Citizenship Teaching & Learning - Volume 16, Issue 1, 2021

In order to be effective in today’s diverse American K-12 classrooms, teachers must teach all students – including immigrant, undocumented and mixed-status students. This article suggests three ways for teachers to become effective educators for all students: by gaining historical perspective on immigration law and policy in the United States; by becoming knowledgeable about undocumented and mixed-status students; and by adopting a cosmopolitan human rights stance regarding migration, membership and human belonging.

This qualitative case study examines the Peace Case in its historical context and scrutinizes the complexities. Ms Butera, who became known as the ‘peace teacher’, had to deal with in the aftermath of her remark ‘I honk for peace’ in her classroom. Drawing from the fields of peace education and educational leadership and policy studies, the study aims to shed light to the dominant dynamics in the case, especially those that might be discouraging teachers to integrate the potentially controversial themes related to war and peace into their curricula. To this end, it first discusses peace education as a controversial issue and illustrates several facets of peace education that make it controversial. Following this, an analysis of a post-Garcetti case, which is known as the ‘Peace Case’, is presented. As this analysis sheds light on several implications regarding peace education as a controversial issue and teachers’ freedom of speech in the classroom, these implications are presented for teacher educators in the final section. While scrutinizing the challenging nature of present public schooling through Ms Butera’s struggles, the study uncovers the possibilities of peace education practices even in an oppressive system of schooling through robust teacher education programmes equipping teachers with powerful skills and capabilities required for transformative educators.

This article aims to generate a better understanding of Hong Kong teachers’ perception of national education as implemented in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (hereafter referred to as Hong Kong SAR) and the interrelationship between their perception and the methods they adopt to teach the topic. We outline the Hong Kong context relevant to our research and review the relevant literature to consider typologies and teaching methods about and for national education. Questionnaire data focused on the seven typologies of nationalism and the three teaching methods of national education identified in the literature review. A total of 601 questionnaires were returned from 198 schools. The typologies of cultural nationalism, civic and peripheral nationalism, authoritarian nationalism, unification nationalism and cosmopolitan nationalism, and the teaching methods of group discussion and an affective approach characterize the views of Hong Kong secondary school teachers about national education. We suggest that teachers’ diverse views about nationalism and their varied use of teaching methods to achieve their goals suggest the powerful influence of current initiatives from the Chinese mainland and the need to reflect on established academic literature that proposes the decolonization of the curriculum and interactive and critical teaching methods.

This article documents the long-term impacts of international development volunteering (IDV) on the prosocial behaviours, educational or career choices, and global citizenship activities of returned international volunteers (RVs). Findings from a 2018 survey completed by 450 Canadian RVs show how IDV can contribute to global citizenship and civic engagement. Qualitative and quantitative analyses demonstrate how IDV can help to build a more empathetic and justice-oriented society dedicated to addressing the causes and consequences of global poverty and inequality. As a distinctive model for transformational learning, this study illustrates the value of IDV as a model for cross-cultural education shaping values of global civic responsibility.

As a response to the protracted political conflict that has plagued Thailand for over a decade, Thai royalist-nationalists have stated that the problem of Thai political development derives from a lack of ‘citizenship’ characteristics in Thais. In their view, the best solution is to educate the masses and to cultivate civic education by teaching both it and normative Thai ‘core values’, together with royalist-nationalist history, as subjects to students. As a result, students are destined to become patriotic ‘saviours’. They are expected to be strong citizens who can solve the political development ‘problem’ of democracy under the ‘Democratic Regime of the Government with the King as Head of State’. This article seeks to understand how the two topics of civic education and history have been taught in Thai schools for twelve years, covering both primary and secondary schools. What type of Thai citizen does this curriculum desire to produce? The author rigorously analysed a corpus of civic education and history teaching material, and argues that the contents of these topics are designed to transform students into ‘docile subjects’. They are ideally ‘objects’ that are to be ordered and imposed upon by the state ideology, shaping them into ultra-royalists and ultra-nationalists.

Contemporary youth citizenship research is challenged with capturing the complexity of young people’s engagement with politics, especially considering the current prevalence of social media. In this article, we address young people’s understandings of political engagement in relation to feminism by drawing on contemporary feminist scholarship. This is combined with qualitative research undertaken in 2016 and 2017 with five focus groups comprising young people from different secondary schools across four New Zealand cities. Exploring this through the lens of everyday citizenship means dealing with the ambiguities around terms and concepts, both for researchers and young people themselves, as well as acknowledging the nuances and tensions concerning what counts as political involvement. The research findings suggest that how educators and youth workers connect and empower diverse groups of young people when navigating the potentially contentious terrain of political positioning, identification and social action requires further investigation.

Review of: The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?, Michael J. Sandel (2020)

London: Allen Lane, 272 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-241-40759-2, h/bk, £20