CIES 2018 pre-conference workshop: Citizenship, Identity and Education
​Sunday March 25

Identity lies in the core of human perceptions, motivations, and actions (Karlberg, 2008), and as such, has become the centerpiece for understanding the many processes that affect patterns of behavior. Identity is also a role-specific understanding, expectation, and projection about self (Bowell & Stokoe, 2006; Wendt, 1992) that plays a significant role in the development of citizenship. If citizenship is the acquisition of a status in a community or society, then identity is an important prerequisite of citizenship that demonstrates how an individual internalizes, codifies, and projects essential features of a group or community that she or he believes to be a part of. If citizenship modality can be demonstrated through a set of norms that a group or community imposes on an individual, identity is a mental construct developed through an interpretation of those norms by an individual that directs individual’s behavior.
Due to somewhat dialectic relationships between citizenship and identity (Garratt & Piper, 2008; Piper & Garratt, 2004; Sant, Davies, & Santisteban, 2016) citizenship education presents a productive discourse for the discussion of the interplay of the both concepts. How do individual’s multiple identities (national, ethnic, or racial) affect their citizenship and civic practices? Is civic identity similar to citizenship? Does the identity paradigm help us better understand the idea of expanding citizenship? And most importantly, at least for us, how education addresses all these problems.   A look at identity through the lens of citizenship education has become even more urgent in light of growing migration (both forced and opportunity based) causing unprecedented global and regional changes that directly or indirectly impact stakeholders’ decisions and curricular practices in regard to public education, identity politics, globalization, and social justice. 
The objective of this workshop is to initiate a discussion and get critical insight of an interplay of citizenship and identity and the role of citizenship and democratic education in identity construction, negotiation, and development. The deliberately broad theme of the workshop allows for a wide range of topics that address all aspects of identity development in citizenship education, theoretical and methodological foundations of identity and citizenship research, as well as the place of identity politics and citizenship education in national or regional education reforms. In addition, through the workshop we aim to address multiple theoretical foci of identity and citizenship including those that are sometimes neglected or marginalized through former hegemonic relations (Global North vs. rest of the world; post-colonial; and critical lenses).
All those interested in participating in the workshop are invited to submit a 200-250 word proposal to Anatoli Rapoport (Purdue University, rapoport@purdue.edu ) and Miri Yemini (Tel-Aviv University, miriye@post.tau.ac.il ) by Friday, November 3, 2017. The workshop will be organized in the form of a seminar where presenters and participants will share their conceptual, empirical, or policy research as well as practical experiences. The pre-conference workshop format will provide more time to discuss and reflect on the papers presented. The workshop is sponsored by the CIES Citizenship and Democratic Education Special Interests Group (CANDE SIG) and James F. Ackerman Center for Democratic Citizenship at Purdue University.

References:
Bowell, B. & Stokoe, E. (2006). Discourse and identity. Edinburgh University Press.
Garratt, D. & Piper, H. (2008). Citizenship education, identity, and nationhood. London: Bloomsbury.
Karlberg, M. (2008). Discourse, identity, and global citizenship. Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice, 20(3), 310-320.
Piper, H. & Garratt, D. (2004). Identity and citizenship: Some contradictions in practice. British Journal of Educational Studies, 52(3), 276-292.
Sant, E.,  Davies, I., & Santisteban, A. ( 2016). Citizenship and identity: The self-image of secondary school students in England and Catalonia. British Journal of Educational Studies, 64(2), 235-260.
Wendt, A, (1992). Anarchy is what states make of it: The social construction of power politics. International Organization, 46(2), 391-426.

---

CIES 2017 pre-conference workshop: Sunday March 5 - 8.30-2.45, 
Lunch break 11:00-12:00. Lunch is sponsored by James F. Ackerman Center for Democratic Citizenship
Sheraton Atlanta, 2, Augusta (South Tower)

Competing Frameworks: National and Global in Citizenship Education
Workshop Coordinator: Anatoli Rapoport, Purdue University rapoport@purdue.edu
This workshop is sponsored by James F. Ackerman Center for Democratic Citizenship
​
Since the time when nationalism played a critical role in unifying new nations, nationality and citizenship have been virtually synonymous terms. Reconsideration and redefinition of normative communal status of various societal groups led recently to reexamination and reconceptualization of citizenship. Even a bigger challenge has been presented by growing global processes. Public schools have become a locus of a potential conflict of two citizenship discourses: the discourse of national citizenship and the discourse of global citizenship that is seeking for a proper place in school curricula. The objective of this workshop is to initiate a discussion and get critical insight of an interplay of national and global in citizenship education in various societies. The workshop will bring together US and international scholars who will share their conceptual, empirical, or policy research as well as practical experiences about the intersection of the national and global in citizenship education. The workshop will be organized in the form of a seminar where presenters and participants will share their conceptual, empirical, or policy research as well as practical experiences about the intersection of the national and global in citizenship education.
​ 
GCE Perceptions among Teachers in British Schools Catering to Significant Migrant Populations
(Heela Goren and Miri Yemini, Tel Aviv University, Israel)
 
Global Citizenship Education (GCE) has been embraced by many countries over the last decade as a way of preparing students to compete and engage in modern global society. GCE has also been suggested by some scholars as an alternative identity model in multicultural countries or those experiencing significant changes in population due to a large influx of immigrants or refugees, toward whom national models of citizenship can often seem excluding or irrelevant. The current study is the first to examine the way GCE is perceived by teachers in schools catering to significant migrant populations, and to examine the way these perceptions are shaped by the student population. Particularly, we examine through semi-structured interviews the complex interplay between teachers’ perceptions of migrant students’ multicultural, cosmopolitan experience and their marginalized status in their host countries, with relation to GCE.
 
A Framework for Citizenship Education in a Global Era
(John Myers – Florida State University, USA)
 
Globalization presents unique challenges for the practice of citizenship education. This paper outlines a framework for a democratic approach to global citizenship education. First, it examines the implications of globalization for the curricular and teaching practices of citizenship education. Next, a typology of civic programs are presented based on the dimensions of civic purposes and civic values: (1) cross-cultural sensitivity, (2) glocal service, (3) international understanding, and (4) global justice. Each of these categories of citizenship education are described with representative educational practices. Finally, institutional challenges to these globally-conscious citizenship education practices are considered.

Flipping the Panoptic: Liberian youth break the fourth wall in the Ebola crisis
(Jasmine L. Blanks Jones - University of Pennsylvania, USA)
 
Foucault’s webs of power glimmer in the modern coercive force of global governance referred to as “new imperialism” (Tickly, 2004) while Boal’s participatory theatre encourages societal change in the midst of power imbalances. Participatory theatre breaks the fourth wall allowing the audience to claim agency by invading the stage space despite a sense of constant surveillance. Thus, human performativity is pushed to transformative power. Foucauldian webs of power as non-necessitating of human occupancy in the Panoptic tower implies that not only is power asserted by gazes but that knowledge is gained through these gazes and objects of surveillance are robbed of agency. This single, explanatory case study uses document review and qualitative methods to examine how in the midst of the West African Ebola crisis, Liberian youth used the arts to bring about global change despite perceptions of the place and power of youth within the national discourse.
 
Who are “we”?  Conceptualizing the Global Citizen Self in Citizenship Education
(Chenyu Wang and Diane Hoffman - University of Virginia, USA)
 
Current debates about citizenship are often framed in terms of tensions between national and global belonging.  In our paper, we present findings from our critical cultural analysis of global citizenship curricula to deepen our understanding of hidden assumptions regarding identities and selves that underlie the construct of the global citizen. In particular, we ask whether global citizenship is in reality not so far from national citizenship in so far as it promotes a particular set of assumptions regarding the selves of learners that privilege individualism, actor agency, and class privilege that underlie both “kinds” of citizenship. Our presentation will be structured around some key statements and questions that invite audience reflection and participation.  The goal is to encourage consideration of how to align the ideals and principles of citizenship with discourses and practices of citizenship education that encourage critical self-reflection while avoiding replication of social inequalities and cultural ethnocentrism.

Migration and Implications for Global Citizenship Education: Tensions and Teacher Perspectives
(Laura Quaynor, Lewis University, USA)
 
Any consideration of global citizenship education in the 21st century is incomplete without an examination of migration as part of the contemporary world.  Globally, migration contributes to the heterogeneity of communities; this has implications for citizenship education, conceived globally or nationally. This presentation first focuses on the conceptual ways that migration both necessitates and challenges global frameworks for citizenship education, considering recent political trends in Europe and the United States.  Secondly, I share empirical data from surveys and focus groups with pre-service and practicing teachers working with migrant students in the United States.  These educators report using both global and national frames for citizenship education, experiencing tensions between the two in their practice. Overall, these empirical results demonstrate ways citizenship education in the context of migration leads teachers to reach for tenets of global citizenship education, whether or not the school and curriculum are focused on the nation. 

GCE in the 21st century: raising global entrepreneurs rather than global citizens?
(Marzia Cozzolino, University of Pittsburgh, USA)
 
This paper positions global citizenship education within the current public education context of the United States as dominated by the two major forces of accountability and 21st century skills. Additionally, it offers an empirical example of how competing (neoliberal versus cosmopolitan) understandings of global citizenship education have played out in an initiative undertaken by a public school in Pennsylvania with the purpose to integrate teaching about the world within its mainstream curriculum. Unfortunately, due to both internal and external pressures, the school has failed to integrate teaching about the world in a meaningful, sustainable and equitable way, opting instead for a limited approach to global citizenship education, one that favors an allegiance to the nation and the marketplace. Implications about the troublesome (serving mostly a nationalistic purpose) and limited space that global citizenship education occupies in American public schools today will be discussed.
 
 
In Quest of A Critical Transformative Citizenship Education: Lost Between the ‘Loyalty’ of the National Narrative and the ‘Compliancy’ of the ‘Claimed’ Global Narrative
(Nashwa Moheyeldine, American University in Cairo, Egypt)
 
This research explores the future of a critical transformative citizenship education in four of Egypt’s schooling systems (public, experimental, private and international schools), as a means to sustain a potential transformation to democracy. Through investigating teachers’ and students’ perceptions of citizenship, as well as schools’ spaces for student empowerment, it was apparent that there was a patriotic ‘national’ citizenship narrative at the public schools and a ‘claimed’ global citizenship education at the international elite school, yet according to Banks (2008) framework and Westheimer & Kahne (2004) framework, these two frameworks failed to produce transformative, justice oriented citizens. The results surprisingly revealed that there are more similarities amongst the public and international schools than the others, in terms of students’ levels of consciousness and civic actions levels. Whilst the nationalistic narrative aims to promote ‘blind obedience’ to the nation-state, the international school seems to promote a ‘neoliberal’ narrative based on compliant behavior.

U.S. youth’s sense of belonging in global and local communities: The argument for probing youth’s non-belonging to a national community
(Jasmina Josic – Pearson PLC, USA)
 
This presentation discusses U.S. youths’ views of their citizenship as constructed in schools or neighborhood communities, as well as through the imaginaries of global community. The youth from this study revealed a sense of belonging to local communities through various engagements in schools or local organizations, as well as a sense of belonging to a global community through programs focused on global justice issues. However, youths’ inability to engage in constructive activities on the national level creating a sense of membership and influence leaves them excluded from that community. The sense of non-belonging to national communities is probed through the lens of citizen agency viewed as a “practice of citizenship encompassing one’s belonging to a community […] and engaging in civic and social action in the community” (Josic, 2016a).  Moreover, the paper delves into the complexity of a sense of national identity and citizenship of immigrant youth (Josic, 2016b). 
 
 
UNESCO’s Global Citizenship Education Initiative
(Felisa Tibbitts, Columbia University, USA)
 
This presentation will focus on UNESCO’s GCED Initiative, which is also linked with Education 2030 and SDG 4.7. I first apply a qualitative content analysis in critically examining related indicator measurements in use by UNESCO to review curriculum, including the UNESCO IBE indicators used in the Ten-Country Study of GCED (2016) with a focus on citizenship-related concepts; the indicators proposed by the UNESCO – Brookings GCED Working Group (2016); and the SDG 4.7 indicators applied in the Global Education Monitoring Report (2016). I then apply these indicators to four countries: Cambodia, Mongolia, Uganda and the United States (New Jersey State) in order to see what these GCED indicators reveal in regards to the presence of GCED-related curriculum themes and educational aims within these curriculum. These combined results show an absence of the notion of “world culture” as presented in the GCED themes and learning objectives and associated indicators. Moreover existing references to globalization that we did find referred primarily to its economic dimension, reinforcing the importance of national development and human capital theory of education. Based on the results of this small scale study, we speculate that the world culture of GCED may end up revealing or reinforcing existing orientations towards a neo-liberal approach to education.

---

CIES 2016 pre-conference workshop

Theoretical dilemmas of democratic citizenship education research in non-Western contexts
In September 2015, a colleague of mine, Dr. Serhiy Kovalchuk, a scholar from OISE, University of Toronto invited me to co-chair a pre-conference workshop at the CIES meeting in Vancouver. I agreed without hesitation. The topic that Serhiy suggested, Theoretical dilemmas of democratic citizenship education research in non-Western contexts, provided an excellent opportunity for scholars from the United States and around the world to address one of the most contested programmatic and methodological issues in citizenship education research. Despite the growing number of studies on democratic citizenship and civics education in post-authoritarian and post-colonial societies, discussions of theoretical approaches and frameworks still lack analytical diversity and comparative perspective. To what extent are Western theoretical research frameworks applicable to non-Western contexts? How do indigenous knowledge and traditions facilitate the development of democratic citizenship? What is a non-Western context, and how much of what we consider “western” culture and ideas exist within the West? What new concepts and research perspectives become available in expanding this research to Asia, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa? Serhiy and I believed that the workshop would be a perfect platform to discuss these questions. The response to our call for proposals was overwhelming. We hoped to receive 6-8 proposals. Instead, we received more than 17 proposals.

Twelve presenters were able to attend the workshop in Vancouver on March 6th: Bassel Akar (Notre Dame University – Louaize), Rebecca Bayeck (Penn State University), Michelle J. Bellino (University of Michigan), Heidi Biseth, (University College of Southeast Norway), Joan DeJaeghere (University of Minnesota), Laura J. Dull (State University of New York – New Paltz), Meg P. Gardinier (Florida International University), Patricia K. Kubow (Indiana University), Mark Malisa, College of Saint Rose), Jennifer Otting (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Laura Quaynor (Lewis University), Nozomi Sakata (University College London), and Mariam Sedighi (University of Wisconsin-Madison). In their presentations, our colleagues addressed differences and similarities between democratic citizenship education in Western and non-Western contexts, reflected on the limitations and strengths of applying Western theoretical frameworks to democratic citizenship education research, and proposed creative solutions to theoretical and methodological challenges. Many focused on the role of political, social, and cultural characteristics in interpreting democratic citizenship education in non-Western contexts. The workshop successfully achieved its goal to initiate a scholarly discussion on developing theoretical and conceptual frameworks complementary to existing Western paradigms, which are not always adequate to the realities of rapidly transforming post-authoritarian and post-colonial societies. A real testimony to the importance and success of the 6–hour workshop was the number of participants in the audience: already after the third presenter we had to bring additional chairs into the room to seat 50 people, and we still were not able to accommodate everyone. Some attendees were sitting on the floor to listen to this interesting set of presenters share their work. One outcome of the workshop will be a special issue in Compare highlighting several of the workshop authors. Serhiy and I are planning to organize a similar workshop next year for the CIES 2017 Atlanta meeting.

-Anatoli Rapoport, Purdue University

2016 presentations:
Young people’s conceptualizations of citizenship in Lebanon: Whose citizenship is it anyway? (Bassel Akar, Assistant Professor, Notre Dame University – Louaize)

The crux of democracy and citizenship education: The need for theorists to step into the field of practice (Heidi Biseth, Associate Professor, University College of Southeast Norway)

Citizen, interrupted: Educating for wait-citizenship amidst Guatemala’s “postwar” challenges (Michelle Bellino, Assistant Professor, University of Michigan)

Citizenship regimes and subjectivities (Joan DeJaeghere, University of Minnesota, USA)
National identity as counter-hegemonic: Perspectives from Ghana and Serbia (Laura Dull, Associate Professor, State University of New York – New Paltz)

Democratic citizenship education in post-communist Albania: An analysis of three approaches (Meg Gardinier, Assistant Professor, Florida International University)

Exploring Western/non-Western epistemological binaries and intersections in South Africa: Theorizing a critical democratic citizenship education to guide research and practice (Patricia Kubow, Professor, Indiana University)

Revisiting post-colonial dilemmas of researching on/with ‘Africa’: A critique of twenty-first century globalization (Mark Malisa, Assistant Professor, College of Saint Rose & University of Zimbabwe & Rebecca Bayeck, PhD Student, Penn State University & University of Yaoundé)

Education reform in a fragile nation-state: Conceptualizing the responsible citizen in Kosovo (Jennifer Otting, PhD Candidate, University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Power and context: Including indigenous institutions in citizenship education research in Liberia (Laura Quaynor, Assistant Professor, Lewis University)

Theoretical vs. practical conflict? Ideological compatibility for learner-centered pedagogy in Tanzania (Nozomi Sakata, PhD Student. University College London)

Abstract categories and the concrete curriculum in Iran (Mariam Sedighi, Phd Candidate, University of Wisconsin-Madison)