognized that this chapter is written in a complex
and changing context of youth participation. First and foremost, youth participation
has been repeatedly and consistently viewed as a core goal for Australian education
and youth services over the last 10 years. In their National Strategy for Young
Australians, for example, the Australian Government (2010) made clear that it
“respects and understands the value and contributions young people offer as citizens
of today, not just the leaders of tomorrow” (2010). The importance of young
Australians’ active participation forms a key goal of Australian Schooling
(MCEETYA 2008). The current Australian Curriculum is predicated explicitly on
helping “all young Australians to become successful learners, confident and creative
individuals, and active and informed citizens” (ACARA 2018a; emphasis added; for
more detailed analyses of action as part of the school curriculum in Australia see, for
example, Peterson and Tudball 2017; Peterson and Bentley 2016; Reichert and Print
2017; Reichert 2016). In addition, the rationale for the Australian Curriculum: Civics
and Citizenship makes reference to students exploring ways they “can actively shape
their lives, value their belonging in a diverse and dynamic society, and positively
contribute locally, nationally, regionally and globally. As reflective, active and
informed decision-makers, students will be well placed to contribute to an evolving
and healthy democracy that fosters the wellbeing of Australia as a democratic
nation” (ACARA 2018a).
57 Education for Youth Civic and Political Action in Australia 907

Yet historically, at a policy level, the importance and benefits of youth participa-
tion have often been predicated on the view that young Australians’ levels of civic
and political knowledge and understanding are generally low and would benefit from
being increased (see, for example, SSCEET 1989; CEG 1994). More recently, the
2016 sample assessment of civics and citizenship within the National Assessment
Program, for example, suggests that while there has been an increasing focus on
civics in Australia’s curriculum, this is not reflected in young people’s civics and
citizenship understandings. The test is conducted every 3 years to assess students’
understanding of Australia’s system of government, its civic institutions, and values.
While results have remained stable for final year students, the results for year
10 students decreased from 49% of those who reached the target in 2010 to 38%
in 2016 (Fraillon et al. 2017, p. xvi).
Despite the concerns that have been voiced by the Australian Government about
this decline (see Ballantyne 2017), this kind of assessment provides limited insight
into youth civic and political activism and engagement – particularly informal
modes. While there are clearly many examples of youth civic and political action
and engagement operating within Australia, as this chapter will suggest, significant
concerns have been raised regarding (1) whether such action and engagement is a
feature of all young Australians’ lives and (2) the form that civic and political action
actually takes. With regard to the latter, for example, Arvanitakis and Sidoti suggest
that the extent of young people’s engagement within informal politics “is disguised
to some extent because it adopts forms that are often not understood, and frequently
dismissed” (Arvanitakis and Sidoti 2011, p. 137).
Arvanitakis and Sidoti comment here reminds us that care needs to be taken in
delineating the scope of what actually comprises civic and political action, partic-
ularly where young people are concerned. For the purposes of this chapter, we
adopt a general and inclusive perspective of youth civic and political action as
incorporating a range of formal and informal processes through which young
Australians engage with others within their communities. Through such activities,
young Australians seek to engage with, influence, shape, and contest matters
affecting themselves, their communities, and others. As will become clearer as
the chapter progresses, civic and political engagement may take place through
formal, partisan political engagement, and/or within wider, potentially issue-based,
social practices.
To identify relevant literature, an institutional1 electronic library database was
used to search for and identify relevant and appropriate literature published since
2010. A variation of search terms was used, combining the following key words:
“youth,” “activism,” “education,” “schooling,” “civic,” “action,” “engagement,”
“citizenship,” “engagement,” and “participation.” In all searches, the term
“Australia” was used. As an interesting aside in light of our discussion later in this
chapter, searches using the term “activism” returned far fewer results than those
which employed “participation,” “action,” or “engagement.” Only literature
reporting on the Australian context was considered, and to be included, forms of
activism/engagement/participation had to have some form of political/social nature
(most clearly, participation in sporting activities or health interventions were not
908 A. Peterson et al.

included). The term “youth” was understood reasonably broadly, but the main focus
was on 14–21-year-olds.
In examining existing literature on education and young Australians’ civic and
political action, the chapter comprises the following sections. First, we explore the
nature of youth civic and political action in Australia, including the extent to which
such action can be said to have changed in nature in recent times. Second, we
examine literature on the barriers to action encountered by disadvantaged and
marginalized youth. The third section pays some brief attention to the question of
why young Australians participate, and in doing so suggests that little explicit
attention is paid to this question of why beyond some fairly basic and perhaps
superficial commitments. The fourth section focuses on new technologies and
examines whether these have led to new forms of social action by young
Australians. The fifth section identifies two key tenets for effective educational
practice aimed at recognizing and fostering youth civic and political action in
Australia.

Changing Patterns of Youth Action/Engagement?

Challenging earlier policy rhetoric that young Australians are in general terms
politically apathetic, a body of literature both questions the perceived level of apathy
and/or seeks to provide evidence of the ways that young Australians are motivated to
participate actively within their communities, both now and in the future (Black
2016; Gidley 2010). A particular feature of this literature is the thesis that rather than
being apathetic, young Australians are shifting their patterns of participation away
from more conventional, formal, partisan forms of political participation to informal,
issue-based politics in which young people think that they might have more influ-
ence (Martin 2012a). Research by The Whitlam Institute at University of Sydney, for
example, has found that young people are civically engaged, but more through
informal than formal politics. Sidoti (2011) suggests that young people “are strongly
values-driven and their attachment is to issues rather than traditional political
organisations. They are alienated from formal politics and the political organisations
that dominate them.” Instead, according to Sidoti, they exhibit a “tendency to shop
around for what best fits their values and concerns is reflected in the volatility of their
voting intentions” (see also Brooker 2011).
Similarly, and drawing on International Social Survey Programme Citizenship
data with regard to Australia in 2006, Martin (2012a) found that young Australians
are engaging less in non-electoral forms of participation than older Australians
(supporting previous evidence from Vromen 2003). This study reports that young
people were more likely than older people to sign a petition and boycott products,
and were also more likely to attend a protest or join a political forum on the internet,
but these latter two were much less common activities generally compared to the first
two, which Martin conceives as more individualized acts. Martin (2012b) states that
young people are more than twice as likely to have attended a protest compared to
the overall population. Young people are more likely to sign a petition, with nearly
57 Education for Youth Civic and Political Action in Australia 909

half having signed a petition in the year prior to the survey (1991–1992). Martin
(2012b, p. 222) concludes that for today’s young Australians “political activity
occurs in a much more fluid way than before through groups that appear and
disappear rather than political activity occurring through well-institutionalised chan-
nels such as political parties and trade unions.” In contrast, Tranter (2010) reports
that young Australians are increasingly viewing protests as passé and as a result are
moving to forms of action focusing on online forums and the giving of donations.
In their study of 15–18-year-olds funded by the Australian Research Council,
Harris et al. (2010) draw on data collected from surveys and follow-up interviews to
suggest that while young people evidence low levels of formal political participation,
they do seek to be included through engaging in deliberative processes. Harris et al.
identify a gap between these young Australians’ perceptions of politics and their
everyday engagements, suggesting an “ordinariness” in participants’ everyday expe-
riences and actions, such as recycling or donating money. According to their
research, for these young people, being heard was in itself viewed as participatory.
Crucial here is the suggestion that analyses of young Australians’ civic and political
action need to look at “ordinary” young people too; that is, those who sit between
young people who are deeply apathetic and young people who engage in uncon-
ventional forms of activism. Harris et al. (2010) suggest that:

while there has been a shift away from formal participation by these young people, this has
not necessarily led to either full-scale disengagement from politics or a widespread turn
towards sub-cultural or postmodern activism. Instead, our research suggests that these young
people are disenchanted with traditional politics that is unresponsive to their needs and
interests, but that they remain interested in social and political issues and continue to seek
recognition from the political system. In this way, their relationship to politics cannot be
characterized as straightforward apathetic disengagement. At the same time, their participa-
tory practices are not oriented towards spectacular anti-state activism or cultural politics but
take the form of informal, individualized and everyday activities (10).

This extract reminds us that young Australian’s civic and political action is multi-
faceted and diffuse, meaning that simple representations may obscure the complex-
ities involved. Indeed, the focus on the “ordinary” aspect of young people’s civic and
political activism and engagement is continuing to gain ground within the wider
youth citizenship literature (see, for example, Roose and Harris’ (2015) and Johns,
Mansouri, and Lobos’ (2015) accounts of young Muslim people’s “everyday”
activism and engagement).
Also significant is the way in which young people are giving voice, expression,
and meaning to their own forms of action. To this end, Gidley (2010) presents
research from 128 secondary students at three large Steiner schools in Australia.
Gidley (Gidley 2010, p. 141) reports that respondents were positive about the need
for action, as well as about their potential to act, citing a Year 10 student, Katrina,
who expressed themselves in the following terms:

Obviously most people hope that the world will improve by the year 2020, but whether this
is realistic or not is up to us. Everyone is able to do something in thousands of ways but
910 A. Peterson et al.

people don’t seem to see that. They think that the problems are too great for them to deal with
by themselves, so there isn’t even any point in trying. I believe that we can do something and
that it is in our hands to change the future of the world. I am personally involved with the
third world organization called world vision (sic) and I have seen the difference that single
people can make. . . So by educating children in schools about what they can and SHOULD
do, more young people may take the initiative to act.

In their research, Vromen and Collin (2010, p. 98) report data which evidences that
both policy makers and young people “agree that existing forms of youth participa-
tion are too formal and ought to be more informal to attract young people from more
diverse backgrounds.” However, they also report that while “policymakers contend
that youth participation should be youth-led, long-term, purposeful, fun, creative and
responsive to young people’s lives, in practice, governments, organizations and
services tend to use formal and adult-led processes to engage young people”
(emphasis added).
In his analysis, Galei (2016, p. 4), and following others (Harris et al. 2010;
Farthing 2010; Beadle 2011), describes the two discourses on young Australians’
civic and political engagement as focusing on “civic deficit” or “alternatively
engaged” models. The former, often led by top-down political agendas, “suggests
the overwhelming disengagement of Australian young people imposes a strict
definition of participation without sufficient insight into how the young people
themselves define participation” (Galei 2016, p. 4; see also Beadle 2011). The latter,
often drawing on data which explores young peoples’ perceptions and intentions,
focuses on the ways in which young people are engaging in “emergent forms of
participation” (5). As Galei (2016, p. 6) reminds us, in viewing these two discourses
“what needs to be acknowledged is that although there are many emergent forms of
participation, there is a more complex picture of participation which neither of the
approaches fully accounts for.” While analytically useful, drawing overly sharp
distinctions between these two discourses may serve to obscure important relation-
ships between the two. Here Gelai, for example, invokes Harris, Wyn, and Young
(2007, 2010) to suggest that young Australians’ participation is unlikely to sit firmly
in one discourse or the other. We might add to this that more research is required to
understand: (1) precisely why young Australians’ participation may have shifted to
alternative forms of engagement; (2) whether, and if so in what way, moves away
from formalized forms of participation are an active, conscious, and deliberate
reaction against formal politics; and (3) whether alternative forms of engagement
actually do involve, in some way, a connection with formal politics.

Barriers to Participation: Disadvantaged and Marginalized

Students

While it is important to appreciate the shifting ways in which young Australians

enact their engagement in civic and political action, it is equally crucial to identify
the barriers and inequalities which impact on certain young Australians, particularly
57 Education for Youth Civic and Political Action in Australia 911

those who are socially and economically disadvantaged. Indeed, there remains a
keen interest in the experiences of groups of young people who may be considered
disadvantaged or marginalized, though it should be noted that research in this area
typically consists of small-scale studies which focus on a specific marginalized
group.
Several studies point to a range of barriers which serve to restrict or limit the
extent of disadvantaged young Australians’ civic and political participation. In their
report Preventing Youth Disengagement and Promoting Engagement, the Australian
Research Alliance for Children and Youth (2008) identifies several such barriers:
racism and prejudice, language and cultural barriers, lack of access to and availabil-
ity of economic resources, and a lack of available opportunities. Summarizing
barriers to young people’s ability to participate generally, the Australian Infant,
Child, Adolescent and Family Mental Health Association (2008) highlights similar
factors, including: a lack of trust in decision-making systems, insufficient resources,
a lack of confidence, a lack of efficacy, a lack of time due to family and/or caring
responsibilities, and a lack of information and opportunities.
Crucial across studies focusing on the participation of disadvantaged and mar-
ginalized young Australians is the attempt to explore and elucidate the multifaceted
(dis)connections between disadvantaged young Australians and their communities.
Setting the scene, Black (2010) speaks of the complex relationship between com-
munity as a space of activism and a real and/or potential distrust of communities held
by young people. In a complimentary study, Black (2011) cites a raft of evidence
from the 2000s which suggested that low socioeconomic status affects a range of
attitudes to, and capacities for, participation. Black et al. (2011) outline a range of
projects – such as the Building Bridges project focused on outer North Melbourne
and the Western Young People’s Independent Network – through which young
people in socio-economically disadvantaged areas have engaged critically with
and in their communities. In doing so, they provide an interesting and insightful
focus “on young people who are, for various reasons, located on the periphery of
their communities but who may be said to be challenging the nature of those
communities” (Black et al. 2011, p. 47).
In other studies, Correa-Valez et al. (2010) report on an intervention with young
refugees, detailing how for these young people linking activities, which help to
connect young refugees to their wider communities, are crucial in both making
attaching and contributing to networks. Pavlidis and Baker (2010) focus on home-
less youth and suggest that for these young Australians particular concerns related to
notions of risk are at play – including day-to-day, immediate risks. According to
these authors, risk for homeless youth is embodied rather than external, and this
impacts on their participation in important ways. A similar argument is made by
Black and Walsh, who consider the ways in which schools in low socioeconomic
communities may encourage young people’s local action and participation, while
simultaneously constructing them as “both subjects and sources of uncertainty and
risk” (Black and Walsh 2015, p. 191). Land (2011, p. 47) considers participative
action undertaken by non-Indigenous youth in support of Indigenous struggles and
raises concerns regarding the extent to which such action can remain shaped by
912 A. Peterson et al.

“colonialist attitudes and behaviors.” For Land, appropriate activism must be shaped
and informed by a critical engagement with decolonization.
Important to understanding potential and actual inhibitors of civic and political
action for disadvantaged and marginalized young Australians, too, is Beadle’s
(2011) contention that the opportunity to engage and to have a voice on issues
relevant to their own lives are crucial determinants of whether young people engage.
Indeed, appreciating notions of opportunity and relevance seems particularly apt so
far as the civic and political engagement of disadvantaged and marginalized young
Australians is concerned.

Why Participate?

A further theme which can be drawn from existing literature is the extent to which
the question of why young people should be active (or indeed activist) in the first
place is either assumed or left implicit. As Wood and Black have pointed out,
citizenship scholars have in recent years drawn an important distinction between
relatively standard expressions of engagement such as voting, taxpaying, and the
other standard acts of a “good citizen,” and more activist expressions of engagement
which “break with routines, understandings and practices and serve to foster social
justice and change, or to ‘make a difference’” (Wood and Black 2014, p. 56). Despite
this, education policy and practice continues to frame young people’s participation
mostly in terms of having a say, rather than necessarily challenging and changing
structural issues – a point to which we return in the following section (Walsh and
Black 2018).
This fuzziness also extends at times to the literature. Beyond the general idea that
being an active participant in one’s community was a general good, there is often
little exploration of the motivations, values, or relationships which might underpin
young people’s education for civic activism and engagement in Australia. This
means that the bonds and relationships between young people and other important
actors within their schools or communities are frequently not attended to. It also
means that where young people’s activism and engagement values and motivation
are mentioned in the literature, these are rather general in nature and remain under-
developed.
In her research, for example, Gidley (2010) refers to values and spirituality in
relation to the Steiner school children who participated in her study, but only rather
loosely (e.g., students mentioned some values) or by referencing a general commit-
ment to concepts like socially equitable futures/social justice/just relationships. What
precisely is meant by social justice and indeed the ethical basis of relationships
between humans and/or humans and their environment remains ambiguous. Simi-
larly, Head (2011) suggests that there have been three main rationales for more
participation of Australian youth: (1) rights; (2) efficiency and better services; and
(3) development benefits – individual (self-esteem, etc.) and social. Again, the
precise meaning(s) of key terms here such as rights or social benefits remain elusive.
In contrast, one area of writing in which the focus on underpinning relationships and
57 Education for Youth Civic and Political Action in Australia 913

values receives greater attention is that which relates to Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander peoples. Another example is when Land (2011) explores ideas relating to
decolonization and solidarity as key in shaping appropriate and meaningful youth
activism, and in doing so provides a more detailed and meaningful account of the
why of participation than many other studies.

New Technologies, New Forms of Action?

When considering “alternative” or potentially “new” learning spaces in relation to

young Australians’ civic and political action, a clear corpus of work has developed in
relation to the impact, use, and possibilities of digital technologies. Presently, such
research provides a rather mixed picture, with some studies welcoming the positive
impact of technologies on youth civic and political activism and engagement and
others adopting a more cautious approach.
In setting out the positive possibilities of technology, Kral (2011, p. 5) reports on
practices undertaken by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander youth, suggesting that
“through their rapid adaptation to and adoption of digital media technologies, young
people are transforming their visibility by engaging in new forms of cultural
production.” Kral (2011, p. 9) also points out that “informal learning spaces such
as libraries play a vital role as communal ‘digital bedrooms’ where youth can access
digital media and communications technologies in the non-school hours.” For Kral,
access to new media resources is allowing Indigenous youth to be “the controllers of
productive processes that generate unique resources and new forms of cultural
production leading to agentive participation in public domains” (9). Kral (2011,
p. 12) cites a young person, Maxwell, who in a speech to the Symposium on
Indigenous Music and Dance in Darwin in 2009 had the following to say:

Come and listen to our stories. Spend time to listen and we’ll work together. We can show
people of the world what Australia means. The problems that we really need to handle in this
country is that people not really working together. We have an opportunity to tell the world
using this media (sic).

Youth engagement and activism through campaigns, flash mobs, protests via social
media such as Facebook and Twitter hashtags, and ethical consumption presents
other avenues of engagement. For example, the rapid mobilization of “flash mobs”
of people to a particular place or collective action, such as a protest, has been enabled
through social media, e-mail, and Short Message Services (SMS). Such gatherings
and actions have a range of forms, from soliciting petitions, crowd-sourcing funds,
or to raise awareness through the satire of spontaneous performance. The Australian
Youth Climate Coalition (AYCC), for example, used flash mobs to engage young
people in raising awareness of environmental issues in campaigns such as Youth
Decide (Walsh and Black 2011). Debate continues as to whether such forms of
“point and click” engagement constitute genuine engagement and activism or
whether they are “slacktivism”; that is, an impulse driven, relatively passive and
914 A. Peterson et al.

tokenistic form of engagement (Walsh 2012). Indeed, a more hesitant approach to

the role of technology is provided by Harris et al. (2010, p. 27) who suggest that
while the Internet offers a “space for social connection and self-expression,” action
using new technologies has an ordinariness to it which replicates what young people
might do in person – such as discussing issues in chat rooms. In their analysis of
social media, youth participation and Australian elections, Chen and Vromen (2012,
p. 3) posit the “newness” of social media in relation to participation in the following
terms:

While this is often seen as a “new” phenomena, social media makes visible the types of
active audience behaviours once difficult for elites to identify: the tendency for sociality and
“cross talk” (i.e. “water cooler talk”), and audience “talk back” to media. What is new is the
extent to which this discussion is visible to the public (providing greater access to it), and the
digestion of this interaction (which allows for quantification of it). Thus social media is a
new phenomena, but is not outside the range of human responses to the media seen
throughout history.

There is also a wider wariness or skepticism toward the use and impact of
technology in general – including among young people themselves. Gidley
(2010) found that secondary age students attending a Steiner school were broadly
skeptical of technologies. Pavlidis and Baker (2010) have also raised concerns,
suggesting that youth, particularly those who are marginalized, are in fact at risk
from new technologies. It is argued, however, that such discourses of risk are
driven by adult anxieties about technology and its impact on children and young
people (Collin and Third 2011), manifest in the plethora of policies and programs
aimed at addressing forms of digital citizenship that equate citizenship with
cybersafety. Third and Collin argue that “In this context, children’s and young
people’s digital media practices present as needing to be ‘appropriately’
channelled, contained and/or disciplined” (Third and Collin 2016, p. 45). But as
they also observe, “Over the last decade, the concept of ‘digital citizenship’ has
begun to supplant ‘cybersafety’ as a critical pillar of policy and programs
pertaining to the use of online and networked media” (Third and Collin 2016,
p. 41). Given the benefits and opportunities for young people to engage in active
citizenship, it is suggested that “coupling ‘citizenship’ with ‘the digital’ is a move
brimming with promise for rethinking citizenship through the digital. And yet, this
potential has gone largely un-noticed and untapped” (Third and Collin 2016, p. 41,
original emphasis; see also Vromen et al. 2015, 2016).
Research also suggests that the relationship between political actors is both
complex and fluid. Here, two particular examples are illustrative. The first is research
which suggests that social media provides a potential tool for engaging young people
in the political process by bringing them into connection with their political repre-
sentatives. Reporting on a study of young peoples’ views of social media use by
politicians in Australia, the UK and the USA, Loader, Vromen, and Xenos (2015,
p. 415) report that “for politicians and celebrities to engage with young citizens they
must develop more participatory communication styles” valued by young people –
styles that is through which young people can develop “a deeper emotional insight
57 Education for Youth Civic and Political Action in Australia 915

into the personal lives and qualities of these who claim to represent them.” The
second, which relates to the first, is research which evidences further a disconnect
between political agencies and young people. Research by Vromen (2011, p. 975),
for example, draws on content analysis of government and community organization-
led websites and reports that most of the Australian youth-oriented websites ana-
lyzed “follow a generally, institutionalized, discursively top-down and dutiful
approach to young people’s civic engagement.” For Vromen, this reflects a dominant
government-led understanding of young peoples’ participation “where there is an
expectation that young people ‘have a say’ but only on the terms set by powerful
traditional institutions” (975). In contrast, a minority of sites led by community
organizations “allow young people to express themselves on the site” offering “a
distinctive online experience that focuses on empowering young people in their
creation of political space and encourage[ing] them to express their political
viewpoints.”

Some Tenets of Effective Practices?

Across the existing literature a number of scholars and organizations have

sought to include a focus on the hopeful possibilities and positive practices
necessary for young Australians’ civic and political action. Though due to
limitations of space it is not possible to outline these in depth here, and clearly
the intention of this chapter is not to provide a “what works” guide for practice,
in this final section we provide two tenets of effective practice stemming out of
the available research.
The first tenet is the value of focusing on young peoples’ strengths and working
with and on these (Black et al. 2011; Kral 2011). The Foundation for Young
Australians has, for example, adopted this tone in Unlimited Potential: A commit-
ment to young Australians (Callingham 2013, p. 1), in which it makes clear that “Our
collective role is to be relentlessly optimistic about the young people of this country
and about their capacity and capability to envision and create the nation and world in
which they want to live and work” (cited in Callingham 2013). Such optimism is
necessarily based on the recognition and embracing of the self-expression and
creativity of young people (Black et al. 2011). To reiterate from the previous
sections, appreciating the strengths, needs, preferences, and actual practices of
young Australians is important for various forms of civic and political participation,
including those based on digital and social media (Vromen and Collin 2010; Vromen
2011, 2012; Loader et al. 2015). Here, Vromen and Collin (2010) suggest that a shift
is required from the structured, individualist method of policymakers to focus on the
input of “expert citizens” to one that engages with young people in the spaces they
already occupy, in particular the network-based presence of localized, youth-led,
online spaces. Through this process, they argue, young people will be more confi-
dent in their ability to effect change in relevant policy.
Integrally related to the first, the second tenet is the need for collaborative, positive
ways of working to engender, support, and recognize young Australians’ civic and
916 A. Peterson et al.

political action. Central to this tenet is the availability and commitment of dedicated
professionals (Black 2015), who work with and for young people to overcome barriers
concerning a lack of agency and locus of control (Harris et al. 2010), as well as
structural and logistical barriers (ARACY 2008). One potential way to work toward
this end is to position young Australians as co-researchers, such as through Youth
Participatory Action Research (Callingham 2013). Another factor also seems crucial
for this second tenet – namely, the need (often against a policy background which
increasingly denies the importance of context) to adopt a situational approach (Head
2011), which starts from where young people are, their lives, their interests, and their
possibilities.

Conclusions and Areas for Further Research

In surveying existing literature, this chapter has presented a complex and mixed
picture of young Australians’ action and engagement. While a core goal of
Australian education, schooling, and youth services, current literature points to
a range of factors which shape and inform the extent and nature of young people’s
action. Central here – and indeed perhaps underpinning the other factors consid-
ered in this chapter – is the question of precisely what sorts of action and
engagement are prioritized by key actors involved. While not wishing to present
it as fixed and binary, the identification between two discourses focused on: (1) a
civic deficit of involvement in formal politics; and (2) a movement toward
alternative forms of participation is analytically helpful. In turn, however, iden-
tifying these discourses raises important questions about which further research
is needed. Here, two seem particularly important. First, what is the nature of
interaction between young Australians’ informal, alternative forms of participa-
tion and their conscious engagement (or indeed nonengagement) in formal
political processes (e.g., is the latter an outright rejection of the former or does
it lead to engagement in the latter in some important ways)? Second, how do, and
can, official discourses and practices about youth participation in Australia
respond to young Australians’ preferences, needs, and experiences? In this
regard, and to repeat from earlier, Vromen and Collin’s (2010) suggestion that
a shift is required from the structured, individualist method of policymakers to
focus on the input of “expert citizens” to one that engages with young people in
the spaces they already occupy, in particular the network-based presence of
localized, youth-led, online spaces is prescient. Such a shift seems crucial and
necessary if the action and engagement of young Australians within their com-
munities is to be valued, appreciated, and meaningful.

Notes

1. University of South Australia

57 Education for Youth Civic and Political Action in Australia 917

Cross-References

▶ Constructions of “Youth” and “Activism” in Lebanon

▶ The Development of Civic Participation Among Youth in Singapore
▶ Youth Civic Engagement and Formal Education in Canada: Shifting Expressions,
Associated Challenges
▶ Youth Engagement and Citizenship in England

Acknowledgments Andrew Peterson wishes to acknowledge the support offered through a funded
Leverhulme International Network project (IN2016-002).

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 Part V
New Directions in Citizenship and Education
Affective Citizenship and Education in
Multicultural Societies: Tensions, 58
Ambivalences, and Possibilities

Michalinos Zembylas

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 924
The Notion of “Affective Citizenship” in the Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 925
Affective Citizenship and Critical Citizenship Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 927
The Emotional Injunctions of Multiculturalism: Two Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 928
“Embracing the Other” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 929
“Coping with Difference” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 930
Implications for Critical Citizenship Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 931
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 933
Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 933
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 934

Abstract
This chapter focuses on discussing the concept of affective citizenship and its
potential contribution to citizenship education discourses, especially in the con-
text of multicultural societies. The chapter synthesizes the literature on affective
citizenship and identifies examples that show how the ideal of the “affective
citizen” is promoted in schools internationally. The discussion focuses in partic-
ular on two widespread emotional injunctions in multicultural societies: the calls
for “embracing the other” and “coping with difference.” The analysis examines
the underlying assumptions invoked by these emotional injunctions in relation to
discourses of citizenship education. Possible tensions and ambivalent obligations

This chapter is based on previously published material from my article, “Affective citizenship in
multicultural societies: Implications for critical citizenship education,” Citizenship Teaching &
Learning, 9(1): 5–18

M. Zembylas (*)
Program of Educational Studies, Open University of Cyprus, Latsia, Cyprus
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 923
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_2
924 M. Zembylas

are identified and discussed. The chapter concludes that more attention to the
implications of the notion of affective citizenship is needed in citizenship educa-
tion particularly in relation to goals aiming at instilling more criticality in
students’ understandings of and feelings about citizenship.

Keywords
Affective citizenship · Multiculturalism · Emotion · Critical citizenship
education · Education

Introduction

“Affect” and “emotion” have become important objects of study in politics, reveal-
ing that conceptions of citizenship and political life are much more affective than
usually assumed (Ahmed 2014; Clarke et al. 2006; Marcus et al. 2002; Redlawsk
2006; Westen 2007). For example, notions of citizenship as loyalty and attachment
to the nation (Fortier 2008) or citizenship as compassion and empathetic understand-
ing of “the other” (Berlant 2004) entail important affective elements. As Di Gregorio
and Merolli (2016) argue “turning to affective phenomena and the politics of affect
reveals that communities founded on the tacit rational consent of citizens is at worst a
myth and at best only part of the story” (p. 935). In particular, the concept of affective
citizenship (Fortier 2010, 2016; Johnson 2010; Mookherjee 2005) has been
suggested to show how ideals of citizenship are grounded in emotions and emotional
relationships. Affective citizenship refers to the emotions that citizens are encour-
aged to feel about their membership or belonging to a nation (Jones 2005). Affective
citizenship, then, is a helpful concept that identifies which emotional relationships
between citizens are recognized and endorsed or rejected, and how citizens are
encouraged to feel about themselves and others (Johnson 2010). In citizenship
education, this concept has important implications because it suggests that educators
need to examine more seriously how emotions are entangled with political partici-
pation and citizenship and which pedagogical conditions cultivate acts of solidarity,
empathy, belonging, and struggles for democratic freedom, which are relevant to
both citizenship and affect.
The aim of this chapter is to outline how affective citizenship has been
approached in the literature and to identify the implications for citizenship education,
especially in the context of multicultural societies. The chapter synthesizes the
literature on affective citizenship and identifies examples that show how the ideal
of the “affective citizen” is promoted in schools internationally. The discussion
focuses in particular on two widespread emotional injunctions in multicultural
societies: the calls for “embracing the other” and “coping with difference.” The
analysis examines the underlying assumptions invoked by these emotional injunc-
tions in relation to discourses of citizenship education. Possible tensions and ambiv-
alent obligations are identified and discussed. The chapter concludes that more
attention to the implications of the notion of affective citizenship is needed in
58 Affective Citizenship and Education in Multicultural Societies:. . . 925

citizenship education particularly in relation to goals aiming at instilling more

criticality in students’ understandings of and feelings about citizenship.

The Notion of “Affective Citizenship” in the Literature

Work in the fields of political science and citizenship studies in the last decade
suggests that the concepts of “citizenship” and “identity” have an affective basis
(Ahmed 2014; Fortier 2008, 2010, 2016; Westen 2007). As Fortier writes:

the prescription of sentiment of feelings for the nation, for the community, for the
neighbour, for the Muslim, for the suicide bomber, for minorities is also what race and
ethnicity are about [. . .] the very act of naming who and how to love, suspect, befriend, care
for, embrace, welcome, and so on, performatively constructs racial, ethnic, cultural and
national differences, along with their gender, sexual, class and generational ‘identities’.
(2008, p. 89)

In her seminal article on affective citizenship, Fortier (2010) uses the term
“governing through affect” to indicate the management of affect for the purpose of
community cohesion, namely, how the state or other sites of disciplinary power (e.g.,
fellow citizens; social and political organisations; schools) prescribe what it means to
be a good or ideal citizen. Governing-through-affect has two important components
that deserve a careful consideration in the context of citizenship education.
First, governing-through-affect determines how individuals are affectively
governed by others (e.g., the state, fellow citizens, social and political organizations)
through the creation of particular emotional relationships. For example, citizens
(including children and youth at schools) may be encouraged to feel proximity
with those having the “same” ethnic or cultural origin, while they may learn to be
suspicious toward “illegal immigrants,” “irregular migrants,” refugees, or other
“foreigners” who (supposedly) want to take advantage of the nation state and its
resources (Johnson 2010). In Foucauldian terms, governing strategies operate on a
biopolitical mode of power that is deeply affective (Fortier 2010). Thus, “the
‘affective subject’ becomes ‘affective citizen’,” writes Fortier, “when its member-
ship to the ‘community’ is contingent on personal feelings and acts that extend
beyond the individual self [. . .] but which are also directed towards the community”
(2010, p. 22). For example, schools become primary sites of cultivating affective
citizenship by teaching children and youth learn from an early age to direct their
feelings toward fellow citizens or “others” in ideological ways (Zembylas 2012, in
press).
The second component of Fortier’s (2010) idea about governing-through-affect
concerns how “affective subjects” learn to govern themselves by expressing “appro-
priate” feelings, especially those of “good citizenship.” For example, the “good
citizen” is constructed on the basis of performing particular emotions such as
patriotism and loyalty:
926 M. Zembylas

So, citizens are expected to demonstrate that they feel loyal, patriotic and integrated. Those
citizens are to be welcomed. People who are suspected of not having the correct feelings,
including those accused of making a point of their difference (for example, by wearing a veil,
or even preferring to speak a foreign language), are problematized and identified as legiti-
mate subjects for critique, fear or suspicion. (Johnson 2010, p. 501)

Citizenship as governing-through-affect, then, is considered to be a process of policing

the emotional boundaries of the community against others who look “dangerous” or
“suspicious” or do not have the “appropriate” feelings. According to this perspective,
students become “good citizens” when they express “appropriate” feelings and mobi-
lize them in the public sphere to demonstrate loyalty and patriotism.
In her more recent work, Fortier (2016) uses the term “acts of citizenship” to refer
“to both institutional and individual practices of making citizens or citizenship,
including practices that seek to redefine, decenter or even refuse citizenship”
(p. 1039). For example, encouraging students to engage in acts of citizenship that
are more inclusive (e.g., welcoming refugees and migrants) and challenge normative
rules of citizenship has important affective implications that need to be carefully
examined in education. The question that follows, to paraphrase Fortier (2016), is:
what does it mean for citizenship education to speak of and cultivate affective acts as
acts of affective citizenship? This question suggests that educators need to pay
attention to how curriculum and teaching may bring forth feelings that are attached
to certain aspects of citizenship (e.g., national pride, etc.), while excluding other
feelings such as solidarity for migrants and refugees (Ahmed 2014). Importantly, this
sort of (ontological) questioning relocates debates of citizenship education from
theory to practice, because it pays attention to the web of practices that make acts of
citizenship “visible, audible, tangible and knowable” (Mol 2002, p. 33).
Learning how to feel about (certain aspects of) citizenship, how to act and feel as
citizens, including how to protest as citizens or against terms of citizenship that are
exclusive to some people “are invariably bound up with what we know about
citizenship and its (failed) promises, much of which is assumed and taken for
granted” (Fortier 2016, p. 1041). Paying careful attention to how the design,
circulation, and distribution of certain emotions for and within a community delin-
eate the codes of conduct of the “good” or “bad” affective citizens (Fortier 2016) is
inextricably linked to the forms of disciplinary and biopolitical power constituted
through certain educational policies and pedagogical practices, specifically, how
students and teachers variously experience, enact, interpret, and feel these policies
and practices. Put differently, writes Fortier,

exploring affective citizenship requires focusing on its complex logic: how the feelings that
attach to citizenship are unevenly distributed across gendered, racialized, sexualized, classed
bodies – some citizens feel safer than others; some citizens are deemed safer than others –
and, in turn, how subjects’ feelings about citizenship are not equally valued – not all desires
for citizenship are deemed equally desirable. (2016, pp. 1041–1042)

The concept of affective citizenship allows us to understand how various actors (e.g.,
students and teachers) are engaged in affective politics (Di Gregorio and Merolli
58 Affective Citizenship and Education in Multicultural Societies:. . . 927

2016) – this understanding might yield critical insights into how certain attachments
to citizenship that are cultivated can facilitate but also erode emancipatory projects in
citizenship education.

Affective Citizenship and Critical Citizenship Education

Different conceptions of citizenship are inevitably associated with different

approaches in citizenship education. Generally speaking, Banks (2008) divides
citizenship education in two major approaches. On one hand, “mainstream citizen-
ship education” is the approach that reinforces, and therefore perpetuates, hegemonic
values and institutional knowledge. This approach is grounded in a conception of
citizenship that adopts the established values and morals of the majority and
maintains the dominant power relations in society; for example, citizenship educa-
tion takes the form of promoting patriotism and allegiance to one’s political com-
munity. Discourses of liberal citizenship are also examples of mainstream
assimilationist conceptions of citizenship, because they put emphasis on individual
rights, while group rights of immigrant and ethnic groups and power relations are
often put aside. In general, mainstream citizenship education does not pay adequate
attention to the complexities that arise from unequal power relations and structures in
society and tends to assimilate the particularities of different cultural groups.
On the other hand, “transformative citizenship education” aims to challenge
mainstream conceptions of citizenship by engaging students in critical analysis of
taken for granted assumptions about membership, identity, and community (Banks
2008). Also known as “critical citizenship education” (DeJaeghere 2006;
DeJaeghere and Tudball 2007; Johnson and Morris 2010), transformative citizenship
education recognizes and validates the cultural identities of students and puts
emphasis on challenging inequalities, developing cosmopolitan values, and taking
action to create just and democratic multicultural communities and societies. Trans-
formative approaches, according to Banks (2008), aim to provide the conditions so
that young people will take informed action to actualize values and moral principles
beyond those of conventional authority. Critical or transformative citizenship edu-
cation, then, challenges liberal assimilationist conceptions of citizenship that have
historically been grounded in the Western European Enlightenment tradition (Banks
2008; Knight Abowitz and Harnish 2006).
Hung (2010) argues that most accounts of citizenship education do not ade-
quately take into consideration the role of the “affective citizen,” that is, “a person
who not only thinks and acts rationally, but also feels and cares affectively and
sensitively” (2010, p. 493). Hung’s point is that both mainstream and critical
conceptions of citizenship are contrived, because they ignore important elements
of affective citizenship. Although he says that affective citizenship is not supposed to
take the place of the rational critical one, Hung adds the “affective citizen” as a type
of citizenship that is hierarchically above Bank’s “transformative citizen.” The
problem is that the “transformative citizen” and the “affective citizen” are viewed
as different rather than as integrated manifestations of critical citizenship. Hung’s
928 M. Zembylas

argument about the affective not already being a part of critical citizenship entails the
danger of perpetuating a problematic dichotomy between the “rational” and the
“affective” (Zembylas 2007, 2015). This (unnecessary) dichotomy makes the devel-
opment of a holistic pedagogy of affective citizenship more difficult.
Critical or transformative citizenship education could be enriched in ways that
reflect the contributions of the notion of affective citizenship identified earlier. That
is, an enriched version of critical citizenship with perspectives of affective citizen-
ship could identify more effectively and critically the multiple emotional affiliations
of students and their implications in everyday life. In the context of critical citizen-
ship education, for example, students can be taught to interrogate the ways in which
they are encouraged to feel certain emotions about themselves and others and
examine the consequences of those emotions. A broad concept of critical citizenship
education, then, would benefit considerably by acknowledging that emotions have
long been part of the very way in which citizenship is constructed in public and
school discourses and practices.
Furthermore, an enriched version of critical citizenship education could pro-
blematize how emotion discourses and practices are embodied in the day-to-day
routines of life in a multicultural society and could explore the possibilities that are
opened for interrupting policies and practices which exclude “others” from certain
affective communities (Zembylas 2009, 2010, 2015). Adopting this approach could
lead to a more nuanced analysis of how students’ different emotional histories
influence their decision-making, their actions and their understandings of member-
ship, identity, and community. Therefore, putting in conversation the concepts of
affective citizenship and critical citizenship provides a more holistic description of
the ways in which students’ emotional histories are embedded in wider contexts of
socio-political forces, needs, and interests.
All in all, an enriched framework for critical citizenship education creates openings to
address more productively some major concerns stemming from the emotional tensions
of living in multicultural societies such as the emotional injunctions of “embracing the
other” and “coping with difference” that are discussed in the next part of the chapter. In
particular, an enriched framework for critical citizenship can respond to the hybrid
identifications of citizens, by shifting its focus from a presumed consensus on ethical
values to a “thin” consensus on the citizen’s practices of negotiating the demands of
living in multicultural communities (Fortier 2010). This idea is grounded in the recog-
nition of different affective bonds in multicultural societies rather than assuming there is
a monolithic and one-dimensional way of living with the other. Thus, as it is shown next,
the emotional injunctions of multicultural intimacy are better described as ambivalences
rather than merely as obligations to, or dangers of, proximity with others (Fortier 2007).

The Emotional Injunctions of Multiculturalism: Two Examples

This part of the chapter will focus on the analysis of two widespread emotional
injunctions in multicultural societies. The two injunctions to be analyzed are
“embracing the other” and “coping with difference,” and they are chosen because
58 Affective Citizenship and Education in Multicultural Societies:. . . 929

they are often highlighted as imperatives in multicultural societies, yet their assump-
tions are not always clearly identified (Fortier 2007). Through the analysis of the
underlying assumptions of these emotional injunctions, the consequences for citi-
zenship education are identified and discussed in order to show the mechanisms with
which children, youth, and citizens in general are governed through affect, fabricat-
ing understandings and feelings of identity and difference with “others.”

“Embracing the Other”

Calls to “embrace the other” are often heard and distributed in multicultural socie-
ties; a major assumption underlying these calls is the ideal that “embracing the other”
is supposedly a “good” thing under certain conditions, of course. As Fortier
(2007) argues, there are two important tensions with the emotional injunction of
“embracing the other.” The first tension is between, on one hand, a rhetoric of
embracing the other as “different,” and, on the other hand, the utopian view of a
nation state as “an assumed bond of shared allegiance where ‘differences’ are
obliterated under a veneer of universal diversity” (Fortier 2007, p. 108). The
widespread motto that is found in many schools that “we are all different” is a
classic manifestation of this tension that often works in an assimilationist manner
under the banner of “we are all the same.”
Taking into consideration the concept of affective citizenship outlined earlier can
actually expose this tension and its underlying ambivalences. The emotional
embrace of the other in multicultural schools is often taking place on the basis of
perceived relations of proximity or distance; wearing a veil or even preferring to
speak a foreign language are acceptable, only insofar as they are exoticized. As
Fortier explains: “The promise of the national embrace is to rewrite the national same
so that ‘we’ could love ourselves as different” (2007, p. 108). What is important to
emphasize though is that embracing the other is not a monolithic process; it is a
process that creates both relations of proximity and distance with strong emotional
connotations that might be ambivalent. It is not difficult to see, for example, how
perceptions of a host community may be implicated in the generation of particular
emotional ideologies and discourses that are hostile to migrants and at the same time
tolerant and understanding. What is important, according to some scholars (e.g.,
Ahmed 2014; Fortier 2008; Svašek 2010), is how the narrative of integration often
ascribes different identities to some individuals on the basis of who is seen as the
legitimate object of empathetic and tolerant feelings (Johnson 2010). These ascrip-
tions, for example, may make some migrant students “fit” and others “unfit” within a
school community.
The second tension with the emotional injunction of “embracing the other” has to
do with an underlying moral politics that projects the national affective bond on the
basis of (hegemonic) values. As Fortier explains, “Within this moral politics the
problem of living together becomes a problem of ‘them’ adjusting to ‘our’ values”
(2007, p. 108). For example, this tension implies that migrant students are never
fully “integrated” unless they embrace the (hegemonic) values of the host
930 M. Zembylas

community (i.e., homogeneity). In this manner, embracing the other is rewritten as

an emotional management strategy that seeks to project the nation state as one that
always has been multicultural, tolerant, welcoming, and enriched by embracing the
other (Fortier 2005); yet, in reality, there is often an underlying or overt moral racist
politics that polices the terms of tolerance, embrace, and empathy both in schools
and in the wider society.
The advocacy of empathetic forms of citizenship, however, offers no simple
solution to the challenges of multicultural coexistence (Johnson 2010). Again, taking
into consideration the notion of affective citizenship exposes the underlying ambiv-
alences of “embracing the other” that is, both the desires and anxieties from
empathizing with the other, yet demanding that he or she adjusts to the values
promoted in “our” schools. The emotional management of multicultural intimacy
in schools, then, is inextricably linked to who is seen as the legitimate object of
embrace and who is not. Therefore, the call for “embracing the other” is not as
innocent or idealist as it sounds; employing the concept of affective citizenship
highlights this for the scholar and the teacher. Enriching (critical) citizenship edu-
cation with the notion of affective citizenship is important because it helps educators
acknowledge the ethically and emotionally ambivalent ways through which contem-
porary perceptions and acts of citizenship function in schools and the society more
generally.

“Coping with Difference”

Another example of a widespread emotional injunction in multicultural societies is

“coping with difference.” A usual assumption that is often made through this injunc-
tion is that multiculturalism brings emotional discomfort to the host population and,
therefore, citizens have to learn to live with difference. That is, the origins of emotional
discomfort are situated in the immigrants and their presence; the host population is
“forced” to learn to cope with the increased diversity that is attributed to “immigrants.”
The underlying idea is that immigrants bring unease and uncertainty to “our” com-
munity and threaten the nation’s “character” (Ahmed 2005; Bigo 2002).
However, the “strangeness” of immigrants and, therefore, the emotional origins
and the extent of discomfort they create are already unevenly distributed, because of
existing power relations that cast some immigrants within an “acceptable”
visual oral economy of multicultural citizenship, while others are designated as a
threat to the core values of a country (Ahmed 2005). For example, not all migrant
children are treated in the same manner in schools; their religion, ethnicity, race, and
cultural values already situate them within a differentiated affective economy that
casts some as more “acceptable” than others (Pinson et al. 2010). This uneven
distribution reminds us about the role of affect in “who” gets constructed as a source
of discomfort. Therefore, emotional injunctions such as those of “embracing the
other” or “coping with difference” that might be perceived as evidence of “good
will” on behalf of local teachers and students cannot simply will away the uneven
distribution of affect.
58 Affective Citizenship and Education in Multicultural Societies:. . . 931

“Coping with difference” reveals, then, a form of governing strategy that operates
at the level of the “affective subject” in schools or more generally the “affective
citizen” in society whose membership to the community is directly linked not only to
his or her personal feelings that need to be managed but also to feelings that are
projected to a collective level. As Fortier writes:

The project of community cohesion both relies on the ‘affective subject’ and seeks to shape
‘affective citizens’ whose personal membership to community is contingent on personal acts
and feelings but which extend beyond the family and the individual, and which are rather
directed toward their shared, public, locally integrated lives. (2010, p. 25)

Community cohesion, in other words, is deemed as an inter-personal process of

governing through affect a process in which affective subjects will have to learn to
align themselves with the community, yet without questioning the power structures
of this “community.” This is an attempt of influencing the feelings, attitudes, and
behaviors of citizens in ways that preserve the status quo: members of majority
groups are taught that difference is discomforting and thus they have to cope with it
without disturbing “cohesion”; members of minority groups are being discouraged
from requesting for targeted services that meet their needs, again in the name of an
abstract notion of community cohesion (Fortier 2008).
Therefore, it could be argued that when taking into consideration the notion of
affective citizenship treats the emotional injunctions discussed here as emotional
ideologies that entail certain inclusions and exclusions. These emotional injunctions
show the ambivalences toward diversity as both asset and threat, rather than offering
an assumed either (negative) or (positive) response to multiculturalism. Emotional
ambivalence indicates the ongoing oscillation between the desired boundaries of
“us”and “them” in citizenship and citizenship education discourses (Zembylas 2009,
2012). An enriched framework for critical citizenship education that takes into
consideration the notion of affective citizenship has important implications, as
discussed more in the final part of this chapter.

Implications for Critical Citizenship Education

Despite these contentious debates, it is possible to develop an enriched framework

for critical citizenship education that takes into consideration the notion of affective
citizenship and its implications. This framework can be initially described in practice
as having four distinctive elements along Cogan et al.’s (2002) definition of citizen-
ship education as the formation of the knowledge, skills, values, and dispositions of
citizens. Along each dimension of those elements, some suggestions are provided
below concerning citizenship teaching and learning at different levels of education
(primary, secondary, etc.):

• Knowledge: Construct knowledge and understanding about the affective elements

of citizenship in different contexts; identify the underlying assumptions and
932 M. Zembylas

implications of various emotional injunctions about “identity” and “difference”

and analyze how these assumptions are crucial factors in citizens’ decision-
making and actions.
• Skills: Develop the capacity to expose and critique the entanglements of percep-
tions and acts of citizenship with emotional practices in schools and beyond;
become capable to critically assess the politicization of affective citizenship and
its various manifestations.
• Values: Trace the emotionality of one’s own and others’ values and the ethical and
political grounds for acting on the basis of those values; develop a commitment to
an ethic that recognizes the emotional ambivalences and complexities that are
involved in enacting those values.
• Dispositions: Take responsibility for decisions and actions that are grounded in
perceptions of affective citizenship; address in practice the consequences from the
emotional injunctions of affective citizenship that establish or perpetuate inequal-
ities and injustices in schools and the society. (Zembylas 2014, pp. 13–14)

The above points can be used as sample recognition of the potential contribution
of using affective citizenship to enhance critical citizenship education. For example,
a romanticized view of multiculturalism in schools is more likely to erase “negative”
feelings that could create contestation and conflict over naming an incident as
“racist” and would rather emphasize the “positive” feelings of embracing the
other. As Fortier points out, this view is often translated into an economy of affect
that determines which feelings are legitimate and which are not: “it is good to have
fun, cool, easy and meaningful interactions, it is bad to tackle racism” (2010, p. 27).
However, an enriched framework for critiquing and extending critical citizenship
education that takes into consideration the notion of affective citizenship is more
likely to acknowledge the emotional complexities and ambivalences that frequently
remain unnoticed in schools through the use of emotional injunctions such as those
discussed earlier. Teachers and students might use the points raised above to explore
the emotional complexities related to the terms of entitlement, community, and
identity in their school and their society. The enriched framework for critical
citizenship education would help teachers and students understand why the cohesion
agenda often collapses, when it fails to recognize the differential affective bonds
involved in this process as well as the power relations that are linked to the affective
economies of multiculturalism (Ahmed 2005, 2014). Consequently, teachers and
students are able to see in practice why citizenship ends up being privatized by
governing and individualizing the feelings that need to be aligned with those of the
community.
It is suggested, therefore, that an enriched framework of critical citizenship
education must engage deeply with the affective components of citizenship to extend
understanding of the emotional injunctions of multiculturalism. Debates in citizen-
ship education will benefit considerably by addressing peoples’ multiple emotional
attachments and their significance in mediating affect, community, and citizenship.
This consideration holds potential to truly expand the notion of critical or
58 Affective Citizenship and Education in Multicultural Societies:. . . 933

transformative citizenship by contributing to the establishment of public and educa-

tional spaces in which the consequences of emotional injunctions are not only
exposed but are also utilized productively to shape the way that social justice is
imagined and enacted in multicultural societies.
Clearly, any attempt to develop such an enriched framework for critical citi-
zenship education that takes into consideration the notion of affective citizenship
has numerous challenges. The knowledge, skills, values, and dispositions of
hegemonic citizenship education discourses are not easily suspended as they are
deeply rooted in the emotional ideologies of the nation state (Bekerman and
Zembylas 2012). As a theoretical and practical scaffold, this enriched framework
for critical citizenship education requires the transformation of the very conditions
of the production and reproduction of hegemonic affective economies in schools
and multicultural societies. Undoubtedly, this is a monumental task, yet the
enriched framework suggested here might at least provide small openings to
support the structure and the process for teachers willing to interrogate the
assumptions of affective citizenship. The advantage of this framework is that it
can be constantly reinterpreted and enriched in the future as empirical studies
inform it.

Conclusion

This chapter has considered how the notion affective citizenship has important
implications for education, especially in multicultural societies. The task of any
educator in citizenship education that is critical of the affective borders that are often
created among “us” and “them” in schools is to identify the acts, practices, strategies,
and spaces where affective transformation might be possible. By critically analyzing
different elements of affective citizenship, there is a potential to identify possibilities
for this affective transformation, while deconstructing taken for granted emotional
injunctions about “others.” Enriching our theoretical and empirical understandings
of affective citizenship in citizenship education requires asking critical questions
about how the entanglement of power, politics, and affect in citizenship education
projects can create openings for transformation or bring closures to emancipatory
acts of citizenship.

Cross-References

▶ Citizenship and Education in an Age of Extremisms

▶ Educational Mobility and Citizenship: Chinese “Foreign Talent” Students in
Singapore and Indian Medical Students in China
▶ International Students: (Non)citizenship, Rights, Discrimination, and Belonging
▶ Typologies of Citizenship and Civic Education: From Ideal Types to a Reflective Tool
934 M. Zembylas

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Hypercitizenship in the Age of
Globalization 59
Sara Petroccia and Andrea Pitasi

Contents
Introduction: The Evolution of the Concept of Citizenship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 938
Hypercitizenship as an Evolution of the Global and Cosmopolitan Citizenship Idea . . . . . . . . . 940
The Dimensions of Hypercitizenship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 941
Hypercitizenship and Cosmopolitanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 942
The Functional Dimensions of Hypercitizenship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 947
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 947
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 948

Abstract
This chapter examines and theorizes the concept of citizenship and its evolution
into hypercitizenship in an age of globalization. It argues that citizenship narra-
tives are not necessarily placed in the contexts of material lives and nor do they
constitute part of networks of direct relations. Instead, citizenship narratives can
be reached in mediated ways and can be part of a virtual or a spatially imaginative
context of reference. The growing interdependence and contemporary erosion
and multiplication of boundaries make it possible to think of oneself as freed from
local ties and as being immersed in global flows which interconnect the whole
planet mostly through intangible assets portfolio such as digital information and
intellectual Property Right Policy. The main focal point of this research shall be
based on the conflict existing between citizenship rights and so-called cosmopol-
itan rights. From a cosmopolitan point of view of global citizenship, this tension
might produce positive effects when international regulations succeed in inter-
fering with the legal systems of single countries. Citizenship policies are
sketching out a paradigm shift from nation sate based on the level to transnational
or supranational levels as testified for example by the hypercitizenship conceptual
S. Petroccia (*) · A. Pitasi
Gabriele d’Annunzio University, Chieti-Pescara, Italy
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 937
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_59
938 S. Petroccia and A. Pitasi

framework and vision described in this chapter. The old conception of nation state
citizenship represents a reductionist vision of what is in practice evolved nowa-
days into a global flow shaped as a systemic process interconnected on a planetary
level (i.e., the about 20 million double passport Brazilias who are also Spanish/
Italian/German/Dutch/Portuguese shaping continuous flow of right between the
European Union and the Mercosur). The traditional meaning of citizenship
essentially focused on legal validity and political participation. Nowadays, in
the complex contexts, legal validity and political participation are still very
important. Nevertheless, citizenship is framed also by economical, financial,
and biotechnological variables (such as the matter of the rights of animals or of
intangible assets and of the outputs of human–machine–animal interaction output
(Harris 2007), which also highlights the allocation of legal intellectual capitals in
global scenarios.

Keywords
Hypercitizenship · Evolution · Globalization · Cosmopolitanism · Educational
innovation policy · Knowledge

Introduction: The Evolution of the Concept of Citizenship

The development of the concept of “citizenship,” from the political and juridical
forms of absolutism to the conceptual frame of an open series of subjective rights,
represents one of the salient aspects of the modern world. The configuration of
citizenship, characterized by the binomial “belonging-rights,” bases its conceptual
foundations in Locke’s philosophical thought the Second Treatise of Government
(Locke 2016). In the course of this chapter, the concept of citizenship that shall be
considered is composed of three main dimensions (Cohen 1999; Kymlicka and
Norman 1994; Carens 2000): first of all, citizenship as a legal status, defined
through civil, political, and social rights that makes the citizen free to act in
accordance with the law and to claim its protection. The second dimension
considers citizens specifically as political agents, actively participating in the
institutions of society, and the third dimension refers to citizenship as the phenom-
enon to belong to a political community (Leydet 2011) which is actually able to
develop a distinct identity base within it itself. The essay written by Thomas
H. Marshall titled “Citizenship and social class” (Marshall 1950) represents the
first theorization of this conception of citizenship as well as the key to understand
the dynamics of a modern democracy occurring when assigning rights and duties
to the new social classes emerging along with the development of industrial society
starting from the second half of the eighteenth century. At Marshall’s times,
citizenship was a mere category to aggregate a wide number of people labeled
by the same right portfolio and they can access thus equality was he key pillar of
that conception of citizenship. In this light, social citizenship, in spite of not being
able to subvert the antiegalitarian logic of the market, may generate an
59 Hypercitizenship in the Age of Globalization 939

improvement in the quality of civil life by reducing risks and insecurity related to
health, employment, and age.
The development of citizenship rights may not be represented as a gradual
process, which emerges spontaneously from the institutions of the market and by
virtue of the protection of the state, as citizenship rights basically derive from the
social and political conflict of the subordinate classes. Therefore, it would be an
illusion to consider the social rights introduced by the welfare state as factors of
pacification within society (Giddens 1982). Whether it is true that, on the one hand,
Marshall’s approach prevents us from perceiving the internal tensions of the various
phases of citizenship by referring to Marxist theories and claiming the impossibility
of altering power relations with the simple introduction of social rights as these
rights affect only the mechanisms of resource distribution and not also the ones
concerning the production, on the other hand Marxist theories seem to underestimate
the complexity of modern citizenship, binding it exclusively to the matter relating to
the classes and the capitalist mode of production.
On the contrary, in our opinion, today the debate must take into account the
increasing gap between citizenship, meant as the assignment of rights within indi-
vidual countries, and the development of Transnational and Supranational Legisla-
tion (Neves 2013; Thornhill 2016; Teubner et al. 2006) in the globalized world
where individuals, governmental, and nongovernmental organizations are found to
be subject to new disciplines both on a national and supranational level. The
definition of a citizen as a person coexisting in a society provided by the Council
of Europe (O’Shea 2003) reinforces even more the aforementioned vision of citi-
zenship as a flexible and open – to cosmopolitanism, for example – concept which
acts as a key foci for transnational and supranational policy modeling.
This definition includes widening the concepts of both status and role, assuming a
bigger scale model of citizenship. The model conceives citizenship as being shaped
by a multidimensional pattern of variables, including, for example,

1. The right of the blood (birth or marriage)

2. Jus soli – rights accorded by birth in a given location
3. Citizenship as investment
4. Citizenship as artistic/scientific, institutional special merit and service, and
5. The Constructivist confederative reshaping of the world (as already theorized by
John Locke in the seventeenth century)

Alongside a formal vision of citizenship as a legal status that attributes to the

citizens rights and responsibilities within their own community, citizenship can also
be defined through participation and commitment to public life. In this way there are
two relevant concepts: first, the concept of citizenship is no longer affirmed only by
taking into account national borders but by also including the international dimen-
sion. Secondly, in addition to expressing a status, the concept of citizenship also
becomes a role. Citizenship, therefore, must be seen as a means not only of access to
the areas of rights, but also of inclusion and integration as well as social promotion
and active participation in the life of the community. When speaking of citizenship,
940 S. Petroccia and A. Pitasi

we have to consider it as a multidimensional concept as shown above in which legal

validity is pivotal but not exclusive. Social, economical, and also technological
dimensions affect the evolution of citizenship.
This is the reason why more and more frequently, in recent years, the term
citizenship has been accompanied by adjectives that have better specified the
intended meaning of the concept. Hence, there have been writings on a social
citizenship (Marshall 1950), inclusive citizenship (Habermas 1998), active citizen-
ship (Benvenuti 1994), administrative citizenship (Gallo 2002; Cavallo Perin 2004),
health citizenship (Menichetti 2000), cultural citizenship (Miller 2010), multicultural
citizenship (Kymlicka 2001), virtual citizenship (Downes Janda 1998) or digital
citizenship (Cogo 2010), planetary citizenship (Annino 2013; Tussi 2010), partici-
pated citizenship (Mortari 2004), flexible citizenship (Ong 1999; Benhabib 2002,
2005), democratic citizenship (Habermas 1992), cosmopolitan citizenship (Held
1995), global citizenship (Romano et al. 2005; Benhabib 2008; Unesco 2015), and
hypercitizenship citizenship (Pitasi 2012a, 2014b; Pitasi and Ferone 2017a). Specif-
ically, these last three expressions better summarize and encompass the meaning of
citizenship as these adjectival terms manage to combine the national level with the
international level, emphasizing the “multiple identities” coexisting in the same
subject.
This chapter is research and policy modeling based and it is essentially structured
as follows:

1. A brief overview of the concept of citizenship in legal, political, and social

sciences
2. An examination of the evolution of citizenship theory and policy since the 1960s
focusing on the impact of globalization
3. A description of the emerging shape of global citizenship named “hyper-
citizenship” which is the core of the research and policy agenda of this chapter
evolving hypercitizenship also to testify the convergent trend towards a more
unified, macro-, and transnational/supranational of globally interconnected
policies

Hypercitizenship as an Evolution of the Global and Cosmopolitan

Citizenship Idea

The goal of this chapter, beyond the historical background described above, is to set out
the problem of the obsolescence of educational processesfor citizenship based on the
traditional methodological nationalism as clearly thoerized by Beck (2006). The illusion
that science and politics are two parallel universes was one of the biggest mistakes made
by Max Weber, which was corrected by Karl Mannheim who in 1929 explained that
politics, as any other aspect of social life, is knowledge intensive and science based.
Expanding the famous motto by T. J. Lowi (2009) that research determines policy
which determines politics, here we introduce hypercitizenship, which is represented as
an evolution of the ideas of Global and Cosmopolitan Citizenship.
59 Hypercitizenship in the Age of Globalization 941

The emergence of citizenship as a multidimensional concept comes out from the

evolution of social systems based on their autopoietic capacity, which should no
longer be analyzed and studied by using old methods of social sciences but by using
the most recent theoretical paradigm of systems theory. In this sense, social sciences
need to present theoretical models that can diagnose existing problems and present
the most adequate solutions to such problems. The concept of citizenship based on
the notion of “world citizen” is redesigned by the globalized and cosmopolitan social
system as one that overcomes the idea of citizenship being limited to the place of
birth and hereditary matters. Let’s give a very simple example of hypercitizenship:
The European Union currently has about 450 million inhabitants self-perceiving as
national state citizens (Italians, Germans, French, and so on). Both the education
system (in high school they study Italian literature or French literature or German
literature, not European literature) and the political system are confirming this self-
perception (they vote on a national scale also at the European Elections), while the
science system, the economical system, and the legal system involve them as
Europeans or even as Global Citizens. The more the citizenship expands legally,
financially, economically, and scientifically, the more the education system and the
political system are under pressure, either through resisting the expansion of citizen-
ships or through the structural coupling of more localized system with the more
global ones (Luhmann, Theory of Society, Stanford University Press, Stanford,
2012–13, 2 voll). Hypercitizenship is thus a research based policy model to facilitate
the evolution of citizenship to a more and more macrolevel.

The Dimensions of Hypercitizenship

The concept of hypercitizenship evolves from the construction of citizenship shaped

by systemically interconnecting four dimensions:

(i) Beck’s cosmopolitan citizen

(ii) Scientific citizenship
(iii) Social autonomy capacity of self-organization
(iv) Entrepreneurial citizenship

Here we describe the four dimensions considering the first two as more structural
and the other two as more functional; thus, cosmopolitan citizenship and scientific
citizenship will be dealt more in depth. The hypercitizen is portrayed as having a
strong entrepreneurial spirit and is able to consider themselves as a citizen of the
world. Hypercitizens have a cosmopolitan mentality acquired though training and
life experiences; those skills are used in order to interpret the world and to choose for
the right way to live one’s own life. This citizenship expansion also implies the move
from doxa to episteme, and thus to eradicate, emotional, childish, and short-term
oriented citizens moved by small-scale egoistic motivations toward more skilled,
educated, cognitive, strategic citizens able to play the game of procedural delibera-
tion as coding and programming systemic functions instead of primitive emotional
942 S. Petroccia and A. Pitasi

participation. These features do not come from ideological-political doctrines of any

kind, rather they derive from the basics of human ethological evolution as shown by
Irenaeus Eibl Eibelsfeldt (Dennet 2004). We now discuss these four dimensions in
depth.
The first dimension of hypercitizenship is cosmopolitan citizenship, as it is
portrayed in Ulrich Beck’s cosmopolitan vision as largely characterized by the
breaking of barriers. Here, cosmopolitanism is the outcome of a transformation in
the globalized world. The cosmopolitan world needs what he calls “cosmopolitan
vision” (Beck 2006). In this context, there is the need for a paradigmatic shift of the
social sciences as assumptions to be able to deal with the complexity of the existing
social relations in the systems.
The second dimension of hypercitizenship is scientific citizenship (Nowotny
2008) in which the ideas of citizenship, science, and technology are linked by the
social system, which is supplied by means of the educational system. The educa-
tional system is the current means for social mobility and the insertion of people in
knowledge intensive and research based economic and work relations. One cannot
conceive the possibility of citizenship without education, as one cannot also imagine
life without knowledge and technology. Social relations are defined more and more
through the growth and improvement of science and technology and a highly
educated and cognitive public opinion.
The third dimension – the social autonomy capacity of self-organization, or
societarian (Donati 1993) – requires self-organizing autonomy for emergent net-
works and communities of citizens, in other words, the emergence of communities
deriving from networks created by citizens. It implies the ability of citizens and
social networks to generate and shape organizations that allow new emerging social
forms by linking charity and lobbying.
Finally, the fourth dimension of hypercitizenship is entrepreneurial citizenship
(Audretsch 2009); that is, the emergence of innovative and strategically applied
ideas for development and expansion and of the citizen. In the space available here,
there is not scope to cover all four of these dimensions in detail, so in the remainder
of this section we concentrate on the first two dimensions before saying something
much briefer about the third and fourth dimensions in the concluding section that
follows.

Hypercitizenship and Cosmopolitanism

As stated above, the first dimension of hypercitizenship, cosmopolitanism, is

inspired by Ulrich Beck’s thesis, who ranks some principles of the cosmopolitan
citizen, largely characterized by the breaking of barriers. On Beck’s reading, cos-
mopolitanism is the result of a memetic transformation in the globalized world, in
which barriers between nations do not limit crises or wars. The cosmopolitan world
needs what he calls a “cosmopolitan outlook” (Beck 2006). In this global and
cosmopolitan context, there is the need for a paradigm shift of the social sciences
as assumptions to be able to deal with the complexity of the existing systemic
59 Hypercitizenship in the Age of Globalization 943

relations. Cosmopolitan theories influence the idea of citizenship in different ways.

One of the reasons may be traced primarily to the basic meaning of “global
citizenship,” which underlies a reference to the “citizen of the world” or to the
commonality and equality of all human beings as such. Another reason may be
linked to the increasingly renewed interest in the cosmopolitan ideal, considered
today as one of the most effective interpretations of the globalized world. Cosmo-
politanism has deep roots and inspires legal and institutional reform projects.
Cosmopolitanism has been repeatedly underlined as crucial for a new reality char-
acterized by the progressive increase in relations and exchanges at a global level
because the economic, political, and legal fields require new conceptual schemes in
order to be decoded, to foresee future developments and face the effects that these
changes are producing. Thus, on a theoretical level, contemporary cosmopolitanism
reveals the existence of a reality that is already strongly cosmopolitan in itself and
represents, at the same time, an attempt to solve the new problems that it entails, to
rethink some traditional conceptual categories in the light of the changes that have
already taken place or that are currently ongoing, to develop new ones as well as to
inspire and direct political-institutional reform projects. In fact, contemporary cos-
mopolitanism manifests itself as fragmented into a multiplicity of areas and contents:
from ethics to politics, from sociology to jurisprudence, from cultural studies to
gender studies. Since the beginning of globalization, national legal systems have
been affected in relation to the formation of their internal norms and international
agreements (Beck 2006, for a continuous upgrading of cosmopolitan sociological
research please follow the works in progress of the European Sociological Associ-
ation – Research network 15- https://www.europeansociology.org/research-net
works/rn15-global-transnational-andcosmopolitan-sociology).
From the laws of trade and property, the effects of the network of cosmo-
politan influences have affected ways of seeing and facing the context of
inequalities. In the traditional national view, problems of inequality are usually
situated in terms of interrelationships between the nation-state and the individ-
ual, national citizen. Thus, responsibilities for inequalities are attributed and
distributed between the individual and society (through nation-state public
policies). However, due to the movement produced by a cosmopolitan society,
there has been a relocation that now sees national inequalities as a reflection of
global inequalities (due to global economic crises and the flow of capital) (Beck
2006, p. 39). The cosmopolitan point of view reverses the traditional hierarchy
of priorities, so that the principles of cosmopolitan, supranational law derogate
the principles of national law. One can observe the application of this emerging
process when considering the prosecution and application of sanctions relating
to so-called crimes against humanity that cannot be judged or condemned by
nation-states alone. This growing trend may signal a significant paradigm shift
from a national society to a cosmopolitan society. For while maintaining the
speed of diffusion from the cosmopolitan point of view of a human rights
regime, there is a tendency to remove the internal-external boundary and
question the legitimacy of the purely national action of the nation-state, both
internally and externally (Beck 2006).
944 S. Petroccia and A. Pitasi

To seek to understand the emergence of a network of interdependent global

normative concepts seems to be a necessity of contemporary law, either through
cosmopolitanism that presupposes a minimum universalism of legal norms (Beck
2006, p. 49) or through its next step, hypercitizenship. The concept of hyper-
citizenship describes the existence of a catalog of strategically formulated laws, in
which the hypercitizen will choose the one that is most favorable to them. Whether in
the idea of cosmpolitan citizenship or hypercitizenship, we are forced to leave the
concept of a legal system aimed at protecting the interests of a specific population,
belonging to a particular culture, and circumscribed to a particular territory. We must
start building the concept of a legal system aimed at the individual, as a plural
citizen, who can use any culture or territory and heuristically implement them as
memetic recombinations on a “glocal” scale.
This emphasis on a new global identity, especially provided by the concept of
hypercitizenship, points to a positive dynamic role played by the citizen, who
actively pursues his or her goals, provided by the conceptual tools that form the
four constituent elements of hypercitizenship described above. This pursuit of
certain events, relative to others and having the freedom to choose them, creates
value and meaning, reintroducing value, meaning, and choice through agency.
Kauffman (2010) reinforces the importance of the individual agent as responsible
for the construction of evolutionary systems, from the simplest system that allowed
the emergence of the first forms of life to the emergence of the economic, social, and
legal systems. Agency, therefore, is the ability to act that presupposes an active
characteristic, such as an active process of decisions and choices. In the context of
new citizenships, agency can undoubtedly be seen in the active capacity of the new
type of citizen to make decisions and choices based on scientific and technological
knowledge, in the cosmopolitan vision, undertaking and catalyzing social groupings
in search of their objectives (See Davies and Bansel 2007). All these actions take
place in a space of freedoms created by the individual agency, which are catalyzed
and shaped by law. Local social arrangements are encouraged or restricted through
local legal rules. Local legal rules, in turn, are influenced by the network of global
legal concepts, especially on the horizon of a cosmopolitan society.
The greater emphasis on the dissemination of human rights as supranational legal
concepts, since the 1948 UN Declaration up to the EU Treaty of Nice and beyond,
points to the formation of a nucleus around the individual, the individual citizen as
responsible for the construction of a plural identity, through agency, contrary to the
previously simple and local relationship between the citizen and the local nation-
state. The law in this context can be seen doubly: not only as a legal science, but as a
social technology (Pitasi et al. 2018). Now, through this definition, it is pointed out
that law is a social technology as it allows the organized interaction of completely
different people, who in any other context would have no reason to interact with
mutual trust and conduct business.
The role of the stabilization of normative expectations (Luhmann 2006) exercised
by law allows the construction of the economic and social architecture that we know,
being completely compatible with the definition of Beinhocker. By viewing the law
as a technology, we can be open to a constellation of innovations and
59 Hypercitizenship in the Age of Globalization 945

interconnections; it means to say that the entrepreneurial dimension of hyper-

citizenship can be used as a constant engine of innovation of the legal technique,
not needing a whole new revolution in the science of law. Technology often evolves
by a new recombination of well-known elements. Thus, many innovations in the
application of law have been, although timidly, developed not necessarily by a
scientific change caused by the science of law, but by entrepreneurs, jurists or not,
that created virtual solutions for technical problems of legal application. Increas-
ingly, the application of the law is being carried out through virtual platforms and
increasingly the citizen (or hypercitizen) will have faster and better tools of not only
choosing which legal system is most appropriate for their purpose, but also acting
through those platforms directly in a system of choice, in a more independent and
efficient way. Day by day, generation by generation the challenge is to empower the
chances for an increasing amount of citizens accessing the hypercitizenship mindset
through quality educational processes.
Just as globalization led to Beck’s cosmopolitanism in an irreversible way, the
technological convergence that has led to the concept of hypercitizenship, a step
further from the cosmopolitan concept, asserts itself as an irreversible process. Legal
systems have changed to seek better regulation in the face of these changes. But
these timid and partial changes have failed to keep up with the speed of technology-
driven changes. Law, like science and technology, must innovate as well. There is a
need for a new angle in the study of legal systems, where law can be seen as a
technology and a science that makes the evolution of agency and citizenship as a
fundamental element. This new angle requires applying an unorthodox tooling to the
study of Law, the tool used in the study of complex adaptive networks: the Sciences
of Complexity. The work of describing the influence of agents on each other and on
the normative network means describing how the interpretation of the flow of
information between these elements takes place and what pattern emerges from
that interaction. It is necessary to apply cognitive concepts to the process of
emergence of social and legal patterns in a Complex Adaptive Social System that
does not admit fixed and univocal concepts. A Complex Adaptive System is
composed of a large number of elements with diversity in structure and capacities
that interact, learn, and evolve (Holland 1995). From the interaction of these agents,
various patterns can arise, through a process of self-organization without central
control, called emergency (Mitchel 2009).
These characteristics can be found in the legal system described as a complex
adaptive network of normative concepts that shape the agents’ performance, who
processes the concepts, acts (through their agency), applies the concepts concretely,
and adapts to them alter the normative network, in a co-evolutionary cycle of
influences and changes. It can be said that the agent acting is the main engine of
self-organization of the legal system. Moreover, the agent processes the information
received form the network of legal concepts and gives it meaning by acting posi-
tively. A possible relationship between the four dimensions of hypercitizenship and
an effective use of individual capacities within the freedoms space of the agency may
indicate a way of approaching how to understand and construct legal systems and
public policies that are not only adequate for the full exercise of citizenship as it can
946 S. Petroccia and A. Pitasi

accelerate the process of emergence of hypercitizenship and its diffusion. From this
point of view, the construction of legal norms and public policies must not only
guarantee a sufficiently wide space of freedoms for the agency, but must also provide
conditions for the four dimensions of hypercitizenship to be developed. This con-
vergence for a hypercitizenship and an application of complexity science tools
requires a society based on the diffusion of techno-scientific knowledge, which
can only arise from a cosmopolitan context of inclusive differences, which will
allow creative social grouping, driven by entrepreneurship.
As set out above, the second dimension of hypercitizenship is scientific citizen-
ship: the idea of citizenship, science, and technology are linked through the social
system, which is supplied by means of the educational system which is also shaped
legally, but education policies are beyond the mere legal dimension of citizenship.
An exemplary brief case: imagine a high level of obsolete jobs depending on a
technological change, for example, the wedding photographer in a world of high
definition mobiles with cameras and videocameras. Let’s suppose an increase of the
unemployment rate and a search for a political – legal decision: all wedding
photographers will be working as state employees. As they are not trained and
probably they are aged and not too open to be trained they will be hired by the
state for no added value jobs. In the short term, it might be an apparent solution as it
downsizes the unemployment and maybe – thanks to the new salaries – it might
improve a little the consumption rate. Nevertheless, the consequences in the
mid-long term would be on one side a wide increasing of no added value spending
and on the other one the reproduction of obsolescence delaying both technological
and organizational change delaying new job opportunities for “Young Blood.” In
brief, an implosive short term, narrow minded solution. It often happens when
educational policies about intellectual and professional training are camouflaged as
unemployment reduction as a motto for political campaigning.
Nowotny, setting her scientific citizenship conceptually, clearly states that: “The
convergent technologies based on successful connections among the biological,
informational, nano, and cognitive sciences open up a broad field in which brain
and matter, body and environment can interact in a controlled fashion. These and
other transformations that spring from science and technology touch on humanity’s
self understanding as much as they change our social life together” (Nowotny 2008,
pp. 12–13).
Nowotny’s (2008) key contribution evolves into the scientific citizenship concept
which shapes the knowledge based society. Thus, a knowledge based society also
increases its production of epistemic things, various kinds of abstract objects, and
technical artifacts that are subject to the same rules. So, the democratization of
scientific expertise appears as the expansion of principles of governance that have
served the Western liberal democracies well. It is logical to extend the concept of
citizenship to scientific citizenship and argue then a broad agreement that more
money should be invested in research to be achieved by putting the unexpected and
new that comes out of the laboratory into the widest possible variety of contexts of
applications to produce in them new knowledge that in turn brings forth new abilities
and continues to spread in society. So that, the entire knowledge of humankind and
59 Hypercitizenship in the Age of Globalization 947

its impressive technological capacities is oriented toward a future that does not so
much promise a new beginning as further intensification and dynamic continuation
of what has already been achieved and the future we are now facing relies on
innovation under conditions of uncertainty. This cannot be equated with the lack
of knowledge – quite the contrary. Uncertainty arises from the surfeit of knowledge,
leading to too many alternatives, too many possible ramifications and consequences,
to be easily judged. In sum, the outcome aims at the expansion of possibilities of
controlling the environment, enabling people to travel greater differences in less time
and to settle the space they found more densely and efficiently. The loss of temporal
distance blurs the difference between what is technologically possible and what is
already present in the laboratory which is often a virtual reality, so the future presents
itself as a sketch of technological visions that block out the social knowledge that is
needed to live in a scientific technological world.

The Functional Dimensions of Hypercitizenship

The fourth dimension of hypercitizenship is entrepreneurial citizenship, that is, the

emergence of innovative ideas and of the citizen who undertakes actions based on
technology and knowledge. This fourth dimension is conceptualized from a reinter-
pretation of the ideas of Audretsch (2007), on the entrepreneurial society, extending
it to an idea of entrepreneurial citizenship. Finally, the fourth dimension is the social
relationship capability of citizens, the emergence of self-organized networks deriv-
ing from nets created by citizens’ emergent new lifestyle trends. It implies the ability
of shaping self-generating and self-organized networks which allow new emerging
social forms by linking charity and lobbying, for example. In this framework, we
affirm that hypercitizenship appears as an emerging systemic and global policy
model (Pitasi et al. 2018; Pitasi and Ferone 2017b). This epistemological theoretical
model recognizes the existence of new relations as elicitations for a response from
law in order to “maintain expectations” systemically thus meaning expectations as
autopietic functions (Luhmann 2006). In this way, rights and obligations become
systemic and global, withdrawing a nation-state’s exclusive power and unlimited
self-determination (Beck 2006). The concept of hypercitizenship could be a central
point around the creation of public policy modeling and making.

Conclusion

After a brief historical description of the evolution of the concept of citizenship, this
chapter introduced the hypercitizenship model at the crossroads between Sociology
of Law and Sociology of Knowledge focused on its higher education impact,
meaning by higher education the Three Academic Levels of the 1999 Process of
Bologna. The four dimensions of hypercitizenship have been described above and
hypercitizenship has been discussed epistemologically, theoretically, and as a
948 S. Petroccia and A. Pitasi

strategic policy model for tactical policy making of macroorganizations in the

knowledge intensive globalization age.

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World-Seeing and World-Making: The Role
of Aesthetic Education in Cultivating 60
Citizens of the World

Suzanne S. Choo

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 952
Cosmopolitan Citizenship Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 952
The Role of Aesthetic Education in Cosmopolitan Citizenship Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 956
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 961
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 962

Abstract
One of the key distinguishing characteristics of the twenty-first century is the
intensification of global mobility and interconnectivity. At the same time, this
illusion of connectivity is also disrupted by rising instances of cultural and
religious intolerance evidenced in the spread of extremism, fundamentalism,
and xenophobia worldwide. Consequently, governments have become increas-
ingly conscious of the need to empower citizens with the skills and dispositions to
navigate cultural diversity in a global age. This chapter premises on the argument
that education for citizenship be explicitly reframed as education for cosmopol-
itan citizenship. It focuses on the role of aesthetic education in developing a
cosmopolitan imagination that continually disrupts national, institutional, and
parochial norms. Though aesthetic education encompasses the production of
artworks and the processes of art-making, it is primarily attentive to shaping
perspectives and predispositions toward others. This occurs not merely through
artworks themselves but through three key pedagogical tools that aesthetic
education supports to developing an imagination hospitable to diversity and
difference – pedagogies of interruption, bridge-building pedagogies, and critical
cosmopolitan pedagogies. Through an ongoing process of world-seeing and

S. S. Choo (*)
National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 951
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_72
952 S. S. Choo

world-making elicited through narratives of otherness, aesthetic education facil-

itates cosmopolitan sensitivities as a means to live ethically and hospitably with
diverse and multiple others in a globally interconnected age.

Keywords
Cosmopolitanism · Aesthetic education · Critical citizenship · Dialogue ·
Literature · Hospitality

Introduction

One of the key distinguishing characteristics of the twenty-first century is the

intensification of global mobility and interconnectivity. Paradoxically, while tech-
nological globalization has effected “time-space compression” contributing to the
impression of a networked, global village (Bauman 1998), this illusion of connec-
tivity is also disrupted by rising instances of cultural and religious intolerance
evidenced in the spread of extremism, fundamentalism, and xenophobia worldwide.
Consequently, governments have become increasingly conscious of the need to
empower citizens with the skills and dispositions to navigate cultural diversity in a
global age. Building on Osler and Starkey’s (2003) proposal that education for
citizenship be explicitly reframed as education for cosmopolitan citizenship, this
chapter focuses on the role of aesthetic education in developing a cosmopolitan
imagination that continually disrupts national, institutional, and parochial norms.
Through an ongoing process of world-seeing and world-making elicited through
narratives of otherness, aesthetic education facilitates cosmopolitan sensitivities as a
means to live ethically and hospitably with diverse and multiple others in a globally
interconnected age.

Cosmopolitan Citizenship Education

It is commonly acknowledged that the term “cosmopolitanism” was first employed

by the Cynic philosopher Diogenes in Ancient Greece who, living in an earthenware
tub in the marketplace, declared himself a kosmopolitēs or citizen of the world. The
concept was subsequently employed by Stoic philosophers who advocated moral
obligation beyond the confines of family or nation and proposed to treat all persons
regardless of class, gender, or nationality as quasi-siblings who deserved equal
treatment.
Cosmopolitan ideals have also been located in Eastern philosophy such as in the
Hindu Upanishads and in Confucius’ Analects (Hansen 2011). Like the Stoics,
Confucius advocated the importance of extending concern that we naturally have
for siblings to everyone in the world. He emphasized that the humane man “wishing
himself to be established, sees that others are established, and wishing himself to be
successful, sees that others are successful” (2008, §6.30, p. 23). Confucius modelled
60 World-Seeing and World-Making: The Role of Aesthetic Education in. . . 953

a cosmopolitan attitude characterized by a willingness to learn from others to better

appreciate what it is to be human.
In fields ranging from Anthropology to International Relations, Literary Studies,
Philosophy, and Education, the ancient concept of cosmopolitanism has undergone a
revival since the 1990s following the end of the Cold War and the intensification of
globalization. On one hand, a cosmopolitan worldview aligns with the current global
zeitgeist in its commitment toward the notion of a common humanity transcending
territorial boundaries. On the other hand, the concept of cosmopolitanism provides a
response to the injustices brought about by global capitalism and has been described
as “the human face of globalization” (Cheah 2006, p. 19).
Cosmopolitan education has typically been categorized as one component of
global citizenship education. In distilling five heuristics of global citizenship dis-
courses, Gaudelli (2009) listed cosmopolitanism as one among others that include
neoliberal, nationalist, Marxist, and world justice/governance. Similarly, in their
typology of global citizenship conceptions, Oxley and Morris (2013) identified
eight conceptions of global citizenship under two broad categories – cosmopolitan
and advocacy. Cosmopolitan conceptions focus on political, moral, economic, and
cultural aspects of global citizenship, while advocacy types focus on social, critical,
environmental, and spiritual aspects of global citizenship. Essentially, there are three
features that distinguish cosmopolitan education from other conceptions of global
citizenship education.

The Other as an End in Place of the Other as a Means

First, cosmopolitan education supports an ethical approach to global citizenship
education that counters neoliberal, utilitarian approaches. Broadly, neoliberal global
citizenship education champions choice and competition and is aimed at equipping
students to thrive in the global economy (Gaudelli 2009). Increasingly common is
the influence of multinational corporations and businesses in crafting education
reform initiatives that push for future-ready workplace skills (Spring 2014). Educa-
tion is conceived in terms of economic utility – the capacity to thrive and compete in
future work places, to get better jobs and higher wages, and to increase one’s
productivity for a country. This utilitarian approach to education perpetuates the
image of the citizen as what Foucault (1979) termed, homo economicus, one who is
an “entrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital, being for himself his
own producer, being for himself the source of earnings” (p. 226). The neoliberal
citizen, depicted as an individualistic and autonomous capitalist, rather than part of a
collective society, is motivated to maximize “utilities” in the accumulation of future-
oriented skills (Tan 2014). At the same time, students are also “utilities,” conceived
by the state as human capital to be invested in and measured for economic returns
rather than for human development that then promotes a managerial school culture
characterized by competition, standardization, and accountability.
Conversely, cosmopolitan education’s essential premise is that the other is an end
in itself. In this sense, cosmopolitan education encompasses a teleological orienta-
tion rooted in the Aristotelian ethical notion that “every action and decision seems to
aim at some good” (1985, §1094a, p. 1). This ultimate end is eudaimonia or human
954 S. S. Choo

flourishing which is not merely an individualistic goal but one that also transcends
self-interest. Thus, Aristotle identified justice as the most superior virtue “because
the person who has justice is able to exercise virtue in relation to another, not only in
what concerns himself” (1985, §1130a, p. 119). For Aristotle, the just person is
concerned with questions about fairness and equality and such concerns, extending
beyond the self, demonstrates a sense of responsibility to others.
When cosmopolitan ideals were later revived in the eighteenth century to counter
rising nationalism, the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1785/1995) reiterated the imper-
ative of treating the other “always as an end and never as a means only” (§429,
p. 46). The primacy of the other was also reiterated in Kant’s political writings in
which he expounded on the concept of hospitality as foundational to cosmopolitan
rights. In the third article of “Perceptual Peace” entitled “The law of world citizen-
ship shall be limited to conditions of universal hospitality,” Kant (1795/1963), while
recognizing the sovereignty of nation-states, argued that this was insufficient in
guarding against hostilities toward foreigners. Universal hospitality was a necessary
condition that transcended national rights which he went on to define as “the right of
a stranger not to be treated as an enemy when he arrives in the land of another”
(§358, p. 102). In the same way, the notion of hospitality grounds a cosmopolitan
education aimed at developing students’ sense of openness and solidarity with others
including those othered in their own communities (Osler and Starkey 2003).

Multiple as Opposed to Monolithic Conceptions of Belonging

Second, unlike nationalist global citizenship education targeted at strengthening
civic identity between a nation and its people, the end of a cosmopolitan education
is “other-centered” (Choo 2018) and supports multiple affiliations to home and the
world. Contemporary scholars have concurred that cosmopolitanism is essentially an
ethical orientation characterized by a willingness to engage the other (Hannerz
1990), an attitude that allows one to learn from the other rather than merely tolerate
him/her (Hansen 2011), and a sensitivity toward empathizing with others (Nussbaum
1997).
On one hand, cosmopolitanism embodies the view of identity affiliations as
occurring beyond the single space of the nation. On the other hand, contemporary
conceptions of cosmopolitanism, or new cosmopolitanism, resists the other extreme
in which identity is an empty signifier connected to an abstract idea of the world.
This world-embracing spirit, rooted in the ideas of Stoic and Cynic philosophers
who rejected allegiance to the polis, subscribes to a universal view of human identity.
Not only does this perpetuate a detachment from all material affiliations, it assumes
the possibility of a single monolithic ideology that can be imposed on other cultures
thus masking its own imperialist agenda.
Today, the universalist notion of cosmopolitanism has been criticized for advanc-
ing a monolithic vision of world citizenship that conflates moral and political
conceptions of belonging. In articulating a vision of cosmopolitan education, Tagore
(2003) argued that this should encompass an affiliation beyond the nation (moral
belonging) as well as rootedness to the nation (political belonging). Likewise,
conceptions of new cosmopolitanism that arose from the late twentieth century
60 World-Seeing and World-Making: The Role of Aesthetic Education in. . . 955

embrace the paradoxical image of a “cosmopolitan patriot” (Appiah 1998) and

“vernacular cosmopolitan” (Werbner 2006) as one who responds to mounting
pluralism and forms multiple attachments to diverse communities within and beyond
the nation.
A key aspect of cosmopolitan education then involves helping students explore
local, translocal, and transnational networks of sociocultural histories of people and
places (Rizvi 2009). The inclusion of other cultural perspectives may also sensitize
students to the ways their own perspectives have been shaped by nationalist ideol-
ogies as well as promote critical reflexivity as students consider how they may be
implicated in the processes of global capitalism and consequently, injustices com-
mitted against others.

Bottom Up in Preference to Top-Down Transnational Engagements

Third, while cosmopolitan education complements rights-based citizenship dis-
courses such as Human Rights Education, it differs by emphasizing a more
ground-up dialogic as opposed to top-down hegemonic approach to citizenship
education. For example, Human Rights Education intersects with peace education,
holocaust education, and environmental education, among others, but the
distinguishing feature is that principles of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights remain central to its program (Tibbitts 2002). The program is generally
organized into two kinds: learning about Human Rights including knowledge
about the history of Human Rights, central Human Rights documents, and contro-
versies about Human Rights and learning for Human Rights where the focus is on
empowering citizens to participate in the transformation of society on the basis of
Human Rights (Lohrenscheit 2002).
Dominant criticisms of a rights-based approach to education include the obser-
vation that it tends to be reductive. The Declaration which seeks to safeguard the
inherent dignity of the human fraternity is encapsulated in a narrow list of principles
that emphasize only minimal standards of treatment (Robeyns 2005). The fixation on
a set of universal rights hinders the productive role of public discussion and opens
debates about the essential freedoms and forms of agency needed for the flourishing
of human beings (Sen 2004). It can paradoxically become a tool of oppression when
universal principles are deployed without taking into account particular contexts or
specific needs of minority communities or when used as an ideological tool for
western powers to intervene politically, economically, and culturally in less devel-
oped economies (Badiou 2002; Žižek 2005).
As Gaudelli (2009) observes, cosmopolitans, though not opposed to institutionaliz-
ing global citizenship, privilege ongoing discourses around values, ethics, justice, and
international agreements about Human Rights as a means to further dialogue about the
nature of a global society. In this sense, cosmopolitan education advocates cooperative
and dialogic modes of learning (Delanty 2006). It is through intercultural encounters
and interactions that the individual is pushed to perceive reality beyond his/her own
parochial beliefs or values. The significance of dialogic encounters is reflected in other
adjectives associated with cosmopolitanism such as “relational cosmopolitanism”
(Baildon and Damico 2011), “ordinary cosmopolitanisms” (Lamont and Aksartova
956 S. S. Choo

2002), “everyday cosmopolitanism” (Choo 2014; Vasudevan 2014), and “actually

existing cosmopolitanism” (Robbins 1998). Such “cosmopolitanism from the
ground up” is rooted in everyday life that “radiates from the bottom outward rather
than awaiting top-down initiatives” (Hansen 2010, p. 3). Thus, cosmopolitan
education provides opportunities for students to encounter others physically,
virtually, or imaginatively through cultural narratives. It precludes affective, as
opposed to purely intellectual engagements with marginalized groups and facili-
tates students’ active participation as citizens who can effect transnational trans-
formations (Saito 2010).

The Role of Aesthetic Education in Cosmopolitan Citizenship

Education

Countering current pressures by governments to invest in STEM (Science, Technol-

ogy, Engineering, and Mathematics) education, this chapter draws attention to the
significant role of the arts in developing global sensitivity and key dispositions
fundamental to securing more peaceful and tolerant societies. Specifically, this
chapter centers on aesthetic education, rather than arts education, and surveys the
kinds of pedagogies employed to cultivating the cosmopolitan imagination. Maxine
Greene (2009) makes a helpful distinction between arts education and aesthetic
education in which arts education centers on appreciating objects of beauty, while
aesthetic education involves “nurturing imaginative and reflective encounters with
works of art” (para. 1). In this sense, aesthetic education attends not so much to
knowing about artworks, appreciating its formal and stylistic properties or acquiring
the skills to create art; rather, its primary focus is on facilitating ethical attunement
and dispositions through engagements with art. In contrast to nineteenth-century
aestheticism and associated movements in the twentieth century such as Formalism
and New Criticism that subscribed to the belief that art and the study of beauty were
ends in themselves, aesthetic education perceives aesthetics as a means to ethics as
an end. The reception and production of art provides the bridge to encountering,
empathizing, and engaging with other cultures in the world. Though aesthetic
education encompasses the production of artworks and the processes of
art-making, it is primarily attentive to the shaping of perspectives. In this sense,
the aim of aesthetic education is closely aligned with cosmopolitan education which
is concerned with an existential orientation to being in the world (Tagore 2003), an
“outlook” that allows one “to break out of the self-centered narcissism of the national
outlook” (Beck 2006, p. 2) and a “state of mind or a mode of being in the world”
(Marotta 2010, p. 112). Given that the primary faculty that directs a person’s
orientation, outlook, and state of mind toward others is the imagination, aesthetic
education can powerfully advance the goals of cosmopolitan education by equipping
students not so much with a set of knowledge or skills but a predisposition toward
diverse others. This occurs not merely through artworks themselves but through
three key pedagogical tools that aesthetic education supports to developing an
imagination hospitable to diversity and difference.
60 World-Seeing and World-Making: The Role of Aesthetic Education in. . . 957

Pedagogies of Interruption
The first pedagogical strategy that aesthetic education facilitates focuses on
interrupting stereotypical, one-dimensional interpretations of the other. The imagi-
nation is the first filter that can hinder a person from wanting to know or reach out to
an other. For example, in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, the key character and
her brother imagine their neighbor “Boo Radley” as a monster figure, and this
prevented them from trying to understand him until he rescues them at the end.
The novel thus exemplifies for readers the innate capacity of the imagination to
enclose the mind. One significant goal of aesthetic education then is to disrupt the
blinkered imagination. Exposure to narratives such as To Kill a Mockingbird can
explicitly sensitize students to the dangers of a prejudiced mind. Further, exposure to
narratives from distant times and places can also expand students’ awareness of
different cultural beliefs and practices.
Beyond exposure to alternative cultural narratives, aesthetic education supports
the interruption of the single story (Adichie 2009). In her study of literature class-
rooms in Singapore schools, Choo (2014, 2016) discussed how teachers intention-
ally paired literary texts so that one would disrupt the cultural viewpoint of the other.
For example, in one grade 11 literature class, as students discussed Shakespeare’s
Taming of the Shrew, the teacher would interrupt this with other short stories by
African American writer Toni Morrison, Caribbean American writer Jamaica
Kincaid, Chinese Singaporean writer Stella Kon, and Japanese American writer
Kyoko Mori. The point was to encourage students to explore how the objectification
of women occurred in different cultural contexts. In another grade 10 literature class,
a teacher utilized the short story “The Moon above His Head” by Yann Martel that
revolves around a Somalian asylum seeker living in Canada to get students to think
about how the story might disrupt stereotypical media representations of asylum
seekers. Similarly, Chappel (2018) observed how a high school teacher of a world
literature class at a Buddhist school introduced his students to Bhagavad Gita, a
classical text of Hinduism to have his students explore similarities and differences in
order to unsettle their Buddhist interpretations of Karma and so become open to
another culture’s views.
These empirical examples illustrate how teachers used narratives to arouse what
Greene (1995) termed “wide-awakeness,” which occurs by disrupting habitual ways
of reading others conditioned by mass media, institutional, and other structures that
impose a singular interpretation of culture. The potential for aesthetic education lies
in the ways teachers can introduce stories from other cultural worlds to push the
limits of the imagination’s attempts to know and perceive otherness (Spivak 2012). It
is only when we imagine that things can be otherwise that the possibility for
encounter and action can then occur (Greene 1995).

Bridge-Building Pedagogies
While pedagogies of interruption disrupt biased, one-dimensional views of the other,
the second pedagogical strategy that aesthetic education facilitates emphasizes
building bridges with the foreign other via imaginative encounters. This can occur
in two ways – passive and active engagement with others.
958 S. S. Choo

Pedagogies that support passive engagement with others may begin by exposing
students to a range of art and stories from different cultures to foster what Nussbaum
(1997) terms the “narrative imagination” that allows one to venture beyond narrow
group loyalties and to consider the reality of distant lives leading to habits of
empathy and expansion of sympathies (p. 10). What grounds this consciousness of
an alternative is an innate cosmopolitan impulse to understand reality beyond self
and nation, to be aware of what it means to live in the world, and to envision a
common world in the making (Greene 1995). However, unlike multicultural educa-
tion that foregrounds local, communal, and national particularities through the
reification of cultural distinctiveness, cosmopolitan education promotes more com-
plex awareness of cultural interconnections and seeks to dislocate essentialist claims
of the local (Donald 2007). Urry’s (1995) framework of aesthetic cosmopolitanism
entails key competencies including “an ability to locate one’s own society and
culture in terms of a wide-ranging historical and geographical knowledge, to have
some ability to reflect upon and judge aesthetically between different natures, places
and societies” (p. 167).
What do bridge-building pedagogies look like in practice? Dejaynes (2018)
described the use of “artifactual literacy” that allowed students to connect with one
another in deeper ways through sharing artifacts and personal stories tied to these.
The artifacts provided invitational windows into the lives of students outside of
school and helped establish “relational learning” and “empathetic listening” in the
classroom. In one study, Parry (2010) explored how students, teachers, and theater
practitioners collaborated to create a performance installation at a school that
highlighted issues related to Human Rights at a societal and global level. The
installation provided a representational space for students to question existing
territorial boundaries and to reconstruct and deconstruct geographical knowledges.
In another study, Abbate-Vaughn (2005) described how the incorporation of ethnic
literature about marginalized populations in a teacher preparation program enabled
these largely middle to upper middle class student-teachers to better empathize with
students from minority, low-income communities and see connections between these
students’ lives and their own.
More active bridge-building pedagogies provide opportunities for students to
co-construct meaning with others particularly those from different cultures. Hull
and Stornaiuolo (2010) discussed the creation of an international social network that
allowed students from Africa, India, Norway, and the United States to exchange and
create digital artifacts. From stories to music, stop-motion videos, animations, and
artwork, they engaged in critical dialogue about common concerns such as discrim-
ination, school pressures, poverty, and the challenges of media representation.
Likewise, Vasudevan (2014) described a theater-initiative program for court-
involved youths. Through improvisations that reflected daily realities of their lives,
youths were pushed to critically engage with their own and one another’s stories and
then to collectively explore alternative possibilities. The multiple stories elicited
from these exercises provided the avenue for cosmopolitan conversations as youths
became more sensitized to the multiplicity of perspectives beyond their own
parochial lens.
60 World-Seeing and World-Making: The Role of Aesthetic Education in. . . 959

Both passive and active bridge-building pedagogies are essentially aimed at

expanding the cosmopolitan imagination by developing hospitable and empathetic
ways of world-seeing and world-making. By examining connections between one’s
life story and those of others and by collectively exploring everyday existence
through artworks, aesthetic education can push students to perceive others beyond
narrow nationalistic sentiments and reinforce a cosmopolitan imagination that
embraces plurality, ambiguity, and difference. Because artworks do not primarily
make definitive, authoritative claims, their inherent educative potential lies not so
much in the lessons they teach but the ethical invitations they give. As Gregory
(2010) has elaborated, these are invitations to feeling, beliefs, and ethical judgment.
These ethical invitations provide avenues to challenge the self’s preconceived
notions and reconfigure citizenship identity in relation to new encounters with
others.

Critical Cosmopolitan Pedagogies

Aside from interruptions and bridge-building, aesthetic education supports peda-
gogies that empower students to engage critically with transnational realities of our
time. Rather than perceiving globalization as an external phenomenon, this approach
presumes glocalization as exemplifying contemporary conditions in which the
global intersects in and through the local (Roudometof 2016). As a “dialectical
mode of criticism” grounded on the work of critical social theorists such as Freire,
Foucault, and Habermas (Gills et al. 2017), critical cosmopolitan pedagogies are
characterized by two essential features – meta-analysis and social-global justice
activism.
First, critical cosmopolitanism entails meta-analysis of sociocultural and socio-
structural systems and their perpetuation of oppression, inequalities, and injustices
within and beyond nations (Strydom 2012). Its epistemological orientation is post-
universalistic since it critiques irreducible tensions between the global and local and
the universal and particular while proposing a dialogical universalism that defies
universal assent or a single interpretation (Delanty 2006). More specifically, critical
cosmopolitanism may involve critiques of the historical legacies of colonialism and
its continued effects on post-colonial nations, how power and colonial difference is
produced, reproduced, and maintained by global capitalism (Mignolo 2000).
In education, critical cosmopolitan pedagogies aim to empower students to
understand their situatedness in relation to social networks and political institutions
beyond the nation as well as the influence of multinational and transnational
corporations on local communities (Rizvi 2009). Gills et al. (2017) have offered a
useful framework for educators to consider five key capacities to facilitating a meta-
ideological work of critical cosmopolitanism involving “(1) the capacity to develop
historicized interpretations of social reality and the recognition of its complexities;
(2) the ability to engage in critical self-reflection or self-problematization; (3) the
openness to the multiplicity of avenues of change in different contexts; (4) the
capability to act beyond the scale of power and to recognize the intersectionality
of inequalities; and, finally, (5) the recognition of the multispatiality of emancipatory
praxes (e.g. local, national, regional, and global)” (p. 447).
960 S. S. Choo

In practice, Oikonomidoy (2016, 2018) described case studies conducted with

secondary and college students exploring how critical cosmopolitan capacities can
be elicited by returning to the school as a site of study situated within global webs of
power. Students may be empowered to understand how hegemonic structures
expressed via the school curriculum, texts, and assessment condition their perspec-
tives and practices. Such a critical cosmopolitan systematic analysis of the school
can allow both teachers and students to recognize the disconnect between the reality
of school and their imagined futures. In a different project conducted with salsa
dancers, Medina (2012) observed the potential for aesthetic experience to invoke
social connections. As students move from appreciating beauty in art to becoming
connected to the world through art, aesthetic experience can become a vehicle for
sharing experiences of oppression. This visceral connection with art and with others
provides a powerful avenue for forging cooperative bonds to counter social
injustices.
Second, critical cosmopolitan interrogations inevitably lead to social-global
justice activism as a strategic intervention. Such interventions do not emerge
from the naïve idealism of the individual but arises through solidarity with distant
others. Building on Habermas’s theory of communicative action, Delanty (2012)
argued that dialogue and deliberation are fundamental to critical cosmopolitan-
ism as it allows openness to alternative perspectives allowing for re-evaluations
and re-workings of self and society through encounters with the other. Delanty
(2012) contrasted critical cosmopolitanism with other critical traditions such as
those of Foucault and Bourdieu. Essentially, critique for Foucault focused on the
subject’s discursive constitution in systems of power, while critique for Bourdieu
entailed a reflexive sociological approach foregrounding one’s situatedness and
habitus in order to engage in social problems from a multiplicity of perspectives.
Absent from both approaches is critical cosmopolitanism’s goal of “immanent
transcendence” that focuses on possibilities for the internal transformation of
society within the present. This communicative and transformative impetus
aligns with Robbins’ (2012) call for a “new, dirty cosmopolitanism” (p. 44) in
which affiliations with distant others result in an organic globalization-from-
below, such as grassroots movements that resist neoliberal, market-driven glob-
alization-from-above.
In the classroom, aesthetic education facilitates pedagogies that enable students to
dialogue with others about power and privilege through artworks. For example,
Hawkins (2018) described the Global StoryBridges project that brought youths who
live in communities of poverty in various locations around the world to share digital
stories and chat about their lives via an online space. She reported that youths
collaborated on creating and editing videos and then sharing it with youths from
other countries who commented on them. The project enabled these youths to
engage in discussions on sensitive issues in a spirit of inquiry and enabled them to
recognize differences in resources and privilege. She observed the potential for such
projects to empower youths in impoverished conditions to find solidarity with others
and seek proactive ways to counter systemic injustices arising from various social
and global forces.
60 World-Seeing and World-Making: The Role of Aesthetic Education in. . . 961

Aside from developing transnational affinity groups through collaborative inquiry

projects, aesthetic education also supports pedagogies that prepare students to
participate in simulated forums that mirror democratic deliberative practices needed
for the mobilization of a critically informed public sphere. For example, Choo
(2017) described a Language Arts curriculum involving the use of short stories,
graphic novels, and film on the theme of “Human Rights.” Students were tasked to
conduct research on a marginalized group in their country and to participate in a
forum where they acted as representatives defending the need for laws to protect this
oppressed group. Following this, students reflected on the extent to which their own
country protected the rights of these marginalized groups.
In her proposal that educators can employ counter-narratives to disrupt hege-
monic discourses, even actions justified in the name of Human Rights, Adami (2014)
also cautioned that critical pedagogy risks reifying groups into categories such as
those who perpetuate, defend, or are victims of oppression. Such dichotomies may
paradoxically limit the possibility of radically imagining more constructive alterna-
tives to such binaries as colonizer versus colonized, global north versus global south.
Thus, an essential feature of critical cosmopolitan pedagogy should be the push for
dialogue as an act of negotiation and as a habit of mind that not only allows one to
incorporate the worldview of another but also attunes one to the processes of
reformation through social struggle. Dialogue then provides a hospitable space for
the collective identification of transformative potential within present moments of
contention.

Conclusion

In an age of flux and mobility, how should educators empower students to be citizens
of the world? Perhaps it would be helpful to return to Stoic conceptions of cosmo-
politanism in which the citizen was envisioned as one who was not merely tied to the
material world but one who was a citizen of the cosmos (Heater 2002). In this sense,
cosmopolitan citizenship, as an extraterritorial aspiration transcending space and
time, can only be realized imaginatively. The polysemic and open-ended nature of
aesthetic language provides a vital catalyst to igniting the imagination’s creative
world-seeing and world-making potential.
In this chapter, various empirical case studies have served to highlight pedagogies
that teachers have used in aesthetic education – namely, pedagogies of interruption,
bridge-building pedagogies, and critical cosmopolitan pedagogies. These pedagogic
interventions continually challenge the limits of hospitality toward the other that go
beyond passive tolerance and sympathy toward a commitment to diverse others in
the world. This problematizing of conditional acts of hospitality ultimately aims at
the possibility of what Derrida (2000) termed, “absolute hospitality.” Whereas
conditional hospitality entails an openness determined by a citizen’s claims to
power in which engagement with the other follows according to his/her cultural
norms, political laws, and demands for assimilation, absolute hospitality entails an
openness that leads to moral obligation to the other. It is here, as Levinas (1987)
962 S. S. Choo

explained, the other “is neither an object nor an interlocutor. His absolute remote-
ness, his transcendence, turns into my responsibility – nonerotic par excellence – for
the other” (p. 165). Indeed, aesthetic education provides the means through which
one can empathize with the other, recognize one’s own complicity in the suffering of
the other, and establish one’s commitment to destabilizing linguistic, symbolic, and
other forms of objectifications of the other. Ultimately, both affirmative and critical
engagements with stories and cultural artworks beyond the nation reinforce the
development of ethical relations with diverse others in the world as a moral priority
in global citizenship education.

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Lessons from Dystopia: The Security of
Nations and the Securitized Citizen 61
Liam Francis Gearon

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 966
The Security of Nations and the Securitized Citizen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 967
The Fictions of Security . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 974
Lessons from Dystopia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 976
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 978
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 979

Abstract
This chapter provides a critical overview of the complex relationship between
citizenship education and state security. Drawing on some major sources from the
historical literature of totalitarianism, the chapter provides necessary reminders
that these current concerns over security are far from new, but argues that bearing
them constantly in mind is essential since citizenship education and the universal
human rights values it espouses arose in the modern, post-Second World War era
precisely as a response to the global trauma of autocracy, dictatorship, and
totalitarianism. Critically demonstrating, though, that risk and threat to societal
and geopolitical order – the security of nations – are transnational, it highlights
the 2020 pandemic as a primary exemplar of such threat to the security of nations.
Delineating this part of a now well-documented context of securitization, these
new contexts do not easily fit, it is argued, traditional models of national citizen-
ship education nor too optimistic models of global collaborative cosmopolitan-
ism. In examining the present-day transnational notions of intensified threats as a
reconfiguration of the traditional correlation of citizenship education and state

L. F. Gearon (*)
University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 965
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_47
966 L. F. Gearon

security, the chapter argues for both a forward-looking urgency and a simulta-
neous turning not to political diktat but to the imaginative configurations of
societal and geopolitical problematics. Taking dystopian literature as an exem-
plar, here, it is argued that amidst the fictionally threatened security of nations, the
securitized citizen and the state itself may conjointly find both reflective freedom
and creative solution to very real non-fiction problems. Such problematics are,
however, it is argued, as existential as they are practical or political. These are the
lessons from dystopia.

Keywords
Security · Citizenship · Dystopia · Pandemic · Camus

Introduction

This chapter provides a critical overview of the complex relationship between

citizenship education and state security. It highlights a still relatively recent, post-
9/11 shift in the relationship between the citizen and the state. In this important
context, citizenship education, understood in the broadest sense, has increasingly
taken a role in the protection against the threats, real and imagined, posed by the
global environment of terror. Here citizenship education is part of a wider, man-
dated, that is, legislatively integrated, role of education as a public policy measure
in a general struggle against violent and ideological extremism. Drawing on some
major sources from the historical literature of totalitarianism, the chapter provides
necessary reminders that these current concerns over security are far from new, but
argues that bearing them constantly in mind is essential since citizenship education
and the universal human rights values it espouses arose in the modern, post-Second
World War era precisely as a response to the global trauma of autocracy, dictator-
ship, and totalitarianism. The chapter critically demonstrates, though, that risk and
threat to societal and geopolitical order – the security of nations – are transnational.
Pandemic and environmental crisis are primary exemplars of such threat to the
security of nations. This is part of a now well-documented context of securitization
(Van Munster 2012). These new contexts do not easily fit, it is argued, traditional
models of national citizenship education nor too optimistic models of global
collaborative cosmopolitanism. In examining the present-day transnational notions
of intensified threats as a reconfiguration of the traditional correlation of citizen-
ship education and state security, the chapter argues for both a forward-looking
urgency and a simultaneous turning not to political diktat but to the imaginative
configurations of societal and geopolitical problematics. Taking dystopian litera-
ture as an exemplar, here, amidst the fictionally threatened security of nations, the
securitized citizen and the state itself may conjointly find both reflective freedom
and creative solution to very real non-fiction problems. Such problematics are,
however, it is argued, as existential as they are practical or political. These are the
lessons from dystopia.
61 Lessons from Dystopia: The Security of Nations and the Securitized Citizen 967

The Security of Nations and the Securitized Citizen

Terrorism has brought citizenship to the foreground of national political life in ways
which are new but not unprecedented. It is evident in the number of ways in which
counterterrorist measures traverse all aspects of public policy. While itself a highly
contested term with multiple academic and legal definitions, many of which center
around who is defining the terrorist act and the terrorist actor, in the power play of
international legislation overseen by the United Nations, terrorism – along with a
multitude of other transnational threats, the environment, and organized crime – is
identified as one of the key areas of threat to international stability (UN 2019). With
its “devastating human cost . . . in terms of lives lost or permanently altered, terrorist
acts aim to destabilize governments and undermine economic and social develop-
ment,” terrorism is characterized as posing “a major threat to international peace and
security” which “undermines the core values of the United Nations.” Responding to
such threats to international stability, the United Nations’ collective determination
has been to create “a common universal legal framework against terrorism,” this is
one supported by instruments of the United Nations Security Council (UN 2019).
The United Nations Security Council Counter-Terrorism Committee (CTC), guided
by Security Council resolutions 1373 (2001) and 1624 (2005), was established “in
the wake of the 11 September terrorist attacks in the United States” in order “to
bolster the ability of United Nations Member States to prevent terrorist acts both
within their borders and across regions.” The consequent the Global Counter-
Terrorism Strategy consists of four pillars, which deeply integrate not only legal
measures but historical and socio-geopolitical impetuses, security actions in directly
countering violent ideology and action, and is supported, above all, by measures of
reinforcement of the international community in the rule of law and human rights
(UN 2019). Directly and indirectly, such measures have helped define the nature of
the citizen in national life and the international community. If terrorism is seen as
threatening of the world order, of stability, engendering conflict, under a variety of
terms – ideological and violent extremism, radicalization – global moves to
counterterrorism have become an integral part of a struggle to identify (or more
properly reaffirm) the acceptable limits of social, cultural, and particular participa-
tion. Such developments have highlighted here, too, the role of education across all
age phases in the formation of the citizen.
Exemplars illustrative of how these notions have impacted educational institu-
tions include, in the UK, the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015 and its legal
definition of extremism as opposition to “fundamental British values” (CTSA 2015).
For universities in particular the CTSA 2015 has brought major new legal respon-
sibilities including the monitoring of and reporting on ideologies and actions deemed
to be potentially a cause of terroristic incident (UUK 2016). Multiple ethical and
professional issues are raised by such legislative developments, from academic
integrity, freedom of speech, and the independence of academic institutions them-
selves, matters which I have charted extensively. The notions of British values are
themselves contested both in definition and, by default, implementation in schools
and universities.
968 L. F. Gearon

The domestic and foreign policy of the European Union now integrates similar
security concerns of all aspects of its bureaucratic operations, making security an
integral part of European social, cultural, and polity life (EAS 2015). Across Europe,
and of course globally, religion has been a critical element in this process, and
debates have raged now for several years about how justifiable is the increasing
politicization and securitization of religion in education (Gearon 2019a). An impor-
tant review of the global literature shows just how widespread are measures to
counter ideological and violent extremism in education (Ghosh et al. 2016).
These developments are often seen, however, as part of a wider and deeper
process of societal securitization. Some years before 9/11 the Copenhagen School
thus determined that the shift of security policy away from its traditional home in
military and related intelligence structures for national defense to the intrusion of
security agendas into civil and public life, a move which has been labeled “securi-
tization” (Albert and Buzan 2011; Buzan et al. 1997; Buzan and Hansen 2009;
Laustsen and Wæver 2000; Taureck 2006). Raising the usual specter of a tension
between liberty and security, such enhanced public policy moves to increase security
provision have increasingly been challenged as problematic to the foundational
values of Europe itself, particularly the 1950 European Convention on Human
Rights and the plethora of rights legislation which came thereafter (Gearon 2016,
2019b; Gearon et al. 2019). The most systematic critique has come from arguably the
world’s leading human rights organization. Thus, Amnesty International’s Report
Dangerously disproportionate: The ever-expanding national security state in
Europe, while recognizing the requirement of states to counter “wanton violence,”
this being “obvious and urgent,” but highlights, too, that “the right to life, enabling
people to live freely, to move freely, to think freely” are “essential tasks for any
government.” Amnesty argue, though, that security cannot trump liberty; the tasks of
societal protection against risks to life in particular cannot be made justifications for
nations “riding roughshod over the very rights that governments are purporting to
uphold.”
If terror has largely defined the geopolitics of the early twentieth-first, totalitar-
ianism defined the twentieth (Friedrich and Brzezinski 1967). Long before the
pervasive present-day lexicon of terror entered the politics of national and interna-
tional governance, Hobsbawm had defined the twentieth century as “the age of
extremes.” Following the end of the Cold War, there had been an anticipation that
the extremes witnessed in global politics would be ameliorated by a new world order,
one characterized by the shared international trajectory toward liberal democracy, a
move which marked by no less than “the end of history.”
Arguably the last “end of history” had occurred at the close of the Second World
War, the formal defeat of Fascism and Nazism, the foundation of the United Nations,
and the instigation of a value code of universal human rights. The framing of the
foundational document of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United
Nations on 10 December was a direction imitation of the eighteenth-century docu-
ments which defined the modern world through near parallel aspiration to the rights
of the citizen which guided the revolutions in America and in France. The violence
used to achieve these rights for the citizen always, in the eighteenth as in the
61 Lessons from Dystopia: The Security of Nations and the Securitized Citizen 969

mid-twentieth centuries, also presented contradictory moral problems. This is why a

number of scholars – whose voices in my view are too little listened to today –
cautioned against the violent imposition of values and highlighted the ironic parallels
between fraternity, freedom, and equality espoused and their actuality in history.
Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies thus castigated the oppression that
defined the historical realities of state communism inspired by Marx, but saw, too,
the origins of the totalitarian in the classical era of Plato to which the anti-clerical
revolutionaries, at least in France, drew so much of their inspiration. It is why Isaiah
Berlin in his “Two Concepts of Liberty” stressed that freedom was something in
name only when it was imposed by violence of either imposed ideologies and or the
force of the state. It is why Hannah Arendt The Origins of Totalitarianism took the
historical long view of the twentieth century and detailed the germinating ideas and
power structures of modern dictatorship both in the western prevalence for colonial-
ism and imperialism. These contradictions persisted even in what I am calling here
the first modern “end of history” at the end of the Second World War. For a number
of powerful Security Council signatories of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights remained at that time colonial powers, most notably Britain and France. The
Security Council formed in San Francisco in June 1945 to oversee the new world
order themselves sanctioned the American bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a
mere few weeks later in August 1945.
In what I term here the second “end of the history” at the end of the Cold War, the
resentment of nations and interest groups at the imposition of values which they did
not espouse, though their own states did, and which they even felt contradicted their
own outlook on the world – what is fashionably today called a “worldview,” itself an
ideological imposition – provided the new basis for conflict. It was to be, as we know
now, less a war of ideology than a conflict of cultures and especially those religious
cultures rooted in histories millennia older than the United Nations.
The late Samuel Huntington, as I have highlighted in many other writings,
himself predicted this and wrote an indirect retort to his former Harvard student in
a work itself castigated for introducing the lexicon of conflict into a world that had
just settled to a peaceful new era: The Clash of Civilizations (Gearon 2019a; Gearon
et al. 2019). The tensions between the universality of human rights values and
especially religious traditions are not uniform. There are multiple differences of
accommodation and rejection to the United Nations’ notions of rights, and even
arguments that the secular formulations of these rights are themselves of religious or
theological origin (Gearon 2016). Yet there is now a vast literature which interro-
gates the terrain.
In both eras, education has been and remains the most prominent point of public
policy for the formation of citizens. It was ever thus. And there is arguably nothing
surprising in political systems wish for and seeking models of education which
uphold their political ideals. Both the totalitarianism of the twentieth century and the
terror of the twenty-first – both versions of an extreme – are distinctive in the
marriage of ideology and violence. For the state and state education systems, this
has meant the need, in both cases, and universally the case today, to conjoin the
security of the state through education for the formation of citizens. By which move,
970 L. F. Gearon

inevitably, the security of nations securitizes the citizen. The conjoining of these
notions of national security and the securitized citizen is a fact of our age and a now
near indelible feature of our educational institutions.
A large proportion of my recent work has been in examining these issues of
security in the context of universities, and particularly important here has been an
elaboration of models which deal with university relations with the security and
intelligence agencies (Gearon 2019a, b, c, d). Here, I have conceptualized and
provided the foundations for an academic subfield of education, security, and
intelligence studies. As highlighted above, this has been critically prompted by the
widening of security to areas beyond its traditional home in explicit military
concerns. The disciplines of security and intelligence studies have themselves
begun to respond to these wider notions of threat and in so doing have begun to
refine the remit of their own fields (Gearon 2019a).
In terms of policy, research, and theoretical framing, this is what I have termed the
universities-security-intelligence nexus. In essence this nexus is concerned with the
elaboration of higher education institutions – in teaching, policy, and research – with
state security apparatus in order to protect against risk and threat in the present and in
preparedness for the future. Because learning from the past is critical to addressing
both present and future concerns, the past histories of such questions are also
significant, indeed foundational. There are few academic disciplines which do not
fall into this remit. The universities-security-intelligence nexus has four overlapping
domains: the operational, the epistemological, the ethical, and the existential. The
operational defines the different modus operandi of engagement between universi-
ties and security and intelligence agencies and deals now significantly with threats
which go beyond the nation state; the epistemological domain is concerned with
knowledge and marks the shared interest of security and intelligence agencies in
knowledge to deal with both national and transnational threat; the ethical domain
treats of those multiple ranges of issues which such interactions being to different
types of institutions in and through their collaboration, academic and security-
oriented; the existential domain demonstrates a common shared set of highly
complex concerns centered around forewarning or predicting of threat and measures
such as civil contingency and emergency governmental powers enacted for the
protection against such threats, which, again, now far transcend (and arguably put
into perspective) national concerns about the protection of states, in large measure
because we are now concerned as a human species not merely with the survival of
states and societies but of species and the shared planetary environment (Gearon
2019a). The modeling can be presented as follows (Fig. 1).
Writing in the present-day midst of a still unfolding coronavirus pandemic is a
tragic illustration of the urgency and indeed unpredictability of such nascent and
future threat. All of which have brought in broadly conceived terms security to
foreground of nation states. The role of universities in confronting and finding
solutions to such threats is evident but also highlights a wider and deeper issue
about the role of universities themselves in the formation of educated citizens able to
learn and to research and thereby make a contribution to the well-being of societies
through the formation of its citizens who in turn further contribute to the well-being
61 Lessons from Dystopia: The Security of Nations and the Securitized Citizen 971

• The Operational •The

Domain Epistemological
Domain

National
National Security and
Universities Intelligence
Agencies

National Global Human

Governments Concerns

•The Ethical •The Existential

Domain Domain

Fig. 1 The Universities-Security-Intelligence Nexus (Gearon 2019c)

of societies of which they are part (Dunn Cavelty and Balzacq 2017). Historical
analyses of the social and political role of universities in the creation, dissemination,
and application of knowledge – which today is most often conceptualized as
“impact” – have in the west at least been an evolving part of the defining role of
the university itself.
International public policy initiatives, importantly from the United Nations itself,
have in recent years begun to frame these broader notions as a concern for citizens
through the notion of “human security.” For example, the UN’s “Framework for
Cooperation for the system-wide application of Human Security” (UN 2015) inte-
grates and highlights the global community’s needs for prediction and protection to
address these pressing and complexly interrelated societal, that is, today, shared
global problems:

For many people, today’s world presents insecure threats on many fronts. Natural disasters,
violent conflicts, persistent poverty, epidemics and economic downturns impose hardships
and undercut prospects for peace and stability, as well as sustainable development. Crises are
complex, entailing multiple forms of human insecurity. When they overlap, they can grow
exponentially, spilling into all aspects of people’s lives, destroying entire communities and
crossing national borders. (UN 2019)

The United Nations Trust Fund for Human Security conceptualizes these around
three freedoms, freedom from want, freedom from fear, and the freedom to live in
dignity (UN 2019). In conceptual and theoretical terms, instances of such
972 L. F. Gearon

transnational preparedness in many senses coincide with securitization theory so

presciently modeled by the Copenhagen School.
The role of education, and particularly higher education dimension, remains
critical. Originally founded under the auspices the American Council for the United
Nations University, the Millennium Project has thus, by way of example, for decades
now produced State of the Future reports both as a reflection of current preoccupa-
tions of human societies and as a predictive set of measures to enable the prioritizing
of protection against such problems. Here is a diagrammatic representation of one
recent modeling (Fig. 2):
The UK security and intelligence themselves have, too, long expressed the need,
in their rare public announcements, to broaden public understanding of societal
threat and security against such. As a former Director General of MI5 remarked:
“. . .progress has been made in reducing our national vulnerabilities – there have
been definite improvements – but I worry that, against the background of no attacks
here, we risk becoming complacent. So my message is to broaden your thinking
about security issues.” Speaking to a community of business representatives, even
now nearly two decades ago, she said:

A narrow definition of corporate security including the threats of crime and fraud should be
widened to include terrorism and the threat of electronic attack. In the same way that health

Fig. 2 Millennium Project, State of the Future Global Challenges

61 Lessons from Dystopia: The Security of Nations and the Securitized Citizen 973

and safety and compliance have become part of the business agenda, so should a broad
understanding of security. . .

More recently the current Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, MI5’s sister
agency MI5, Alex Younger, speaking at St Andrews University similarly stated:

Across the century of SIS’s existence, we have evolved continuously to confront each
generation of threat: from the World Wars to the Cold War to the rise of transnational threats
including international terrorism. Now, we are evolving again to meet the threats of the
hybrid age.

The notion of hybridity in warfare is important. If widening of security concerns

to aspects of society previously untouched by it defines securitization theory,
warfare itself has come into the foreground of society too. Thus, the post-Cold
War era has seen the mergence of the notion of “hybrid,” “hybrid threat,” or
“nonlinear” warfare, connoting “the use of conventional military force supported
by irregular and cyber warfare tactics.” The Russian determination of “nonlinear
conflict” is a variant form of this now widely applied strategic term which in effect
“has meant has meant major shifts in intelligence gathering and in the epistemo-
logical complexity of intelligence gathering., including the widening and deepen-
ing of dependencies on academic expertise, and far transcending traditional images
of spy-craft and espionage.” This is accepted as a fact of modern security now
because “the sources of knowledge required to combat threat or perceived from
sources beyond the conventionally military have inexorably multiplied.” Ball
usefully summarizes the distinctions:

Linear conflicts are defined by a sequential progression of a planned strategy by opposing

sides, whereas nonlinear conflict is the simultaneous deployment of multiple, complemen-
tary military and non-military warfare tactics. A nonlinear war is fought when a state
employs conventional and irregular military forces in conjunction with psychological,
economic, political, and cyber assaults. Confusion and disorder ensue when weaponized
information exacerbates the perception of insecurity in the populace as political, social, and
cultural identities are pitted against one another.

I have analyzed at length how such a proliferation of conflict and security

contexts has impacted educational institutions, those students who attend them, the
academic who teach and research there, and the managers who oversee the objec-
tives of universities and related institutions themselves.
Unarguably modern warfare itself has traversed the boundaries between mili-
tary and civilian. The bombing of civilian populations in the Second World War is
the prime modern example, including the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
which formally defined its close. Security and intelligence agencies, too, have
always been interested not simply in the military capacity of enemies but in their
societal makeup, and indeed their own, to see traces of weaknesses in defense or in
preparedness for attack. The Cold War is good instance, and John Preston’s
extensive work on government work on the civil preparedness of citizens in the
974 L. F. Gearon

event of a nuclear strike on them has been critical in developing our understanding
of how the notion of securitized citizen is not new, only new formulated by the
issues of another though not so far distant age. And as, too, an extensive literature
show, the Cold War in particular was as keenly about culture as traditionally
defined by the arts, literature, and ideological identity as it was about nuclear
armaments.

The Fictions of Security

Fictional representations of such threats are rarely far from the spy agencies. Alex
Younger – the same MI6 Chief who above showed the importance of a widening
definition of security – only recently highlighted this in identifying his role with a
famous fictional spy and distancing his professional work from another: “the merits
of what he considered to be appropriate characters in fiction”: “. . . I should make it
clear that, despite bridling at the implication of a moral equivalence between us and
our opponents that runs through novels, I’ll take the quiet courage and integrity of
George Smiley over the brash antics of 007, any day.” There was, he claims, a further
relevance to spy fiction:

We have attracted some great writers; some have become famous, many more have set aside
their vocation and remained in the service. Some of the operational correspondence I have
seen during my career would grace many an anthology were it not for its classification.

The relationship between the actual geopolitical of the secret world of spying and
its fictional representation is even seen in symbiotic relationship:

Despite inevitable tensions between the secret and published world, the relationship has
generally been of mutual benefit. Literature gains an edgy genre. We are painted in the minds
of a global audience as some form of ubiquitous intelligence presence. This can be quite a
force multiplier, even if it means we are blamed for an astonishing range of phenomena in
which we have no involvement at all.

As Ewen MacAskill has argued, “It is a reminder, if ever one was needed, of how
good fiction can question the way that governments work.” As I have intimated
elsewhere, there is good reason for this. If literature is a lie which seeks to tell a truth,
and espionage is a trade dependent on deceit, where the two professions meet, the
dissembling knows no limit (Gearon 2019a). John le Carré, writing of his real-world
persona as novelist and former intelligence officer for both MI5 and MI6, sees a
close, autobiographical, correlation between: “I’m a liar, born to lying, bred to it,
trained to it by an industry that lies for a living, practised in it as a novelist.” Spy
fiction and spy facts have thus provided a range of novelistic practitioners who have
drawn on their real-life experience as security and intelligence professionals prior to
writing: Eric Ambler, John Bingham, John Buchan, Ian Fleming, Graham Greene,
John le Carré, Eliza Manningham Buller, Somerset Maugham, and Arthur Ransome
are instances of high renown and profile.
61 Lessons from Dystopia: The Security of Nations and the Securitized Citizen 975

There is, though, a far wider correlation between the worlds of security and
literature, a complex interface of cultural production of all varieties, and the
security of nations and/or the ideologies which they represent, across all political
hues (Chomsky 2008; Herman and Chomsky 1995; Wilkinson 2009). It is for this
reason that literary as well as those who produce it have so often through history
been targets of the regimes which their fictions are deemed to oppose. There are
chilling examples from Nazi Germany, elaborated in sickening detail by
Bytwek’s (2004) Bending Spines. The large academic literature on propaganda
shows how books and other cultural outputs have often become part of political
and security apparatus of the state, something which in broader political terms
has long fascinated modern cultural theory (Adorno et al. 2007). Interconnecting
books and bombshells, Taylor (2003) thus calls propaganda the “munitions of the
mind” (see also Taylor 1999, 2012). O’Shaughnessy (2000) defines propaganda
as a “weapon of mass seduction” (also O’Shaughnessy 2016, 2017). And the use
of often covert cultural influence is far from simply the provenance of the
totalitarians. As a controversial and contested academic literature shows, liberal
western societies have seen over decades a well-documented series of interven-
tions by security and intelligence agencies directly into the world of cultural
influence (Miller Harris 2016; Risso 2014; Stonor Saunders 2013; Whitney 2018;
Wilford 2003, 2009).
As I have shown, this also long predates the Second World War or the Cold
War, but can be seen explicitly in the efforts of Britain’s First World War
Propaganda Bureau (Gearon 2019a). In the same early twentieth century, one
author can even lay credit for having influenced the formation of Britain’s
Security Service and its Secret Intelligence Service. Chris Andrew, official
biographer of MI5 even opens his Defence of the Realm with an introduction
relating the importance of William Le Queux’s 1906 story of German foreign
invaders – in its time the massively bestselling The Invasion of 1910 – with the
enhancement of a sense of British public insecurity, one which led, if indirectly to
the early, formal establishment of the Britain’s security and intelligence agencies
(Andrew 2010).
In a context where citizen education and all the security agenda with which it has
been faced in recent decades is so often delivered through lessons about the positive
roles of democratic, human rights and government – very much rooted in the real
world of actual, national, and international politics, and reported as such in the
extensive literature of citizenship education research – literature here seems a less
than well-used avenue for convening many of the themes which confront the subject.
In terms of threat, risk, and imagined scenarios for dealing with the security of
nations, spy literature is naturally important, as has been highlighted. It takes us,
however, only so far. It rarely moves beyond representation of specific risks and their
resolution to broader conceptualization of society’s political future or indeed the
planet’s. What is now commonly framed in literary studies as dystopian fiction does
so, and presents, I argue, some lessons which can enrich our perspectives both of the
security of nations and the securitized citizen. I loosely term this approach lessons
from dystopia.
976 L. F. Gearon

Lessons from Dystopia

The notion of “lessons from dystopia” originated as one element of a larger concep-
tualization to reconfigure the relationship between philosophy, literature, and edu-
cation, with my own interests here focusing on political philosophy and questions of
the security uses of literature in real-world socio-political contexts.
Originating from a symposium I convened at the Philosophy of Education
Society of Great Britain (PESGB) at New College Oxford in 2013, developed
through a major grant funded by PESGB for a seminar series on this theme, a
Society for Educational Studies funded Colloquium on Writers and their Education
at Oriel College Oxford (Gearon and Williams 2018), all culminated in two signif-
icant edited collections for international educational research journals (Gearon and
Williams 2018, 2019). With a particular focus on citizenship education, the explicit
notion of “lessons from dystopia” was the heading for a focus on the political
dimensions of the interface of philosophy, literature, and education in 2016 at the
British Academy, London. Borrowing from the seminar series theme, Christine
Sypnowich’s (2019) “Lessons from Dystopia: Critique, Hope and Political Educa-
tion” – in our special issue of the Journal of Philosophy of Education – analyzed
utopian and dystopian literature as an aspect of political education, detailing how the
notion of utopia and dystopia appear both in literature and political philosophy. For
the politically educative role of this “genre,” she treated of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-
Four and Zamyatin’s We. Beyond the broad sense of the political, I have undertaken
extensive subsequent work on the relationship between security and literature
(Gearon 2019a) and am currently also editing a Polish international journal, Text
Matters, on the theme of Literature and Security.
In our Special Issue of the British Journal of Educational Studies on Writers and
their Education (Gearon and Williams 2019) was included my article “Engineers of
the Human Soul: Readers, Writers, and their Political Education” (Gearon 2019a).
This detailed the long history and particularly acute modern history around the
political uses and abuses of literature. I had framed my premise for discussion
around an extreme example of the political uses of literature by highlighting Stalin’s
much quoted diktat presented to the firs congress of the Union of Soviet Writers that
artists should be “engineers of the human soul,” showing the uses to use cultural
outputs, and especially literature had been used by dictatorial regimes as a means of
upholding and furthering totalitarian goals, not least too in Hitler and Maoist
regimes. Here I was particularly struck by recent attempts to construct “literature
pedagogy” for cosmopolitan, “globalizing,” political ends, specifically an article in
the Harvard Education Review by Suzanne Choo (2017). These are and remain
naturally more benign aims and purposes for the use of literature in schools, and of
course in university literary studies, but my sense of wariness arose from the
warnings of history about other more malign uses. My own piece provided some
stark reminders about conjoining educational and political objectives through a
literature not designed for either purpose. This has prompted a further recent
response for Choo (2020), and the debate on the uses for specific goals in citizenship
education is ongoing. And while there are difference of nuanced opinion – for
61 Lessons from Dystopia: The Security of Nations and the Securitized Citizen 977

example, between Choo and myself – on this pedagogic maneuvering of a literary-

political aesthetic, the epistemological terrain is important, not least because the
issues at stake are existential, that is, in fiction as in geopolitical factuality life and
death at stakes, and not simply the life and death of individuals, but the life and death
of societies and, indeed, that of the human species itself.
Cultural outputs and still here literature are important even in a digital age. There
is narrative and counter-narrative in the political domain, and there is the narrative of
fiction which it is often now claimed colors both (Croft and Moore 2010; Glazzard
2017), what Jameson (2002) famously called the political unconscious. Knowledge-
gathering by the security and intelligence agencies in new security contexts still
includes focus on the representation of geopolitical realities, and the importance of
this is evidenced in the prevalence of such terms as “fake news” and epistemological
and political consideration of “post-truth.” Fiction like security and intelligence
gathering here are united in many ways by imagining unimaginable risks and threats.
Environmental catastrophe; global health threats; attacks of global reach of a chem-
ical, bacteriological, radiological, or nuclear nature; or future wars over the physical
resources for survival (food and water and fuel) as much as physical territory are all
equally integral features of new security landscapes. But they have been features of
fictional landscapes for longer. It is not for no reason that the genre of science fiction,
which has been critical in defining much modern utopian literature, emerged in the
modern world contemporaneously with the rise of science, whether this is romantic
rebellions and later science fiction reflection over the dehumanizing prospects of
science and technology – from Frankenstein to Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot series – or
the fear of invasion. On the latter is a powerful instance of how fantastical variants on
the latter theme in H. G. Wells’ late nineteenth century War of the Worlds – Martians
invade England – arguably impacted the more prosaic threat from across the Channel
with, less than a decade later, William Le Queux’s bestselling novel from 1906 The
Invasion of 1910 which with journalist realism narrated a German military takeover
of Britain. In all literary and political cases, the civilian, the citizen, all civilians, and
all citizens are impacted. This extension of security to a wider population is not
exclusive to the modern age, but it has in this era taken on particular forms.
Despite, then, particular reservations about the direct and heavy-handed uses of
literature for political ends – even George Orwell is explicit about the political
purposes of both his journalism and his fiction – or perhaps highlighted by them,
literature remains one of the most powerful weapons in the arsenal of political
education. Gregory Claeys’ (2018) Dystopia: A Natural History provides powerful
testimony here. Claeys’ study of modern despotism, identifying its antecedents in
political and religious history, its articulation in the West at least Christian theology
and classical philosophy. In considerable detail – from Thomas More’s sixteenth-
century Utopia to the classics of twentieth-century literature (focusing on George
Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World as iconic
texts of a wider literature bordering science fiction and prophetic futuristic fiction) –
he shows how these political and theological themes of great antiquity continue to
have their literary diffractions suited to the modern age through new genres of
fiction.
978 L. F. Gearon

Conclusion

Within weeks of the coronavirus or COVID-19 outbreak, one of the perhaps not too
surprising literary outcomes in the world of book sales has been the return of the
Nobel Prize winning Albert Camus’ 1947 classic set in the 1940s Oran, The Plague.
I took from my own bookshelf at Oxford a 40-year-old edition of the novel read and
dutifully underlined throughout, from my undergraduate study of philosophy and
literature at the University of Lancaster. These personal biographical details are to
me are important, as citizenship education tends so much toward the impersonal, the
statistical, and the macro-political, leaving the individual voice as a sometimes less
significant element in the broad sweep of geopolitical history. The writer, Camus, is
here no exception, always draws on the personal, the world of character and
characters, to show the individual, lived response to predicaments. Camus thus
drew largely from his own Algerian-French heritage to write a story about a
nondescript town in his homeland. The town, his narrator notes on the first page of
The Plague, “let us admit, is ugly. It has a smug, placid air and you need time to
discover what it is that makes it different from so many human business centres in
other parts of the world.” It is the particularities of Oran in confronting the plague,
how its populace responds, and how the characters react. The devoted Dr. Bernard
Rieux ministers to the sick and the dying, the Jesuit priest Father Paneloux (“very
highly thought of in our town, even in circles quite indifferent to religion”) to their
souls, the police inspector who oversees order between the living and the dead, who
visits and castigates the would-be suicide Cottard, the individuals who provide
factual details our narrator has not directly observed – the journalist Raymond
Rambert, or the journal-writer Jean Tarrou, and Joseph Grand, whose day job was
as clerk at the Municipal Office and becomes responsible for charting the grim
statistics of fatality, but whose private work was the more ambitious and lofty goal of
studying “the growth of personality.” The life and legacy of Camus endures, then,
and one of the obvious facts of this legacy is the particular endurance of his literary
as opposed to his more formally philosophical works. It success lies arguably in the
multi-layered readings to which The Plague – like much great literature (greatness
being measured in the extent not to which it sells on publication but the extent to
which it sells beyond the author’s own lifetime) – can be subject. Here, from excerpt
taken from Olivier Todd’s (1997) unsurpassed biography, is Camus, modestly
declaiming his own genius, while outlining the multivalent readings of his own,
even then famous, work:

La Peste may be read in three different ways. It is at the same time a tale about an epidemic, a
symbol of Nazi occupation (and incidentally the prefiguration of any totalitarian regime, no
matter where), and, thirdly, the concrete illustration of a metaphysical problem, that of evil
. . . which is what Melville tried to do with Moby Dick, with genius added (Camus, cited in
Todd 1997: 168)

The novel as a literary form has in many respects thus its most profound impacts
as literature by contrast with the personal reading, the imagining of oneself in
61 Lessons from Dystopia: The Security of Nations and the Securitized Citizen 979

situations unknown and untrammeled. It is one of the purposes of imaginative fiction

not merely to transport the reader to other worlds but to enable to provide fresh
readings of their own.
One of my challenges to Choo is in the providing of literature with a singular,
however, beneficent reading, for broad political or narrow citizenship education
purposes. In the context of the present challenges – and there are always present
challenges – for the security of nations, the securitized citizen can choose either
docilely to comply to the political diktat of the age or to venture forward into the less
certain territory of moral and political ambiguity. One of the lessons here of
dystopian fiction is something almost entirely neglected by citizenship education
itself.
That is, in its original struggles to move from the metaphysical and the theolog-
ical, the religious, and the existential, by focusing on the pressing realities let us say
of the political pavement it neglected, and still does neglect, the heavens above. I do
not think this was the intention of the Enlightenment context which did so much
intellectually to frame the political movements of the eighteenth century, which is
our political legacy today in liberalism, democracy, and human rights. Without doubt
one of the founding figures of the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant after all opened his
1788 Critique of Practical Reason (1788), his important thesis on the morality, by
stressing the practicalities needed in the political and the social (the clue is in Kant’s
title), but never forgetting the cosmological and thus existential context which frame
the former, and so important was this dual view for Kant that he frames his second
Critique around it: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admira-
tion and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens
above me and the moral law within me.” Indeed, so important were these sentiments
on the existential that on his death Kant’s friends chose these words for the epigram
on the great philosopher’s tombstone.
One of the lessons from dystopia is arguably then not the simple taking of
practical political messages for the education of mechanistic citizens, cogs in the
machinations of global politics, the taking of moral messages from books (though
these may be drawn), but of using books to free citizens from, to enable them to see
beyond, the narrowly conceived confines of the political to the personal, with some
glimpse, however perplexing, of what ultimately remains the mystery of human
existence.

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Citizenship and Education in an Age
of Extremisms 62
Reza Gholami

Contents
Introduction: The Age of Extremisms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 984
Citizenship in the Age of Extremisms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 986
Policy, Representation, and Exclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 988
Educating Citizens in an Age of Extremisms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 992
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 994
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 995

Abstract
This chapter aims to show the ways in which contemporary liberal democracies
find themselves in an “age of extremisms,” an age defined by the increasing
dominance of extreme ideas and practices across the political spectrum, including
in the mainstream. Nation-states partially bear responsibility for this situation
through their responses to extremist movements, and because of these responses,
the very pillars of liberal democracy, such as human rights and social justice, are
today under threat. Crucially, in this age of extremisms, both citizenship and
education have been formally drawn into counter-extremism policy across the
Western world. This shift in policy has important implications for, and raises vital
questions about, citizenship and education as ideas, principles, and practices. The
chapter will explore these issues and questions. It will use a range of academic
and nonacademic sources, but its examples are mainly drawn from the UK
context and its primary analytical thrust is sociological.

R. Gholami (*)
Department of Education and Social Justice, School of Education, University of Birmingham,
Edgbaston, Birmingham, UK
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 983
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_24
984 R. Gholami

Keywords
Citizenship · Education · Extremism · Liberal democracy · Policy · Terrorism

Introduction: The Age of Extremisms

In his seminal book The Age of Extremes (1994), the late, prominent historian Eric
Hobsbawm traces what he calls the “short twentieth century,” the period between
1914 and 1991. This period is unique in that it witnessed two World Wars (leading to
the state sanctioned killing of an unprecedented number of people), the near collapse
and subsequent restructuring of capitalism, the beginning of the postcolonial world,
and the fall of communism. The century was also marked by great advances in
science and civil rights. Ultimately, however, Hobsbawm delivers a damning verdict
on capitalism, state socialism, and nationalism in the twentieth century. His conclu-
sion is that neither the past nor the present (as he found it in the 1990s) provide a
useful roadmap for the future of humanity. In fact, his predictions for the twenty-first
century are rather grim, involving continued global violence and political and
economic instability.
In the years immediately following Hobsbawm’s publication – from the
mid-1990s until the early 2000s – the historian’s predictions might have looked to
be inaccurate. During that time, a great deal of academic research and policy
initiatives emerged that painted a much more optimistic picture of human living.
In the social sciences, authors such as Arjun Appadurai, Ulrich Beck, James
Clifford, Stuart Hall, Aihwa Ong, and Saskia Sassen, to name a few, wrote of a
world of hybridity, fluid national boundaries, “flexible” citizenship, cosmopolitan-
ism, and diasporic connections, a world that offered opportunities for the marginal-
ized to meaningfully challenge the structures that had historically oppressed them.
These advances were mirrored in education policy by a commitment to a multicul-
turalist and inclusive education as well as a desire to increase pupils’ political
literacy and global outlook in a rapidly globalizing world. These principles came
to underpin the school subject of Citizenship in England, which became statutory in
2002 following the publication of the Crick Report in 1998.
However, with the benefit of hindsight, the world as we encounter it in the
summer of 2018 seems a great deal closer to Hobsbawm’s grim predictions. Since
the terrorist attacks against the United States on 11 September 2001, the world has
consistently witnessed major political and economic catastrophes: the devastating
financial crash of 2008; the Syrian war and refugee crisis, which in part led to the rise
of ISIS; the threat of nuclear Armageddon resulting from the stand-off between the
USA and North Korea; the rapid growth of right-wing extremism across the Western
world; systematic persecution and ethnic cleansing (e.g., of Myanmar’s Rohingya
Muslims); and so on. Moreover, in socialist democratic countries like the UK,
government policy has generally turned against the welfare state with severe cuts
to the funding of fundamental public services such as health and social care, housing
and, of course, education. There is evidence that austerity politics has hit the poorest
62 Citizenship and Education in an Age of Extremisms 985

members of society, as well as ethnic minorities and women, the hardest (see Portes
2018). In education, it has arguably reduced quality and increased the potential for
corruption (Sodha 2018; FT 2017).
What does all of this have to do with an “age of extremisms”? Whereas
Hobsbawm’s short twentieth century saw epic battles between major global ideolo-
gies, those ideologies had firm historical and ideological moorings. Therefore,
within those ideological frameworks, the behavior of proponents and opponents
alike was to a large degree predictable, and they operated with reference to a
perceived solid center. Today, however, any sense of predictability seems to have
left social, political, and economic affairs. Social and political life feels like a game
in which “anything goes” and those with the most wealth and power can say or do
whatever will influence public affairs to their own benefit. In the time of posttruth
(now officially an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary) and fake news, politicians
seem to lie with impunity and governments use cyber technology to interfere in the
democratic processes of other countries. Moreover, facts and expertise seem to
matter less to many voters than emotions, perceptions, and personal cults. For
example, the Leave.EU campaign that helped to secure the UK’s vote to leave the
European Union in 2016 explicitly denigrated economic and political experts and
asked people not to listen to them, while the “Remain” side predicted unprecedented
economic disasters that were seen by some Leave supporters as fake news. And
much of current US policy seems to be dictated by Donald Trump’s whimsical
Twitter outbursts with no sense of coherence or forethought whatsoever.
Such political capriciousness, however, is not just characteristic of a few inflated
personalities such as Trump. In July 2018, the UK’s Home Secretary, Sajid Javid,
stated without any forewarning that the UK government would not oppose the death
penalty for two British men due to face prosecution in the USA on suspicion of
having carried out terrorist offences for ISIS. This move, which was severely
criticized by a range of stakeholders, is in direct contradiction to the UK govern-
ment’s long-standing opposition to capital punishment and its policy of seeking
assurances that British citizens prosecuted abroad would not be put to death. The
government’s argument was that it is better to ensure the prosecution of these men in
the USA than to risk failing to bring them to justice in the UK. However, legal
experts argued that the UK justice system is more than robust enough for the task
(see Foa 2018). Presumably, the government believed that in this case the crimes are
so heinous – and they are indeed most heinous – that they warrant a U-turn on the
UK’s political and ethical stance. But the important question, surely, is whether, to
what extent, and how a democratically elected government should change its
position on such matters. At the time of writing, the government has temporarily
suspended its decision due to heavy pressure from civil society, though it defends its
position and the case is ongoing.
The above case underscores the whimsical, unpredictable, and emotionally
charged nature of contemporary politics, even in matters of utmost importance to a
liberal democratic society. However, it also draws attention to another important
feature of the age of extremisms, namely, the way in which liberal democracies are
choosing to respond to extremist movements and the implications of such responses.
986 R. Gholami

The Home Secretary’s aforementioned decision followed an earlier statement by

Rory Stewart, Minister of State for the Ministry of Justice, in which he appeared to
sanction the killing of British citizens who had gone to Syria to join ISIS. In an
interview, he said: “I’m afraid we have to be serious about the fact these people are a
serious danger to us, and unfortunately, the only way of dealing with them will be, in
almost every case, to kill them” (BBC 2017). This is emblematic of much of
contemporary Western politics (Trump’s “Muslim ban” can be cited as another
example): in their response to extremist movements and ideologies, liberal democ-
racies founded on the principles of justice and human rights are taking increasingly
extreme positions themselves, backtracking on their own values in a sort of “fight-
fire-with-fire” politics. The driving force behind such a politics is the fact that in the
context of terrorism, economic hardship, and refugee crises, politicians are playing
on the emotional outrage of their electorates. In turn, they may be leading their
countries down a dangerous path. Donald Trump’s election campaign is a good
example of this: his unashamed ridiculing of women and disabled people alongside
his venomous attacks on Muslims and Mexicans have gone a long way to embolden
extreme far-right voices in the USA and generally create an acrimonious public
discourse (see, e.g., Vowels 2017).
A dictionary definition of extremism is “belief in and support for ideas that are
very far from what most people consider correct or reasonable,” which is also
adopted by UNESCO (2017). By this definition, it is possible to say that the kinds
of statements made by Donald Trump and Rory Stewart, and indeed many other
politicians around the world, are extreme because they contradict what most people
consider acceptable speech and behavior. That is, presumably most people, espe-
cially in a democratic country, do not agree with the denigration of women, disabled
people, or religious and ethnic minorities; nor would they go as far as to promote the
state murder of youths who have joined an extremist movement. Panjwani et al.
(2018) talk about an age of extremisms (in the plural) in this sense. Although in
popular debates extremism has come almost exclusively to refer to the activities of
Islamist movements, and in some cases the Far-Right, they argue that it is today
equally important to pay attention to “extremisms of the mainstream” – Trump,
Stewart and others. As the coming sections will demonstrate, the age of extremisms
has immensely important implications for citizenship and education, in terms of
policy and practice, because both have become formally drawn into the counter-
terrorism agenda. The next section will examine questions of citizenship, followed
by a more specific focus on counter-terrorism policy. The chapter will then explore
what is at stake in educating citizens in today’s liberal democracies.

Citizenship in the Age of Extremisms

What does it mean to be a citizen, especially a citizen of a liberal democracy, in the

sort of world described above? The most obvious answer is that extremisms of all
sorts will have an impact on being a citizen. For Panjwani et al. (2018), people today
live in an age of extremisms because even though most citizens do not hold extreme
62 Citizenship and Education in an Age of Extremisms 987

beliefs, they nonetheless live surrounded by extreme ideas, even in the mainstream,
and have come to anticipate them in every aspect of their lives. This includes key
areas of policy, which this chapter will return to below. The dangerous flip-side of
this, of course, is that gradually extreme ideas, policies, and practices will come to
dominate the public sphere and seem normal, resulting in a shift of an entire society
towards more extreme positions. There are already signs of such a shift. In the past
few years, for example, ultra-nationalist and far-right demonstrations in many
European countries have attracted very large crowds from across social classes,
with one such march in Poland in 2017 drawing up to 60,000 people (see Taylor
2017). Similarly, recent German polls show that the right-wing, anti-immigrant AFD
party has the support of some fourteen percent of the German electorate, which
equates to the sobering figure of around 8.7 million people (The Local 2018).
In such a political environment, citizenship becomes very palpably split along racial,
ethnic, and religious lines and comes to mean very different things to different people.
At its core, “citizenship” denotes membership of a political community (i.e., a status)
that confers upon an individual certain rights and duties and determines the level of
participation in the affairs of that community. However, there are also important tensions
in the idea and practice of citizenship, namely, in the balance between emphasizing a
homogeneous polity alongside the recognition of social diversity (see Joppke 2007;
Balibar 2015). Jopkke highlights that in addition to status and rights, identity is also a
key dimension of citizenship – that is, the way in which individuals perceive themselves,
behave, and are expected (by the state) to behave as members of the political commu-
nity. His argument is that in the era of globalization and multiculturalism, state mem-
bership no longer imputes a specific/unitary identity, which is to say that citizenship has
become available to diverse individuals without ethnic, racial, sexual, or religious
provisos (ibid: 38). The upshot of this, for Joppke, is a weakening of the long-existing
links between nation-states and their sense of ethnic homogeneity.
However, as demonstrated earlier, today there are concerted efforts across the
political spectrum in many Western countries to revitalize the links between citizen-
ship, national identity, and ethnic/racial/cultural homogeneity. In the age of extrem-
isms, being a citizen is increasingly defined as belonging and being loyal to a
particular understanding of the nation-state, one that is racialized, linked to ideas
of religious heritage, and plays on the notion of shared values and culture. As
mentioned, this conception of citizenship creates a rift in the way diverse people,
especially religious and ethnic minorities, experience their citizenship. In turn, it
affects how those people behave and practice their citizenship. A useful way to
conceptualize these dynamics is to draw upon Banks’ notion of “failed citizenship,”
which he argues comes to exist when:

individuals or groups who are born within a nation or migrate to it and live within it for an
extended period of time do not internalize the values and ethos of the nation-state, feel
structurally excluded within it, and have highly ambivalent feeling toward it. Individuals
who experience failed citizenship focus primarily on their own needs for political efficacy,
group identity, and structural inclusion rather than the overarching and shared goals of the
nation-state. Their allegiance and commitment to the nation-state is eclectic and complex.
(2017: 366)
988 R. Gholami

Banks is right to focus on the discord that materializes when an individual’s or

group’s values and priorities are divergent from those that dominate the national
agenda. However, he seems to place the onus too heavily on the “failed citizens” to
internalize the nation-state’s dominant values, potentially holding them
disproportionally responsible for the “failure.” This is further seen in Banks’ choice
of language that failed citizens feel (rather than are) structurally excluded. Perhaps
this is not surprising when considering that Banks is defining failed citizenship in
relation to a patriotic citizenship that is ultimately held together by/in a nation-state
and pledges allegiance to it foremost (ibid: 369). What Banks does not sufficiently
address, however, is that regardless of rhetorics and policies of equality and “shared
goals,” nation-states are sites of unequal power relations, social hierarchies, and
governance through hegemony. As the next section will demonstrate, in some cases
citizens from minority backgrounds are excluded and demonized in the national
mainstream despite their best efforts to integrate. This is significant in the context of
this chapter because key policies affecting citizenship and education are often
shaped in relation to ethnic and religious minorities and tend to problematize and
disadvantage them.

Policy, Representation, and Exclusion

In 2017, a report by the UK’s All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on social

integration, which is chaired by Labour MP Chuka Umunna, recognized that
immigrants in the UK are often demonized. It further stated that the demonization,
which has been a growing problem after the Brexit vote, is a significant barrier to
integration (APPG 2017). However, the problem of integration is faced not only by
recent immigrants but also by British citizens whose families have in some cases
been settled in Britain for three generations or more. For example, a recent study of
Iranians in the UK found that despite very high levels educational, professional, and
economic success, language proficiency, and cultural proximity to the mainstream,
Iranians are nonetheless negatively represented in dominant discourses about inte-
gration (see Gholami and Sreberny 2018). According to this study, the main reason
for Iranians’ demonization and exclusion was that they were perceived in the
mainstream as Muslims, even though the majority of the study’s participants, and
reportedly the majority of UK Iranians (Sreberny and Gholami 2016), identified as
secular. This research lends a great deal of credence to the argument that one’s legal
status and rights as a citizen, and even a high degree of integration, are not sufficient
to ensure acceptance by a majority community. Rather, the bestowal of such an
acceptance remains the privilege of the majority and tends to be strongly connected
with racial, ethnic, and religious positionalities and perceptions.
It is clear, then, that in terms of practice citizenship is constituted through legal,
social, and cultural “assets” (or capital) to which a country’s citizens have varying
levels of access. If at the time of the French Revolution – generally accepted as the
birth of the modern citizen (see Brubaker 1989) – national citizenship was imagined
as the great equalizer, that promise certainly has not been borne out throughout its
62 Citizenship and Education in an Age of Extremisms 989

history. Generally, minority ethnic, racial, and religious people seem to have to
“work harder” to be and remain citizens. This raises the important issue of the
potential loss of citizenship, which is also a top-down process over which minorities
exert little control. In July of 2018, for instance, the Indian government rescinded the
citizenship of some four million Bengalis in Assam whom it declared “illegal.”
These people could, as a result, find themselves completely outside the protection of
the law, face internment, separation from family members, and deportation. Another
example is the 2018 “Windrush” scandal in the UK during which people from the
Caribbean, former British colonies, who migrated to the UK between 1948 and 1970
and settled there in the belief that they were British, suddenly found themselves as
“illegals” and faced deportation. Some were deported and others experienced loss of
employment, housing, and benefits payments. Particularly disturbing was the fact
that the children of those migrants, who had been born and raised in Britain and
identified as British, were asked by the UK Home Office to “prove” their Britishness
or they themselves could face deportation.
These cases underline the complex relationship between citizenship as lived
experience and citizenship defined purely legally. State policy, concerned only
with the latter, operates as if the two can be neatly separated. However, when the
state casts doubt over a person’s legal status as a citizen – as in the case of the
Windrush scandal in the UK – it also wreaks havoc on even the most intimate parts
of that person’s life (see for example, Quinn 2018; Khan 2018). Of course, the
boundary between lived and legal citizenship is blurry and complex for all members
of a society. For example, the 2013 British Social Attitudes Survey on national
identity found that most people define Britishness by a range of civic and ethnic
factors. Thus, although 95% said that speaking English (a civic factor) was a key
factor in being British, 77% mentioned having lived in Britain for most of one’s life;
74% highlighted being born in Britain; and 51% noted having British ancestry as
major factors in defining Britishness. It is also noteworthy that 24% of respondents
listed Christianity as a determining factor (NatCen 2014). The issue, however, is that
the interrelationship between the civic and the ethnic is rarely, if ever, questioned in
the case of majority populations, who of course also tend to make up most of the
government. This, then, throws into sharp relief the centrality of power in matters of
citizenship policy and whether power favors the majority group or is equally
distributed. If the former, minorities will always be in danger of treatment as
second-class citizens and of losing their citizenship altogether, which can have
grave, even fatal, consequences.
In his influential book Homo Sacer (1998), Agamben likens the loss of citizen-
ship (one’s political life) to a person’s reduction to “bare life” (an unpolitical, purely
functional/biological life). Crucially, this reduction places the individual outside the
law, a space Agamben calls “the state of exception” where individuals may be
“lawfully” killed by the state. The treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany offers a
brutally vivid example of the state of exception, where millions of people, stripped of
their citizenship and thus all their rights, were at the total mercy of the state (ibid:
114). In most cases, they were systematically abused, tortured, and eventually
murdered without anyone (in Germany at the time) being legally responsible.
990 R. Gholami

However, such horrific events cannot be dismissed as a “thing of the past”: for
Agamben, the state of exception is an integral part of how modern politics works. In
fact, even in liberal democracies today it seems that people do not so much have the
right to have rights, as Hannah Arendt famously put it, as they are allowed to have
rights. Albeit not a direct comparison to Nazi concentration camps, Guantanamo Bay
prison serves as a useful contemporary example because the underlying logic for its
existence is the state of exception. People suspected of terrorism are incarcerated
there indefinitely and are subject to torture (officially called “enhanced interroga-
tion” and otherwise illegal) by the US government. Although the European Union
(EU) does not have an equivalent to Guantanamo, European citizens have been
imprisoned at the US facility.
In the age of extremisms, the revocation of citizenship has come to play a major
role in political life in Western democracies, being used by politicians, and called for
by ordinary citizens, as a legitimate defense against perceived security threats. To be
sure, citizenship – or revocation thereof – now forms an integral part counter-
terrorism policy across many Western countries. Esbrook (2016: 1276) describes
this use of citizenship as extreme and notes that after the Second World War Western
countries generally shunned the practice exactly because it was a tool of the Nazis.
However, things have changed markedly since 9/11. Whereas the UK government,
for example, rescinded zero citizenships between 1973 and 2003, from 2003 to 2012
it rescinded the citizenship of twenty-seven people, followed by another twenty
revocations in 2013 alone (ibid: 1282). The legislative safeguard against citizenship
deprivation has historically been the clause that revocation cannot take place where a
person is rendered stateless as a result. However, as Mantu (2018: 34) explains,
Western states (e.g., Austria, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, the UK) have in
recent years amended their laws to enable them to revoke citizenship even when this
results in statelessness, provided that the individual concerned obtained citizenship
through naturalization. Thus, here, too, one’s minority status is significant, as these
laws have applied virtually exclusively to foreign-born, or naturalized, citizens
(Esbrook 2016: 1285). Ultimately, Esbrook warns that using citizenship as a
counter-terrorism tool is profoundly dangerous because it threatens to upend the
hard-fought achievements of post-WW2 liberal democracies. Esbrook’s concern is
echoed by Mantu (2018: 39) who argues that citizenship deprivation poses a
significant challenge to the human right to nationality and to a slew of international
legal measures ratified by democratic countries designed to protect that right.
However, current policy logic in many Western nations suggests that govern-
ments are unlikely to redress the decline in protecting citizen rights so far as
revocation is concerned. In fact, the logic of that policy is now shaping other
policies, creating an environment in which suspicion and securitization shape a
great deal of public life. For example, the borders of the nation-state are being
tightened and suspicion of the Other is being (re)enforced through public institutions
such as schools. Public employees, including teachers, are being required to act as
security agents, and citizen-on-citizen surveillance is increasingly commonplace.
Arguably, this is precisely how “Prevent,” a key strand of the UK’s flagship
CONTEST counter-extremism policy operates. Prevent assumes that without state
62 Citizenship and Education in an Age of Extremisms 991

intervention young people are vulnerable to radicalization, and thus requires teachers
and other public employees to “spot signs of radicalization” (HM Government 2015)
and refer suspected individuals to the government’s Channel program, which pro-
vides support for those “at risk” of being drawn into terrorism. In 2016–2017, 7631
people were referred to Channel, with two-thirds of the referrals being for concerns
about “Islamist” extremism. These figures have sparked criticism that the policy
disproportionately targets people of Muslim backgrounds and is therefore
Islamophobic (see Novelli 2017). Interestingly, 86% of the referrals were rejected
by Channel, and of the remaining cases, 96% left the Channel program without the
need for any further action. This belies the fact that spotting the signs of radicaliza-
tion is a straightforward process rather than being a process which inevitably relies
on racial, religious, and behavioral stereotypes and assumptions.
Clearly, the issues targeted by the Prevent policy – youth radicalization and the
prevention of terrorism – must be addressed. However, questions must be posed
about whether or not the policy is best suited for its purpose to safeguard people and
communities from terrorism, including whether its negative side effects are a price
worth paying (see Open Society 2016). In addition to the issue of Islamophobia,
teachers and other educators, as we will see, have criticized the Prevent policy for
making their jobs difficult and for hindering young people’s ability to engage in
discussions about controversial topics. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the Channel
program is in doubt. For instance, after an attempted terrorist attack on London’s
underground rail network by Ahmad Hassan in September 2017, it became clear that
the perpetrator was known to the authorities and had in fact received Channel
support (Guardian 2018). Finally, Prevent defines extremism as “vocal or active
opposition to fundamental British values of democracy, the rule of law, individual
liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs”
(HMG 2015, emphasis added). However, as Hand (2014) argues, although the focus
on the values (which incidentally can be found in the constitutions of many countries
around the world) is welcomed, attempting to link them to British national identity is
problematic as it can cause exclusion and resentment (cf. House of Lords 2017).
On the whole, it is possible to argue that policies such as Prevent play on a fluid
version of Agamben’s state of exception, i.e., several states of exception with
varying degrees brutality. By defining anyone who even vocally challenges a state-
selected list of values as a potential extremist, and by requiring public professionals
to use racial, religious, and behavioral markers to spot potential terrorists, Prevent
opens up the possibility for citizens to be placed in a temporary and partial state of
exception. Being referred to Channel arguably suspends an individual’s normal life
by identifying them, possibly in front of their peers and community, as a potential
terrorist. This, in turn, exposes that person to, and justifies, treatments, and repre-
sentations not normally experienced by British citizens. By the same token, the
person also enters into a new relationship with the state. Although the Channel stage
is described as “support” and cannot be compared to extreme measures like
Guantanamo, a referred individual is potentially on a trajectory that could send
them up the policy chain to Guantanamo-like practices and citizenship revocation.
In this way, states of exception seem to be working through the entire “repertoire” of
992 R. Gholami

counter-terrorism policies, functioning exactly as a means to curtail individual

agency at the same time as they implicate the concept of citizenship, which, at
least in theory, is about guaranteeing individual agency and freedom.

Educating Citizens in an Age of Extremisms

In their 2003 paper, Osler and Starkey built on Held’s notion of “overlapping
communities of fate” to suggest that citizenship education must be seriously
concerned with educating cosmopolitan citizens who are “confident in their own
identities and will work to achieve peace, human rights and democracy within the
local community and at a global level” (2003: 246). For Osler and Starkey, education
for cosmopolitan citizenship is predicated upon an understanding that young citi-
zens, though formally seen as citizens-in-waiting, are in fact highly political and live
lives that span across local, national, regional, and global arenas. The authors are
critical of national curricula that fail to recognize and prepare young people for, those
complexities. Fifteen years later, and no closer to Osler’s and Starkey’s vision, the
educational agenda in many Western democracies is today dominated by an inward-
looking, ethno-nationalist logic increasingly formalized through policy. In the UK,
education is being reshaped by the Prevent duty with its statutory requirement to
promote “fundamental British values” (FBVs), which fosters a radically different
vision of citizenship.
One of the striking features of the Prevent policy, as alluded to above, is that it
identifies the education sector as a key site for counter-extremism. Incidentally,
schools and colleges were responsible for the largest number of referrals to Channel
(33%) in 2016/2017. Furthermore, as Panjwani et al. (2018: 5) show, key concepts
and definitions central for and to Prevent have been honed through education
policies, including the teaching of FBVs. Drawing the education sector into
counter-extremism policy so formally and explicitly is unprecedented, and it has
had wide-reaching implications for how some young British people are perceived
and perceive themselves, as well as for citizenship education more generally
(cf. House of Lords 2017).
The UK’s Association for Citizenship Teaching (ACT 2015) has argued that the
citizenship classroom is the right place for pupils to discuss the sort of “controversial
issues” raised by the Prevent policy. This view builds on the government’s own
advice to schools in the wake of the policy highlighting the importance of citizenship
education and discussing controversial topics (DfE 2015). ACT’s report thus sets out
quite detailed ideas for how citizenship teachers can incorporate the Prevent duty and
FBVs into their lessons. Importantly, ACT draws attention to the problem of
Islamophobia, which can be exacerbated by Prevent. ACT also suggests that Prevent
itself be discussed as a controversial issue. These are useful ideas in so far as they
acknowledge the civic and socio-political dimensions of extremism and that policy
processes are complex and need critical dialogue. However, ACT also recognizes
that Prevent places considerable limitations on citizenship classrooms. As the report
states:
62 Citizenship and Education in an Age of Extremisms 993

A key consideration is the way in which the tension is resolved between facilitating the
discussion of controversial issues (which implies there are a variety of valid viewpoints) and
the need to challenge some views or even report them to senior colleagues (which implies
some views are forbidden). (ACT 2015: 2)

Thus, under Prevent, some views will always be “too controversial” and beyond
the realm of engagement; they will trigger, rather, a process that marks the end of
teaching/learning/debating/exploring and divides the classroom into “good” and
“bad” citizens. In other words, although subtly, FBVs-style citizenship works
increasingly normatively and is shot through with moral imperatives determined
by the state in the context of extremism and terrorism. To be sure, liberal democracies
are increasingly becoming contexts in which crucial questions of values, social
relations, and political engagement are approached primarily in relation to extrem-
ism and terrorism. In such contexts, citizenship education risks becoming a training
course by which young people learn to merely internalize, and not question, the
state’s imperatives, accept extremism/terrorism as normal and act in relation to them,
accept the logic of everyday suspicion and surveillance, and identify people with
divergent views as enemies.
It should be noted that the British government maintains that there is nothing
problematic or disruptive about the addition of the Prevent duty to education; that the
former is a natural extension of the latter, because ultimately it is about safeguarding
young people (see DfE 2015; see also HM Government 2018). However, evidence
from teachers points to many challenges in the classroom resulting from the diffi-
culty of implementing the Prevent duty into daily teaching practice. As
Quartermaine (2018: 32) observes:

Both politics and religion are considered [by Prevent] as definable components of terrorism,
but the promotion of political ideas must be avoided (restricted by the Education Act 1996:
230) and respect for freedom of religion or belief must be maintained. A skilled teacher may
have the necessary tools to undertake such a complex task, but even then, the resultant
restricted discussion may not have the desired effect of preventing certain individuals from
engaging in violent activities.

In this vein, recent research on education professionals by Busher et al. (2017)

shows that among their respondents, a third of education staff without a lead
safeguarding role could not describe themselves as even “fairly confident” in
implementing the duty. Confidence levels were lowest among younger and less
experienced teachers. Staff also mentioned that the duty makes it harder to provide
an inclusive educational environment, and were particularly worried about the
stigmatizing effect it has on Muslim children. Overall, the effectiveness of the policy
in picking up individuals with a genuine potential for violence was questioned. What
is more, there is evidence that the policy can be counter-productive by creating in
some youths a resentment towards mainstream society, potentially inspiring them to
join extremist movements (see Open Society 2016).
In light of these difficulties, politicians have taken it upon themselves to develop
curricula and educational materials. In 2017, the UK government started to write a
994 R. Gholami

curriculum for teaching FBVs to address the anxieties of the teaching profession
(Whittaker 2017). The new curriculum is meant to be delivered through existing
subjects such as Citizenship, History, and Religious Studies. In this way, FBVs is set
to become a key component of the entire national curriculum, which could work to
justify the whole FBVs agenda. In History, for instance, the “chronological teach-
ing” of British history is supposed to “foster integration,” according to Lord Agnew,
the Academies Minister (ibid). The focus will be to teach pupils about the evolution
of parliamentary democracy and religious tolerance in Britain. These themes are of
utmost importance, but there is a danger that such selective teaching presents a
distorted and overly triumphalist picture of British history. This sort of celebratory
approach has been part of the government’s educational agenda since Conservative
politician Michael Gove’s tenure as Education Secretary (2010–2014). Teachers,
however, have been complaining about a “white-washed” history curriculum that is
apologetic for the racist brutality of the British Empire at the same time as down-
playing the experiences of the peoples it exploited (see Lais 2017). In the context of
extremism/terrorism and FBVs, such a curriculum risks hiding from view the role
that Western states played in bringing about the current state of affairs, for example,
by creating, funding, and educating violent Islamist movements in Afghanistan after
the Cold War (see Novelli 2017). In terms of citizenship education, moreover, the
curriculum will not enable young people to adequately engage with the complex
dynamics and nuances of contemporary citizenship, such as those raised above
regarding the fluidity of states of exception.
The issue of Prevent and FBVs in education sketched briefly here casts light on
what is increasingly a defining characteristic of education in the age of extremisms:
competency, legitimacy, and expertise, as well as wider educational goals of nurtur-
ing young minds and instilling in them values of global justice, peace, and equity,
seem today to matter less than the enforcement of noneducational policies through
public education and the instilling of narrowly defined values by educational means,
as educators now perform the role of intelligence and border force agents and
politicians are involved in designing curricula and managing educational
institutions.

Conclusion

It should be borne in mind that the issues raised in this chapter are unfolding in a
wider educational context in which arts, humanities, and some social studies
subjects – subjects that encourage a critical and creative relationship with the
world – are being devalued. The devaluation is often systematic and structural
taking the form of under-funding or accusations of lack of academic rigor. This is a
trend that can be witnessed in many parts of the world (see Nussbaum 2009). In the
UK, and in England more specifically, citizenship education has not been unaf-
fected by this trend despite being singled out by the government for the promotion
of its counter-extremism agenda. As Education Secretary, Michael Gove was
vehemently critical of citizenship education and attempted unsuccessfully to
62 Citizenship and Education in an Age of Extremisms 995

make it a nonstatutory subject. However, Gove’s wider reforms, including intro-

ducing the English Baccalaureate to promote “traditional” academic excellence,
have had a negative impact on subjects such as citizenship. According to the latest
official figures, between 2014 and 2018 GCSE entries for Citizenship Studies have
dropped by 53.3% (The Telegraph 2018). Similarly, one of the least popular
A-Level subjects in 2017 was Critical Thinking, which only attracted 1241 stu-
dents out of a cohort of 720,000 (Nixon 2018).
Interestingly, this sort of systematic devaluation may itself be one of root causes
of radicalization and terrorism. Sociologists Gambetta and Hertog (2016) have
shown that the vast majority of Islamist suicide bombers have had science back-
grounds, especially in engineering. Their conclusion is that these are clever young
people who are unable to question authority. Panjwani et al. (2018), too, have
suggested that it is vital, now more than ever, for society to renew its commitment
to the values of liberal education, which emphasizes the holistic nurturing of human
beings, critical thinking, and a balance between the arts and sciences. In stark
contrast to this, as this chapter has shown, the age of extremisms is one where
both citizenship and education have become tools of counter-terrorism policy in the
highly volatile political and economic environment of contemporary liberal democ-
racies. But in so doing, Western countries are no closer to eradicating the threat of
radicalization and terrorist attacks by Islamist or far-right movements. Instead, they
have increasingly normalized extreme discourses, practices, and policies throughout
their own societies, marginalizing their ethnic and religious minority citizens and
risking the erosion of the very foundations upon which their democracies have been
erected.

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Teaching Migration as Citizenship-Building
in the United States and Beyond 63
Adam Strom, Veronica Boix-Mansilla, Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj, and
Carola Suárez-Orozco

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1000
Re-imagining Migration’s Learning Arc: Citizenship Education for a World on the Move . . . 1003
Theoretical and Pedagogical Foundations of the Re-imagining Migration Learning Arc . . . . 1004
Social Emotional Learning Insights Informing the Re-imagining Migration Learning Arc . . . 1005
Culturally Responsive Teaching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1005
Existing Programs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1006
The Learning Arc . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1007
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1011
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1011

Abstract
It is increasingly uncommon to find any city, town, or county in which
immigrants do not play a role: they are integral to the present and future of civil
society. Changing student demographics and the complex realities of a globalized
world require school personnel to reconsider what and how they teach their
students. Teaching about migration as a fundamental part of human history and

A. Strom
Re-imagining Migration, Los Angeles, CA, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
V. Boix-Mansilla
Re-imagining Migration and Project Zero, Cambridge, MA, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
C. Sattin-Bajaj (*)
University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
C. Suárez-Orozco
Re-imagining Migration and UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, USA
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 999
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_70
1000 A. Strom et al.

contemporary society represents one way that teachers can seek to improve all
classroom relationships. Migration – as an essential topic of study – can be an
avenue for helping students develop foundational civic habits and international
civic understanding. This chapter presents the Re-imagining Migration Learning
Arc, a novel approach to civics education designed to bridge students’ under-
standing of migration and their preparation as active agents in a transforming
world. The Arc starts with the premise that migration is a basic part of the shared
human condition; and it places migration at the center of students’ educational
inquiry. The chapter also asserts that the study of migration is a necessary
component of a robust civics education agenda in the twenty-first century. First,
the chapter provides an overview of the foundational theories that inform the
Learning Arc: civic and citizenship education, social and emotional learning
(SEL), and culturally responsive teaching (CRT). Second, it provides examples
of how the Learning Arc is implemented in classrooms and other educational
institutions in the United States and describes how educators, policy-makers, and
leaders in diverse contexts can adapt the Learning Arc to their particular settings
and local imperatives.

Keywords
Migration · Civics education · Curriculum · Pedagogy

Introduction

Images of migrants held at the US-Mexico border and families sailing across
the ocean in unstable boats headed for Europe dominate media portrayals of twenty-
first-century global human migration. However, the migrants and asylum seekers
whose experiences are reflected in sensationalistic media coverage comprise only a
small, albeit important, proportion of people on the move across the globe.
The majority of the 271.5 million people currently living in countries outside of
their place of birth are working, studying, and contributing to the daily life of their
local communities as any other resident or citizen (UN 2019). In the United States,
many parts of Europe, and elsewhere, it is becoming increasingly uncommon to find
any city, town, or county in which immigrants do not play a role: they are integral to
the present and future of civil society. However, all too often they must contend with
stereotypes and misinformation circulating in the information ecosystem from pol-
iticians, the press, social media, and public discourse.
Changing student demographics and the complex realities of a globalized world
require school personnel to reconsider their personal and professional identities vis-
a-vis their students and to update their teaching practices and curricula. Positive
student-teacher relationships are consistently shown to be significant predictors of
positive school adjustment, increased academic and behavioral engagement, and
long-term school success (Birch and Ladd 1997; Curby et al. 2009; Ewing and
Taylor 2009; Hamre and Pianta 2001; Rudasill et al. 2010). To build such positive
63 Teaching Migration as Citizenship-Building in the United States and Beyond 1001

relationships, teachers must invest in getting to know their students as individuals

(Croninger and Lee 2001; Gehlbach et al. 2016; Whitlock 2006); demonstrate
interest in learning about their stories, backgrounds, and experiences; and build a
positive, safe classroom climate (Rudasill et al. 2006; Spangler Avant et al. 2011).
Yet, teachers’ work does not end with building personal relationships with
students. Rather, they must also explore ways to effectively engage all students in
new approaches to learning in the global age, regardless of their linguistic, ethnic,
cultural, racial, or religious background. Teaching about migration as a fundamental
part of human history using strategies that explicitly aim to engage diverse student
perspectives represents one way that teachers can use curriculum to foster positive
learning relationships: between teachers and students and among classmates. As
important, migration as a topic of study can be an avenue for helping students
develop foundational civic habits and international civic understanding.
Indeed, rising xenophobia and myths about the causes and consequences of
migration are sowing divisions and undermining social, economic, and democratic
prospects for the global population (Cinalli and Giugni 2016; Crandall et al. 2018;
Flores 2018; Rogers et al. 2019; Ruzza 2018; Wieviorka 2018). Schools are at the
center of this maelstrom: they are both sites of discrimination and hate incidents
directed toward immigrant-origin students and spaces where teachers can educate
newcomers and their peers about the role that migration has played in enriching
local, national, and global societies (Bajaj et al. 2016; Crawford 2017; Faas 2016;
Huang and Cornell 2019; Ee and Gándara 2019; Rogers et al. 2019). In a period
marked by partisan divides and skepticism toward institutions and traditional sources
of information (Hochschild and Einstein 2015; Rich 2018; Rogers et al. 2019),
educators are being called on to better align their curricula and pedagogical practices
with their students’ needs and experiences and with the new demands of the twenty-
first century (Crawford and Dorner 2019; Nieto 2017; Suárez-Orozco 2007).
The need for a comprehensive approach to teaching students of immigrant-origin
backgrounds and for teaching about the importance of migration as a part of civics
education for all students has been brought into sharp relief in recent years. Increas-
ingly restrictive immigration policies, border closures, intensified immigration
enforcement activities, and a reduction in the number of refugees accepted by the
United States and many European countries (Human Rights Watch 2019; Meissner
et al. 2018; Pierce 2019) have been accompanied by a rise in anti-immigrant rhetoric
and violent actions inside and outside of schools (Ee and Gándara 2019; Huang and
Cornell 2019; Rogers et al. 2019; USDOJ 2018). Global challenges in response
to migration are felt more intimately in the lives of young people in schools around
the world, whose identities, histories, and experiences are what immigration scholars
Carola Suárez-Orozco, Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, and Robert Teranishi (2016) refer to
as “the human face of globalization.”
In the United States, for example, hate crimes occurring in primary and secondary
schools as well as post-secondary institutions increased by 25% in 2017 compared to
the prior year, according to data collected by the Federal Bureau of Investigation
(USDOJ 2018). A longitudinal study of bullying in Virginia schools before and after
the 2016 US presidential election also found that reported bullying incidents were
1002 A. Strom et al.

18% higher after the election in schools located in areas where a majority of people
voted for Trump in the 2016 election, compared to schools in non-Trump majority
localities (Huang and Cornell 2019). Significantly, the response rate to the survey
question asking if students had been teased “because of their race or ethnicity”
was 9% higher in majority-Trump voting areas after the election. Finally, two
groundbreaking surveys of students (Rogers et al. 2019) and school personnel (Ee
and Gándara 2019) documented widespread and troubling consequences for
immigrant-origin and non-immigrant-origin students’ physical and mental health
and educational engagement associated with the political climate, immigration
enforcement activities, and anti-immigrant sentiment in the Trump era. Teachers,
principals, school counselors, and other staff also experience significant negative
effects working in these stressful conditions in which students come to school
traumatized and afraid, if they make it to school at all (Ee and Gándara 2019; Rogers
et al. 2019; Sattin-Bajaj and Kirksey 2019).
Responses to the cultural, demographic, and social changes that accompany
migration reveal tensions that exist around ideas about civics and citizenship includ-
ing rights, belonging, and responsibilities to the most vulnerable. While migration
presents economic and cultural opportunities, it is also seen as challenging the status
quo, often requiring cross-border solutions that expose the limits of national sover-
eignty. Moreover, the nature of migration itself presents a window into some of the
toughest civic challenges that individuals, nations, and regions face, raising ques-
tions about responsibilities to people on the move, who should be eligible for
citizenship and according to what criteria. By exploring these and other civic
dilemmas, a study of migration highlights the importance of citizenship, member-
ship, voice, and rights in a time when people are grappling with questions about how
to coexist and cooperate across difference.
These issues are both timeless and timely. In fact, such an endeavor is necessary
to achieve target 4.7 of the United Nation’s sustainable development agenda. This
target calls for ensuring that “all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to
promote sustainable development, including, among others, through education for
sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality,
promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence, global citizenship and apprecia-
tion of cultural diversity and of culture’s contribution to sustainable development”
(UN 2015). Yet, there is a dearth of supports for teachers who are committed to
addressing the civic implications of migration in schools.
Recognizing the lacunae in the research and professional development offerings,
in this chapter, we focus on the Re-imagining Migration Learning Arc (Boix
Mansilla et al. 2019), a novel approach to civics education designed to bridge
students’ understanding of migration and their preparation as informed, active agents
in a transforming world. The Arc starts with the premise that migration is a basic part
of the shared human condition, and it places migration at the center of students’
educational inquiry. It also asserts that the study of migration, people’s experiences
with migration, and the implications of human mobility for society and civic
institutions are necessary components of a robust civics education agenda in the
twenty-first century. As such, the Learning Arc is geared for a wide audience of
63 Teaching Migration as Citizenship-Building in the United States and Beyond 1003

educators and students; it is explicitly designed to reach non-immigrant-origin

students as well as students of immigrant backgrounds. It is part of a broader
Re-imagining Migration Educational Framework (Boix Mansilla et al. 2019) that
outlines capacities and dispositions that may help young people successfully partic-
ipate in diversifying societies as students, citizens, and future leaders.

Re-imagining Migration’s Learning Arc: Citizenship Education

for a World on the Move

There is a vigorous debate at present about citizenship education in a world of

migration. This chapter focuses on one way that migration can be understood
as vital to citizenship education, and it provides strategies for how it can be
incorporated across disciplines in K-12 classrooms. Here the definition of citizen
is expansive; it is based on the notion that all individuals have rights regardless of
where they are living or their documentation status within national communities – a
premise aligned with the vision articulated in UNESCO’s 1998 report Citizenship
Education for the 21st Century. These rights are also articulated in the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights and the covenants that followed the adoption of
the UDHR (UN General Assembly 1948). The Learning Arc presented here
combines values and traditions from the field of human rights with firm grounding
in the priorities of civics education (Gould et al. 2011).
The Learning Arc is designed around inquiry into a series of key questions about
the human experience. Fundamentally, it proposes to guide students and their teachers
as they interrogate ideas about humans – as individuals and communities – and
consider where people come from and how they evolve. Lessons and discussions
progress into examinations of the reasons people leave their homes, the meaning and
function of borders, and the legal and human rights bestowed upon people who
straddle more than one nation. Ultimately, the Learning Arc seeks to take students
on a reflective journey that allows them to consider their own responsibility in
constructing welcoming and inclusive societies.
The Learning Arc is positioned as an antidote to the polarized, often hate-filled
responses to migration, offering opportunities for young people to engage in dia-
logue about complex civic issues, practice civic inquiry, develop civic knowledge,
and cultivate civic dispositions. It culminates in a call for young people to engage in
relevant, civically oriented actions inspired by the question “How can we take action
toward more inclusive and sustainable societies?” (Boix Mansilla et al. 2019). Civic
action projects prompted by the Learning Arc have included a range expressions of
student engagement, from a whole school Youth Participatory Action Research
(YPAR) project that explored the impact of story sharing across a school community
to art projects and public presentations made to community and school leaders.
The next section provides an overview of the foundational theories and related
educational approaches that inform the Learning Arc: civic and citizenship educa-
tion, social and emotional learning (SEL), and culturally responsive teaching (CRT).
It is followed by a discussion of some of the existing US-based curricular and
1004 A. Strom et al.

pedagogical programs designed to help teachers educate students about difference

and address issues of hatred, bias, and discrimination from history and today. It also
describes the ways in which Re-imagining Migration Learning Arc differs from
these other programs in terms of goals and approaches. Then, the Learning Arc is
introduced, including examples of how it is being implemented in classrooms and
other educational institutions. The chapter closes with a discussion of how educators,
policy-makers, and leaders in diverse contexts can adapt the Learning Arc to their
particular settings and local imperatives.

Theoretical and Pedagogical Foundations of the Re-imagining

Migration Learning Arc

Re-imagining Migration’s work draws from fundamental skills, competencies, and

practices in civics education as described in the Carnegie Corporation’s report on
the Civic Mission of Schools (Gould et al. 2011). The report highlights six proven
practices of civics education, which include (1) instruction in government, history,
law, and democracy; (2) in-class discussions of current, local, national, and interna-
tional issues and events; (3) opportunities to apply lessons through community
service activities linked to the formal curriculum and instruction; (4) extracurricular
activities that facilitate school or community involvement; (5) opportunities for
student participation in school governance; and (6) student participation in simula-
tions of democratic processes.
Despite their value in establishing a baseline for civics education, these practices
and other important civic initiatives tend to be framed in purely national terms with
nationally-focused solutions (iCivics 2019). The complexities of a world trans-
formed by globalization, migration, transnationalism, and unprecedented economic
and political interdependence belie this framing that reverts to a traditional notion of
national membership and national borders. For example, it is common for those
promoting civics education to emphasize political engagement and voting as bench-
marks for success, obscuring a host of other, equally compelling aspects of civics
education (ibid.). These goals, which reflect meaningful measures of civic partici-
pation and knowledge, do not accurately capture the range of possibilities for (and
limits to) civic engagement in the lives of many young people, particularly
immigrant-origin youth, whose families may be unable to vote and may be reluctant
to get involved in standard expressions of civic action. Moreover, narrow concep-
tions of civic involvement and civics education may result in excluding eager
members of civil society who wish to contribute (Suárez-Orozco et al. 2015).
Recognizing the need for a more expansive approach to civics education for a
world on the move, Re-imagining Migration’s Learning Arc is informed by insights
from the Macarthur Foundation’s Youth Political Participation Project. Participants
in the project outline a new civics for the digital age, one that emphasizes “partic-
ipatory politics” and the skills that are essential to “leverage the power of social
networks, the creation and circulation of civic media. . .as a means of investigating
issues, promoting dialogue, impacting cultural norms, and mobilizing others”
63 Teaching Migration as Citizenship-Building in the United States and Beyond 1005

(Kahne et al. 2016, pp. 2–3). These practices reveal new, and more inclusive, models
for civic action, including the DREAMers, a political movement led by undocu-
mented youth in the United States who sought to regularize their migration status.

Social Emotional Learning Insights Informing the Re-imagining

Migration Learning Arc

Cultivating informed, empathic, civically engaged global citizens requires attention

to students’ social emotional needs as well as explicit instruction in civics education.
Work in the area of social and emotional learning therefore provides a starting point
for the opening sections of the Learning Arc, which builds on many of the compe-
tencies that SEL seeks to develop in young people.
CASEL, the largest consortium promoting research into SEL and the integration of
SEL into the life of schools, defines social and emotional learning as “the process
through which children and adults understand and manage emotions, set and achieve
positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive
relationships, and make responsible decisions” (CASEL n.d.). The broader SEL
community promotes a set of competencies that can be helpful for young people
forming identities in a transforming world, including empathy, communication across
difference, and perspective-taking. These competencies are particularly relevant for
schools with diverse student populations, or in demographically changing communi-
ties. Re-imagining Migration incorporates them into its work and extends them in the
Learning Arc for the purposes of citizenship education via studies of migration.

Culturally Responsive Teaching

Culturally responsive teaching (CRT) shapes the Re-imagining Migration Learning

Arc, particularly in terms of pedagogical approaches. CRT is rooted in Gloria Ladson-
Billing’s seminal work (2009/1994), The Dreamkeepers, which explores the exem-
plary teaching practices of eight teachers working in predominantly African-American
school districts and their successful efforts to create “intellectually rigorous and
challenging classrooms” that honor students’ cultural and social backgrounds and
experiences. At the heart of CRT is the understanding that “culturally relevant teaching
uses student culture in order to maintain it and to transcend the negative effects of the
dominant culture. The negative effects are brought about, for example, by not seeing
one’s history, culture, or background represented in the textbook or curriculum or by
seeing that history, culture, or background distorted” (Ladson-Billings 2009, p. 19).
Culturally responsive practices recognize that students learn best when they see
themselves reflected in the classroom and in the curriculum. One of the central
principles of CRT is the belief that educators must rethink the canon of texts they
introduce to students. More than that, educators must take students’ cultural back-
grounds and emerging identities seriously, not just on an interpersonal basis, but also
as subjects worthy of study.
1006 A. Strom et al.

At the same time, CRT is often framed as an educational approach for

students who are not part of the dominant groups within a society – newcomers
as well as people often treated as ethnic, racial, and religious outsiders
(Gonzalez 2018; Teaching Tolerance n.d.-a; Wlodkowski and Ginsberg 1995).
CRT practices are important for all students, including students whose cultures
and histories are associated with the mainstream. Students from dominant social
groups need exposure to a wide range of social actors and perspectives to develop
informed perspectives about power and privilege and individual responsibility to
address inequities. Moreover, exclusion of the dominant groups reinforces difference
and division and presents a false picture of an increasingly interdependent world.
Thus, part of learning how to live in a changing world means that young people need
to develop at least some basic knowledge of cultures other than their own and an
understanding about how those cultures shape the way all people live in the world.
Culturally responsive practices have a lot to offer civics and citizenship teachers.
Enabling young people to find pro-social opportunities for engagement in their
communities is important for both themselves and their communities as a whole.
What is more, an orientation toward culturally responsive teaching compels educa-
tors to consider which stories and which civic actors are featured in the curriculum
and who may be missing. Guided by the philosophy of CRT, the last section of
the Re-imagining Migration Learning Arc seeks to make visible the voices and
actions of lesser known, often immigrant-origin social actors working to create more
welcoming and sustainable communities.

Existing Programs

Re-imagining Migration is not new in its creation of resources and strategies to help
educators lead students in scholarly exploration of pressing, often controversial
issues. Over the course of the past 40 years, a number of organizations have
developed educational programs for middle and high school students that seek to
address issues of bias and discrimination in the United States. For instance, in the
late 1970s, Facing History and Ourselves used the Holocaust and mass violence as a
point of departure for teaching students about empathy, the fragility of democracy,
dangers of stereotyping, and ethical decision-making (Facing History n.d.) (The use
of the phrase “fragility of democracy” is inspired by Facing History and Ourselves.).
Teaching for Change (teachingforchange.org) was founded when teachers in 11 cities
gathered to create the Network of Educators’ Committees on Central America after
the number of Central American students escaping civil war begin to swell. Finally,
Teaching Tolerance was formed by the Southern Poverty Law Center with the
principles of the civil rights movement as a guide (Teaching Tolerance.org n.d.-b).
Many of these organizations have since expanded beyond their original purview
to teach broader issues of social justice and democracy, often using specific historical
events as a starting point for their programs. The diffuse and ongoing nature of
migration as an influential human phenomenon makes it difficult to capture using
this same approach; consequently, it is often lost in the classroom. Instead teachers
63 Teaching Migration as Citizenship-Building in the United States and Beyond 1007

spend a few days on key events or a literary work but miss the connections across
time and experience (Strom and Boix Mansilla 2019).
Civic and citizenship education programs in the United States, on the other
hand, often emphasize civic knowledge or skills taught in the form of action civics
activities, simulations, legal cases, and case studies or increasingly through
educational games. Organizations providing support to civics and citizenship edu-
cators promote a wide range of approaches. Some, like iCivics, began by harnessing
digital technologies to produce games for use inside and outside of the classroom
that focus on developing civic knowledge. Others, like Generation Citizen, offer an
action civics model in which students research a civic issue and develop an action
plan (Generation Citizen n.d.). The Democratic Knowledge Project based at Harvard
University seeks to build core knowledge about democracy, engage students in
explorations of what democracy looks like in practice, and then inspire them to
develop civics intervention-based research led by the MacArthur Foundation
Research Network on Youth and Participatory Politics (Democratic Knowledge
Project n.d.). The Democratic Knowledge Project reaches beyond K-12 classrooms
to engage libraries, museums, universities, and other civic institutions.
In sum, none of the current educational programs directly addresses the issues
faced by immigrant-origin children or provides guidance to adults who teach these
students and seek to broaden the perspectives of all students – immigrant
and non-immigrant-alike. The work of Re-imagining Migration fills this gap by
presenting educators with a whole-child, whole-school approach to migration
that nurtures students’ curiosity, empathy, and respect for difference while simulta-
neously addressing the broader educational culture. As such, the Re-Imaging
Migration framework and its Learning Arc can be understood as a tool for civics
education that helps engender the ideals of inclusivity and cross-cultural understand-
ing by developing worldly, knowledgeable, civically oriented students.

The Learning Arc

Each of the five sections of the Re-imagining Migration Framework is designed to

reenforce the others, with the Learning Arc serving as a model for developing
curriculum (Boix Mansilla 2019). While other sections of the Arc put forward core
beliefs about students, the purpose of education, best practices for creating nurturing
education settings, and the role of the teacher, the Learning Arc illuminates universal
themes in the experience of human migration that crosses time and geography. It also
introduces essential questions that help tease out the differences between particular
episodes of human migration. Veronica Boix Mansilla writes that the Learning Arc
“is centered on the belief that the goal of teaching about migration is not a matter of
simply remembering information. Instead, it entails having the capacity to reason
one’s way through and respond to a situation, a media report, a new refugee crisis,
feeling oriented enough to advance possible explanations, interpret or contextualize
perspectives, and compare present developments with past ones” (Boix Mansilla
2019). Organized into three parts, Stories of Migration, Understanding Migration,
1008 A. Strom et al.

and Taking Action, the Learning Arc aims to develop five critical habits
and dispositions that are essential for citizenship and civic participation:
perspective-taking, inquiry, communication across difference, the ability to look
for and recognize inequities, and the capacity, sensitivity, and inclination to take
action toward inclusive and sustainable societies.
The Learning Arc does not prescribe particular episodes in human migration that
must be taught. Instead, it is focused on how any lessons about migration should be
taught. The Arc serves as a guide for the selection of resources as well as the range
and order of themes that might be included. It also presents an approach that
connects understanding of migration to informed action.
The following introduces the guiding questions proposed by the Learning Arc.
Then, three moments in the Arc are highlighted and illustrated with specific exam-
ples of practice drawing explicit connections to the dimensions of civics education.

Stories that Make us Human

What are our stories of movement and change? In what ways do stories of migration help us
understand who we are?
What can we learn from the many visible and
invisible stories of migration around us?
How can we approach the sharing of stories of
migration with understanding and compassion?
Where do we humans come from? Where do humans come from, and what is our
shared story?
How do we know about our ancestors who
migrated around the planet over the last
70,000 years?
How is our shared human history shaping our
lives today?
Understanding Migration
Life Before Migration
Why do people leave their homes? What was life like before migration?
In what ways do societal and environmental
push and pull forces and more intimate
personal contexts motivate people’s decisions
to leave their homes?
What happens to those who stay, and how do
they relate to those who leave?
The Journey
What do people experience as they move from In what ways are people’s migration journeys
one place to another? similar and different from one another?
How much control do migrants have over their
journey, and what are the choices and dilemmas
people face during their journey?
What do these journeys reveal about human
nature?
How do borders impact people’s lives? What is the purpose of borders?
How do the visible and invisible borders people
encounter shape their lives?
How can borders work in an ethical way?
(continued)
63 Teaching Migration as Citizenship-Building in the United States and Beyond 1009

Ambiguous status: Who is responsible for What are the rights of people on the move with
people in the in-betweens? ambiguous status (not clearly recognized by the
State)?
Who is responsible for people on the move with
an ambiguous status?
How should nations decide who can settle and
who cannot?
An Ecology of Adjustment
What are the conditions in the new land, and How might the environment in the new land
how do these shape the experience of help or hinder newcomers’ inclusion?
migration? How do newcomers come to understand the
new land and their place in it over time?
How might newcomers and the receiving
community balance their identities, cultural
values, and world views as they interact with
one another?
What are the public stories of migration, and What messages about migration are people
how do they influence people’s perspectives hearing through media and thought leaders?
and behaviors? How can we assess whether available public
stories about migration are reliable and
representative?
How do stories of migration influence how
people think and (re)act?
How do local narratives of migration relate to In what ways do particular cases reflect the
global patterns? bigger picture of human migration over time
and around the globe?
What can we learn from other narratives about
migration to help us to inform our perspective?
What are the universal and unique qualities of
successful integration?
What are the public stories of migration, and What messages about migration are people
how do they influence people’s perspectives hearing through media and thought leaders?
and behaviors? How can we assess whether available public
stories about migration are reliable and
representative?
How do stories of migration influence how
people think and (re)act?
How do local narratives of migration relate to In what ways do particular cases reflect the
global patterns? bigger picture of human migration over time
and around the globe?
What can we learn from other narratives about
migration to help us to inform our perspective?
What are the universal and unique qualities of
successful integration?
From Stories and Understanding to Action
How can we take action toward more inclusive What issues related to migration do we care
and sustainable societies? about and why?
What can we learn from the ways individuals
and groups have addressed issues of migration
in the past?
How might we use our spheres of influence to
create and sustain inclusive and welcoming
communities?
1010 A. Strom et al.

In a nod to Urie Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological systems theory,

Re-imagining Migration’s approach crosses the educational system from school-
based interventions to work with museums and other community-based educational
institutions. At the core of the Learning Arc is the belief that successful citizenship
education involved more than curriculum design. Veronica Boix Mansilla writes that
there are “five re-conceptualizations deemed essential to educate about, for, and
through migration.”

[The Re-imagining Migration Framework] invites us to recast our idea of the child, and our
theories of learning and teaching; to reframe our understanding of human migration; sharpen
our views about learning environments and envision new approaches to professional devel-
opment. In each case, the framework proposes a novel set of principles and practices to
support educators in their work. For educators working in schools, museums, libraries and
communities interested in preparing immigrant-origin students, their families and peers to
participate fully in contemporary societies this framework stands as an invitation to re-frame
migration not merely as a pressing challenge but mostly as an opportunity to re-imagine a
new approach to education—one destined to benefit all. (Boix Mansilla 2019)

Educators in a wide range of educational settings and geographic locations are

adapting the Learning Arc to develop curriculum. For example, in Charlotte, North
Carolina, a 9th grade Language Arts unit uses the Learning Arc to organize an
exploration of migration through a range of texts. Students thread their own stories
of migration together with a selection of primary sources, essays, and short stories.
After developing an understanding of migration, drawn from the Re-imagining
Migration Learning Arc, the unit concludes by asking students to brainstorm about
the borders in their community and encourages students to draw up a plan to
eliminate a “harmful border to help people in the community feel more welcome.”
In Boston, Massachusetts, the Learning Arc anchors a project across eight public
schools that forges a collaboration between the Office of English Learners and the
Department of History and Social Studies. The in-classroom lessons follow the
Re-imagining Migration Learning Arc, beginning with student storytelling work-
shops facilitated by I Learn America, an organization that works with immigrant
youth to creatively express their stories. The project then pivots to historical reflec-
tion on migration through a mini-unit guided by the second section of the Learning
Arc, understanding migration through primary source texts such as Emma Lazarus’s
poem “The New Colossus” that links the Statue of Liberty to ideas of inclusion and
welcoming of immigrants. The Boston Public Schools’ project culminates in a
public civic storytelling event bringing students from each of the schools together
to an audience of community members. Outside of schools, a team representing a
cross section of museums, centers, and initiatives at the Smithsonian Institution, a
group of 19 museums and research centers administered by the US government, is
developing an online learning place for educators that will include digital resources
from the vast collection of the Smithsonian organized around the Learning Arc.
The Learning Arc is intentionally left flexible so that people in different sectors
of society (e.g., schools, museums, community-based organizations) working in
distinct contexts (predominantly immigrant, new immigrant destination) can expand
63 Teaching Migration as Citizenship-Building in the United States and Beyond 1011

and modify it to suit their community’s particular needs. It can be the launching pad
for deeper academic study of different topics and themes; prompt teachers to pursue
new pedagogical, student-centered approaches; and bring questions about immigrant
students’ experiences to the fore in classrooms, schools, and districts previously
unprepared to respond to demographic changes and what they demand of educa-
tional institutions.

Conclusion

Migration is one of the defining civic issues of our time. Responding to the civic
challenges and opportunities that accompany large-scale human migration demands
that citizens and noncitizens alike rethink the nature of our ethical, moral, civic, and
legal bonds. There may be no more fundamental question for citizenship education
than who can be a citizen and what rights are owed to noncitizens.
Yet, too often discussions of citizenship entirely overlook the complex tensions
around migration and how it tests long-held assumptions about the ways citizenship
should be defined and who should be counted among citizens. This raises important
questions about how best to prepare diverse citizens to participate in civil society.
Re-imagining Migration’s work broadens the scope of these conversations and, with
them, extends notions of citizenship, civics education, and teaching for the age of
migration by including the perspectives and lived experiences of the ever-more
diverse members of global societies.
Teaching for and about migration tests our commitment to and understanding of
contemporary citizenship. Humans do not confine themselves to national borders,
neither should citizenship education. The Learning Arc can help educators move
forward on the path toward competently engaging in the critical task of educating
members of civil society to successfully coexist in a changing global context.

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Revisiting a Spiritual Democracy: In Search
of Whitman’s Democratic Vistas 64
Gabriel P. Swarts

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1016
Early Perspectives on the Democratic Spirit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1017
Seeing Further: Creative Visions of the Spirit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1020
Spiritual Citizens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1023
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1025
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1026

Abstract
In today’s civic sphere, anxiety regarding the “threats” of authoritarianism,
migration, economic disruption, multiculturalism, globalization, identity, etc.
permeates political and public life as division and fear reverberate through
media broadcast and local conversation. The “threat” discourse is pervasive,
persistent, and often paralyzing. Questions linger regarding where we go from
here. This chapter focuses on the exploration of envisioning a spiritual democ-
racy, specifically the cultivation of a democratic spirit through exploring ideas
that inform art, poetry, teaching, and literature to stage a reimagining of Walt
Whitman’s seminal work, Democratic Vistas. Using Whitman’s manuscript, and
related foundational writings to set the historical and social context, this chapter
aims to build on Whitman’s vision to construct an artistic pathway forward,
embracing democratic living through love, expression, community, and
citizenship.

G. P. Swarts (*)
University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY, USA
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 1015
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_28
1016 G. P. Swarts

Keywords
Democracy · Spiritual · Democratic vista · Poetry · Walt Whitman · Citizenship ·
Community · Creativity

We have frequently printed the word Democracy. Yet I cannot too often repeat that it is a
word the real gist of which still sleeps, quite unawaken’d, notwithstanding the resonance and
the many angry tempests out of which its syllables have come, from pen or tongue. It is a
great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten, because that history has yet to be
enacted. Walt Whitman (1871/2009, p. 37)

Introduction

The aim of this chapter is to reexamine a foundational American democratic poet and
philosopher, Walt Whitman, and how his work in Democratic Vistas can influence
citizenship education and democratic living in education today (Whitman 1871/
2009). A meandering exploration of life, community, democracy, and creativity, this
seminal work established Whitman as a “seer” of the potential of democratic living
(Dewey 1927/2008). Specifically, Whitman’s work birthed the ideal of a “spiritual
democracy,” an emergent theme incorporating higher ideals from religion and moral
teachings through a poetic investigation of his United States. At once hopeful and
visionary, Whitman’s essay recognized the profoundly unfinished work of American
democracy. Whitman envisioned the democratic apex of the United States being
achieved by an educated, intelligent community, through the works of poets, artists,
and lecturers – what he called the “literatus.” This creative cohort would connect
individual experience through democratic values, within an educative framework,
reestablishing our commitments while nurturing the democratic “spirit” in all (Whit-
man 1871/2009, p. 6).
For this chapter, democracy is defined as a multilayered, seemingly contradictory
process that is focused on individual rights, decision-making, participation, subjec-
tivity, and freedom of choice (Dahl 1989; Schumpeter 1943/2010; Touraine 1997).
In light of these defining characteristics, how divorced are we from Whitman’s grand
vision? The search for the democratic spirit of Whitman’s work may be more
complicated than ever as division, competition, and faction may be further revealing,
or exacerbating, democracy’s long struggle with an inherent “instability and flawed
character” (Dewey 1888). For proof, in 2016 and as part of a larger global trend
affecting 72 surveyed nations, the United States was downgraded to a “flawed”
democracy by the Economist Intelligence Unit. An arm of The Economist maga-
zine’s data department, this group has developed a “democracy index” approach to
review nation-state institutions, structures, and practices (The Economist Intelli-
gence Unit 2016). Citing a variety of research-based studies, political results, and
global trends, the globally focused white paper declared the Western political and
societal machinations in 2016 as a “democracy recession.”
64 Revisiting a Spiritual Democracy: In Search of Whitman’s Democratic Vistas 1017

In this recessionary trough, division and angst among citizens in nation-states

around the world have fed into strained political divisions and vice versa, leaving
many to ponder the fundamental ideals and aims of democratic society and governance
at large (Hook 2017; Schmitter and Karl 1991; Suh 2014; Touraine 1997). Public
figures, publications and media, commentators and scholars in psychology politics,
and the general public discourse repeatedly cite fracturing “threats” to current political
and social order (Oxley et al. 2008). In the United States, which was Whitman’s focus,
it seems that all political sides have embraced threat discourse; Whether conservatives
bemoan the “threats” of multiculturalism, globalization anxiety, and identity politics or
progressives furiously denouncing authoritarian “threats” in a Donald J. Trump pres-
idency and GOP-controlled Congress. Even centrists place blame on extremists
regarding the lack of cross party legislation, deliberative approaches, institutional
concerns, and communicative strategies. “Threats” exist on all sides of larger discus-
sions on civic life and democracy. In a variety of media, academic, and public spaces,
“threat” discourse is pervasive, all-encompassing, and highly influential in how we can
couch the social and historical roots of the (real or perceived) “recession” in contem-
porary US democracy.
As it seems in these discourses, democratic living is facing unprecedented
challenges as the “deconsolidation” of democratic ideals and practices occurs,
reversing long-term, long assumed, trends of Western democratic function. (Foa
and Mounk 2016, 2017). How did a foundational ideal of Western society get to this
point? Many factors and trends must be at play and need to be scrutinized and
studied. The aim of this chapter is to explore a way forward, or a potential answer,
based on a vision. Instead of asking how we got here, perhaps the question can be
framed, instead, around how to journey toward the horizon.
In this current context exists devastatingly complex questions: What are the
threats to democratic living? What democratic future do we want? What driving
“spirit” is envisioned in a democratic society (Taylor 2016)? For Walt Whitman, the
historical and literary focus of this chapter, democracy was something distant yet
grand, in his own words, a “vista” (Whitman 1871/2009). This chapter is a
reimagining of Whitman’s vision in order to build a spiritual capacity, a horizon
line, for citizenship education to counteract the preoccupation with threat discourses
so pervasive in public discussion today. Through exploring work on the “spiritual”
side of democratic living in the United States, democracy forms through creativity,
centered in artistic expression of a democratic culture through communication in
literature, aesthetics, poetry, and other forms of creative practice (Abbott 1910;
Dewey 1939/1989; Dewey 1940).

Early Perspectives on the Democratic Spirit

Prior to Whitman’s Vistas, politicians and scholars as far back as ancient Greece
explored the spirit and virtue of the democratic citizen. This chapter is not intended
as an encompassing survey of democratic thought but, instead, a touchstone of
scholars/philosophers which contributed important foundational ideas to the
1018 G. P. Swarts

exploration of spiritual democracy in this chapter and to Whitman’s literary arc.

Ideals of lived practice in democracy and the emergent spirit of the democratic living
can be historically traced through foundational ideals from two purposefully selected
works written by foundational democratic spiritualists: Aristotle and Baron de
Montesquieu.
The feeling of Whitman’s scholarship aids in imagining a democracy of individ-
ual recognition within the larger community, with an intense focus on the develop-
ment of the inner self (Myers 1934). The realization of self, as one within a One, is a
profound link enunciating the religious depth of Whitman’s work. In that vein,
exploring both ancient and modern interpretations of democratic action and wisdom,
through the works of Aristotle and Baron de Montesquieu, allows the reader to trace
Greek and Enlightenment ideals of ethics, belonging, and morality within
Whitman’s writing. These foundational works influenced modern American politics
and thinkers and still provide founding, constructive ideals for educators and
students to prepare the next generation for democratic living in classrooms (Pearl
2018; Rubin 2018).
Aristotle composed a structure of ethical traits or characteristics befitting Athe-
nian democracy. Building from ethical and moral foundations, The Nicomachean
Ethics studies and classifies various ethics such as courage, temperance, liberality,
and generosity, building concurrently and accessed through practical judgment or
wisdom, what Aristotle called “phronesis,” or practical wisdom (Kraut 2006;
Schwartz and Sharpe 2010). This practical wisdom allowed for citizens to maintain
a spirited democratic life, specifically the hoi mesoi, or middle-class Athenians, who
neither craved wealth or power nor were ignorant (Lintott 1992). In a paper on
Aristotle’s politics, M.A.R. Habib (1998) explains the mean of social class and the
distinct role the “middle” must play in balancing democratic living within the body
politics, through practical wisdom:

The principle of the middle way thus introduces itself on a number of levels in Aristotle’s
exposition of polity. The aim of this constitutional mixture, says Aristotle, is to regard the
interests of both rich and poor, the wealthy and the free. The criterion of virtue, paramount in
an ideal aristocracy, is also to be included. Thus polity occupies a “middle” position in which
the extremes of both democracy and oligarchy disappear. Aristotle observes that all states
contain three sections, the very rich, the very poor and those in the middle. Again invoking
the principle of the mean, he asserts that to hold a “middling” amount of property is best of
all. People in this condition, whom he calls hoi mesoi, are most easily obedient to reason;
they exhibit the least reluctance and least eagerness to hold office; they are exempt from the
arrogance of the very rich, who cannot understand how to be ruled; and from the wickedness
of the poor, who cannot understand how to rule. (Habib 1998)

To Aristotle, these middle-class leaders, through their commonalities and like-

minded ideals, could be entrusted with reason to further democratic vision and
maintenance while striving to construct a more virtuous society, thus avoiding
infighting, conflict, and institutional atrophy.
Building on Aristotle’s exploration of virtue, Whitman’s writing explores love,
both as a binding agent and also as a field of contention, which ultimately led critics
64 Revisiting a Spiritual Democracy: In Search of Whitman’s Democratic Vistas 1019

to brand his work as obscene and out of step with the morals of the time. The
exploration of his own love and passion, his eros, became a central tenet of his work
providing space for the nurturing of spiritual democracy as an acceptance of equal
love, for men and women within his life and work. This “bi-eroticism” was a
foundational component of the fundamental nature of equity and equality in
Whitman’s Vistas and allowed a view into Whitman’s own sense of belonging,
community, and spirit through his poetry and prose (Herrmann 2014).
In 1748, Baron de Montesquieu published a highly influential work on com-
parative politics called de L’Esprit des Lois (The Spirit of the Laws). Within this
work, Montesquieu explored an exhaustive list of publications and political struc-
tures, aiming to distill governmental practices (de Montesquieu 1748/1989).
Reducing political structures to three major types (despotic, monarchical, and
democratic), Montesquieu sought to identify the ticking mechanisms of political
life. In exploring democracy, Montesquieu arrived at a key principle for democratic
existence and sustainable living: the love of virtue. The Spirit of the Laws gave
structure to liberal democratic structures of the eighteenth century, with limitations
to human freedom in a democracy, such as slavery, colonialism, and authoritarian
practices, fiercely challenged (Carrithers et al. 2001). Montesquieu went on to
establish the “spirit” of democratic governance, through the principle of virtue,
which he explicitly tied to the work of educators in order to sustain this “love of
laws” in a democracy:

This virtue may be defined as the love of the laws and of our country. As such love requires a
constant preference of public to private interest, it is the source of all private virtues; for they
are nothing more than this very preference itself. This love is peculiar to democracies. In
these alone the government is entrusted to private citizens. Now a government is like
everything else: to preserve it we must love it. . . Everything therefore depends on
establishing this love in a republic; and to inspire it ought to be the principal business of
education. (de Montesquieu 1748/1989, book 4, Chap. 5)

Montesquieu’s “love” emerged in Whitman’s work as a focal point, as to love

democracy or society or laws was not to love blindly but to love as self and in search
of awakening. The spiritual, or religious, miasma of Whitman’s democracy allowed
for all religions to be subsumed under the umbrella of the “spiritual” in an intimate
acceptance of all religious ideals (Whitman 1871/2009). To engage in Montesquieu’s
ideal “spirit,” one must immerse the self in reflection, moral and ethical delibera-
tions, informed by an intimate love of the public. This intimacy, this love that
Whitman describes, can only be found through interaction and is described in a
relational sense by Garrison and O’Quinn (2004):

The greatest American epic is the story of what it means to attain spiritual democracy. The
enduring story of spirituality seeks relations that are more intimate with the world around it,
especially other people, and values a commonwealth wherein individual, creative acts matter in
the course of cosmos. The continuing story of democracy is one of unique individuals questing
in community with other such individuals for more intimate relations. (Garrison and O’Quinn
2004, p. 68)
1020 G. P. Swarts

Whitman’s focus on literature, poetry, and the arts as the vehicle for such spiritual
work in a democracy allows for the intimacy that Garrison and O’Quinn describe.
Creative acts and the vision of self in a democracy require the “love” that both
Whitman and Montesquieu describe. For de Montesquieu, cultivating relationships
and the formation (for Whitman, “adhesion”) of love of democracy and fellow
citizens were the central tenets of education and the establishment of a spiritual
democracy. This construction enabled a citizenship of belonging, shared humanity,
and creative exploration of the love and communal ties among selves.
The belief that conceptions of belonging and citizenship must include love, in
addition to Aristotle’s practical wisdom, allows for a constructive starting point for
Whitman’s work in which the One of humanity can be explored through education
for democratic living and visioning. Once more, Garrison and O’Quinn (2004)
exemplified this process in educational terms guided by the artistry of teachers and
learners in the construction of democratic values:

Educators are meliorists. They want to ameliorate suffering, oppression, and hopelessness.
Meliorists are moral agents and as such require a moral compass to find their way in
darkness. (Garrison and O’Quinn 2004, p. 70)

In education, as citizenship educators and, in essence, the artistic keepers of

democracy, teachers and students must be the builders, the constructionists, and
the creators. John Dewey described teaching as the “supreme art” of a democratic
society, as the ultimate creative endeavor (Dewey and Small 1897).
Through Aristotle and Montesquieu’s theorizing of an ideal democratic spirit,
Whitman’s journey is clarified. Aristotle’s virtue of the middle class requires education
as a resource for creative cultivation. Montesquieu’s “love of laws” is not simply
acceptance of governance without critique but a profound respect and admiration for
the structure of democratic living, for the sake of the democratic public over all private
interests and motivations. Thus, the emergence of self, interaction, love, and creativity
becomes the nexus of Whitman’s exploration in Vistas and builds upon the foundation
of democratic ideals and the core of democracy itself. As visionaries, educators and
artists are responsible for construction of creative, poetic, and nurturing connections
within society to ensure the survival of the democratic spirit extoled by Aristotle,
Montesquieu, and Whitman. Specifically, Whitman’s emphasis on literature and
creativity spoke to the need in society for a compass or guiding light. Educators and
teachers of citizenship and democratic principles can look to Whitman and his work as
this compass, the ultimate “seer” of democracy, to guide in the foundation of educa-
tional and artistic work (Dewey 1927/2008).

Seeing Further: Creative Visions of the Spirit

Using Whitman’s own words and approach in Democratic Vistas, this section out-
lines key interpretations of his work as well as a historical context for Whitman’s
impact and philosophical approach. This will serve as a foundation for reimagining a
64 Revisiting a Spiritual Democracy: In Search of Whitman’s Democratic Vistas 1021

“spiritual democracy” as an artistic and educational journey toward Whitman’s

horizon of the American, democratic promise. Though the focus will be on Whit-
man, one commonality with all of the cited works is that of constructing, or building,
democratic society through philosophy and practice. Understanding larger ideals of
“sprit,” “virtue,” “leadership,” etc. as worthy pillars in democratic society is
acknowledging the necessity that creative, deep, caring, and thoughtful conversa-
tions must happen to guide individuals who participate and shape these ideals in
order to advance democratic society. Democracy must exude a spiritual nature, to
continue as a living organism and to function at its most visionary state. More than a
century ago, Abbott (1910) described this animated democratic process:

. . . the emergence of man from a state of pupilage toward the state of manhood, with all has
animal appetites and passions, all his higher aspirations and desires, as yet neither under-
stood nor controlled. It is the spirit of growth, of progress, of development. Democracy is not
merely a form of government; it is not merely a phase of society; it is a spirit of life.
Democracy, therefore, does not merely have to do with the political organization. It is the
reign of the common people in every department of life. It therefore revolutionizes every
department of life: architecture, mechanics, invention, literature, art, the home, the school,
industry, government, religion. (italics added for emphasis, Abbott 1910, p. 24)

It is imperative that shared democratic aims, like Abbott’s ideals of common man,
living revolution, and spirit, be informed by a deep commitment to pluralistic
humanism which are deliberated, theorized, and folded into daily democratic life
and educational aims (Henderson et al. 2018). Whitman exemplified this commit-
ment in Vistas and valued the lives of the worker and their spirit, much as Aristotle
did (Townsend 2011). In order to advance such connection and voice, individual
experiences amplified through thoughtful study and creativity can be harnessed to
light the pathway of the democratic journey.
In Whitman’s construction, the virtuous individual, guided by the poets and
artisans of society, lives through the ultimate “leveler” of democracy. Through
democratic values, the individual can maintain and sustain this leveling force in
lived practice, which he envisioned as follows:

I can conceive such a community organized in running order, powers judiciously delegated,
farming, building, trade, courts, mails, schools, elections, all attended to; and then the rest of
life, the main thing, freely branching and blossoming in each individual, and bearing golden
fruit. I can see there, in every young and old man, after his kind, and in every woman after
hers, a true Personality, developed, exercised proportionately in body, mind, and spirit. I can
imagine this case as one not necessarily rare or difficult, but in buoyant accordance with the
municipal and general requirements of our times. And I can realize in it the culmination of
something better than any stereotyped eclat of history or poems (italics in the original).
(Whitman 1871/2009, p. 47)

The common spirit, fueled by the virtue of democratic life, illustrated a society of
spirited citizens, was one built for, and of, democratic life. Although seemingly
utopian, Whitman saw these ideals as common in everyday life, constructed in daily
interactions and through creative exploration. For Whitman, the question was
1022 G. P. Swarts

whether these ideals already existed somewhere in the nation and whether these
communities could practically fulfill his ideals of democracy.
This fulfillment, according to Whitman, progressed through three stages of
democracy, two of which have been unevenly achieved while the third level is yet
elusive. Whitman’s first two levels of democracy are described in Vista’s as:

The First Stage was the planning and putting on record the political foundation rights of
immense masses of people indeed all people-in the organization of Republican National,
State, and Municipal governments, all constructed with reference to each, and each to all.
This is the American program, not for classes, but for universal man, and is embodied in the
compacts of the Declaration of Independence, and, as it began and has now grown, with its
amendments, the Federal Constitution and in the State governments, with all their interiors,
and with general suffrage; those having the sense not only of what is in themselves, but that
then: certain several things started, planted, hundreds of others, in the same direction, duly
arise and follow. The Second Stage relates to material prosperity, wealth, produce, labor-
saving machines, iron, cotton, local, State and continental railways, intercommunication and
trade with all lands, steamships, mining, general employment, organization of great cities,
cheap appliances for comfort, numberless technical schools, books, newspapers, a currency
for money circulation, etc. (italics added for emphasis, Whitman 1871/2009, p. 55)

While it can be argued that all three stages are still incomplete today, important
work has been achieved in stages one and two of Whitman’s description. Despite
uneven distribution and access, political rights and wealth abound in modern
democracies in comparison to past epochs as well as in comparison with current
authoritarian regimes. Modern democracies reflect many of Whitman’s unfinished
stages. Flawed and contested, the promise of the United States in these first stages of
Whitman’s democratic maturation is present. Historically, these democratic pro-
gressions have occurred despite the lingering wounds of slavery, Native American
genocide, LGBTQ oppression, gender inequality, etc. as those are still open and
important and can be influential in creating space for further staging. Whitman knew
these stages were morphing and ever changing and that the horizon lines were still
far into the distance but present nonetheless.
The third stage becomes a realization of the most distant vista, the emergence of
the educated poet-citizen, and the full blossom of creative expression within dem-
ocratic living. This is where, as educators, important work has yet to be completed.
Whitman’s views relied fully on the perspective of the artist (the poet, the teacher, the
architect, etc.) for democracy to function as he envisioned. Artists and educators are
needed to function as visionaries to fully reconcile the emergent, expressive self with
larger communal beliefs. Whitman described this final stage as spiritual, unifying,
and guiding society forward toward the distant vistas:

The Third Stage, rising out of the previous ones, to make them and all illustrious, I, now, for
one, promulge, announcing a native Expression Spirit, getting into form, adult, and through
mentality, for These States, self-contained, different from others, more expansive, more rich
and free, to be evidenced by original authors and poets to come, by American personalities,
plenty of them, male and female, traversing the States, none excepted-and by native superb
tableaux and growths of language, songs, operas, orations, lectures, architecture-and by a
sublime and serious Religious Democracy sternly taking command, dissolving the old,
64 Revisiting a Spiritual Democracy: In Search of Whitman’s Democratic Vistas 1023

sloughing off surfaces, and from its own interior and vital principles, entirely reconstructing
society. (italics added for emphasis, Whitman 1871/2009, p. 56)

The “expression spirit” of Whitman’s work exemplified the maturing United

States as a unique salvation for humankind. This salvation in the third stage was
made possible and able to mature through artistic expression. Through their work,
artists were able to expose, embrace, or confront the most electric promises and
sinister evils of a truly democratic society (i.e., slavery, corruption, or extending
LGBTQ rights). Whitman focused on a “democratic literature” as the rocky passage
of which reconciliation of self and community would occur. Individual talents,
struggles, and convictions laid in “service of the larger ideal of democracy” (Whit-
man 1871/2009, p. 89). Being able to place one’s experiences within the larger
maturation of democracy allowed for a strengthening of individual and communal
spaces through one another. So, as society contends daily with the “threats” of any
given time, citizens and artists have the ability to critique, search for, engage with, or
create the literature and space needed to contribute to the construction of the third
stage, the “spiritual” component of American democracy. In education, literature is
defined through our daily texts of teaching and learning in the classroom. Lesson
planning, curriculum work, and pedagogy allow for spaces in which the collective
spirit of democracy can “dissolve the old.” Whitman’s ideal artist was an emergent
figure, fueled by love and creativity and guided by self-discovery and educative
experience.

Spiritual Citizens

So where are the spiritual citizens, the “shamans” of the democratic spirit, today
(Herrmann 2014)? Reading Whitman’s descriptions of farmers or laborers, mothers,
teachers and students, local characters, and friends, it was apparent that anyone was
capable of contributing to the artistic construction of the spiritual awakening. In
Whitman’s view, the “spirit” was an ethos of citizenship, a way of living, and could
be nonreligious. The idea that spirit was love, as in Montesquieu’s conception of
spirit in The Spirit of the Laws, is a helpful parallel. Whitman moved beyond
Christian ideals of the spirit to focus instead on a creative oneness that formed
communal interactions, practices, and journeys. This “spiritual” living would have to
inform the citizen as well as visions of an American democracy.
Drawing on all religions as this greater One in Vistas, Whitman saw individuals
in the United States in much the same way. Capable of esteemed citizenry, daily
democratic action, artistic expression, and hardened resolve, the exemplars of
Whitman’s democracy were emergent from any corner of the state. However, the
key figures in Whitman’s work in the third stage of democracy were the intellectual
and artistic leaders. As these artisans create and explore, our feelings and connec-
tions of self and community are exposed and challenged. In Whitman’s own
writings – which were succinctly summarized by esteemed Whitman scholar Ed
1024 G. P. Swarts

Folsom in the forward of the most recent pressing of Vistas – the power of lighting
the democratic spirit was embodied by poets:

What is most striking about Whitman’s emphasis in Democratic Vistas is his insistence that a
democratic literature was the most essential factor, for as long as the imagination of the
country remained shackled by feudalistic models of literature, by romances that reinforced
power hierarchies and gender discrimination, and by a conception of literary production that
put authorship only in the hands of the educated elite, then democracy would never flourish,
regardless of the form of government.
Whitman was finally more intrigued with the way a democratic self would act than the
way a democratic society would function, and the defining of this revolutionary new self, he
knew, was a job for the poet. A democracy, then, would require a new kind of imaginative
relationship between reader and author, a more equalizing give and take, and so Whitman
argued that “a new Literature,” a “democratic literature of the future,” and especially “a new
Poetry, are to be, in my opinion, the only sure and worthy supports and expressions of the
American democracy. (Whitman 1871/2009, p. xviii)

In Whitman’s view, the artists, the teachers, and the “meliorists” create and search
for their “moral compass” as they continue Whitman’s vision. These creators
maintain and continue Whitman’s work in everyday interactions, lesson plans, and
works. Some voices become amplified, bringing important topics and viewpoints to
the forefront, demanding attention. For example, in recent times we have seen in the
United States recognized “poets” and leaders such as Pulitzer-prize winning hip-hop
artist and sold-out stadium-touring Kendrick Lamar (2017); the unflinching Donald
Glover (2018), a hip-hop artist, actor, and TV show producer; #metoo catalyst,
actress, and director Rose McGowan (2015); and Randy Olsen, the photographer
behind National Geographic’s Planet or Plastic awareness campaign (2018). On a
grassroots level, teacher groups and organizations have engaged in worker strikes
and demanded higher expenditures for education across the board in Oklahoma and
West Virginia, as more education advocates collectively exercise a moral authority
(Galchen 2018). These artists and educators have created important works and
movements that exemplify the combination of individual expression and experience
with community concerns and the larger aims of democratic society. Even more so
today, through media and social media, creative and civic work can more visible,
connective, accessible, and representative of our lived experiences. Whitman’s
“democratic literature of the future” may exist already in Lamar’s hip-hop verses,
teacher social media comments or accounts, or in Olsen’s photographs on Instagram,
and these works offer a kinetic possibility unseen before in our democracy.
As teachers look toward their classes, lessons, and curricula, the artistry of their
work in education becomes starkly focused; the poets, the creators, the lecturers, the
architects, and the mechanics contribute their own artistic visions to society. It is a
teacher’s work to enable and embody these visions and to provide a space for the
freedom of their presentation. How else can poetic voices hone their “new poetry”
but through teaching and learning in a democratic life? These educative spaces
enable the virtue, the love of democratic promises, and must be cultivated for the
good of society, its institutions, and its progress (Costa 2009). To rediscover the
unappreciated “depth and fullness of meaning” in democratic societies today, it is
64 Revisiting a Spiritual Democracy: In Search of Whitman’s Democratic Vistas 1025

important to interpret education, everyday teaching and learning, as poetic and

artistic (Rockefeller 1989, p. 301). John Dewey saw teaching as the “supreme art”
of society and Whitman as the ultimate “seer,” inspiring the vital currents of this
chapter (Dewey and Small 1897, Dewey 1927/2008). Whitman envisioned a creative
society of artists and creators, of which teaching is the most fundamental. To reach
the third stage of Whitman’s Vistas, educators most look forward and be the true
visionaries of society though their daily work. The “threat” discourses of politics are
not constructive or visionary but destructive and reactionary. Whitman (as well as
Aristotle and Montesquieu) believed that emotional bonds made democracy truly
function, enabling discovery of self within a more perfect society. The possibility of
a “teacher-poet” truly allows for a visionary and creative approach to encouraging
these emotional bonds while linking educational experience with the roles of
democratic citizenship.

Conclusion

As teachers and learners we can incorporate these poets and others into our citizen-
ship discussions every day. The job as teacher-artists has to be exposure, deliberative
debate, and investigation into daily democratic practice as a way of life (Dewey
1916/1944). To Whitman, democracy also was a lived experience, one that was
deeply spiritual. On this reading, the role of educators is to use personal judgment
and interpretation to champion the works of the poets while inspiring the next
generation of creators to stoke the flames of democratic spirit. Touraine (1997,
p. 197) sums up the aims of this spirit by stating that a “democratic culture is a
means toward the end of recomposing the world and individual personalities by
encouraging different cultures to come together in such a way that we can all share as
much as possible of the human experience.” The recomposition of democratic
virtues, derived from individual experience, action, and shared amongst communi-
ties, allows for citizenship education to have a foundational structure, a spirit.
For Whitman, the vista of democracy was achieved through a loving and creative
life. There could be no “best citizen” or best societal structure, a specific window
from which to view the way forward. Instead, for Whitman, the view was to be
distant, emergent, and complicated, needing careful curation and inspiration as
democratic society looked forward toward the distant horizon lines. This vision
required faith in the work it would take to build on knowledge from the past, to forge
new paths and roads, novel ideas and creations, and a new language of democracy.
To that end, Whitman saw as far as he could and left inspiration for today’s poets and
educators:

America demands a Poetry that is bold, modern, and all-surrounding and kosmical, as she is
herself. It must in no respect ignore science or the modern, but inspire itself with science and
the modern. It must bend its vision toward the future, more than the past. Like America, it
must extricate itself from even the greatest models of the past, and, while courteous to them,
must have entire faith in itself and products out of its own original spirit only.
1026 G. P. Swarts

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Typologies of Citizenship and Civic
Education: From Ideal Types 65
to a Reflective Tool

Aviv Cohen

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1030
Theoretical Frameworks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1031
Conceptions of Citizenship and Civic Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1031
The Methodological Tradition of Ideal Types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1032
The Use of Ideal Types in Educational Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1033
Approach to Literature Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1034
12 Citizenship and Civic Education Typologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1035
Typologies of Citizenship and Civic Education – Towards a Reflective Tool . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1040
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1042
Document Analysis Protocol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1043
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1044

Abstract
The field of democratic civic education continues to dominate theoretical and
empirical studies, influencing practitioners in countries across the globe. This
abundance of available, and at times competing, discourses creates a convoluted
reality in which the assumptions, goals, and practices of democratic civic educa-
tion are highly debated. One methodological approach that has been adopted to
deal with this convoluted reality is the use of ideal types, which has led to the
construction of numerous typologies of civic education. The goal of this review is
to examine these typologies by offering a critical methodological discussion of
their merits. The main argument to be presented is that such typologies should not

A. Cohen (*)
The Seymour Fox School of Education, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 1029
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_43
1030 A. Cohen

be seen as external goals, guiding this process based on fixed desired ideals, but
rather as an internal heuristic tool, offering a starting point for the process of self-
reflection.

Keywords
Citizenship · Citizenship education · Civics · Classifications · Ideal types ·
Typologies · Review

Introduction

Civic education continues to raise questions and pose challenges in countries across
the globe (Hahn and Alviar-Martin 2008; Lee and Fouts 2005; Torney-Purta et al.
2001). Ultimately, it is generally agreed upon that civic education may be defined as
the course of “help[ing] young people acquire and learn to use the skills, knowledge,
and attitudes that will prepare them to be competent and responsible citizens
throughout their lives” (Gibson and Levine 2003, p. 4). However, moving beyond
this basic definition, one of the field’s main challenges is that it includes an
abundance of both theoretical and empirical studies. As Kerr (1999) mentions
regarding this issue, “this breadth and complexity is both a strength and a weakness”
(p. 2). This abundance of existing research creates a convoluted reality and a real
“embarrassment of riches” in which the assumptions, goals, and practices of civic
education are highly debated.
One methodological approach that has been adopted to deal with this reality is the
use of ideal types, which has led to the construction of numerous theoretical
typologies of citizens, and by extension, education for citizenship. The goal of this
review is to examine these typologies by offering a critical methodological discus-
sion of their merits. The main argument to be presented as a result of this review is
that such ideal types should not be seen as an external goal, guiding the process of
civic education based on fixed desired ideals, but rather as an internal heuristic tool
for practitioners, offering them a starting point for the process of self-reflection. The
chapter starts with some general explanations of the field of civic education,
followed by a short description of the concept of ideal types and their use in
educational research. Afterward, the approach to the literature analysis will be
presented, followed by the presentation of the 12 typologies of civic education. A
discussion of these typologies will be offered, highlighting the importance of relating
to such typologies as a reflective tool, relating to implications for teacher education.
Throughout this review, the term citizenship and civic education (CCE) will be
deliberately used. This term encompasses a vital assumption that frames this field,
regarding the connections between the theoretical mode of citizenship aspired to and
the educational practice implemented to achieve this goal. In this manner, the chosen
term of CCE emphasizes the connection between these two components – the
philosophical conception of citizenship and the educational practice of civic
education.
65 Typologies of Citizenship and Civic Education: From Ideal Types to a. . . 1031

Theoretical Frameworks

Conceptions of Citizenship and Civic Education

Many agree on the importance of CCE, as expressed, for example, in the fact that
some form of CCE exists as both an educational goal and curriculum policy in most
nations (Hahn 2010). Nevertheless, one may be overwhelmed by the abundance of
topics and plurality of issues dealt with while reviewing the research in the field.
Levstik and Tyson (2008) categorized this spectrum into five broad categories
representing the main components of CCE manifested in the U.S. classrooms: (1)
U.S. democracy; (2) cross-national comparisons; (3) discussion and decision
making; (4) service-learning; and (5) cosmopolitan and multicultural education.
Cotton (2001) also offered an extensive overview of this field of study after
surveying 93 scholarly items. She divided this area of study into three main
categories: (1) studies of the relationships between educational practices and stu-
dents’ civic outcomes; (2) critiques, concept papers and reports regarding such
studies; and (3) papers that concentrate on general and specific student populations.)
Focusing on the relations between general citizenship discourses and the practice of
civic education, Abowitz and Harnish (2006) offered a review of different citizen-
ship conceptions, questioning their manifestation into the classrooms. They con-
cluded that

the conceptions of citizenship that currently are communicated in schools reflect little of the
theoretical and practical insights that these discourses bring to meanings of citizenship.
Citizenship education that engaged the debates, questions, and multiple discourses associ-
ated with civic and political life would prove to be far more enlightening, engaging, and
inspiring for students than the current civics curriculum—with its vision of a more cleansed,
idealized, narrow, and fairy-tale-like citizenship than actually exists (p. 681).

Thus, they argued that it is precisely this reality, of a gap between general citizenship
discourses and the ways civics is taught in schools, which gives rise to students’
apathy and cynicism towards this subject. Similarly, while focusing on the use of
metaphors and embodied cognition, Fischman and Haas (2012) pointed to the
complex reality of educating toward democratic citizenship, specifically in regard
to the discrepancies and tensions that exist between the “prototypical visions of
democracy, and the lived experiences of both individuals and groups” (p. 186).
Such reviews point to how existing research in the field of CCE encompasses
different foundational conceptions of the terms citizenship and civic education:
while one approach may emphasize the knowledge that individual citizens hold
regarding the political sphere (Milner 2002), a second approach may emphasize the
common values shared by the community as a whole (Bottery 2000). Moreover, a
third approach may claim that knowledge and values are not satisfactory, and good
citizenship is judged by the criteria of civic engagement (Nie et al. 1996), and a
fourth approach may claim that such engagement must be critical in its nature (Apple
1993). In other words, reviewing the literature of the field of CCE exposes a real
discrepancy between the widely agreed upon importance of this field and the lack of
1032 A. Cohen

consensus regarding the different conceptions practiced. Whereas this may be the
case regarding other subjects taught at schools, such as math or science, the teaching
of civics is highly influenced by the social and political realities, resulting in such a
wide variation (Castro and Knowles 2017).
This confusing state of affairs may be seen as what John Dewey (1927) referred to
as “the great bad.” Dewey warned of “the mixing of things which need to be kept
distinct” (p. 83). In the case of CCE, this “great bad” may occur when the different
conceptions are translated into different educational practices, incompatible with one
another at best and contradictory at worst. This unclear situation, in which numerous
conceptions of CCE influence classroom practice, is similar to what Barr et al.
(1977) identified regarding the general field of social studies in the USA, viewed
by them as a “seamless web of confusion” that suffered from an “identity crisis”
(p. 10). In an attempt to untangle this web of confusion, a common methodological
tradition that has been adopted by several scholars was the use of ideal types and the
construction of typologies. In the following, I will offer a more detailed look at the
concept of ideal types and the use of such types as part of educational research. In the
next sections of this chapter, I will describe a study of 12 specific CCE ideal types.

The Methodological Tradition of Ideal Types

Whereas the act of classification can be traced to the philosophy of Aristotle

(Hartigan 1996), the modern term ideal type was presented by Max Weber (1949),
one of the founders of the social sciences. His guiding assumption was that
researchers’ knowledge is constantly influenced by the particular point of view
from which they evaluate reality. He thus challenged the notion that a researcher
can bring forth the facts themselves without being influenced by their personal
characteristics, and saw this notion as naïve. He explained that researchers’ personal
beliefs and values influence what is seen as valuable, important, and significant
regarding the phenomenon being evaluated. Weber explained that any attempt to
analyze a social reality without relating to the researchers on personal beliefs “is
absolutely meaningless” (p. 82).
This inherent personal bias led Weber (1949) to set the question of what is
significant about theories and theoretical conceptualization in the field of social
sciences. As an answer to this question, he offered the use of ideal types, which
were defined by him as “a mental construct for the scrutiny and systematic charac-
terization of individual concrete patterns which are significant in their uniqueness”
(p. 100). In other words, Weber proposes the use of a utopian display of a phenom-
enon that has been created by what he refers to as an “analytical accentuation of
certain elements of reality” (p. 90). It is important to point out that Weber did not see
these ideal types as a goal in itself, but rather as a means to research the social sphere.
In this sense, he explained that when evaluating a particular social reality, the
emphasis should be on what factors make this phenomenon unique, while comparing
it to similar cases. A central distinction to consider is between the common meaning
of the term ideal, relating to a utopian portrayal that suggests the best or most
65 Typologies of Citizenship and Civic Education: From Ideal Types to a. . . 1033

preferred performance, as opposed to defining and detailing the specific character-

istics of a particular phenomenon. Following Weber, the typologies of CCE to be
presented in this chapter take the form of the latter sense.
According to Weber (1949), the use of such ideal types shifts the concentration of
the research from the phenomenon itself, to the evaluation of the relationship
between the phenomenon and the ideal type. Thus, the use of ideal types should
not be seen as a method of describing reality, but rather as a heuristic analytical tool,
utilized to enable the researcher to form a hypothesis regarding reality. Weber
stressed the understanding that such ideal types are genetic concepts rather than a
reflection of reality.
To compose an ideal type, Weber (1949) explained that an individual phenome-
non should be evaluated from numerous points of view. In this manner, a synthesis of
the different components of this phenomenon is created, thus forming a “unified
analytical construct” (Gedankenbild) (p. 90), or a mental image. Weber clarified that
with this use of numerous points of view, the final ideal type is, in fact, a utopian
portrayal of the phenomenon that “cannot be found empirically anywhere in reality”
(p. 90).
With the ideal type in hand, Weber (1949) explained that the next step of research
is the comparison of the actual phenomenon to its ideal. This comparison may
generate insights regarding the manner in which the phenomenon approximates or
rather exceeds the utopian ideal. With this analytical tool, a researcher may better
understand the social circumstances of reality at a given place and time. Further-
more, numerous case studies may be compared, thus revealing long-term processes
as well. Also, Weber suggested composing numerous ideal types regarding a broader
question, thus supplying the platform for an evaluation of the relationship between
these different ideal types, creating an even more in-depth understanding of a
complex reality.

The Use of Ideal Types in Educational Research

Holmes (1981) referred to the use of ideal types while researching the field of
education. He explained that this analytical tool is especially useful while comparing
different educational issues stetted in different cultures. He recommended the use of
ideal types to understand the normative statements regarding education that people
“debate, accept or reject” (p. 112). In this manner, ideal types may be used as a
means of obtaining a better understanding of the proposed norms underlying con-
temporary debates in the field of education. Holmes explained that ideal types
provide “conceptual clarity and simplicity” (p. 113) of a complex reality. This insight
relates to Weber’s main point, seeing ideal types as a way of understanding the
manifestation of ideas, rather than attempting to portray reality itself.
On the practical level, Holmes (1981) detailed the process of composing ideal
types when dealing with educational issues. He stressed the importance of relating to
educational, political, religious, and economic factors that are debated in society.
Thus, he elaborated on three fields that he saw as mandatory when producing such an
1034 A. Cohen

ideal type: (1) the nature of man, (2) the nature of society, and (3) the nature of
knowledge. He explained that each one of these fields must be confronted from the
educational point of view. For example, the nature of man may relate to questions
regarding equality and the tracking system, dividing student based on their person-
ality. The nature of society may deal with questions regarding what types of schools
exist in a given society and what different opportunities exist for the children in that
society. Questions regarding curriculum, pedagogy, and methods of assessment are
all driven from the fundamental conceptions of the nature of knowledge.
Hayhoe (2007) added to these three fields an additional venue in the form of the
normative values that each ideal type contains. She presented a critical point of view
aimed at scholars such as Holmes, due to the neutral-scientific manner in which they
displayed the concept of ideal types. She claimed that each ideal type holds a value-
based normative assumption that must not be overlooked. Therefore, she called to
use ideal types not just as a “scientific” analytical tool, but rather as a means of
promoting normative values to be implemented in the future.

Approach to Literature Analysis

This review of typologies of CCE is based on the examination of 92 academic

resources, dating from 1977 to 2017 (see Table 1 – Summary of sources reviewed).
The sources were gathered based on searches in academic websites and databases
(such as Google Scholar, Eric, JSTOR, ProQuest). Following the focus of this
review, sources that presented a clear conceptual view of CCE were identified. It
is important to point out that this review did not include curricular materials but
instead concentrated on empirical and theoretical studies that examined such primary
sources.
Due to this concentration on written documents, methodological insights were
drawn from previous studies with similar thematic focuses (Alridge 2006; Brown
and Brown 2010; Hess 2005). Literary analysis was adopted as the main methodo-
logical approach (Marshall and Rossman 2010), aspiring to reach theoretical insights
based on the reading of text-based sources. This approach was utilized in four stages:
(1) review of the text, (2) identification of the central themes, (3) discussion of these
themes, and (4) presentation of examples that support the themes. A research
protocol was used to assist in the evolution of these texts (see Appendix A –
Document Analysis Protocol).
As a result of this process, and based on a preliminary review of this examination
(Cohen 2010), the use of ideal types was identified as a prominent methodological
approach, resulting in the construction of at least 12 typologies of this field, as will
be presented following.

Table 1 Summary of sources reviewed

Books Book chapters Articles Total
37 9 46 92
65 Typologies of Citizenship and Civic Education: From Ideal Types to a. . . 1035

12 Citizenship and Civic Education Typologies

The following section will present a survey of 12 offered CCE typologies that
utilized the methodological tradition of ideal types as their primary approach.
These typologies include both general typologies focused on the field of citizenship
that have significant educational implications and typologies focused on the field of
CCE (see Table 2 – Summary of typologies of CCE).
Table 2 Summary of typologies of CCE
Theoretical Offered ideal
Resource Focus or empirical types
General Marshall Rights Theoretical 1. Universal civil
citizenship (1950) rights
typologies 2. Political rights
3. Social rights
4. *Cultural
rights (added)
Almond and Citizenship orientations Theoretical 1. Parochial
Verba (1963) 2. Subject
3. Participant
Hirschman Citizens’ efficacy Theoretical 1. Exit
(1970) 2. Voice
Typologies McLaughlin Citizenship interpretations Theoretical 1. Minimum
of CCE (1992) conception of
citizenship
2. Maximum
conception of
citizenship
Lamm Forms of CCE Theoretical 1. Ideological
(2000) education
2. Political
education
Sears and Conceptions of CCE based Empirical 1. State-based
Hughs on a study of official conception
(1996) Canadian educational 2. Liberal
documents conception
3. Cosmopolitan
conception
4. Social justice
conception
Westheimer Beliefs of good citizenship Empirical 1. Personal
and Kahne as manifest in three responsibility
(2004) educational programs aimed conception
at promoting democracy in 2. Participation
the U.S.A Conception
3. Justice-driven
conception
Rubin Civic identities based on Empirical 1. Aware
(2007) interviews and discussions 2. Empowered
conducted with students 3. Complacent
from four USA high schools 4. Discouraged
(continued)
1036 A. Cohen

Table 2 (continued)
Theoretical Offered ideal
Resource Focus or empirical types
Sim and Citizenship understandings Empirical 1. Nationalistic
Print (2009) and classroom practices 2. Socially
based on eight teachers in concerned
Singapore. 3. Person
oriented
Castro Approaches to citizenship Empirical 1. Conservative
(2013) presented by preservice values based
teachers at a Midwestern 2. Awareness
university in the USA. based
Sim et al. Study of 14 Singaporean Empirical 1. Character
(2017) social studies teachers’ driven
approaches to citizenship. 2. Social
participatory
3. Critically
reflexive
Cohen Conceptions of CCE Theoretical 1. Liberal
(2010) 2. Diversity
3. Critical
4. Republican

One of the first of such typologies was offered by the sociologist Marshall
(1950), who concentrated on the issue of rights. It is important to mention that
although Marshall did not relate in his writings to the field of education, his
typology may influence the translation of such ideas derived from the social
sciences into educational practice. For example, the Crick Report in England
(Crick 1998) employed Marshall’s conception as a starting point. Marshall claimed
that in different periods of modern history, an emphasis was put on different types
of rights. In the eighteenth century, the emphasis was put on the idea of universal
civil rights, influenced mainly by the liberal political thought that dominated this
era. Following the industrial revolution, Marshall explained, the emphasis shifted
to political rights that were closely connected to the idea of the nation-state that
started to emerge at that time. In this period, the term citizen started to relate to
particular national rights, in addition to the universal civil rights of the previous
era. The two world wars of the twentieth century brought forth a third type of rights
– that of social rights. Marshall explained that following the atrocities of the
Second World War, there was a need to define social rights to be respected by
the states. Interestingly, based on the writings of scholars in the field of multicul-
turalism (Kymlicka 1995), we may add to this typology a fourth type of right, that
of cultural rights.
In their seminal work, Almond and Verba (1963) were the first to identify
the components and characteristics of the participatory culture that identifies
democracies. They offered a typology of three citizenship orientations:
65 Typologies of Citizenship and Civic Education: From Ideal Types to a. . . 1037

(1) parochial – a citizen that has no knowledge of the public sphere and no will
to participate; (2) subject – a citizen that has knowledge of the institutions but
shows no will to participate; and (3) participant – a citizen that has strong
knowledge of the political institutions and has the will to influence the public
sphere.
Another general theoretical typology often advocated in the field of civic studies
(Flew 2009) offers the distinction between the terms “exit” and “voice,” coined by
Hirschman (1970). Although rooted in the field of economics, these terms help in
understanding citizens’ beliefs in their feeling of civic self-efficacy, particularly
concerning the state in which they live. In short, the exit option reflects citizens
who have mentally abandoned their social and political surroundings, due to their
feelings that they cannot influence them. The voice option represents competent
citizens who feel that they can amplify their positions, enabling them to influence
social and political outcomes. (As mentioned, these three typologies do not relate
directly to the field of education. Nevertheless, the different citizenship concep-
tions that each one of these typologies presents have educational implications,
which ought to be considered. For example, Marshall’s distinction between civil,
political and social rights is used as a starting reference point, interestingly
enabling the examination of elements that are often overlooked (Lister and
Campling 2017). Almond and Verba’s (1963) classification of the parochial,
subject and participant modes of citizenship help in framing the goals of civic
education for example regarding the potential use of technology as a tool to create a
civic culture (Dahlgren 2000). Hirschman’s (1970) positioning of citizens in the
exit or voice options has been used to better understand socio-cultural curricular
perspectives (Cohen 2017).)
The following typologies relate directly to the educational arena.
McLaughlin (1992) drew attention to the “ambiguities and tensions inherent
in the concept of ‘citizenship’ which are therefore involved in any attempt to
educate for citizenship” (p. 236). To better understand these ambiguities and
tensions, he offered a continuum of interpretations divided between a minimum
and maximum conceptions of citizenship. Based on the minimalistic view,
citizenship is reduced to a passive respect of law or in other words citizenship
that “is seen merely in formal, legal, juridical terms” (p. 237). Supporters of the
maximalist view see citizenship as connected to active participation by the
citizens that is “conceived in social, cultural and psychological terms”
(p. 237). He further explained that the minimal conception’s main priority is
the provision of information and thus its emphasis is mainly on the procedural
aspect of citizenship while excluding critical reflection or understanding. As
such, this conception promotes “unreflective socialization into the political and
social status quo” (p. 239). In opposition to this conception, the maximal
conception of citizenship will require a “considerable degree of explicit under-
standing of democratic principles, values and procedures on the part of the
citizen, together with the dispositions and capacities required for participation
in democratic citizenship” (p. 238).
1038 A. Cohen

Similarly, an important distinction that helps clarify the very essence of the CCE
process was offered by Lamm (2000), who presented its two optional forms:
(1) ideological education and (2) political education. Lamm explained that whereas
in the ideological education process the primary goal is to persuade the students to
adopt a specific partisan political ideology, political education is the process in which
the student is taught the ability to take part in the political world while developing his
views independently. Therefore, Lamm stressed the importance of promoting the
political education process as the primary goal of CCE.
In addition to such theoretical debates, the six following studies offered typolo-
gies of CCE based on the findings of empirical research. Sears and Hughes (1996)
presented ideal types of CCE based on a study of the existing conceptions of CCE in
Canada. To compose the different ideal types that represented these different con-
ceptions, they evaluated numerous official documents regarding CCE from through-
out the country, representing all of Canada’s provinces. Based on the evaluation of
these documents, the researchers derived the existing conceptions of CCE and
presented them as ideal types. These types include: (1) a state-based conception,
which concentrates on issues of national importance, such as the state’s institutions
and its shared values and norms; (2) a liberal conception, which emphasizes the
personal skills such as the ability to scrutinize public issues and the articulation of
personal value positions; (3) the cosmopolitan conception that stresses the need to
understand world issues such as the topic of environmental responsibility; and (4) a
social justice conception that is centered on the issues of equality, oppression, and
discrimination.
In the same manner, Westheimer and Kahne (2004) surveyed the different
undercurrent beliefs of good citizenship as appeared in educational programs
aimed at promoting democracy in the USA. In their research, they pinpointed
three concepts of good citizenship that may be seen as the base for the ideal
types of CCE: (1) the personal responsibility conception, which sees its goal as
developing each citizen’s own individualistic character; (2) the participation
conception that promotes citizenship that is of an active leadership role; and
(3) the justice-driven conception that calls for citizens to critically assess the
structures of injustice in society. The authors illuminated the limitations of the
personally responsible citizen, thus promoting either the participatory or the
justice-oriented models of CCE. These two sets of typologies are similar in the
sense that they illuminate the conceptions of CCE as they are defined based
mainly on the initial stage of the educational process concerning the normative
expectations and goals.
Rubin (2007) offered a typology of civic identities based on interviews and
discussions conducted with students. She arranged these identities of citizen-
ship based on the range of the students’ approaches regarding their civic
experiences about the ideals taught in school and based on their attitudes
toward civic participation. As a result, she offered four types of civic identity:
aware, empowered, complacent, and discouraged. In relation to these identities,
Rubin pointed to the fact that factors such as race, socioeconomic status, and
65 Typologies of Citizenship and Civic Education: From Ideal Types to a. . . 1039

community of origin all influenced the development of the students’ civic

identity.
Based on a study of eight social studies teachers in Singapore, Sim and Print
(2009) offered three ideal types that encompass these teachers’ citizenship under-
standings and classroom practices. These types include a nationalistic, socially
concerned, and person-oriented approaches, whereas each approach emphasizes
the surrounding related to as part of the civic education process – the nation, society,
or the individual student. In a subsequent study of 14 social studies teachers in
Singapore (Sim et al. 2017), additional ideal types of citizenship were presented.
These included: (1) character-driven, (2) social-participatory, and (3) critically
reflexive approaches. The authors showed how each approach emphasized different
aspects of teaching. For example, whereas the character-driven approach yielded
different teaching methods, the critically reflexive teachers engaged more in issues
of social justice.
An additional typology based on an empirical study was presented by Castro
(2013), who investigated the approaches to citizenship presented by preservice
teachers at a Midwestern university in the USA. His guiding assumption was that
citizenship worldviews served as a foundation, guiding teachers’ beliefs and actions.
He found that participants identified with either a conservative-values-based or
awareness-based definitions of citizenship, presenting them as ideal types of civic
education. The former type relates to teaching certain values, traits, and morals,
whereas the latter emphasizes the citizen’s awareness of community issues and the
ability to enforce social change.
Based on parts of this review, a preliminary report (Cohen 2010) resulted in the
construction of four ideal types of conceptions of CCE, set on a theoretical field
between the interactions of two axes: political knowledge and normative values
(see Fig. 1 – Four conceptions of civic education on two axes). These conceptions
were determined by the combination of what type of knowledge and which
perception of values are emphasized in the educational process, influencing the
civic behavioral outcome. The four ideal types and their main educational goal are
as follows: (1) Liberal Civic Education – the student will develop the individual-
istic skills needed in order to take part in the political process; (2) Diversity Civic
Education – the student will understand the ways in which the different social
groups that compose society may receive recognition and take part in the national
field; (3) Critical Civic Education – the student will develop individual analytical
skills needed in order to understand the unjust reality of society better; and
(4) Republican Civic Education – the student will possess a feeling of belonging
and solidarity to the national entity.
To summarize, reviewing these 12 typologies of CCE exposes the various
assumptions, frameworks and classroom practices that guide and influence how
this subject can potentially be taught. Whereas such typologies may be seen as a
helpful tool, in the sense that they enable a better understanding of such different
options, in the following I will argue that they should not be seen as a mere
prescription, but rather as a reflective tool.
1040 A. Cohen

Procedural
Political
Knowledge

1) 2)
Liberal Diversity
Civic Civic
Education Education
Individualistic Communal
X
Normative Normative
Values Values
3) 4)
Critical Republican
Civic Civic
Education Education

Substantive
Political
Knowledge
Y

Fig. 1 Four conceptions of civic education on two axes (Cohen 2010)

Typologies of Citizenship and Civic Education – Towards a

Reflective Tool

As a result of this review, in the following section, the merits of the methodological
approach of ideal types in the context of CCE will be discussed, while critically
examining its practical applications. I will first question the potential oversimpli-
fication that may be the result of using such ideal types, due to their grounding in
specific empirical cases alone. Building on the ideas of Karl Popper (1965), I will
advance this debate by emphasizing the ideal types’ theoretical-philosophical
components. Based on this critique, I will offer to shift the attention from the
contents of the ideal type to the methodological process in which they were
created.
Following Banks (1993b), who explained that the use of ideal types is “a useful
conceptual tool for thinking about knowledge and planning” (p. 6), I will ultimately
argue that the use of such typologies should not be restricted to the portrayal of fixed
desirable ideals, marking educational goals and aspirations that are external to the
practitioners’ perceptions, but rather as a heuristic tool that is situated as an internal
means of self-reflection. To the best of my knowledge, studies that examine how
such typologies are accepted and perceived by teachers, teacher educators, or
practitioners do not exist. Therefore, this argument is in no way aimed at the scholars
who constructed them. Nevertheless, the argument does wish to address current
trends in the field of educational studies that fixate on tangible educational practices
65 Typologies of Citizenship and Civic Education: From Ideal Types to a. . . 1041

alone, overlooking reflective aspects. (For an example of such a debate in the field of
teacher education see Zeichner (2012).)
One apparent flaw that emerges as a result of this review is the lack of a sound
theoretical ground on which several of the ideal types are based, particularly those
rooted in empirical research limited in cases. This critique is mainly based on the
foundational ideas of Karl Popper (1965), who stressed the use of a more deductive
point of view, one that bases the understanding of the world on a solid hypothesis
solely derived from observations. (He argued that such a hypothesis should be checked
and rechecked by additional observations, and in time, may be refuted. Popper
explains that this sort of understanding is more scientific and it differs from explana-
tions that are based on an ongoing gathering of observations that tend to reinforce
themselves. In the realm of this inductive methodology, this ability to refute a theory
by setting additional counter options does not exist. As a result, Popper explains, the
emphasis on the inductive assumptions and methods may, in fact, encourage pseudo-
scientific studies.) Thus, typologies based on ideal types that represent a specific reality
of the cases studied by the research alone are less satisfactory.
As mentioned, the goal of this claim is not to undermine scholars who conducted
such work, but rather to question the tendency to oversimplify significant differences
in theoretical positions on CCE, which in turn may obscure fundamental implications
for practice. When creating ideal types, the researcher should aspire to correlate the
types with the theoretical-philosophical debate, which will enable a future evaluation
of multiple case studies. In other words, based on Popper’s (1965) assumptions, it may
be claimed that ideal types that were derived from the inductive methodology leave
room to question the process of generalization that is based on these cases alone. In
fact, this methodological practice contradicts Weber’s (1949) original suggestion to
compose ideal types that are based on numerous case studies to create an accurate ideal
representation of the phenomenon. It may be claimed that this representation can never
be reached due to the problem of the researcher’s personal bias. Nevertheless, this does
not dismiss the researcher’s responsibility to aspire to reach the best representation
based on the theoretical aspect of the field of study.
In this regard, typologies of CCE that are based on the inductive process of
constructing ideal types rooted in particular settings are of some importance since
they offer potential interpretations of this educational practice that may not exist in
other settings. In this manner, several studies analyzed CCE while comparing
empirical data to such ideal types. (For example, Leung et al. (2014) compared
official policy documents from Hong Kong to the three ideal types offered by
Westheimer and Kahne (2004), pointing to the lack of the justice-oriented citizen
conception in this context. Marri et al. (2014) reached a similar conclusion in their
study of U.S. based urban pre-service teachers’ views.)
However, once such ideal types are portrayed as desirable ideals that practitioners
should aspire to, the practitioners particular and local understandings and interpre-
tations may get lost in the process. Patterson et al. (2012) express such a concern
regarding their empirical study of teacher’s views based on a comparison to the
Westheimer and Kahne (2004) ideal types. They concluded that “teachers are able to
articulate ‘university-speak’ citizenship aims, but too often the nuance of their
1042 A. Cohen

responses suggests a different kind of citizenship” (Patterson et al. 2012, p. 204).

Instead, such typologies should attempt to encompass different theoretical options
and possibilities, following the deductive approach offered by Popper. Thus, the very
role of the use of ideal types will shift – from the portrayal of educational goals and
practices to a heuristic tool that enables the process of self-reflection. In other words,
instead of emphasizing the content of the ideal type, we should embrace the
methodological process in which they were created. This logic will be demonstrated
following based on an example derived from the field of teacher education.
General educational studies (Marcos and Tillema 2006), and particular research in
the field of teacher education (Gay and Kirkland 2003; Hatton and Smith 1995),
point to the act of teacher reflection as an essential factor, influencing practice.
Following this notion, typologies and ideal types may be used as a pedagogical
tool, encouraging this act of self-reflection. For example, as part of preservice and
in-service training, student-teachers and novice teachers may be asked to compose a
typology based on ideal types they identify in their educational surroundings. Such
an act may help them reflect on the particular context in which they act and on their
role in this context. Subsequently, student-teachers and novice teachers may be
asked to create their own desired ideal type, as an amalgamation of different
components they identified and related to. This too, I assume, will assist in their
process of self-reflection regarding their personal aspirations, while relating to their
students and the institutions in which they teach.
A significant advantage that such an approach offers is that it does not force
teachers to choose one ideal type over the other. The different ideal types are thus not
seen as competing, but rather as completing one another. In this manner, teachers
have the freedom to decide which components of the ideal types should be empha-
sized, based on their understanding of the context in which they teach. As explained
by Banks (1993a):

Typologies are helpful conceptual tools because they provide a way to organize and make
sense of complex and disparate data and observations. However, their categories are
interrelated and overlapping, not mutually exclusive. Typologies are rarely able to encom-
pass the total universe of existing or future cases. Consequently, some cases can be described
only by using several of the categories (p. 7).

The benefits of such an approach are twofold: it encourages practitioners to relate to

existing concepts and ideas as presented as part of the discourse; also, it respects
their personal views and ideologies in relation to their local contexts.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I examined the methodological use of typologies and construction of

ideal types in the field of CCE. I explained that this approach is not surprising due to the
convoluted state of the field of CCE. Nevertheless, when relating to the original
intentions of this methodological tradition, and the methodological discussions it sparks,
65 Typologies of Citizenship and Civic Education: From Ideal Types to a. . . 1043

it became clear that the strength of this approach is not only in the presentation of such
types based on empirical studies of limited cases. The danger of such an approach is in
the oversimplification when translating such types to actual classroom practice. There-
fore, as an alternative, I offer to expand such discussions beyond the content of fixed
ideal types, to the very process in which such ideal types are constructed.
As such, future studies may examine how ideal types are enacted by teachers,
teacher educators, and practitioners. Various methods of using such ideal types as
pedagogical tools may be explored on both theoretical and practical levels. In
addition, it would be interesting to examine how such use of ideal types is accepted
and perceived by different types of learners and by diverse cultural groups. In this
manner, the use of ideal types as part of the CCE process may be further explored,
emphasizing its use as a true educational-pedagogical reflective tool, forging the
much-needed connections between theory and practice.

Document Analysis Protocol

Identifying Information:

1. Resource Name
2. Author/s
3. Year of Publication
4. Publishers
5. Description (Book/Book Chapter/Article)

General Questions:

1. What are the goals and main arguments of this document?

2. What topics does it relate to?
3. How is it organized?

Conceptions of Citizenship and Civic Education:

1. Which conceptions of citizenship and civic education appear in the document? In

what manner?

Conception Expression
1044 A. Cohen

2. How else does the text refer to conceptions of citizenship and civic education?
3. What is the excerpt that best represents the manifestation of conceptions of
citizenship and civic education in the text?
4. Are conceptions of citizenship and civic education represented in a theoretical
manner? What is the best excerpt that represents this?
5. Are conceptions of citizenship and civic education represented empirically? What
is the best excerpt that represents this?

Summary:

1. How can this text be summarized?

2. Any additional observations?

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Citizenship, Disability Discrimination, and
the Invisible Learner 66
Fiona Hallett

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1048
Inclusive Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1049
The Capability Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1052
Disability Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1054
Critical Disability Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1055
(Dis)Ability Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1056
Ableism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1056
Disableism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1056
Crip Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1056
Transnational Models of Disability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1057
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1058
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1059

Abstract
This chapter outlines three theoretical lenses (Inclusive Education, the Capability
Approach, and Disability Studies) that can be used to think about citizenship,
disability discrimination, and the invisible learner. Throughout the chapter, the
term invisible learner is used in order to emphasize the marginalizing effects of
educational systems and the processes of identity formation and societal engage-
ment. The lenses have been selected to represent the ways in which scholars have
described the impact of educational systems on learners with disabilities. The first
lens, Inclusive Education, will be familiar to most readers in citizenship education
and includes debates around the disabling effects of society. The Capability
Approach is then outlined as an example of how thinking in other fields –

F. Hallett (*)
Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, UK
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 1047
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3_58
1048 F. Hallett

predominantly philosophy and economics – has been adopted and adapted in

education. The third theoretical lens, Disability Studies, includes Critical Disabil-
ity Studies, (Dis)ability Studies, and Transnational Models of Disability. The
notion of an invisible learner emerges throughout each of the models as a product
of blinkered viewpoints that pathologize difference rendering the learner less
visible than the perceived disability. The chapter concludes with an outline of
arguments that seek to look beyond the global West in theory application and
development.

Keywords
Ableism · Disability · Capability approach · Critical disability studies ·
Disability · (Dis)ableism · Inclusive education · Inclusive pedagogy

Introduction

When considering citizenship, or for that matter, citizenship education, it is all

too easy to ignore disability, and it is difficult to understand why this might be
the case. As a form of Othering in practice (the term “Othering” is used in
sociology to analyze how minority identities are constructed), disability dis-
crimination demonstrates the nature of fractured societies and is worthy of
deeper analysis. Indeed, whether the reader of this text has an interest in
disability, or not, is less relevant than the need to look at citizenship from a
range of perspectives.
Exclusion and disability discrimination have been studied over a number of
decades from a range of theoretical perspectives. While debates in the field naturally
evolve, and even resurface, the current United Nations’ focus on equality in educa-
tion creates a space for a chapter of this nature to be both introductory and of
practical relevance. For instance, debates around Inclusive Education are addressed
in the United Nations General Assembly 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development
(U.N. 2015), which is based around 17 Sustainable Goals that represent a framework
for action that is universal, ambitious, and significantly, “of the people, by the people
and for the people” (U.N. 2015, p. 12).
Sustainable Development Goal 4 – Education – calls for the international com-
munity to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong
learning opportunities for all” within key pillars of access, equity, and inclusion.
Here, attention is paid to the need to:

• Eliminate gender disparities in education and ensure equal access to all levels of
education and vocational training for the vulnerable, including persons with
disabilities, indigenous peoples, and children in vulnerable situations. (SDG 4.5)
• Build and upgrade education facilities that are child, disability and gender
sensitive and provide safe, non-violent, inclusive, and effective learning environ-
ments for all. (4a)
66 Citizenship, Disability Discrimination, and the Invisible Learner 1049

In addition, with reference to the Capability Approach defined later in this

chapter, a commitment is made to ensure that:

People who are vulnerable must be empowered. Those whose needs are reflected in the
Agenda include all children, youth, and persons with disabilities (of whom more than 80 per
cent live in poverty). (U.N. 2015, p. 7)

Each of these perspectives is interrogated by Disability Studies scholars. That is, the
need to effect change by examining the intersectionality of gender, race, sexuality,
and disability is brought to the fore: Disability Studies is about more than the study
of disability in society.
In response to this agenda, this chapter deals with three theoretical lenses, which
can be used to think about citizenship, disability discrimination, and the invisible
learner. This is not to create artificial separation between these fields; rather, the
purpose is to outline areas of scholarship that can be explored more thoroughly by
the reader. To this end, key readings are identified and interrogated, throughout the
chapter in order to demonstrate the wider relevance of this area of scholarship.

Inclusive Education

While the concept of inclusion may be ubiquitous and even dominant across
educational discourses, it would be fair to say that an agreed meaning of either
“inclusion” or “Inclusive Education” remains elusive. In 2012, Hodkinson published
an often-cited article within which he articulated the conceptual difficulties in
attempting to define what inclusion is, and what Inclusive Education became, during
the latter part of the twentieth century and first decade of the twenty-first century in
England. In this article, Hodkinson expressed three primary concerns, namely, that
inclusion in England was not a simple construct but was infected with extant
ideological ghosts, that government policy was confused, and that inclusion policy
failed and became illusionary, because it was not radical enough (Hodkinson 2012,
p. 4). Liz Atkins further analyzed the idea of illusionary inclusion (Atkins 2016) by
applying it to a real-world example of the legitimization of discriminatory practices,
highlighting the influence of what has been described as the “Special Educational
Needs (SEN) industry” (Tomlinson 2012, 2017). By adopting this term, Tomlinson
points to the learned helplessness of parents and professionals who, faced with
“specialist” resources, provided on the basis of categorization, become dependent
upon an industry designed to expand their clientele in performative school cultures.
These complexities remain significant in the field with many authors tackling the
continued conceptual confusions surrounding Inclusive Education. For example,
Julie Allan continues to examine conceptual confusion, alongside how such confu-
sions are played out in practice (2015). More than 20 years after the Salamanca
Statement, Allan, and others, seek to explore the degree to which the Salamanca
vision of “all children being accommodated in ordinary schools” (UNESCO 1994)
had been achieved.
1050 F. Hallett

An interesting text that analyzes Inclusive Education across a broad range of

national contexts (Armstrong et al. 2016) includes an international conversation on
Inclusive Education by Jenny Corbett and Roger Slee. Originally published in 2000,
this book outlines enduring debates around Inclusive Education (at least in the global
West), such as those relating to human rights, equal opportunities, and social justice.
This is not to argue that these agendas no longer require scrutiny in the West; indeed,
one value of this book is that it examines enduring challenges from new perspec-
tives. Further evidence of the degree to which these challenges remain in the global
West continue to be explored in relation to issues such as disability hate crime (Ralph
et al. 2016) and the impact of austerity on funding choices (Timberlake 2018).
Within these debates, Inclusive Pedagogy could be described as a means by
which inclusion can be enacted in educational settings, focusing on meeting the
needs of all learners, including those with Special Educational Needs and Disabil-
ities. As such, Inclusive Pedagogy rejects the notion that any learner has a “fixed”
ability with an emphasis on recognizing that what teachers choose to do impacts
upon achievement. The very notion of Inclusive Pedagogy, similar to that of
inclusion, is seductive; who would not want to adopt inclusive pedagogical
approaches? However, the concept can be somewhat slippery; what does Inclusive
Pedagogy look like? How does it differ from teaching that is nondiscriminatory in
intent?
Lani Florian is, arguably, the primary proponent of Inclusive Pedagogy and has
written widely on the subject, from initial explanations of Inclusive Pedagogy
(Florian 2010; Florian and Black-Hawkins 2011) to more recent expositions of the
Inclusive Pedagogical Approach in action (Florian 2015). As she explains in the
latter publication:

By focusing on how achievements in learning are realised through participation in the

community of a classroom, the inclusive pedagogical approach acknowledges that there
are individual differences between learners but avoids the problems and stigma associated
with marking some learners as different. (Florian 2015, p.11)

This focus on the community of a classroom attempts to highlight the stigma of

labels in order to address important questions about Dilemmas of Difference which
Brahm Norwich (2009) has identified as the cost/benefit of diagnosing or “labeling”
a child with a disability in order to gain access to additional support or resources.
Clearly, such debates become a political endeavor and are gaining more attention
across the field. For example, Greenstein argues for Radical Inclusive Pedagogy by
drawing upon:

theoretical ideas from disability studies to explore notions of difference, interdependency

and social exclusion/inclusion, and on the ideas of various critiques of education, particu-
larly those associated with the field of critical pedagogy, to rethink the meaning of education
and the role of schools. (Greenstein 2016, p. 5)

As a former practitioner (teacher, speech, and language therapist), Greenstein

offers a compelling account of his move from practitioner to researcher in the
66 Citizenship, Disability Discrimination, and the Invisible Learner 1051

process of developing a more openly political approach to education and school-

ing. He describes Oliver’s explanation of the Social Model of Disability (Oliver
1990a) as a “lightbulb moment.” Oliver’s model holds sway in much of the
literature around inclusion and Inclusive Education, if only as a counterpoint to
the Medical Model of Disability. In brief, Oliver argued that the Social Model of
Disability:

. . .does not deny the problem of disability but locates it squarely within society. It is not
individual limitations, of whatever kind, which are the cause of the problem but society’s
failure to provide appropriate services and adequately ensure the needs of disabled people
are fully taken into account in its social organization. Further, the consequences of this
failure does not simply and randomly fall on individuals but systematically upon disabled
people as a group who experience this failure as discrimination institutionalized throughout
society. (Oliver 1990b, p. 3)

Interestingly, he has revisited these arguments in recent years, exploring their

relevance “30 years on.” Firstly, Oliver and Barnes revised The Politics of
Disablement which, while in many ways true to the original text, has additional
chapters addressing issues around ideology, the disabled individual, and
constructing disabled identities in more depth (Oliver and Barnes 2012). In
addition, Oliver authored a retrospective article on the use and utility of the
Social Model of Disability, restating his view of what the Social Model was
and what he sees as its potential for improving the lives of disabled people
(Oliver 2013).
In summary, Inclusive Education (including discussions around the Social Model
of Disability and Inclusive Pedagogy) is widely recognized in the West and is
beginning to be addressed in areas such as Central Asia (Rouse and Lapham
2013). In an interesting juxtaposition of questions that remain on the agenda in the
West, Rouse and Lapham offer a series of case studies conducted in Central Asia,
which aimed to address the following questions:

• To what extent do education policies and practices include, or further marginalize,

the most vulnerable?
• How are services structured to account for the needs of different groups?
• Are government programs using education as an equalizing force, particularly in
the early years, or are educational policies and practices designed to preserve the
status quo or create new elite groups?
• Does the broader community of teachers, parents, and children have meaningful
opportunities to participate in the conception, design, delivery, and monitoring of
education?
• How is disability defined in the region, and to what extent are these notions of
disability consistent with social and interactional models of disability in other
parts of the world?
• What are the implications for the reform of teacher preparation and professional
development for those who work to support children, young people, and their
families? (ibid., pp. 2–3)
1052 F. Hallett

In terms of the aforementioned debates around conceptions and enactments of

Inclusive Education, it is interesting to note that this set of questions continue to be
asked by the previously cited authors about practices in the UK, Australia, the USA,
and other European contexts. Furthermore, even where it is accepted that deficit
approaches need to be addressed, there can be a lack of focus on interrogating deeper
assumptions about the aims and purpose of education; it is all too easy to assume that
practice that looks inclusive is inclusive.
The next section in this chapter turns to the Capability Approach. While origi-
nating in the work of Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen around welfare economics,
the Capability Approach continues to be adopted, and adapted, by the academic
community and therefore represents an important focus for those interested in
citizenship, disability, and the invisible learner.

The Capability Approach

While initially developed as an economic theory, the Capability Approach has latterly
been used as an approach to understand disability beyond the aforementioned
“Dilemma of Difference” (Terzi 2005). Amartya Sen presented “basic capability
equality” in The Tanner Lecture on Human Values (Sen 1979) recognizing that:

The notion of the equality of basic capabilities is a very general one, but any application of it
must be rather culture-dependent, especially in the weighting of different capabilities. (Sen
1979, p. 219)

In terms of the “invisible learner” referred to in this chapter, the Capability Approach
offers a useful conceptual framework for understanding explicit, and implicit, forms
of discrimination. Sen’s position was adopted in contradistinction to the “primary
goods” arguments set forward by Rawls, who Sen described as taking:

primary goods as the embodiment of advantage, rather than taking advantage to be a

relationship between persons and goods. (Sen 1979, p. 216)

From his original notion of equality of basic capabilities, Sen elaborated the Capa-
bility Approach by arguing for five distinct types of freedoms, political freedoms,
economic facilities, social opportunities, transparency guarantees, and protective
security, each of which helps to advance the general capability of a person (Sen
1999).
Aligned, but with something of a twist, Martha Nussbaum argues for a Capabil-
ities (my emphasis added) Approach in the form of a list of aspects of life to which
capabilities relate. These are:

1. Life. Being able to live to the end of a human life of normal length.
2. Bodily health. Being able to have good health, including reproductive health;
being adequately nourished.
66 Citizenship, Disability Discrimination, and the Invisible Learner 1053

3. Bodily integrity. Being able to move freely from place to place; being able to be
secure against violent assault, including sexual assault.
4. Senses, imagination, thought. Being able to use the senses; being able to
imagine, to think, and to reason – and to do these things in a way informed
and cultivated by an adequate education; being able to use imagination and
thought in connection with experiencing and producing expressive works and
events of one’s own choice; being able to use one’s mind in ways protected by
guarantees of freedom of expression with respect to both political and artistic
speech and freedom of religious exercise; being able to have pleasurable
experiences and to avoid non-beneficial pain.
5. Emotions. Being able to have attachments to things and persons outside our-
selves; being able to love those who love and care for us; being able to grieve at
their absence, to experience longing, gratitude, and justified anger; not having
one’s emotional developing blighted by fear or anxiety.
6. Practical reason. Being able to form a conception of the good and to engage in
critical reflection about the planning of one’s own life (This entails protection for
liberty of conscience).
7. Affiliation. Being able to live for and in relation to others, to recognize and show
concern for other human beings, to engage in various forms of social interaction;
being able to imagine the situation of another and to have compassion for that
situation; having the capability for both justice and friendship.
8. Other species. Being able to live with concern for and in relation to animals,
plants, and the world of nature.
9. Play. Being able to laugh, to play, to enjoy recreational activities.
10. Control over one’s environment. (a) Political: being able to participate effec-
tively in political choices that govern one’s life; having the rights of political
participation, free speech, and freedom of association (b) Material: being able to
hold property (both land and movable goods); having the right to seek employ-
ment on an equal basis with others. (Nussbaum 1999, pp. 41–42)

Nussbaum justifies this list by arguing that each of these capabilities is needed in
order for a human life to be “not so impoverished that it is not worthy of the dignity
of a human being” (2000, p. 72). Crucially, she contends that we need to consider
people individually (UN 2006). This is particularly important when considering
disability discrimination; when a learner has a given “label,” it is easy to classify
them in terms of their diagnosis, which could form the basis of discrimination –
albeit often benignly intended. Furthermore, citizenship and dignity can be viewed
in sympathetic, potentially patronizing terms. Again, while this may be well-
intentioned, such behaviors must be challenged in a civil society.
For the purpose of this chapter, it is important to consider how Lorella Terzi has
applied the Capability Approach to Disability Studies, where she argues that:

the capability approach allows the theorization of a unified framework that sees the interplay
of the theoretical level of defining disability and special needs in education with the political
level of determining a just educational entitlement. (Terzi 2005, p. 445)
1054 F. Hallett

From this perspective, the Capability Approach encourages us to see the whole child,
including their strengths and how these can be built upon. The World Health
Organization uses this approach in the International Classification of Functioning,
Disability and Health (WHO 2007). This document sits alongside the WHO Diag-
nostic Manual (2018) as a means by which people can assess the positive functions
of an individual, alongside making a diagnosis.
While not specifically aligned with the Capability Approach, the intention is
clearly similar; as Terzi points out:

perspectives emphasizing individual limitations end up overshadowing the role played by

the design of schooling institutions in determining learning difficulties. Conversely, per-
spectives that identify schooling factors as causes of learning difficulties tend to overlook
elements related to individual characteristics. (Terzi 2005, p. 446)

Here, Terzi implores us to reconsider the Dilemma of Difference in terms of justice,

an argument that she developed more fully 3 years later (Terzi 2008) and latterly with
specific reference to citizenship (Terzi 2015). With regard to the central premise of
this chapter, this emphasis on equity seeks to bring the whole learner into focus,
rather than viewing them through the lens of a given disability.
This leads us to Disability Studies, a field of scholarship that brings discrimina-
tion into sharp relief. By examining the meaning, nature and consequences of
disabilities, Disability Studies scholars embrace interdisciplinarity and
intersectionality as ways in which different disciplines ask questions about ways
of being that can help our understanding overall.

Disability Studies

Disability Studies is something of an umbrella term that can be interpreted in myriad

ways. In an effort to tease out the usages of the term, this section will outline three of
the main concepts: Critical Disability Studies, (Dis)ability studies, and Transnational
Models of Disability. The purpose of this is to explain each term while acknowl-
edging the fact that some authors have written across genres and others have
critiqued aspects of Critical Disability Studies in ways that require further examina-
tion. It could be argued that, while not wanting to pit one theoretical position against
another (when all are equally motivated by the need for change), a more immediately
practical guide to understanding Disability Studies can be found in broader socio-
logical texts (Barton 2017). As with Oliver’s book mentioned in the first section of
this chapter, the first version of Barton’s text was published in 1996 and revisited two
decades later in order to capture developments in the field.
To fully understand Disability Studies, this text is organized into four sections:

• Theoretical development, which includes chapters by the aforementioned Mike

Oliver (2017) and Colin Barnes (2017).
66 Citizenship, Disability Discrimination, and the Invisible Learner 1055

• Disability and Education, which includes reflections on the language of reason-

able accommodations (Slee 2017).
• Disability, Charities, Normalization, and Representation, which includes
chapters on power and prejudice (Shakespeare 2017) and the politics of identity
(Peters 2017).
• Disability: A Particular Research Method. This section presents a methodol-
ogy for accessing the voices of individuals with learning difficulties (Booth
2017).

For those new to, and interested in, the application of theory to the everyday – and
vice versa – this text, alongside others, “foregrounds micro- and mundane moments
in order to make sense of powerful discourses, practices and relations” (Thomas and
Sakellariou 2018, p. 4). Again, as discussed earlier in this chapter, there is little to
argue with here; identity, citizenship, and belonging raise culturally and politically
bounded questions (for related arguments about developing citizenship education for
diverse learners, see Banks 2006).

Critical Disability Studies

A useful introduction to Critical Disability Studies (CDS) was given by Dan

Goodley who identified five aspects of CDS: theorizing through materialism, bodies
that matter, inter /trans-sectionality, global disability studies, and self and other
(Goodley 2013). In doing so, Goodley concluded that:

Discrimination is an increasingly complicated entanglement of disability, gender, sexuality,

nation, ethnicity, age and class. Critical disability studies have not developed simply to
capture the theoretical interests of scholars, but have developed theories that are in concert
with contemporary lives, the complexities of alienation and rich hopes of resistance.
(Goodley 2013, p. 641)

In this sense, Goodley and others seek to explore what it means to be human and how
society pathologizes difference (Goodley et al. 2017) bringing forth the political
nature of this debate.
The strengths and weaknesses of CDS as an academic discipline have been
examined by a range of scholars in an attempt to move the field forward to take
account of barriers faced by individuals in developing national contexts. For exam-
ple, Vehmas and Watson argue that CDS has challenged practice to the same degree
as the Social Model of Disability (2013, p. 638), thus recognizing the profound
impact that this theoretical model has had on the field. Nonetheless, 10 years ago,
Meekosha and Shuttleworth argued that:

If CDS wants to contribute to theory and politics on a global level, we certainly need to listen
to theories of emancipation and social participation emerging from the global south. (2009,
pp. 65–66)
1056 F. Hallett

If, as is argued by scholars in the field, CDS is about emancipation and equal social
participation, these arguments need to extend beyond the developing world. The fact
that most scholarship is written in English and published in books and journals in the
West does not help this situation.
Many scholars are now considering the way forward for Critical Disability
Studies (Ellis et al. 2019) by revisiting issues of identity, politics, agency, and
oppression. The next section in this chapter explores these developments in more
detail.

(Dis)Ability Studies

By 2014, Goodley had addressed the argument put forward by Vehmas and Watson
(although from his own perspective, not as a specific response to this criticism) by
presenting (dis)ableism, recognizing that CDS scholars were in danger of backing
themselves into theoretical and political corners. Goodley sets out the reasons for a
distinct intellectual project that might encourage reconceptualization of disability,
ability, and the need to address the “occlusion of concerns from equally transforma-
tive political movements” (Goodley 2014, p. ix). This text theorizes ableism and
disableism, which have been explored by other authors with regard to factors
contributing to continued discrimination and prejudice (Heesoon 2018), invisible
disabilities (Kattari 2018), and Crip Theory (McRuer 2006, 2018). Given that the
purpose of this chapter is to examine the ways in which disability discrimination can
foreground the disability at the expense of recognizing the whole learner, it is worth
briefly explaining each of these terms.

Ableism

Ableism, in short, constitutes discrimination in favor of able-bodied people. Inter-

estingly, ableism has been addressed in a number of recent fields such as philosoph-
ical debates (Scuro 2017) and special education (Hehir 2018).

Disableism

Disableism refers to discrimination against disabled people and tends to be used

alongside ableism. However, the distinction made by some scholars is that
disableism recognizes the imposition of the social category of disability and its label.

Crip Theory

Robert McRuer introduced Crip Theory in 2006 as a foray into the ways in which the
interdisciplinary fields of Disability Studies and Queer Theory can inform one
66 Citizenship, Disability Discrimination, and the Invisible Learner 1057

another. While many other scholars have developed Crip Theory – too many to
mention here – McRuer has recently published a text exploring disability, globali-
zation, and resistance which relates to notions of citizenship education (McRuer
2018). In this book, he critiques the political and economic shifts observed over
recent decades and examines how disability activists can generate change and resist
dominant forms of globalization in an age of austerity which he describes as “crip
times.”

Transnational Models of Disability

The need for a transnational model of disability has been argued by Mladenov, who
pointed out that:

For disability studies and activism, the significance of embracing a transnational perspective
is potentially as far-reaching as was the significance of embracing the social model of
disability in the 1980s and the 1990s. (Mladenov 2016, p. 1236)

Referencing the paradigmatic shifts in the field, Mladenov further argues that:

Considering that the overwhelming majority of disabled people reside in the Global South, it
follows that only a transnational model of disability could effectively address the issues
faced by most of the disabled people in the world. (ibid. 2016, p. 1236)

Such concerns are explored in a far-reaching edited collection addressing real-world

contexts of war, poverty, and critical intersections (Grech and Soldatic 2016).
Specifically, this collection covers:

• Critical issues in conceptualizing disability across cultures, time, and space

• The challenges of disability models, metrics, and statistics
• Disability, poverty, and livelihoods in urban and rural contexts
• Disability interstices with migration, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality
• Disability, religion, and customary societies and practice

If, as argued by Mladenov, the significance of embracing a transnational perspec-

tive has the game-changing potential of the introduction of the Social Model of
Disability, the importance of this movement cannot be underestimated. Indeed, to
come full circle, the case studies published in the Rouse and Lepham collection,
mentioned in the first section of this chapter, elucidate the degree to which questions
of this nature are emerging in national contexts hitherto beyond the mainstream
academic gaze in order to shed a different light on the “conceptual schemas of
disability that are formulated by Western theorizing” (Gable 2014, p. 88). By
examining practices in other national contexts, we create opportunities to turn a
critical lens back on our own practice so that we can see the forms of citizenship in
which we are embedded in a new light.
1058 F. Hallett

Conclusion

In conclusion, the three broad models discussed in this chapter represent the field of
disability to date. While some could be argued to be more openly politicized than
others (notably those that sit within Disability Studies), each provokes thinking
about what it is to be an equal citizen in civil society.
Inclusive Education, including Inclusive Pedagogy, aligns with Oliver’s Social
Model of Disability and, while some describe Inclusive Education as an illusionary
concept, it offers a useful introduction for those unfamiliar with the field. The
primary aim of Inclusive Education is to put the learner before the disability and
teach in ways that include all learners, including those with Special Educational
Needs and Disabilities.
The Capability Approach is less well known to those involved in education
emerging, as it did, from economic theory and philosophy. Nonetheless, the focus
on what individuals can do, and how society can be structured to enable all citizens
to lead a fulfilled life, is wholly relevant to education. Terzi’s interpretation of the
Capability Approach demonstrates how this lens enables the identification of dis-
ability discrimination in schools in order for those involved in education to “see” all
learners.
Similarly, Disability Studies, in all forms, highlights the political nature of the
debate and the need to confront forms of discrimination in education, including those
relating to disability. While education cannot compensate for inequalities in society,
it remains deeply implicated in the reproduction of the many inequalities that exist.
As exemplified by the authors cited in this chapter, interrogation of the various
aspects of our identities helps us to better understand our thinking, our perception of
the world, and how we see and interpret others.
It is hoped, therefore, that a chapter of this nature does more than outline a field of
study; the purpose is to engage in thinking that goes some way toward aiding us in
avoiding “Othering” citizens from different groups and with different backgrounds,
experiences, and expectations. Aligned to this, hooks argues that there can be no
intervention that challenges the status quo if we are not willing to interrogate the
norm (hooks 2003, p. 147). Familiarizing ourselves with the arguments and research
outlined in this chapter is an important start and serves as a basis for developing our
own understanding of citizenship. The next step is to reflect upon our personal
educational trajectories and our beliefs, values, and expectations with respect to
education.
In addition, we need to be aware of potential barriers to learning such as the need
to “eliminate gender disparities in education and ensure equal access to all levels of
education and vocational training for the vulnerable, including persons with disabil-
ities, indigenous peoples and children in vulnerable situations” (United Nations
2015, SDG 4.5). As such, we must continually guard against viewing individuals
from underrepresented groups as being “problematic” and/or as inevitably needing
additional support. As has been argued throughout this chapter, there is much that
can be done to model a perspective that normalizes diversity and assists social
integration, to promote positive attitudes to diversity among students and colleagues,
66 Citizenship, Disability Discrimination, and the Invisible Learner 1059

and to develop and embed inclusion in education (UN 2006). In this sense, a space
can be created to examine ethical norms and social justice in education (Reindell
2016) in order to make all learners visible. Accordingly, and in response to the call to
“conduct more research on factors that may impact ableist ideas and actions”
(Friedman and Owen 2016, p. 2), scholarship around disability discrimination offers
new ways of conceptualizing the links between citizenship and education.

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Index

A Anti-school culture, 785

Ableism, 1056 Arabic, 457
Action, 74–76 Aristotle
Active citizenship, 376, 378, 393, 397–400, citizenship definition, 23–26
404, 409, 415, 499–501, 584 citizenship vs. virtue education, 29–30
and Confucian-inspired ideology, 510–511 ethics and politics, 20–21
education in Singapore, 512–514 human nature, 23
and informed citizenship, 439 life and method, 19–20
and participatory citizenship, 815, 816, political regimes and citizenship, 26
818, 821, 825 puzzles about citizenship, 26–27
Activism, 909 as social democrat, 30
blogging/social media, 577 specifics of civic education, 28–29
conceptions and practices, 572–574 virtue education, 27
gender justice work, 575 virtues, 21
trash protests, 575–576 Artifactual literacy, 958
Adelaide Declaration, 438 Asylum Seeker Resource Centre
Adolescents, 571, 707, 711, 712 (ASRC), 407
Italian adolescents, public space in, Aussie Democrazy project, 407
713–716 Australia, 907
social cohesion and quality, 713 Italian migrants in, 684–687
social spaces and institutions, 713 participation of disadvantaged/
value orientations of, 712 marginalised youth in civic and
Adult education, 106, 814, 818, 819 political action, 910–912
Adversarial model, 344 technology, in civic and political action,
Affective citizenship, 924 913–915
and critical citizenship education, 927–928 tenets of effective practices in civic and
description, 925–927 political action, 915–916
Al Baath Arabic Socialist Party, 456 youth action/engagement, 908
Al Baath party, 456, 460 Australian Youth Climate Coalition
All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG), 988 (AYCC), 913
Amour-propre Authentic citizenship education, 245
and challenges to citizenship, 83–85 Authoritative knowledge, 867
inflammation, 88 Autonomy
meaning and nature of, 83 comprehensive, 37, 43, 44
passion of, 83, 84 ethical, 43
prevention of, 84 full political, 41
Analects, 5, 7, 12 political, 36
Annihilative policy, 229 political versus comprehensive, 42
Anti-political approaches, 573 substantive, 43

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 1063
A. Peterson et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67828-3
1064 Index

B Catalonia
Banking education, 100–101 education, citizenship and politics, 237–240
Barriers to participation, 910–912 education and language, 232–234
Beck’s cosmopolitan citizen, 942, 945 framework of Spanish state, 229–230
Belfast/Good Friday Agreement of 1998, 453 future of, 235
Beliefs, 260, 264, 268 indoctrination of children by families and
Belonging, 424, 426, 427 the school, 235–237
classed and racialized, 427–429 political recentralization in, 230–232
multicultural, 421–422 Character and citizenship education (CCE),
Belonging, international students, 606 507, 770
auto-biographical factor, 609 Charles Mills’ theory of racial contract, 544
economic factor, 607–608 Charter School Management Organization
legal status, 606–607 (CMO), 217
protection of rights and wellbeing, 609–610 Charter schools, 212, 217, 221
relational factor, 608–609 Chile’s citizenship education policy
social, 608 adversarial model, 344
Bi-eroticism, 1019 comprehensive educational reforms, 347
Big Society, 849 under democracy, 349–352
Black Papers of 1977, 147 under dictatorship, 348–349
Blair, Tony, 849, 850 national identities, 352
Blogging, 577 objectives, 344
Blunkett, David, 381 teaching state, 345
Boston Public Schools project, 1010 China, 620, 895, 897
Bought privileges, 170 China Communist Youth League (CCYL), 308
and significance of economic, 171–173 Chinese citizenship and education
Brexit campaign, 851 CPC supremacy, 301–302
Bridge-building pedagogies, 957–959 cross-curriculum approach, 306
Brigada Eskwela program, 284 cyber security law, 305
Britishness, 420–423, 429 drastic ideological change, 303
British values, 420, 422, 424, 426 gongmin and renmin, 300
Brown, Gordon, 849, 850 issues, 309–310
periods, 298
post-Mao China’s socialist Chinese
C citizenship framework, 303
Cameron, David, 849 prior to Socialist Chinese Republic,
Canada, 196 298–299
citizenship, 198–200 Citizenship, 142, 143, 213, 217, 219, 221, 228,
indigenous Nationhood in, 197–198 420, 429, 430, 569, 574, 600, 602, 609,
inherent rights, 204–205 610, 724, 725, 832, 1020, 1023
opportunities for learning, 206–208 in age of extremisms, 986–988
reconciliation movement, 200–202 American, 487
relationships conditioned by rights, Amour-propre and challenges to, 83–85
202–205 Aristotle’s definition, 23
Canada, youth civic engagement and formal in California, 731–734
education, see Youth civic engagement civic liberal, 45
and formal education, in Canada consumer, 147
Capability Approach, 1049 cosmopolitan, 992
aspects of life, 1052 decentralization, 50
disability studies, 1053 deprivation, 990
freedoms, 1052 education importance, 992
invisible learner, 1052 education policy making, in England,
World Health Organization, 1054 147–150
CASEL, 1005 and education studies, 725–727
Index 1065

education vs. virtue education, 29 political literacy, 383

first national curriculum, 383–387 political will, 381–383
flexible, 984 social and moral responsibility, 383
geo-politics, 147 Citizenship education, 157, 316, 502–503, 551,
implications for, 986 591, 620, 621, 623, 630, 668, 673, 799,
inaccurate portrayals of, 484 802, 803, 805, 852, 857, 966, 975, 976,
interdisciplinary approach to, 489 978, 979
and ISM (see International student mobility adaptation, 156
(ISM)) aims, 512
loss of, 989 as Cindrella subject, 319–321
models of, 142 collective emancipation, 156
moral and ethical responsibility of Confucian conception of (see Confucian
citizens, 147 citizenship education)
narratives of, 839–841 critical approaches, 157
national, 489 critical theory, 331
policy, 989 developments in, 4
political liberal, 37 Dewey on, 114, 115, 118, 121
political liberal education, 42 dilemmas and possibilities, 334–335
and political regime, 26 ecological, 163
puzzles about, 26 educational ensemble, 330–331
republican, 486 ethical and political dilemmas in settler
in Rousseau’s thought, 80–83 colonies, 544–546
second national curriculum, 387–392 evolution of, 503–506
third national curriculum, 392–393 gender, 161
traditional statist approaches, 146 global (see Global citizenship education
training, 488 (GCE), in South Korea)
youth advocates and allies for, 734–736 history, 334
youth citizenship and hope in Freetown, moments of possibility, 330
836–837 pedagogical approaches to, 4
Citizenship and civic education personal emancipation, 156
Almond and Verba work, 1036 in Philippines, 277–279
ambiguities and tensions, citizenship, 1037 policy, 331–332
civic identities, 1038 political aspects of, 157
conceptions in Canada, 1038 politics, 332–333
conceptions of, 1031–1032 religion and spirituality, issues of, 164
democracy in US, 1038 in Republic of Ireland, 317–319
document analysis protocol, 1043 responsibilization, 321–323
Hirschman typology, 1037 seizing moments of possibility, 330–339
ideological and political education, 1038 in Singapore, 551
literature analysis, 1034 Singapore’s communitarian approach
Marshall’s conception, 1036 to, 513
by preservice teachers, 1039 social action, 337–339
reflective tool, 1040–1042 social inquiry, 335–337
social studies in Singapore, 1039 social problems, 333–334
typologies, 1035–1039 student-centric, 507
Citizenship education, in England as well-being discourse, 323–324
active citizenship, 397–399 in Zambia (see Civic education, in Zambia)
community involvement, 383 Citizenship Foundation, 378
development of, 379–380 Citizenship in rural Sierra Leone, 837–839
history of, 377–378 Citizenship learning
national curriculum for citizenship, 383 in formal school setting, 893–894
national curriculum policy, 395–396 online participation, 895–899
policy opportunity, 379–381 social practice, 894–895
1066 Index

Civic(s), 802, 804 citizenship education, 440–443

and citizenship, 906, 907 federal education policy initiatives, 439
education, 1002, 1004, 1008 perceived social problem, 440
culture, 584 social justice, 443–444
dimension, 706, 709, 710, 712–716 youth and participation, 436–438
education model, 878 youth citizenship Australian policy
empowerment gap, 584 response, 438–440
Civic education, 584, 587, 589, 591, 594 Civil society, 837–839
civic republicanism translate into, 61 Class council, 346
conceptions of, 489 Collaborative cosmopolitanism, 966
deliverances of, 64 Colonialism, 197, 969
dynamic approaches to, 484 Communitarian approach, 849
forms of, 490 Communitarian tradition, 30
program, 484 Community, 1016, 1023
teaching of, 488 cohesion, 931
tradeoffs confronting nineteenth, 486 cultural development, 413–414
in United States, 484 involvement, 62
Civic education, in Zambia, 193 vs. liberty, 59
Christian missionary, 188 political, 54
CPDs, 191 Community Involvement Programme (CIP),
democratic education, 188 767, 770
educational policies and reforms, 192 Community Service Volunteers, 378
junior level of secondary education, Compensation hypothesis, 586
189, 190 Confucian citizenship education
learners attitudes and habits, 192 dao (Way), 8–10
national education policy, 188 junzi (exemplary persons), 6–8
political, economic and social utilization of dialogue, reflective citizens,
challenges, 187 10–12
school curriculum, 190, 191, 193 zhengming (rectification of names), 6
senior level of secondary education, 191 Confucian Ethics, 766
transformative citizenship education, 189 Confucian-inspired ideology, 501–502,
values, 191 510–511
Civic engagement Confucianism, 298
challenges, 593–594 Confucius, 6, 8, 9, 12
individual resources approach, 585–588 belief, 12
institutional resources approach, 588–592 citizenship education (see Confucian
multi-layered approach, 592–593 citizenship education)
Civic participation, Singapore, 761–762 cultural embededness of knowledge, 8
non-political participation, 762–763 reflective thinking, 10
political participation, 763–764 Conscientization, 98–99
Civic Republicanism Constructivism, 857
adherents of, 54 Consumerism, 854
into civic education, 61 Consumers, 142, 147, 150
described, 54 Continuous professional development (CPDs)
political freedom, 57 activities, 191
problems and issues, 58–61 Corporate security, 972
strengths of, 64 Cosmopolitan citizenship
Civics and citizenship education, 245–246 Beck’s cosmopolitan citizen, 942, 945
programs, 1007 dimensions of, 941
in Zimbabwe (see Zimbabwe) educational processes, 940, 945
Civics and citizenship education in Australia entrepreneurial citizenship, 942
active and informed citizenship, 439 global citizenship, 943
aims, 436 global inequalities, 943
Index 1067

glocal scale, 944 spiritual, 1018

scientific citizenship, 942, 946 stages of, 1022
self-organization of legal system, 945 Democratic citizenship, 40
social autonomy capacity of self Democratic education, 104–105
organizitaion, 942 Democratic knowledge project, 1007
social systems, 941 Democratic Vistas, 1016, 1020
supranational leagal concepts, 944 Department for Education and Skills (DFES),
Cosmopolitan citizenship education, 952–956 386, 387
aesthetic education in, 956–961 Development Assistance Committee
Cosmopolitan conception, 1038 (DAC), 362
Cosmopolitan imagination, 956, 959 Dewey, John, 114, 128
Cosmopolitanism, 129, 130, 638, 639, 650, on ability to think, 116
651, 660, 672, 952 approach to citizenship education, 114
Counter-Terrorism Committee (CTC), 967 on attitudes, 123
Creative inbetweenness, 571 on basic educational theory, 115
Creativity, 1016, 1020 citizenship education, challenges of,
Crick, Bernard, 378, 379, 382 128–131
Crick Report, 1036 on critical thinking, 122
Crip Theory, 1056 on democracy, 117
Critical citizenship education on democratic citizenship education, 115, 117
and affective citizenship, 927 dynamism of democracy, 137
implications for, 931–933 on education, 114
Critical civic education, 1039 education for democracy, 135, 136
Critical cosmopolitan, 959–961 experience and democracy, notions
Critical disability studies (CDS), 1055–1056 of, 131–135
Critical discourse analysis, 867 pedagogic strategies, 137, 138
Critical pedagogy, 102–103 perspectives, 137
Critical theory, 331 vs. Plato, 116
Critical thinking, 116, 121, 122 on social life, 116
Dewey on, 122 Dialogue, 10, 99, 698, 751, 961
Cross-community relations, 455 Digital citizenship and education, 914
Cuba, 620, 624 digital access, 467
Cultural-cosmopolitan, 638, 639, 642 digital communication, 467
Cultural dissonance, 170, 176–179 digital ethics, 468
Culturally responsive teaching, 1005–1006 digital health, 468
Culture wars, 487 digital law, 468
Curriculum, 316, 318–320, 324, 1001, 1004, digital literacy, 467
1005, 1007 digital rights and responsibilities, 468
policy, Zambia (see Civic education, in digital security, 468
Zambia) digital trading, 467
in Turkey, 475–479
Digitalization, in Turkey
D computer and Internet usage, 469, 471, 472
Dao (Way), 8 e-government, 473–475
Decivilization, 710–712 history of, 469
Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals information technology usage statistics,
(DACA), 725, 729, 733–734 469, 470
Democracy, 70, 438, 746, 749, 751, 1016 Disability studies
American, 1023 ableism, 1056
and education, 114, 118, 131, 132, 135, CDS, 1055–1056
136, 139 Crip Theory, 1056
index, 1016 disableism, 1056
recession, 1016 transnational model of disability, 1057
1068 Index

Disableism, 1056 Education Services for Overseas Students

Discourse analysis, 142, 144 (ESOS) Act, 609
citizenship (see Citizenship) E-government, 473–475
neoliberalism (see Neoliberalism) Emotions, 924
textually-oriented approach to, 144 emotional injunctions, 928
Discovering Democracy program, 438 Employment, 836–837, 840
Discrimination, 601, 609 Engagement, 908–910
employment opportunities and workplace, and citizenship, 847
603–605 definition, 847
“second class” citizens and marginalisation, model of citizenship, 754
602–603 youth engagement, in England (see Youth
Diversity, 695, 697, 702, 703 engagement and education, in England)
civic education, 1039 England
of religion, 260, 264, 268, 269 citizenship education, 846
DREAM Act, 729, 730, 732 government policy developments, 846
Duties, 658 religious citizenship in education
Dystopia, 966, 976–977, 979 (see Religious citizenship in education)
youth engagement and education (see Youth
engagement and education, in England)
Enlightenment, 159
E Entrepreneurial citizenship, 942
Ecological systems theory, 1010 Entrepreneurial universities, 866, 874
Education, 142, 926 Environmental activism, 576
citizenship, 927, 986 Europe, young people and young adults in, 815
citizenship, in England (see Citizenship European Union
education, in England) Brexit campaign, 851
for cosmopolitan citizenship, 992 referendum on membership, 851
domestic, 90 Every Child Matters, 387
governance, 142 Experience, 128, 129, 131–136, 139
modes of, 87 Extremism(s), 967
policy making, in England, 147 age of, 984–986
Prevent and FBVs in, 994 citizenship in age of, 986
Prevent duty to, 993 educating citizens in, 992–994
private, 90
role of, 143
sensory, 89
social care to, 145 F
1996 Education Act, 852 Fair Work Ombudsman (FWO), 610
Education Act of 1966, 188 Faith, 156, 160, 163–164
Educational and civic practices, 709–710 FATIH project, 476
Educational citizenship, 69–71 Filipino teachers
Educational ensemble, 330 augmented participation in politics,
Educational innovation policy, 941 288–290
Educational mobility and citizenship, 635 community engagements, 284–287
China, Indian medical students in, 642 forms of community engagements,
and formal/legal citizenship, 636 social identity, and citizenship
and global citizenship, 638 education, 283–284
Singapore, Chinese “foreign talent” students National citizenship education (NCE),
in, 640 279–283
Educational processes, 945 practical skills and self-efficacy, 291
Education policy, 325, 436, 438–441 school-community linkage to, 281
1988 Education Reform Act, 379 traditional cultural, social, and religious
Education Reform Act (ERA), 147 activities, 290–291
Index 1069

Financial crisis, 850 Global citizenship education (GCE), 695, 702

First Nations sovereignty in settler colonies, challenges, 696–698
540–543 critical/transformationalist, 696
First World War, 798 definition, 525, 696
Flagship Diploma Program, 529 dimensions of, 526
Flagship policy, 381 diverse purposes and pedagogical
Formal education, 797, 798, 801, 805, 808 frameworks, 669–670
Formal schooling, 106–107 entrepreneurial, 526
Foucauldian discourse analysis, 142, 144, 150 global competencies approach, 696
Freedom, 54, 55 global consciousness approach, 696
concept of, 58 goals for development, 532
notion of, 56 and IFD, 700–702
version of, 56 as qualification, 670–671
Freire, Paulo radical/conflict approach, 696
adult education, 106 as socialization, 671–674
banking education, 100–101 as subjectification, 674–675
citizenship education, politics and critique, typology, 525
103–104 Global citizenship education (GCE), in South
conscientization, 98–99 Korea, 360
critical pedagogy, 102–103 changing population, 360–361
democratic education, 104–105 components of, 364
dialogue, 99 curriculum, 364
diversity and social justice education, 104 DAC, Korea’s membership of, 362
formal schooling, 106–107 limitations of, 365–366
and informal education, 107–108 multicultural education, 363
life and work of, 97–98 NGO-led GCE, 369
and literacy education, 103 ODA, 362
peace education and social policies and programs, 365
transformation, 105 SDGs, 362
praxis, 99–100 transformative learning processes, 364
problem-posing education, 101–102 typologies of, 364–365
Fundamental British Values (FBVs), 420, 421 UNESCO’s agenda, 361
arts-based education and critical World Education Forum, 362
pedagogy, 425 Global civic engagement, 639
classed and racialised belongings, 427–429 Global competence approach, 353, 639
identities, learning and teaching about, Global Connects program, 409
426–427 Global education, 362, 366
political policy, 423–424 Global Education First Initiative (GEFI), 362
racism and Islamophobia, 425–426 Global inequalities, 136, 943
schools and teachers, expectations on, Globalization, 136, 694, 697, 701, 702
422–423 challenges of, 554–561
of citizenship (see Hypercitizenship)
coping with, 553
G inherently-divergent, challenges of, 551
Galtung, Johan, 158 Global knowledge economy, 553, 559, 563
GCSE Citizenship Studies, 380, 392, 396, 398 Global middle class (GMC), 527
Gender, 156, 160–162, 164 cosmopolitan values, 530–532
General Social Survey (GSS), 800 International Baccalaureate, 529–530
Geopolitics, 968 Global state, 655, 656, 658, 660
Global citizenship, 139, 363, 635, 638, 642, Global StoryBridges project, 960
643, 667–669, 866–873, 943 Glocal scale, 944
in GCE, 650–652 Gongmin, 300
scope of, 659–660 Good Friday Agreement in 1998, 455
1070 Index

Gove, Michael, 397 Informal learning, civilization and public

Governmentality, 144, 146, 150 sphere, 708–709
Grassroots, 412–414 Institutional resources approach, 588
Interfaith dialogue (IFD), 695, 702
definition, 698
H dialogue phase, 699, 701
Habermas’s theory of communicative and GCE, 699–702
action, 960 post-dialogue phase, 699, 701
Haudenosaunee peoples, 199 pre-dialogue phase, 699, 701, 702
Higher education, 725, 727, 729 International Baccalaureate (IB), 529
Hillsborough Agreement, 453 International community, 967
Hobart Declaration, 438 International education, 637, 638
Homo economicus, 953 International student mobility (ISM), 635
Honneth’s theory of recognition, 781 China, Indian medical students
Human good life, 24 in, 642–644
Human nature, 23 and formal/legal citizenship, 635–638
Human security, 971 and global citizenship, 638–639
Hunhu/Ubuntu, 252 Singapore, Chinese “foreign talent” students
Hybridity, 973 in, 640–642
Hypercitizenship International students, 600
cosmopolitanism (see Cosmopolitan belonging, 606–609
citizenship) employment opportunities and workplace,
definition of citizen, 939 discrimination, 603–605
evolution of citizen, 940, 941 protection of rights, wellbeing and
global policy model, 947 belonging, 609–610
knowledge, 947 “second class” citizens, marginalisation and
Marshall’s approach, 939 discrimination, 602–603
multidimensional pattern of variables, 939 Internet, 895–898
multiple identities, 940 Internet-based social media, 473
Process of Bologna, 947 Italian migrants
technology, 947 in Australia, 684–687
study of, 680
in USA, 680–684
I
Ideal types, 1030
in educational research, 1033–1034 J
methodological tradition of, 1032–1033 Junior Secondary School Curriculum, 191
Identity, 420, 422, 425, 426 Junzi (exemplary persons), 6
learning and teaching about, 426–427 Justice Citizens project, 410
Ideological education, 1038 Justice-driven conception, 1038
Idle No More (INM) movement, 202–204 Justice-oriented citizenship, 404, 410, 412,
Imperialism, 969 414, 501
Inclusive education, 1049–1052
Inclusive pedagogy, 1050
Indigenous sovereignty, 540, 542, 543 K
Individual(s), 71–74 Kathy Bickmore, 159
resources approach, 585 K-12 basic education program, 278
Informal education, 107–108, 710, 716 Korea Immigration and Integration Program
Australian youth work, 752 (KIIP), 361
description, 747–749 Korea National Statistical Office, 361
and formal education, 746 Korean GCE programs, see Global citizenship
and structural youth work, 751 education (GCE), in South Korea
Index 1071

L Migration, 526
Labor market, 788–789 economic and cultural opportunities, 1002
Laos, 620 global challenges, 1001
Learning, 424, 426–427, 430 Italian, 684
Lebanon, youth activism See also Re-imagining migration learning
blogging/social media, 577 arc
conceptions and practices of activism, 572 Mill-town mentality, 783
conceptions of youth, 570 Moral underclass discourse (MUD), 819
environmental activism, 576 Movement for Multi-Party Democracy
gender justice work, 575 (MMD), 187
trash protests, 575 Movement politics, 878–887
Legal residency, 724, 726, 731, 733 Multicultural belongings, 421–422
Legal status, 606–607 Multiculturalism, 422, 928–931
Liberal civic education, 1039 Munitions of the mind, 975
Liberal conception, 1038
Liberal democracy, 986 N
Liberal humanism, 159 Nasawiya, 575
Liberalism Nation, 421, 422, 426, 427, 429, 430
commitment to toleration, 37 National and Strategic Studies (NASS),
political, 37–42 251, 253
Liberty National Citizen Service, 849
community vs., 59 National citizenship education (NCE), 279
concept of, 54, 60 National Curriculum for Citizenship, 383–393,
establishment of, 59 852
ideas of, 63 National education, differentiated participation
love of, 60 in, 769
narrative of, 63 National education and community
negative conception of, 57 involvement programme (1990s), 766
participative, 57 National identity, 249, 252, 420, 422, 426,
practical engagement with, 55 427, 430
pursuit of, 61 National Pledge, 251, 253
republican, 54–58 National security, 970
role of, 63 National Strategy for Young Australians, 906
types of, 58 National Unified School (ENU) project, 347
Linear vs. nonlinear conflicts, 973 Natural childhood, 781–782
Linguistic Ethnography Forum, 855 Nature, 156, 159, 162–164
Literacy education, 103 Neoliberal citizenship, 142, 866, 871
Literature analysis, 1034 education policy making, in England, 147
Literatus, 1016 Neo-liberalism, 142, 143, 145, 146, 150, 320,
Local education authority (LEA), 147, 148, 150 849, 864, 866
active citizenship and adult education in,
M 816–818
Mao’s socialist citizenship framework, 303 ‘crisis of neoliberalism, 145
Marshall’s conception, 1036 ‘exogenous privatisation, 145
May, Theresa, 850 legitimacy, 145
Melbourne Declaration, 439 of political economies, 145
Membership, 652, 653 Neoliberal market logics, 784
modalities of, 655 Neoliberal schooling, 212, 213, 215, 221
political, 654 New Zealand citizenship education in,
Meta-ethnography see Citizenship education
comparative synthesis and, 171 No excuses, 216, 218, 222
phases of, 172 Non-citizenship, 600, 603, 605, 607, 610, 611
1072 Index

Non-domination, 56, 58 Personal responsibility conception, 1038

Non-formal education, 365 Personhood, 213, 214, 216, 219, 221, 222
Non-governmental organizations (NGOs), Philosophy of education, 123
GCE, role in, 366–371 Philosophy of Education Society of Great
Non-political civic participation, Singapore, Britain (PESGB), 976
762 Phronesis, 1018
Northern Ireland, 452 Poetry, 1019, 1020
challenges for children, 458 Policy, 846, 847, 852, 858
children and young people in, 454 Policy for citizenship education, in England,
citizenship education in, 452–455 see Citizenship education, in England
education curriculum in, 451 Political autonomy
education system in, 455 vs. comprehensive autonomy, 42
North Korea, 620 realization of, 36
Political civic participation, Singapore, 763
Political-cosmopolitan, 639, 642
Political education, 652, 660, 976, 977, 1038
O Political liberalism, 37–42
OECD PISA 2018 Global Competence Political literacy, 378, 383
Framework, 671 Politically-orientated citizenship
Official Development Assistance (ODA), 362 model, 893
One Arab Nation with an Immortal Political realm, 72, 76
Message, 456 Political socialization, 878
Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Political unconscious, 977
Development (OECD), 656 Postcolonialism, 674
Othering, 1048 Post-conflict contexts, citizenship education
Overseas Students Ombudsman (OSO), 610 in, 451–452
Oxfam, 656–657 Post-industrial standard narrative, 783
Postmodern peace education, 163, 164
Postneoliberalism, 145
Postsecondary education, 724
P Post-socialist era, 620, 625, 629, 630
Parochial citizenship, 1037 Practical wisdom, 1018, 1020
Participation, 23–25 Practice, 846
conception, 1038 Praxis, 99–100
political, 653, 657, 659 Presidential Commission, 248
and taxation, 659 Prevent policy, 991
Participatory citizenship, 413, 415 Problem-posing education, 101–102
Patriotic Front, 187 Process of Bologna, 947
Peace education, 105, 157, 158, 699, 700 Professional and funding bodies, 858
critical approaches, 157 Programme for International Student
educational philosophy perspective, 158 Assessment (PISA), 656
Enlightenment values, 160 Programme for Political Education (PPE), 378
faith, 163–164 Protestant schools, 455
gender, 160–162 Public choice theory, 149
nature, 162–163 Public policy, 967, 969
peacebuilding, 158 of citizenship education, in Chile, 352
peacekeeping, 158 Public reason, 37, 39, 40, 42, 46
peacemaking, 158 Public spaces
political aspects of, 157 decivilization, 711–712
Peacekeeping, 450 decline in, 712
Pedagogy, 797, 801, 804–805 in Italian adolescents, 713–716
Peking University, 306 Public sphere, 707–708
People’s Action Party (PAP), Singapore, 760 informal learning and civilization, 708–709
Index 1073

Q Rural youth
Qualifications and Curriculum Authority citizenship practices, 787
(QCA), 382, 386, 387, 392, 396 decentralized and deregularized school
Quiet Revolution, 799 system, 788
and education, 785–786
labor market, 788–789
local culture in marketing, 789–790
R material conditions and economic
Radicalization, 421 incentives, 787–790
Radicalism, 850 mobility, employment and (un)desired
Rational choice theory, 149 trajectories, 786
Rawls, John, 37, 42 representations of, 781–784
Reasonable pluralism, 37
fact of, 39
Reconciliation, 200–202
Redistributionist, 819 S
Reform, 316, 320 Scientific citizenship, 942, 946
and opening-up policy, 893 Secondary school, 584, 585, 589, 591
Re-imagining migration learning arc Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), 973
citizenship education, 1003–1004 Securitization, 966, 968
culturally responsive teaching, 1005–1006 Security
educational system, 1010 fictional representations, 974–975
educators adapting, 1010 nations and securitized citizen, 967–974
flexibility, 1010 Self-determination, 72, 74, 541, 545, 546
in-classroom lessons, 1010 Self-organization of legal system, 945
learning arc, 1007–1011 Separatism, 236
programs, 1006–1007 Settler citizen, 543–544
social emotional learning, 1005 Settler colonialism, 539, 541
theoretical and pedagogical foundations of, Sierra Leone
1004–1005 Ebola epidemic, 839–841
Relational cosmopolitanism, 955 historical and socio-political context,
Religious citizenship in education, 261 833–836
collective worship and prayer, 266–268 people’s citizenship in rural settings,
faith schools and pupil admissions, 262–264 837–839
and festivals, 264–266 youth citizenship and hope in Freetown,
pupil values and interfaith relations, 836–837
268–269 Singapore, 498
Religious education, 766 changing patterns of young Singaporeans
Renmin, 300 for political participation, 511–512
Republican civic education, 1039 citizenship education in, 502–506, 551–561
Residential School system, 196 civic participation, 761–764
Resilience, 322 conceptions of active citizenship, 499–501
Responsibilization, 212, 218, 220, 222, Confucian-inspired ideology, 501–502
321–323 education for active citizenship, 512–514
Rights, 261, 600, 603, 605, 607, 609, 611, 751 education system, 561
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 80 globalization, 551
amour-propre, 83 volunteerism, 510
domestic and civic, 85–92 youth participation in, 764–773
educational project, 84 Skills, 878, 880, 882–886
political thought, 92 Social action, 337
thoughts on citizenship, 80–83 Social autonomy capacity of self-organization,
virtue epistemology, 88 942
RUMAD, 409 Social belonging, 608
1074 Index

Social cohesion, 557 citizenship education for children from, 451

amidst growing inequality, 560–561 education in, 456
‘Asian values’ and, 553 national curriculum, 457
Social education, 584 Persian languages in, 457
Social emotional learning, 1005 power in, 456
Social exclusion, 436, 443, 814, 818, 821, 825 Russian languages in, 457
Social inequality(ies), 149, 585 schools in, 456
Social inquiry, 335 war in, 458
Social integrationist discourse (SID), 819
Socialist citizenship, 620, 621, 629, 630
Social justice education, 104, 443–444
T
Socially responsible biliteracies, 725
Tantamount to non-citizenship, 817
in action, 736–738
Teaching, 420
Social media, 855
FBVs (see Fundamental British Values
Social media activism, in new media age, 771
(FBVs))
Social model of disability, 1051
Technology, 466, 469, 474, 476, 478
Social movement organizations (SMOs), 879,
Terrorism, 967, 986, 990, 991,
880, 882, 887
993, 995
Social reproduction, 170, 174, 177
Theater-initiative program, 958
Social responsibility, 639
Thick citizenship, 410
Social studies
pop-up and student-led examples,
courses, 490
406–408
critical potential of, 491
school curricula examples, 408
curriculum, 477, 478
and thin approaches, 405–406
emergence of, 484
Totalitarianism, 966, 969
from history to, 490
Transformative citizenship education,
Social systems, 941
189, 927
Socioeconomic status (SES), 586, 589, 591
Transnational citizenship, 851
Source of inequality, 585
Transnationalism, 680, 687, 688, 847
Spanish political transition, 229
Transnational models of disability, 1057
Spatial identity, 784
Transnational preparedness, 972
Spirit of the Laws, 1019
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of
Spiritual citizens, 1023
Canada, 800
State-based conception, 1038
Turbulent student activism (1950s to
State-led GCE, in Korea, see Global citizenship
1970s), 764
education (GCE), in South Korea
Turkey Qualification Framework
State orthodoxy, 300
(TQF), 477
21st century competencies, 505, 514
31st NatCen Social Research British Social
Attitudes survey, 851
Stratification, 588 U
Study abroad, 864–866, 868, 869, 873, 874 UK Independence Party, 851
Subject citizenship, 1037 Uncomplaining accommodation, 818
Sub-Saharan Africa, 830, 842 Undocumented students
Sun’s principles, 299 benefit of, 730
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), in California, 724
362, 367 citizenship for, 739
Sweden, 782, 783, 788, 789 content and contexts pertaining to, 725
Symbiotic relationship, 974 education in the United States,
Syria, 452 728–729
Arabic language, 457 rhetorical literacies of, 739
Index 1075

state financial aid for, 724 World citizen, 941

and undocumented youth, 725 World Education Forum, 362
Unified analytical construct, 1033
United National Independence Party (UNIP),
187, 188 Y
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Young people, 878, 884, 887, 894–897
Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and young adults, 814, 820, 825
654–655 Youth
United Nations Security Council, 967 action, 908
United States of America, Italian migrants in, activism (see Activism)
680–684 agency, 832, 838
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 137, conceptions of, 570–572
138, 968, 969 empowerment, 725, 733, 735, 737
Universities-security-intelligence nexus Youth activism, 799, 851
epistemological domain, 970 civic education model, 878, 879
ethical domain, 970 hard and character skills, in participative
existential domain, 970 trajectories, 882–886
higher education institutions, 970 political socialization, 878, 879
historical analyses, 971 Youth citizenship, Australian policy
operational domain, 970 response, 438
University of Singapore (Amendment) Act, 765 Youth civic engagement and formal education,
in Canada
Canadian political culture, 797
V civic learning intentions, 798
Values, 186, 188, 190, 193 curriculum policy reforms, 802–804
Values in Action (VIA), 508, 770 educational studies, 801–802
Vietnam, 620, 622, 624, 625 issues and challenges, 805–807
Violent extremism, 421 personal and social responsibility, 798
Virtues, 21 strengthened pedagogical
Visual discourse analysis, 867 practices, 804
Voluntary civic engagement, 291 teaching practices, 799
Volunteering, 840–841 Youth Corps Singapore (YCS), 508
Youth engagement and education,
in England
Big Society, 849
W characterizations of community, 848
Wales, 262 citizenship education, 857
See also Religious citizenship in education civic action, 853
Welfare, 322, 323 civic participation, 856
Western Europe, 589 communitarian approach, 849
Western tripartite model, 299 educational policy documents, 847
Wet’suwet’en predicament, 200 government discourse, 850
Whiteness, 867, 869, 871, 873 interpersonal skills, 855
White supremacy, 544, 545 lower socio-economic backgrounds, 853
Whitman, W. personality traits, 854
early perspectives on spiritual democracy, political issues, 848
1017–1020 2011 riots, 849
impact and philosophical approach, spiritual social media, 855
democracy, 1020–1023 volunteering, 853
spiritual citizens, 1023–1025 voting, 855
Wide-awakeness, 957 youth activism, 848, 851–852
1076 Index

Youth-generated media, 577 boundaries and tensions, 745–747

Youth participation, 437, 796, 879 citizen ship formation and democratic
Youth participation, in Singapore participation, 749–752
character and citizenship education (CCE), informal education in Australian, 752–754
770–771
differentiated participation in national
education, 769–770 Z
ideal citizen (1980s), 765–766 Zhengming (rectification of names), 6
national education and community Zimbabwe
involvement programme (1990s), content of civics and citizenship education,
766–768 249
social media activism in new media age, ideological implications, civics and
771–773 citizenship education, 250–251
turbulent student activism (1950s to 1970s), nature of civics and citizenship education in,
764–765 251–254
Youth participatory action research (YPAR) political, social and economic context,
project, 1003 246–247
Youth work Presidential Commission, 248–249