Institutional Settings and Civic Education: A Comparative Study of Different Types of Publicand Private Schools.
Since the 1990s, the Swedish school systemhas become increasingly more diversified. Decentralization, the introduction ofprivate schools, the challenge of globalization and increased ethnic diversity amongpupils have contributed to an increasingheterogeneity.
This project analyses the prospects for civiceducation in different institutional settings and contexts, in both public and private schools. Using unique survey data1999 and 2009 we ask which effects differentinstitutional settings have on ”citizen competences”, i.e. civic engagement, political efficacy, knowledge about democracy and political issues, and democratic values and tolerance.
The project breaks down into three distinct but interrelated parts. The first deals with changes over time in young Swedes' civic competences. The second subproject focuses on the way and consequences when controversial issues are taught in different schools and institutional settings. The third sub-project adds acomparative perspective by analyzing similarities and differences among young people and schools in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and England.
Villkoren för skolans demokratiuppdrag har förändrats. Det offentliga huvudmannaskapet har utsatts konkurrens från privata initiativ och en ökad kulturell mångfald har konfronterat skolan med nya utmaningar.
Vad betyder detta för skolans möjligheter att bidra med demokratisk utveckling hos skoleleverna?
I den här forskarantologin presenteras en fördjupad analys av svenska elev-, lärar- och skoldata från den internationella utvärderingen ICCS 2009. Rapporten innehåller beskrivande analyser av förutsättningarna för skolor och lärare att hantera kontroverser och av vad eleverna har för medborgarkompetens.
Avslutningsvis görs även preliminära försök att förklara de mönster som präglar svenska elever, lärare och skolor när det gäller medborgarkompetens.
This special issue of Education & Democracy – Journal of Didactics and Educational Policy (in Swedish: Utbildning & Demokrati – tidskrift för didaktik och utbildningspolitik) is dedicated to the challenges raised by current conditions in higher education when it comes to promoting civic and professional responsibility. The four articles emerged from a collaboration between research centres in Örebro and Oslo, initiated
at the NERA Conference in Copenhagen in 2003, which has been followedup with seminar meetings and presentations, most recently at the NERA Conference in Copenhagen and the ISA Conference in Oslo, both in 2008. Our shared ambition has been to interrogate and critically discuss central aspects of the recent development of mass higher education, with regard to its role in educating towards engaged citizenship and professional responsibility. The cases are situated in a Scandinavian context, yet discussed in relation to the influence of European higher education policy.
At a time when the dominant language
Agonistic recognition in education has three interlinked modes of aesthetic experience and self-presentation where one is related to actions in the public realm; one is related to plurality in the way in which it comes into existence in confrontation with others; and one is related to the subject-self, disclosed by 'thinking. Arendt's conception of 'thinking' is a way of getting to grips with aesthetic self-presentation in education. By action, i.e., by disclosing oneself and by taking initiatives, students and teachers constitute their being. The way Arendt theorizes action (vita activa) makes it essentially unpredictable and destabilizing, which does not seem to fit into what should be expected from education. In the article I will argue that it should have a place by virtue of the debate, challenge and contest it offers. But education should also be defined from a specific kind of contemplation called 'thinking' to become the cultivation of a faculty of judgment in education-thinking (vita contemplativa) as a common virtue in education. Arendt's demarcation between truth and meaning does from the point of view of agonistic recognition in education call for 'thinking' as a qualification of political and moral meaning-the 'taste' to be established in the individual, by individual judgements but always judged in relation to members of a community.
The article is concerned with issues of national identity in a multicultural society (Sweden) and the role of citizenship education in creating a national identity. After having witnessed the terrorist attack and the traumas from Oslo and Utøya (22 July 2011), and the suicide bombing in Stockholm 11 December 2010, certain words, such as national identity and patriotism, make the project of writing on national identity from a Scandinavian perspective not just urgent but somewhat problematic. What I term national identity and democratic patriotism in the article is intended to combat all forms of chauvinistic ethno-nationality, on the one hand, and, on the other, fundamental ethno-religious identity. I argue for a particular way of understanding national identity that transcends ethnicity but also acknowledges it, by elaborating on the conception of ‘democratic patriotism’. In this respect my discussion is framed by the discussion of social integration and its importance to citizenship education, where my intention is to discriminate between the kind of national identity that refers either to aspects of political domination or a cultural hegemony, or both, and democratic and critical understanding of national identity in relation to pluralism and contingency, i.e. claims on respect for difference and otherness. The purpose of this article is to provide theoretical and empirical arguments for a didactical professional attitude and practice for reciprocal communication in this sense where meanings of national identity are discussed, tested and challenged in class. In light of the ongoing debate the article is a revisiting of concepts and a debate over concepts of national identity and belonging: how national identity can be identified, and what might be done to affirm a constructive, democratic national identity beyond both nationalism and multiculturalism.
In recent years, reports have drawn attention to an ongoing instrumentalization of academic actions, governed by economic power. In the light of these reports higher education in Sweden is analysed combining Deweyan pragmatism with the discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe to construct a theoretical conception of professional and personal responsibility. At the beginning of the 1990s and the 21st Century it is possible to observe a discursive domain filled with variations in language use - the existence of a classical academic discourse, a discourse of Bildung, a discourse of democracy and a discourse of economic globalization - that causes both conflicts and oppenness regarding the meaning of higher education and professional responsibility. The closer we get to 2007, the more this variation in language use is reduced and the narrower the meaning we find, owing to the hegemonic tendencies of the discourse of economic globalization.
The purpose of the study from which this paper emanates is to investigate and discuss how aspects of professional and civic responsibility in higher education can be motivated in terms of self-reflexivity. The research questions are: What kinds of arguments are provided by social theory and educational policy regarding the role of higher education and self-reflexivity? Which specific cultural life styles for students and institutions are established through the different arguments? What are the concepts and views suitable for a theory of self-reflexivity in higher education? In the paper we draw on mainly Dewey’s concept of individuality and on arguments promoting the university as an open reflexive institution supporting students’ autonomy. By discursive text analysis, we study the arguments provided by social theory and Swedish educational policy (1990-2006). Our findings show that social theory stresses the critical role of higher education and provides arguments for a self reflexive life style. Educational policy tends to stress the economic role of higher education and thereby promotes a more instrumental life style. However, our analysis indicates that the educational policy area simultaneously represents a complex net of interwoven and ambiguous aims, which makes it impossible to reduce higher education to an institution living or promoting only one life style.