Giovanni Moro e Roberta Salzano sono intervenuti nel Panel Transforming Citizenship Through Civic Education. Approaches, Methods, Experience, con due contributi, rispettivamente, su "Civic education as citizenship practice" e "The role of experiential learning in citizenship education: lessons from the Field".
Di seguito i contenuti esposti:
1) Civic Education As Citizenship Practice – Abstract, Working paper
Moro, Giovanni (Sapienza University, Rome, Italy)
Keywords: citizenship, democracy, citizenship practices, civic education, education methodologies
It is common wisdom that education has always been an essential part of citizenship-building process, though, at the same time, this relation has been contested because of its ambiguity (Heater, 2004). In addition, in the last decades the crisis of democratic citizenship paradigm has put civic education in a critical situation, because of the coincidence between growing expectations and uncertainty on the content and extension of citizenship itself. These difficulties can be observed both in the definitions of the strategic concept of “active citizenship” (Hoskins, 2006; Jochum, Pratten, Wilding, 2005; European Economic and Social Committee, 2011), and in civic education policies (Eurydice, 2017; Fondaca, 2018).
To manage this situation, the shift from a normative to an empirical concept of citizenship could be helpful. Thus, democratic citizenship could be viewed as a phenomenon, consisting in a device, able to grant inclusion, cohesion and development of political communities and structured in the three components of belonging as status and as identity; of rights with related duties; and of participation of citizens in public life (Bellamy, 2008; Moro, 2020).
Looking at democratic citizenship as a device allows to look at different “places” where citizenship is defined and transformed. It means that we could observe citizenship not only as a product of constitutional norms and provisions, but also as defined and redefined in other two places. One is what we could define civic acquis or “storage”, that is, the set of legal- or policy-based provisions establishing the content of citizenship, including laws, public policies, court decisions, administrative acts and procedures, recognized collective agreements, etc. The other one is citizenship practices, as to say, the dynamic relations between citizens and the polity, as well as the political community, on an everyday basis (Wiener, 1998). Thanks to the concept of citizenship practices, we can observe citizenship as an output not only of political decisions and institutional acts, but also of citizens’ lives, a product of social meanings and actions (Bellamy, Castiglione, Shaw, 2006). In other words, what people do with citizenship is of crucial importance to give shape to citizenship itself.
As a consequence, we can look at civic education as a citizenship practice, where the current crisis of democratic citizenship is managed by redefining and transforming citizenship itself, especially when non-conventional education methodologies are employed (Fondaca, 2018). The case of management of multiculturalism is a good example of this transformative attitude.
2) The role of experiential learning in citizenship education: lessons from the Field (file pdf)
