Education,Citizenship and Social Justice

Canada is a country with a long history of substantial ethnocultural diversity. Questions about the reasonable accommodation of immigrant groups, the preservation of official language minority rights, and the fostering of Aboriginal rights permeate political and social discourse in Canada. Effective citizenship requires people who understand the subtle differences between and among groups in Canada, and are able to wrestle intelligently and respectfully with difficult questions inherent in these issues. This article reports on a study designed to map the conceptions of ethnic diversity held by grade 6 students in the eastern Canadian province of New Brunswick with a particular focus on the three areas outlined above. Overall, students demonstrated quite superficial understandings of ethnic diversity being able to identify some practices and beliefs as ‘cultural’, but with little knowledge of specific cultural groups or practices or the role of language as a vehicle for cultural enhancement and preservation.

Given the key drivers around citizenship education, children’s rights, voice, and participation, it is essential that all children are supported to engage in the society in which they live. This article explores how McCall’s Community of Philosophical Inquiry might offer that support to children who are potentially marginalised due to their specific needs. The article presents three case studies of children at risk of being marginalised in school settings who participated in Community of Philosophical Inquiry over a period of 10 weeks. Community of Philosophical Inquiry has features that may be conducive to the achievement of broad goals associated with children’s voice and citizenship education. The article explores the ways in which these particular children engaged with Community of Philosophical Inquiry and the impact of participation on their behaviour. The analysis of the accounts of their teachers supports the hypothesis that potentially marginalised children appear to benefit from the structure that is inherent in this form of practical philosophy.

Narrative inquiry is both phenomenon and methodology for understanding experience. In this article, we further develop our understandings of narrative inquiry as a practice of social justice. In particular, we explore ways in which social justice issues can be re-framed and re-imagined, with attention to consequent action. Drawing on work alongside Kevlar, a youth who left school early, we explore our understandings. Being grounded in pragmatism and emphasizing relational understanding of experience situate narrative inquiry and call us to think narratively with stories. This allows for movement away from dominant narratives and toward openings to imagine otherwise in dynamic and interactive ways.

This article’s aim is to provide, through a case study, new insights into current research on the civic education policies that encompassed the transition from authoritarian to democratic political regimes that took place as of the final years of the 20th century in Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin America. Many of these studies parted from the assumption that citizenship could be promoted by imparting a universal set of rights and attitudes, which would not interact with pre-existent and varied conceptions of citizenship. By studying the midlevel students’ protests that took place in the city of Córdoba in Argentina in 2010, we show that even in societies that have undergone long dictatorial periods, there are pre-existent civic traditions that influence the implementation and effects of these policies. This leads to new recommendations on the importance of considering these traditions when designing and assessing civic education policies.

Contemporary liberal education owes its existence to various educational ideas and pedagogical formulas that emerged from the 18th century intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment. Many Enlightenment conceptions, principles, and practices such as public schooling, equality of opportunity, freedom of expression, critical thinking, scientific methodology, empiricism, and rationality constitute the backbone of current liberal education. Despite this, in recent years, most of these Enlightenment legacies have come into sharp contrast with neoliberalization policies and practices that are plaguing the contemporary educational domains, in general, and the field of higher education, in particular. To what extent are the current institutions of higher learning able to cope with the onslaught of neoliberalization policies and practices? This article explores this question by juxtaposing relevant educational and pedagogical conceptions of the Enlightenment against some of the contemporary challenges and struggles in the field of education.

The purpose of this study is to inform global citizenship practice as a higher education agenda by comparing the retrospective experiences of a range of community engagement partners and including often silent voices of non-researcher partners. Higher education–community engagement aims to contribute to social justice as it constructs and transfers new knowledge from the perspectives of a wide range of community engagement partners. This qualitative secondary analysis study was framed theoretically by the transformative–emancipatory paradigm. Existing case data, generated on retrospective experiences of community engagement partners in a long-term community engagement partnership, were conveniently sampled to analyse and compare a range of community engagement experiences (parents of student clients (n = 12: females 10, males 2), teachers from the partner rural school (n = 18: females 12, males 6), student-educational psychology clients (n = 31: females 14, males 17), Academic Service-Learning (ASL) students (n = 20: females 17, males 3) and researchers (n = 12: females 11, males 1). Following thematic in-case and cross-case analysis, it emerged that all higher education–community engagement partners experienced that socio-economic challenges (defined as rural school adversities, include financial, geographic and social challenges) are addressed when an higher education–community engagement partnership exists, but that particular operational challenges (communication barriers, time constraints, workload and unclear scope, inconsistent feedback, as well as conflicting expectations) hamper higher education–community engagement partnership. A significant insight from this study is that a range of community engagement partners experience similar challenges when a university and rural school partner. All community engagement partners experienced that higher education–community engagement is challenged by the structural disparity between the rural context and operational miscommunication.