‘I felt really inspired by it, it was really interesting to interact with the pupils’: active citizenship in the British undergraduate social science curriculum.
2009
This paper explores the research findings from a project on active citizenship and citizenship learning in higher education in the UK, more precisely the South East of England. It provides an evaluation and discussion
of social science undergraduates’ experiences of studying citizenship in
one particular first year module, ‘Citizenship and Identity’. The paper addresses some of the possibilities, and limitations, of embedding a meaningful experience of citizenship within the higher education curriculum.
There is an emerging national and European policy agenda focused on
active citizenship and citizenship education. There are two key contexts
for this. The first concerns the construction of a European political community and the attempt to constitute a meaningful European identity. Secondly, there is a crisis over social and political integration at the national
level indicated by low levels of trust for political elites, ‘crises’ over immigration and cultural and ethnic diversity, as well as the perceived negative
effects of the individualisation of everyday life (Giddens 1991). Active citizenship and citizenship education in such an environment could mean
nothing more than the extension of mechanisms of state control and market discipline. Historically, citizenship education at the national level has
been concerned with inculcating children with dominant ideologies and
cultures. Meanwhile, the image of the active European citizen appears to
be that of the liberal, self-governing individual with the skills to negotiate
the highly competitive global ‘knowledge’ economy (Wright 2004). Educators are in this sense faced with the dilemma of a policy agenda open to
citizenship education but contexts which may constrain and direct the
form this can take. Despite recent moves to standardise higher education
curricula, it is possible to argue that this remains a space where academics still negotiate and control key aspects of the construction and dissemination of knowledge. The starting point of this paper is that of citizenship as a contested and open concept that can be meaningfully translated into the learning experiences of higher education students.
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