Citizenship Teaching & Learning - Volume 6, Issue 2, 2011

Do young people of today feel themselves to be global citizens? If so, what is it that they care about? Is it politics, poverty, climate change or issues relating to children? Understanding young people's views is important if schools are to be responsive to their needs and prepare them for life in a rapidly changing world. This article reports on a study into the hopes and fears of over 600 children and young people from a range of schools in the UK for the future of the global community. The sample was drawn from three age groups: eleven, fourteen and seventeen. It indicates the extent to which young people feel optimistic about the future, informed about current global issues, and motivated to act for change. The UK study was part of a larger study involving Poland and Spain. Comparisons are made with findings from these countries and with earlier UK studies (Hicks and Holden 1995; Holden 2007). Findings demonstrate that UK pupils are concerned about global issues relating to the environment, war, poverty, and injustice but that they are often misinformed about the causes and possible solutions. They want to be involved in working for change but action tends to centre around school-initiated fund raising or low level environmental activity. Participation is adult-initiated rather than pupil led. The findings have implications for policy makers and practitioners engaged in education for citizenship and global education. Listening to what young people have to say reinforces the need for a global dimension in the curriculum which is responsive to their concerns and helps prepare them as active and informed global citizens.

This article reports the perception of secondary students about Citizenship Education just after its implementation as a specific statutory subject in schools from the Autonomous Community of Madrid, Spain. The research was intended as an exploratory study of the present situation, and provides a first approach to these issues in the Spanish context. Participants were 2nd grade secondary students attending a public school of Madrid. A semi-structured interview designed for this study was individually administrated to the participants in order to explore their views about Citizenship Education lessons, teaching and learning strategies, students' participation and assessment processes. The findings can inform further research within the field.

Globalization is one of the most frequently discussed economic, political, social and cultural phenomenon of the twenty-first century, however there are very few studies that seek to uncover how young people, the future generation of the globalizing world, perceive these processes. Most of the existing studies target attitudes toward the economic changes and youth in Western European societies. There has been no study to investigate the perception and attitudes of young adults in post-socialist countries; therefore the goal of the present research was to explore Hungarian university students' views. Altogether 103 respondents of two different majors (humanities and social sciences/economics) participated in the research. A closed-ended questionnaire including a semantic differential scale and a 4-point Likert-type attitude scale consisting of 30 items regarding the most common mentioned economic, political, cultural and environmental benefits and dangers of globalization was administered. The analysis of the data revealed that while the participants consider the influence of globalization on Hungary large, they are neither fearful nor enthusiastic about its effects, however they considered their general impact slightly more negative than positive. Items expressing different aspects of globalization resulted in five factors: Decreasing Differences, Multiculturalism, Globalization as a Threat, Benefits of Globalization, and Cultural and Economic Hegemony. University major proved to be a better predictor of the attitude towards globalization than gender. Students of economics evaluated globalization significantly as being more good, exciting and useful than students of humanities. They seemed to have a more definite and elaborated picture about what is needed for success in a globalized world in terms of skills. Economics students also had higher means in Factor 4 'Benefits of Globalization' and they evaluated the specific effects of globalization more positively.

Citizenship education in pluralistic countries often relies on programs to combat negative prejudice and, to a lesser extent, to make various groups feel as if they are all one group. Recent research on allophilia, a largely ignored positive dimension of intergroup attitudes, suggests that these approaches are insufficient. Intergroup attitudes do not have to be negative (prejudice) or neutral (tolerance); they can be positive (allophilia). Allophilia research finds that allophilia takes five forms: affection, comfort, kinship, engagement and enthusiasm. Research also finds that increasing allophilia has different antecedents and predicts different outcomes than decreasing prejudice does. For citizenship education, this means that two goals – reducing existing prejudice among a country's different groups and increasing allophilia among them – can and should be pursued to achieve the goal of a country with different groups that actually want to live and work together. The article suggests ways in which citizenship education programs can promote allophilia, including the use of empathic joy along with the more commonly used empathic sorrow; activities to promote affection, comfort, kinship, engagement and enthusiasm; applications of social-networking technology to promote allophilia; and the use of direct measurements of positive attitudes, such as the Allophilia Scale, rather than assuming that low measurements of prejudice indicate the presence of allophilia.

Since the mid-1980s, the notion of 'European citizenship' has been discussed as a crucial factor in the formation of neo-European identity with particular symbolic, ideological and political content. This article explores aspects in which 'European citizenship' symbolic content and constructs (membership, belonging, rights, participation and identity) are delineated through the European Union's institutional, political and educational discourses and policies. It is argued that, over the past decades, the institutional construction of European Union (EU) citizenship has been characterized by a weak ideological and symbolic content as well as by political and social deficits. Moreover, it is claimed that the EU's education discourses and policies are controlled by an economic and technocratic rationale (marketization, govermentality, benchmarking, etc.), through which the 'European citizenship' paradigm is gradually depoliticized, mutated, and decreased to a measurable 'civic competence' governed by numbers.

In this article the author defines 'citizenship education' in the context of multicultural societies, applying the concept of transculturality. In this paper, he suggests how cross-cultural learning can be developed in a culturally diverse classroom. As soon as 'culture' is operationalized as a set of rules, it appears that meta-rules can be applied to cultural diversity. Rules become questionable, as do the arguments themselves. Finally, only Human Rights can provide a basis for further discussion.