Citizenship: a matter of schooling? An educational inquiry into the normativity of citizenship education

Over the last three decades, the promotion of citizenship education (CE) in schools has received renewed and abundant attention on both national and international educational agendas. This stressing of the importance of CE in schools often appears to be paired with a rather self-evident manner of approaching the role of schools in CE and the relationship between education and citizenship. Descriptions or justifications of the choices made in the use of the concepts and their underlying normativity, are mostly scarce or limited to descriptions of what good citizenship is and should be. What good education is, and how it relates to citizenship is less frequently made explicit or defined. This dissertation research considers all of these elements essential to be able to get to the essence of what CE is, can or should be. It therefore first explores the normativity of currently dominant approaches to CE in research and policy, that tend to conceptualise citizenship and CE as a matter of developing competence(s). Second, it develops an educational approach towards this normativity, turning to classroom practices and educational theory to expand and broaden this current language of citizenship education.

The first chapter deals with the normativity of the main documents of the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) of 2009, the largest international comparative study of citizenship education, that significantly influences the language of citizenship education. The chapter illustrates how all aspects of the ICCS appear to mainly emphasize conservative and reproductive aims of citizenship education. This analysis demonstrates a tension between the content and criteria included in the study on the one hand, and the study’s proclaimed aim of CE as helping pupils to become autonomous, active and independent democratic citizens on the other hand. The second chapter explores the European level of policy text production concerning CE. This second study analyses six ‘key’ policy texts on CE by European institutions. The chapter indicates how, while collective and democratic purposes are accorded to CE on a European level, the policy texts themselves actually tend to promote rather narrow, individualistic and arguably limited conceptions of democratic citizenship and CE in schools.   Chapter three turns its attention towards actual classroom practices, presenting an ethnographic exploration of how CE can be seen to take place in the classroom. Building on the hypothesis that political aims accorded to citizenship education first assume pedagogical aims, it discusses how a relational account of CE that takes into account teachers, pupils and school material, can significantly expand and reshuffle prevailing notions of the responsibility of schools in CE as contributing directly or primarily to young people’s individual political competence and action. The fourth and final chapter and study area of this research project concerns the initiation of a theoretical perspective to citizenship education in schools that reconciles both external, societal expectations to democratic CE, and an educational perspective on the school as intrinsically worthwhile and democratic. The chapter explores how in both approaches, the democratic principles of freedom, equality and fraternity can be thought of as fundamental for thinking about the relationship between education in schools, citizenship and democracy. It thus develops a position that embodies trust in schools as a primarily pedagogical context, but equally acknowledges that both schools and their pupils are always already part of political and societal life as well.                

Finally, we offer some implications of the conducted studies for expanding current lines of thinking and speaking about CE in educational research, policy, practice and theory.