When kind of citizen? Temporally displaced citizenship education in a Chilean private school

ABSTRACT

In Chile, some elite private schools have developed a particular approach towards citizenship education, acknowledging the privileged social position their students occupy, while inviting them to disrupt the same social structure that has produced this privilege. However, the enduring salience of Chilean society's inequalities begs the question of how effective this approach truly is. This paper attempts to answer this, examining a Chilean private school and a particular service-learning activity. Through ethnographic methods and an analysis rooted in cultural production theory, the paper argues that, although many of its components are still quite problematic, service-learning activities like this one do provide opportunities for promoting participatory and social justice citizenship education, through the students' engagement in “collective deliberations.” However, these opportunities are neutralized when framed within a particular cultural fact – here called the Discourse of the Leaders – which displaces the enactment of students' citizenship into a future that still does not exist. The article provides a more nuanced understanding of the different ways inequitable social structures of privilege are dealt with in elite educational institutions that explicitly purport to challenge them. It also offers new avenues for educators to contribute to citizenship education practices that can more effectively promote social change.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizenship education
• service learning
• privilege
• elite education
• temporal displacement
• social change

Acknowledgments

I want to thank the students and teachers who participated in this study and generously allowed me to learn with and from them. I also want to thank Valentina Errázuriz, Rachael Stephens, Nicholas Limerick, and Hervé Varenne for their insightful comments and feedback to this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The school name and all proper names are pseudonyms.

2. In the Chilean educational system, cohorts are divided by groups. Each one of these receives a letter that identifies them. Its members stay together and share the same classroom and almost the same classes until they graduate. Each cohort group has a head teacher, who works directly with them and their parents, usually for a year or two.

3. All interactions and conversations with my participants were in Spanish. In this article, all quotes from them are my own translation of their words.

4. The Class-Council is a class in which every cohort group meets with their head teacher for 45 minutes and discusses different issues concerning the group. The range of issues could vary from the organization of recreational activities to the participation of the cohort group in public and political manifestations.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rodrigo Mayorga

Rodrigo Mayorga is a PhD candidate in the Anthropology and Education programme, at Teachers College, Columbia University, and a fellow of the Becas Chile programme of CONICYT, Chile. His research interests are in political and citizenship education, and in historical consciousness in high school settings, both in the present and in the past.