Session Information
07 SES 13 C JS, Education for Citizenship and Social Justice
Joint Symposium NW07 and NW23
Contribution
This symposium reports on the scholarship in The Palgrave Handbook of Education for Citizenship and Social Justice, a collection of chapters that is in process and will be printed later this year. The Handbook will contain up-to-date contributions from leading writers in the field, providing a much needed international reference work on the interconnections between education for citizenship and social justice. It will be the first book of its kind to fully explore these interconnections in a systematic way, providing a point of reference for scholars and students working in the field of education.
The editors of the Handbook recognise that both social justice and education for citizenship are contested terms, and the handbook works with the following definitions to frame the focus of the chapters:
Social justice refers to issues of equity and fairness in the distribution of resources within jurisdictions, including access to democratic decision-making processes. Education is integrally connected to questions of social justice in a number of ways, including how education systems and processes respond to, challenges or indeed reinforce issues of social justice.
Education for citizenship refers to the formal and informal processes through which young people are prepared for their role as participatory members of local, regional, national and global communities. While education for citizenship can take the form of a timetabled curricular subject we use the term in a broader sense that includes the formal curriculum alongside a range of other educational processes including mission, ethos, and extra-curricular activities. In general terms we understand education for citizenship to possess both a socialising and transformative role, with young people learning about their place within their communities as well as ways of challenging this through democratic means.
Recognising the conceptual importance of issues and context the book will be structured around two main sections. The first section will contain chapters that explore central issues relating to social justice and their interconnections to education for citizenship. The purpose of this section is to explore central issues regarding social justice within education and their relationship to education for citizenship. In this section key determinants / factors relating to social justice will be considered. While we recognise that in reality these determinants / factors are inter-related (this is something we will discuss in detail in the editors’ introduction and conclusion), each determinant / factor has sufficient importance within policy and literature debates to provide a focal point for analysis. The second section will contain chapters that explore issues of education for citizenship and social justice within the contexts of particular nations. The purpose of this section is to consider the inter-relationship of the determinants / factors explored in section one within the contexts of particular nations. This will enable context-relevant issues to be discussed, with common themes across the chapters in this section brought together in the editors’ conclusion.
This symposium provides 3 exemplar chapters from research conducted in the UK, Cyprus and Australia. The first paper draws on Fraser’s three dimensional understanding of global justice to expore global justice in relation to ideas about global ethics, and identifies issues and implications for education for global citizenship in England. The second paper examines interconnections Between Citizenship Education and Critical Peace Education in the context of Cyprus.The third paper takes up the problem of citizenship, school and ‘educational disadvantage’ and ponders how schooling might think past the dissonance between the serious border work of the nation through citizenship and the weak version of citizenship that defines citizenship education.
References
Bauman, Z. 2001. Community: Seeking Security in an Unsafe World. Cambridge: Polity Press. Kymlicka, W. (1995) Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Robertson, R. (1992) Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London, Sage. Peterson, A. (2011) Civic Republicanism and Civic Education: The Education of Citizens. Palgrave: London. Zembylas, M. (2014). Affective citizenship in multicultural societies: Implications for critical citizenship education. Citizenship Teaching & Learning, 9(1), 5–18.
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