The Influence of IEA Civic Education Studies on Policy and Practice in Latin America

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Reflections on IEA Civic Education Studies’ Multi-faceted Contributions to the Research, Theory and Practice of Democratic Education across Countries

Proposal

"There is increasing disaffection from traditional forms of political involvement around the world particularly in the youth population. Latin America is not the exception, where electoral participation has declined steadily since the eighties. However, this pattern has been accompanied by a diversification in participation repertoires, with new generations participating in democratic spaces via alternative channels. It is in this context that a growing interest in civic and citizenship education in the region has emerged.

This paper is based on a chapter of the book Influences of the IEA Civic and Citizenship Education Studies: Practice, Policy and Research Across Countries and Regions. Its aim is to present an analytical review of scholarly products based on these studies and their influence on policy and practice in the Latin American region from the point of view of a scholar who has worked in that area. It also describes the people, institutions and research teams involved in this movement across the region.

We found that scholars of the region, have been mainly interested in two topics: citizenship participation and students’ attitudes toward equality and tolerance. Both topics are related to societal changes in the region. The first is connected to the decline of political participation, and the second is consistent with the changing patterns of migration and demands for equality from socially disadvantaged groups.

These identifiable lines of research have been coupled with the development of a network of researchers and practitioners across Latin American countries. However, what the countries’ educational discourse and practices have achieved by their participation in IEA’s civic education studies varies according to national contexts. There has been a range of different outcomes depending on national, political, and institutional factors. For example, a large proportion of the research publications with CIVED and ICCS data have been focused on three Latin American countries: Mexico, Chile and Colombia. The other Latin American countries that have participated in ICCS, such as Guatemala, Dominican Republic, Paraguay, Guatemala and Peru, have received less attention. This could be partially due to the availability of skilled personnel in well-developed evaluation centers in Mexico, Colombia and Chile and also to some senior scholars there who have provided reflections about the meaning and direction of democratic processes in the region.

Concretely at the base of these lines of development of the ‘emergent field’ of Latin American studies of civic education are capacity, networking and cooperation-building processes that cross the north/south classification in new ways. Research on Latin America is now mainly based in the region, and its volume and quality is increasing. We suggest that in order to continue with this trend, the following strategies could play a decisive role:
- Establish partnerships among national governments, international organizations and academic institutions in Latin America and beyond (e.g. translation of scholarly outputs as well as technical documentation, capacity-building, reflection on results from a variety of perspectives).

- Development of user-friendly, open-source software to analyze large-scale assessment data (e.g. the adoption of open-source software to meet the needs of researchers in the region)

- Enhanced consideration of theoretical perspectives."

Author

• Andres Sandoval-Hernandez, Bath University, UK