Citizenship discourses: production and curriculum

Abstract

This paper explores citizenship discourses empirically through upper secondary school student’s understandings, as these emerge in and through their everyday experiences. Drawing on a post-structuralist theorisation inspired by the work of Michel Foucault, a discourse analysis of data from interviews with students is carried out. This analysis characterises three discourses of the active citizen – a knowledgeable citizen, a responsive and holistic citizen, and a self-responsible ‘free’ citizen. The analysis raises questions over the implications of contemporary efforts for the intensification of standardising forces through citizenship education. It also stresses the notion that engaging students actively does always also involve discourses other than those stressed through the curriculum, which nurtures the body and nerve of democracy itself.

Keywords:

• citizenship education
• citizenship discourses
• curriculum
• citizenship
• Foucault
• condition of possibility

Notes

1. A central assignment in the Swedish educational curricula is to provide for an active democratic citizenry by teaching about democratic citizenship, providing opportunities to exercise democratic citizenship in school through the exertion of student influence, and organising school in a way that offers opportunities to students to experience democratic citizenship (Öhrn, Beach, and Lundahl 2011).

2. Examples of the main questions asked: What did you find hardest/easiest with this task? Why was that? Did you erase any documentation (photo, film or sound recording)? Why/why not? As evidence, the photographs, audio-recordings and video-recordings made by the students by means of the pen-camera were the only resources used for the interviews. The interviews were therefore unstructured. An important circumstance here was that that not all kinds of citizenship activities were – or even could be – part of their documentation. To mention one such category; voting and other such formalised citizenship activities were not likely to be documented, as it was not an electoral time in Sweden.