Towards a framework for critical citizenship education

minorities’ (ibid.). It stipulates the teaching of information about human rights, but ignores
any corresponding social responsibilities. ‘Community involvement’ (ibid.) is also a term
which does not adequately reflect an engagement with praxis in the Freirean sense.

Andreotti (2006, p. 6) combines a postcolonial perspective with critical literacy in
order to produce a classification of two types of global citizenship: ‘soft’ and ‘critical’.
This is a distinction which provides several elements for our analytical framework
including analysis and critical reflection on one’s own position/context and the addressing
of complexities and power relations. However, its narrower focus on global citizenship
prevents it from having the wider application to citizenship education in general.

Other writers in the field of critical pedagogy have also described ways of linking
citizenship education and aspects of critical pedagogy. Apple and Beane (1995, p. 16), for
example, argue that a ‘democratic curriculum’ should allow students to ‘shed the passive
role of knowledge consumers and assume the active role of “meaning makers”’. Parker’s
(1996, p. 117) ‘advanced democracy’ similarly advocates a citizenship that ‘embraces
individual differences [and] multiple group identities’, aiming to unite these in ‘democratic
moral discourse’. DeJaeghere and Tudball (2007, p. 51) suggest that one way to achieve
this is through ‘contrapuntal pedagogy’, as in ‘the inclusion of non-mainstream literature,
history and ideas that create new knowledge and understanding in contrast to dominant
discourses’, and this may be a useful perspective in developing students’ sense of
subjectivity, or ‘the self’. In a similar vein, Grossman (2009) argues that democratic
citizenship requires the use of a dialogic or conversational pedagogy which stresses the
need for open and deliberative classroom discussions.

Giroux (1983, p. 168) makes an important distinction between ‘training’ students
and using education to form a ‘sound’ character, and advocates an ‘emancipatory
rationality’ for citizenship education, which focuses on ‘macrostructural relationships’,

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