Citizenship Teaching & Learning - Deciphering Citizenship Education in Asian Contexts: Discourse, Practice and Politics, Jun 2024

This study addresses the two questions: ‘How do Japanese civics teachers perceive participation in society?’ and ‘What are the factors that influence their views on participation in society?’ For this purpose, active citizenship in this article is defined as participation in society including voting, political activism and community involvement. The dataset for this study consists of semi-structured interviews with eleven secondary school civics teachers from different parts of Japan. Participating teachers were asked about citizenship ideals in terms of identity, civic virtue, political involvement and requirement for democratic society. Results of thematic analysis suggest that the Japanese civics teachers were reluctant to participate in protests and demonstrations. Instead, actively seeking information about causes of protests and being critical about government policies are suggested as alternative approaches. Illustrating Japanese civics teachers’ perception of active citizenship for young people based on the findings from interview data, this article contributes to further understanding the conceptual diversity of active citizenship in terms of political, cultural and social contexts. Possible reasons why protesting is not a preferable option are also considered.

Teaching young Hongkongers a sense of ‘Chineseness’, especially in a cultural sense, was embedded in the city’s colonial history. Yet moulding the young generation to be patriotic citizens of the People’s Republic of China was a new objective for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government after 1 July 1997. This study analyses civic and citizenship curriculum guidelines issued in Hong Kong from 1997 to 2022 to explore how a new construct of national identity was pedagogized in the post-handover context. The research findings of this study suggest that the pedagogical discourse of national identity in the curriculum guidelines has tended to prioritize an ethno-cultural sense of Chineseness as an external entity and orient Hong Kong students as passive recipients for this new identity after the handover. The article concludes by considering the implications of these findings for the teaching of national identity in Hong Kong’s new political context after the implementation of the National Security Law in 2020.

Citizenship education is often assigned a role in nation building as it attempts in part to bridge social divisions within society and foster a more unified national identity. As an element of citizenship education, teaching about ethnic minorities is an imperative to achieve this aim. This article examines how ethnic minorities in China are represented in recent primary and secondary textbooks for political and civic subjects, focusing on the nature of state–minority interrelations. We find that textbooks frame ethnic minorities as patriotic Chinese citizens while legitimizing Chinese rule over them. These findings expand on the past literature emphasizing unequal Han–minority relationships and shed light on how diversity is negotiated and formulated in civic education in a non-western society.

Review of: Research on Global Citizenship Education in Asia: Conceptions, Perceptions, and Practice, Theresa Alviar-Martin and Mark C. Baildon (2021)

Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 243 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-64802-323-1, p/bk, $45.04