Implementation of content related to children’s rights in schools: How to teach them?—perceptions of future teachers in Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia

This paper reports on the self-assessment of future teachers regarding their familiarity with the Convention on the Rights of the Child and their competency to teach about children’s rights and participation. A total of 561 future teachers were surveyed in Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia. They all agreed that, during their studies, they did not acquire sufficient knowledge on children’s rights and participation and were not adequately prepared for teaching this content in schools. The authors further suggest an introduction of new study programs and a significant increase in the number of classes dealing with these topics in day-to-day school practice.

Developing epistemic impartiality to deliver on justice in higher education South Africa

In South Africa, the scholarship of epistemic justice has taken on an historical gaze with higher education framed as a social institution that might ameliorate the historical traumas of colonialism. Undoing the legacies of colonialism has been framed as the democratisation of the knowledge project. Using the White Paper 3 of 1997 that posits academic freedom, institutional autonomy and public accountability as fundamental to institutional governance, in part I of this analysis I broadened public accountability to include the social, political and economic factors that inhibit or act as catalyst to the attainment of educational desire. In this second part publication, I am interested in developing and proposing epistemic impartiality. This concept is developed from Mitova’s proposition of ‘decolonising knowledge without too much relativism’, which ultimately fosters epistemic justice through rigorously scrutinising each epistemic tradition. My suggestion is that epistemic impartiality enables dialogue between divergent traditions.

Is another democracy possible in schools? Challenges to create a truly democratic school

In most schools everywhere, democracy and participation continue to be carried out through the usual channels based on representative democracy and the vote of elected representatives. However, this reality is not monolithic, and we do find centers committed to practise a full and more profound democracy. Based on a case study, the article analyzes the theoretical and practical approach of Germinal School. Despite some difficulties, this school has successfully implemented a project of radical democracy, both through micropolitics and daily pedagogical action. This article also examines why it is so difficult to democratize school and how to create a truly democratic institution. Finally, we address the possibility of extending the democratic model presented here to other schools.

‘And I would ask myself, what’s being gay got to do with this anyway?’ Constructions of queer subject positions in student’s stories

In this paper, the author explores some of the issues associated with teaching about compulsory heterosexuality and schooling in an undergraduate sociology programme. Using a novel approach to gathering data, the article analyses the stories students submitted about themselves or others who were counter normative in terms of gender and sexuality in school. Informed by the work of Ahmed and Foucault, this article explores what kinds of gendered and sexualised subject positions become possible through the stories of students, and how are these subject positions interpellated and constituted relationally? Despite progressive legislation, queer activism and the significant visibility of gender and sexuality counter-normative identities in the South African media, the analysis highlights that students’ position school attending queer youth as (1) stereotyped caricatured subjects, (2) objects of fear and (3) subjects of violence. These subject positions serve as straightening devices that interpellate queer school attending youth as unfamiliar, not belonging and unworthy and therefore requiring change. Insights from this article can inform the research and practice which is pivotal to addressing cisheteronormativity not only in schools but cultural ideas, norms and practices too.

Service-learning effects on student civic engagement and community - A case study from India

The development of student civic engagement has featured in Indian educational policies for decades as a critical goal of schooling. However, the narrowness of the prescribed K-12 curricula, and the intense focus on competitive exams, do not support such an outcome. To overcome this problem, ABC School in India decided to pilot service-learning in its middle-school classroom. The idea was to assess the effects of such a program on students and the community’s welfare. Analysis of data from surveys, focus groups, and interviews showed that the service-learning project might have supported increased civic engagement in some students while also enhancing the welfare of the community served. No prior peer-reviewed empirical studies have been published on the nature and effects of service-learning at schools in India.

Civic education’s relationship to affective partisan divides later in life

Civic education is often touted as a counterweight to the contentiousness of American politics. Yet, civic education’s relationship to dislike and distrust of opposing partisans (affective polarization) remains largely untested. Simultaneously, there are calls for educators to promote more civic informed action, taking civic education beyond the walls of the classroom. This study utilizes data from a survey of the 2016 election to examine the relationship between individuals’ recalled civic education experiences (classroom pedagogy and community service) and affective polarization. In addition, this study explores two potential moderators of the relationship between civic education and affective polarization, partisan social identity strength and age. Analysis of the sample shows a significant relationship between both types of civic education experience and affective polarization, though the nature of that relationship may depend on respondents’ partisan social identity and age.

Social bonding and children’s collaborations as citizen-peers at primary school

This qualitative research explored 9- to 12-year-old children’s citizenship participation at primary school in the Republic of Ireland. During 2016–2017, 160 children from 6 co-educational primary schools participated. Through a process of grounded analysis, children are identified as active citizen-peers of their peer groups. As citizen-peers, children used social strategies to assert their agency and autonomy within the adult-controlled school environment. Social bonding between children also influenced the ways citizen-peers negotiated peer group social hierarchies. Inductive analysis of observational data identifies children’s social strategies as covert and overt forms of Collective Social Action ( CSA); motivated by competition and/or protest against the activities children did not want to participate in at school. This research found that low social bonding between children affects peer solidarity, which suggests that social bonding is an important aspect of children’s collaboration as citizen-peers at school.

What kind of global citizen? A framework for best practices in world history civic education

Scholars have long identified fostering democratic citizenship as a primary purpose of public schooling in the United States, as schools should intentionally prepare students with the knowledge and skills needed for active, informed democratic citizenship. In addition, global interconnectedness has reshaped needed civic competencies to participate in civic life. This conceptual article considers the intersections between civic and world history education, assessing the relationship between the two disciplines in order to create a framework of best practices in world history civic education. Global citizenship discourse is analyzed using this framework, considering how different forms may reinforce or undermine world history’s purpose of preparing students with pluralist understandings for global democratic living. Drawing on components of history education, world history, and global citizenship education scholarship, this article seeks to establish epistemological clarity as to how world history can contribute to meaningful civic education and vice versa.

Evaluating the impact of global citizenship education programmes: A synthesis of the research

Given the calls to reinforce the accountability of education programmes, this review evaluated studies that evaluated K-12 global citizenship education (GCED) programmes to assess the evidence that such programmes improved the students’ global learning. There are no current reviews assessing the impact of GCED programmes in the US. The authors conducted an electronic search in the educational databases to review the studies that addressed the impact of GCED programmes between 2000 and 2019. We reviewed the abstracts based on specific criteria: 33 studies met the inclusion criteria. Most of the studies were rejected because they did not provide the whole information about the programmes. The final 22 studies were selected because they provided the complete description about the evaluation programme of GCED. The review examined the components and the measures of the programmes, the approaches for collecting and analyzing data. The outcomes of the evaluated programmes support the claim that these programmes succeeded in improving students’ global learning. However, our analysis revealed flaws in the studies evaluating the impact of the GCED programmes.

Global citizenship and the global citizen/consumer: Perspectives from practitioners in development NGOs in Portugal

This paper makes an empirical contribution to the debate about the pluralism of global citizenship. This is considered a crucial aspect for research, not only because charity and social justice standpoints coexist, but also in the light of growing examples of neoliberal understandings about global citizenship education and the global citizen. Informed by critical and postcolonial thinking and with a special focus on Andreotti’s discursive orientations, this paper analyses discourses of practitioners of global citizenship education who work in development NGOs in Portugal. Findings suggest that humanist views are predominant, although intertwined with neoliberal and postcolonial perspectives. They also point to an archetypical vision of the global citizen and a prevalence of the responsible citizen-consumer as an agent of social change.