This multi-case study in six Chilean secondary schools explores the challenges for leaders and schools in an area that has gained relevance in the national and international context due to a growingly diverse student body, and social movements that bring controversial issues to the forefront: the implementation of Citizenship Education to promote student civic involvement, in an increasingly commercialized and results oriented educational system. It uses the lens of Ethical Leadership, associated with the fulfilment of the moral imperative of education, and aims to answer how citizenship education takes place in different types of schools in Chile, exploring how managerial grammar, through the instruments of planning, accountability, and evaluation, shapes the discourses and practices of Citizenship Education.

Current transformations of the educational system under neoliberal and managerial logic make it difficult for citizenship education to be a priority at schools worldwide. In Chile, there is a contradiction between de integral development of students proposed by the Law of Education and the mechanisms that educational policy establishes for planning and assessment of schools and teachers. This results in less and less time devoted to citizenship education, promoting individual success over collective learning. Law 20.911 (2016) established that each school must have an annual Citizenship Education Plan, a tool to register actions related to citizenship education, prioritising this area and making it more visible at schools. But the initial evaluation of these plans revealed that 30% of schools did not have citizenship education actions and that there was little relationship between schools and their communities (PNUD, 2018). This study aims to further explore how this educational policy is being signified by schools, directives and teachers.

This multi-case study used an ethnographic approach, including observations, interviews and document analysis, to explore the discourses and practices of students, teachers and principals about citizenship and citizenship education in six Chilean schools at the high school level. Ethnographic techniques were used to achieve an in-depth immersion in each of the research sites. Ethnographic approaches are conducted in natural or authentic contexts, through a prolonged involvement with the participants that allows building a relationship and trust; they aim at an in-depth understanding of the contexts, without seeking to generalize (Willis, 2007); and they allow revealing the connections between different layers involved in public policies, understanding how they are recontextualized, appropriated and negotiated (Cassels, 2011). The field sites of this research correspond to a convenience sample, which sought to represent the diversity of educational establishments in Chile, including schools of different administrative dependencies, educational modality, region and rural/urban location. Fieldwork was conducted during two school years, visiting the six schools, observing classes, extracurricular programming, meetings, interactions in hallways, playgrounds, cafeterias and teachers' lounges, celebrations, civic acts and other events. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with school principals, inspectors, academic coordinators, teachers and students. Documents of each school were reviewed, including the Mission and Vision, coexistence regulations, websites, curriculum, educational project, planning, and evaluations, among others. The qualitative analysis program NVivo was used to code the documents and interviews, and to identify themes and discursive patterns in the data (Rubin, & Rubin, 2012), using tools from Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 2003), which views discourse as a site of power struggles, manifesting particular ideologies.

The results reveal how the emphasis on accountability and performance in schools limits citizenship education, with teachers in different schools experiencing strong pressures to cover the mandatory curriculum, in a context of standardized tests with high consequences. It is also evident how these logics have permeated students' own subjectivity, installing the orientation to individual success and competition. However, resistance to such logics was also identified, with spaces in which the teaching and practice of citizenship emerged despite the constraints of the school context, allowing the promotion of a democratic culture, the critical thinking of students and their empowerment as citizens. The limited FC taking place in schools contrasted with the grandiloquent discourses on citizenship present in the Ministry of Education's guidelines and the schools' missions, being possible to identify a gap between citizenship education discourse and practice. These pressures also made it difficult to think of a transversal citizenship education, since faculty gave priority to the contents of their own subjects, with the possibility of exercising ethical leadership in jeopardy, since the moral sense of education was not seen as a central part of the teaching work. It is concluded that the educational policies and instruments of Citizenship Education are approached mostly as the fulfilment of an obligation, outlining possible routes for an ethical leadership of Citizenship Education.

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