Academic Civic Mindedness and Model Citizenship in the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme

This study uses interview and survey methods to describe the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Programme's (DP) development of students' “academic civic mindedness” and “model citizenship” at four public schools in California. Results indicate that the DP pedagogy enables students to develop many of the skills that are necessary for civic advocacy and that the DP places a strong emphasis on students' knowledge of issues related to public policy. The DP develops students' citizenship through promoting their awareness of political and social issues and required active engagement with a local or global issue. Most IB students and teachers feel that the DP develops students' academic civic mindedness and model citizenship to a considerably greater extent than other curricular alternatives. Finally, teachers feel that the strongest limitation to their prioritization of students' citizenship development is their lack of clarity on how to frame the civic implications of what they teach.     

Fostering Global Citizenship Dispositions: The Long-term Impact of Participating in a High School Global Service Club

To assist teachers in fostering students' global citizenship dispositions through service experiences, this article reports findings from a case study that investigated one high school's global service club and its impact on former club members' global awareness and global citizenship dispositions. Data were collected from Web-based documents and interviews with the faculty advisor and four former members. Data were analyzed by using the constant comparison method to elicit the following findings: (1) fundraising and awareness campaigns, when connected to a larger global service network, can act as viable local actions to combat global poverty; (2) club involvement can produce adults who feel more globally aware, but who do not necessary display critical understandings of global issues; and (3) club involvement can have a positive impact on global citizenship dispositions as participants reported feelings of empowerment and personal/social responsibility, yet no former club members continued participation in global service initiates as adults. Findings suggest the need for structural support when establishing high school global service clubs and, to optimize critical justice aims, local service actions should be tied to a more formal global citizenship curriculum.     

Kashmir and the Kashmir Impasse

Social studies educators are responsible for successfully teaching students the knowledge, skills, and values necessary to be effective citizens. The National Council for the Social Studies urges educators to design technology-enhanced experiences that address social studies content and prepare students for effective citizenship. In this paper, we give examples from a piratical unit designed for a fourth-grade social studies classroom to highlight the role digital technology can play in enhancing social studies teaching and learning. We use Internet workshops as structures for students to meaningfully research social studies content, and we use blogs as technological tools to publish and showcase authentic student work, and ultimately, to develop students' higher order thinking skills and creativity.     

The Tradition of Pioneer Hardships in American History Textbooks

Two middle-school teachers incorporated student creation of historical accounts into their history instruction. During these projects, the teachers instructed their students to (1) summarize information presented during classroom instruction on a topic (e.g., the Great Migration) and (2) explain the significance of that topic to the present day. This second component of the task addressed a curricular standard regarding historical thinking, but students' responses referenced themes from citizenship education (e.g., cultural pluralism, social criticism, and national identification). More than eighty student projects were analyzed and coded for themes. This study presents a portrait of ambitious history teaching and suggests a tactic for a civics-infused history education course.     

Love's Cruel Promises

The paper argues that citizenship needs to be understood as a multi-layered construct, in which one's citizenship in collectivities in the different layers - local, ethnic, national, state, cross- or trans-state and supra-state - is affected and often at least partly constructed by the relationships and positionings of each layer in specific historical context. This is of particular imporance if we want to examine citizenship in a gendered non westocentric way. The paper explores some of the central issues which affect contemporary citizenships, in particular those relating to constructions of borders of boundaries, starting from the boundary between 'private' and 'public' and then looking at state borders and collectivities' boundaries. The effects on citizenship of the new modes of communication and transport, as well as the contradictory expansions and defensive closures of people's identities states are also explored.     

Citizenship on the margins: Citizenship,social work and social action

Drawing on a critical synthesis of the two main citizenship traditions, so as to construct citizenship as both a status and a practice, linked through the notion of human agency, the article explores citizenship's exclusionary and inclusionary sides within both a national and international framework. Within a national framework, the implications of citizenship's ‘false universalism’ are explored as the basis for a recasting of citizenship in a way that addresses the tension between universalism and particularity or difference. Within an international framework, a human rights perspective is introduced as a means of challenging citizenship's exclusion of nation state outsiders, most notably immigrants and asylum-seekers. This approach draws upon a multi-tiered conceptualisation of citizenship stretching from the local through to the global.

Some implications for social work practice and policy are then discussed in relation to support for active citizenship in deprived communities and anti-poverty action in which poor people themselves have a voice. This includes a brief consideration of political exclusion; the potential of self-help groups and community social work and development work; and user-involvement. The article concludes that citizenship offers social work a framework that embraces anti-poverty work, principles of partnership and anti-discriminatory practice and an inclusionary stance.     

Application cards: A classroom technique for teaching social work practice

This paper describes the use and evaluation of application cards as a teaching tool designed to enhance students' abilities to apply knowledge learned in social work practice classes. Strengths and limitations of this tool as a means for enhancing students' application skills are discussed, based on qualitative and quantitative evaluative data.     

Students' dreams for the future and perspectives on resilience-building aspects of their lives: The view from East Greenland

This study explores how perspectives from students can increase knowledge of how teachers and school authority can support students in building up resilience as a response to social challenges in the community. A locally flexible methodology using structured drawings (including classroom observation), semi-structured interviews, and semantic coding and situated analyses in a case study in East Greenland provided the following results: The students' aspirations were mostly about getting an education and a job and becoming socially successful. The students' motivation for attending school and doing educational assignments often depended on the social interaction with their teachers, and the students requested more involvement in decision-making processes at school to create more meaningful educational practices. If schools are to support the processes of building resilience and motivation for education, schools should include students' perspectives and encourage students' agency by listening to what they have to say.     

Perceptions of students' locus of control of discipline among pre‐service and in‐service teachers in multicultural classrooms

The purpose of this study was to determine teacher perceptions of students' behavior/misbehavior in the classroom, and the differences between pre‐service and in‐service teachers' perceptions of students' locus of control of discipline (i.e. the source of discipline) in multicultural classrooms. The study also investigated perceptions in three related dimensions of discipline: motivation, mechanism and the basis of discipline. Furthermore, the study generated data to determine whether culture was perceived as a factor in teachers' perceptions of students' locus of control of behavior in the classroom. Findings were intended to assist in determining choices for appropriate intervention strategies for use in effective discipline or management of behavior in multicultural classrooms.     

What Changes MSW Students' View on the Mission of Social Work?

Little is known about how professional social work education affects students' view on the social work mission. Using a secondary analysis of larger longitudinal data collected from masters in social work (MSW) students in California, USA, this study sought to explore the relationship among the students' demographic characteristics, their primary reasons for pursuing an MSW degree, and their view on the mission of social work at the time of entering an MSW program, whether the students' view on the mission of social work changed in the course of an MSW education, and factors contributing to a change of MSW students' view on the social work mission—individual adaptation vs societal change—between the beginning and the end of the MSW program. The results showed that students' degree of social action involvement, type of field practicum, and ideological variables predicted students' view changes or adherence between entering the MSW program and graduating.     

Governability and Women's Citizenship

SUMMARY

The fragility of Latin American democracies places the subject of gendered citizenship as an important issue in the context of a most needed democratic governability. This article first develops a proposed nexus between democratic governability and gender equality and assumes the need to place women within a universe of citizenship, as an inherently inclusive democratic perspective would require. We emphasize what we see as women's citizenship deficit according to a traditional definition of the political. The second part of the article analyzes the insertion of Mexican women in the construction of citizenship on the basis of empirical material drawn from the second National Survey on Political Culture and Practice of Citizenship. We then present some conclusions, with an eye on what Victoria Camps has called the public virtues, such as solidarity, responsibility and tolerance, as democratic values of the first order and as characteristics of a gendered citizenship within new political spaces. We believe the fragile democracies of Latin America and the important quality of democratic governability can be strengthened if a new form of gendered citizenship, more inclusive of women's concerns and practices, is recognized and nurtured.     

Community Social Structure and Issue Differentiation: A Study in the Political Sociology of Welfare

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to analyze a case of cross-cultural interaction as it bears on attitude formation and attitude change. Three hypotheses on the relationship between interaction, perception, and attitude are tested. Two sets of survey data on the Arab students' experience in the United States were collected before and after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. In absence of conflict (before the war) the Arab students' attitudes toward Americans seemed to be a function of (a) the students' perception of Americans' attitude toward the Arabs, and (b) the extent to which the students interact with Americans. Under conditions of crisis or conflict, however, the students' attitudes toward Americans seemed to be mainly a function of how they perceived Americans' attitudes toward the Arabs.     

Gender and Citizenship in a Global Context: The Struggle for Maquila Workers' Rights in Nicaragua

This article analyzes the strategic deployment of rights and citizenship discourses by a Nicaraguan women's organization (MEC) and the struggle that this group has faced in reconciling the use of these discourses with its aim of bringing about changes in the conditions faced by women workers in the Free Trade Zone (FTZ). Contestations regarding notions of citizenship are explored, and I discuss Nicaraguan state agents' and (to a lesser degree) maquila factory owners' use of notions of citizenship, and how they both coincide and conflict with neoliberal social and economic projects. The case of this Nicaraguan organization's discursive engagement with state actors sheds light on the question: How do ideologies linked to transnational social movements filter into regional and national discourses and become transformed by local actors? In addition, this case has important implications for the larger issue of changing state sovereignty within a global context. A contextualized approach to the strategic use of (human) rights and citizenship calls attention to the complex and situationally specific dilemmas and opportunities involved in adapting this "frame" to work for oppositional objectives. Furthermore, viewing rights and citizenship as always situational calls us to move away from narrow conceptualizations of structural transformation to a more complex and nuanced vision.     

COHORT AND GENDER DIFFERENCES IN EXTRACURRICULAR PARTICIPATION: THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ACTIVITIES,MATH ACHIEVEMENT,AND COLLEGE EXPECTATIONS

Using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 and the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002, I analyze the association that students' extracurricular activities have with two academic outcomes: mathematics achievement test scores and college expectations. I consider changes between cohorts and gender differences within each cohort. While prior achievement and expectations have the strongest associations with the dependent variables, relationships do appear between extracurricular participation and the dependent variables. There is only one cohort difference in the association between activities and math achievement test scores; computer use was positively associated with students' scores in the 1990s, but had no association with students' scores in the 2000s. School-sponsored activities were associated with higher scores for all students, while television-watching and hanging out with friends were negatively associated with them. School activities were positively associated with the college expectations of students in both cohorts, while spending time hanging out with friends was negatively associated with expectations, especially for students in the later cohort. There were a few gender differences in the association between activities and math scores, but no gender differences in the association between activities and college expectations. The findings indicate that many of the same activities are relevant for math achievement and college expectations in the two time periods.     

DIFFERENTIAL MODELS FOR MATH ANXIETY IN MALE AND FEMALE COLLEGE STUDENTS

The relative importance of several predictors of math anxiety were examined in multiple regression models. The predictors were test anxiety, ACT math scores, student perceptions of high-school math teachers' teaching ability (PHAM), student perceptions of college math teachers' teaching ability (PCAM), parental support for math skills (PSM), the length of time since completing high-school, number of college math classes taken, perceived math ability (PMA), and gender. No significant difference was found between the genders for amount of math anxiety. However, when separate analyses were conducted for males and females, different factors were significant for each gender. Specifically, males' math anxiety was most strongly related to general test anxiety and ACT math scores. Predictably, males' math anxiety increased as ACT math scores declined and test anxiety increased. In contrast, females' math anxiety was most strongly affected by students' PMA, PHAM, ACT, and general test anxiety. Females' math anxiety increased as PMA and PHAM declined. General test anxiety was positively related to math anxiety. Surprisingly, females' math anxiety increased as ACT math scores increased in the model. Explanations for the latter finding and recommendations for reducing math anxiety are discussed.     

Family Influences on College Students' Anticipated Work-Family Conflict,Social Self-Efficacy,and Self-Esteem

The authors sought to test work-family conflict (WFC) theory by examining how family relationships may influence WFC, social self-efficacy, and self-esteem. They developed and tested a structural model of the relationship between family career influence and self-esteem through the mediating variables of anticipated emotion-based WFC, behavior-based WFC, and the cognitive variable of social self-efficacy. Data were collected from 301 college students (208 women, 93 men) and analyzed using structural equation modeling. Results indicated that family career influence positively related to college students' self-esteem through the mediating variables of social self-efficacy and emotion-based WFC. Behavior-based WFC did not function as a mediating variable. When focusing on issues related to students' self-esteem, career counselors should address ways that family influences anticipated emotion-based WFC and use interventions designed to increase social self-efficacy. Future researchers should consider and test additional mediating factors that may help explain how the dimensions of WFC relate to self-esteem.     

Citizen Bodies: embodying citizens – a feminist analysis

The starting point for this paper is that bodies give substance to citizenship and that citizenship matters for bodies. However, the growing literatures on the body and on citizenship rarely 'speak to each other' in any straightforward sense. Feminist theory has made a significant contribution to both fields of thought,but once again the connections between these fields tend to be passing and underdeveloped. Feminist literature on citizenship – for example in discussions of participation – increasingly offers a critique of the model of the disembodied (supposedly universal) citizen as exclusionary and advocates taking bodies seriously (Lister; Yuval-Davis). Yet bodies appear in such discussions in quite limited ways and remain instrumentally conceived. On the other hand,the growing work on the body fromcontemporary feminist theorists has designated the body a political site par excellence (Grosz). Nevertheless, these writings are typically relatively abstract and philosophical, tend to perceive corporeal politics in circumscribed ways, and are positioned at a distance from political theorizing about implications for citizenship. We intend to consider how to flesh out the bodily element in feminist citizenship literature and how to interrogate the contextual sociality of the political in recent feminist theorizing of the body, in order to suggest ways of thinking about citizen bodies and related future directions for policy-making.     

Nurturing Citizens: Secure Attachment and Democratic Citizenship

Attachment research has been concerned with social policy issues as well as with individual pathology and dysfunction. This paper applies attachment theory to the large populations addressed by sociology and political science. It argues that modern citizenship requires qualities similar to those found in securely attached adults. It proposes an approach that links the development of adult citizenship behaviours with infant attachment style and the child's induction into the family's construction of reality. Discussion of the implications of this approach and proposals for future research complete the paper.     

Do We Need More “Doing” Activities or “Thinking” Activities in the Field Practicum?

How do MSW students learn new professional skills in the field practicum? Does students' reflection affect the use of other learning activities during the field practicum? Students in field practica participate in activities that involve observation, doing (participatory), and conceptual linkage. In this study of MSW students, conceptual linkage activities represent students' overall reflective capacity to integrate classroom theory and field practice. The results indicate that conceptual linkage activities are more strongly related to learning outcomes than observation or participatory activities. There is also a significant interaction effect between participatory activities and conceptual linkage activities when students' satisfaction is considered. Discussion includes suggestions for increasing students' reflection to integrate classroom and field.     

News and Comment

This article tells the story of a classroom teacher's journey with her elementary students as they attempt to understand and define citizenship. The narrative highlights the process of using an emergent curriculum, creating a democratic classroom, and facilitating an active citizenship project led by students. The authors provide steps to help classroom teachers implement a social action curriculum, and they also include children's literature connections.