Citizenship Teaching & Learning - Volume 9, Issue 1, 2013

This article explores the concept of ‘affective citizenship’ and its potential contribution to citizenship education discourses in multicultural societies. This exploration is grounded in analysing two widespread emotional injunctions in such societies: the calls for ‘embracing the other’ and ‘coping with difference’. The analysis examines how these emotional injunctions imply ambivalent rather than monolithic notions about the ideal of the ‘affective citizen’ that is promoted in schools. A key argument of this article is that the assumptions that inform discourses of citizenship education in multicultural societies – namely assumptions about what constitutes ‘good citizenship’ in a multicultural society that wants to encourage its citizens to cope with difference and embrace the other – need to be critically interrogated for their underlying emotional tensions and the ambivalent obligations they may create. To do this, more attention to issues of affective citizenship is needed in schools and particularly to the ways in which such issues can be used by teachers as points of departure to instill more criticality in students’ understandings of and feelings about citizenship.

Various researchers contend that realizations of citizenship rights in the sphere of the individual are influenced by official citizenship status, age, social class, nationality, disability, religion, sexuality and gender. These dimensions that define citizenship are significant within organizations. Thus citizenship is a useful, important concept in elaborating the equality of conditions in educational institutions such as universities. This article focuses on sexual harassment in universities, which the authors consider a violation of citizenship rights. The article explores the shortcomings and insufficiencies of university sexual harassment policies and developments that have occurred since the university in northern Finland renewed and revised its sexual harassment policies. This study employs a qualitative method and is characterized by a gender-sensitive approach. The message that sexual harassment is forbidden at university has remained the same in policy documents over the past two decades; however, the issue of sexual harassment at university has become increasingly visible. Despite the existing policies and their development from 1990 to 2011, students and staff have experienced – and continue to experience – sexual harassment that hinders the full realization of their citizenship, that is, the intertwined fulfilment of bodily and intellectual rights at university.

Youth are traditionally excluded from meaningful decision-making in macro-level educational reform. An example of this absence is made present by youths’ voluntary dialogue and engagement through social media about a significant piece of educational reform in the province of Alberta called Bill 44. The findings indicate significant possibilities for the inclusion of student voice as part of active citizenship education in macro level educational policy and reform proceedings.

An area often neglected in the historiography of public education in the United States is the contributions made by black youth in the fight for equal education. During the 1950s and 1960s, when the struggle for equal education reached its apex, black youth were an essential part of the struggle. This article centeres the activism of black youth by illuminating how they actively fought for educational equality after the Brown decision and how their activism was linked to a larger struggle for full citizenship. Moreover, I examine the multiple forms of direct action black students utilized to promote citizenship education. By elevating their usage of walk-ins, walkouts and sit-ins, I argue that black youth advocated for more than just access into a building previously denied to them. Their activism was deeply rooted in the tenets of citizenship education. Using empirical data from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) files, A. Philip Randolph papers, Bayard Rustin papers and historical black and national newspapers, this article shows how equal education was inextricably linked to citizenship education and both would have to be accomplished before educational equality could be obtained. While the Brown decision legally reshaped public schools in the United States, it was the advocacy of black youth – particularly those living in the South, along with civil rights and teacher organizations that declared second-class education unacceptable. This work adds to scholarly works on citizenship education by illuminating the various ways black youth used civic participation as a tool to achieve educational equality. I conclude by suggesting that teachers and students can benefit from this historical work because it portrays the different ways students can participate in educational reform while simultaneously giving teachers ideas of how to support and empower their students for civic engagement.

This article reports on an intervention that leverages game-based learning in citizenship education. The Rise of Li’ Ttledot represents a curricular programme for citizenship education that was trialed in a primary school in 2011. It draws inspiration from prior research-based interventions in Singapore and attempts to translate key design principles from these earlier enactments to a younger demographic cohort of learners. It seeks to do so by providing a rich in-game experience and subsequently facilitating the abstraction of key citizenship values through a post-game programme of dialogic interaction between teacher and students. The article presents data that seems to support the degree and nature of scaffolding provided to facilitate these abstractions among younger learners.

This article outlines the diverse nature of Citizenship Education provision in England and identifies some problems arising from such diversity in relation to the initial and continued professional development of pre-service and in-service teachers. It goes on to outline some of the variety of academic background among teachers of Citizenship Education and some of the challenges that arise for both specialist and non-specialist citizenship teachers in addressing divergent and complex modes of subject provision. Differences in school provision, teacher background and attitude(s) to the subject require sensitivity in the construction and delivery of programmes intended to enhance teacher confidence and competence in Citizenship Education. A typology of the ‘8 Cs’ of citizenship teachers is identified and discussed, outlining the range of needs and attitudes among specialist and non-specialist teachers of Citizenship Education, and some recommendations are offered regarding how these can be approached.

The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 4. The Passage of Power, Robert A. Caro (2012) London: The Bodley Head, 736pp., ISBN: 9781847922175, h/bk, £35

The Teacher and the World: A Study of Cosmopolitanism as Education, David T. Hansen (2011) New York: Routledge, 176 pp., ISBN: 9780415783323, p/bk, £16.99