Opening discourses of citizenship education: a theorization with Foucault

Abstract

We argue two major difficulties in current discourses of citizenship education. The first is a relative masking of student discourses of citizenship by positioning students as lacking citizenship and as outside the community that acts. The second is in failing to understand the discursive and material support for citizenship activity. We, thus, argue that it is not a lack of citizenship that education research might address, but identification and exploration of the different forms of citizenship that students already engage in. We offer a fragmentary, poststructuralist theorization oriented to explore the ‘contemporary limits of the necessary’, drawing on specific resources from the work of Michel Foucault and others for the constitution of local, partial accounts of citizenship discourses and activities, and exploration of their possibilities and constraints. We argue this as a significant tactic of theorization in support of an opening of discourses of citizenship and in avoiding the discursive difficulties that we have identified. Our theorization, then, is significant in its potential to unsettle discourses that confine contemporary thought regarding citizenship education and support exploration of what might be excessive to that confinement.

Keywords:

• citizenship education
• active citizenship
• discourse
• power
• statement
• condition of possibility
• democracy

Notes

1. Nelson and Kerr (2006) carried out an international review of active citizenship policy definitions and orientations in curriculum and assessment frameworks in internet archive (INCA) countries: Australia, Canada, England, Hungary, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, Scotland, Singapore, Spain, the USA and Wales. Data on active citizenship was gathered through questionnaire and through discussions at an international seminar in 2006.

2. Given the salience of paid work to contemporary characterizations of citizenship, the group was stratified according to ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ status as a proxy for social class. ‘Insiders’ conformed with a stereotypical model of the ‘successful’ young person as on the route through ‘A’ levels and university and into graduate-type employment; ‘outsiders’ fell well outside it, with few or no qualification and a record of unemployment for most of the time since leaving school’ (Lister et al. 2003, 236).