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CITIZENSHIP EDUCATION AND YOUTH PARTICIPATION IN DEMOCRACY

ABSTRACT: Citizenship education in established democracies is challenged by declining youth participation in democracy. Youth disenchantment and disengagement in democracy is primarily evident in formal political behaviour, especially through voting, declining membership of political parties, assisting at elections, contacting politicians, and the like. If citizenship education is to play a major role in addressing these concerns it will need to review the impact it is making on young people in schools.  This paper reviews a major national project on youth participation in democracy in Australia set in the context of a national citizenship education programme. The Youth Electoral Study found that citizenship education in Australian schools has at best been marginally successful and substantially more is required to raise levels of democratic engagement. The paper explores many opportunities available to education systems and schools to address these issues through reconceptualising aspects of the formal and the informal curriculum.

Education for Democratic Citizenship in the New Europe: context and reform

been the recognition that people need to be educated about the importance of democracy and democratic citizenship. Young people in school have been particularly identified as in need of such education. It would, however, be a mistake for governments to create some new, perhaps reactionary, approach to education for democracy. The last decade of the 20th century saw a remarkable growth of interest in a new approach to this type of education. While this phenomenon was generally worldwide, it was more clearly evident in the newer democracies of Europe and the established Western democracies. This interest took many forms, including programme reviews, research projects, policy initiatives and the development of major curriculum resources and initiatives for schools in order to meet the need for a new, more effective educational approach to democratic citizenship. In a large measure, these developments reflected the changing political circumstances entailed by the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe and the USSR. In 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall proved to be both a significant catalyst and a symbolic factor in the demise of Communism in Eastern Europe. The USSR soon imploded and former Soviet republics began searching for ways to become viable democracies. Other former Communist countries scrambled to assume the trappings of Western democracy with the hope for associated economic growth. Meanwhile, most Western countries faced growing concern about the condition

Measuring quality in universities: An approach to weighting research productivity

The aim of the study is to demonstrate, via the use of the discipline of Education, a procedure to identify and weight the importance of various indicators of research productivity which in turn have become significant components in determining quality within and between universities. The methodology allows for the identification of indicators that are most important, and ascertains if there are differences among academics as to the relative weighting of the various research indicators.Highly valued indicators of research productivity amongst the Education academics were refereed journal articles, peer reviewed books, and major competitive research grants. Refereeing was critical in the determination of quality in research productivity, and the findings generalized across many academics regardless of their own personal productivity. It is recommended that the methodology can serve to determine the tacit weights that academics within and across disciplines attach to various research products. At least, this method makes academics and administrators aware of the weightings they are actually using when making decisions about the quality of academic departments.

Citizenship education in Singapore: controlling or empowering teacher understanding and practice?

Teachers understand and apply citizenship education differentially in traditional western democracies. But what of Asian countries where democracy is more recent and treated differently and where countries have traditions of highly controlled education systems? Do teachers have and demonstrate independence of thought in civic matters? This article reports on a study of social studies teachers’ understandings of citizenship education, and how these understandings influence their teaching. We found that teacher understandings and practice of citizenship education were located in three distinct groupings, characterised as nationalistic, socially concerned and person oriented. This reflected a citizenship education landscape in Singapore that, despite tight controls, was not as rigid, prescriptive or homogenous as literature on the Asian region suggests.

Nationalistic Education as the Focus for Civics and Citizenship Education : The Case of Hong Kong

Civic education has been assigned the mission of preparing critical thinking, responsible, participating, multidimensional citizens and is also used to serve the function of instilling a sense of national identity, loyalty to the nation state and patriotism In 1996, before the return of sovereignty of Hong Kong to China, the Hong Kong Education Department published theGuidelines in Civic Education for School (1996), which includes education for democracy, human rights education, global education and nationalistic education This survey adopted an amalgamate framework of five types of nationalistic education to study the understanding of nationalistic education of civic educators in secondary schools in Hong Kong The initial findings showed that the civic educators were basically strongly eclectic in terms of education for cosmopolitan, civic, and cultural nationalism and moderately eclectic in terms of anti colonial nationalism but rejected education for totalitarian nationalism This eclectic understanding can be said to be heading towards a more liberal, rational, open and inclusive type of nationalistic education, which is compatible with a cosmopolitan and pluralistic society such as Hong Kong

Curriculum capacity and citizenship education: a comparative analysis of four democracies

Governments, international organizations and academics have, in recent decades, expressed a sense of crisis in the practice of democracy based largely upon increasing levels of disengagement by citizens from even the most basic elements of civic life. One response has been to devise civics and citizenship education curricula for schools with the concomitant expectations of enhanced civic practice. Our examination of citizenship education programs has revealed considerable variation from country to country in the degree of success achieved in the design, development and implementation of programs. This paper examines recent developments in citizenship education in four leading Western democracies – Australia, Canada, England and the USA; each one with its own particular successes and shortcomings. It identifies several factors associated with the successful building of curriculum capacity for citizenship education and argues that these are fundamental for countries wishing to move beyond rhetoric and toward substance in citizenship education.

THE STATE, TEACHERS AND CITIZENSHIP EDUCATION IN SINGAPORE SCHOOLS

ABSTRACT: States commonly employ education policy to build a strong sense of citizenship within young people and to create types of citizens appropriate to the country. In Singapore the government created a policy to build citizenship through both policy statements and social studies in the school curriculum. In the context of a tightly controlled state regulating schooling through a highly controlled educational system, the government expected teachers to obey these policy documents, political statements and the prescribed curriculum. What do teachers understand about citizenship in this context? In schools do teachers demonstrate independence of thought on citizenship education or do they acquiesce to government policy? This article reports on a small group of social studies teachers’ understandings of citizenship, and explores the nature of these understandings in the context of government policy. The study showed an unexpected diversity of conceptualization amongst Singaporean teachers with their understandings of citizenship located in four themes, namely a sense of identity, rights and responsibilities, participation, and national history. This response was unintended by government and reflects an independence of citizenship education landscape in schools, despite the tight policy and bureaucratic controls over teachers by the Singapore state.

Civics and Values in the Asia‐Pacific Region

Abstract The Asia‐Pacific region has witnessed a substantial and frequently profound surge of interest in civics and democratic citizenship in recent years. This change has been driven by global forces and educational policy initiatives at national level in most countries and more localized levels in others. In turn these policies have been driven by a perceived need for a more active, participatory citizenry in a time of accelerated capitalism and globalization. A key feature of the policies in the region has been the deliberate inclusion of a set of values based on concepts of the ‘good’ citizen and democratic citizenship. This article examines these developments in selected countries within the region, with particular emphasis upon the values initiatives taken, in an attempt to make sense of the changing scene in civics education. This article was prepared as part of a project funded by the Pacific Basin Research Center and Soka University.

Civic education and competences for engaging citizens in democracies

What competences do young citizens need to be considered as active and engaged in the context of a modern Europe? In 2011 an invited research symposium of leading civic and political educators, social scientists and educational administrators from Europe met in Hannover, Germany to consider this key concern facing Europe today. In examining the above question the symposium addressed two significant issues:

The Productivity of Australian Academics in Education.

The recent push towards ‘quality assurance’ classifies universities into six bands based on quality of research, teaching, community service, and processes to improve quality. This paper argues that the individual, rather than university and department, is the appropriate unit of analysis to make statements about quality. This conjecture is illustrated by using one criterion, productivity of publications in Australia by academics in education, as an index. The productivity of 2048 academics in education across the 32 universities with departments of education were matched with the 45 000 entries in the Australian Education Index. The individual highly productive academic had the most critical impact on overall productivity and it is suggested that the correct unit of analysis for quality assurance is more appropriately the individual and not the department or university.