Giovanna Barzanò, October 2005
In our proposal we have promised to investigate the relationship between "school culture" and "citizenship education" in order to gather new understandings on how the school can develop effective policies to tackle the issues of citizenship and what competences teachers need to accomplish the tasks that this objective implies. On the basis of this understandings the second macro phase of our project will be implemented, concerning the definition of the framework of competencies, the selection of exemplary practices and the development of training materials and modules.
Therefore the first phase of the project, lasting from the beginning until the end of the first year, is concerned with some research. This should include:
Re 1
the issues of school culture and citizenship education, despite their apparent self-evidence, confront us with a multiplicity of meanings, definitions and approaches.
We should interrogate the available literature, as well as our experience, in order to select our own perspective and to share common definitions of both, so that we can better define the rationale of our study.
I propose to concentrate on the more "manipulable" aspects of school culture, the ones which are produced through interactions within the school and may change when different policies are implemented and different practices are in use (Solvason 2005). In particular cooperation, participation and decision making should be considered, with respect to both pupils and teachers.
I also propose to put more emphasis on the social, affective and participatory dimensions of citizenship rather than on the cognitive and political ones. The former are in fact linked to the more informal and deep aspects of the teaching-learning processes. If we regard the school as the first place where citizenship as participation can be practiced, then it is important to understand to what extent schools do offers opportunities in this respect, how these opportunities occur, what competencies are necessary to be able to create a suitable and rich learning environment (Varnham 2005).
Re 2
The aim of the case study exploratory research which is at the core of this years’ activity is to provide us with an overview of what is meant with citizenship education, in a broader sense, in the specific "culture" of a group of schools belonging to different countries. Hence the school should be considered as the unit of analysis, but the normative context in which schools operate, i.e. the way educational systems frame the curriculum, should also be taken into consideration.
Given the cross-national, comparative dimension of our overview, it would be useful to have some "fresh" analysis of the way citizenship education appears in the curriculum in our countries. Within the framework of a Comenius 2 project on citizenship, coordinated by the Regional School Office for Lombardy (the institution to which we belong) and just concluded, a comparative study has been produced by the University of Geneve, concerning this topic. The study includes three countries of our interest: Italy, Catalunia-Spain and England besides Sweden, Portugal and France. We could consider to expand this study, using the same categories of analysis for Norway and the Czech Republic. The report is now in French, but an English version is going to be produced soon.
Another interesting work in this respect is the recent Eurydice report "Citizenship education at school"(2005).
Our discussion, together with the review of some relevant literature, should therefore lead us to frame the scenario of the case studies we have to implement. This will include thinking of the overall design: aims and content, methods, data collection… In other words we have to decide together what we are looking for, taking into consideration an array of possibilities.
To this extent it is important to draw our attention on the difference between exploratory and exemplary case studies. While we have also promised a selection of some exemplary practices, at this preliminary stage, it could be advisable to stick to a more exploratory approach, which leaves us freer to discover weaknesses and strengths.
An important aspect of case study data collection is the use of multiple sources of evidence (documentary analysis, interviews, focus groups with different actors) converging on the same set of issues ( Yin 1993): this will be a challenge for us, since we have to stick to our resources in terms of time, efforts and last but not least, money.
To this extent the "logistic" is also important: how many cases, where, when. When we have a meaningful picture of what the interest of our institution is in developing understanding and activities on the issues concerned with the project, maybe we can come out with some creative solution which allow us to expand our resources , virtually or concretely, combining different objectives.
While a subgroup meeting is foreseen to define in details the case studies planning, it is important that we come to a clear, although general, idea of what we want, during this plenary meeting.
The case studies’ results should lead us to identify ideas, interesting practices, needs, which will offer us a basis to develop our conceptualisation of competences as well as our training materials and activities.
