It is obvious that schools can exert a great influence as appropriate areas to foster a fairer and more equitable society, with greater moral, civic and political commitment among citizens. Civic education contributes to this end and, therefore, it has been introduced -with different appellations- in the curriculums of most Western countries to facilitate citizens the assumption of their rights and responsibilities. This is considered as one way of transmitting the necessary knowledge, skills and attitudes for young people to become active citizens with the capacity to build the future for our democratic societies. The education reforms performed in different countries highlight the need for citizenship education by advocating for their incorporation in the syllabus. The objective of this article is to point out the attention that civic education has received in Spain, specially from the implementation of the 1970 General Education Act. To do so, the successive reforms that have been introduced until today are analyzed. We ask ourselves whether these curricular reforms succeed in improving the civic competence of our students. As a main conclusion it has been established that a discourse supporting democracy, social responsibility, interculturalism and civic participation can only be effective with the commitment of the teaching staff, family and society as a whole.
In this article, 41 Service-Learning (SL) courses have been evaluated in 5 Spanish universities (4 public and 1 private), in order to determine whether they are SL initiatives or other type of educational practices. These experiences, which were implemented during the 2015/2016 academic year, covered degree programs from the five knowledge areas. Most of them involved Bachelor’s degree students and only one of them Master’s degree students. A qualitative methodology has been used, focused on content analysis and based on evaluations made by four experts. The analysis of the experiences points out an encouraging course of action for this methodology in the Spanish university system, showing a certain change in the teaching culture, as they all meet the basic requirements which, according to international literature, must be present in service-learning projects and are also considered as criteria for assessing quality in such projects. Finally, a three-way action is presented, to open new prospects of educational innovation and social responsibility through Service-Learning possibilities in Higher Education.
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