Education for Active Democratic Citizenship through English. A Challenge for Academia

Abstract

The present-day globalized society and its extremely competitive labour market pose numerous challenges which universities should be able to anticipate, reflect on and address in a consistent and coherent manner. It becomes increasingly clear that to be successful, graduates should show flexibility, openness, autonomy, self-determination and empowerment, while constantly demonstrating they are engaged in active democratic citizenship along with being prepared for their specialized subject. This chapter explores the opportunities offered by coherently integrating these transversal skills and trans-curricular competences within language learning programmes with the aim of better preparing graduates for democratic citizenship. Also, it outlines a possible methodology: integrating education for active citizenship and plurilingual competence at university level can be done through specially dedicated subject courses of intercultural communication, gender studies or cultural studies and connecting them to language learning syllabi, as tools to develop self-reflection and autonomy-building strategies for students, in order to enable them to take over their own learning and thus better cope with the challenging labour market facing them.