Education,Citizenship and Social Justice

Every society faces a dilemma of instilling a shared vision of citizenship, on the one hand, and accommodating specific identities, on the other. This Special Issue addresses the problems of citizenship and democratic education in pluralistic societies that face a challenge of accommodating diversity and maintaining social cohesion. This volume is the result of comprehensive joint efforts of scholars from different countries and regions, who are at various stages of their careers, all working in the field of citizenship studies in education. The papers featured in this collection were presented at the symposium Citizenship, Identity, and Education at the 2018 Comparative and International Education Society conference in Mexico City. We hope that the publication of this Special Issue will contribute to the dialogue about the interplay of citizenship and identity and the role of citizenship and democratic education in identity construction, negotiation, and development.

This article builds on the growing importance of concepts of identity and diversity in citizenship education studies and argues for an expanded conception of diversity that ultimately includes the non-human and even inanimate realm. The dramatic pace of human-induced global climate change requires a commensurate urgency in developing forms of citizenship education that shape new ecological as well as political civic identities, and which expand democracy beyond the human community. Situating my empirical work on Mexican civic education reform in a global, comparative context, I consider the challenges that all schools and school systems will need to address to incorporate even deeper practices of respect for diversity and acknowledgment of the radical pluralism that life (and non-life) on earth presents.

The Israeli education system is divided and segregated along the lines of nationality and religiosity. While Israeli society and its education system, in particular, have generally been subjected to the influence of globalisation, including universal discourses of citizenship, in many ways it remains highly particularistic and nationalistic. To a large extent, what we see today in terms of school curricula in Israel stands in contradiction to the main trends in civic education in the developed world. It expresses a move towards neo-nationalistic religious (neo-Zionist) discourse which overtly gives preference to the Jewishness of the state over and above its commitment to democratic universal principles. This article will focus on these recent discursive changes. It will examine the space, or rather the lack of it, that is given to the Palestinian identity and narratives in the official civics textbook for high schools. The article explores several discursive practices adopted by the textbook in reinforcing the marginal position of Palestinian citizens, constructing them as the ultimate ‘others’ and undermining their civic status and rights.

Traditional conceptions of civic education for young children in the United States tend to focus on student acquisition of patriotic knowledge, that is, identifying flags and leaders, and practicing basic civic skills like voting as decision-making. The Civic Action and Young Children study sought to look beyond this narrow vision of civic education by observing, documenting, and contextualizing how young children acted on behalf of and with other people in their everyday early childhood settings. In the following paper, we offer examples from three Head Start classrooms to demonstrate multiple ways that young children act civically in everyday ways. When classrooms and teachers afford young children more agency, children’s civic capabilities expand, and they are able to act on behalf of and with their community. Rather than teaching children about democracy and citizenship, we argue for an embodied, lived experience for young children.

This article investigates the relationships between ethnonational identity and educational level in three West African contexts: Liberia, Ghana, and Côte d’Ivoire. Citizens in these neighboring countries identify with overlapping ethnic groups, but have varied historical experiences, with Americans settling in Liberia; the British colonizing Ghana, and the French colonizing Côte d’Ivoire. In the recent era, Côte d’Ivoire elected an opposition leader at the end of its civil war in 2010; Ghana is considered as the most stable democracy in West Africa; and Liberia experienced two protracted conflicts over the past 30 years and completed its first peaceful transition of power in 2017. We analyze 2014 Afrobarometer data from these three countries to consider if respondents are more likely to value local identities, national identities, or equally value both in each context, and how these valuations vary according to schooling experiences and national context. The findings do not show a linear relationship between education and civic identity, as more respondents who completed only primary school identified primarily with ther national group than those who completed secondary school. Most respondents who completed graduate study in all three countries identified with both their national and ethnic group; none identified primarily with their ethnic groups. In addition, the trends in identity and schooling in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire are more similar to each other than to Liberia.

Citizenship and identity can be viewed as dynamic and transformative rather than as fixed or static, especially in an era in which the public sphere for contestation and deliberation has expanded beyond the limits of nation-states and into the global realm. It can be difficult, though, within the confines of conventional classrooms to create an atmosphere that gives students, even in culturally diverse university settings, a sense that they are taking part in a meaningful global conversation. New digital media platforms and videoconferencing technology are rendering this goal less elusive than before, and this article works across the theory and practice of global citizenship education to explain how faculty members in Los Angeles, California, and Seoul, South Korea, have team-taught their respective undergraduate courses via live Skype seminars. We review, in concrete and practical terms, the planning and logistics that went into this teaching strategy, including an extensive discussion on how we evaluated the initiative and how we modified the strategy to add team assignments that brought the students together for collaboration beyond the weekly class meetings. We then reflect upon how our shared endeavor of bringing students together for mutual learning across national borders carries implications for the ways in which our students think about their roles and identities as citizens.

The aim of this qualitative research is to investigate how religious Zionist female adolescents (N = 40) construct and deconstruct their perceptions of democracy within the ‘postsecular’ Israeli society as a result of their intensive, religious Zionist education and socialization process promoted by Israeli schools which subscribe to this ideology within the Israeli state religious education system. This study found that female graduates from the national religious schools were influenced by political theology which was promoted through their schools’ education and socialization processes. The findings highlighted the graduates’ belief in the Jacobin communitarian approach to democracy; their focus on Liebman’s concept of expansionism; and the challenges these approaches pose for maximal civic education in Israel.