Book Chapter Details
Mandatory Fields
Audrey Bryan
2019 Unknown
The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education
Citizenship Education in the Republic of Ireland: Plus ça change?
Palgrave Macmillan.
New York.
In Press
0
Optional Fields
citizenship education; wellbeing; welfare; resilience; neo-liberalism; education policy; reform; curriculum; responsibilization
This chapter presents a critical overview of the literature concerning the reception and content of citizenship education which has been taught as a compulsory subject to lower-secondary level students in Irish post-primary schools since the late 1990s in the form of Civic, Social and Political Education (CSPE). It seeks to illuminate the “placebo” function that citizenship education serves (Gillborn 2006). While ostensibly concerned with enabling young people to come to a deeper understanding of social and global injustice, and empowering them to take action against these injustices, it presents evidence to suggest that CSPE works to constrain young people’s imagination about what is possible, and how they might engage in struggle for a more egalitarian world (Kennelly 2011). The chapter also interrogates the recent re-framing of citizenship within a newly foregrounded wellbeing discourse in contemporary educational policy, paying particular attention to the ideological work performed by the civic dimensions of a newly implemented wellbeing program in Irish schools. Specifically, it is argued that the citizenship-as-wellbeing discourse serves to amplify earlier individualized versions of citizenship promoted in CSPE and to encourage citizen-subjects who are self-reliant, self-responsible, self-managing and resilient. In so doing, it seeks to demonstrate the ways in which the contemporary focus on wellbeing detracts from the actual social and material determinants of wellbeing and considers what forms of citizenship are foreclosed by a citizenship-as-wellbeing discourse.
A. Peterson, G. Stahl and. H. Soong
978-3-319-67827-6
https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-319-67905-1_54-1
87
https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-319-67905-1_54-1
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