E.U./Lebanese Cooperation in Citizenship Education: Developing New Approaches to the Curriculum

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

Abstract

Professor Hugh Starkey (Institute of Education University of London, UK)

In the Middle East, as in other developing regions of the world, innovation in practice and policy is often driven by the availability of external (aid) funding. The EU through its development cooperation programs is a major source of funding for educational reforms. This paper reports on the experience of managing a large-scale EU-funded research and development project Support to the Lebanese Education Reform: citizenship education (2012 – 2015). It reflects on lessons learnt about strategies for achieving an evidence base; the relationship of research and policy; the challenges of policy implementation.

Lebanon is a post-conflict society, following the ending of its civil war in 1991. It holds free elections but its political system is based on delicate coalitions involving changing alliances between Sunni and Shia Muslims, Maronite, Catholic and Orthodox Christians and Druze. It preceded the so-called Arab Spring with its own Cedar Revolution of 2005 that saw the withdrawal of Syrian troops (Knudsen and Kerr, 2012). The substantial Palestinian population has no constitutional role in Lebanese politics. Although there is no agreement in Lebanon on a history curriculum, citizenship education is promoted by the Ministry of Education and Higher Education (MEHE) as a means of addressing, through a commitment to the Lebanese nation-state, the diversity of competing religious and ideological perspectives that still generate sporadic violence.

The Ministry drew up its vision for citizenship education in 2009 and negotiated EU funding for a team of six researchers and four administrative staff based in Beirut and London. The intention is to develop new approaches to citizenship education in Lebanese public schools. The program is committed to involving stakeholders in the reform with a bottom up process complementing top down policy directives. A systems leadership approach to educational reform promotes stakeholders including students, teachers and parents as crucial partners in any successful innovation of policy and practice (Fullan, 2007). We therefore set out to involve ‘knowledgeable agents’ with insider knowledge who can challenge and modify imposed reforms in a dialectical process of negotiation (Giddens, 1994).

This paper confronts the utopian perspective of citizenship and human rights as addressing deep divisions in society with some pragmatic considerations for research informed policy. The first challenge was establishing a base line of the state of citizenship education in Lebanon. Drawing on records of meetings, correspondence and official documents as well as a wider literature review the paper records the real difficulties of identifying definitive statements of policy and arriving at a coherent picture of realities. The rhetoric of intensions was confronted by ethnographic qualitative studies of schools across the country, as reported in this symposium in the paper by Shuayb and Akar. These required the development of original research methods that could be undertaken by relatively inexperienced researchers. The paper concludes with an evaluation of progress to date and recommendations for future researchers working in similar contexts.

Author

• Hugh Starkey, UCL Institute of Education - London