Citizenship Teaching & Learning - Volume 10, Issue 2, 2015

How do adult students enact citizenship, and what discursive and material conditions make certain enactments more or less possible? This article draws on 37 interviews with adult students at Swedish Folk High Schools and focuses on the everyday material-discursive enactments of interactive media in adult students’ statements about citizenship. Drawing on a post-constructional perspective, the analysis illustrates how students’ statements about citizenship are made possible by ever-present media technologies and the associated practices of ‘living in media’. Students’ statements continuously reiterate how notions of citizenship are entangled with the Internet (and other new media). However, while new media are deeply embedded in the everyday lives of citizens and enables important citizenship enactments, they are also a source of discomfort, giving rise to ambiguous statements. These double-edged statements refer on the one hand to negative implications on physical health, distraction from important tasks and an over-reliance on the Internet as an everyday need, and on the other hand to improved access to information, convivial communities and empowered citizenship.

International Service Learning (ISL) is a pedagogy designed to engage students in first-hand experiences of global social issues including poverty and inequality. There are growing concerns in the critical ISL research literature that positions of power and privilege obstruct opportunities to engage in transformative learning. Critiques are often founded on an understanding of ISL as learning about Others versus learning from Others and engaging with difference. This article considers the possibilities for a practice of ISL education that centres on the formation of socially ethical engagements with Others. It is motivated by my research on the impact of ISL practices on host communities in Tanzania. Racial and socio-economic differences are two key tensions that emerged as participants and community partners struggled to understand their respective roles in this project. Todd’s work problematizes ethical educational practices and is a valuable lens through which think about the ways that ISL may be complicit with the injustice that most practitioners and students of ISL originally seek to mitigate. Todd’s analysis built on Levinasian theory of relationship with Others is a space for ISL educators to imagine new opportunities for transformative and ethical educational practices.

Pharmacy education is focused on preparing students for practice as health professionals. Curriculum for this professional programme includes pharmaceutical, social and health sciences. For pharmacy students to appreciate their role as citizens, exposure to citizenship teaching must be integrated into the curriculum, but this has not been studied within pharmacy. The purpose of our research was to describe the impact of an international pharmacy elective course that placed University of Alberta pharmacy students in Italy for a three-week period. Activities within the course were designed to expose the students to social justice, health policy, citizenship and their role in addressing health issues. Student interviews and course materials were analysed for emerging themes. The analysis identified themes relating to an developing awareness of citizenship and the personal and professional roles the students could play; appreciating broader health issues in the world, and the realization that medications are not always the primary approach for health; the importance of policy and advocacy for the right to food and health; and the integration of professionalism, advocacy, justice and citizenship in addressing health. Student learning regarding citizenship was supported through course activities and the context of the cross-cultural setting. The learnings about citizenship started at a basic level, identifying a significant curriculum gap in pharmacy education. Further collaboration between Pharmacy and Education, and international course experiences can assist in enhancing the citizenship teaching and learning of future health professionals.

Higher education is a rapidly changing environment for policy creation and administration. Since the 1960s students have been included in governing bodies and are viewed as central to the development of a democratic organizational culture at universities. However, many student activists and leaders do not feel their interests are being represented appropriately or adequately within the university. Through an examination of the literature on organizational culture and citizenship, and the use of a brief example from a university in Canada, I posit that students are not core contributing members of the organizational culture of the university and are not included in a significant manner in governance. As a result, they are not ‘citizens’ of universities and are instead seen as ‘clients’. This could have potential impacts on student reactions to changing administrative practices such as programme changes and fee structures.

In order to better understand the college classroom as a site of potential citizenship education, this article connects the delimited literature of the contested purposes of citizenship in higher education with scholarship on education for citizenship and provides empirical evidence from an analysis of how macro contextual influences are worked out in the micro practices of pedagogy and curricular design. By analysing two interdisciplinary college classrooms both with civic aims, this research offers a potential typology for understanding citizenship education at institutions of higher education.

This article explores the concept of citizenship based on the experience of student leaders from a mid-sized university in western Canada. Five student leaders participated in semi-structured individual interviews to explore their experience with, and understanding of citizenship. Interviews concentrated on personal view points and definitions of citizenship, explored whether or not there are good and great citizens, and the role universities play in fostering strong citizenship amongst its student body. The measurement of citizenship and opportunities to foster citizenship were also explored. Qualitative content analysis revealed five themes, including political participation, social citizenship/solidarity, engagement, transformative action and autonomy. Citizenship, while highly valued by this population, also appears to be impossible to measure. If post-secondary institutions are aiming to create better citizens, more work needs to be done to create a common understanding of the intended outcome. Based on these findings, a new potential model of citizenship is proposed, in line with the work of Dalton and others who emphasize a shift towards personal involvement over traditional political engagement. Further, these results suggest that students could benefit from understanding themselves as political agents, capable of inculcating change within the university context and beyond.

Organizational Citizenship Behavior in Schools: Examining the Impact and Opportunities within Educational Systems, Anit Somech and Izhar Oplatka (2015) London: Routledge, xvi + 157 pp. ISBN: 9780415720533 Hardback £90

Growing Up Muslim: Muslim College Students in America tell their Life Stories, Andrew Garrod and Robert Kilkenny (2014) Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 232 pp., ISBN: 9780801452529, Paper back, £14.87

Citizenship Education in China: Preparing Citizens for the ‘Chinese Century’, Kerry J. Kennedy, Gregory P. Fairbrother and Zhao Zhenzhou (eds) (2014) New York: Routledge, 267 pp., ISBN: 9780415502726, h/bk, £80

Citizenship and Crisis in Contemporary Brazilian Literature, Leila Lehnan (2013) New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 252 pp., hardcover, £61 ISBN: 9781137277558