Creating Citizenship Communities

Education, Young People and the Role of Schools

I. Davies, V. Sundaram, G. Hampden-Thompson, M. Tsouroufli, G. Bramley, T. Breslin, T. Thorpe

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137368867
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Comparative Education

On the basis of a national research project undertaken in England, this volume explores how and why young people's engagement is so important globally in education and society, and looks at what teachers and students think about citizenship and community. The authors make recommendations to enhance understanding and the potential for engagement.

1

Why Is the Attempt to Promote Youth Engagement a Major International Issue?

In this chapter, we provide an international overview of some of the issues that are important in the consideration of citizenship and community and forms of education that are intended to help young people and others understand and become more engaged in contemporary society. This chapter is deliberately international and global in its outlook and provides a wide-angled lens on developments about citizenship and community before we explore in detail, in Chapters 2–6, the specific research and development project that took place within England, and prior to broadening our focus back to overarching themes in Chapter 7. It is probably sensible for us to re-state the note of caution that we offered at the beginning of the book. We are not suggesting that in this chapter and towards the end of the book we would include all the themes and perspectives that are significant in all parts of the world. Derek Heater was right to emphasise the scale of the task when he declared:

What is needed, though it would be a formidable undertaking, is a comparable study of world citizenship education.

(Heater 2002, p.177)

Indeed the task is even more formidable than Heater suggested, as we would need to explore not only what was happening in the name of world citizenship education but also formal and explicit programmes of citizenship education in all the countries of the world, as well as review the often less formally framed work that takes place in and with communities (globally and nationally). What we will do in this chapter is clarify what is meant by citizenship and community, the twin themes of this book, and discuss some of the theoretical perspectives, empirically research-based projects and professional and other practically based initiatives that allow us to give a partial coverage of significant aspects of relevant work that is happening in different parts of the world.

We aim to do these things as sensitively and as meaningfully as possible. A division in our chapters between our project which took place in England and international issues should not be taken to mean that we are making simple and clear distinctions between ‘international’ and ‘national’. Such labels are constructed and our point is to emphasise the need to realise the worldwide significance of citizenship and community and to appreciate their meanings through attention to context. It is fairly common in scales of intercultural competence (Spitzberg and Changnon 2010) that positive recognition of difference across national and other contexts is preferred over a simplistic assumption that everyone in the world is the same. We are reluctant to accept the idea, which seems to be implied in the quotation below, that we may identify the exporting or even imposition of ideas from one place to another:

From the time of the Greeks and the Romans in the old European republics (the spirit of what we now called civic republicanism) citizenship education has been as important in the culture of the western world – now permeating outwards throughout the world . . . . There is still some way to go in breaking from long ingrained habits and overly rigid traditional teaching.

(Crick 2011, p.xiv)

Rather, we feel that as far as possible it is important to view ideas and issues creatively in order to achieve a more accurate portrayal of what is happening. In contrast to the certainties offered by Crick in the quotation above, we feel it is important to be more carefully reflective, which may mean that accepting that other people in other places do things better than may be imagined by one set of nationally based policymakers. Indeed, self-criticism may prove to be fundamental:

Western liberalism may survive but it is no longer immune from serious self questioning . . . other non-liberal societies, like the East Asian countries, seem to be proving that modernisation is not identical with Western liberalism. There are other, perhaps more powerful ways to become modern.

(Grant 1985, quoted in Kennedy 2004, p.9)

Throughout we are determined to try to avoid a stereotypical approach to understanding that emphasises the essential correctness of one single approach. In that light, we are attracted to Merryfield and Duty’s position:

Unlike essentialist or dichotomous thinking (black/white, civilized/uncivilized) of past eras, hybridity in a global age is based on egalitarian pluralism that rejects broad divisions and blurs distinctions. It also represents marginalities that are common to the human condition within and across all groups.

(Merryfield and Duty 2008, p.84)

It is within these parameters that we provide not fully complete definitions but rather some discussion which allows us to suggest, tentatively, characterisations of our key terms. We provide in three sections of overlapping issues some general indications of the meaning of our key terms, an indication of the key issues that affect citizenship and community across the world with some illustrative examples and, finally, some case studies that show how things have developed in specific places.

The characterisation of citizenship and community

Citizenship is essentially a compound of legal status, identity and action (Osler and Starkey 2005). Community is, fundamentally, about belonging to a place or people or ideal. As such there are obviously very significant overlaps between citizenship and community, but each requires a little further discussion in order to clarify the nature of our work. The three areas of citizenship referred to above – status, identity and action – suggest that a citizen is able, in terms of her status, to gain a passport and be accorded rights and responsibilities, including those to vote, to speak in certain ways in particular contexts and to maintain the law. A citizen might in relation to identity see him or herself as part of a wider group. Regarding action, a citizen in connection with their legal status and commitment to certain groups could be expected to have the right and the responsibility to engage with others. Through these elements, citizenship is broadly informed by two traditions: the civic republican and the liberal. Whereas the former emphasises responsibilities in public contexts, the latter is essentially concerned with the rights of individuals in private contexts. While someone operating from the basis of a civic republican perspective would, to choose an example that some would see as extreme, support something such as national service, a liberal would perhaps more readily see a citizen as exercising rights to get on with his or her life as he or she saw fit. Of course, the picture is much more complicated than that. The three areas of legal status, identity and action are hugely problematic. One might see the legal status of citizenship as rather exclusive (it is possible that citizenship, at a time when refugees and asylum seekers and immigration are significant topics in contemporary debate, is highlighted to identify more easily those who do not belong – and thus, possibly, to allow for their removal). It is possible for a citizen to be legally attached to a particular place – the United States, Spain or another country – but to feel Catalonian not Spanish or more African than American in a hyphenated identity. Identity may be felt most keenly in relation to an ethnic or gender or other group and not sit easily with legally framed conceptions of citizenship, and within debates about fundamentally important matters such as human rights, there are contested matters about the group or individual basis of such entitlements. The issue of participation and engagement is similarly potentially challenging. If we were to assume that there is some sort of trade-off between rights and responsibilities (‘you get out only what you put in’), then vulnerable members of society who are less able than others to make a contribution may in effect be seen in some contexts as second-class citizens. And, the meaning of the two traditions – the civic republican and liberal – becomes somewhat challenging when practical situations are experienced. As a parent, is it my right or my duty to look after my children? The answer to that question may be that a right and a duty (while always enjoying a meaningful distinction) are often overlapping so significantly as to make simple dividing lines impossible to achieve. Issues about community overlap very strongly with these issues that have been raised above about citizenship and are similarly challenging. There are debates, which are more thoroughly explored below, about the roles of ideas, events and issues which are often explored explicitly in the context of community. Psychological perspectives about the nature of belonging, the nature of our preferred and actual family and other groups and the ethnic and other lines which intersect with feelings towards, and practical engagements with, others are highly complex, contested and controversial. There is often a rather complex conflation of the public and private. However, prior to a more precise consideration of the issues that arise from these things, it is perhaps useful to state, very broadly, for the purposes of developing our arguments in this book, what we deem citizenship and community to be. Community is thought of

as a place or neighbourhood . . . as a normative ideal linked to respect, inclusion and solidarity . . . as something based on a politics of identity and recognition of difference . . . as a political ideal linked to participation, involvement and citizenship.

(Annette 2003, p.140)

And in relation to citizenship:

Individuals are citizens when they practise civic virtue and good citizenship, enjoy but do not exploit their civil and political rights, contribute to and receive social and economic benefits, do not allow any sense of national identity to justify discrimination or stereotyping of others, experiences senses of non-exclusive multiple citizenship and, by their example, teach citizenship to others.

(Heater and Oliver 1994, p.6)

Key overarching perspectives and issues about citizenship and community

In this section we explore, necessarily with very broad brush strokes, some of the key issues that influence debates about citizenship, community and engagement across the world. We recognise that there is an increasing amount of attention to understanding how systems work across nations (e.g. Meyer and Benavot 2013). Consistent with our cautious approach, we wish to undertake this initial comparative discussion sensitively in the context of the possibilities of globalising democracy and avoiding a blinkered view. We have been influenced by the discussions about the trends and emphases in comparative education in publications such as Phillips and Schweisfurth (2006) and Mundy et al. (2008) and do not wish to develop a narrow straitjacketed view of what is going on across the globe.

We have allowed for some reflections on very general philosophical perspectives, demographic considerations and forms of implementation of approaches in educational contexts. We draw from literature reviews of citizenship and community, whose meaning has been developed in recent years by consideration of large-scale and other projects, including the IEA work in the 1970s, the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), Civic Education Study (CIVED) in the 1990s and the more recent International Citizenship and Civic Education Study (ICCS) project. We are alert to transnational work in specific contexts (especially from the European Union and Council of Europe) as well as material from the ‘east’ (e.g. Kennedy et al. 2014). We also draw from some single country studies. We frame each issue or area as a question in order to highlight the exploratory nature of our thinking.

What sort of attention should we devote within educational contexts to citizenship and community?

It is important to recognise the long-standing neglect (beyond rhetorical statements) of citizenship and community in education and also to note the opposition to educational work that is not narrowly based around academic subjects or vocational training. Various histories and overviews of citizenship education that point to this tradition (e.g. Heater 1977; Brennan 1981; Batho 1990; Davies 1999) are already available and do not need to be repeated here. In England and in many other countries, until the 1960s the history of citizenship education was one of neglect. This is not to suggest that nothing was done that could be seen as relevant. There has been much that has been done very positively for the development of citizenship and community, and some of the examples and issues that demonstrate this appear elsewhere in this chapter. The League of Nations Union and the Council for Education in World Citizenship are examples of initiatives that took place in the early part of the 20^th century that sought to develop professional forms of education around citizenship and community. There are also, unfortunately, very many examples of countries that have developed anti-democratic forms of education. And there were also, of course, those who sought to exclude political issues from schools. At times it is possible that some of those were operating rather disingenuously. In the United Kingdom, a 1949 government pamphlet (Ministry of Education 1949, p.41) insisted that ‘a healthy democratic society’ can be encouraged if schools develop ‘the old and simple virtues of humility, service, restraint and respect for personality’. By the 1960s, in many countries there were courses in civics for those students who were not expected to do well academically and were perhaps being prepared for ‘followership’, while there were also high-status academic courses in Politics for those students who would probably go to university and secure middle-class jobs in the civil service or other professions. However, under the pressure of a range of democratising features things did change. In the United Kingdom, the age at which one was allowed to vote was reduced to 18 years in 1970 and in 2014 young people of 16 will be allowed to vote in the referendum about Scottish independence from the United Kingdom. There was a growth in comprehensive (i.e. all-ability) community schools, and research evidence which suggested that school lessons and textbooks contained political images and issues and that material could be understood by young people. This meant that the significance of political issues within existing educational contexts and the need for a professional approach to them were accepted more readily than previously. It is now rare to see statements in which the potential and need for citizenship and community learning are denied (although there are still strong tensions around such matters as may be seen, for example, from the debates about the introduction of civics into the new national curriculum in Australia). It is, however, common for particular processes and goals for that learning to be promoted. Similar examples of trends towards an increasingly explicit recognition of the school in helping young people to understand and take part in contemporary society may be seen in the case studies at the end of this chapter and elsewhere in this book. There is acceptance that schools are intimately wrapped up with citizenship and community, but there is little consensus as to why that should be the case, how it should be done or what outcomes should be demonstrated by teachers and young people.

Do attitudes to citizenship and community differ in different parts of the world?

Broadly, within a universalist approach we recognise significant differences between regions in their approach to community and citizenship. Those differences may at times be rather fluid, although we do recognise the deep-seated nature of ideas in different parts of the world. According to Levy et al, ‘Nations do not immediately adopt new narratives when their governmental structures change’ (2011, p.18). There will obviously be differences within and across countries, and within that complex picture are groupings about which assumptions are made at times. We need to think carefully, for example, about the meaning of ‘east’ and ‘west’ as we make comparisons across, and within, regions and nations. Geographically, the meaning of ‘east’ and ‘west’ is determined by where one stands and that is also true in relation to political, social and cultural and other matters. Within regions there are extremely significant differences: within the so-called east, China is not Japan; within the so-called west, the United States is not the United Kingdom. There may be blends within particular locations (e.g. Tse (2012) in a discussion of Macau refers to a mix of ‘Chinese morality and western citizenship’). The need to explore these concepts and practices is very real and is occurring perhaps more than ever before. The 2013 citizED conference held in Tokyo had the title of ‘East and West in Citizenship Education: Encounters in Diversity and Citizenship’. There may be an unthinking assumption that in the ‘east’ there will be a stronger commitment to citizenship and community in ways that depend more on collectivism and duties than would be the case in the ‘west’. This simple position is of course not sustainable but is superficially attractive in the context of the predominance in literature of discussion of the themes of Confucianism and Marxism/Maoism. The hugely enterprising nature of the individuals and economies of China, Japan and elsewhere are enough to steer us away from these simplicities. And yet, it is impossible to ignore the influence of these collective-oriented ideologies. Summarising the work of various authors (e.g. Chen and Chung 1994; Chia 2011), it is possible to characterise Confucianism as something in which social harmony, hierarchical relationships based on age and employment or community role, the importance of the family and concern for the less well-off are vitally important. Confucianism also emphasises the importance of education, and within that there is a clear expectation that the community of teachers, within the community of school, will be respected. The emphasis on respecting the group is not of course entirely divorced from what is seen in the ‘west’, but this respect for authority and for those who are responsible for the delivery of knowledge can give citizenship a very different ‘feel’. Indeed the existence of borrowed words in citizenship and community discussions tends to suggest that particular approaches are in prevalent. For example, the most common term for ‘identity’ in Japan is the English-derived word ‘aidentiti’ and, at times, political aspects of citizenship are less emphasised in the east than they are in the ‘west’ (Lee 2004, p.32).

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Why Is the Attempt to Promote Youth Engagement a Major International Issue?
• 2. Exploring Citizenship and Community in Education in England
• 3. Researching Young People’s Engagement in Society
• 4. Issues Arising from a National Survey of Schools
• 5. Findings from the Focus Groups
• 6. Creating Citizenship Communities through Teaching and Learning
• 7. Creating Citizenship Communities: Lessons and Recommendations – Pulling the Threads Together
• References
• Index