dialectically connected with ‘how notions of consciousness, ideology, and power enter into
the way human beings constitute their day-to-day realities’ (Giroux 1980, p. 348). While
Zaman (2006, p. 15) considers the practical implementation of Giroux’s conceptions ‘an
impossible mission for institutions established, managed and financially supported by the
state’, they are helpful in the development of a framework for critical citizenship
education.

A Framework for Critical Citizenship Education

As highlighted above, writers in the fields of citizenship education, critical pedagogy and
critical thinking have developed a plethora of concepts and models to categorise and
conceptualise critical citizenship. It is, however, possible to synthesise the literature to
establish a ‘framework’ for analysing and comparing curricula which promote forms of
critical citizenship. To allow us to identify and compare the features of critical pedagogy
and citizenship education reviewed above, we have developed Table 1. This maps the key
descriptors of critical pedagogy along the horizontal axis against the curricular
manifestations on the vertical axis.

The four distinctive elements of critical pedagogy shown in Figure 1, above, form
the horizontal categories of Table 1: politics/ideology, social/collective, self/subjectivity
and praxis/engagement. For the vertical categories, we have used Cogan, Morris and
Print’s (2002, p. 4) useful definition of citizenship / civics education as the formation of
‘the knowledge, skills, values and dispositions of citizens’. These terms can represent both
individualistic attributes (for example, individual knowledge and skills) and the culture or
‘ethos’ (McLaughlin 2005) of an educational context (for example, communal values or
dispositions). They are arguably conventional rather than radical terms, broadly reflecting
the categories used in national curriculum documents. However, the use of this curricular

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