This paper builds on research about young adults as citizenship construction actors, in Portuguese relatively disadvantaged secondary schools. Building on young voices, this paper explores research findings concerning the construction of educational-citizenship.

Concerns addressed are: i) How young adults construct educational-citizenship within an educational system informed by Europe?; and ii) What are the conflicts and commitments between this form of citizenship and other forms of young adult construction?

Europe is the larger educational setting, within which concerns with “youth”, education and citizenship moved to the centre of debate, particularly in the last decades. This has resulted in the European production of various guidelines for education, citizenship and youth against which there have been changes in national education policy.

I argue that the lack of attention to young adult voices constitutes a lacuna in democracy. Besides raising boundaries to young adult citizenship it may both result in non-transgressing thought, which contributes to the reproduction of an uneven social order; as well as it may rule out young adult contribution towards the construction of their educational-citizenship and their ways of life including school.

The conceptualization of educational-citizenship matches up a variety of theoretical contributions with young adult voices. It is a form of “claimed citizenship” (Stoer & Magalhães, 2001; 2005). This means that educational-citizenship is constructed in the context of late modernity, which emphasizes fragmentation and mixing of identities that embody the heterogeneity of the educational subject. It implies the claim for identity and difference but also equality of rights, a framework oriented towards interdependence (Lister, 1997, 2007). As a form of claimed citizenship, educational-citizenship implies the assertion of voice.

The cases under study led to conceptualize educational-citizenship in two-strands that often arise dissociated in young adult formulations: educational-citizenship-of-rights and educational-citizenship-of-knowledge. The first reconfigures the democratic pedagogic rights - inclusion, participation and enhancement (Bernstein, 1996), which correspond to: a sense of belonging and recognition by (and within) the school culture; partnership in education through broad participation in co-construction, co-maintenance, co-transformation of school life and achieving the potential of each person and beyond (ibid.). These rights, with a focus on pedagogy, are matched up with feminist demands for inclusion (Young, 2002), recognition (Young, 2002; Lynch & Lodge, 2002) and equality of condition (Baker, Lynch, Cantilon& Walsh 2004) with a focus on the subject. This form of citizenship is based on the realization of the right to be heard and recognized, reflecting and acting on life contexts, including school, a social setting that has central role in young lives, as is known.

In turn, educational-citizenship-of-knowledge expands and specifies the right of participation (Bernstein, 1996), in school life and in other contexts of young life. It stands on the right to knowledge, participating in its construction and definition. This form of citizenship crosses the bernsteinian thought with pro-voice movement that gained momentum in the UK, particularly since the 1990s, and which may include studies such as Arnot (2006) and Arnot & Reay (2006a, 2006b, 2008).

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