John P. Myers

Citizenship Education Practices of Politically Active Teachers in Porto Alegre, Brazil and Toronto, Canada

This research examined the ways politically active secondary teachers, involved either in formal politics or in social movements, practiced citizenship education in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and Toronto, Canada. My aim was to explore the complex ways and multiple spaces in which these teachers’ roles as both citizens and citizenship educators intersected within the local contexts. My premise is that the local political and educational contexts are critical in shaping citizenship education practices. These teachers are political actors, and it is in dynamic relation to local and national politics that they developed their political ideologies and values, particularly in terms of the ways that they understand the concepts of “democracy” and “citizenship” in relation to education. In this regard, I understood pedagogy as fundamentally political (see Ginsburg et al. 1992; Ginsburg 1995), which involves the values, ideologies, theories, and discourses surrounding teaching and schooling. My approach is situated within a tradition of comparative education that emphasizes the role of culture in shaping schooling, which has typically focused on the historical origins of educational systems (e.g., Stenhouse 1967). Recently, increased attention has been given to (national) culture as a fundamental lens for understanding and explaining teachers and teaching (Alexander 2000; Clarke 2001; Anderson-Levitt 2004), seeking to avoid the limitations of psychological studies for understanding teachers’ behavior in classroom situations. These studies, however, have often minimized local

Informal Civic Learning Through Engagement in Local Democracy: The Case of the Seniors' Task Force of Healthy City Toronto

This chapter explores the dimensions of informal civic learning of a local democracy initiative known as Healthy City Toronto (HCT). It examines one of the programmes of HCT, the Seniors’ Task Force, particularly the content and process of the participants’ learning. This study is part of an international research project that explores the pedagogical dimension of participatory democracy, with a focus on the informal learning acquired by citizens in programmes of shared decision making at the level of municipal government. It attempts to shed light on these issues by addressing three areas that are relatively underrepresented in the research on citizenship education: adult populations, informal learning and local democracy. First, a cursory literature review suggests that most large-scale research on citizenship education, from the pioneering work by Almond and Verba (1963) to the recent international study coordinated by Judith Torney-Purta (2001), has concentrated heavily on K-12 schooling, and particularly on secondary school programmes. These studies range from curriculum analysis to observation of teaching practices to surveys of students’ civic knowledge and attitudes. Moreover, the field of adult citizenship education, at least in countries with high immigration rates like Canada, tends to be understood almost exclusively as courses for the naturalization test, and is sometimes conflated with English as a second language (ESL). Second, research on citizenship education seldom pays attention to the area of informal learning. The low attention given to informal learning in the field of citizenship education is not an anomaly, as it reflects an overall neglect for this area in educational research and policy (Livingstone, 1999; Eraut, 1999a, b). Since citizenship education focuses on school settings, most references to informal learning tend to be limited to the discrepancies between the formal curriculum and the hidden curriculum, such as the assessment of the democratic or anti-democratic nature of the classroom environment. Informal civic learning outside of educational institutions is rarely addressed.

Educational Vouchers and Social Cohesion: A Statistical Analysis of Student Civic Attitudes in Sweden, 1999–2009

This study examines the Swedish national educational voucher scheme and changes in social cohesion. We conduct a statistical analysis using data from the 1999 and 2009 rounds of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement’s civic education study of 14-year-old students and their attitudes toward the rights of ethnic minorities and immigrants. Using regression models, we do not find evidence of a decline in civic attitudes and therefore social cohesion. We attribute the results to Sweden’s voucher design and context that minimized segregation and preserved civics curricula in all schools.

Exploring adolescents’ thinking about globalization in an international education program

This research examined US high school students’ thinking about economic and cultural globalization during their participation in an international education program. The findings mapped the students’ categories for the two aspects of globalization and showed that the students’ positions were shaped by relatively stable narratives characterizing the phenomenon. In general, the ethnic minority students were found to have more critical perspectives. Suggestions based on the findings for improving the teaching of globalization in international education programs are described.

Beyond knowledge and skills: Discursive construction of civic identity in the world history classroom

ABSTRACT The research presented in this article investigates the role of classroom discussions for supporting students’ ongoing identity work during the study of global issues. Civic identity is theorized as a socially constructed process in which individuals become associated as a particular type of citizen created through social interactions in a given context. The findings revealed that classroom discussion focused on supporting identity work facilitated students to critique civic discourses and to negotiate global civic identities within the classroom relations of power that privilege certain positions. The findings suggest conceptualizing civic identity as a fundamentally unresolved process of navigating multiple ways of being a citizen that are ongoing and contingent. However, the students did not discard their national identities in favor of global ones. Instead, they made sense of diverse responsibilities by considering the moral implications of remaining loyal to the nation. Thus, rather than imposing citizenship as a fixed, singular narrative, we suggest that educators support the exploration of diverse moral and political ways of being citizens in the world. Although there are promising results for civic identity work, the findings were less sanguine for a commitment to civic engagement.

Cinderella and the Search for the Missing Shoe: Latin American Adult Education Policy and Practice during the 1990s.

This article examines the main trends in adult education policy in Latin America during the 1990s. During this period, in spite of the commitments made by national governments in Jomtien in 1990 and ratified in Dakar in 2000, adult education in Latin America has been marginalized and neglected, both in terms of public policy and public funding. This paper raises different hypotheses in order to explain this dynamic and the variety of strategies that have been proposed to garner support for the field. Adult education in Latin America is now at a crossroads, and the collective search for its mission, purpose and identity is as urgent as ever. In discussing the revitalization of adult education in Latin America, the debates undertaken in the region by governmental and non-governmental organizations in the preparation for and in the follow-up to the 1997 Hamburg International Conference on Adult Education (CONFINTEA V) are described. In the final section, after summarizing the main issues and achievements, the article outlines several challenges for the future.

Civic Responsibility and Higher Education

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Cinderella and the Search for the Missing Shoe

Former President of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, an adult educator himself, once said that adult education is the Cinderella of government departments (Nyerere 1988). This dictum applies as much to most Latin American countries as it does to Tanzania. Adult education governmental agencies throughout the region are often underfunded, forgotten and marginalized from the education policy realm.