Towards a framework for critical citizenship education

consider the ideas of some of their critics; and finally to begin to outline a potential
structure for the framework for critical citizenship education.

Distinctive Features of Critical Pedagogy

Ideology and Politics

This element associates the terms “politics” and “ideology”: although citizenship
educators are more accustomed to the former term. The current literature in this area of
critical pedagogy frequently refers to theories of “ideology and power” and “oppression
and injustice”.

Darder, Baltodano and Torres (2003, p. 13) define ideology as ‘the framework of
thought that is used in society to give order and meaning to the social and political world in
which we live’; this framework for many critical pedagogues is associated with Marxist
philosophy or one of its successors (neo-Marxism; post-Marxism; Marxist feminism and so
on). However, there is a long-standing debate as to whether Marxism is an essential tenet
of the ideology of critical pedagogy. Certainly the language of critical pedagogy centres
around the language of power used by Marx (1867/1999), Gramsci (1971) and other
prominent Marxist thinkers, and the anti-capitalist ideology of a number of critical
pedagogical writers is expressed in no uncertain terms:

Humanity may let itself be led by capitalism’s logic to a fate of collective suicide or it may
pave the way for an alternative humanist project of global socialism. (Scatamburlo-D'Annibale
and McLaren 2004, p. 194)

While Gibson (1986) argues that within any deep critique of society it is likely that
critical theorists will ‘find enormous difficulty in not locating the root of all social ills in
economic relationships’ (Gibson 1986, p. 6, original emphasis), it is difficult, as Green
(1997) suggests, to align the macro-social explanations of Marxism with relativist
postmodern interpretations such as Giroux’s (1992; 2005) ‘border pedagogy’, which aims

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