Reading Note #3: Citizenship Education and Diversity: Implications for Teacher Education

            This article highlighted the incredible need for a reconceptualization of citizenship education because of the salience of diversity issues across the world. Increasing racial, ethnic, cultural and language diversity is a reality in most schools but most teachers and administrators have proven to be incapable or ill equipped to address the issues that arise with this growth in diversity (and subsequent needs). Banks (2008) argues for the establishment of “multicultural citizenship” which will enable students to acquire a “delicate balance of cultural, national, and global identifications and to understand the ways in which knowledge is constructed, to become knowledge producers; and to participate in civic action to create a more human nation and world” (p. 317).

            Banks proposes that one of the challenges that many pluralistic democratic nation-states are currently facing is finding and providing opportunities for cultural and ethnic groups to “maintain components of their community cultures while at the same time constructing a nation-state in which diverse groups are structurally included and to which they feel an allegiance” (p. 317-318). The gap that currently exists between the ideals and realities in these nation states have resulted in the rise of ethnic revitalization movements in countries such as the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom in the 1960s and 1970s. Banks goes on to discuss how citizenship education has been traditionally conceptualized. An assimilationist approach has been the preferred (or imposed) method with Anglo-conformity as the goal of citizenship education. The repercussions of this approach were many students feeling alienated and disconnected from not only their first cultures and languages but also from their own family.

            Multicultural citizenship, a concept by Kymlicka and presented by Banks, is a new type of citizenship that is needed in the 21^st century in order to properly address the diversity and new cultural communities that have arisen. Multicultural citizenship “recognizes and legitimizes the right and need of citizens to maintain commitments both to their ethnic and cultural communities and to the national civic culture” (p. 320). Throughout this article, Banks is a strong proponent of not only having strong local, national connections but also developing clarified global identifications and students understanding their roles within the world community. Citizenship education, therefore, must teach students to know, to care and to act.

            Banks considers the difference between mainstream academic knowledge and transformative academic knowledge, particularly in relation to knowledge construction. Mainstream academic knowledge involves the concepts, theories and explanations that constituted traditional and established knowledge. They are taken to be true and objective. Transformative academic knowledge, on the other hand, involves the concepts, theories and explanations that challenge mainstream academic knowledge. Transformative scholars believe that one’s own personal values, social context and features such as race, class and gender influence knowledge. A great value of transformative knowledge is its potential ability to change society and to make it more just and humane. Transformative academic knowledge is the type of knowledge that we as teachers should be using in order to help our own students to understand and investigate how knowledge is constructed. When our students participate knowledge construction, they begin to challenge the mainstream metanarrative

            I found this reading incredibly useful to my own teaching practices and my development as a culturally sensitive, inclusive educator. Ontario is Canada’s “most diverse” province, which indicates the need for all teachers to learn about different cultures, races, religions and languages in order to be effective teachers and foster positive learning environments for all students. Perhaps the greatest strength of the article in my opinion was Banks’ focus on the need to change teacher education programs and how we are (not) currently preparing new teachers to teach citizenship and civic education. I found the discussion presented on the demographics of teachers today and how they often have difficulty relating to their culturally diverse students even if they traditionally came from marginalized groups because they have been forced to assimilate in order to be successful in their professional environment. Recently, there appears to be an increasing “concern” or focus on citizenship in curriculum yet very few teachers programs put an emphasis on discussing the concept and how to effectively teach about citizenship in an inclusive, thoughtful way. Banks highlights insightfully the need for teacher education programs, and teachers themselves, to challenge the metanarrative that currently exists. Though there is a lot of “talk” on reform of curriculum, teacher education programs, I question how prepared professors and policy writers are in starting and delivering these important conversations.

            One of the questions that this article prompted for myself was on the relationship between local and global citizenship. In order to be an effective citizen in the “global community” as Banks argues for, it is required to first be an effective citizen at the local level? Do these “skills” develop in tandem or does one necessitate the other?

A limitation of the article that popped up in my mind was the omission of discussing intersectionality. Intersectionality is the idea that categories of identification, be it age, class, education, gender expression, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, religion etc., are experienced simultaneously and cannot be genuinely separated from one another. All too often, our discussions surrounding diversity focus on specific categories of identification and forgetting others or taking into consideration the layers. Citizenship and civic education rely heavily on the ability to “construct clarified identifications” (p. 324). This can only truly be achieved if teachers begin recognizing that many diversity categories will impact how students identify with the communities and nation as well as understand how to approach these discussions.

Banks, J. (2008). Citizenship education and diversity: Implications for teacher education.

In Peter, M. Britton, A. & Blee, H. (Eds.), Global citizenship education (pp. 317-332.) Rotterdam: Sense.