Beneath the rhetoric

Abstract

`Local and global citizenship' will become a statutory component of the Revised Curriculum for Northern Ireland from September 2007. This article uses the development of this new curriculum area as a site to explore three significant stages in the process of transforming policy into practice suggested by the author: policy gestation; policy delivery; and policy approximation. While efforts have been made to ensure that the citizenship curriculum will not repeat the mistakes of previous educational initiatives designed to address the conflict in Northern Ireland and its legacy, an analysis of the citizenship policy within this policy transformation process reveals several flaws which may impede its effective implementation. In particular this article draws attention to certain themes in the rhetoric surrounding citizenship education in Northern Ireland and explores how the `approximation' of these ideas, as the citizenship policy is variously (mis)interpreted by those who mediate it, could potentially destabilize the citizenship project.