Since the Crick Report, active citizenship has been promoted as a vehicle for
enhancing community involvement and political literacy among school and
higher education students. This ostensibly progressive educational and social
goal is beset with a number of tensions and contradictions, notably around the
nature of participation and between enhancing social control and encouraging
political engagement. This article examines the various tensions surrounding
citizenship education with reference to an evaluation of an innovative undergraduate
sociology module called ‘Teaching Citizenship’. The aim of the module
was to provide students with an experience of active citizenship based on local
community involvement that took the form of students’ facilitating citizenship
education at two secondary modern schools. Drawing upon evaluation research
findings, the article discusses the ways in which the sociology students actively
negotiated the dilemmas of participation and power characteristic of citizenship
education.
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