Session Information
05 SES 03 A, Democracy, Citizenship, Safety and Voice
Paper Session
Contribution
This proposal aims to discuss the concept of youth as citizens that emanates from discourses and practices of secondary schools in border regions of Mainland Portugal around citizenship education. This is done based on the analysis of structural school documents (educational projects, annual activities plan, schools’ citizenship education strategies) and based on interviews with teachers who coordinate citizenship education in their contexts.
Citizenship education has assumed a central role in the promotion of global democratic citizenship (UNESCO, 2015), with schools emerging as a central space for the promotion of citizenship and youth participation (Biesta, 2011). These concerns are also reflected in Portugal, in the National Plan for Youth (2018, 2022) and in the National Strategy for Education for Citizenship (2017), enacted through Decree-Law 55/2018, which has as assumptions, among others, a logic of co-responsibility of young people, assuming itself as a space for the promotion of a humanistic training in the guarantee of democratic values (PORTUGAL, 2017). At the European level, the Strategy for European Youth 2019-2027 follows this vision that it is necessary to promote a culture of participation and active democratic citizenship among young people (EU, 2018).
Literature has suggested that the way citizenship is perceived influences the way citizenship education is developed in different educational contexts (Alzina, 2008). A logic that is more co-participatory and focused on students' experiences, and therefore less centred on the rhetorical transmission of values, has been advocated (Menezes, 2007; Biesta, 2011). In this, it has been argued that citizenship education presupposes the involvement of students in order to make them participate critically in the roles that are reserved to them, i.e., an involvement that recognizes them as full citizens (Nogueira, 2015; Menezes, 2007), in a vision of citizenship that is built in practice, in which the process is concerned with the conditions in which young people live (Pais, 2005; Lawy & Biesta, 2006), which contradicts an idea of citizenship as achievement (Lawy & Biesta, 2006) and often a result of a vision that is built from an adult-centred point of view (Pais, 2005).
This proposal is part of a PhD research project (Ref: SFRH/BD/143733/2019) under development that aims to study how different schools, in border regions of mainland Portugal, are developing their work on citizenship education in secondary education. Our intention is to understand how, in this work, dimensions such as the involvement and aspirations of young people and aspects related to local culture are considered in citizenship education in their schools. This PhD project is part of the GROW:UP – Grow Up in Border Regions in Portugal: Young People, Educational Pathways and Agendas project (PTDC/CED-EDG/29943/2017), also under development, which aims to study how young people construct their biographical and educational pathways and how different contexts seek to respond to young people's aspirations around these pathways.
Method
This proposal is grounded in empirical data from the collection and analysis of school guiding documents and from empirical data from semi-structured interviews conducted with teachers that coordinate Citizenship Education in their schools. Although the border regions of mainland Portugal are composed of 38 municipalities, only 29 have Secondary Education in their educational offer (PORDATA, 2022). In this sense, the guiding documents were considered and the coordinators of these school contexts were interviewed. Among the 29 possible interviews, 24 interviews were carried out. The interviews were conducted online, via zoom and the script included as dimensions: a) the impact of the National Strategy on Citizenship Education and construction of the School Citizenship Project; b) Perceptions and priorities around citizenship education; c) CE and networking with the wider educational community; d) Valorisation of the local culture in the development of initiatives in citizenship education. The main aim of the interviews was to understand how schools appropriated the National Strategy on Citizenship Education (PORTUGAL, 2017) and what school practices resulted from this appropriation, considering the normative of this guiding document. In addition, three structural documents that all schools have - Educational Projects, Annual Activity Plans and Schools’ Strategy for Citizenship Education – were analysed to understand the educational practices developed by each school regarding citizenship education. 26 Educational Projects, 21 Annual Activity Plans and 18 Schools Citizenship Education Strategies were analysed focusing on the following dimensions: formal aspects around citizenship education; initiatives/projects/areas valued by the school in an EC work; networking strategies around citizenship education; valorisation of local aspects; youth involvement in the citizenship strategy. Since the Citizenship Education Strategy came into force from 2018, through Decree-Law 55/2018, only documents developed by schools from that date were considered. Content analysis procedures (Bardin, 2011) were performed resulting in 5 dimensions of analysis that contribute to understand aspects that bring together and differentiate the different contexts regarding the appropriation of educational policy: a) perceptions and priorities of the school regarding citizenship education; b) approaches to develop citizenship education (disciplinary, transdisciplinary); c) network with the surrounding community to develop CE; d) integration of local specificities and local cultural heritage in citizenship education; e) openness and inclusion of young people in decision-making processes regarding CE.
Expected Outcomes
Data points to the fact that most schools share discourses around citizenship education and youth participation, aligned with national and international guiding documents (e.g. Forum on Citizenship Education (2008), National Strategy for Citizenship Education (2017), Global citizenship education: Preparing learners for the challenges of the 21st century (2015), which assume a citizenship education for young people that promotes an active democratic citizenship (Hoskins et al., 2006) in three key axes: Individual civic attitude; Interpersonal relationship; Social and intercultural relationship. Thus, it denotes a vision not only of young people as citizens under construction, but also a vision of citizenship focused particularly on democratic responsibility and common and social well-being (Ross, 2012), in a national perspective. However, it can be seen in some contexts, through the coordinators' speeches or in the intentions expressed in the school guiding documents, a vision of citizenship education as a tool where young people are recognized as agents for their contexts, in a work that focuses on the resolution of problems of local order, in a vision of participatory citizenship in the community (Menezes & Ferreira, 2014), and where work takes place in a procedural way (Lawy & Biesta, 2006), in a practical dimension built with and by young people. In this co-construction, they develop projects (proposed and designed by them and based on their own priorities) that seek to solve problems not only of a local order (of the context, of the territory), but also of problems and priorities for themselves as young people (Silva et al., 2022). In short, despite what seems to be some alignment with the guiding documents, some schools seek, for their contexts, to provide answers to local and youth needs, which seems to denote a vision of citizenship that, in contexts of global citizenship, also focuses on the local dimension.
References
Alzina, R. (2008). Educación para la ciudadanía y convivencia: El enfoque de la Educación Emocional. Madrid: Wolters Kluwer. European Union (EU) (2018). Estratégia da união europeia para a juventude 2019-2027, Jornal Oficial da União Europeia. Bardin, L. (2011). Análise de conteúdo. Lisboa: Edições 70. Biesta, G.(2011). Learning Democracy in School and Society: Education, Lifelong Learning, and the Politics of Citizenship. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Hoskins, B.; Janmaat, J. G & Villalba, E.(2012). Learning citizenship through social participation outside and inside school: An international, multilevel study of young people’s learning of citizenship’, British Educational Research Journal, 38, 419–446. Lawy, R. & Biesta, G.J.J. (2006) Citizenship-as-practice: the educational implications of an inclusive and relational understanding of citizenship. British Journal of Educational Studies. 54(1), 34-50. Menezes, I. (2007). A evolução da cidadania em Portugal. Actas do 3º Encontro de Investigação e Formação: Educação para a Cidadania e Culturas de Formação, 17-34. Menezes, I. & Ferreira, P. (2014). Cidadania participatória no cotidiano escolar: a vez e a voz das crianças e dos jovens, Educar em Revista, n. 53, 131-147. Nogueira, F. (2015). O espaço e o tempo da cidadania na educação. Revista Portuguesa de Pedagogia, 49-1, 7-32. PORDATA (2022). Retrato de Portugal. Fundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos. PORTUGAL (2017). Estratégia Nacional de Educação para a Cidadania. Ross, A.(2012). Education for Active Citizenship: Practices, Policies, Promises. International Journal of Progressive Education, vol. 8, 3, 7-14. Silva et al. (2022). Agendas para a juventude e as suas comunidades: propostas de jovens a crescer em regiões de fronteira. Porto: CIIE. UNESCO (2015). Educação para a Cidadania Global: Desafios para os jovens no Séc. XXI. (Trad. P. Almeida). Brasília: UNESCO
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.