Citizenship as a life experience.Developing Citizenship Education from the Political Philosophy of Roberto Esposito

Author(s):

Félix Angulo Rasco(presenting / submitting)Silvia Redon(presenting)

Conference:

ECER 2014

Network:

03. Curriculum Innovation

Format:

Paper

Session Information

03 SES 14 A, Curriculum Change and the Key Competences

Paper Session

Time:

2014-09-05

15:30-17:00

Room:

B110 Sala de Aulas

Chair:

Luis Tinoca

Contribution

The paper proposes a curriculum framework for teaching citizenship from the ideas developed by Roberto Esposito. Roberto Esposito is a well-known Italian philosopher whose work has only recently begun to be translated into English (2008, 2009ª,2011) [1]. Although, as noted Timothy Campbell (2006), all concepts that Esposito has analyzed and developed, is precisely the Bios and biopolitics that have been the focus of analysis in english language [2], we would like to focus also on the communitas and the inmunitas. Not only because they are the most basic concepts of his intellectual development, but because they represent a first and, in our view, a successful approach to important educational thematics, very important for the development of citizenship education (Banks 2007) ). The topics that were introduced in the Education for Citizenship, illuminated by the thought of Esposito, were the following: How to build citizenship, understood as an experience of com-munitas and inmunitas from life (bio-politics)? How to analyze the current political philosophical theory from strands of biographical subjects that share the subject? How to deepen these new categorical records of political theory, connected to the curriculum? The curricular structure of the course called "Education and Citizenship" is a subject that the entire university community of all careers forming secundary teachers at the Catholic University of Valparaiso transversely taught. The objectives of this elective course, are linked to provide a curricular space that allows professional future, demonstrate the educational event in its teleological dimension as a political fact, while politically it questioned regarding the well (fair) in the coexistence cohabitation. The course aims to encourage the development of skills and attitudes addressing theoretical and practical elements from the experience of citizenship, rather than the classical subject, anchored in civic knowledge, rights and dutieswhich presents the meaning of citizenship in a homogenizing (Norman and Kymplicka). With the help of Roberto Esposito, we open the inherited concepts of political philosophy through a process not only of de-construction and interrogation of metaphysical, unilinear and closed concepts of modern political theory character, but from experience and ways of life that that have determined the civic identity of students. Therefore, an essential part of the pedagogical work and 'deconstruction' and analysis is in the biographical accounts that must prepare students for the courses. These stories are one of the key sources for reconsideration of its citizens and to deepen rather handicapped and contracted forms of community in which they have been living so far (Clandinin & Connelly 2000).

[1] Esposito (2008, 2009a, 2011)

[2] See Diacritics - Volume 36, Number 2, Summer 2006 and Journal of the Theoretical Humanities volume 18 number 3 september 2013

Method

The methodology involves the use of stories or biographical narratives of the students participating. Stories that although they have to focus on the way how they have lived citizenship over his past life, must they emphasize their famimliares, social relations and especially in the schools for which they have passed. We have collected 14 life stories of 8 women and 6 men, from different careers secondary teacher education, from physical education to history and natural sciences. Once collected the stories were analyzed through Nvivo10 program to generate the emerging basic categories. With these categories we could get into the vivid world views that students understood and used to see himself as a citizen.

Expected Outcomes

Some provisional conclusions: A) The reality of social segmentation embodied and concretized through the Chilean educational system undergoing a neoliberal educational policy of privatization and destruction of public education. This reality is expressed in the pathways of life and experience of exclusion, injustice, a kind of resignation and an identity configuration of a feeling of submission and acceptance, in some cases, which is not part of the big party. B) Living injustice and exclusion as a resignation, as an identity element undergoing and accepted without critical analysis. 3) The experience of the big differences and social inequalities, the itineraries of student life, are built on a sense of 'social repair' governed by the logic of 'charity'. On the 'missionary' should 'repair' to those who are in a clear situation of detriment. Doing something live from the private, the individual, not the common. 4) A four powerful narratives axis, what is the bios-family as the normative frame that guides, inspires and directs their lives with the life experiences of countless contradictions, injustices and abuses. This category of loss, abandonment and violence as an identifying feature in shaping citizenship linked to situations of physical punishment, adoptions, relations of domination, gender discrimination, stories are hurting the wing of the dimension of the arising private and therefore outside the pubic right to claim justice. 5) A fifth category compose the experience of the school as a term of abuse and arbitrariness.

References

Banks, J. (2007) Diversity and Citizenship Education: Global Perspectives. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco. Bird, Greg & Short, Jonathan (2013) Community, Immunity, and the proper. An introduction to the political theory of roberto esposito. Angelaki. Journal of the Theoretical Humanities volume 18 number 3: 1-12 Clandinin, D.Jean y Connelly, F. Michel (2000). Narrative Inquiry. Experience and Story in Qualitative Research. San Francisco. Jossey- Bass.Esposito, Roberto (2008) Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy (Posthumanities). University of Minnesota Press Esposito, Roberto (2009a) Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community. Standford University Press Esposito, Roberto (2009b) Comunidad, Inmunidad y biopolítica. Barcelona. Herder Esposito, Roberto (2011) Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life. Cambridge. Polity. Flick, U. (2004). Introducción a la investigación cualitativa. Madrid. Morata.McDonough, K. and Feinberg, W. (2006) Citizenship and Education in Liberal-Democratic Societies: Teaching for Cosmopolitan Values and Collective Identities, Oxford University Press, New York. Peters, M., Britton, A. and Blee, H. (2007) Global Citizenship Education: Philosophy, Theory and Pedagogy (Contexts of Education), Sense Publishers, Rotterdam. Redon, Silvia; Angulo, J.F. et ali. (2013) The sense of the common of the democratic experience in the curriculum in schools of social exclusion. American Association for the advancement of curriculum Studies. 12º Annual Meeting. San Francisco.

Author Information

Félix Angulo Rasco (presenting / submitting)

Universidad de Cádiz, Spain

Silvia Redon (presenting)

Pontificia Universidad CAtólica de Valparaíso

Valparaíso

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