Search

Research shows that teachers and educators struggle to act when conflict appears in the classroom. This article argues that (political) conflict should not be avoided or eradicated. Teachers should enable conflict and attend to their pupils in the process, in order to enable further understanding of each other and their differences, as part of living together in a plural and diverse society. Scholars and educators often take a deliberative approach to citizen education by focusing on problem solving and consensus seeking. This article explores how conflict can be educational if we accept that antagonisms are inherent parts of human relations. The aim of this paper is not to propose moral boundaries to conflicts. Instead, it wants to contribute to a shift from teaching citizenship as conflict-free space towards learning democracy, in which educational conflict, or "friction," is seen as an important part of the political education of pupils. This paper uses democratic theory, narrative theory, and the cultural-historical theory of play as described by Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, to construct analytical tools to further understand conflict in the classroom.

Recent critiques of citizenship education have identified the need for curricula that cover not only civil, political, social and cultural aspects of political belonging and responsibility, but that orient students to the realities of global engagement and responsibility. Rather than focussing on national values, histories and political procedures, the argument is that active citizenship, cosmopolitan values and identities, social justice, globally responsible behaviours, and critical self-awareness should be the goals of such education. This paper develops a typology of citizenship education, and then examines the 'Civics and Citizenship' module of the new Australian National Curriculum to understand what type of citizenship is being promoted through the curriculum and the teaching resources. The research finds that despite some opportunities to engage students' thinking more globally, and a positive focus on the rights and contributions of Australia's Indigenous peoples, the main thrust of the curriculum is the promotion and perpetuation of traditional nationalist and proceduralist citizenship, rather than global or cosmopolitan citizenship. Some recommendations for potential improvements are made.

This paper provides a Deweyian analysis of "Australia's Ethical Understanding General Capability" curriculum documents, which outline a promising moral education curriculum for students aged 4-17 years. The moral development of students has long been identified as a key aim of schooling. However, schools seldom have time for dedicated moral education classes. Furthermore, the two most prevalent approaches to moral education have been subject to considerable criticism: 1) 'traditional' character education, which has been criticised for indoctrinating students; and 2) 'progressive' inquiry based approaches that are often criticised for promoting moral subjectivism. Australia's national curriculum offers a promising alternative, named the "Ethical Understanding General Capability." It integrates moral education into existing school subjects. Drawing on the ideas of John Dewey, I argue that Australia's "Ethical Understanding" curriculum avoids both indoctrination and subjectivism and aims to foster the three key elements of moral education: 1) understanding of moral issues and concepts; 2) moral inquiry skills; and 3) moral habits and values (e.g. being honest and caring). The Philosophy for Children program (P4C), which is heavily influenced by Dewey's ideas, provides practical methods for implementing the Ethical Understanding curriculum in diverse subject areas at both the primary and secondary levels of schooling.

Conservative trends across western schooling contexts are signalling an explicit devaluing of social and moral learning within their official curriculum mandates. These mandates are increasingly privileging the "academic rigour" of traditional subject disciplines. This paper draws on interview and observation data from a case study of a large and highly diverse English secondary school to explore this school's prioritizing of social and moral learning. Such prioritizing is supported at this school by its "Academy" status--which in the English context allows schools a measure of freedom over curriculum as part of broader government moves to increase school autonomy. The paper's focus is on how these conservative trends are understood and disrupted to support a critical view of existing curriculum and a desire to modify and re-shape it to support more relevant and connected learning for students. The paper describes particular examples of practice at the school in the areas of Citizenship and Religious Education to illustrate this approach. Engaging with social and moral learning along these lines is argued as productive in working within and against the constraints of current conservative curriculum priorities.

This paper examines the Europeanization of citizenship education policy through a comparative analysis of two European states, Germany and Spain, with strong traditions of regional control of education policy. While previous studies have tended to focus on national responses to and implementation of EU initiatives, they often disregarded the complex relationship regional actors have with national state and supranational actors. Using evidence from interviews and a detailed framing analysis of citizenship education curricula, textbooks, and policy documents, this paper looks specifically at Catalonia and Bavaria to explore the conception of the "ideal citizen" within and across local education practice(s), regional policy imperatives, central state-level citizenship education policy, German and Spanish federal policy related to citizenship and immigration, and EU educational initiatives. (Contains 1 table and 6 notes.)

In recent decades there have been increased calls for UK schools to develop a more European and global orientation in their pedagogy and curriculum, and to equip children and young people with post-national knowledge, skills, and dispositions. This paper examines some key problems in post-national conceptions of citizenship education, in order to develop a research agenda focusing on the contested nature of notions of post-national citizenship (with particular attention to European and global citizenship), and on the way these notions are understood as having competing claims in education. In examining these issues the paper explains the confused governmental agendas and commitments in relation to European and/or global citizenship education, and concludes by considering alternative theories of citizenship, curriculum, and pedagogy that may provide a deeper understanding of the associated issues and tensions. Although the paper relates directly to the UK, some of the debates have a wider significance. (Contains 21 notes.)

This paper evaluates the extent to which the implementation and assessment of the new citizenship curriculum in England treats learners as citizens or subjects by evaluating whether the interests of state or citizen predominate. Philosophical, contextual, and practical perspectives on citizenship education are drawn upon to evaluate mechanisms which mediate state power in young citizens' lives. Current methods of delivering and assessing the citizenship curriculum in schools are challenged and the ideology underpinning citizenship education, as conceptualized in official discourse, is questioned. The view is advanced that citizenship cannot be reduced to what learners know (the informed citizen) or do (the active citizen) as it cannot be divorced from who they are. This paper focuses on citizenship education in the context of English liberal democracy but has a wide application as it addresses issues relevant to the state education of citizens elsewhere.

This paper analyses how textbooks deal with the issues of education for democratic citizenship encompassed within the European framework and Spanish educational reforms. The sample comprised the 24 individual texts in social science, natural science, and technology for 6-12-year-olds. This paper delimits and defines the six themes for analysis: responsibility, participation, conflict resolution, diversity, and human rights. It offers a qualitative description of the content of each theme as well as a quantitative assessment of the frequency with which they appear. The results indicate that European ideals of citizenship education are dealt with unevenly, and in some cases barely, in these textbooks. (Contains 4 notes.)

While economic factors play a crucial role in determining election outcomes, the place of economic understanding in educating citizens is neither widely recognized nor substantially articulated in the literature. Although economic educators have frequently asserted that economic understanding is important to citizens' education, they have not set out their case by engaging with the wider literature on citizenship education. This paper identifies two dimensions of an economic education that enable it to contribute to a "maximalist" citizenship education.

Despite a groundswell of evidence for transformative education, manifestos for 'transformative pedagogy for global citizenship' remain under-theorized and pay limited attention to implications for practice. This paper connects theory and practice through analyzing a curriculum development project that sought to produce a framework for 'engaged global citizens'. It considers the political and philosophical framings of the self and other, citizen and world, that underlie this empirical work, especially with reference to reflexivity, hermeneutics, democratic engagement and co-production. The resultant pedagogical framework, based upon concepts of transformative learning, attempted to undercut the homogenizing tendencies within global citizenship education (GCE). This discussion highlights the tensions and reifying effects of educational frameworks such as the Teaching Excellence Framework in the UK and the proposed framework for 'global competence' in the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment. Evidence is presented that frameworks which attempt to make explicit educational phenomena and processes are overdetermined by efficacy and metrics that become perverse ends in themselves. While the anticipated project output here was the framework itself, the substantive output was, in fact, practical: namely the ongoing deliberation and reflection upon the discourses that both do and undo the task of locating the transformative dimension of GCE.

This paper uses the concept of stories of peoplehood to examine how the Singapore government has constructed a story of harmony and to consider how this story has influenced two important school subjects focused on civic education: Social Studies and Character and Citizenship Education. Stories of peoplehood, including constitutive, economic and political power stories, play a central role in the political project of people-making which involves defining the nature of membership in a political community and promoting a collective political identity. This study provides an alternative way of conceptualizing the goals and curriculum content of civic education and it also offers an example of how a nation state with a strong Confucian tradition has chosen to address the educational goal of living together through the promotion of values such as social cohesion and community relationships within a story of harmony. The study also shows how Singapore political leaders construct a narrow and limited discourse of harmony within the curricula and use it to legitimize policies that privilege particular groups, limit political freedoms, marginalize groups with less power or status, and circumscribe the kinds of actions a citizen can legitimately take.

This paper contrasts the prevailing individualistic approach of financial literacy measurement and financial education with an educational framework that seeks to equip young people to play an active democratic role and to develop a broader understanding of the financial world. In particular, the framework suggests how important dimensions of financial literacy may be addressed in terms of the individual, the financial industry and government.

Using Singapore as a case study, this paper examines how the discourses of democratic elitism and meritocracy help allocate different citizen roles to students and define the nature of the social studies citizenship education programmes for different educational tracks. While the Singapore education system is not unique in its stratification of students into distinct educational tracks with diverse educational outcomes, it is one of the very few countries with explicitly differentiated formal national citizenship curricula for students from different educational tracks. Students are formally allocated different citizenship roles and responsibilities according to the hierarchy defined by the state. Three distinct roles can be identified: (1) elite cosmopolitan leaders; (2) globally-oriented but locally-rooted mid-level executives and workers; and (3) local "heartlander" followers. To cater to these different citizen roles, the three programmes encompass significantly different curricular goals, content, modes of assessment, civic skills, and values. The findings indicate that only the elite students have access to citizenship education that promotes democratic enlightenment and political engagement. The social studies curriculum for students in the vocational track, in contrast, focuses almost exclusively on imparting a pre-determined body of knowledge and set of values deemed necessary for academically low-achieving students. (Contains 2 tables.)

Citizenship education is of central importance in curriculum and schooling, as evidenced by the proliferation of research and writing in the area over the last 20 years. Building on existing citizenship literature, this paper discusses one aspect of a larger project exploring the ways in which citizenship is discursively produced in officially mandated school curriculum and the ways in which students themselves understand and take up narratives of "good" citizenship in light of their diverse experiences and social locations. Using an image-based approach to research, students visually represented and then discussed with researchers their perceptions of good citizenship. What became apparent through the analysis of images and focus group transcripts was the ease with which students, regardless of their social locations, reproduced commonsense narratives of "good" citizenship, including socially sanctioned concern for the environment, a sense of nationalism and national pride, respect for relationships and a communal ethos, and the official discourse of multiculturalism. Missing from students' understandings of "good" citizenship was any kind of social analysis, suggesting that they largely accepted citizenship as universally realized and experienced by individuals. (Contains 2 notes.)

National curricula are being challenged and transformed by the impact of migration and European integration. This paper examines how cultural diversity and Europe are intertwined in geography, history, and citizenship education curricula in Greece, Germany, and England. This question is explored using quantitative and qualitative methods through a case study of curriculum content and discourses of 5 years compulsory schooling in all three countries. One might expect Germany and Greece, which have historically embraced a more monocultural vision, as having largely similar approaches. Yet, the cross-national analysis illustrates that the relationships between European and multicultural values are put together in rather different ways depending on the school subject. Whilst history is ethnocentric in all three countries, Greek geography and citizenship curricula veer between ethnocentrism and Europeanism. In contrast, in England, notions of multicultural Britishness are reinforced in geography and citizenship education. German curricula privilege national and European topics, but attempts have been made to address diversity, particularly in geography. Curriculum analyses have hitherto largely focused on either national and European dimensions or multicultural and global dimensions. This study provides new insights into how these dimensions intersect and their combined effect on migration and citizenship education in European societies. (Contains 7 notes, 1 table, and 1 figure.)

Human beings ought to use critical reflection to define and decide their courses of action. This paper examines the use of attention-seeker questions in the framework of critical pedagogy purposely to study the way some Ugandan teachers are constrained in their practice by their lack of participation in developing the school curriculum. This enables one to explore and discuss curriculum overload, poor resourcing, and imposed curriculum as fundamental issues surrounding curriculum development in Uganda. The major conclusions are centred on putting teachers in charge of the curriculum. This involves making decisions on key issues during its design and its management, as well as training them for a critical approach. It is recommended that policy-makers consider means for encouraging practitioner participation in developing curriculum theory and policy. (Contains 18 notes and 1 table.)

This paper investigates the relationship between schooling and conflict in Pakistan using an identity-construction lens. Drawing on data from curriculum documents, student responses to classroom activities, and single-sex student focus groups, it explores how students in four state primary schools in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), Pakistan, use curricula and school experiences to make sense of themselves as Pakistani. The findings suggest that the complex nexus of education, religion, and national identity tends to construct "essentialist" collective identities--a single identity as a naturalized defining feature of the collective self. To promote national unity across the diverse ethnic groups comprising Pakistan, the national curriculum uses religion (Islam) as the key boundary between the Muslim Pakistani "self" and the antagonist non-Muslim "other". Ironically, this emphasis creates social polarization and the normalization of militaristic and violent identities, with serious implications for social cohesion, tolerance for internal and external diversity, and gender relations. (Contains 18 notes and 4 figures.)

Increasing European integration and European education policies are fuelling political and academic debates over the meaning of a "European identity" and a "European citizenship" and their potential relationship(s) to national and/or state identities. These debates are especially fraught in a case such as Cyprus, a case characterized by an intractable socio-political problem of ethnic conflict and war that stems from identity, citizenship, and the politics of recognition. Cyprus must respond to demands of revisiting citizenship and identity as a condition of EU membership and as a response to increasing international and internal pressure for resolving the existing division. This paper explores how European citizenship is constructed in Greek-Cypriot policy, curricula, and textbooks for civic education, and how citizenship is positioned in relation to national and state identities. Although "Europe" provides a framework from which policy documents increasingly draw to introduce curricular innovation, European citizenship is not substantially addressed in the syllabi and textbooks analysed. Nationalistic discourses of citizenship "appropriate" "Europe" in ways which legitimize both ethno- and Euro-centrism and which fail to alleviate existing tensions between ethno-national and state identities in Cyprus. (Contains 1 table and 11 notes.)

The EU and other European institutions have launched a wide range of educational initiatives over the past 50 years in order to foster European citizenship and bring Europe "closer to the people". However, the efficacy of these efforts is questionable. In the EU, education policy (and in particular, curriculum policy) is governed by subsidiarity: citizenship education curricula are designed at the national level, with limited input from European institutions. This paper examines whether European citizenship education initiatives have impact upon national-level curricula and, moreover, how the concept of European citizenship has been defined and constructed in national citizenship education programmes. These questions are explored here using qualitative, socio-historical methods through a case study of curricular reform in the Republic of Ireland. This case illustrates that there has been a gradual deepening and broadening of the way in which European citizenship is conceptualized in the Irish curriculum. However, this remains a narrow conception of European citizenship, and one which ultimately limits both the impact on national citizenship and the prospects of European citizenship. (Contains 4 tables and 11 notes.)

The paper analyses how the formal aims of citizenship education, as declared in legislation and policy documents, have changed since the end of the 1980s in response to the transformation of the political scenery in Finland and the Russian Federation. One central question framing the analysis of Finnish citizenship education is whether nationally-based citizenship is becoming obsolete because of Finland's latest involvement in the European integration process. In the Russian case, the aim is to investigate whether nationality has become more strongly linked to the Russian state since the breakdown of the Soviet empire. The study also examines whether nationality has acquired new meanings because of the political transformations of the last two decades in Finland and Russia. The study's findings illustrate that Finland is both forsaking the strong link between the state and the nation, and returning to the pre-independence cultural concept of the nation. These changes allow Finland to move in the direction of a multi-level conception of citizenship. Nevertheless, for Finland national citizenship remains the nucleus of other citizenship and identity layers. In contrast to the recent developments in Finland, the discourses of state integrity and national unity have become more prominent in Russia. Russia seeks to attach citizenship to the state-wide national space by encouraging state patriotism and strengthening the position of the Russian language. (Contains 12 notes.)

The documented social-subjects curricula for Scottish 5-16 year olds are analysed for representations of "self-in-society". Such representations are important in Scotland because it is expected that the new Education-for-Citizenship framework will in part be delivered through the social subjects. However, citizenship education is also relevant throughout the UK and beyond and our analysis of the social subjects has wider relevance. An ideal-type analysis was used on documents including national guidelines, examination syllabuses, examination papers, and assessor instructions. Our analysis suggests that in these documents: the self is seen as an abstract; people are understood by category; society is the sum of discrete institutions; self-in-society is fully defined; and this representation of society is not contested. This representation becomes increasingly exclusive with age/ability and may be linked to assumed modes of curricular division, teaching and assessment. We discuss how this overall picture might affect students' sense of "agency" in the light of citizenship education. We conclude that the social-subjects' curricular representation of self-in-society may not fully support the Scottish Education-for-Citizenship framework. (Contains 1 table, 1 figure, and 3 notes.)

Education is thought to provide a certain outcome--a "promise". I argue that a promise that education will counteract cultural and social disintegration involves a risk of engendering narrow social and cultural incorporation. On what reasonable basis could education contribute to civic life, when contemporary Western society is represented by a diversity of lifestyles and beliefs, with roots in different traditions? Habermas's communicative theory and theory of procedural democracy contain a normative core of presuppositions that function as enabling conditions for practical discourse to take place under such conditions. However, Habermas's perspective conceptualizes these presuppositions as features of a political culture whose "accommodating quality" citizens need to be able to expect sociologically. Within a political and moral theory, Habermas only counts on these preconditions implicitly, but he does hope for such accommodating qualities to be fulfilled in a process of socialization and in political forms of life. (Contains 14 notes.)

Teaching is a moral endeavour. It transmits moral messages based on values and expectations. This paper explores the relationship between school practice and the democratic values endorsed in the Swedish national curriculum. A lunch-time episode illustrates the discrepancy between the national curriculum's ethical values and their realization in practice. This discrepancy problematizes the decentralization process in Swedish schooling. Furthermore, it suggests that episodes at the margins of school practice may be just as important to the moral curriculum of school as the knowledge-related elements conventionally deemed to be the core of the curriculum. (Contains 4 Notes.)

Following the continental tradition of phenomenological pedagogy, this paper focuses on the lived time and space of school – and on contexts in which school is understood as a democratic community. It does so by comparing and contrasting related works of G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831), Martinus Langeveld (1905–1989) and Eugen Fink (1905–1975). It shows how, within the school, social questions and problems are transformed into pedagogical ones, allowing pedagogical action to become socially productive. In so doing, it articulates a systematic approach to the general question of purposes of the school as a distinctive social institution with its own logic of teaching and learning. First, it is shown via Hegel that in school a pedagogical practice is taking place in an institutionalised and artificial manner which is opposed to other social spheres, institutions and practices. With Langeveld the logic of pedagogical action is worked out, in which extrinsic questions and problems are implemented in a temporal, spatial and social pedagogical order. Fink locates school in a dynamic and scientific-technical (post-)modern and (post-)democratic society. In this context he sees the action and communication occurring in school as able to add to the production of meaning and experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Western and established democracies are wary of teaching students about national identities and aspire to broaden the framework of history education, the Republic of China (Taiwan) is still struggling to construct a Taiwanese identity to safeguard its freedom from the Chinese historical narrative. As the divide between Taiwan and China grew, what would be Taiwan's preservice teachers' historical consciousness and purpose of teaching history? Thirty-three preservice history teachers from Teacher Education institutions in different areas of Taiwan were interviewed in order to determine the historical consciousness of their national identity and teaching orientation. The results showed that most preservice teachers have a Taiwanese-oriented historical consciousness, while fewer of them have a mixed or Chinese orientation. Their preferred goals, thinking skills, and contents varied according to their specific historical consciousness. However, pedagogically, most of them believed that they should remain neutral on the issue of national identity. This paper argues that preservice teachers' historical consciousness matters and teacher educators must help to clarify and develop their 'narrative competence' and be aware of how it orients their teaching of history; history education should be based on developing a sound democratic society, in which memories, thinking skills, and future visions come together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports results from a six-state study of 62 USA social studies classrooms. We examined the extent to which intellectually challenging authentic pedagogy was present in study classrooms, the characteristics of classroom practice at different levels of authentic pedagogy, and how those characteristics may promote or inhibit high levels of authentic intellectual work (AIW). Like earlier AIW studies, we found generally low levels of AIW in observed classes. However, we did find several cases of classrooms scoring in the highest AIW range. We examined characteristics of practice that typified teaching of exemplar lessons at four different levels of authentic pedagogy and identified noteworthy differences in teacher purpose, the ways teachers structured and enacted lessons to accomplish their purposes, and the ways that the structures of the lessons encouraged different lesson narratives that communicated different epistemological assumptions about the complexity of social reality and the process of sense-making. Teachers at the higher levels of the AIW scale sought to promote autonomy and civic competence. We conclude that to maintain democratic societies, educators must expand the number of classrooms offering students this essential preparation for civic life and provide suggestions for how this might be accomplished. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past, philosophers discussed cosmopolitanism as a normative ideal of allegiance to humanity as a whole. A debate among social theorists, however, has examined cosmopolitanism as an incipient empirical phenomenon: an orientation of openness to foreign others and cultures. This paper introduces actor-network theory to elaborate the social-theoretical conception of cosmopolitanism. In light of the actor-network theory of cosmopolitanism, the paper proposes cosmopolitan education that aims to foster in students three dispositions: to extend attachments to foreign people and objects; to understand transnational connections in which their lives are embedded; and to act on these attachments and understandings to effect transformations across national borders. Through this three-fold cosmopolitan education, students will grow to be citizens of the world who traverse national borders dialogically by virtue of their transnational attachments, understandings, and actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue of JCS has examined the changes and challenges facing citizenship education policy and curricula by way of case studies from Europe and beyond. It is indicated that European and/or global integration have had an impact on all of the citizenship curricula examined. However, it is also noted that each case conceptualizes supra-national citizenship and its relationship to national citizenship and other groups in differing ways. It is argued that these ways present issues of exclusion, as curricula often remain centred on the nation-state and use European citizenship as a means to exclude 'non-Europeans'. The article concludes by discussing the research implications of these findings within the context of discussions over supranational and cosmopolitan modes of creating, and educating for, citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Citizenship education has been the subject of growing attention in policy and academic circles over the past 20 years. Citizenship education curricula have typically focused on national institutions, issues, and ties. Citizenship education has been closely bound up with the legitimacy of the nation-state, and alternative institutions and citizenships thus present a significant challenge not only to the contents of national curricula, but also to the traditional purpose and assumptions of citizenship education. The articles in this special issue seek to explore how nation-states have responded to this challenge by exploring, from a comparative perspective, the ways in which one supra-national, regional citizenship (namely European citizenship) has been defined in the citizenship education curricula of states from across Europe. This Introduction describes the supra-national policy developments that have led European states to consider reforming their citizenship education curricula. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay demonstrates how Deleuze and Guattari's notion of 'microfascism' is of crucial importance to understanding the complexities of contemporary pedagogical efforts to combat populism, right-wing extremism, and fascism. The author discusses how 'affect' and 'biopower' are entangled in everyday processes of discipline and control, and argues that these concepts are pivotal for appreciating the affective relations and capacities of microfascism. To illustrate how affect and biopower are intimately linked to microfascist practices in schools and classrooms, the author analyzes two examples—one in health education and another in citizenship education. Finally, the author suggests pedagogical strategies that could contribute to unmaking microfascist subjectivities, emphasizing that it is crucial to pay attention to the connections between micro- and macro-level fascisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the rising popularity of scripted curricula in the United States public and charter schools, there has been little to no research that explicitly addresses how this phenomenon influences the democratic aims of our educational system. Using the six democratic values that Meira Levinson employed to evaluate the movement towards standards, assessment and accountability, the authors examine both the potentials and real-world impacts of scripted curriculum. Although arguments in favour of scripted curriculum suggest that its usage increases the democratic promise of education by rendering instruction more equitable and efficient, the authors suggest that patterns of usage and outcomes are in fact at odds with such values. Furthermore, the authors argue that the pre-structured and highly controlling character of scripted curriculum is inherently undemocratic because it severely constrains the intellectual participation of both teachers and students in the classroom. The authors conclude that greater teacher autonomy and curricular flexibility are necessary elements in the education of future citizens in a democratic society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares and re-examines citizenship education (CE) teaching and learning in Hong Kong (HK) and Guangzhou (GZ), China. It questions two stereotypical perceptions—that China schools indoctrinate students, and that CE lessons in HK are more open than those in mainland China. Data are drawn from some 30 lesson observations, 1,200 questionnaires, and 80 teacher/student interviews from six sampled HK and GZ schools. The study used NVivo to examine qualitative data, and employed hierarchical linear modelling with the help of SPSS and AMOS to analyse quantitative data. The findings suggest both cities are similar in terms of teaching/learning CE, due to globalization and domestic changes, and have similar CE conditions more conducive to open pedagogies (e.g., inquiry-based approaches) than indoctrination. HK's greater socioeconomic openness does not ensure its CE is more open than GZ's, for pedagogical and non-pedagogical reasons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on sociocultural theories of teaching and learning, rooted in constructivist traditions, this study examined the teaching of civics in relation to contextual sociocultural factors in the Israeli educational system. The study focused on ways in which three civics teachers conceptualized and framed notions of good citizenship in relation to the teaching of the civics subject matter, and on the ways in which such notions manifest in their planned teaching. The main finding points to how the teachers framed their civics lessons in a manner that was in congruence with their perceptions of their students' approaches to citizenship. Thus, the study reaches the conclusion that teachers' perceptions are a key element in framing and conceptualizing civics lessons, resulting in a reality in which students from different backgrounds may experience significant differences in their orientation to the notion of good citizenship, limiting their exposure to multiple views. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

大學階段的人才培育是教育的重要課題，而它與普通高中教育有著密不可分的連動關係。隨著大學數量的擴增、全球化競爭與知識經濟之趨勢，大學教育已從菁英教育朝向大眾化教育，並且人才培育觀也從強調專精專門知識的人才培養轉而強調具備通識、跨領域能力及公民素養的全人教育觀。大學教育的這些轉變與發展，將連動高中教育的定位與課程改革，包括重新定位普通高中的通識教育功能、強化跨領域學科能力、公民素養的培養，以及如何與大學端的優質銜接等。本研究係在此脈絡下，首先說明大學發展趨勢及人才培育觀的轉變，其次探討現行普通高中教育，特別是課程綱要及學校課程在此方面的回應、連動影響與相關現況。最後，則針對未來十二年國民基本教育普通高中階段之課程改革提出若干建議。 The increase in the number of universities has coincided with the growth of international competition in higher education and the development of the global knowledge economy. Universities have responded to these challenges by shifting from an elite view of education to a more popularized model, from prioritizing specialized knowledge to a more holistic emphasis on general knowledge, transdisciplinary skills, and civic literacy. The basic functions of general high school education will have to be reimagined to reflect these developments in university-level education and better links between these two levels will have to be forged. The first part of this paper is an exploration of the changing views of university education. This is followed by a discussion of how the general high school curriculum is evolving in response to these changes. Finally, I offer a number of high school curriculum reform recommendations.

In 2008, the Italian government passed a law that introduced a new school subject: Citizenship and Constitution. The law requires all students between the ages of 3 and 16 to attend almost 400 h of Citizenship Education during their 13 years of compulsory schooling. The law is part of an increasingly wider international effort that focuses on improving pupils’ knowledge of and involvement in society by exposing them to history and civic content. The aim of this article was to present a Citizenship Curriculum and its possible implementation in schools and other areas. Taking into account the Curriculum Transposition model, we propose both an External Transposition, which analyses international and national documents about Citizenship Education, and an Internal Transposition, in order to design a curriculum that will enable children to participate in decision-making processes and improve their complex thinking. The Implemented Citizenship Curriculum (Poli§ophiaproject) was introduced into the Municipal Council of Children, and the Philosophy for Children method was applied in order to help children make moral judgments, a fundamental component of democratic thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Most Americans and many residents of other democratic countries hold public schools to the social and political goal of preparing children to be good citizens. This goal is being challenged by some new forms of schooling promoted through popular education reform movements, especially in the US. This article reveals potentially insurmountable conflicts between the beliefs and practices of one of those forms of schools, for-profit charter schools, and their public task of educating for citizenship. This study begins by exploring the public nature and purposes of public schools, especially their role in creating particular types of citizens. This understanding of public schooling and good citizenship, then, becomes the theoretical lens for analysing the practices of for-profit charter schools. A critical discourse analysis was conducted of school materials such as websites, curricula, investor relation materials, proposals for new charter schools, and interviews with charter school founders. That analysis was used to indicate aspects of support for and incompatibility with quality citizenship education and to assess the overall likelihood that for-profit schools can educate citizens well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There have been multiple trends of building democratic citizens through formal education, and in the European context the trials have been dramatically increased with the Europeanization process since the 1980s. In line with this trend, an in-depth qualitative case study was carried out in a private primary school in Turkey to shed light on the role of school-based extra-curricular activities as a contemporary trend in building active citizenship values and competencies in students. Qualitative data were collected through multiple data collection tools as observation field notes, interviews, and document analysis to achieve triangulation and trustworthiness. Much of the findings were compatible with EURYDICE Report (2005) on citizenship education, and yielded six themes, called the six blossoms of extra-curricular activities in citizenship education: namely, active citizenship perception; social accountability; intercultural awareness; awareness of democracy and human rights; thinking and research skills; and interaction and interpersonal skills. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including pedagogic discourse and transformation, complexity of Chinese pedagogic discourse, and democratic education.

This is the fourth of five commentaries discussing Zongjie Wu’s essay, ‘Interpretation, autonomy, and transformation’. It argues that he may have committed two methodological mistakes in his contrast between traditional Chinese education and contemporary Chinese (and Western) education: reverse-Orientalism and a form of fundamentalism. It will then argue that the distinction Wu’s essay correctly reveals is not between China and the West, but between forms of a philosophical education and those of the mass education. In contemporary Western democratic education, the philosophical, political, and mass forms of education are collapsed into one, mass education, and by arguing for preservation of philosophical education on a mass level, Wu also implicitly adopts this conflation position. However, this commentary will argue that this conflation needs to be corrected, and the traditional Confucian education actually tries to strike a middle way between, and to correct, the forms of pre-democratic Western education and democratic education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Citizenship education typically focuses on the nation and citizens' supposed natural affinity to the nation-state. In this global age, this is challenged by cosmopolitans who propose a form of education which encourages a primary commitment to fellow humanity and/or the planet Earth. However, citizenship education has been re-emphasized by those who assert that in a globalized world and nation-states characterized by diversity, one requires a primary commitment to the nation-state. The latter group proposes a renewed focus on civic education which promotes national belonging and loyalty, often targeting, either explicitly or implicitly, students from minority or migration backgrounds. Within EU member-states, this binary between education for national and global citizenship is troubled by the issue of European citizenship and belonging. This article analyses the official citizenship curriculum for England and reports on qualitative research with teachers, designed to explore their perceptions of the curriculum and their students' needs as learner-citizens. The teachers reflect on local, national, European, and global dimensions of citizenship. Expressing concern about the ethno-nationalistic attitudes of some students, they work to engage with and extend students' experiences. The article proposes education for cosmopolitan citizenship to meet students' needs, whether their affinities are apparently fixed or flexible; local; national; global; or multiple. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While it is clear that all educational undertakings consist of ends and means, the relationship between the two is far from straightforward. This article proposes a framework for understanding the relationship in the context of citizenship education. Qualitative research was undertaken of three educational initiatives in Brazil: the schools of the Landless Movement, the Plural School framework in the city of Belo Horizonte, and the Voter of the Future programme, run by the Electoral Tribunals. Case studies were carried out of each, involving documentary analysis, interviews, and observations. Analysis of the relationship between ends and means in each case gave rise to two key frames: the first, 'proximity', refers to the extent to which ends and means are separate or unified; the second, 'rationale', refers to the grounds on which means are chosen. Finally, the implications of this framework for understanding curriculum are drawn out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How is the tension between renewed nationalist and European narratives of belonging being unfolded in the curricula, discourse, and practice of civic education in Slovakia and Estonia. As two post-socialist territories that were 'reborn' as independent nation-states in the 1990s, Slovakia and Estonia were confronted with pressure to 'Europeanize'. 'Europeanization' is intended to challenge doctrines of ethno-cultural citizenship, and is expected to play a significant role within civic education. One might expect nationalists in these contexts to reject Europeanization and those with a more tolerant or cosmopolitan bent to embrace it. These different case studies show, however, that educators, curriculum developers, and textbook authors at the national level do not simply dismiss conceptions of Europe. Rather, two trends emerge: First, Europe is redefined geographically, allowing Estonia and Slovakia to assert that they are inherently European (as the borderland and the centre, respectively). Second, the meaning of Europe is contested through counter-narratives about what constitutes Europeanness, and the concept of Europe is sometimes appropriated not to advance civic citizenship, but rather for exclusionary and nationalist ends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One route to uncovering schooling's goals for an improved citizenry is to track certain subjects of the compulsory curriculum. In this case, health is investigated, and especially its messages on smoking and drinking. First introduced as scientific temperance instruction (in the 1880s), renamed hygiene (from about 1910), then as health (from the mid-1920s), and expanded to encompass as well physical education and personal development from the mid-1940s, health curricula were an important vehicle for turning impressionable youth into personally and socially responsible citizens. An explication of the Ontario (Canada) health curriculum between 1890 and 1960 provides an insight into the changing official prescription of the good citizen. It also shows how changed notions of health in the modern age are from the 19th-century antecedents, and, especially, how self-interest has become central to that definition. Accordingly, the lessons around smoking and drinking have moved from these products being an 'evil influence' to one of social facilitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on political education in schools suggests that an emphasis on formal structure, constitutional principles, formal citizen rights, and debates on current issues is common. The Norwegian national curriculum on political education envisions a different political education emphasizing that students should be critical of political life and social structures, that they should be familiar with democratic ideals, learn how they may influence by means of various forms of political participation, and be motivated to do so. I examine whether these ambitions are realized at the classroom level. Based on qualitative interviews and classroom observations I conclude that Norwegian political education is centred on political parties and on an attempt to help students find out which party is closest to their preferences. Political education takes the form of voter training for competitive elite democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present the results of a literature review of studies on teaching strategies for moral education in secondary schools (1995-2003). The majority of the studies focus on the 'what' and 'why', i.e. the objectives, of curriculum-oriented moral education. Attention to the instructional formats for enhancing the prosocial and moral development of students (the 'how') is relatively sparse. Most studies on teaching strategies for moral education recommend a problem-based approach to instruction whereby students work in small groups. This approach gives room for dialogue and interaction between students, which is considered to be crucial for their moral and prosocial development. Other studies discuss more specific teaching methods, such as drama and service learning. We conclude that the theoretical discourses on moral education are not reflected on the practice of curriculum-oriented moral education and its effects on students' learning outcomes. We recommend that future research on curriculum-oriented moral education includes the subject areas encompassing moral issues and the social differences between students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]