Critical Citizenship Research Articles

Storytelling and media-education: an exploratory study in the interior of the eastern Amazon

The pandemic has impacted education and educators who work with children. In this sense, they reinvented themselves and the media came overwhelmingly into schools, forcing them to reframe teaching in order to guarantee a minimum of learning. In view of this, we investigated the contribution of the media in the storytelling process for the teaching and learning of children in the 1st year of Elídia Maria dos Santos School in Rondon do Pará. Bearing in mind that storytelling at the beginning of schooling is a fundamental resource for the literacy/literacy process, we sought to understand the relevance of this practice, as well as the role of the media in education to form readers, creative and critical citizens. Interviews were also conducted with the two teachers. It was noted that, despite the evolution of the means of communication, schools and families still have many access difficulties, which makes the effectiveness of educational actions via the media unfeasible.

(Ri) educate to Political Participation: The Democratic Challenge

In recent decades, an increasingly significant break in the bond that binds politics and subjects has been affirmed. An increasing number of citizens have distanced themselves from politics and its party drift and have ceased to recognize themselves in it and in its institutional representatives. This process has pushed the subjects towards individualistic orientations and privatization of the experience. The increasingly low level of political culture of the citizens, both outcome and cause of the growing disaffection and deresponsibilization, exposes to the risk of an increasingly demagogic, populist and low democratic policy. The last decades, therefore, have undermined the conditions for the existence of a “critical citizen”, a priority objective to ensure fully democratic decision-making and government processes. The goal of a full and widespread democratic participation requires training courses of political culture, starting from a rethinking and a redesign of the times and spaces of training so that widespread conditions of learning knowledge and skills elicitation for a full voice are guaranteed Keywords: democracy, participation skills, third spaces, cities, complexity

The use of experts in building political trust: dissenting opinions and critical citizens in times of crisis

ABSTRACT Under COVID-19 emergency decrees, countries imposed freedom-restricting measures that health experts endorsed to contain the disease. There has been debates about whether the pandemic has led to the backsliding of democratic standards and the promotion of illiberal and authoritarian practices. This study conducted a survey in Hong Kong, a non-democracy. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the government postponed an election widely expected to be won by the opposition. This study explores whether health experts’ opinions could affect public support for postponement of a regular election and government trustworthiness. It finds that neither health experts’ affirmation nor negation increased support for the postponement, but rejecting the government mandate reduced government trustworthiness while affirming it did not. The negative opinions thus had asymmetric information value against affirmative opinions in a known-censored environment. This channel operates through democrats in Hong Kong, who are critical citizens of the regime. The strategy of silencing dissent would be cost-effective for preserving political trust while engaging experts to support the mandates appeared unhelpful. This study contributes to understanding the use of experts in influencing political trust within an authoritarian setting.

The Economic Dimension of Education, Educational Inequalities and Their Role in Shaping the Democratic Citizen

In this paper we will deal with the inequalities in the field of education and the way they affect the democratic society. This is a very important issue, especially in our time, because the problem is becoming more intense due to the accelerated economic competition, globalization and the changes taking place in the social fabric of the state’s due to the migration of large parts of the population worldwide. In modern Democracy (Agamben, 2005) there is a strong criticism, which basically focuses on the fact that the modern state of Representative Democracy does not realize the goals set by the revolutions of the 19th century and his proclamations of equality and liberty. In today’s societies, education is an important parameter in the formation of the citizen, who will then play an active role in the creation of a democratic society, which will be governed by democratic principles and values. Although all citizens and stakeholders recognize the requirement for a democratic education, its realization remains a question. Within this context, the question arises whether and under what conditions today’s students can be the emancipated and critical citizens of the future society.

Existential insecurity and deference to authority: the pandemic as a natural experiment

IntroductionThe global coronavirus pandemic offers a quasi-experimental setting for understanding the impact of sudden exposure to heightened existential risk upon both individual and societal values.MethodsWe examined the effect of the pandemic on political attitudes by comparing data from eight countries surveyed before and after the worldwide spread of COVID-19 in March 2020 with continuous weekly polling tracker data from the United Kingdom from 2019 to 2021. Multilevel models were used to explore the drivers of change, and the results indicated that reported emotions of fear and stress were positively associated with institutional approval during periods of greater pathogen risk.ResultsOur findings revealed that support for political and technocratic authority, as well as satisfaction with political institutions, rose significantly above long-term historical baselines during the pandemic.DiscussionThe results support the hypothesis that exposure to existential risk results in greater support for authority and that individual feelings of insecurity may be linked to less critical citizen orientations.

I am not the info desk for Islam and Arabs: the racialization of Islam and boundaries of citizenship

ABSTRACT By bridging the discussions on critical race and critical citizenship studies, this paper asks how the racialization of Islam shapes the lived citizenship of minorities in the Finnish context. The study focuses on a group of Finnish citizens and residents who have backgrounds in southwest Asia. The 26 people in this group were asked questions about their lived experiences of citizenship and the role of religion in their experiences. The results indicate that regardless of the participants’ religious identifications as Muslims or non-Muslims, their belonging was challenged through the mechanism of racialized gaze that framed them as strangers who do not fit into the epistemic community of whiteness. The study introduces the terms selective secularism and labour of explaining to reflect upon the mechanism through which the racialized gaze operates in everyday encounters. At times, some research participants resisted and contested the racialized gaze.

Energy Policy as a Socio-Scientific Issue: Argumentation in the Context of Economic, Environmental and Citizenship Education

One goal of environmental civic education is preparing students, both as citizens and as professionals, to use effective arguments in public debates. Such debates include dominantly economic claims, which are multifaceted and rarely taught in schools. A learning unit that applied the pedagogical principles of socio-scientific issues was developed for ‘Israel’s Natural Gas Export Policy’, a real sustainability dilemma. The study aimed to understand how pre- and in-service science teachers craft their arguments, by comparing their written reasoned opinions on the gas export debate, before and after the learning unit. Content analysis was conducted using Grounded Theory on the two groups’ texts in a multiple case study design. Five reasoning rationales were found: ‘Profits and Risks’, ‘Ethics or Ideology’, ‘Pragmatic Objectives’, ‘Evidence Base’ and ‘Stakeholder Motivations’. Each rationale yielded different reasoning strategies, including ‘Costs/Benefits’, ‘the Trade-Off Dilemma’ or ‘Compromise’, ‘Compensatory Benefits’ and ‘Non-Compensatory Costs/Risks’. The findings show that both groups used more argument types in the post-task. The development of ‘Profits and Risks’ strategies, between the pre- and post-texts, shows how the teachers’ arguments became more complex and decisive. These results exemplify how the SSI-focused learning unit enables learners to enhance their critical citizenship thinking, one of the cornerstones of democracy.

Emotional and critical citizens: Portuguese students’ engagement with wicked issues in contemporary EU policy

ABSTRACT Democracies expect citizens to engage actively in public life by making decisions about political issues that are frequently ambiguous, with strong moral and emotional implications, and often subject to misinformation and manipulation. Strong critical thinking (CT) appears therefore as a crucial component of a reflective democratic citizenship. This study identifies sociopolitical topics that are relevant to secondary Portuguese students and explores the interplay between emotions and cognition in their moral-political decision-making. Participants in two rounds of focus group discussions were asked to choose one sociopolitical topic and to report their emotions about that topic; in the second round, they discussed an ethical-moral dilemma about the most selected topic. The students’ emotions selection and their verbal explanations revealed that topics related to refugees, animal rights and environmental issues were the most engaging ones. The dilemma about refugees showed that a strong emotional engagement can lead to higher levels of conflict and that emotional ambivalence can have positive effects on CT. We conclude that pedagogical activities to educate critical citizens should explore social, humanitarian, and environmental issues, encouraging the expression of emotional ambivalence as a precursor to cognitive-moral conflict that is important to a truly engaging and reflective democratic citizenship education.

Studies in chemistry education under the perspective of the animal issue: a review on the international literature

Guided by the questioning about how issues related to animals are addressed in research aimed at teaching chemistry, we conducted a review in international journals in science, chemistry, education and animal ethics, seeking to identify a possible dialogue between the themes. Highlighting the novelty of these possible relations, the objective was to assemble a panoramic impression of it, assuming that inserting the animal theme in chemistry classes would improve learning, the development of values generally associated with a critical citizen, and would promote significant practices linked to the questioning of reality. In line with the themes of the works found, we built a theoretical basis on the issue between animal consumption and the future of the environment, followed by the methodology and analysis of the selected articles, divided into three categories: environmental chemistry as driving issue to construct scientific concepts, discussions on food and nutrition through a scientific view, and introduction of concepts, analysis and methods through food chemistry. The analyzed texts brought several aspects of the investigated relations, dealing with both food health and environmental problems. Along with that, they explored numerous pedagogical possibilities in order to raise awareness and make the teaching-learning process more attractive and effective. Among the conclusions, there is that animal ethics, through its various aspects, is either not contemplated or appears in a veiled way by publications in the area of chemistry education. We recognize that there is a long way to go in search of a new perception.

Critical citizenship and civic participation in three generations of Russian Israelis

ABSTRACT Civic behaviour of immigrants reflects both their pre-migration political socialization and the exposure to new political realities in the host country. Jewish immigrants to Israel receive citizenship soon upon arrival and are endowed with all political and economic rights in their adopted country. This essay highlights the long-term dynamics of civic attitudes and participation in three consecutive generations of ex-Soviet Israelis: from adult migrants (Gen 1.0) to their USSR/FSU-born children socialized mostly in Israel (Gen 1.5), and the Israeli-born Gen 2.0. Drawing on the combined analysis of national surveys and qualitative studies conducted over the last 20+ years, we examine shifts in attitudes and practices of citizenship reflected in voting patterns, volunteering, feelings of belonging, and ethnic mobilization for common community causes. We discuss the shifting civic agendas of Russian-speaking Israelis: from mainly economically driven during the 1990s to mainly symbolic and ethno-national since the early 2000s. Our analysis contributes to theoretical discussions on critical citizenship and sub-politics in immigrant-receiving societies.

The relational dynamics of racialised policing: community policing for counterterrorism, suspect communities, and Muslim Americans’ provisional belonging

ABSTRACT For over two decades, policies for countering violent extremism have enacted racial logics to target Muslim communities as suspect communities. While much research in this vein examines either the enactment of counterterrorism policies or Muslim communities’ responses, less is known about how racialised policies are experienced through relational dynamics between these two entities: police who implement counterterrorism policies and their targets – Muslim communities. Bridging critical citizenship, socio-legal, and migration studies, this article conceptualises how racialised policies shape the relationship between agents of the state and suspect communities. With unique analytic leverage from semi-structured interviews with law enforcement and focus groups with Muslim communities, findings show that police consistently deploy racial logics of CVE to distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Muslims, rewarding the former with resources and protection and punishing the latter with surveillance and criminalisation. In turn, these definitions inhibit Muslim Americans’ religious and cultural freedom, political expression and collective action, and legitimize their racial profiling and surveillance. Tradeoffs to provisional inclusion mean not only accepting racial logics but also reproducing them within their own communities. This article expands our understanding of how the meanings of belonging are continually negotiated between the state and racialised communities.

Latvijas politiskās kultūras jēgas konstrukcijas žurnāla Ir politisko žurnālistu publikācijās 2021.–2022. gadā

Based on the constructivist-system theoretic approach to the explanation of the communication processes of the media society, the system theoretic approaches to the study of political communication and political culture, using the explanations of party democracy and party state offered by political science, as well as hermeneutics in the comprehension of its method of understanding, the article analyzes the shape of the meaning of political journalists and the relationship of meaning in publications of the journal Ir describing the activities of the government formed by Latvia’s poorly developed political parties and their parliamentary majority factions. The results confirm the realities of Latvia’s weak democratic political culture subcultures identified by international democracy measurements. The formulations of the meaning and meaning of the goals declared by political parties and the coalition government and the activities aimed at achieving them, constructed by political journalists, are mainly addressed to representatives of critical citizen political subcultures who are dissatisfied with the instability and insufficient performance of political democracy in Latvia. The texts of political journalists focus on the stability of the political “cadre parties” of Latvia and the instability of the coalition government, which are mostly described rather than analytically evaluated, making it difficult for readers to recognize the shapes of meaning and the overall relationship of meaning in the existing party state.

“Hosts, not guests, in Israel”: younger generations of Russian Israelis on the path to active citizenship

ABSTRACT Jewish immigrants to Israel (olim) receive citizenship soon upon arrival and are endowed with all political and economic rights in their adopted country. Civic attitudes and behaviour of olim reflect both their pre-migration political socialization and their exposure to Israeli realities. This article highlights the dynamics of citizenship and civic participation in the younger cohorts of ex-Soviet Israelis (generations 1.5 and 2.0) vs. their parents who immigrated in the 1990s as adults (Gen 1.0). Our theoretical framing draws upon the concepts of critical citizenship, sub-politics, and cultural public sphere. Drawing on the combined analysis of national surveys and qualitative studies conducted over the last 20+ years, we examine shifts in voting patterns, volunteering, feelings of belonging, and ethnic mobilization for both national and community-specific causes. We argue that the civic agenda of ex-Soviet Israelis has evolved from mainly economically driven during the 1990s to mainly symbolic and ethno-national since the early 2000s. The findings also highlight gender differences in civil engagements of younger immigrant cohorts.

National curricula and citizenship education in populist times. The cases of Brazil and Spain

ABSTRACT Despite increasing attention to citizenship education since the turn of the 21st century, the recent spread of authoritarian populism worldwide has raised relatively little attention in educational policy and research. As a result, the possibilities and limitations that national curricula offer to educators to deal with this phenomenon are still rather uncertain. In this article, we develop an analytical framework based on the key features of authoritarian populism and critical citizenship education to compare the elements and scope for addressing populism in the national curricula of Brazil and Spain, two countries where national populism is particularly widespread. This paper examines the extent to which national curricula in these countries include goals and content that enable teachers to address the complexities of this phenomenon ranging from political polarisation through to the exaltation of national identities.

Damage of Sedentary Lifestyle in Adult Life Because of The Lack of Practice of Activities in Physical Education Discipline in the Contemporary World

Sedentarism is a serious public health problem, as physical inactivity over the years can lead to several noncommunicable chronic diseases, which in Brazil and in the world have shown a high mortality rate. In this context, the objective of this article was to discuss the impacts of a sedentary lifestyle on the health of the adult population due to the lack of physical activity at school age, especially in Physical Education classes, considering that the regular practice of physical exercises is a of the most effective alternatives against this problem. Studies show that health and quality of life awareness must be initiated within classrooms, which must be cultivated and worked on in a didactic-pedagogical context, with the active participation not only of students, but also of their families, in the construction of the school's pedagogical political projects. However, with technological development, increasing urbanization and the increase in violence, many children and young people have reduced their affinity for sports and physical activities in general, which can have bad consequences for their future. Therefore, Physical Education becomes an increasingly important subject for students to be aware of the benefits of practicing physical activities in childhood/adolescence. But for it to become more significant, is necessary for there to be changes in attitudes, even by teachers, regarding the improvement of classes, to help combat sedentary lifestyles within the school environment, enabling the formation of active, critical citizens who are concerned with your long-term health and well-being.

Primary students' learning about citizenship through data science.

Much of the mathematics that children experience in school neglect the skills increasingly needed for citizenship, particularly the power of complex data to investigate and make sense of the world. We draw on the relatively new field of data science as a multi-disciplinary approach to investigate problems through analysis of massive, non-standard, incongruous and/or messy data. Our exploratory qualitative study had as its research question: What can children learn about citizenship when they engage with data science? The case study in this paper illustrated ways that children's learning about citizenship were enriched through an age-appropriate data science investigation. The study analysed classroom video from a Year 4 classroom (aged 9-10) over six lessons that integrated curricula in digital technologies, health, and mathematics. In these lessons, the children generated and analysed non-standard data and debated social, well-being and privacy issues as they considered their activities in cyberspace. The video data were analysed using a framework based on critical citizenship education literature that examined dimensions of power, collective engagement, individual responsibility and action. Three key findings emerged. First, the case study highlighted skills in citizenship education developed through data science, positioning children as agents and advocates. Second, the study showed how a complex data investigation in citizenship education was achievable with primary children through meaningful curriculum integration. This is important given that problems that citizens address are typically interdisciplinary. Finally, the findings revealed a gap between data science skills and those developed in the mathematics curriculum, and recommend ways that the maths curriculum could be updated.

Политический процесс в современной Франции: общество и власть

In modern France, power and society are developing in different directions. President E. Macron has built a rigid “vertical of power”, which was further strengthened under the conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic. Power in France has exceptional autonomy and an ability to make and implement decisions that do not have public support. The president can implement reforms by decree, and the prime minister – relying on the Article 49.3 of the Constitution, which allows laws to be passed without a vote in parliament. Society, in turn, has become more demanding in the field of obtaining individual rights and expanding political rights. While power was growing more and more “vertical”, society developed in the opposite direction. The individual rights of citizens have expanded (legalization of same-sex unions and sex change); French citizens have become more demanding of representative institutions and politicians. It is customary to consider French society depoliticized. In reality, modern French people, even if they don’t go to the polls and don’t trust political parties, are interested in politics. The mood of “critical citizenship” has become widespread in society, an increasing number of citizens would like to participate in political decision-making, and the ideas of direct democracy are very popular. The multidirectional development of society and power inevitably gives rise to a systemic socio-political conflict. The protests against raising the retirement age from 62 to 64 that unfolded in France in 2023 were a continuation of the protest movements of past years. Three scenarios for the development of the political situation in France are formulated: normalization; political crisis and way out of it; renewal of the political regime.

Critical Affective Literacies in/for Applied Linguistics

In this paper, the authors propose that attention to affect/emotion be given greater prominence in applied linguistics following a theoretical and pedagogical framework delineated as critical affective literacy (CAL) by Anwaruddin (2016). Following the IICOLA conference theme of emotions in multidisciplinary studies, the authors outline the interdisciplinary influences (e.g., philosophy, memory studies, semiotics/multimodality, citizenship education, etc.) that underpin key CAL principles and their understanding of affect/emotion in applied linguistics. In support, the authors discuss the potency of affect and emotionality of texts by way of duoethnography (Norris & Sawyer, 2012, 2017), a research methodology they have utilized in exploring affective/emotional dimensions of language in educational domains (e.g., English for Academic Purposes and Language Teacher Education) and as part of broader socio-political deliberation (i.e., critical citizenship pedagogies). The authors detail specific features of duoethnographic research methodology (e.g., participant transparency and juxtaposition, epistemological and ideological risk-taking) that contribute to CAL principles and aspirations. The authors also identify several implications of their work for the development of CAL in applied linguistics followed by brief descriptions of curricular and pedagogical innovations where affect/emotion have been integral to the pedagogical and literacy strategies described.

Critical education as an attempt to question the dominant habitus through the educational system

In the article, I analyze the role of education in the prevailing system of neoliberal capitalism. On the one hand, it is used by the dominant culture characteristic for the upper classes to imprint appropriate ideological assumptions in the minds of students. On the other hand, there is strong resistance to the practices of subordination and implementation of the logic of the prevailing system. Illich's concept of deschooling society recognizes that compulsory education should be abolished. Critical educators such as Henry Giroux and Peter McLaren argue that the resistance present in the school testifies to the possibility of using the school to shape critical citizens capable of defending democracy. In my article, I argue that it is possible to partially free oneself from the logic of the dominant culture and to partially emancipate the habituses characteristic of the lower classes. However, it is not my goal to illustrate the ideas present in the theories under analysis by referring to specific examples in the field of a particular educational system.

Controversial issues and apps for developing social and civic competence. Analysis of the effectiveness of Project 1936 in initial teacher training

In order to form critical citizenship, history teaching and learning should foster the development of social and civic competence. To this end, it is necessary to introduce changes in teaching methods and in the training of future teachers. The aim of this research is to evaluate the effectiveness of Project 1936 in initial teacher training, as well as to verify whether there are differences between perceptions of participating and non-participating students with respect to the use of innovation strategies, the interest in the study of history, and the acquisition of social and civic competence. A total of 239 students from the UPV/EHU Primary Education Degree participated in this study: 116 in the experimental group and 122 in the control group. A 21-item questionnaire was used, divided into three variables. Analyses of mean differences and their respective effect sizes, and multiple linear regression analyses were carried out. Following the teaching intervention, a statistically significant high-magnitude increase was observed in all variables for the experimental groups. We can conclude that the introduction of innovative teaching strategies, such as the approach to socially controversial topics and the use of technological teaching resources, increase the interest in the study of history and indirectly affect the development of social and civic competence.