Citizenship Teaching & Learning - Volume 17, Issue 1, 2022

When the #RhodesMustFall movement called for the decolonization of the university curriculum in South Africa in 2015, academics were soon under pressure to begin to explore various ways to go about beginning such a complex process. One possible approach to this would be to explore whether Afrofuturism could practically liberate the mind towards addressing any forms of cognitive injustice that students may experience as a result of a colonized curriculum, and in what ways it might do so. A literature review has found a paucity of empirical research exploring ways in which a film that employs Afrofuturism could be used to advance the decolonization project in teaching and learning practices in South African higher education. This article aims to contribute to this discourse through a case study which attempted to uncover the attitudes and emotions of a group of students who, after viewing the film Black Panther, which employs Afrofuturism, were or were not, able to make sense of and/or re-imagine their identities and relationships with others in the context of Afrofuturism, and to what extent. The article thus reports on a case study at a university of technology (UoT) in South Africa in which the film was used to attempt to advance the idea of Afrofuturism in the university curriculum and to uncover the lived experiences, social realities and ideas of self/identity of particular students from marginalized communities.

One of the main roles of schooling is equipping students with civic values and preparing them for participation in democratic societies. However, what should be taught and what kind of citizenship should be promoted are core issues in civic education, especially in the time of globalization. As several researchers stated, what kind of citizens we want to nurture and what kind of school curricula will best promote it are contentious topics among educators and policy-makers. The purpose of this article is to examine the influence of speaking a foreign language, social media use and types of citizenship on global competence. The correlational survey model was applied for the study. The participants were selected through cluster random sampling during the 2018–19 academic year. This study was implemented with 425 high-school students in Turkey. The author used the Global Citizenship Scale and ‘What Kind of Citizen’ survey. The findings showed that the number of social networks that participants engaged in was positively related to global competence. A positive attitude towards participatory citizenship was also associated with global competence. Multiple regression was conducted to determine the best linear combination of speaking a foreign language, social media use, and attitude towards participatory citizenship for predicting global competence. Test results showed that the combination of these variables significantly predicted global competence.

This study investigates university students’ perceptions of identity, rights and duties. The context of the study is an English department at a public-sector university in Sindh, Pakistan. The main research question that guides this study is ‘What perceptions of identity, rights and duties are held by a sample of undergraduate students in Pakistan?’ Semi-structured interviews were used as the research instruments. Cogan’s model of citizenship was used as theoretical frameworks guiding this study. Data were collected from twenty students of final-year undergraduate class. The key arguments based on findings of this study are that participants’ perceptions of identity, rights and duties included types and examples of citizenship themes discussed by Cogan as well as the themes particularly relevant to the participants’ context such as religion, morality and caste issues. Asian understanding of citizenship advocates importance of morality and religion or spirituality for Asian citizens. However, the literature reviewed did not exhibit any reference to the importance of caste in a citizen’s sense of identity. I make recommendations for further research to explore the role of context in learners’ citizenship interpretations along with other recommendations for research and professional practice.

This article presents a six-session course the author developed as an integral part of a doctoral research to explore two small groups of teachers’ initial understandings of democratic peacebuilding citizenship through eliciting their narratives of practice and their emerging understandings after voluntarily participating in this non-formal professional learning initiative. Another aim of the study was to explore how their involvement in the course facilitated their own professional learning. Teacher participants were from different private schools in two relatively contrasting contexts, one in the Greater Cairo Area in Egypt and one in the Greater Toronto Area in Canada. This course sets an exemplary participatory approach to inform future research in teacher professional learning for democratic peacebuilding citizenship education in post-conflict zones, societies transitioning out of violent conflict and relatively democratic societies.

Global citizenship education is premised on the narrative of an increasingly interconnected and interdependent world. However, the rise in exclusive nationalistic response to the COVID-19 has indented the central tenets of global citizenship education. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the triumphalism of exclusive nationalistic responses to COVID-19 has manifested in an increase in nationalism rhetoric, border closure, reinforcement of border fences the repatriation of foreign nationals and evacuation of citizens. In some instances, foreign nationals have been denied COVID-19 state food handouts. Consequently, there has been a rise in xenophobia, sinophobia and other forms of racial discrimination, which have affected the higher education sector. Contrastingly, global citizenship education envisions a global collective response to a phenomenon, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. This article explores and analyses the complex challenges that the COVID-19 pandemic has imposed on global citizenship education.

Studies carried out in different countries identify young people as the least politically engaged age cohort. Since political interest and participation are largely shaped by socialization agents, such as parents, peers and school, the objective of our research is to explore the role of each agent within the Polish context. Results of two studies, quantitative (n = 570) and qualitative (44 individual in-depth interviews), show that young Poles’ political interest and participation are indeed influenced by parents, peers and school, though the impact of each agent is related to different areas of activity. We separate those practices that have a constructive effect on political engagement from those that impact it in a destructive way. Finally, we provide a model of political socialization including the specific role of each agent and consider their potential for increasing young people’s political engagement.

This article focuses on the potential of in-group music lessons to foster musical citizenship. It further discusses the relation between musical citizenship and conventional citizenship and shows how musical citizenship reorientates our thoughts towards citizenship, particularly in the light of the recent pandemic. The discussion is based upon reflection on semi-structured interviews conducted during my ethnographic fieldwork research on musicking among refugees sheltering in reception centres. The discussion is framed with approaches to citizenship and musical citizenship. The discussion is structured in three parts. First, I conceptualize my interlocutors’ current ‘in limbo’ status. Second, I show how music learning in-group fosters musical citizenship and helps navigate exclusions. Third, the attention shifts on how music learning was impacted by the way that the lockdown was implemented as a measure to limit the spread of the pandemic, highlighting the inclusivity of ‘musical citizenship’ undermined by (conventional) citizenship and the relevant exclusionary policies.