Education for Citizenship and Human Rights in Turkey

• In Event: Education for Diversity, Citizenship, and Human Rights in the Middle East

Abstract

Kenan Çayir (Istanbul Bilgi University)

This paper reports on the glaring gap between socio-political developments in Turkey and newly developed citizenship curricula. It argues that Turkey provides an example to theoretically reflect upon the tensions between rival concepts of citizenship and nationality and how these are played out in curriculum policy.
Turkey has been undergoing major transformations for the last two decades. Non-Turkish and non-Muslim groups have gained a public visibility and have been demanding their equal rights of citizenship. As a result, Turkey is in the process of developing a new constitution.
Whilst citizenship education has always been a part of the state-centric modernization project involving a ‘modern’ (read European) and distinct national identity in Turkey and the curriculum has always included a separate course on citizenship, human rights themes, on the other hand, are more recent. They have been increasingly incorporated into citizenship education and as a cross curricular subject since mid-1990s, when Turkey established its Committee on the (UN) Decade for Human Rights Education. Since 1998 citizenship education courses and textbooks have been revised three times, modifying what is taught in different grades. This paper explores the presentation of citizenship and human rights themes on the basis of a discursive analysis of these textbooks. This reveals that new textbooks include some progressive elements such as the removal of militaristic concepts and the inclusion of new themes such as discrimination and stereotypes. Despite these developments, citizenship education still promotes a difference-blind, nationalistic and exclusionary notion of Turkishness. Whilst different ethnic groups may have attained visibility in public and in textbooks, their inclusion brings the danger of essentialism unless there is a common understanding of equal entitlement to human rights such as freedom of religion and freedom of expression. However, revising the notion of difference-blind citizenship in textbooks is not an easy process given the long political tradition in Turkey of secularism in the public sphere and a consequent denial that gender or ethnic identities do frequently determine the opportunities available to theoretically equal citizens.
The research leads to recommendations to ensure that innovations in policy and practice are more effective. In particular it proposes ways in which textbooks and professional development opportunities may together provide a ground for teachers and students to critically reflect upon local and global processes.

Author

• Kenan Cayir, Instanbul Bilgi University