Citizenship Teaching & Learning - Current Issue

This article adds to the debate about children’s engagement in political and social action. To explore this, we created educational workshops in Norway and Finland in 2023, in which 35 children, aged 9–12, were asked to imagine, in groups of four to five participants, a new planet for the arrival of Earth’s inhabitants and discuss laws for such a utopian society. Afterwards, the children were presented with dilemmas on various political and social issues with the aim of facilitating a discussion among them to increase perspective-taking and to get a deeper grasp of their views. The workshops were conducted on two different Saturdays in a non-school setting with free meals; we aimed to reach out to children from various backgrounds. The informal setting allowed children from different schools to meet and reduced expectations of conforming to class standards. Our findings show that children under twelve years of age articulate many and different perspectives on how the world should be run. Still, they see their own limitations as children to influence policies and decision-making processes. Further studies would benefit from exploring these findings more closely.

Democratic education (DE) is contested for not contributing optimally to pupils’ agency or participation. Additionally, it is argued that DE’s focus on rationalistic agenda overlooks materiality, e.g. bodies and spaces. Therefore, this article explores how a school’s democratic practices are entangled with materiality as we study agency with pupils in a youth-led project. The theoretical foundations of this study are based on feminist new materialism, which is rarely employed in the context of DE. Drawing on the research method of drifting, the empirical material was produced with eleven pupils, aged 13–14 years. In the analysis, we explore how bodies and spaces have thing-power, ability to affect, and are thus relevant to DE, because they contribute to children’s participation and school democracy. Focusing on materiality reveals power relations that hinder DE from being actualized. We conclude that adding material perspectives to DE and to the understanding of agency would provide a transformative and inclusive approach to foster children’s participation and citizenship in school and society.

Different worldviews and opinions converge in the classroom, sometimes leading to tensions about controversial topics. Many teachers either avoid such discussions or feel uncertain about handling them. Philosophical dialogue is a way to facilitate discussions, shifting the focus from judgement to in-depth reflection. Generally, teachers aim for students to obtain the ability to grasp multiple perspectives, especially regarding controversial topics. This study examines teachers’ perceptions of the impact of philosophical dialogue on teachers’ approaches regarding controversial issues and students’ multiperspectivity. Through Educational Design Research, we developed a philosophical dialogue method which was tested by Flemish teachers. Data were collected through 78 questionnaires and ten interviews. During the philosophical dialogue, teachers allow different students’ perspectives to surface by adopting a facilitator role, but differ in how far they express favouring one particular perspective. Training and structured philosophical exercises support teachers in this facilitating role. Moreover, teachers reported that philosophical dialogue fosters students’ multiperspectivity in a gradual manner.

This article examines the integration of social justice-oriented citizenship education (SJCE) into history teaching in secondary schools (ages 11–16), aiming to empower students with the knowledge, skills and dispositions necessary for active democratic citizenship. Grounded in the principles of SJCE, the article argues that history provides unique opportunities for fostering critical thinking, agency and a commitment to social justice. Through innovative pedagogical approaches, such as dialogic teaching and historical enquiry, history teaching can transcend rote memorization to critically engage with themes of inequality, resistance and societal change. By fostering empathy through historical narratives, such as the story of William and Ellen Craft, students can connect past struggles with contemporary social and political issues. The article concludes that integrating SJCE into history teaching can nurture reflective, active citizens capable of shaping a more equitable and democratic future.

Sport activities can provide an informal educational setting where citizen formation, emancipation and resistance against social exclusion can take place. In this article, we explore the social ambitions of Girl Football Community (GFC), a girl-only football activity which organizes spontaneous sport activities, for girls aged 6–19, conducted by women, with the objective to create opportunities for girls in disadvantaged areas to participate in sports and to use participation to form social inclusion. Based on interviews with leaders and participants as well as participant observations of the activities, we explore how critical pedagogy is enabled in football activities for girls underpinned by social ambitions. We analyse how self-organization of the activities facilitate participation on the girl’s own terms, how gender separatism in the activities creates relations and a sense of community. Critical reflection around social injustices takes form through continuous dialogue and talk about rights in the activities and opinion work oriented towards actors beyond. Rather than taking a fixed understanding of critical pedagogy as our starting point, we theorize how this formation of self-organization, community through separatism and critical dialogue and talk about rights as well as opinion work provides a certain critical pedagogy.