Democratic Citizenship Education in Non-Western Contexts: Implications for Theory and Research

This book examines the issues of theorizing citizenship education research in non-Western societies that have embarked on democratic development after the fall of authoritarianism and colonialism.

Despite a proliferation of studies on citizenship and citizenship education in non-Western contexts, there has been limited theorization of this research and little discussion of the applicability to such contexts of Western theoretical frameworks. This volume addresses these issues through empirical case studies of citizenship conceptions, practices, and education in South and West Africa, Latin America, Central Europe, and the Middle East. The contributors to the volume call into question the uncritical application of Western theoretical frameworks to non-Western societies and advocate for the development and wider application of new paradigms rooted in local processes and indigenous knowledge to better understand and theorize citizenship and citizenship education in such societies.

This volume will be of interest to scholars, researchers, and practitioners working in the field of comparative and international citizenship education. It was originally published as a special issue of Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education.

Serhiy Kovalchuk is a Research Associate and Lecturer at the University of Toronto, Canada. His research interests include democratic citizenship education, comparative and international education, and qualitative research methods. His work has appeared in Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, European Education: Issues and Studies, and the Journal of Ukrainian Politics and Society. He is a co-editor of Reimagining Utopias: Theory and Method for Educational Research in Post-Socialist Contexts (2017).

Anatoli Rapoport is an Associate Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at Purdue University, USA. He is editor of the Journal of International Social Studies and past Chair of the Citizenship and Democratic Education Special Interest Group of the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES). His research interests include global aspects of citizenship education, comparative education, and constructivist theory. He is the author of Fields Unknown: Russian and American Teachers on Their International Exchange Experiences (2007), co-author of Civic Education in Contemporary Global Society (in Russian, 2009), and editor of Competing Frameworks: Global and National in Citizenship Education (2018).