Theorizing Young People's Perceptions of Their Citizenship Identity

The paradigm of social justice gives voice to those without the resources to deal with responsibilities imposed by a neoliberal agenda. The authors focus on pupils in Sweden and England, countries which have moved from a sense of communality to the growth of neoliberal societal individualism. To clarify real citizenship (rather than formal), they apply the concepts of intersectionality and of human capabilities in place of rights, which means that people adhere to numerous simultaneous collectivities and having the capability to do something requires more than an entitlement to it. While everyone might have the right to an education and to a dignified life, many live in powerlessness and in political, social, and economic exclusion. Sufficient human capabilities are required in order to receive the education necessary for citizenship in its real meaning, and the intersectional approach enables interrogation of factors that coalesce, rather than viewing in them in isolation.

Governmentality, Curriculum Policies, and Citizenship Education

Citizenship education has received increasing attention in recent decades. After its inclusion in the agenda of international organizations and European institutions, many studies and academic debates have taken place. Despite their undoubted merits, a significant portion of that literature has not sufficiently discussed its starting presuppositions. It has often introduced citizenship education as if it were a novelty. That presentism has had a dangerous effect: the ease with which some ways of thinking and talking about citizenship education have been naturalized. Precisely for that reason, a historical perspective is essential: It helps us distance ourselves from our own frame of reference to question what is usually taken for granted by analyzing the changes in the tacit knowledge systems. In this chapter, the authors try to illustrate this by examining the main tendencies that have introduced citizenship education in national curricula during the two key cycles of socio-institutional restructuring experienced by Western countries since the end of the 19th century.

The “Two Ways” of Citizenship Education in China

This chapter aims to analyze the “Chinese way” of citizenship education as a meeting place between the historical lessons of Confucianism, Marxist-Leninist socialist ideology, and newer concepts of global citizenship. Furthermore, this project seeks to understand how the model of education for “global” citizenship fits within the established system of ideological and moral education. To this end, research was carried out at three different levels. Firstly, a review of the most recent and “global” literature on education for citizenship was conducted. Secondly, public government documents were studied and compared, in particular, those from the Ministry of Education and the Association for Higher Education, which is supervised by the Chinese communist party and its General Secretary, President Xi Jinping. Thirdly, surveys were conducted to gauge the degree of involvement of students in their own citizenship education at high school and university level. Finally, a field study was conducted at Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangdong province (Zhuhai campus).

Learning for Democratic Citizenship

This chapter investigates students' political learning by unfolding the dynamic patterns of political learning that can be explored among Scandinavian students. To serve this purpose, the following research question is forwarded: What dynamic patterns of political learning can be uncovered among various upper secondary students in relation to participation in political institutions? By the incorporation of theories of learning in the analytical approach, it is shown how students display a complex pattern of political attentiveness. School-based civics education programs to some extent seem to have failed to equip young people with the tools, knowledge, and experience needed for participation in political institutions. Research in this area has traditionally been interested in either the political awareness of youth or the sources of influence on the youth. However, there has not been a lot of interest in the various offsprings initiating the political engagement and political development. Summing up, some recommendations for citizenship education are forwarded.

Education for Citizenship as a Permanent Laboratory

In this chapter, the authors discuss the results of three focus group discussions conducted in the context of the teacher professional development project STEP (school territory environment pedagogy) undertaken by researchers and teachers from three EU Countries—France, Spain, Italy—and one non-EU country, Switzerland. Specifically, they present findings regarding changes in how the teachers in the Milano Bicocca case study represented citizenship education practices. The focus group data was subjected to content analysis, using a set of categories drawn from the national reference documents on curriculum design and the transnational curriculum defined in the STEP project. The changes in the teachers' representations concerned three main aspects: dialogue with the local community and territorial context, the gap between teachers declared intentions and actual educational actions, and the adoption of a complex perspective in the choice of knowledge to be mobilized.

Education for Citizenship to Integrate the Curriculum

In the 1990s, when a concern for education for citizenship began to manifest, curricula plans began to be implemented in various countries which had detected that the knowledge and skills being taught in schools were not relevant to young people's lives nor the complex problems of the modern world. In this sense, education for citizenship became a concept that could integrate the different educational purposes to converge in an emancipatory education focused on the student. However, this approach required a method to select and organize the content that conformed to new educational aims, and this led to a new debate on curriculum integration.

Geographical Concepts and the Goal of Citizenship Formation in Brazilian Researches Concerning Geography Teaching

Post-graduate education and research at Brazil has been amplified by quantitative and qualitative standards. One of its lines of inquiry which has stood out in the last three decades is geography teaching. The analysis of this theme, and particularly of investigations about geographical concepts and citizenship formation, is the motivation to the development of this essay's ideas. The text is a result of reviews into the state-of-the-art of the area's researches in the 2004 to 2015 period, amongst which the abstracts of theses and dissertations were considered. Based on the titles, abstracts, and keywords, studies concerning geographical concepts and citizenship formation in geography were selected. The data points out a diversification of thematic focuses to discuss the formation of concepts and the growing efforts to reference geographical concepts, as well as to the potentialities of the citizenship formation on those researches.

Leave No Trace Urban Program

Outdoor activities have been installed as a massive phenomenon. In them, people declare behaving—and generally comply—in a respectful way with the natural spaces they visit. However, when time is everyday in a city where the life of today's humanity mostly happens, the ecological ethics tends to be relativized under a myriad of justifications. Caring for wild areas while we are in them and then damaging them from our urban life is something that does not make sense, because cause-effect relationships in nature do not recognize political borders, nor between countries, nor less between urban and non-urban areas; they only recognize geographic borders, which are permeable to the circulation of energy, gases, liquids, matter, information, life, and death. This proposal is aimed at reversing this paradox, sustaining ethics and actions of planetary care present in wilderness areas in urban daily life.

Project We Propose!

In 2011, the Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning (IGOT), University of Lisbon, launched the We Propose! project. In the subject of upper-secondary school geography, making a case study that focuses more in particular on local problems is compulsory. However, it would go against school routines. The We Propose! project was designed in order to encourage work on a case study and it has taken up the challenge of promoting young people's territorial citizenship by means of overhauling school practices and forging partnerships among universities, schools, and the community, especially the municipalities in local government. Pupils have to identify what the problems are in their own residential areas, carrying out field work on them and putting forward proposals to help solve them. Their proposals are then shared with the local community. Apart from Portugal, it has now been disseminated in Spain, Brazil, Mozambique, Colombia, and Peru.

Civic Knowledge, Engagement, and Attitudes Among Lower-Secondary Students in 24 Countries

The ICCS 2016 study is a continuation and extension of ICCS 2009. The study explored the enduring and the emerging challenges of educating young people in a world where contexts of democracy and civic participation had changed and continue to change. In total, ICCS 2016 is based on test and questionnaire data from more than 94,000 students enrolled in their eighth year of schooling (Grade 8 or equivalent) at more than 3,800 schools in 24 countries. These student data were augmented by contextual questionnaire data from school principals of selected schools and more than 37,000 teachers.