Session Information
20 SES 09 B, Learning in Public Spaces: Reconnecting Democracy and Education
Symposium
Contribution
The question of democratic citizenship has not only emerged as an important issue at the level of nation states but is also increasingly becoming an issue at the European level. The legal status of European citizenship was introduced in the Maastricht Treaty (1992) and came into force the year after. The idea of European citizenship not only provides inhabitants of the member states of the European Union with additional rights, but also performs an important symbolic function as it allows for individuals to identify in a range of different ways with the wider ‘project’ of Europe. In addition, the notion of European citizenship is also important with regard to the political legitimacy of the European Union and, through this, with the democratic quality of European governance. Education plays a crucial role in all this, not in the least because educational institutions from schools and colleges up to universities have been mobilised to contribute pro-actively to the promotion and formation of European citizenship. The question of citizenship – and more importantly the question of how individuals become citizens and develop and maintain their civic identifications and political allegiances – is, however, not only a question of formal education. It could actually be argued – and has been argued in the literature – that the formation and maintenance of citizenship depends as much on the input from formal education as it does on informal learning in the everyday practices that make up people’s lives. One important question this raises for research is about the dynamics of such informal learning processes. While such learning processes may take place in the private sphere, it is likely that a significant part of relevant informal civic learning will take place in the ways in which individuals act in and engage with the public sphere. To understand the importance and significance of such learning processes it is, on the one hand, important to investigate what kind of learning opportunities there are in the public sphere and how individuals may or may not engage with such opportunities. It is, on the other hand, also important to reflect upon the particular ‘character’ of the public sphere, as not any space in which people are together is necessarily a sphere with a public, civic or democratic quality. The contributions to this symposium engage with these questions from a range of different angles within a range of European contexts, combining an interest in empirical questions about civic and democratic learning in public places and spaces, with more theoretical questions about the particular quality of public space as a political and democratic rather than just a social space. In addition, the contributions are based on engagement of the presenters with Europe-wide projects that aim to contribute to the development and maintenance of democratic citizenship predominantly outside of formal educational settings. There is, therefore, not only a focus on questions about understanding civic and democratic learning in public spaces, but also on questions about the development and promotion of such learning processes.
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