f Heterogeneous practices and homogenizing policies: Towards a typological analysis of Canadian citizenship education in Ontario

In 2016, rumours began to spread that the Ontario Ministry of Education was quietly considering cutting its mandatory high school civics course in order to expand another mandatory course on career preparation. While the Ontario Ministry of Education ultimately backed down from this controversial position, the resulting public dialogue raised important questions regarding what Ontario hopes to accomplish through citizenship education. In this article, I engage this debate primarily from a theoretical perspective, arguing that the ambiguous role of citizenship education stems in a large part from a lack of clarity regarding how we use the term ‘citizenship’. In the first and second section, I review the existing literature, with particular emphasis on educational scholarship and political philosophy, to illustrate the incongruity between the complex and multi-layered ways in which citizenship is enacted in Canada and the superficial and homogeneous manner in which it is portrayed in Ontario curricula and educational policies. This incongruity, I suggest, illustrates the need for greater analytic clarity regarding the meaning(s) of citizenship. In the following section, I propose a typology of citizenship, featuring five dimensions along which citizenship is primarily enacted – political, legal, public, economic and cultural. Finally, I illustrate this typology through a brief empirical analysis of the Ontario civics curriculum – a comparative keyword content analysis of the 1999, 2005 and 2013 versions of the curriculum policy document. In conclusion, I suggest that there has been a historical shift in Ontario educational policy towards economic expressions of citizenship at the expense of other dimensions. In this sense, the brief controversy over cutting the Ontario civics course to expand the careers curriculum can be seen as just one manifestation of a larger policy trajectory.