As schools are increasingly expected to develop their students' political and social engagement in order to promote good citizenship, they are struggling to define what good citizenship is. In this article, we put forward a way of formulating perspectives on citizenship that specifies the normative aspects of good citizenship in a systematic manner. In doing so, we distinguish between citizenship education goals which are generally shared and citizenship education goals that are often disputed. Subsequently, an exploratory data analysis is conducted to investigate to which degree educational level in current Western European educational systems is associated with outcomes regarding these consensus and contested citizenship education goals. The findings provide support for our hypothesis that educational level is predominantly associated with general democratic citizenship outcomes, rather than with outcomes that are emphasized by more specific, but contested citizenship perspectives.
Primary and secondary schools across the world are expected to contribute to the citizenship development of their pupils. Most citizenship curricula focus on the acquisition of knowledge and the cultivation of skills and attitudes. Citizenship-related self-efficacy beliefs are often neglected in the literature on citizenship education, although they appear to play a crucial role in learning processes, among others as explanatory factors for the inequalities between students in different educational tracks. As such, studies on the development of citizenship-related self-efficacy beliefs have the potential to inform practice in a way that fosters greater equality of opportunity. However, as the literature on civic and political self-efficacy uses different dimensions and conceptualizations, this poses challenges to both the scientific accumulation of knowledge and translation to teaching practices. Here, we analyse the conceptual challenges and propose a framework for the study of self-efficacy in citizenship education research that incorporates social and political tasks of citizens and distinguishes the variety of communities in which citizens perform those tasks on two axes, namely formality and size. In doing so, we argue for fine-grained distinctions based on context instead of the all-encompassing notions of civic and political self-efficacy political theorists appear to prefer. We end by discussion two normative issues.
Over the last decades, many European Union countries have invested in strengthening participatory learning in citizenship education policy and practice. This survey study provides insight into how high school teachers in the Netherlands advance critical democratic citizenship and a
democratic school culture in the context of mock elections. A quarter of the schools that organized mock elections in 2017 participated in the study. Analysis reveals that attention for critical, valuerelated teacher aims and teacher aims directed at strengthening a democratic school culture
is still limited in mock election-related education. It also shows that half of the participating schools offer less than one hour of mock electionrelated educational activities, and that one-third of the teachers would like to offer additional educational activities.
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