Chair: Heidi Biseth, University of South-Eastern Norway & Bryony Hoskins, Roehampton University (UK)

Discussant: Saiki Lucy Cheah, University of Helsinki

This symposium introduces the Nordic context of civic and citizenship education in schools and discusses the issues relevant to democratic citizenship education that are of central significance in the four Nordic countries that participated in the IEA Civic and Citizenship Education (ICCS) studies. This symposium argues for a new cross-country comparative analysis of ICCS data based on themes typically engaging Nordic scholars, including students' understandings of citizenship, digital citizenship education, environmental citizenship education, and inequalities and citizenship education.

Nordic countries have long-standing traditions as democracies, with social democratic models of society (see e.g., EIU, 2020; Ringen, 2007; 2011). The four Nordic countries included in the ICCS studies are ranked among the top 10 in the Democracy Index based on the five categories: electoral process and pluralism; civil liberties; the functioning of government; political participation; and political culture (EIU, 2020). Denmark and Norway are both in the top five countries according to the level of satisfaction of their population with democracy in the world and Sweden and Finland are ranked in the top 10 (EIU, 2020). The four Nordic countries score among the top 12 out of 189 states ranked in the Human Development Index (HDI) (UNDP, 2020).

The most surprising and consistent pattern found in the Nordic countries is the high levels of civic knowledge scores coupled with low current and expected future civic engagement and participation in comparison to the international average in the ICCS study. This is particularly puzzling since Nordic countries have consistently held some of the highest levels of democratic participation of the adult population in Europe (Hoskins & Mascherini, 2009), and indeed the world (EIU, 2020). However, there are many opportunities in Nordic countries for young people to participate in both schools and civil society during their later teens, which may provide the more crucial learning of political engagement practices for democratic societies. These opportunities also move beyond traditional ways of understanding engagement and include, for example, the use of digital and social media (e.g., Sevincer et al., 2018). This is not yet effectively reflected when determining civic engagement in ICCS 2016. Complacency when it comes to civic engagement may seem, to some extent, present in the Nordic countries, but a study measuring new and alternative ways of engaging in democracy among youth, and the role of education in it, is not yet developed. 

The ICCS studies provide results based on conventional understandings of democracy but also include elements allowing us to address issues supporting the need for profound changes in education. How to measure and teach civic and citizenship education is relevant to the extent that it is addressing the reality in which we live, the societal and environmental challenges we face. To enable and support our young citizens in their civic actions in a rapidly changing world, we need transformative civic education (McWhinney & Markos, 2003; Taylor, 2017). The contributions and discussions in this symposium will address possible avenues for such transformative education.

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