Imagination and play are often relegated to specific times of the school day (e.g., recess) or pushed entirely into after school hours (e.g., extracurriculars), carefully separated from subject area instruction. How often has it been said that "playtime is over "or that "it's time to buckle down and get serious" when it comes…

These are times of rapid change. According to the Marrakech Framework for Action, adult learning and education (ALE) can and should play an important role in equipping citizens with the necessary skills to participate actively in these processes and shaping the future. In this article, we share case studies from community projects in Tunisia and…

Patriotic education in China is a state project that serves the Chinese government. However, current discourse on Chinese patriotic education basically views inward and outward aspects of patriotism as separate and incompatible, which downplays the intricate relationship between them. Arguably, a more nuanced understanding of patriotism is needed…

A survey of the nation's civic health reveals troubling trends, with historic lows in trust among individuals and key institutions such as government, media, and the courts. Political polarization has significantly increased among Americans in the last 40 years, surpassing eight other democratic nations and challenging the idea that it is merely a…

International schools have historically grappled with the fundamental dilemma of providing a high-quality curriculum and qualification supporting international mobility, while promoting a culture of peace and understanding. The internationalist (ideological)-globalist (pragmatic) spectrum of approaches can be applied to understand this dilemma.…

How can we imagine the ideal of "civic friendship" in the current contentious atmosphere? This article recasts the original concept of civic friendship through a tangle construct known as "weak ties." It introduces the initial interactions between Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Jane Addams as a useful model for forging weak ties…

The liberal arts tradition is under attack in the United States, even as it is spreading around the globe. That tradition was formalized in Latin Antiquity, but the essential questions and rational methodology that underpin it date to Ancient Greek philosophy. At the core of the tradition is the range of modalities of rational thinking, the main…

In recent decades, deliberation about public issues has become a central theme in citizenship education. In line with an increasing philosophical and political appreciation of the importance of deliberation within democracy, schools, as training grounds for democratic citizenship, should foster high-level deliberative skills. However, when this…

This article offers a contemporary interpretation of the work of global educator, Paulo Freire, inspired by the concept of "untested feasibility" which he first expounded in his work "Pedagogy of Hope." Our purpose is to pay particular attention to some relevant lessons stemming from the imagination of what has so far been…

In a time of for-profit schooling, continuing segregation, racism, book banning, unconscionable inequality, and antiquated approaches to pedagogy, the prescription for democratic schooling seems daunting. Yet the path is clear: We need to change society to enable democracy in schools; we need democratic schooling to bring the public out of its…

While 'national education' has regularly been invoked by post-1997 Hong Kong administrations, its pursuit has acquired new force and urgency since the introduction in 2020 of a National Security Law. Investigating the role of schooling in this reinvigorated project of thought reform, this article asks how far recent initiatives have merely…

Populists employ truth as a tool for aligning the people against the elite. Citizenship education rarely takes up critiques of liberal democracy, discussions of populism, or conversations about what truth is. This paper provides an alternative pragmatist vision of truth that builds on the populist call for democracy to better reflect the will of…

This paper discusses how Bernsteinian concepts ('pedagogic rights', 'discursive gaps' and 'pedagogic code') from the field of sociology of education can be used as didactic tools to illuminate how different ways of organising teaching in VET has implications for citizenship preparation. The paper is based on results from a five-year research…

In this article, the authors review higher education's evolving role in this nation's democracy. They then describe a new collaboration, the Civic Learning and Democracy Engagement (CLDE) Coalition, which responds educationally to the challenges facing our democracy. The CLDE Coalition aims to (1) reclaim and revitalize higher education's public…

Citizenship and related values are common elements in the missions of honors programs. Our goal was to design a junior honors seminar with an intentional focus on developing citizenship, civic identity, and civic virtues through engagement with the challenging history of our city, Montgomery, Alabama. The course employed four evidence-based…