Citizenship Teaching & Learning - Volume 9, Issue 2, 2014

The EU needs to address specific measures on children and youngsters with a migrant background in order to achieve the EU 2020 strategy goals on education. These pupils still perform worse than their native peers at school, and their underachievement represents an important obstacle to reach the global challenges. To do so, it is crucial to focus strategic action based on policy implementation and reframe the current status of educational systems into a community, systemic and inclusive approach.

International Baccalaureate (IB) schools have traditionally been associated with displaced expatriates and globally mobile privileged elites. In recent years, there has been an increase in the number of state funded Title I IB schools across the United States, many of them serving immigrant and refugee children and youth. However, this unprecedented access of immigrant and refugee students to an international education is an underrepresented field in the education literature. How do immigrant and refugee children construct and perform citizenship in such contexts? How does the school utilize their cultural and global capital? In this article, I present the findings of a qualitative case study conducted in a fourth grade classroom in a public charter international school, River Song Elementary (pseudonym), serving immigrant, refugee and local children in one of the largest refugee resettlement areas in the United States. Through document analysis, focus groups, individual interviews, and ethnographic observations over a period of twelve weeks, I explored the children’s constructions and performances of citizenship. I found that there were tensions between global and local narratives that trickled down to the school and classroom climate dichotomizing various aspects of children’s identities and cultures as well as the ways in which they understood and enacted citizenship. Yet, guided by their teachers, the children were actively engaged in the construction of common civic spaces where different forms of expression played a singular agentic, participatory and unifying role.

This article focuses on the Swedish school’s democratic mission to foster active democratic citizens in relation to fundamental human rights, the National Education Act and the National Curriculum for the compulsory school system. This is done by showing the tension contained in policy documents and giving examples of how this is played out in the everyday practices of schooling. The overall democratic mission for the Swedish school system – to prepare the younger generation for Swedish citizenship – takes place within the nation state and therefore carries with it historical and cultural norms, values and laws that in certain ways become relevant to various minority groups in the country. In this article, the notion of the abstract citizen is used to elaborate on the imaginary of the nation and its ideal citizens. The empirical material consists of two case studies, both of which are situated in the same Swedish town and have been chosen in order to achieve socio-economic variation. A mixed-method approach has been applied to the study. The results show the complexities that result from the tension that exists in the policy documents with respect to the school’s responsibility to prepare the younger generation for an active, democratic citizenship characterized by virtues such as democratic, pluralistic and tolerant. An important feature is the school staff’s professional judgement, i.e. an awareness of the grounds on which students are treated and which opportunities exist for individuals to differ from the majority of the population. Such situations of response and processes of socializing and disciplining create practices of inclusion and exclusion. In democratic terms, the notion of the abstract citizen must be constantly negotiated and renegotiated in the policy implementation and enactment in the everyday practice of schooling.

Education for citizenship in contexts of diversity arises from the intensification and diversification of migratory flows to Portugal, in particular to the Lisbon Metropolitan Area, in the transition from the twentieth century to the twenty-first century. The arrival of people from diverse origins to the city is visible in the areas of settlement not only in the multitude of uses, practices and forms of appropriation of space but also in the dynamics unfolded among the recently arrived citizens, the local population and the existing community institutions. The schools of the neighbourhoods hosting this diversity of residents have registered remarkable changes in their students and the integration of sociocultural diversity is today one of the main challenges faced by the educational community. School is essential in the construction of this plural society. It is responsible for training people and promoting their citizenship. In the context of diversity, the school can help students to develop their identity with the cultural group they belong to and to transmit values of global citizenship and training people for a ‘multicultural citizenship’. In this article, we pay special attention to the role of the school and family in the construction of citizenship in young people from different cultures, basing this on the empirical data gathered from: children and young people, both with native and with immigrant backgrounds attending public schools in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area; their respective families; and the school projects. Combining the perceptions of students’ practices, families’ expectations and school policies, we identify and analyse the multiple dimensions that education for citizenship can assume in a diverse educational context.

European societies increasingly implement diversity education as part of citizenship education (CE) curricula in order to provide young people with skills for dealing with diversity. This article analyses the policies and practices of diversity education at both the level of the European Union and the Council of Europe, and on the level of nation states, focusing on Germany and Russia as examples. In Europe, diversity education at schools simultaneously pursues two separate goals: on the one hand, teaching materials and education policies generate a grand narrative of celebrating European diversity. On the other, those same materials and policies stipulate that issues of inequality are to be dealt with separately. Thus, within European citizenship, diversity education and inequalities are often decoupled. Conceptualizing diversity in terms of heterogeneities and inequalities, this article reveals the ways in which diversity and inequalities are decoupled in citizenship and civic education and asks what happens when diversity is treated only as a matter of celebration. Examining blog posts from LGBTQ youth who are minority learners who experience exclusion, the article demonstrates the way in which the narrative of celebration of diversity disempowers them and how it contributes towards more uncertainty and more (self-)exclusion of those learners who do not find themselves within celebration of diversity narratives. The article argues for a reintroduction of the term ‘heterogeneities’ into CE and concludes by suggesting that diversity education as part of CE should begin with the question of whether there are any heterogeneities that do not require action or critical reflection.

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson (2012) London: Profile Books, 320 pp., ISBN: 9781846684296, h/bk, £25

Gendered Citizenships Transnational Perspectives on Knowledge Production, Political Activism, and Culture, Kia L. Caldwell, Kathleen Coll, Tracy Fisher, Reyna K. Ramirez and LokSiu (eds) (2009) New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 225 pp., ISBN: 9780230619852, h/bk, $95.00

Challenges and Inequalities in Lifelong Learning and Social Justice, Susan Jackson (ed.) (2013) Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 138 pp., ISBN: 9780415837712, h/bk, $145.00

Using Critical Research for Educational and Social Change, Tricia M. Kress (ed.) (2013) Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 257 pp., ISBN: 9780415839792, h/bk, $145.00