Citizenship practices in school spaces: comparative discourse analysis of children’s group decision making

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    1 Citation (Scopus)
    27 Downloads (Pure)

    Abstract

    Critique of citizenship education has suggested citizenship should be reconceived, not as a status, but as something that people continuously do: citizenship as practice. This article draws on a two-year ethnographic study of citizenship practices in a Scottish primary school examining how citizenship curriculum was distributed across children’s experience of the school day, the ways belonging was constructed in different spaces and time frames and how civic participation was identified in pupils’ own terms. The article’s close discourse analysis examines moments when children’s decision-making reveals the connections made between citizenship curriculum and viable citizenship identities in practice. This micro analysis of the semi-formal space of the school reveals children’s understanding of group cooperation that remain opaque in the more formal setting of the classroom. The findings suggest that educators would do well to attune further to children’s informal decision making processes and curricular practices that would better support them.
    Original languageEnglish
    Article number2037689
    Pages (from-to)323-340
    Number of pages18
    JournalPedagogy, Culture and Society
    Volume32
    Issue number2
    Early online date23 Feb 2022
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 14 Mar 2024

    Keywords

    • citizenship
    • speech communities
    • discourse analysis
    • group work
    • curricular practice
    • collaborative problem solving
    • dialogic mediated activity

    Fingerprint

    Dive into the research topics of 'Citizenship practices in school spaces: comparative discourse analysis of children’s group decision making'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

    Cite this