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Purpose: The aim of this country report is to offer an overview of civic and citizenship education in Spain. Approach: The report analyses the Spanish curriculum and the current legislative framework, examining the way social and civic competences are integrated in both primary and secondary education. Additionally, the paper also examines the latest educational reform, establishing a comparison between how citizenship education was addressed in the curriculum until 2013 and the way a cross-curricular approach has been adopted since then. Findings: The paper has been able to establish a clear difference between two political conceptions. On one hand, from 2006 to 2013, the Spanish government introduced “Citizenship and Human Rights Education” as a core subject. After the 2013 reform, the new government favoured instead a cross-curricular approach that avoided references to the idea of citizenship and limited the scope of civic education. A discussion is provided regarding what policy reforms can be expected in the near future in Spain.

This paper focuses upon the community engagement of young peoplegrowing up in socio-economically disadvantaged areas and the creation ofapt civic learning spaces. It is in direct response to public policy within theUK, as in many other democratic countries, giving continued attention tohow young people’s active citizenship can be best supported. As aconsequence of processes of globalisation, social change and technologicaladvancement it is being increasingly recognised that young citizens faceunprecedented challenges in the 21st century. At the same time youngpeople growing up within areas of socio-economic disadvantage arecommonly identified as being most at risk of social exclusion anddiscouragement with regard to their civic participation.This paper draws from the EngagED project, a two-year study based inEngland that used a mixed methods research approach to explore the civicaction and learning of young people living in both inner city and rural areasof socio-economic disadvantage. It presents an eco-systemic model of thehost of factors and agencies that influence young people’s civic identity andpatterns of community engagement. It outlines two new civic learningspaces that were created in response to these complex ecologies and fromthese experiments in ‘pre-figurative practice’ proposes a set of keyprinciples for the effective civic pedagogue. This radical notion of the civiceducator moves away from educational strategies that seek to ‘transform’young people into good future citizens, towards finding personalised waysof supporting young people ‘as’ citizens.

Highlights • Constitutional freedom of education affects democratic citizenship education policy. • Citizenship education legislation in 2006 and 2007 placed little demands on schools. • Legislation introduced in 2021 has further specified what is expected from schools. • Studies of citizenship education in practice are largely critical of the extent to which schools teach about, through and for democracy. Purpose: This paper discusses developments in citizenship education policy and practice in the Netherlands, and outlines key challenges as faced by the different stakeholders involved. Design/methodology/approach: Our discussion is based on existing research and policy documents in the Netherlands. The authors, from three Dutch universities, are experts in the field of research on citizenship education. Findings: Promoting citizenship education in primary, secondary and vocational tertiary education in the Netherlands has been challenging, particularly in light of the constitutional freedom of education in the Netherlands. Five issues are discussed in this regard: the contents of CE legislation, the normative character of legal requirements, integration of CE legislation in national curriculum aims, clarifying expectations from schools in teaching CE, and teacher education and professionalization.

Keywords: Citizenship education; Measuring citizenship competences; Output-driven approach; Data-use in education; Social outcomes of education Highlights: • Research on effective characteristics of citizenship education is still scarce. • An output-driven approach may improve the effectiveness of citizenship education. • We reflect on the feasibility of an output-driven approach to citizenship education. • We conclude that such an approach seems feasible for citizenship education. • Normativity and the availability and quality of measurement instruments need attention. Purpose: Scholars are increasingly paying attention to the characteristics of effective citizenship education. The systematic use of data to maximise student learning, also called an output-driven approach, is often presented as a powerful predictor of student outcomes. However, its effectiveness has not been studied in citizenship education. Therefore, this paper aims to theoretically reflect on whether an output-driven approach is also feasible for citizenship education. Methodology: We distinguish five building blocks of an output-driven approach and elaborate on their applicability in citizenship education. While doing so, we draw attention to the normative notion in citizenship education and the quality and availability of measurement instruments for citizenship competences. Both may challenge the application of an output-driven approach, particularly given the relatively young tradition of measuring citizenship competences. Findings: We conclude that an output-driven approach in citizenship education seems feasible, provided that the characteristics of citizenship education are carefully considered.

This paper discusses results from a small scale qualitative study of howprimary and secondary schools in three English local authorities respondedto the introduction and subsequent inspection of a legal duty to promotecommunity cohesion, following a series of ‘race’ riots in 2001 and theLondon bombings of 2005. The policy itself is seen as reflecting widerdiscourse and is shown as shifting in focus during the period it wasofficially inspected between 2008 and 2011. Schools respondeddifferentially to the duty and its inspection, with those in more multiculturalareas responding with higher degrees of confidence than those inmono-ethnic areas. Some policy ‘slippage’ is seen to occur in the wayschools re-framed the duty. Over time, most schools came to identify thecurriculum and the school’s ethos as the most important weapons in theirarmoury. Teachers embraced the new duty with different degrees ofenthusiasm – for some it confirmed the importance of holistic approachesto education which they felt had been sidelined in recent years, whilst othershowed various forms of resistance. Teachers encountered some subtle andchallenging professional dilemmas in the course of discharging the duty.Overall, the respondents in this study felt that the imposition of the dutyand its inspection had been more of a benefit than a burden.

This paper aims to introduce new theories and practice in Social Studies in Japan since the 1990s, to outline some trends and characteristics relating to the question ‘Is Citizenship Education the aim of Social Studies as a school subject?’ and to identify ‘Applied’ and ‘Academic’ Social Studies as two separate categories. The Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sport, Science and Technology has long advocated the merits of Applied Social Studies, but recent trends have seen educational researchers and local education administrators actively supporting the reformation and promotion of Social Studies from an ‘applied’ perspective. Going even further, several schools and districts are so in favour of this development that Citizenship Education has been incorporated as a subject or topic into the school curriculum. However, defence of Academic Social Studies is also deeply rooted; its argument being that Social Studies means Social Sciences. According to this view, Geography, History and Civics (comprising politics, economics and sociology) are treated as distinct fields of Social Studies.

Referring to a critical review of eight international research initiatives (e.g. studies, surveys, research reports) conducted between 2001 and 2010 in the field of citizenship and citizenship education, this paper examines the relationship between different conceptualisations of citizenship and the nature, role and impact of citizenship education. I focus on the Europeanaspects of these research initiatives and draw on the knowledge they disseminate to reflect on the theory of citizenship and the practice of citizenship education in Slovenia. First, I present an overview of the methodology used in the literature review and reflect on the significant limitations in conducting international and comparative research. Second, I reflect on the various relationships between different conceptualisations of citizenship and their effects on citizenship education practices as presented in the overviewed literature. On the basis of the knowledge and results of the literature review, I then make several observations which are relevant to the advancement of citizenship theory and citizenship education practice in Slovenia. Finally, I argue that different conceptualisations of citizenship can have a significant influence on the practice of citizenship education, as evinced by the analysis of the recent results on civic knowledge in Slovenia.

In contemporary democratic societies that deal with cultural and linguistic diversity, education faces new challenges such as how to promote a shared knowledge and competence framework about “citizenship,” how to prepare the young generation to enter a complex world, and how to help immigrant students to integrate into the school system. Some of the European recommendations focus on the importance of promoting “intercultural education”. However, so far little is known about concrete practices and their outcomes. This paper aims at documenting and providing elements of reflections about the difficulties and contradictions faced by both teachers and students involved in pedagogical intercultural activities in Switzerland. From the results of a qualitative research based on a sociocultural perspective, identity and institutional issues of addressing “otherness” in school are discussed. It stresses the importance of a frame in order to allow elaboration and transformation of personal and emotional experiences into thinking and reflexive processes.

The empirical research presented in this paper focuses on concepts and perceptions of European politics and citizenship which are expressed by students and teachers in secondary schools. The qualitative study is based on semi-standardized interviews, written surveys, and classroom research (video transcripts, observation records). The results suggest that many young people are amenable towards transnational patterns of identity and they tend to combine pragmatic-optimistic expectations with European Union citizenship. Many of the students interviewed seem willing to adapt themselves to a larger European environment. However, many of the teachers voiced ambivalent notions while expressing veiled scepticism, although they rarely expressed open criticism based on their own fears towards political developments in a unified Europe. The classroom research shows that in the examined civic education lessons, the everyday concepts of students are seldom questioned and sparsely developed towards social-science-based explanatory models. Sometimes even misleading concepts are enforced in classroom interaction instead of being clarified by the development of adequate categories and models.