East and west in citizenship education: Encounters in education for diversity and democracy

This article is made up of a set of interrelated pieces of work that emerge from the 9th citizED conference that was held in Tokyo in 2013. A symposium at that conference was organized on the theme of ‘Comparative approaches on citizenship education: East and west’. We present here four individual contributions from Daehoon Jho, Shigeo Kodama, Walter Parker and Libby Tudball as well as an introduction and concluding remarks by Mitsuharu Mizuyama and Ian Davies. Throughout we have been keen not to present stereotypical reflections and are struck as much by the similarities and overlaps between authors as well as the differences. We hope that by sharing these ideas we will celebrate diversity and contribute to thinking and practice in specific countries, as well as raising the possibility of cross national collaboration and perhaps generating further reflections about the possibility of global standards for citizenship education.