Citizenship Teaching & Learning - Volume 8, Issue 3, 2013

This article offers a narrative concept of citizenship in order to suggest a model of citizenship education as opposed to the factual, values-oriented model currently emphasized in Korea. Korea’s current approach to citizenship education is shaped by a mandated moral education curriculum meant to instil selected national values and moral virtues in children through a top-down method of teaching and learning citizenship. The article develops a different concept of citizenship in order to inspire the practice of citizenship education as children’s identity-making. The new concept, which employs a narrative inquiry methodology for the autobiographical inquiry, is found to be in fundamental conflict with Korea’s current practice of citizenship education: the narrative concept of citizenship attends to children’s lived experiences as a starting point for citizenship education that educates children about who they are and how they live as citizens. In contrast, the predetermined values-/virtues-oriented view of citizenship underpinning the established teaching practices in Korea educates children to be knowledgeable about citizenship values or virtues without establishing the relevance of this knowledge in their lives. This study suggests that, given the goals and standards of citizenship education, the narrative concept of citizenship would be far more effective in that it allows children to see themselves in multiple dimensions of good citizenship.

This article examines how the themes employed in citizenship teaching and learning are relevant to understanding the education of welfare professionals in English universities. The academic literature on citizenship education has predominantly focused upon the school curriculum and, consequently, the experiences of children and young people. Nevertheless, the boundaries of citizenship education are contested and the research presented here concerns its applicability to vocational programmes in Higher Education outside of teacher training. We argue that although citizenship education has become more explicit within secondary school classrooms, educators involved in the teaching and training of welfare professionals find themselves caught within a number of dynamics that make it difficult for them to engage directly with the potential value, as well as the pitfalls, of extending a programme of formal citizenship education to their students. Taking a phenomenongraphic approach, we explore how these educators understand citizenship and negotiate the idea of citizenship education within the university context and the wider community within which their students are being trained to practice. In so doing, the limitations and possibilities of extending citizenship teaching and learning to new constituencies are highlighted.

In 2006 a bi-lateral donor working with the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport (MoEYS) in Cambodia identified the need for improving the quality of literacy. The bilateral donor outsourced the contract to a team of British consultants to design and lead an early literacy project working alongside Khmer national consultants. This article begins by discussing and analysing how globalized perceptions of teaching, learning and national identity were enshrined in the development of training and classroom materials for both teacher and pupils. It uses the example of the place of phonics in the teaching of reading to explore the contradictions in practice between donor and low income countries. By examining the perceptions and assumptions made by all parties and analysing the discourse that took place in the development process it is possible to identify how national education and perceptions of identity and citizenship come into conflict with what was identified as a ‘global pedagogy’. As more agencies become involved and agendas change, the conflict between issues of national identity, citizenship and global pedagogy become increasingly blurred leaving the authors the task of unpacking the relative importance of these concepts on the impact of the project. We conclude that in educational project design there is a need to strike a balance between the influences exerted through international practice and priorities against the effects of local conditions, culture and context.

This article reflects on a European Union-funded research project – Social Documentary as a Pedagogic Tool – and its local implementation in Citizenship pedagogy in three non-selective English secondary schools in mixed and ‘disadvantaged’ communities in the West Midlands. An ethnographic methodology (for pedagogy) enabled Citizenship students to produce documentary films representing their communities’ perceptions of local identities in relation to Europe and its future. In working ethnographically, students making the documentary films were at the same time the ‘subjects’ (agents) and ‘objects’ (the data) of the learning and the research. Data was captured for discourse analysis in three forms – the documentary films produced by students, uploaded to the project’s website and screened at two international film festivals; individual interviews with teachers and group interviews with participating students. The article reviews the discursive data and discusses the potential of this pedagogic intervention for reflexive learning in Citizenship to successfully work in the ‘interplay between contexts for action, relationships within and across contexts, and the dispositions that young people bring to such contexts and relationships’.

In the United States, providing students with the education needed to develop the knowledge, skills and values that will enable them to become effective citizens is in question due to weak curricular requirements, inadequate state standards, inappropriate assessment measures, and poor teacher preparation. The role teacher education could play in filling these voids is critical. This article examines the effects of a digital game on the knowledge of civics concepts of students and the development of specific twenty-first-century skills, making judgments and decisions. A comparison of pre and post results reveal participants (n=58) learned civics concepts using this interactive and content-rich instructional resource.

This study explores the ways in which a group of secondary teachers in Jamaica think about and understand citizenship and considers how these understandings are informed by the social, economic and political context. The study utilizes an analytic framework of minimal versus critical conceptions of citizenship to highlight the calls by scholars and academics for conceptions of citizenship to reflect concern for issues of fairness, justice and democracy. The findings highlight that while the views of citizenship held by these teachers may be regarded by some as not sufficiently robust, an interpretation of these conceptions in light of the economic, social and political context reveals great complexity.

Reshaping Education for Citizenship: Democratic National Citizenship in Hong Kong, Pak-Sang Lai and Michael Byram (2012) Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 257 pp., ISBN: 978-1-4438-3531-2, h/bk, £39.99

The Labour Party and Citizenship Education: Policy Networks and the Introduction of Citizenship Lessons in Schools, Ben Kisby (2012) Manchester: Manchester University Press, 208pp., ISBN: 978-0-7190-8622-9, h/bk, £65.00

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, Jonathan Haidt (2012) London: Allen Lane, XVII + 419pp., ISBN: 978-1-846-14181-2, h/bk, £20.00

Pass the New Life in the UK Test: The Complete Study Guide for 2013, Celine Castelino (2013) Leicester: National Institute of Adult Continuing Education, 333 pp., ISBN: 978-1-86201-702-3, p/bk, £11.95