Session Information
23 SES 01 C, Focusing on Citizenship
Paper Session
Contribution
People increasingly move across national borders for longer or shorter periods. The autonomy of nation states is thus challenged and questioned, but they still hedge in and concomitantly close off people in separate national spaces. The starting point for this study is that these simultaneous, and often contradictory, processes are of great importance of how the “right” kind of future citizen is formed in mandatory schooling. The overall aim is to investigate processes of globalization in education policies and in pedagogic texts, with focus on civic education and the fostering of the future citizen in four countries: Norway, Sweden, Syria and Turkey. The two Nordic countries, as well as the two neighbouring countries along the eastern Mediterranean, allow for interesting points of comparison, both historically and geopolitically. Although each country has its own history and local context, each is also very much a part of a world of migration and mobility. Sometimes the countries even “share” the same citizens due to transnational processes. Central questions in our project are:
• How is “the citizen” constructed in relation to place, nation, language, religion, ethnicity and gender in education policies and in pedagogic texts?
• How are relations between national and global perspective treated in relation to “the citizen”?
• Which civil rights and obligations are given attention and which individuals are included or excluded nationally as well as globally?
One theoretical point of departure is migration research with an interest in the ways that long- or short term migrants create and maintain social, economic and political relations which cut across national borders (Basch et al 1994, Vertovec 2008, Faist 2000, Anthias 2002). This transnational perspective is rewarding also for analyzing how policy and soft law may move across borders (Benda-Beckmann et al 2009), not least when it comes to educational issues.
Another theoretical point of departure is critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 1992) which offers tools to study how “the citizen” and different subject positions are constructed in texts and practices (Aamotsbakken 2007, Gee 2008). Various educational texts and policy documents can thus be seen as part of a network of discursive practices in which educational thinking and interaction with the community are expressed (Popkewitz 1998). The construction of national histories in, for example, textbooks carries a conception of who belongs to the nation and at the same time establishes a dichotomy between insiders and outsiders. A detailed analysis of such texts may reveal different stereotypes that need to be critically scrutinized within, as well as outside, educational institutions (Tuba & Altinay 2007).This theoretical point of departure underlines that pedagogical texts, curricula and policy documents take part in an intertextual dialogue. The four countries represent different cases and are used for soft comparison where similarities and differences will be scrutinized to generate new insights and deepen the analysis.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Aamotsbakken, B. (2007) ”Pedagogiske intertekster. Intertekstualitet som teoretisk og praktisk begrep”, in S.V. Knudsen, D. Skjelbred & B. Aamotsbakken (eds) Tekst i vekst. Teoretiske, historiske og analytiske perspektiver på pedagogiske tekster, Oslo: Novus Forlag. Anthias, F. (2002) “Where do I belong? Narrating Collective Identity and Translocational Positionality”, in Ethnicities, vol.2 (4). Basch, L. et al (eds) (1994) Nations Unbound. Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nations-States, New York: Gordon & Breach. Benda-Beckmann, von F. et al (eds) (2009) The Power of Law in a Transnational World. Anthropological Enquiries, New York: Berghahn Books. Fairclough, N. (1992) Discourse and Social Change, Cambridge: Polity. Faist, T. (2000) “Transnationalism in International Migration: Implications for the Study of Citizenship and Culture”, in Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol.23 (2). Gee, P.J. (2008) Social Linguistics and Literacies. Ideology in Discourses, London: Routledge. Kanci, T. & A. G. Altinay (2007) Educating Little Soldiers and Little Ayses: Militarised and Gendered Citizenship in Turkish Textbooks. In M. Carlson, A. Rabo & F. Gök (eds) (2007) Education in ’Multicultural’ societies. Turkish and Swedish perspectives. Istanbul: Swedish Research Institute. Transactions, Vol. 18. Popkewitz, T. S. (1998) Struggling for the Soul. The Politics of Schooling and the Construction of the Teacher. New York: Teachers’ College Press. Schiffauer, W. et al (eds) (2004) Civil Enculturation. Nation-State, School and Ethnic Difference in the Netherlands, Britain, Germany and France, Oxford: Berghahn Books. Schissler, H. & Nuhogly Soysal, Y. (eds) (2005) The Nation, Europe and the World. Textbooks and Curricula in Transition, Oxford: Berghahn Books. Vertovec, S. (2008) Transnationalism, London: Routledge. Wimmer, A. & Glick Schiller, N. (2002) “Methodological Nationalism and Beyond. Nation-state Building, Migration and the Social Sciences”, in Global Networks 2.
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