Abstract
It has been widely argued that effective citizenship education should focus on more than mere teaching of civic knowledge, but should provide a wider range of opportunities for the experience of participation and development of skills, efficacy and interest instrumental to active citizenship. Opportunities for critical reflection such as open classroom discussions, fairness at school, institutional efficacy and student participation at school activities have been linked to the development of civic and political attitudes. The capacity of school education to provide opportunities for critical reflection on students’ participative experiences, however, has not been explored empirically sufficiently. This paper aims to identify the contribution of different school characteristics to the development of civic and political attitudes and their impact on students’ level of participation in civic activities through a mixed methods study. Questionnaire data collected in two waves with 685 adolescents from Italy were analyzed through structural equation modeling to test the effects of school characteristics at Time 1 (democratic climate, student participation and critical reflection) on civic participation at Time 2, mediated by institutional trust, civic efficacy and political interest. In order to explore the quantitative findings and examine further students’ perceptions of the school aspects that support their civic involvement, focus group discussions were conducted with students from secondary schools with different tracks.The results highlight the importance of opportunities for active involvement in school and critical reflection in fostering political interest, efficacy and civic participation. Democratic school climate was found to impact institutional trust and civic efficacy, but not participation. Students’ accounts of schools’ citizenship education activities highlight further the need for a participative environment that rises above information transmission by inviting critical reflection and giving value to students’ active involvement in the institution.
Highlights
The school’s role in shaping young people’s civic and political sense is pivotal as an institution that is capable of reaching the majority of youth with a clear educational agenda aimed at acquiring civic skills and knowledge (Niemi and Junn, 1998; Schulz et al, 2010).Beyond the formal curriculum, both structural and perceived characteristics of schools can influence adolescents’ civic development
The results show that civic participation is predicted at a oneyear interval directly only by student participation and political interest
Democratic school climate and critical reflection at school measured at Time 1 (T1) did not have significant direct effects on civic participation at Time 2 (T2)
Summary
The school’s role in shaping young people’s civic and political sense is pivotal as an institution that is capable of reaching the majority of youth with a clear educational agenda aimed at acquiring civic skills and knowledge (Niemi and Junn, 1998; Schulz et al, 2010).Beyond the formal curriculum, both structural and perceived characteristics of schools can influence adolescents’ civic development. Opportunities for democratic experience in school can be understood within an ecological systems framework (Bronfenbrenner, 1979) as positive contextual characteristics that interact with individual ones and other contexts in shaping young people’s civic development. While they do not operate independently of macro and social predictors, the importance of perceptions of the educational contexts and the mediating role of psychological factors in predicting behavior has been underlined in recent integrative models of civic and political participation (Barrett, 2015; Barrett et al, 2015; Barrett et al, 2019). Understanding the capacity of participative opportunities in citizenship education, entails examining young people’s perceptions of these interactions with school characteristics that can provide practical experience of democratic citizenship
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