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Highlighted Session: Citizenship Education: Paradoxes, Processes, Struggles, Possibilities of Implementation at Local, National and International Levels

Tue, March 12, 2:45 to 4:15pm, Hyatt Regency Miami, Floor: Third Level, Miami Lecture hall

Group Submission Type: Highlighted Paper Session

Proposal

This panel focuses on how agents of citizenship education (CE) in Canadian, Croatian, and US contexts negotiate power and shape the ability of CE to advance social justice and collective action. In a world of rapid changes, globalization, and increasing insecurity about a sustainable future, citizenship education is proposed as a significant mitigating factor for children and youth facing the consequences of such societal issues. Scholars, educators and policymakers mostly agree that formal and informal citizenship pedagogies can help children unpack and address the experiences that affect their daily lives (Bickmore et al., 2017; McAvoy & Hess, 2013; Quaynor, 2015). However, what citizenship education is, what it should teach, and in what ways are highly debated issues among stakeholders (Awad, 2019; Kubow, 2018; Starkey, 2012). The debate directly relates to what and whose values and visions of the future gain saliency. For those interested in advancing social justice, a key question in this debate: can and under what conditions does CE help create real systemic change, protect existing rights, and teach young people to organize collectively to seek justice in their communities? More specifically, presentations in this panel analyze the paradoxes of citizenship education initiatives in neoliberal states and their ability to create transformative pedagogies that enable ground-up system change towards social justice and equity.

This panel explores how institutional agents of citizenship education define themselves in relationship to young people, each other and to governing power structures using lateral and vertical power flows. The presentations examine ways that the state can simultaneously support and stymie citizenship education. Each presentation uses empirical evidence from critical discourse analysis, personal interviews, and autoethnography to highlight how states utilize and corrupt CE as a strategy of social transformation. Two presentations focus on teacher experiences and analyze teacher and student responses and ways of resisting such corruption to foster active citizenship that challenges the status quo. One presentation considers how the state appropriates CE in attempts to form young national subjects and manage young peoples’ aspirations for themselves and their communities. The focus of all three panels is teacher and youth agency in engaging in more radical CE through acts of subversion and protest.

The first paper examines the recent uptake of democratic citizenship pedagogies by the Canadian government in initiatives aimed at the inclusion of young people in national affairs. By focusing on the development and content of Canada’s first-ever national youth policy as a case study, the paper attends to how youth voices are incorporated into dominant discourses of official multiculturalism and, therefore, simultaneously empowered as agents of change while reproducing dominant power structures of the settler-colonial nation-state. This discussion contributes insights into the negotiations of youth agency and state interests in situated practices of citizenship education.

The second paper examines the experiences of postsocialist Croatia’s citizenship education teachers negotiating global CE frameworks, local debates on citizenship discourses, and student needs and interests. The paper compares dominant citizenship discourses with the postsocialist teachers’ imaginaries of CE that move young people and educators to seek social justice in their communities collectively. The paper discusses multiple power flows present in teachers’ relationships with students, colleagues and state/supra-state agents. In paying attention to the multiple power flows of domination and resistance, the paper examines how interplays of hegemony and solidarity affect pedagogy, motivation and social change.

The final paper addresses how an American public school internationally recognized for authentic citizenship education responded when its very existence was questioned by a change in two layers of leadership. A teacher and alumnus of the school share perspectives on how and why citizenship education persisted when threatened at this particular school. The school’s history as an education laboratory has allowed citizenship education to evolve in fluid response to changing power regimes over multiple decades, and it has thus secured a reputation, through the lived experiences of generations of stakeholders, that allow it continued leverage in spite of attempts at state control.

This panel aims to transnationalize conversations about how local, national and global relate in preventing citizenship education from reaching its transformative potential. However, panelists seek to highlight the potential of citizenship education to challenge power relations through the acts of transgenerational, transdisciplinary, and transnational relations of solidarity among educators, policymakers and youth. This panel contributes to existing knowledge by examining the possibilities and limitations of citizenship education as a vehicle of social transformation. By viewing the role of the state in citizenship education through a transnational lens, emancipatory practices for citizenship education can gain international solidarity in challenging instead of reproducing state-endorsed systems of injustice.

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