Civic and Citizenship Education in Israel

As distinguished from the formal, political science-oriented citizenship curriculum studied exclusively in secondary schools, civic education-learning develops throughout the young-mature citizen's life in Israel. The analysis of the role and learning of two primary civic myths--'Israel is a Jewish and a democratic state' and 'Israelis are Jews'--demonstrates how this learning takes place through 'formations' of hegemony such as the family, the media, civic militarism as well as through schools' statist and social curricula. Successes of civic education enable the civic myths to be vibrant, gestalt worlds of meaning for Jewish Israelis, and sites of resistance for ultra-orthodox Jewish as well as Palestinian citizens of Israel. On the other hand, as an ethnocracy, democracy in civic Israel is not a meaningful world of value but rather a means to manage political processes. Therefore, the Israel case study is insightful for understanding the limitations of civic and citizenship education that seeks to advance democratic-oriented values such as human rights, liberty, justice, tolerance, civility, coexistence, pluralism and an alternative concept of Israel as a civil society.     

Schooling,politics and the construction of identity in Hong Kong: the 2012 ‘Moral and National Education’ crisis in historical context

Since Hong Kong's retrocession, the government has endeavoured to strengthen local citizens' identification with the People's Republic of China – a project that acquired new impetus with the 2010 decision to introduce ‘Moral and National Education’ (MNE) as a compulsory school subject. In the face of strong local opposition, this policy was withdrawn in 2012, and implementation of MNE made optional. This article seeks to elucidate the background to the MNE controversy of 2012 by locating the emergence of a distinctive Hong Kong identity in its historical context, and analysing successive official attempts (before and after the 1997 retrocession) to use schooling for purposes of political socialisation. We argue that the school curriculum has projected and reflected a dual sense of identity: a ‘Chineseness’ located mainly in ethno-cultural qualities, and a ‘Hongkongeseness’ rooted in civic attributes. While reinforced by schooling, local civic consciousness has been intimately related to a tradition of public activism strongly evident since the 1970s, and further strengthened post-1997.     

Education and citizenship in diverse societies

The question of the state's role in the control of sponsorship of education is addressed in the light of liberal political principles designed to keep peace and enforce toleration in culturally diverse societies. Some contemporary, self-described liberal philosophers argue for a much more substantial educational role for the state than liberal principles will really allow. Brian Barry's argument for that role assumes that the state can prescribe answers to controversial questions regarding the truth and the good life in which a truly liberal state would take no interest. Stephen Macedo is more accommodating to religious diversity than Barry, but his argument fails because of his rashly optimistic view of the state's effectiveness in promoting civic virtue and the possibility of reconciling that role with fundamental liberal values. Liberal regimes do not depend on civic education, even under conditions of diversity. Their life-blood is toleration and dissent rather than the widespread diffusion of civic virtue.     

Composition in the Context of the CAP: A Case Study of the Interplay Between Composition Assessment and Classrooms

What happens when a state's curriculum and assessment policies are in conflict? This article reports on a case study of how 2 eighth-grade, writing teachers in California interpreted and enacted the state's high-stakes California Assessment Program (CAP) direct writing assessment in their classrooms and compares the resulting writing instruction with the ideal presented in California's Handbook for Planning an Effective Writing Program (California State Department of Education, 1986). The principal encouraged all teachers to achieve curriculum alignment with the test; in fact, each target teacher defined and enacted curriculum alignment differently. On one hand, teacher statements indicated that the exam motivated them to prioritize writing instruction. On the other hand, the way the teachers interpreted the CAP materials and consequently approached writing instruction conflicted at points with the state's own curricular recommendations. Reciprocally, the roles and relationships established in the classroom influenced the administration of this assessment. I conclude that teachers' and administrators' interpretations of an assessment are most salient to its classroom implications, and therefore instructional validity (Garcia & Pearson, 1991) of large-scale tests is critical.     

Listening to learn: children playing and talking about the reception year of early years education in the UK

Recently in the UK there have been dramatic changes in the state provision of early years education and care, most notably the introduction of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority's ‘early learning goals’ in 1999 and ‘curriculum guidance for the foundation stage’ in 2000. Outlining the context in which these changes came to take place, this research begins to consider how we might understand children's experiences of this policy in practice in their reception year. Valuing children's potential as participants in research, a play‐based activity was designed to ensure that the process of generating data would be meaningful to the children as well as to the researcher. Analysis of the discourse highlights themes of early education that were of importance to the children. Further discussion of these themes offers insight into how concepts of work and play might be linked to the role of the adult‐in‐charge, potentially undermining opportunities for learning; and how concepts of the individual, normalisation and the individualised academic curriculum promoted by national policy stand opposed to a notion of community on which the children place great emphasis.     

Challenges to Values Education in Hong Kong School Music Education

This study deals with the issue of incorporating values education in music education in Hong Kong's primary and secondary schools. It includes the development of the state's cultural and national identity since its handover from the United Kingdom to the People's Republic of China (PRC). Thirty primary and secondary school music teachers were interviewed in order to understand how notions of “musical values” and “non-musical values” have been addressed in the curriculum. In particular, this study focuses on music teachers' perspectives on teaching world music, traditional Chinese music, the PRC national anthem, and non-musical values. This paper questions the effectiveness of existing curricular and pedagogical attempts to encourage the students' musical experience and extra-musical education. It concludes that values education must have clear conceptions of “values”, “musical cultures”, and “national identity” in order to maintain unity amidst the intensifying plurality of ethnicities and cultures in Hong Kong.     

德育政策中的公民教育:文本分析与政策建构

公民教育是当前世界各国教育发展的基本趋势,也是我国传统德育在转型过程中不得不面对的议题。公民教育思想在当前的课程实践以及新的课程标准和教科书中都有一定的体现,但公民教育的完整概念和明确表述还没有真正进入德育政策设计的范围中。公民教育的理论研究及其实践尝试都给德育政策的设计带来了挑战,德育政策必须面对公民教育思想的冲击,在政策设计中积极建构公民教育内容。     

School and Community Impacts of Hydraulic Fracturing Within Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale Region,and the Dilemmas of Educational Leadership in Gasfield Boomtowns

Innovations associated with gas and oil drilling technology, including new hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling techniques, have recently led to dramatic boomtown development in many rural areas that have endured extended periods of economic decline. The Marcellus Shale play, one of the world's largest gas-bearing shale formations, lies beneath approximately two-thirds of Pennsylvania, including some of the state's most economically lagging rural areas. Spurred by a state-level policy environment favorable to unconventional gas extraction, drilling activity in the last five years has rapidly increased, often with profound social, economic, and environmental implications for communities. In this paper we use schooling as a particular analytic lens for understanding the dynamics of natural resource boomtown development, community change, and how these changes may affect educational and instructional decision making. Using data from interviews and focus groups with educators and administrators in Pennsylvania communities experiencing intensive natural gas development, we discuss the multiple organizational, curricular, and educational dilemmas school leaders face in the context of both rapid, unpredictable community change, and an educational policy environment unfavorable to place-sensitive educational responses to local change.     

Discovering democracy: an analysis of curriculum policy for citizenship education

Citizenship education has become the focus of renewed interest internationally as governments are struggling with issues of national identity in an era of globalisation where there is much ‘talk’ of threats to the legitimacy of nation states. Within this context, the Australian Commonwealth Government took another step in an accelerating trend of becoming involved in curriculum policy with the introduction of its citizenship education curriculum package, Discovering Democracy, in the late 1990s. Legally, education in Australia is a State government responsibility. However, over the last half century, the Commonwealth Government has increasingly set education agendas, justified in terms of'the national interest’ and has achieved them using financial levers which result from the vertical fiscal imbalance between the Commonwealth and the States.

This article examines citizenship curriculum policy processes and practices associated with the enactment of the Commonwealth's Discovering Democracy curriculum package in the State of Western Australia (WA). The study employed a framework of a policy trajectory extending from the Commonwealth Government (macro level) through State (WA) policy enactment (meso level) to individual classrooms (micro level). Documents and interviews with key players, including the Commonwealth Minister for Education, were the main data sources.

Analysis of the policy process revealed the emergence of power struggles as a result of the provision of a national curriculum on citizenship education by the Commonwealth Government, and these struggles occurred at national, State and local levels. These power struggles resulted in extensive transformation of Commonwealth and State level policy intent as the policy enactment proceeded at the classroom level. The study demonstrates the need for better alignment of conceptualisations and discourses in the processes of curriculum development if a greater congruence is to be achieved between expectations and realities in curriculum renewal. Meta‐level issues to emerge from the data, in particular the nature of policy consultative processes and the construction of teacher professional identity, have broader implications for education policy processes in other domains and in other countries.     

Against Professional Development

An intensification of interest in early childhood by government, parents, and employers, focuses primarily on the provision of private early childhood education services outside of the home. With a focus on New Zealand, the paper argues that the form of early education now promoted is a particular form of care and education that moves children away from family and community narratives embedded in the historical, cultural and humanist intentions of the national curriculum Te Whāriki (Ministry of Education, 1996). It argues that current early childhood policy directions, largely driven by global economic agendas, pay scant regard to the lived experiences of children and families. Working with Ricoeur's narrative identity, Ricoeur's ‘capable subject’ is considered in order to examine the emerging purposes and aims of early childhood education, with a particular focus on just institutions for children and families.     

Introduction to the Special Issue on Alternate Assessments Based on Modified Academic Achievement Standards: New Policy,New Practices,and Persistent Challenges

This introduction to the special issue titled Alternate Assessments Based on Modified Academic Achievement Standards: New Policy, New Practices, and Persistent Challenges addresses the federal policy introducing the new alternate assessment for students with persistent academic difficulties, as well as related implementation issues that will be more thoroughly considered throughout the journal. Three guidelines are identified within the policy for alternate assessments based on modified academic achievement standards (AA-MASs), including that (a) a state's grade-level academic content standards cannot be modified for an AA-MAS, (b) a state's general test can be modified for an AA-MAS, and (c) a state's achievement standards can be modified for an AA-MAS so long as they remain on grade level. This article introduces key issues including identification of students eligible for an AA-MAS, the degree of modification that can be applied to develop an AA-MAS, and the current state of AA-MAS development across the nation. The article concludes with overviews of each contribution in the journal.     

Using a Critical Service-Learning Approach to Facilitate Civic Identity Development

This article highlights elements of civic engagement programs that have the rich potential to facilitate civic identity development. Focusing on research with alumni, the study examines 3 civic engagement programs, the approaches of which are guided by critical service-learning. It explores elements of the experiences that alumni name as influential to their learning, development, and present commitments to understand the ways that civic engagement programs based in a critical service-learning approach can encourage them to develop commitments to active citizenship as exemplified by Knefelkamp's (2008) vision of a mature sense of civic identity.     

Formations of Mexicana ness: Trenzas de identidades multiples Growing up Mexicana : Braids of multiple identities

As California's complexion and social panorama changes in color and class so must the directions for writing ethnicity and social analysis. This qualitative study seeks to break out of paradigmatic insulation by proposing innovative perspectives and directions for creating subversive narratives about our own realities. It also seeks to inform current social analysis about Mexicana quality of life and about educationalpolicy on Mexicana educacion (education of the whole person) and school cultures. This article examines how Mexicana identities are created, shaped, and developed through the construction of narratives. I interpret these with the analytical tools of trenzas that ''braids'' critical race theory and multidimensional feminist frames, platicas (popular conversations) and cultural intuition, and the engagement of myself, the researcher, and the young Mexicanas participating in the study. By claiming our space and voicing our feelings and meanings about language, Aztlan culture and identity, and womanhood, we correct stereotypic representations that render Mexicanas vulnerable and dismissed from U.S. civic life and public education. In light of the missing discourse about young Mexicana identity formations, this research makes possible trenzas ''braids'' of multiple identities and tools for transforming educational research, curriculum, and the building of education partnerships.     

Becoming civil in Hong Kong: a tale of two schools

This chapter describes the study as it was conducted in Hong Kong in two case study schools. The first is a new school located in a recently developed area close to the mainland border. The second is a long established school, operated by the Anglican Church. The results suggested that the goals promoted by the government were not a strong feature of the schools’ implemented programs. Although the planned goals of civic education in the first school reflected the national policy, in practice, the emphasis was on prescribing correct attitudes and the maintenance of order and discipline. In the second school, there was no continuity between the school's goal and the national policy; however, there was a strong continuity between the school's goal and the perspectives of all stakeholders.     

Learning citizenship through social participation outside and inside school: An international,multilevel study of young people's learning of citizenship

In this article we revisit and re‐analyse data from the 1999 IEA CIVED transnational study to examine the factors associated with the ways in which young people learn positive attitudes towards participation in, and knowledge and skills about democracy. Less formal learning, wherever it takes place, has recently been conceptualised as a process of social participation, and we explore its effects using Lave and Wenger's and Wenger's understanding of learning through communities of practice. This is then contrasted with the effect of the volume of civic education. The analysis shows that learning through social participation, both inside and outside school, and in particular through meaning‐making activities shows a strong positive relationship with citizenship knowledge, skills and dispositions across a wide range of countries. Moreover, it demonstrates the usefulness of situated learning theory in the field of civic learning, and its applicability in large‐scale, quantitative studies.     

Project-based learning in post-WWII Japanese school curriculum: an analysis via curriculum orientations

In the 2000s, the new national curriculum, dubbed as the ‘yutori curriculum,’ introduced a new subject for project-based learning ‘Integrated Study’ as its prominent feature. Comparing curriculum orientations in project-based learning in three historical periods after the WWII including Integrated Study, this paper aims to offer a genealogy of postwar Japanese school curriculum primarily based on a critical reading of the national curriculum guidelines on project-based learning, which is emblematic of the extending power of postwar Japan's curriculum authorities. Although Integrated Study was purportedly child-centered and put emphasis on each child's personal relevance and each school's autonomy, the finding of this study shows that Integrated Study in the yutori curriculum was rather a technology that disciplined schools, teachers, and classroom processes to shape children into morally good and cognitively flexible Japanese nationals. Despite its rhetoric of child-centeredness and personal relevance, the introduction of Integrated Study as part of the yutori curriculum was ultimately part of the state's move to gain further control over schooling.     

Nationalistic Education in a Post-colonial Age: the Impact of Study Trips to China and the Development of Hong Kong Students' National Identity

With the return of its sovereignty to the People's Republic of China (PRC) on 1 July 1997, Hong Kong attained a new political status as a Special Administrative Region. Hong Kong students, under British rule, had long been receiving de-politicised education, and a sense of belonging to China was limited to the cognitive domain of Chinese history. The ideal of promoting national identity, underpinned in the current civic education curriculum, is proving to be a difficult task. While much literature has documented how curriculumbased educational practices fail to instil students with such an identity, little study has been undertaken to suggest effective alternatives and to examine how they work. This paper reports a study investigating the impact of study trips on developing students' national identity. Through observation and interviews, it takes an in-depth look into students' experience, into how they identify with a Chinese identity. Results indicate that though the study trips help to nurture the cognitive and affective dimensions of national identity, there are limits and possibilities involved. This paper concludes with reminders which teachers should have taken into account when thinking of using co-curricular activities to address the legitimate need of fostering nationalistic education.     

Relations of blood? Racialization of civic identity in twenty-first century Hong Kong

ABSTRACT

This paper explores how notions of race, ethnicity, and blood are mobilized in educational texts in Hong Kong. It elaborates how civic identity is racialized as part of a nationalist education operating beneath the surface of expressed commitments to global citizenship, human rights, etc., in curriculum and textbooks. Many have commented on how cultural and ethnic ties are prioritized over political principles as bases for civic education in Asian societies. These cultural/ethnic bases should be critically examined, however, as they imply racial/ethnic exclusions. Examining how race, ethnicity, and blood are used to justify cultural framings of civic identity leads to questions about how education can be used to unify some, while alienating others from a sense of belonging and community. I argue that racialization of Hong Kong civic identity is not a happy solution for all members of society, and for more inclusive visions of identity in education.     

英、澳、美、加四国公民教育课程改革影响因素比较研究

世界各国面对全球一体化带来的公民身份认同危机,纷纷颁行关于公民教育课程的政策法规,以实现培养合格公民的目标。在这一进程中,英国、澳大利亚、美国、加拿大四国的公民教育课程改革较具代表性。课程目标制定的专业性及明确性、课程资源的可获取性、教师培训的有效性、资金支持的连续性以及课程研究、评估和监督的持续性,成为影响公民教育有效实施的几大决定性因素。     

Let them eat Shakespeare: prescribed authors and the National Curriculum

In this article, we examine the debate that surrounds prescribed reading lists in the English National Curriculum. In particular, we attempt to locate the role which ideas about heritage and social and moral values have played in constructing this debate. We begin by examining the English National Curriculum's origin in the 1980s as a conservative exercise in stemming cultural crisis, and the discourse about literature's role in the curriculum which this helped construct. We then examine how this discourse has influenced, and continues to influence, the educational policy of prescribing a list of authors and consider the assumptions that are embedded in this policy. Finally, we reflect upon how the material conditions of the classroom provide a site of resistance, or difficulty, for the officially sanctioned discourse concerning literature's role in the curriculum.