Radical citizenship education

Journal article

Leighton, R. 2022. Radical citizenship education. Education, Citizenship and Social Justice. https://doi.org/10.1177/17461979221080604
AuthorsLeighton, R.
AbstractAll education is political; the radical approach to Citizenship Education promotes social justice and critical active participation. In synthesizing a pedagogy of discomfort and the principles of subversive teaching, this is predicated on the notion that authority should be accountable, that people should be able and enabled to take decision makers to task, that those decision makers are the servants of the people. This article is based on research conducted and published during 16 years as subject leader for Citizenship Education on a pre-service qualifying programme for specialist teachers. It is adapted from the commentary submitted as part of my PhD by publication. The proposed ‘Radical Citizenship Education’ aims to enable people to question and, if they wish, to change social circumstances rather than to stoically accept the status quo. Couched within a framework which owes as much to Postman and Weingartner as it does to Marxism, studies are summarized largely chronologically to explain and contextualize the data collected. The influence of many other thinkers and writers is acknowledged, from the 19th Century to the 21st, in the continued belief that the purpose of Citizenship Education should not be to protect the civic landscape, but to change it.
KeywordsEducation; Citizenship
Year2022
JournalEducation, Citizenship and Social Justice
PublisherSAGE
ISSN1746-1979
1746-1987
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)https://doi.org/10.1177/17461979221080604
Official URLhttps://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17461979221080604
Publication dates
Online27 Apr 2022
Publication process dates
Deposited11 May 2022
Publisher's version
License
Output statusPublished
Permalink -

https://repository.canterbury.ac.uk/item/91104/radical-citizenship-education

Download files

Publisher's version
17461979221080604.pdf
License: CC BY-NC 4.0

  • 41
    total views
  • 95
    total downloads
  • 0
    views this month
  • 2
    downloads this month

Export as

Related outputs

Theorizing young people's perceptions of their citizenship identity
Leighton, R. and Nielsen, Laila 2018. Theorizing young people's perceptions of their citizenship identity. in: Pineda-Alfonso, J. (ed.) Handbook of Research on Education for Participation Citizenship and Global Prosperity Pennsylvania, USA IGI Global. pp. 339-352