Participation Experiences and Civic Concepts, Attitudes and Engagement: implications for citizenship education projects

This article considers participation experiences of 14 year-old and upper secondary students in six European countries that were involved in the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) Civic Education Study: the Czech Republic, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, Sweden and Switzerland, countries that vary in their history of institution of democratic regimes. Participation has been considered as a crucial dimension of citizenship, and experiences within civil society are viewed as a relevant opportunity for developing personal and social resources essential for the survival and expansion of democracy. Additionally, participation experiences in adolescence seem to be a good predictor of political engagement during adult life. Results show that participation is most evident in organisations that provide enrichment activities (sports, music, computers), but both 14 year-old and upper secondary students are involved in voluntary activities, in some civic-related organisations (mainly Scouts, religious affiliated and environmental), and in experiences within the school (with student councils and school newspapers at the top). However, cross-national and cross-age variations are significant. Overall, there seems to be a positive impact of the frequency of students’ involvement on civic concepts, attitudes and engagement, but results also reveal that more is not necessarily better. The most relevant implication for the development of citizenship education projects is that ‘action’ can be a powerful learning tool but only if it is intentionally designed and systematically supported: the quality of participation experiences, both in terms of meaningful involvement, of interaction with (different) others, and opportunities for personal integration, is therefore crucial if the goal is to promote the personal empowerment and social pluralism on which the essence of democracy relies. Renewed interest in citizenship is visible across several disciplines and discourses since the 1990s (Van Steenbergen, 1994), making citizenship, as Ignatieff (1995) puts it, a contemporary ‘myth that appeals to our political imagination’ (p. 53). European educational policies have followed this general PARTICIPATION EXPERIENCES 431 trend, with a particular emphasis on citizenship education as a crucial goal of education emerging since the mid-1990s (Menezes, forthcoming) [1] due to the recognition of the growing phenomena of social exclusion, discrimination and political disengagement, together with diluted feelings of social belonging and cohesion (Torney-Purta et al, 1999). The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) Civic Education Study also departs from this acknowledgement of participation deficits in our democracies and aims to explore how young people construct meaning out of the political world, in terms of knowledge, competencies, attitudes and behaviours (Torney-Purta, 1994). In the context of the IEA study, analysis of civic engagement and participation of 14 year-olds and upper secondary students included a diversity of attitudes and behaviours. In this article, we will analyse European students’ political experiences both within and outside the school and their impact in dimensions of civic concepts, attitudes and engagement, within six countries in the IEA Civic Education Study, which tested both younger and older adolescents: the Czech Republic, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, Sweden, and Switzerland.[2] It should be noted that these countries include both societies with long-established democratic traditions (Norway, Sweden and Switzerland), and countries (Czech Republic, Portugal, and Slovenia) that have only experienced democratic transitions in the last three decades. On the Relevance of Political Engagement and Participation for Democracy Even a brief analysis of the field of citizenship theory reveals that citizenship is far from being a consensual, fixed-meaning concept (Dahrendrof, 1994; Van Steenbergen, 1994; Kymlicka & Norman, 1995; Carter & Stokes, 1998; Janoski, 1998; Benhabib, 1999; Torres, 2001). However, there seems to be some agreement that citizenship contains both a normative, formal dimension, which regards ‘the belonging by individuals [within a political community] [3] ... of certain universalistic passive and active rights on a specified level of equality’ (Janoski, 1998, p. 9), and a sociological dimension, involving the individual’s feelings of belonging to the community and daily experiences that entail exercising one’s rights and duties (Benhabib, 1999). Even if the emphasis on citizenship within educational discourses does not explicitly recognise this dual dimension of the concept, it is in fact the tension between the two features of citizenship, normative and sociological, that accounts for the criticism that the project of equality that underlies citizenship failed (Ignatieff, 1995), and that underneath claims for (formal) universality is a pressure for homogeneity that denies and represses individual and group differences (Young, 1995) – a discussion that is not only at the core of contemporary citizenship theory (e.g. Beiner, 1995), but has also relevant educational implications. Emphasis on a formal dimension would limit citizenship education to a mere ‘mechanism of diffusion, socialization and recognition of