Towards a framework for critical citizenship education

ideal citizenship education. As a liberal multicultural model, it is powerful in its depiction
of otherness, which is very useful in a framework for critical citizenship education.
However, its individualist focus highlights elements such as human rights, feeling and
action without explicitly relating these to social interaction, dialogue, co-operation or
praxis.

Models of Critical Citizenship Education

Several frameworks for citizenship education already possess an explicitly critical
angle. Although each on its own does not cover all the elements of critical pedagogy
examined above, we are able to adapt and combine many of the relevant aspects for our
framework for critical citizenship education.

DeJaeghere (2006, p. 307) suggests that a ‘critical approach’ should replace the
term ‘maximal’ as the ideal for citizenship education. Drawing on McLaughlin (1992),
Cogan and Derricott (1998) and Westheimer and Kahne (2004), she argues that this critical
approach would aim ‘to provide the conditions for collective social change’ through a
combined focus on ‘knowledge’ and ‘participation’ (DeJaeghere and Tudball 2007, p. 49).
This displays strong links to features of critical pedagogy as ‘knowledge’ refers to ‘critical
and structural social analysis’ (specifically including ‘asymmetries in power and the effects
of colonization/decolonization’), representing the ideological/political elements of critical
pedagogy described above; and ‘participation’ reflects elements of praxis, in actively
examining ‘relationships between the individual’s behaviour in society and structures of
social injustice’ (ibid. , pp. 48-49).

Also linked to critical pedagogy is Osler and Starkey’s (1999, p. 213) checklist for
effective citizenship projects, which includes ‘co-operative practice’; ‘independent
reasoning and critical awareness’; and ‘intercultural communication’. However, rather
than considering the many types of oppressed peoples, it focuses on ‘women’ and ‘ethnic

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