Abstract
In recent years, the idea of the contribution of education to citizenship has been reinitiated. The purpose of this paper is to investigate constructions of citizenship as they are articulated in European policy documents on teacher education. It is indicated that the normative form of active citizenship is put into play through the individual and her or his actions, which is centred on learning. Drawing on Foucault’s analytic approach to problematization and Foucauldian methods of analysing policy problematizations of a certain problem, this study draws attention to the discourse of active citizenship and technologies of accountability that are utilized to shape teaching civic learning. It is suggested that citizenship is constructed as a learning problem, which motivates young people in school to reflect on their skills and competences. It is also from these capacities that their attitudes towards cultural diversity are assumed to be developed. Thus, in the formation of citizenship, emphasis is laid on the individual’s capacity for learning, which is also mobilized in narratives of the construction of Europe.
Keywords
Introduction
Since the Lisbon Treaty of 2007, the question of civic participation in the European Union (EU) integration process has been intensified. 1 It is also a question addressed in current European teacher education policy, where it is stated that the teacher is assumed to ‘[…] contribute to preparing learners to be globally responsible in their role as EU citizens' (European Commission, 2005: 4). This expectation of the teacher rests on a supposition that education is a key instrument for fostering young people to become ‘good’ citizens by civic-related learning (Biesta, 2011). The purpose of this study is to investigate suppositions and assumptions of teaching for civic-related learning that are expressed in European policy discourse and to examine what kind of technologies are put into play to ensure that this learning is realized. Taking Michel Foucault’s connection of power and knowledge as the entry point of the analysis, this study seeks to uncover the relations between sets of practices and political rationality which underpin policy assumptions of citizenship and so-called ‘civic competence’, which produce effects of what counts as a competent citizen in Europe (Bacchi, 2009; Foucault, 1997). In doing so, intersecting processes of the reconfiguration of citizenship and the reformation of teacher education are examined (European Commission, 2007a). The former relates to post-national and cosmopolitan discourses of citizenship (e.g. Nussbaum, 1997; Sassen, 2002). The latter targets the teaching profession and how the teacher is trained to engage students in learning in general and learning civic competence in particular (European Commission, 2007a). Teaching for civic participation here refers to the idea that fostering civic skills and competence can be supported through education in general, by varied teaching activities and by the specific subject of citizenship education in the curriculum. The analysis here starts by locating discursive practices of citizenship as displayed within European policy and the kind of dispositions of the individual that are produced in relationship to formation of the citizen. By discursive practices, this study refers to ‘practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak' (Foucault, 1982: 64); that is, sets of practices, which shape the rules for what is accepted as knowledge in a certain domain at a particular time. In this perspective, institutional procedures, technical instruments and pedagogical activities can be regarded as practices to support articulations of citizenship and civic competence.
Citizenship is no longer comprehended merely in terms of a legal relationship between the state and the individual. Citizenship beyond the national-state, Yuval-Davies (2011: 61) argues, is also the politics project of belonging, which ‘encompasses a diverse set of memberships in local, regional, national, cross and supranational political communities'. In European policy, responses to reconfigurations of citizenship are not explicitly addressed in terms of post-national citizenship or cosmopolitanism, yet discursive practices of post-national citizenship operate implicitly in political strategies for meeting challenges from globalization and European integration. In the EU there are mainly two strategies for new forms of citizenship. There is European citizenship, which provides certain kinds of rights and duties, and the other strategy has become known as ‘active citizenship’. 2 The latter will be dealt with here; legal status or specific rights and duties do not frame active citizenship. This means that there is no compulsory obligation to actively participate in society.
The idea of active citizenship has become established in the EU Lisbon goals of wealth, competitiveness and social cohesion in Europe (European Council, 2000) and it is integrated in European objectives for education and training (European Council, 2009). 3 Promotion of active civic participation in society is, however, not a new idea. For Aristotle, for example, citizens have an obligation to participate in the life of the community and contribute to its well-being. His idea was that in doing so, each citizen exercised and improved his or her civic virtues (Miller, 2012). In contrast, contemporary political goals of education and training are linked up with motivation of civic competence and skills for active citizenship. However, current ideas of active citizenship in Europe are being debated. Biesta (2011: 27), for example, raises the vital question of ‘what young people’s active citizenship actually entails' and, in addition, the nature of the citizenship activity and in which domain it is exercised. In this study, the domain of education and citizenship activity is performed in pedagogical practices. It is concluded that citizenship is made into a learning problem. Assumptions of learning outcomes achieved in civic learning are primarily linked to the student's ability to attain skills and competences. However, pedagogical practices of intercultural learning also encourage self-awareness. Considering the regime of accountability which has become a part of educational systems (Webb, 2009), this study also draws attention to governing practices of taking the teacher into account for students’ formation as citizens in schooling.
This study starts by examining the framing of citizenship and civic competence in European policy discourse. This is followed by an analysis of political rationality and configurations of practices that underlie policy assumptions of civic-related learning and calculations of the teacher in relation to such assumptions. Thereafter, policy strategies for teaching for citizenship are located in ideas of fostering citizenship through education and responses to post-national citizenship and cosmopolitanism. However, this study will first clarify its analytic approach to policy discourse.
A Foucauldian approach to analysing policy discourses
This study's approach to policy follows the analytic stance that policy produces the ‘problem’ (and the solution) through a particular ‘mode of reasoning’ of the issue of ‘problem’ (Bacchi, 2009). Instead of focusing on already designed solutions, the analysis examines how policy produces the ‘problem', here, learning civic competence and accounting for the teaching to do that. As a consequence, the analysis does not seek to explain policy intentions but to problematize flexible conditions by which truth-claims of the problem are produced. Typically, a policy of teacher education mobilizes knowledge about citizenship, civic competence, diversity and learning and proposes how teacher education should respond to these issues by connecting different and sometimes competing discourses and omitting others. Processes of modulation and transformation when policy travels to teaching situations where it is enacted within the discursive field as well as in conflict with other discourses and various technical devices are recognized (Ball et al., 2011). However, studying policy enactment understood as observing translations and negotiation of policy discourse is beyond the scope of this work, which focuses on discursive formations and practices by which knowledge of civic competence is acquired, as manifested in policy texts. This study tries to elucidate connections of knowledge, strategy, technology and truth-claims in policy discourse. Using the Foucauldian analytic approach of problematization (Foucault, 1997), the analysis focuses on policy ‘problematizations’. Why and how is educating for citizenship and civic competence constructed as a problem? This study is less interested in, for example, globalization as a phenomenon; instead, attention is drawn to discourses, social practices, technologies and mechanisms that are deployed in policy problematizations of the problem.
To be more precise, this analysis draws attention to procedures and mechanisms as mediating practices which work within and across networks and through which civic competence becomes conceivable and the ‘civic subject’ governable. In other words, what counts as citizenship and civic competence is not determined in advance but evolves through political rationality mediated by technologies of government. The latter refers to diverse devices, which make it possible to govern (Foucault, 1988). Technologies operate in relationship to what Foucault (1988) calls ‘technologies of the self’, which are practices by which individuals act upon themselves to form themselves as subjects. In line with this approach to technologies, this analysis pays attention to mechanisms by which thoughts about the classroom, teaching methods and social relations are organized.
In analysing policy texts, this study seeks to elucidate complexity and multiplicity in discursive and technical practices of governing European citizenship, and in relation to this the mobilization of civic-related learning through education. By reading texts, this study identifies articulations of citizenship and teaching citizenship and the procedures, assumptions and techniques that go with them (Webb, 2014). Patterns as well as modifications and cases of ambiguity, uncertainty and difficulty are located. Data are constructed from official policy documents primarily devoted to teacher education and education that in one way or another is central for an understanding of how teaching citizenship is fabricated. These policy documents were produced within the EU and the Council of Europe during the period 2000–2012. 4 European policy documents on teacher education do not explicitly address teaching civic competence or citizenship education. It is, however, implicit in articulations of pedagogical practices and expectations of the teacher. Before analysing knowledge of citizenship and civic competences as manifested in the European policy of teacher education, this study will first examine the mobilization of knowledge of citizenship in Europe and the technical devices for organizing civic competence.
European governance of citizenship
The Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union offers people in Europe certain rights such as the right to vote in European elections and municipal elections, the right of free movement and freedom of discrimination of nationality. 5 These rights are not separated from normative citizenship, which will be in focus here. Governance of citizenship through a common sense of belonging to Europe relates to citizens’ trust in the democratic processes of the European Union. However, the results of the EU Election of 2014 indicate increased distrust for the EU and a surge for parties that advocate nationalism. 6 Thus, challenges for European integration are coming from within rather than from outside. Fear of disintegration in the community of Europe appears to motivate the desire of citizens to display ‘both a sense of belonging to one's locality, country, the EU and Europe in general and to the world, and a willingness to participate in democratic decision-making at all levels' (European Parliament, Council of the European Union, 2006: 17). Governance of participation in society and acknowledgement of people’s multiple belonging help to understand the promotion of active citizenship mentioned above. This form of normative citizenship is not tied up with the nation-state, nor is it restricted to institutional procedures. It is described in terms of ‘participation in political, organizational/associational and community life characterized by mutual tolerance, non-violence, shared responsibilities and respect for human rights and the rule of law' (Hoskins et al., 2006: 5). Instead of legal rights, the international human rights regime underpins active citizenship, which has a functional role in social cohesion (Biesta, 2009 ). Thus, rather than shaping a citizenship based upon a European identity shared by people in Europe, what is at stake is the formation of a sense of common citizenship resourced by civic participation, human rights and social cohesion. This form of government is productive in making Europe hospitable and democratic, and it has also constitutive effects on what it means to be a citizen in Europe. It is a power that is deployed in various kinds of practices, for instance intercultural dialogue. In recent years, European governance of social inclusion and integration has come to employ intercultural dialogue in strategies for enabling ‘voice’ to reinforce willingness for democratic citizenship, which constitutes European citizenship (Hodgson, 2011). Promotion of intercultural dialogue is reinforced by the regime of human rights. The Council of Europe’s White Paper on Intercultural Dialogue: ‘Living Together as Equals in Dignity’ (Council of Europe, 2008: 4) states: ‘If there is a European identity to be realised, it will be based on shared fundamental values, respect for common heritage and cultural diversity as well as respect for the equal dignity of every individual'. Citizenship is coupled here with common values, which form part of constituting subjectivities for the European citizen. From the governmentality perspective, intercultural dialogue operates as a technique ‘ology' for the involvement of individuals in formations of citizenship. In this view, the official strategy for intercultural dialogue is intertwined with governance of active citizenship
The notion of active citizenship and its vagueness and indeterminacy makes it possible to connect with a variety of knowledge about citizenship in diverse sites, one of which is education. Learning to undertake active citizenship is expected to take place in curricula, pedagogies, and management at all school levels (European Commission, 1997: 56–62). It is framed by the European Framework for Key Competences for Lifelong Learning (European Parliament, Council of the European Union, 2006), which comprises eight competences relying on each other. 7 Civic competence is one of them. The term ‘competence’ is generally associated with ability and capacity, that is, what people can do, and in a narrower sense performing skills (Allan, 2011). EU indicators for civic competence are set up in four dimensions: knowledge; skills; attitude and values (values include respect for difference and respect for human rights) (EURODICE, 2012; Hoskins et al., 2011). 8 These indicators do not determine what civic competence is, but they serve as technical devices when monitoring educational systems and they provide new areas of visualization and of the circulation of knowledge about civic competence and how it can be learned and taught (Edwards and Usher, 2008).
The next section will examine the kind of political rationality that underpins policy knowledge about capacities and dispositions for civic competence.
Civic learning, diversity and teaching
Policy predominantly speaks of teaching civic competence in educational institutions and what takes place in the classroom. This is noteworthy since globalizing discourse has extended pedagogy outside the classroom and extended learning outside the educational institution (Simons and Masschelein, 2008). By speaking of the classroom, a spatial and temporal location of unity and boundaries is produced in which the teacher is expected to acknowledge multiple identities and personal capacities. Policy describes the classroom as a location of diversity exemplified by ‘age and gender; the diversity of learning styles and intelligences; the diversity of socio-economic groups, the ranges of ability/disability; the diversity of mother tongues' (European Commission, 2007b: 5). With this broad definition, the term ‘diversity’ covers anyone and everyone. Further, the narrative of the classroom of diversity implies that diversity is already in place, ready to be managed by the teacher. A suggestion of how to do that is the following example from a discussion of teacher education curricula in the European Commission’s peer learning activity of teacher education and training: The skills and qualities that teachers need to teach effectively in culturally diverse settings are the same as those they will need in any other setting. They are based upon the principle that teaching should respond to the unique needs and aptitudes of each individual learner. (European Commission, 2007b: 5)
Policy inscribes the notion of diversity into the problem of social inclusion and producing the learner in various ways. It brings about social technologies, which work upon teachers’ attitudes towards diversity and teaching methods for learning in relation to social inclusion. The configuration of diversity, social inclusion and learning is put into play in the desire of teacher education to encourage teachers’ approaches to continuing training and lifelong learning. Lifelong learning is produced as a condition for teachers’ ability to ‘cater for diversity and inclusion; and to meet the needs of disadvantaged learners, such as Roma, children with disabilities or those from a migrant background. The ultimate focus of all these activities should be to improve learning outcomes' (European Commission, 2012: 11); this presumption of teaching for diversity and inclusion does not emphasize the school as a community but instead individualized responsibility of learning. Pedagogical practices compensate for lack of sufficient learning capacity and strengthen the construction of the learning subject. The ‘disadvantaged learner’ is thus not framed by the division equality/inequality but rather by equivalence/difference in relation to learning. It allows ‘cater for diversity and inclusion’ to relate to equal responsiveness to different needs, which might develop equal resources for learning (Bacchi, 2009). The effect of this power/knowledge arrangement is the possibility to integrate equivalence of learning opportunities and social inclusion, which is about fostering a student’s capacity to learn to be a social subject. In this regard, the arrangement of learning and social inclusion is engaged with strategies for readiness for participation in active citizenship.
Elsewhere, teaching in cultural diversity settings is based on the narrative of heterogeneity in unity in Europe. Teacher education is expected to provide teachers with intercultural skills in order to ‘work in multicultural settings (including an understanding of the value of diversity, and respect for difference)' (European Commission, 2007a: 13). Normative values of cultural diversity are deployed by social technologies of involvement such as pedagogical activities for adopting intercultural skills. In education, the concepts of intercultural dialogue and intercultural skills are generally associated with communication and multilingualism (Besley and Peters, 2012). However, through discourses of competence and learning, intercultural skills have come to be part of what counts as social and civic competences and cultural diversity (European Parliament, Council of the European Union, 2006). Intercultural teaching involves a method to facilitate individuals’ civic and social capacity to appreciate diverse values and cultures (Council of Europe and European Commission, 2000). This expectation appears to underlie policy examples of looking for educational resources: Schools can make use of the intercultural competences that have been gained by immigrant families themselves from living in the host country. Involving the parents of minority pupils in school and classroom activities can bring important additional resources into class; it can also help to convey the message that their language and culture are as valuable as those of the host country. A parent who cannot speak the language of the host country can still be treated as a partner in the child's education; one example involved parents from minority groups being invited to share in the activities of after-school homework clubs. (European Commission, 2007b: 4)
While it might be said that the teaching activity above is performed through the technique of ‘exposure’ to cultural diversity, the technique of ‘experience’ is put to work in teaching activities of intercultural learning. Teaching for intercultural skills and competence is expected to be designed to encourage self-experience and self-reflection with the help of pedagogical self-assessment tool-kits. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) provides a tool-kit on teaching for diversity, and the classroom activity called ‘Multicultural me’ starts from taken-for-granted knowledge about cultural differences and lack of knowledge about fellow students. 9 It is staged as a non-conflicting pedagogical situation, which is based not so much on awareness of difference as on presuppositions of commonalities which are to be intensified in intercultural encounters of learning (Besley and Peters, 2011). Presumptions of shared attitudes appear to inform policy ideas that intercultural skills and competence arise from learning directly from the ‘other’ and getting immediate feedback – and thereby respecting different viewpoints and values. Thus, intercultural encounters serve as a teaching practice for responding to diversity through experience. Being part of the narrative of the culturally diverse classroom, intercultural learning motivates self-experience in order to be ‘conscious of our personal responsibility' (Council of Europe and European Commission, 2000: 35). In addition, encouraging teachers to self-reflect on diversity and learn intercultural skills is a form of ‘responsibilization' which is related to presuppositions of teachers’ actions on managing diversity. As the European Commission says, ‘Teacher education should provide teachers with knowledge about intercultural issues in society and as they are present in the school. It is presumed to ‘engage teachers' commitment to working in a culturally diverse society' (European Commission, 2007b: 5, italics in original). 10 In this view, commitment is a social technology mobilized to account for a certain kind of teacher who responds to change in the European society. The next section looks at calculation of teaching and the teacher and the technology of accountability.
A note on the technology of accountability
Put simply, accounting in human practices involves a specific combination of belief, values and techniques. Teaching civic competence is connected to the neoliberal regime of accountability, which includes economic spaces and mediates values, ideas and instruments for calculation and performance evaluation (Miller and Power, 2013). It is thereby aligned with educational reforms and organizational value, which the teacher (and the whole staff) is involved in to produce (Ahmed, 2012). Thus the classroom is constructed as a space of diversity; and teaching performance of learning outcomes and facilitating achievement of civic competence are made calculable. The mediating role of accounting in processes of adding value to the educational organization and the teaching profession is an important aspect of the calculation of managing diversity. Yet, accounting for teaching through teachers’ capacity to enable students to develop civic competence through learning and self-experience is contingent on a shifting web of connections and disconnections of discursive formations, technical things (evaluation tools, pedagogical kits and dispersion of practices of teaching), human elements (pedagogy and desires) and the negotiations at each of these interactions (Rose, 1999). Within this process of connecting networks, which can be broken or take other directions, teaching civic competence is enacted and translated not merely in terms of knowledge circulation and teachers’ interpretation but also mediated in material matters such as curriculum, pedagogy and systems of evaluation. Policy usage of the term diversity is connected to various kinds of knowledge in order to add value to the educational organization. It involves the calculation of teachers’ competence; dispositions of managing diversity are then adjusted to standards. However, standards are not given but have to be calculated as quality, which is a category shaped in specific space and time. Accountability to standards in education today is often called managerial professionalism, and meeting standards is a form of service-level requirement, but it is not a service-level agreement until it is enacted (Evans, 2011). Since enactment is not investigated in this study, the question of teaching civic competence and ideas of the contribution of education to citizenship will be returned to.
Cultivation of citizenship through education
Cultivation of citizenship could be regarded as a technology of government, which implies ‘the way by which, […], we have been led to recognize ourselves as a society, as a part of a social entity, as a part of a nation or a state' (Foucault, 2000: 404). In this regard, what comes to be understood as citizenship and how citizenship is reasoned about emerges in different forms of governance in specific time and space. Congruent with this understanding, the formation of citizens is an effect of power/knowledge relations and thereby fragmentary and infinite. During the past few decades, the notion of citizenship has been given pluralized meaning, which is produced both by the formal extensions of legal status and the international regime of human rights (Sassen, 2002). What is acknowledged as post-national citizenship does not abolish the nation but ‘de-stablishes' the idea of the nation-state to be the exclusive site for the protection of rights, formal status or participation in political democratic processes. Post-national citizenship shifts from ideas about the formation of citizenship within a community perceived as an entity towards global interdependency and multiple identities. The taken-for-granted assumption of belonging to a nation, shaped through relational rules of institutional practices, social positioning and normalizing dispositions, is complicated by cross-cultural and hybrid identities based on local values and cultures and intersectional forms of dialogue and positionality (Anthias, 2013). Post-national citizenship embeds the global in the national and transforms knowledge and practice of citizenship even when it remains in the national and/or European context (Sassen, 2002).
Reconfigurations of citizenship affect how the individual formation of citizenship is thought about which is enacted by multiple and continuous practices in numerous situations in life. However, a strong idea in modern Western society is that education plays a crucial role in the formation of democratic citizens. Modern forms of civic education or citizenship education in schooling have been organized in specific ways in historical times and through different technologies (e.g. Crittenden and Levine 2013; Osler and Starkey, 2006). What is called liberal education is based in Dewey’s idea that the school should be a place where students are prepared for civic participation by being part of creating a democratic environment and teaching examples of values (Dewey, 1966). In the past few decades, designs for education have been debated from diverse positions of cosmopolitanism. For instance, Nussbaum (1997) develops ideas for how education can cultivate human beings and their humanity, rather than cultivate national citizenship. In her opinion, the cultivation of humanity can be encompassed in education by learning about the other and in that way developing a capacity for empathy. In contrast, re-thinking plurality is put forward by Todd (2011), who suggests that pedagogical relations based on ethics implies learning from the other through the narrative. Roth (2012) adopts a different approach, discussing the design of teacher education from a Kantian perspective and arguing for the cultivation of peoples’ judgment and self-mastery in order to develop a moral character. In their work on cosmopolitan citizenship, Osler and Starkey (2003) are concerned with cultural diversity and emphasize recognition of young people’s multiple loyalties and their rights. In addition, intercultural education can be seen in relationship to new interest in cosmopolitanism in education. Since intercultural issues have expanded from being centred on multilingualism and communication to involving the dimension of human rights, intercultural education has been integrated into citizenship education (Besley and Peters, 2012). Sometimes ideas of cosmopolitan education and intercultural education tend to be seen as a solution to global problems or the problem of cultural diversity. Another aspect of problem solving is the potential for governing new kinds of subjects, for example the lifelong learner (Popkewitz, 2008). This is an aspect that adds further challenges for teaching civic learning.
Conclusion
This study has examined the kind of citizenship that is promoted in and through European teacher education, which is a part of European higher education. In a shift towards a citizenship of plurality, there are efforts to direct citizenship to the individual and the European community through the idea of active citizenship. It has been shown that teaching citizenship and civic competence is framed by active citizenship within a national and/or European context. By elucidating political rationality and discursive practices that underlie assumptions of teaching civic competence, this study has tried to clarify the conditions for policy’s coupling together of learning, civic competence and citizenship so that they mutually imply one another. Focusing on the notion of diversity, this study has sought to draw attention to diversity as a governing technique operating within various policy constructions of teaching for citizenship. In certain constellations of diversity and learning, diversity is a difference already known and which in part has been accounted for as manageable (Ahmed, 2012). It is in such configurations that the notion of diversity is held to be valuable. Diversity and difference are rendered visible in pedagogical activities, in which cultural diversity is made to ‘otherness' in society. Students are being asked to relate to diversity by imagining and reflecting on their attitudes towards what is already displayed as difference. They are asked to turn inwards and reflect on their competence or skill, or lack of the same, to appreciate diversity. In other words, they are asked to be citizens as individuals separated from each other and not ‘being-together-with’ (Masschelein and Simons, 2002). It has been suggested that citizenship is fabricated as a learning problem to be solved by the individual. An effect of this is an individualized citizenship for which the teacher is held accountable to facilitate through pedagogical practices of civic learning. However, Fenwick and Edwards (2010) note that pedagogical practice may also modify and disrupt the strategies it is to accomplish.
The Foucauldian method of problematization has allowed this study to reassess practices and technical devices by which teaching civic competence is governed. In doing so, this study has made visible conditions for constructing citizenship and civic competence in European teacher education. In addition, this study has made visible the complexity and indeterminacy in regulative practices of establishing what counts as civic competence and educating citizenship. This study also seeks to point out that it is precisely the fragility and ruptures of policy prescriptions, as well as non-calculated effects in teaching and learning encounters, that can be worked with when questioning historically conditioned truth-claims of civic-related learning and how it is to be taught.
Footnotes
Funding
This research has been carried out within the research project – Teaching students to become cosmopolitan citizens? Prospects and challenges for Swedish teacher education, and is financed by the Swedish Research Council. Professor Klas Roth is the scientific leader.