This thesis enquires into the kinds of citizenship taught and learned in formal and informal settings of citizenship education in Scotland. There has been a ‘perceived’ crisis in democratic citizenry in the UK and elsewhere across the world since the 1990s and this has brought about renewed interests in citizenship education whereby young people are a specifically targeted group. Yet, citizenship education is a fundamentally contested domain where conflicting and contrasting ideologies co-exist and the Scottish version of ‘education for global citizenship’ is an archetypal example of this. By exploring similarities and differences between accounts of ‘what adult practitioners do’ and ‘what young people learn’ in each setting, the thesis emphasises tensions and challenges of citizenship education and their implications for the wider debates about the complex relationship between citizenship, democracy and education. The thesis deploys a synthesised theoretical framework for differentiating and analysing the types of education and learning that are legitimate points of reference in citizenship education for democratic life. It distinguishes between approaches to education for citizenship that focuses on membership of the community (relationships and service work in communities), formal political participation (political literacy in terms of institutions, processes and procedures) entrepreneurial citizenship (employability skills and economic participation) and social and political activism (the commitment and capacity to think critically and act collectively to realise the inherent goals of democracy). These different approaches entail a broad ideological mix of civic republicanism, liberalism and neoliberalism which informs citizenship education. The increasing emphasis on economic participation in educational contexts resonates with what can be termed as a neoliberal version of ‘responsiblised citizenship’ that promotes an individualised and depoliticised conception of citizenship by equipping young people with knowledge, skills and experiences to get on and get into the labour market through their own individual efforts rather than being concerned with the collective needs and interests of young people. Formal education and, to some extent informal community education, tend to overlook the de facto issues, experiences and contributions of young people as engaged citizens and the need to focus on the commitment and capacity to think critically and act collectively in order to realise the inherent goals of democracy as an unfinished project. Consequently, the experience of citizenship education is one young people often feel marginal to or marginalised from. This thesis challenges the dominant assumption of ‘disengaged youth’ to focus instead on the democratic deficit at the heart of citizenship teaching and learning. Along with the ‘invited’ spaces of citizenship education, in both formal and informal settings, the goal of democracy should include the ‘invented’ spaces of citizenship learning which reflects the lived experience, concerns and aspirations of young people.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / The general aim of this study was to explore the extent to which the Grade 11 LO curriculum prepares learners for active citizenship in a democratic South Africa. The main research question that the study addresses is: To what extent does the Grade 11 LO curriculum prepare learners for active citizenship in a democratic South Africa? The main objective of the study is to explore the extent to which the Grade 11 LO curriculum prepares learners for active citizenship in a democracy in the South African context. Even though democratic structures and participation forms a small component of the broader topic of active citizenship in the Grade 11 LO curriculum, the study examines the public participation initiatives of Parliament, as a democratic structure with the intention to increase active citizenship in a democratic South Africa. The theoretical framework of this study considers Paulo Freire's educational theory in the context of critical theory and models of public participation in preparation for active citizenship. As such, the literature was used in order to come to an understanding of concepts relating to active citizenship in a democracy, the concepts, namely, "education for "public participation‟, "citizenship‟, "democracy‟, "inclusivity‟ and "human rights‟. The study adopted a mainly qualitative research approach to explore the extent to which the Grade 11 LO curriculum prepares learners for active citizenship in a democracy. In order to gain an in-depth understanding of learners' perceptions, a case study method was employed and data collection techniques included questionnaires and focus group interviews. The sample in this study comprised 461 Grade 12 learners, who completed the Grade 11 LO curriculum during 2012, and seven LO educators from five selected schools in Metro South Education District in the Western Cape. Even though the total number of participating educators was seven, four completed the questionnaires and four participated in the focus group interviews. The data collection process encompassed three phases. Phase one included a literature review and document study. Phase two included the administration of questionnaires and phase three included the facilitation of focus group interviews. Thematic and document analyses were applied in order to undertake a detailed examination of documents and interviews.

Beginning in earnest in the 1990s, research and political communities have taken a strong interest in citizenship education both in Canada and worldwide, but in the context of secondary schools this has resulted in primarily theoretical papers rather than empirical analyses of student experiences. The student voice is particularly important to the study of citizenship education given the complexity of constructed civic subjectivities and the rapidly changing definitions of community, including the relationships between local, national and global. Canada has been characterized as post-national or even without identity, and its young people are caught up in the persisting narrative of young apathy when it comes to politics and civic duty. Drawing on theories of national and global citizenship, this exploratory mixed methods study of 104 British Columbian secondary students investigates student vocabularies of citizenship in order to map current youth understandings of citizenship and experiences in their secondary education. In discussing the results, I challenge the narratives of Canada as a meaningless signifier and youth as apathetic, and investigate scholarly concerns regarding the depoliticization of citizenship, and the potential conflict inherent to the globalization of youth identities. Finally, I discuss best practices in citizenship education with reference to established scholarly research and the student-based findings of the present study. / Graduate

The full abstract for this thesis is available in the body of the thesis, and will be available when the embargo expires. / Education, Faculty of / Educational Studies (EDST), Department of / Graduate

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 purpose of this study is to develop and evaluate a functional home room citizenship program; to determine the changes to be made in one school year in the civic attitudes of a given group through an especially arranged curriculum.

To form people that develop in an active and compromised way their citizenship to solve community and country problems is the objective of our present education. However some specialists observe mistakes in our civic education noticing that it needs an integral and structural change. School is the perfect place to constantly practice citizenship through the practice of values, capacities and abilities that allow students interact among them, with their authorities and with society members. In this article, it presents a service-learning proposal which links learning and solidarity service in order to apply the acquired knowledge in the classroom for community service developing competences in daily contexts. / Formar personas capaces de ejercer su ciudadanía de una manera activa y comprometida para afrontar los problemas de la comunidad y del país es un propósito en la educación actual, sin embargo, algunos especialistas observan fallas en la formación ciudadana advirtiendo que precisa de un cambio integral y estructural. La escuela es el espacio de convivencia idóneo para el ejercicio permanente de la ciudadanía a través de la práctica de valores, capacidades yhabilidades que permiten a los alumnos interactuar entre ellos, con sus autoridades y con los miembros de la sociedad. En el presente artículo se plantea una propuesta de aprendizaje-servicio, que vincula el aprendizaje y el servicio solidario, para aplicar los conocimientos adquiridos en el aula al servicio de la comunidad, desarrollando competencias en contextos cotidianos.

In Ontario, as in many other provincial, state, and national jurisdictions, the government has come to play a significant role in shaping the curriculum taught in public schools. The curriculum, in this sense, is a matter of public policy. In educational research, however, there is a surprising lack of literature analyzing the curriculum as policy. This thesis engages with this gap in the literature through a multifaceted analysis of four successive versions of Ontario’s key curriculum policy document on the education of public secondary students as citizens. In analyzing this document, my emphasis is on how it frames citizenship, which I understand here as the desired relationship between the individual, the society, and the state. Methodologically, this thesis is a hybrid of deductive and inductive analytic approaches. The deductive element consists of an analysis of theoretical literature to develop a typology of the dimensions of citizenship—political, public, juridical, economic, and cultural. The inductive element consists of qualitative analyses of both the four versions of the curriculum policy document and a selection of interviews with teacher candidates who taught courses from this document. My findings reveal a gradual shift in the framing of citizenship in the curriculum over a twenty-year period, with active participation in local or national public life becoming eclipsed in favour of an individualized emphasis on economic participation and juridical responsibilities. While the teacher candidates interviewed reveal a willingness to creatively reinterpret the curriculum, they also describe how they are constrained by a network of other policies that effectively discourage active forms of citizenship. In conclusion, I suggest that future revisions of the curriculum policy document should place greater emphasis on active forms of citizenship in order to bring greater balance to citizenship education policy in Ontario.

Desde los años 1990 (Curtis, Ward, Sharp, & Hankin, 2013), con el desarrollo de un mundo cada vez más globalizado e individualista, diferentes estudios (Andreotti, 2014; Brown, 2017; Byram, 2014b; Guilherme, 2002, 2007; Hoskins, 2006; Hoskins & Crick, 2010; Osler & Starkey, 2015; Shultz, 2007; VanderDussen Toukan, 2017) han mostrado la necesidad de desarrollar políticas educativas que impliquen una forma de aprendizaje donde los estudiantes sean capaces de desarrollar proyectos y competencias cívicas que aborden temas referidos a cuestiones sociales, económicas o ambientales, entre otras. Este enfoque global y colaborativo de la educación es conocido como Global Citizenship Education (GCED), y en él se abordan contenidos como la paz y los derechos humanos, la interculturalidad, la educación ciudadana, el respeto por la diversidad y la tolerancia, y la inclusividad. Partiendo de estos principios, la pregunta de investigación planteada es ver si la canción protesta tiene elementos que pueden servir como materia transversal en el ámbito educativo especialmente en la formación de la GCED en alumnos universitarios. El antecedente del uso de la canción protesta, por ejemplo, para despertar sentimientos hacia movimientos sociales que estaban o están en contra de la guerra y en consecuencia buscar la mejora de los derechos civiles, no es algo novedoso. Los episodios que protagonizó la sociedad estadounidense contra la guerra de Vietnam se pueden considerar como un hito histórico en la reivindicación de estos –The Civil Rights Movement-, pero en la actualidad, dada la globalidad y la individualización del mundo, como ya se ha señalado, parece ser que la canción tipo protesta, a pesar de su producción y conocimiento por parte de la sociedad, no tiene el mismo vigor ni magnitud que en épocas anteriores. Esta aparente carencia de vigencia cuando el mensaje que subyace es el mismo a largo del tiempo, pone de manifiesto una serie de inputs que deben de ser analizados con el fin de comprender y profundizar en los procesos y las complejas interacciones entre este tipo de músicas y la construcción de significados que respondan a los principios de la GCED. Por este motivo el estudio tiene cuatro fases. La primera ha consistido en hacer un vaciado que relacionara prensa y canción protesta, pues se ha considerado que la prensa en el año 2003 –Guerra de Irak-, todavía actuaba como formadora de opiniones. En segundo lugar, se abordaron aquellas canciones que respondieran al concepto de canciones antiguerra de Irak y ver si tenían en la población algún efecto de tipo transversal que respondiera a los principios de la GCED- En tercer lugar, comprobar si una canción mayoritariamente desconocida por los alumnos universitarios Stange Fruit (Meeropol, 1939) que pone de manifiesto y clama contra la violencia racial (Lynching) podría todavía tener vigencia transversalmente en la actualidad en el ámbito educativo universitario, como en la sociedad en general. En cuarto lugar, se decidió estudiar el impacto de un texto con un alto contenido contra el racismo y la venganza con la finalidad de explorar si la carencia de acompañamiento musical produjera los mismos resultados que los estudios anteriores. El texto fue un extracto conocido como “Hath not a Jew eyes? ”de la obra de Shakesepare, “The Merchant of Venice” Global Citizenship Education (GCED), la promoción de educación para una ciudadanía global, representa un compromiso a nivel internacional para abordar temas actuales y globales como pueden ser: medio ambiente y desarrollo sostenible, justicia social, derechos humanos, pobreza y la paz, entre otros.

The aim of the diploma thesis is to examine the formation, evolution, content and especially the purpose of the European dimension in education with an emphasis on the European citizenship development. The theoretical part of the paper focuses on the transformation in understanding of the concept of citizenship during the second half of the 20th century and on the development and formal establishment of the European citizenship. The key part of the paper focuses on the legislative process of integrating the European dimension into the strategic documents on the European level and introduces the main theoretical approaches to this process. The paper analyzes the aspects of the European dimension which helps to develop relevant competences related to the European citizenship. It also examines the integration of the European dimension into the Czech national curriculum. The empirical part of the paper is dedicated to an analysis of the 14 years old students' actual civic knowledge, attitudes and activities that reveals the extent of their civic competences related to the European citizenship and the role of the school they attend.