Session Information
19 SES 04 A, Paper Session
Paper Session
Contribution
At least since the 19th century, schools have linked, in one way or another, history and citizenship education. Chile was not the exception (Serrano, Ponce de León and Rengifo 2012). In the last few decades, history curriculums around the world have experienced important transformations, as new ideas about historical thinking circulate transnationally and are adopted locally. “Concepts of second order” are a key component of this new way of understanding history education (Arteaga and Camargo 2012, Seixas 2015). Since the mid 2010s, the Chilean Ministry of Education has implemented a new history education curriculum, which closely follows these pedagogical ideas. In this context, this paper aims to answer the following question: in which ways this transnational curricular shift has affected the existing links between citizenship history and citizenship education in Chilean schools?
This paper proposes a vertical case study approach (Bartlett 2014, Bartlett and Vavrus 2014) to answer this question. Thus, it analyzes the shifting relations between history and citizenship education at three different, interconnected levels: 1) the curriculum level (how transnational ideas about history education are adopted and/or adapted in the process of crafting the Chilean history education curriculum); 2) the implementation level (how the curriculum directives are adopted and/or adapted by textbook authors and teachers); and 3) the learning-experience level (how students make sense of these ideas, as they experience them at school). Connecting curricular analysis with ethnographical fieldwork at one Chilean high school, I expect to illuminate the complex ways in which transnational ideas about history and citizenship education are adopted, resisted, and appropriated in local contexts and through interconnected social practices.
Achieving the aforementioned objective requires to understand citizenship as a relational practice (Lawy and Biesta 2006). By engaging in citizenship practices, individuals are constantly establishing relationships and positioning themselves with respect to others. Numerous anthropological studies have focused on how individuals and groups challenge the limits established by traditional understandings of citizenship and, in the process, affect their relationships with other members of their society (Lazar 2008, Paz 2018). Understanding citizenship as a relational practice implies also to recognize that the school is not a place where a set of citizenship knowledge and skills are unidirectionally transmitted. The anthropology of citizenship education has questioned this view, as well as other dominant theories that claimed that schools were ideological apparatuses of the state (Althusser 2006 [1971]), institutions for the reproduction of classes (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990), and sites of dissemination and induction in models of patriotic citizenship (Anderson 1991). Rather, these studies understand schools as spaces of contestation, negotiation and cultural production (Sobe 2014), in which students, teachers and other actors are affected by their context as they appropriate and/or resist the ideas made available for them (Benei 2008, Luykx 1999).
Further, citizenship as a relational practice has a relevant temporal dimension. As Lawy and Biesta (2006) rightly point out, understanding citizenship as a practice means abandoning the notion that it is the end result of an educational process, recognizing that "young people learn to be citizens as a consequence of their participation in the actual practices that make up their lives” (45). More importantly, the way how school actors approach this temporal dimension of citizenship, can have important consequences for the teaching-learning processes that take place in the school (Gordon and Taft 2011). This is way, examining the changing social practices that link history and citizenship education at different levels, can help us comprehend how young people are learning to be citizens and historical actors in the present.
Method
This paper proposes a methodological approach that combines qualitative content analysis of curriculum (Roller and Lavrakas 2015) with ethnographic research techniques. Both methodologies feed each other, since the curricular analysis serves to develop categories that inform the observations, while the ethnographic work helps to contrast the curricular mandates with their implementation inside the classroom. This methodology allowed me to examine in which ways history and citizenship education are –or not– linked in teaching-learning processes at Chilean high schools, and how these processes allow students to imagine themselves as citizens over time. In order to carry out the qualitative content analysis of Chilean History curriculum, I collected the different curricular documents related to this research. These included all those documents that are in force in Chilean high schools, and are related to the subject of History, Geography and Social: the Ministry of Education’s Curricular Bases and Study Programs. Ethnographic fieldwork, on the other hand, was carried out in two high schools (although this paper reports only on one). One of them was a public high school, and the other one a charter school. In each of these schools, one 9th grade class was chosen, and its students were followed during one calendar school year. During this year, observations of all their History, Geography and Social Science classes were conducted. All these observations were made from the vantage point of the students (whether in physical or digital spaces, depending on sanitary restrictions because of the COVID-19 pandemic). Observations were documented with detailed field notes, and reviewed and complemented daily with methodological, theoretical and self-reflection notes. During ethnographic fieldwork, I also collected samples of historical writing carried out by the students (Henriquez, et al., 2018). Data collected from the curricular documents was analyzed through political discourse analysis categories (Nieto 2017). Using the qualitative analysis software Nvivo12, I conducted an open, axial and selective codification of my data, until reaching adequate content saturation (San Martín Cantero 2014) The data produced during the ethnographic fieldwork was analyzed in an interpretive and iterative way. For this, I elaborated my own matrix from the theoretical-conceptual framework previously exposed, which I constantly reviewed and reworked from the data and the interpretations arising from fieldwork (LeCompte and Schensul 2010). Historical writing samples were coded using this same matrix, highlighting the historical representations and narratives present in them (Miguel-Revilla and Sánchez-Agusti 2018).
Expected Outcomes
This paper presents two main findings: 1) In the context of the Chilean curriculum, the adoption and adaptation of transnational ideas about “concepts of second order”, shows the tensions between traditional and newer conceptions of the relation between history and citizenship education. Although the current Chilean history curriculum shows the incorporation of “concepts of second order” at the center of its pedagogical justification –eradicating, in this way, discourses about acquiring historical knowledge in order to become a “better citizen”–, when the same curriculum’s learning objectives are examined, this centrality is disputed by more traditional “concepts of first order”. This illustrates how the adoption and adaptation of transnational educational ideas collides and is affected by national educational “common-senses”, some of which can be traced back as far as the 19th century. 2) Nonetheless, in the case of Chile, this curriculum has allowed for textbook authors, teachers and even students to make use of “concepts of second order” in the practices of history education in which they engage. This opens new possibilities for them to make use of history to establish connections between citizenship and history education. The practices in which they engage for doing this, can be classified in three categories: a) practices that enact the national curriculum directives about citizenship education; b) practices that resist the national curriculum directives about citizenship education; and c) practices that create new and original ways of citizenship education, not present in the national curriculum directives. The coexistence of –and tensions between– these different kinds of citizenship education practices, allows and shapes diversity within an educational system based on a nationally-mandated curriculum.
References
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