Summary
Contents
Subject index
The SAGE Handbook of Education for Citizenship and Democracy brings together new work by some of the leading authorities on citizenship education, and is divided into five sections. The first section deals with key ideas about citizenship education including democracy, rights, globalization and equity. Section two contains a wide range of national case studies of citizenship education including African, Asian, Australian, European and North and South American examples. The third section focuses on perspectives about citizenship education with discussions about key areas such as sustainable development, anti-racism, and gender. Section four provides insights into different characterizations of citizenship education with illustrations of democratic schools, peace and conflict education, global education, human rights education etc. The final section provides a series of chapters on the pedagogy of citizenship education with discussions about curriculum, teaching, learning and assessment.
The Struggle for Citizenship Education in Canada: The Centre Cannot Hold
The Struggle for Citizenship Education in Canada: The Centre Cannot Hold
In August 2005 the Ministers of Education from member countries of the Organization of American States (OAS) met in Trinidad and Tobago on the theme ‘Quality Education for a Democratic Citizenry’ (OAS, 2005). The summit culminated with a commitment to a hemisphere-wide programme of education for democratic values and practices comprising ‘a broad range of activities undertaken within the framework of the OAS to strengthen democracy through education’ (OAS, 2006). The programme included a presentation by Judith Torney-Purta, Chair of the International Steering Committee for the Civic Education study of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) and a co-author of the OAS report, ‘Strengthening Democracy in the Americas Through Civic Education: An Empirical Analysis Highlighting the Views of Students and Teachers’ ( Torney-Purta and Amadeo, 2004) that had been a focus for discussions at the summit. Dr. Torney-Purta had worked diligently to secure Canadian involvement at various stages of the IEAs and OAS's work on civic education so she took the opportunity afforded by the meeting to talk with the Canadian delegation. She found them largely unaware of the citizenship education research work of the IEA, Canada's involvement in Phase 1 and its absence from Phase 2 of the Civic Education Study; nor were they much aware of the state of citizenship education in Canada generally and certainly no one in the delegation was in a position to speak for Canada.
We relate this vignette not by way of criticism of the individuals in the Canadian delegation but to illustrate the central fact of public education in Canada. Quite simply, it is impossible to speak of Canadian education in any legal or formal sense. To be sure, there is education and schooling in Canada but it falls under the direction and governance of each of the 13 provinces and territories; there is no federal ministry of education. Coordination and collaboration is minimal, particularly in citizenship education, with a nod toward pan-Canadian interests provided by the Council of Ministers of Education Canada (CMEC) (Note that in Canada we dare not speak of national interests; rather convention dictates that they are pan-Canadian). The Canadian delegation's response to Dr. Torney-Purta reinforced her view that compared with many other jurisdictions, civic education in Canada is simply not a priority (Hughes and Sears, 2006).
Canada as Part of the International Consensus in Citizenship Education
Over the past 15 years a pervasive consensus about citizenship education has been growing across the democratic world. That consensus consists of four central elements: a sense of crisis about the state of democratic citizenship; a belief that the crisis can and should be addressed by effective citizenship education; a commitment to a largely civic republican conception of citizenship and a move toward constructivist approaches to teaching and learning as best practice in citizenship education. Canada shares in all aspects of this consensus.
The Crises of Citizenship
There has been a sense of crisis or, more accurately, overlapping crises in democracies around the world about the disengagement of citizens from participation in even the most basic elements of civic life. This concern is commonly expressed in both academic literature and popular media and often called a ‘democratic deficit’ (Cook and Westheimer, 2006: 349). We will not discuss it in detail here but Table 10.1 provides an overview of the overlapping crises of ignorance, alienation and agnosticism underlying this widespread concern particularly as regards young people. A number of critics have questioned the degree to which these crises accurately reflect the nature of young citizens' knowledge about and engagement in civic processes in Canada and elsewhere but, nevertheless, they permeate literature and policy statements in the area of civic education (For a fuller discussion see, Sears and Hyslop-Margison, 2006, 2007; Chareka and Sears, 2006).
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