Symposium: Monitoring Citizenship Education in Europe and Beyond

Even though many legal documents assign citizenship education an important role in education (e.g. Council of Europe 2010), neither the domain on the national level, nor on the supranational level is well established within Europe (Keating 2014; Grimonprez 2020). In addition to a general weak representation in curricula, citizenship education is characterised by very heterogeneous approaches to implementation within and between countries (Eurydice 2017). This further contributes to a low profile and visibility. Notwithstanding, there is a growing and unsatisfied demand for effective citizenship education to put up with growing social transformation and to fight the “deconsolidation of democracy” (Foa & Mounk 2016).
In this situation, the discourse on educational policy could profit from monitoring citizenship education (Abs 2021). Monitoring does provide structured information on the level of education systems, not on the individual level. It selects, collects and presents information characterized by its representativeness and regular recurrence, so that a time series can be formed.
While in former times monitoring was more about, whether education is available at all, nowadays it is about the “right to quality education” (Council of Europe 2017). The historical focus shifted from monitoring the mere availability of civic education to questions addressing also the process (e.g. concrete contents of the lessons held) and outcome of civic education (e.g. competencies acquired by the students). Today there is even a danger to misuse the notion of quality as a synonym for student outcomes according to given standards (Scherman & Bosker 2017). Over the last two decades, especially international large-scale assessment of student achievement supports a concentration of policy discourses on student outcomes in the so-called core domains of education, while other domains as citizenship education have been marginalised. For these domains, monitoring is a strategy to regain attention by the public and by policy makers and to provide a basis for policy reform. In doing so it will be important not to focus exclusively on student outcomes, which might lead to “naming and blaming games” instead of improved education. Monitoring needs to contextualise outcomes and to relate them to malleable antecedents.
In this sense, the information gathered and provided in monitoring citizenship education may relate to the provision/availability of educational resources in terms of infrastructure and personnel. It may relate to the access to various types of education for target groups. It relates to the qualification of educators and educational processes, and it relates to student’s learning results as well as their effects on society. In doing so, monitoring has the potential to connect the empirical description of the domain with the above-mentioned challenge of “deconsolidation of democracy”.
On this background the following questions for the development of monitoring citizenship education come up/ are of high relevance. The symposium aims to shed a light on these questions from the perspective of currently ongoing monitoring initiatives.
- What are suitable/ adequate selection criteria for indicators?
- On what basis will be decided about the structure and content of monitoring reports?
- What kind of existing datasets can be employed for monitoring?
- How can the monitoring of citizenship education be connected with existing practices of monitoring in education?
- How can research contribute to increase the usage of monitoring results