Suchergebnisse

The purpose of this article is to compare teachers' and students' interpretations of citizenship education (CE) across different communities in conflict-affected societies. By drawing on qualitative research that was conducted in four different schools in Northern Ireland and Israel (Catholic, Protestant, Jewish-Israeli and Arab-Palestinian), we show what may be universal and particular about teaching and learning CE in these different contexts and why variations occur. Despite being a compulsory subject with a common curriculum in both jurisdictions, CE was subject to multiple and competing interpretations by teachers and students. It was variously deemed to be an empowering subject that teaches critical thinking and is relevant to students' lives, a political tool that both stirs and silences controversies, and a subject that focuses on performance and whose importance was routinely underplayed. The findings illustrate the complex entanglement of CE with the particular political and community context that shapes its interpretations.

This article focuses on the role of the civics teacher against the backdrop of the recent political developments in Israel, where the political elite increasingly seeks to underpin citizenship education with a national-religious ideology. As in previous work on this topic by other academics, we draw on Gramsci's work on cultural hegemony to locate the hegemonic discourse of citizenship education in Israel and focus on the teacher's role along the spectrum of being an agent of the nation-state to acting as a transformative intellectual. We have interviewed Jewish-Israeli civics teachers to gain a better understanding of how they mediate their role between the different demands that the pojavascript:void(0);litics of civic education in Israel imposes on them. Our findings outline how teachers sometimes tend to reproduce the hegemonic discourse and how they also find ways to rebel against it, drawing on counter-hegemonic strategies in their classroom practice.