This book offers an examination into the meanings of citizenship in the contemporary world, and trends that are forcing a rethinking of the concept in today’s nation-states.

This book explores the rights held by young people in the citizenship education classroom in the divided societies of Northern Ireland and Israel. Against the backdrop of a long history of protracted conflict and division, the author analyses how international rights obligations are reflected in the contested citizenship education curriculum in secondary schools. Drawing upon extensive qualitative data as well as policy and curriculum documents, the author reveals that understandings of education rights can be oriented around three themes – minority group representation in the curriculum, dealing with difference through pedagogy, and preparing young people for life in a (divided) society. This can be mapped onto the 42-A rights framework where education should be ‘acceptable’ and ‘adaptable’. However, the variety of interpretations held by participants raises questions regarding the ‘universality’ of international frameworks for education rights, and the workability of such frameworks in the national and divided contexts. While the contexts of Northern Ireland and Israel have much in common, they are rarely compared: this book will show that their comparison is as relevant as ever, as issues of identity continue to affect everyday school life. This book will be of interest to citizenship and history education scholars, as well as those who are concerned with the application of international human rights law.

The focus of this book is to offer a humane rocesponse to dealing with violence. An interpretive analysis is presented in order to think differently about violence in schools and about how a citizenship education of becoming can deal with the unpredictable consequences of violence in its own potentiality. It seems to the authors that, given the confident onslaught of violence, there is nothing left to do but to offer insight into the nature of violence itself and, by so doing, to search for unexplored ways of humane response and being. The authors are not pretending to hold a magic wand that will sanctify schools into the safe zones that they ought to be and as which they should serve in any society. This would be both presumptuous and misleading. What one is looking and hoping for, however, is a renewed engagement, a slight tilting of the perspective, so that something other than how we have always responded to violence perhaps will emerge. The authors are confident that such a deconstructive approach to violence in schools through the lens of a reconsidered view of citizenship education can assist them and others to wrestle with its potential for destruction that can be changed into options for co-belonging of a non-violent, if not peaceful, kind.

There is no single answer to the question: what are human rights? The answer depends on whom you ask. Several of the papers presented at Fourteenth World Congress of Comparative Education held at Bog ̆aziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey, in June 2010 discussed issues related to human rights from a comparative education viewpoint. The nine papers presented in this book spans from policy analysis to practices in classrooms. They include analyses of human rights from a regional or country perspective, including Greece, Jordan, the Latin American region, Morocco, Northern Ireland, Portugal, the UK, the US, and Turkey. In facilitating a clarification of the ways in which we understand and talk about human rights in the field of comparative education, the editors have analysed and visualized the chapter contributions using Marie-Bénédicte Dembour’s categorization of human rights discourses. This is a fruitful exercise as it unravels the fact that we do not always mean the same thing when talking about human rights and also sheds light on the issues within human rights to which we are silent, issues that we should conceivably be discussing. Our engagement in human rights seems to focus on using these rights as leverage to promote our arguments about education, not engaging in a more philosophical debate about human rights. Human rights can be used as an ethical lingua franca and thus providing a fertile ground for nuancing our understanding of human rights. Since we experience a huge gap between morality and reality, an engagement in the ethical perspectives of human rights can help us on the way to closing this gap.

Misiaszek examines the (dis)connection between critical global citizenship education models and ecopedagogy which is grounded in Paulo Freire’s pedagogy. Exploring how concepts of citizenship are affected by globalization, this book argues that environmental pedagogues must teach critical environmental literacies in order for students to understand global environmental issues through the world’s diverse perspectives. Misiaszek analyses the ways environmental pedagogies can use aspects of critical global citizenship education to better understand how environmental issues are contextually experienced and understood by societies locally and globally through issues of globalization, colonialism, socio-economics, gender, race, ethnicities, nationalities, indigenous issues, and spiritualties.

The essays in this edited collection argue that global citizenship education realistically must be set against the imperfections of our contemporary political realities. As a form of education it must actively engage in a critically informed way with a set of complex inherited historical issues that emerge out of a colonial past and the savage globalization which often perpetuates unequal power relations or cause new inequalities.

Local Citizenship in the Global Arena proposes a reconsideration of both citizenship and citizenship education, moving away equally from prevailing ‘global citizenship’ and ‘fundamental British values’ approaches towards a curriculum for education that is essentially about creating cosmopolitan, included and inclusive, politically-engaged citizens of communities local, national and global. Viewing education as both problem and solution, Findlow argues that today’s climate of rapid and unpredictable geopolitical and cultural re-scoping requires an approach to citizenship education that both reflects and shapes society, paying attention to relationships between the local and global aspects of political voice, equality and community. Drawing on a range of international examples, she explores the importance and possibilities of a form of education that instead of promoting divisive competition, educates about citizenship in its various forms, and encourages the sorts of open and radical thinking that can help young people cross ideological and physical borders and use their voice in line with their own, and others’, real, long-term interests. Successive chapters develop this argument by critically examining the key elements of citizenship discourses through the interrelated lenses of geopolitical change, nationalism, the competition fetish, critical pedagogy, multiculturalism, protest politics, feminism and ecology, and highlighting ways in which the situationally diverse lived realities of ‘citizenship’ have been mediated by different forms of education. The book draws attention to how we think of education’s place in a world of combined globalisation, localism, anti-state revolt and xenophobia. It will be of key interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of education, political science, philosophy, sociology, social policy, cultural studies and anthropology.

The critique of Critical Pedagogy—in its current various trends and paths teaches me not only the shortcomings of various versions of Critical Pedagogy. No less important, it offers an invitation to a reflection on the limitations, costs, and open horizons of “critique” itself.

Debates in Citizenship Education encourages student and practising teachers to engage with and reflect on key topics, concepts and debates that they will have to address throughout their career. It places the specialist field of citizenship education in the wider context and aims to enable teachers to reach their own informed judgements and argue their point of view with deeper theoretical knowledge and understanding.

This edited collection offers analyses of ‘global citizenship education’ within and across different national contexts. This book illustrates the contingency of definitions, the complexities of juxtaposing demands and priorities in different educational contexts, and the difficulties and tensions of asking a question that is arguably one of the most pressing of our time: how should we live together in interdependent ecologies in a finite planet? In the discipline of education, where market imperatives and the dictatorship of 'effective replicable results' have laid siege to independent debates, this book aims to emphasize the importance of raising our intellectual game as educators to interrupt new and old problematic patterns of engagements, representations, uncomplicated solutions and conceptual straightjackets. Contributors to this volume address the tensions between homogenizing universalisms and parochial specifisms, ethnocentrisms and relativisms, deficit theorizations and romanticizations of difference, fantasies of supremacy and paralyses in guilt, the 'global' and the 'local'. The chapters take different approaches to map the origins, meanings, workings, ethics, politics and implications of initiatives, approaches, and conceptual frameworks related to the ideas of globalization, citizenship and education in different sites of knowledge production. This book was originally published as a special issue of Globalisation, Societies and Education.