Learning Citizenship

Drawing on contemporary global events, this book highlights how global citizenship education can be used to critically educate about the complexity and repressive nature of global events and our collective role in creating a just world.

This book shows how a variety of teaching strategies can be used to teach citizenship skills across a range of curriculum subjects as well as in Citizenship lessons.

Learn how to design history lessons that foster students’ knowledge, skills, and dispositions for civic engagement. Each section of this practical resource introduces a key element of civic engagement, such as defending the rights of others, advocating for change, taking action when problems are observed, compromising to promote reform, and working with others to achieve common goals. Primary and secondary sources are provided for lessons on diverse topics such as the Alice Paul and the Silent Sentinels, Samuel Gompers and the American Federation of Labor, Harriet Tubman, Reagan and Gorbachev’s unlikely friendship, and Lincoln’s plan for Reconstructing the Union. With Teaching History, Learning Citizenship, teachers can show students how to apply historical thinking skills to real world problems and to act on civic dispositions to make positive changes in their communities. “Teachers will appreciate the adaptability of the unscripted lessons in this book. Each lesson provides background historical context for the teacher and the resources to expose students to themes of civic engagement that cut across historical time periods and current events. With the case studies, ideas, and sources in this book, teachers can instill students with the dispositions of democratic citizens.” —From the Foreword by Laura Wakefield, interim executive director, National Council for History Education

For many years, the fields of citizenship education and participatory democracy have often operated independently from each other. During the last decade, the Transformative Learning Centre of the University of Toronto has nurtured multiple spaces for an interdisciplinary dialogue among scholars, practitioners and students from these two fields. One of those spaces was the Second International Conference on Citizenship Learning and Participatory Democracy, where close to 300 participants from all over the world shared ideas in more than 150 sessions, including discussions, round-tables, workshops and keynote addresses. This volume brings together a selected collection from the many papers submitted to the conference. Learning Citizenship by Practicing Democracy: International Initiatives and Perspectives includes an introductory essay, 18 chapters and a postscript, and is organized in three sections: I. Learning democracy in educational institutions II. Learning democracy in communities III. Learning democracy in participatory budgeting The articles in this book represent a variety of perspectives (as the authors come from different geographical and disciplinary locations), but they all share a commitment to improvements in theory, research and practice in the worldwide movement for deepening democracy and for an emancipatory citizenship education.

This volume offers a remarkable collection of theoretically and practically grounded conversations with internationally recognized scholars, who share their perspectives on Global Citizenship Education (GCE) in relation to university research, teaching, and learning. Conversations on Global Citizenship Education brings together the narratives of a diverse array of educators who share their unique experiences of navigating GCE in the modern university. Conversations focus on why and how educators’ theoretical and empirical perspectives on GCE are essential for achieving an all-embracing GCE curriculum which underpins global peace. Drawing on the Freirean concept of "conscientization", GCE is presented as an educational imperative to combat growing inequality, seeping nationalism, and post-truth politics. This timely volume will be of interest to educators who are seeking to develop their theoretical understanding of GCE into teaching practice, researchers and students who are new to GCE and who seek dynamic starting points for their research, and general audience who are interested in learning more about the history, philosophy, and practice of GCE.

Citizenship is the newest addition to the National Curriculum. For students training to teach citizenship as a first or second subject, this practical text is underpinned by a sound theoretical background.

Supporting children and young people to participate safely, effectively, critically and responsibly in a world filled with social media and digital technologies is a priority for educators the world over. Most young people in Europe today were born and have grown up in the digital era. Education authorities have the duty to ensure that these digital citizens are fully aware of the norms of appropriate behaviour when using constantly evolving technology and participating in digital life. Despite worldwide efforts to address such issues, there is a clear need for education authorities to take the lead on digital citizenship education and integrate it into school curricula. In 2016, the Education Department of the Council of Europe began work to develop new policy orientations and strategies to help educators face these new challenges and to empower young people by helping them to acquire the competences they need to participate actively and responsibly in digital society. This volume, the first in a Digital Citizenship Education series, reviews the existing academic and policy literature on digital citizenship education, highlighting definitions, actors and stakeholders, competence frameworks, practices, emerging trends and challenges. The inclusion of a wide selection of sources is intended to ensure sufficient coverage of what is an emergent topic that has yet to gain a strong foothold in either education or academic literature, but has received wider policy attention.

Active citizenship is an objective of schooling in an increasingly complex context, in which social cohesion of the multicultural society is a cause for growing societal concern. International co-operation between European countries and a growing heterogeneity of the (school) populations of most European countries have led to an increased interest in education for citizenship. The core question dealt with pertains to the role that schools can play in developing citizenship through formal and informal learning. Day-to-day school life is seen as a rich environment in which aspects of functioning in a democratic society and dynamic interplay with rules, leadership and peers with different backgrounds are experienced and form a source of learning. In this view the school context functions as a micro-cosmos to exercise “school citizenship” as a bridge to societal citizenship and state citizenship. The book brings together material from Cyprus, Denmark, England, Germany, Italy, Romania and The Netherlands.