This tri-theoretical study of globalization attempts to contribute to the limited scholarly research on global citizenship in education. Utilizing three important critical theories: neo-Marxism, gender and postcolonialist theory; this study analyzes in-depth the hidden process behind the formation of current global citizenship education. The findings reveal that it is possible to teach global citizenship education through critical civic education; however, a better understanding and application of critical theory and especially the critical sociology of space is required in current curriculums. In the absence of resources, motivation and infrastructure within school boards to implement a more state-guided critical citizenship education within their global citizenship education programs, assimilation of critical theory by teachers becomes absolutely necessary.

This tri-theoretical study of globalization attempts to contribute to the limited scholarly research on global citizenship in education. Utilizing three important critical theories: neo-Marxism, gender and postcolonialist theory; this study analyzes in-depth the hidden process behind the formation of current global citizenship education. The findings reveal that it is possible to teach global citizenship education through critical civic education; however, a better understanding and application of critical theory and especially the critical sociology of space is required in current curriculums. In the absence of resources, motivation and infrastructure within school boards to implement a more state-guided critical citizenship education within their global citizenship education programs, assimilation of critical theory by teachers becomes absolutely necessary.

While the challenge of improving young North Americans’ civic engagement seems to lie in the hands of schools, studying alternative ways of teaching citizenship education could benefit the current educational system. In this context, free schools (i.e., schools run democratically by students and teachers), guided by a philosophy that aims at engaging students civically through the democratic activities that they support, offer a relatively unexplored ground for research. The present inquiry is a case study using tools of ethnography and drawing upon some principles of complexity thinking. It aims at understanding students’ citizenship education experiences during democratic activities in a Canadian free school. It describes many experiences that can arise from these activities. They occurred within a school that operated democratically based on a consensus-model. More precisely, they took place during two kinds of democratic activities: class meetings, which regulated the social life of the school, and judicial committees, whose function was to solve conflicts at the school. During these activities, students mostly experienced a combination of feelings of appreciation, concernment and empowerment. While experiencing these feelings, they predominantly engaged in decision-making and conflict resolution processes. During these processes, students modified their conflict resolutions skills, various conceptions, and their participation in democratic activities and in the school. Based on these findings, the study concludes that students can develop certain skills and attitude associated to citizenship education during these activities and become active from a citizenship perspective. Hence, these democratic activities represent alternative strategies that can assist educators in teaching about citizenship.

The school subjects of history and social science are expected to contribute with historical and social scientific knowledge, skills and abilities: that is, subject knowledge. The subject knowledge that students achieve during their schooling is not only meant for future studies, but is also expected to inform a life as democratic citizens. However, the curriculum and syllabus have not always been explicit about this aim, and the relationship between subject knowledge and citizenship education is only vaguely explained. This thesis investigates this relationship within the context of history and social science education in Swedish upper secondary school. The educational dimensions of Biesta – socialisation, qualification and subjectification – are used as an approach to this investigation. The aim of the study is to explore, analyse and discuss the role of history and social science teaching for students’ citizenship education. This is done by investigating curricula, teaching and educational discourses and by using both empirical methods and content analysis. The thesis is a compilation of five articles, all exploring subject knowledge and its connection to students’ citizenship education. The first two articles investigate possible second-order concepts in social science education, which are described and discussed using theories and concepts from history didactics. The findings in these articles work as a basis for further study in following articles, where the subject knowledge and its connections to citizenship education are explored in more depth. Taken together, the articles present a rich picture of the complex reality of teaching and provide a basis for understanding better how teachers, students and curricula express subject knowledge and how this is related, or not, to citizen education. The contribution of the thesis is a more developed theoretical and conceptual understanding of history and social science education, especially through concepts that can be used in practical teaching in order to strengthen and develop citizenship education.

This dissertation addresses the questions: How do activists sustain hope while increasingly aware of social complexity? How is agentive hope related to experiences of systemic power relations, including class, race, and gender? In a political climate increasingly circumscribed by neoliberal and neoconservative policies and rhetoric, the question of how scholars and teachers, both formal and informal, can support hopeful, agentive, social democratic citizens becomes critical. Employing a mixed genre format, based in an ethnographic position informed by Virginia Dominguez's “politics of love and rescue” and Hirokazu Miyazaki's "method of hope," I examine hope and its relationship to diversity and citizenship through analysis of in-depth field research conducted in undergraduate citizenship education courses. Through both traditional anthropological analysis and a full-length, ethnographically inspired novel, I explore activists' motivation, life stories, and political values, asking how their ability to sustain hope for the short term and the long term articulates with their lived experiences of systemic power relations and their visions of citizenship. Key factors in sustaining a long-term orientation toward hope include perspective-taking ("the wide angle lens"), loving relationships, and doing and reflecting on direct action, especially across social boundaries. I conclude that reflective, relational, action-focused pedagogies can effectively support diverse groups of hopeful, agentive citizens committed to progressive visions of social justice.

This study focuses upon the extent that teaching about democracy affects pupil comprehension and opinions about democracy. Its point of departure is the question, “to what extent is school an agent of democratic socialization?” The overall aim of this study is to contribute to understanding the democratic socialization process and especially to understand the role that school can play in that process.   The study is comprised of a survey about democratic values, democratic institutions and democratic authorities completed by 318 upper secondary pupils upon two occasions. The first was just prior to the start of the course, “Samhällskunskap A” and the second was at the end of that course. The survey also included a number of background questions related to each individual participant; 28 pupils in one of the schools who had not yet studied “Samhällskunskap A” were used as a control group. Twelve teachers involved in actual teaching at that time were interviewed regarding their attitudes toward the official documents about democratic socialization and whether or not they saw the goals as articulated in those documents as possible to achieve.   Based upon theories about democratic socialization and socialization agents, a number of conditions and problems were formulated and operationalized in order to analyse the outcome of the study. Three main concepts were used as analytical tools: democratic orientations, democratic socialization and socialization agent.   The results do not support the assumption that school can be seen as a general democratic socialization agent through teaching about politics and democracy. But certain situations and aspects of democratic orientations demonstrate that the school has a tendency to affect socialization; therefore school is seen as a specific democratic socialization agent. The main conclusion of this study is that teaching about politics and democracy is expected to have limited influence on pupils in upper secondary school. Also important is the finding that the pupil’s average change on the aggregate level is low, but on individual level, many pupils made significant changes regarding their democratic orientations during the course. The results support a view that the process of democratic socialization is a complex process and is difficult to predict.

This study interrogates whose knowledge about the self and the other is represented to Iranian students in the 2004 and in selected pre-2004 editions of elementary and guidance school textbooks by analyzing how issues of identity politics, diversity, “citizenship” and development inform the construction of Iranian national identity since the introduction of various curriculum reforms (i.e.: global education) after the Revolution of 1978-79. I draw upon antiracism and transnationalism as discourses of analysis through which the West-East dichotomy is (re)evaluated and interrogated within the context of Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism and Boroujerdi’s (1996) conceptualization of “Orientalism in reverse”. I utilize deconstruction, discourse and qualitative interpretative content analyses as methods of investigating how “race”, ethnicity, social class and gender are configured in representations of sameness and difference. I “look at style, figures of speech, settings, narrative devices, historical and social circumstances, not the correctness of the representation nor its fidelity to some great original” (Said, 1978, p. 28). I argue that the ideal citizen and Iranian national identity are constructed by references to conflicting discourses of mustāżafīn (the oppressed), jīhād-i sūzandagī (the Reconstruction Jīhād), ‘ashayir (nomadic tribes), Ummat-i Islamī (Islamic Nation/Community), Īrān-dūstī (loving Iran), the Aryan migration, velayat-e-faqih and colonialism. In their discursive formations, nationalist, anti-imperialist, Islamic, middle-class and Orientalist narratives construct a homogenized Iranian citizenry who has always been active in regional/global relations of power. The ideal citizen is represented through the invocation of two types/sets of “shifting collectivities” that identify it as “white”, male, Shi’a, Aryan-Pars, progressive, independent, pious and a leader in the Islamic world. The first set divides between Shi’a-Persians and non-Shi’a and non-Persians. The second set of binary oppositions represents the ideal citizen in relation and in opposition to the West and the East in their multiple and historical forms. These textbooks are assimilationist texts that act as “border patrolling” and “stignatizing” discourses. They are also forms of “textual genocide” that exclude the voices and histories of national and global minorities and acts of discrimination committed by Iranians against women and minority religious and ethnic groups as official knowledge about friendly/enemy insiders and outsiders.

The purpose of this study was to examine social studies teachers' perceptions about social studies goals and content areas that should constitute the social studies curricula of grades five to 10 in Oman. This national study involved a population of 538 social studies teachers in basic education schools of the second cycle (grades five-10). Of 538 surveys, 407 surveys were completed and returned for a response rate of 76%. Cronbach's alpha values for each subscale ranged from .723 to .861. The resulting alpha value for the whole scale was .886, which indicates sufficient internal consistency reliability. Major findings indicated that social studies teachers supported all social studies goals suggested in this study. However, the degree of implementation of each goal was significantly lower than that of importance (p < .005). Overall, social studies teachers indicated more support for social studies goals of citizenship transmission, social science disciplines, and life adjustment than for social studies goals of reflective thinking, global education, and civic participation. The most important social studies content areas were perceived to be current events, core values of Oman society, geography, environmental education, history, family life education, and public issues. Geography and history, along with the perceived most important content areas, received the highest degree of implementation. The lowest-rated content areas in both importance and implementation were sociology, political science, psychology, and law-related education. The degree of implementation of each content area was significantly lower than that of importance (p < .003). Findings of the post hoc analyses revealed that there were statistically significant differences between male and female teachers in their perceptions about the importance and implementation of some goals and content areas, favoring female teachers. Among these content areas were environmental education, current events, public issues, geography, and history. Findings suggested that teacher gender influences curricular decisions about teaching some goals and content areas. Major barriers to teaching social studies were centered on the lack of participation of local community and students in determining social studies goals and content areas. Social studies teachers reported having little control over the curriculum they teach. It was concluded that social studies is not a high priority subject in basic education schools of the second cycle. Recommendations were made to improve the status of social studies in Oman.

Soon after the political handover in 1997, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) government had introduced a series of education and curriculum reforms. Such reforms is said to be proceeded in response to teenagers' lack of national identification towards their motherland China, and also to the public discourse addressing the economic challenges and competition in the universal trend of globalization. Although a few studies had unveiled the underlying values of Confucianism, neo-liberalism and market ideology under these objectives, how the new definitions of "ideal citizens" is understood and promoted in the actual school settings, and how those values influence the process of students' identity construction and their vision on their life trajectories, remains unknown. Drawing on the data from an ethnographic research conducted in 2010, this thesis illustrates how the qualities of an "ideal citizen" propagated in the education and curriculum reform would be understood and transformed in two very different schools in Hong Kong. One is a long-established girls' school located in a middle-class district, which has a reputation of providing "all-rounded" education and nurturing future woman-leaders; the other one is being considered as a "academically-low band" school located in remote area, which struggled to survive and started to admit "Non-Chinese speaking" (NCS) students from Pakistan, Nepal and Philippines three years ago in order to solve the problem of insufficient intake of local students. Apart from the halfyear participant-observation in the two campuses, in-depth interviews of the 2 school principals, 13 teachers, 19 students and 2 alumni of the two schools have also been conducted. Other school documents including official school magazines, school reports as well as students’ publications have also been collected as supporting information. Due to the different historical background, the school management strategy and most of all, the composition of students from very different socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds, the two schools had developed very different ideas and definition of an "ideal citizen", and thus led to different directions of school policies and expectations on students. Through the examples of the provision of the “Other learning Experience” (OLE) and students’ participation patterns in Chapter Five, the different language policies and students’ ability in languages in Chapter Six, and the process of the construction of femininities of young girls in Chapter Seven, this study shows how the problematic of class, gender and ethnics domination still exist under the new context of education reform. This study also reveals that while Hong Kong policy-maker claimed that the education reform ‘bears upon the equity and balance of our society', the socio-economic backgrounds, ethnicity and gender which traditionally being viewed as factors that differentiate education outcomes in sociological studies are completely ignored in the reform.

Evaluation of the civic education is by itself very specific and there are a lot of schools, teachers and students that reflect on the most effective way how to evaluate the civic education. The aim of my thesis is to focus on the evaluation forms that are most acceptable for the students, teachers and parents and that can provide as much information as possible. In the theoretical part will be in general described the evaluation, its functions and forms which are applied at the second level of elementary school. The main focus will be put on the forms of evaluation, mainly on the classification and verbal assessment. There will be discussed the advantages and on the contrary the disadvantages of using these forms of evaluation as well as how they can affect the student and motivate him for his further education. The practical part of my thesis will be devoted to a questionnaire survey at the second level of elementary school. In this research I will focus on students, parents and teachers with the intention to find out what forms of evaluation do they prefer and whether the evaluation can really affect student?s motivation to learn.