The dominant premise underlying contemporary educational theory and practice is that citizens are members of political communities who have inherent rights as part of that membership and concomitant responsibilities that inform their beliefs, commitments, capabilities, and actions as members of these same communities. How individuals govern themselves in relation to others within the political community is a primary aim of education in contemporary policy documents, aims, and objectives statements. Yet, despite the urgency and salience of students learning to live together in the face of social division and conflict, the framing of citizenship and ethics in schools varies at least as much as the different visions of what constitutes a good citizen in the first place. This lack of consensus is reflected in how and where citizenship is framed in schools, how it is considered in policy, and how it is interpreted and facilitated in classrooms. Various educational theorists have also conceptualized the notion of citizenship and its place in schools. The variety of perspectives on these questions underscores the difficulties that educators experience in navigating ethical challenges in an educational and social context, where citizenship has become a publicly contested issue.
Article
Talatu Salihu Ahmadu and Yahya bin Don
Organizational citizenship behavior has recently received much interest as it differentiates between actions in which employees are eager to and not to go beyond their prescribed role requirements in diverse organizations. The claim for organizational effectiveness is generally on the increase, seeing as the world is globalizing. In particular, educational systems are shifting toward an era of reorganization, requiring them to toil in a competitive and complex environment. This makes higher education institutions share a likeness with other organizations as the crucial business of an educational institution is imparting quality knowledge through research, teaching, and the learning process. Several organizations have endeavored to be familiar with and compensate employee citizenship behavior as it is currently being integrated into workers’ assessments owing to indications that organizational behavior contributes greatly to the thriving efficiency of employees as well as school organizational competence. This has made the phrase organizational citizenship behavior no longer exclusively applicable to the business segment. It has become germane with regard to educational institutions and their functionality inthe early 21st century, as there isjust slight dissimilarity between education and business organizations. Bearing this in mind, it then becomes importantthat teachers at higher institutions strive to do meet their responsibilities in form of teacher organizational citizenship behavior in spite of all impediments. Also, school leadership must devise a means of encouraging teachers to do their best to support their schools’ accomplishments.
Article
Tommy Ender
Social studies, theoretically, examines the social dynamics of different groups of people within a particular society. The subject, as defined in the US education system, incorporates different disciplines, such as history, sociology, geography, and political science. The objective of social studies is the development of students as active participants in civic society. Since 2001, however, decreased learning time for social studies in elementary school grade levels and narrow interpretations of historical events in secondary school classes due to standardization efforts have threatened the viability of social studies in US schools. A critical social studies interpretation can redirect the current path of the subject. The concept of critical social studies scrutinizes three facets of the subject: curriculum, citizenship, and teaching. Critical teachers, curriculum writers, and students utilize self-reflection, critical theories, and active engagement in critiquing dominant concepts of citizenship. The open exchange of ideas with different individuals challenge standard explanations of citizenship in the United States. Critical educators use community development, student-centered dialogue, and transdisciplinary methods in expanding the learning of social studies. Critical social studies seeks to bring social studies back to its intellectual origins while pushing it into new peripheries.
Article
Amy Stornaiuolo and T. Philip Nichols
In the opening decades of the 21st century, educators have turned toward cosmopolitanism to theorize teaching and learning in light of increasingly globalized relationships and responsibilities. While subject to extensive debates in disciplines like political science, philosophy, anthropology, and sociology, cosmopolitanism in education has primarily been explored as a moral framework resonant with educators’ efforts to cultivate people’s openness to new ideas, mutual understanding through respectful dialogue, and awareness of relationships to distant and unknown others. Scholars have recently called for more critical cosmopolitan approaches to education, in which the framing of cosmopolitanism as a neutral, essentializing form of global togetherness is subject to critique and includes analysis of systems of power, privilege, and oppression. However, while scholarly efforts to articulate critical cosmopolitanisms (in the plural) are still in nascent form in terms of educational practice, recent work in other disciplines offer promise for forwarding such a critical agenda. In sociology, for example, a focus on cosmopolitics foregrounds the labor of creating a shared world through ongoing, often conflictual negotiations that take into account the historical and contemporary political exigencies that shape that process. A framework of cosmopolitics for educators, particularly as a counterpoint to liberal understandings of cosmopolitanism as a form of ethical universalism, will be explored. Such a critical approach to educational cosmopolitanism not only foregrounds the local, everyday actions needed to build connections with others and create common worlds—but also acknowledges the historical and sociomaterial conditions under which such actions take place. A cosmopolitical approach to educational practice thus recognizes multiplicity and contingency—the mobility that locates people and ideas in new relations can just as easily lead to prejudice and bias as tolerance and solidarity—but does so in an effort to understand how social, political, and economic structures produce inequality, both in the present moment and as legacies from the past.
Article
Ji-Yeon O. Jo and Minseung Jung
South Korea has experienced a surge of foreign immigration since 1990, and one of the major migrant groups is female marriage migrants. Although the South Korean government has implemented a variety of policies to reform its education system in order to accommodate the growing multicultural population, it has been mainly focused on K–12 education for children of migrants. In addition, the issues of access to and quality of higher education for female marriage migrants in South Korea are seldom discussed in academic and public spheres. Although female marriage migrants have a great degree of motivation to pursue higher education, they face multilayered hurdles before, during, and after receiving their higher education in South Korea. Narratives of female marriage migrants in higher education not only challenge the common stereotype of “global hypergamy” and gender stereotypes related to female marriage migrants but also provide chances to reexamine the current status of higher education in South Korea and the notion of global citizenship. Their stories highlight the changes in self-perception, familial relationships, and social engagement and underscore female marriage migrants’ process of embracing global citizenship. Their narratives articulate how gender, migration, and higher education intersect in their daily lives, how their lives are connected to the globalizing world, and how these reveal two essential components of the sense of global citizenship—dignity and compassion.
Article
Oakleigh Welply
In a context of globalization and increased mobility, migration has brought new societal challenges to nation-states, raising questions about how countries can promote inclusion within contexts of increased diversity. Education occupies a central yet paradoxical place in this process. On the one hand, schools’ failure to be fully inclusive of new forms of diversity is decried as a cause of violence and fragmentation in society. On the other hand, schools are invested with the role of including and socializing individuals from diverse backgrounds for future participation in society. There is little agreement on how this can best be achieved. Central to these questions are the ways in which educational systems can engage with increasing diversity, be it new movements of people, new forms of communication, and networks, or more complex forms of identity. These present new challenges in terms of educational policy and practice, locally, nationally, and globally. Young migrants face multiple barriers to inclusion, such as underachievement, discrimination, and segregation. In order to fully engage with these challenges, global and national policies need to be considered alongside institutional structures, the role of key stakeholders (teachers, support staff, parents, local community members), and the experience of young immigrants.
Article
Genaro Oliveira and Bronwyn Wood
Prior to colonization, tangata whenua (people of the land) in Aotearoa (New Zealand) developed robust knowledge traditions. Formal social sciences education in New Zealand began with the schooling system introduced by European settlers in the late 19th century. It has been subject to recurrent review and reform since its foundation. The Education Act of 1877 led to the first formal national curriculum that introduced geography and history teaching in primary schools. During the first half of the 20th century, social sciences education in New Zealand saw a greater emphasis on citizenship education due to increasing migration and geopolitical changes resulting from the two world wars. Enduring and contentious curricular changes would follow the recommendations of the Thomas Report (1944), which introduced social studies in secondary schools as a new integrated school subject to promote learning across the social sciences.
Since the 1990s, the social sciences have been named as one of New Zealand’s eight curriculum learning areas. Social studies (junior social sciences) remain as a core integrated subject taught compulsorily from years 1 to 10 (primary, intermediate, and junior secondary years), while a suite of discrete social sciences disciplines is optional for students at senior secondary levels (years 11–13). For almost 80 years, social sciences curricula have been the primary vehicle for citizenship education. The most recent curricular reforms have emphasized the importance of Mātauranga Māori (indigenous knowledge) to promote culturally-responsive social sciences learning in commitment to Aotearoa New Zealand’s bicultural foundations.
Article
Carlos Alberto Torres
The emergence of post-national citizenships questions the principles and values as well as the rights and responsibilities in which national citizenships were founded. Does this new reality reflect a crisis of classical liberalism and particularly of its neoliberal declination facing the new challenges of globalization and diversity? Multiculturalism, one of the answers to the dilemmas of citizenship and diversity shows signs of crisis. In these context concepts such as cosmopolitan democracies and global citizenship education have been invoked as solutions to the possible demise of the regulatory power of the nation-state and failed citizenship worldwide. The implementation of the Global Education First Initiative (GEFI) in 2012 by the UN Secretary Ban Ki-moon sets a new program for education where Global Citizenship Education is predicated as a resource to enhance global peace, sustainability of the planet, and the defense of global commons.
Article
E. Wayne Ross
Social studies education has had a turbulent history as one of the core subjects in the school curriculum. The fundamental content of the social studies curriculum – the study of human enterprise across space and time –however, has always been at the core of educational endeavors. It is generally accepted that the formal introduction of social studies to the school curriculum was instigated by the 1916 report of the National Education Association’s Committee on Social Studies, which emphasized development of citizenship values as a core aim of history and social science education. Earlier commissions of the N.E.A. and American Historical Association heavily influenced the Committee on Social Studies recommendations. The roots of the contemporary social studies curriculum, therefore, can be traced to two distinct curriculum reform efforts: the introduction of academic history into the curriculum and citizenship education. There is widespread agreement that the aim of social studies is citizenship education, that is the preparation of young people so that they possess the knowledge, skills, and values necessary for active participation in society. This apparent consensus, however, has been described as almost meaningless because social studies educators continue to be at odds over curricular content as well as the conception of what it means to be a good citizen. Since its formal introduction into the school, social studies curriculum been the subject of numerous commission and blue-ribbon panel studies, ranging from the sixteen-volume report of the American Historical Association’s Commission on Social Studies in the 1930s to the more recent movement for national curriculum standards. Separate and competing curriculum standards have been published for no less than seven areas of that are part of the social studies curriculum: United States and global history, economics, geography, civics, psychology, and social studies. Social studies curriculum is defined a lack of consensus and has been an ideological battleground with ongoing debates over its nature, purpose, and content. Historically there have been a diverse range of curricular programs that have been a prominent within social studies education at various times, including the life adjustment movement, progressive education, social reconstructionism, and nationalistic history. The debate over the nature, purpose, and content of the social studies curriculum continues today, with competing groups variously arguing for a social issues approach, the disciplinary study of history and geography, or action for social justice as the most appropriate framework for the social studies curriculum.
Article
John Chi-Kin Lee
Geography is a school subject in some countries, for example, the United Kingdom, and an academic discipline that has strong relevance with environmental education, both as a field of study and a cross-curricular theme in the school curriculum. This article reviews the geographical and environmental education with reference to the key literature dated back to the 1990s. Since then, geography can be offered either as a secondary school subject or a field of study or as being part of a social studies curriculum. Different countries pay varying attention to geographical and environmental education because of its historical and sociocultural contexts. The United States, for example, has published national geography standards, whereas England and Australia have incorporated geographical inquiry into educational guidelines. At an international level, the International Geographical Union Commission on Geographical Education has exerted profound influence on the development of geographical education worldwide. For environmental education, its emphasis has gradually shifted to education for sustainable development under the backdrop of echoing UNESCO’s Sustainable Development Goals.
It is noteworthy that geographical and environmental education has advanced its research and advocacy through different educational research paradigms, approaches, and environmental ideologies. Some emerging topics are discerned. One of them, linking with the concept of people–environment interactions in geographical and environmental education, is the topic of place. Another topic is environmental learning and significance of life experiences for learners. In addition, how geographical and environmental education links up with and contributes to citizenship education and global understanding under a globalized and transnational world becomes an increasingly important agenda. Moreover, the impact of technology, for example, the employment of the Geographical Information System as well as information and communication technology, has provided new insights to and extended the horizons of geographical and environmental education. Future educational development in such direction needs cross-disciplinary contribution and cross-sector collaboration.
Article
Sarah M. Stitzlein
Public schools are intricately connected to the stability and vitality of our democracy in the United States. The important relationship between public schooling and democracy began as a foundational idea in our fledgling republic, and it grew slowly over the course of our country’s history. Along the way, the relationship has been tested and challenged, encountering significant problems and limitations over time, including some that continue today. Despite these struggles and the many ways in which we’ve failed to fully fulfill the relationship, it has become a key one for maintaining the strength of our society and our political system.
Unlike a monarchy and other forms of government, it is difficult to maintain a democracy. Democracies take work; they rely upon the ongoing effort of elected officials and citizens, because they cannot run themselves or rely on just one person to lead. While democracy may be a highly desirable political system, its benefits are not always self-evident to children, and the pursuant skills and work it requires do not come naturally to most people. This is the rather precarious position of democracy; in order to maintain it, we have to educate children about its benefits and rationale while also equipping them with the skills and dispositions they need in order to for them to perpetuate it well. This is why we must link education and democracy.
Democracy requires informed and active voters who seek information to make wise decisions on behalf of themselves and the common good. Such voters must understand their own rights and freedoms, as well as those of others, as they deliberate together to reach mutually agreeable policies and practices. They must be equipped to engage in free and critical inquiry about the world and the problems surrounding them. And, they need the imagination and creativity to construct, revise, add to, and share the story of democracy with others, including the next generation.
The relationship between public schooling and democracy is best understood and fulfilled when it is not just a unidirectional one, where public schools support democracy, but rather when it moves in both directions, with the formal and cultural elements of democracy shaping the governance, content, and practices of schools. In this way, democracy is not just the end of public schooling, but also the means by which we achieve it.
Article
Ruth Heilbronn
Education is a human right and benefits both the individual and the whole society. Education that encourages debate and discussion and acknowledges complexity and ambiguity is essential for people to develop a respect for others and for democracy—that is, to participate as citizens. This concept is encapsulated in the United Nations Charter of Human Rights. The humanities and the creative arts are important curriculum areas that can encompass diversity and complexity and support the development of a necessary critical disposition. Study in these areas helps to create people who are at home in a culture in which openness to others and criticality in receiving ideas are paramount. Literature plays a key role in attaining these curriculum aims.
Article
Molly Quinn
To contemplate the question or concern of peace in curriculum studies, and as has been taken up in the field, is to traverse terrain neither simple nor singular. Peace as a concept, and an ideal, is itself complex and contested, elusory even, and approached in manifold ways, often in relation to other equally intricate and disputed ideas, like violence, war, justice, freedom, hope, and love (as well as human rights, hospitality, citizenship, and cosmopolitanism)—historically informed and context-specific as well. The challenges, too, in undertaking such a task are further compounded as concerning curriculum studies, where there is neither a clearly established nor a cohesive body of work upon which to turn or draw here, where no formalized attention has been given systematically to the study of peace, peace education, or peace studies in relation to such. Nevertheless, one could argue that the field of curriculum from its inception, and enduringly so, has been implicitly and integrally connected to the interest of peace and point to a diversity of work therein, of some breadth and depth, to support this claim and examine this interest. The contemporary scholarship that has emerged in the field and explicitly addressed matters of peace and nonviolence, as well as the work of peace advocates and educators, portends further advancement of this line of inquiry—particularly in response to the growing threats and realities of inequality, conflict, violence, war, ecological devastation, and genocide worldwide—in the hopes of creating a more beautiful world of justice, harmony, and human flourishing via education.
Article
Susan Verducci
Open-mindedness disposes us to value and seek truth, knowledge, and understanding by taking a particular stance toward ourselves, what we know, new information, and experience. It aims to improve our epistemic standing, both individually and socially. Widely accepted as a valuable educational aim, scholarship on the nature and extent of open-mindedness’ epistemological and civic value is growing. Epistemological conceptions range from its role in rational inquiry to thinking of it as an attitude toward one’s self as a knower, or as an attitude toward individual beliefs. Conversations on its status as an intellectual virtue, its associations with personal transformation, and its role in aesthetic experiences are also on the rise. Of particular note for schooling are its connections to democratic citizenship. Theorists argue that open-mindedness operates in respecting others, tolerating differences in pluralistic contexts, and exercising autonomy.
Central challenges to its value, however, abound. They include the difficulty of pinpointing the line between open-mindedness and gullibility, and the ways that human cognitive limitations make open-mindedness more aspirational than possible. Its incompatibility with holding strong commitments serve as some of the most relevant challenges to its value. Are there any ideas or beliefs that we ought not be open-minded about? And if (and when) there are, can open-mindedness support structures of power and/or oppressive forces? Additional challenges come from those who explore how open-mindedness fares in posttruth and postfact conditions.
The educational discourse on open-mindedness shows that its objects, occasions, and processes have expanded over time and in response to new understandings of historical, social, and cultural conditions. In this light, educational philosophers may no longer be theorizing about a singular phenomenon with a set of agreed upon characteristics. Instead, open-mindedness may have become a constellation of related and overlapping epistemological phenomena with similar features, much like what Ludwig Wittgenstein calls family resemblances. If so, this constellation requires a conceptual framework, such as the one Jürgen Habermas laid out in Knowledge and Human Interests, to provide open-mindedness with theoretical and educational coherence.
Despite the growing incoherence of thinking about open-mindedness as a singular phenomenon, most educational theorists maintain a fundamental commitment to open-mindedness as an educational aim. Regardless of whether one considers open-mindedness to have essential characteristics, to be a constellation of epistemic phenomena with Wittgensteinian family resemblances, and/or a concept in search of a singular framework (such as Habermas’s), much of the educational discourse on open-mindedness will likely continue to be maintained as it improves our epistemic, moral, and civic standing. This line of thinking assumes and suggests that we simply need to educate for the right orientation, the right attitude, the right sort of openness, and the right skills to attain these goods. However, increasing exploration of the political nature of open-mindedness and emerging perspectives from critical theory seem to be coalescing into a second strand of counterdialogue. Examination of “the goodness” of open-mindedness in contexts of oppression, intolerance, closed-mindedness, and posttruth/postfact conditions provide increasingly serious challenges to open-mindedness’ secure status as an educational aim.
Article
Generally, as a result of the need for many schools to compete on a global level, the use of digital technologies has increased in teacher education programs as well as in U.S. public schools. The dynamics of globalization and digital technologies also continue to influence teacher preparation programs, with multiple implications for educational policies and practices in U.S. public schools. Rapidly emerging developments in technologies and the digital nature of 21st-century learning environments have shaped and transformed the ways learners access, process, and interpret both the general pedagogical content knowledge and discipline-specific content in teaching and learning. Ultimately, the roles of students and teachers in digital learning environments must change to adapt to the dynamic global marketplace. In practice, these changes reiterate the need for teacher educators to prepare skilled teachers who are able to provide social and academic opportunities for building a bridge from a monocultural pedagogical framework to a globally competent learning framework, which is critical to addressing the realities of 21st-century classroom experiences. Specifically, there is a need to equip teacher candidates with cultural competency and digital skills to effectively prepare learners for a digital and global workplace. The lack of cultural competency skills, knowledge, attitudes, and dispositions implies potential social and academic challenges that include xenophobia, hegemony, and classroom management issues. The development of 21st-century learning skills is also central to the preparation of digital and global citizens. The 21st-century globalization skills include communication skills, technological literacy and fluency, negotiations skills, knowledge on geography, cultural and social competency, and multiculturalism. To be relevant in the era of globalization, teacher education programs should take the lead on providing learners with knowledge that promotes global awareness and the 21st-century learning skills required to become responsible global and digital citizens.
Article
Kathleen Gallagher, Nancy Cardwell, Rachel Rhoades, and Sherry Bie
The field of drama education and applied theater is best understood through a consideration of the major developments and aspirations that have shaped its trajectory over three historical periods: the latter years of the 19th century up until 1960, between 1960 and 1990, and the years encompassing the turn of the 21st century, 1990–2015, which was a decidedly more globalized epoch. The drama education/applied theater scholarship of the English-speaking world, including the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and North America, offers a fascinating distillation of the relationship between making drama and learning, including the history of alternative forms of education. Scholarship from Asia drawing on traditional forms of theater-making, as well as imported and adapted structures of Western drama education movements, speak to hybrid and ever-expanding practices across the globe.
Although young as a discipline within the academy, drama education/applied theater has all but made up for its relative immaturity by spanning a wide domain of multidisciplinary thinking, embracing an eclectic theoretical field that covers an enormous breadth of social issues and a vast range of learning theories, while straddling a compelling spectrum of political positions. The development of the field is infused with pioneering ideas that broke with entrenched historical traditions and habitual ways of learning, harkening toward new ways of thinking, being, relating, and creating. Taking the world as its source material and humanity as its target audience, the history of the progressive discipline of drama education/applied theater tells the story of an ambitious, flawed, idealized, politicized, divisive, and deeply humanistic scholarly and practice-driven field.
Article
Elisabeth Krimbill, Lawrence Scott, and Amy Carter
As global citizens, we have an increasing international interdependence that now impacts the way we solve problems and interact with one another. Intentionally planed travel abroad has the potential to transform lives by creating a greater global and personal awareness, where adolescents see themselves as not just members of their local community, but also a global community. In an attempt to prepare students for an international and interdependent world, one inner-city nonprofit agency partnered with a local university in South Texas to provide overseas experiential learning opportunities paired with service-learning projects. Through one innovative program, more than 600 students have traveled to more than 20 countries as a full-immersion experience, most of which were centered on service-learning opportunities. The students in this program had the opportunity to examine their prejudices, assumptions, and fears while learning about themselves and developing deeper relationships with members of their school and local community through global outreach.
