Students as Citizens: Conceptions of Citizenship in a Social Studies Curriculum

Abstract

This article investigates representations of citizenship in a provincial, Social Studies Grade 9 curriculum in Canada to better understand how the document conceptualizes global education and differing worldviews, and to determine how these conceptions are supported by two Ministry of Education resource documents that compliment Social Studies 9: the Broad Areas of Learning and Cross-curricular Competencies. All three documents were analyzed using a citizenship conception model and a global citizenship framework. Our analysis of the curriculum and supporting documents that draws upon a four-stage dialectical-relational model of critical discourse analysis revealed that the majority of curricular indicators espoused a deliberative or social justice conception of citizenship. Although a similar finding was supported by the types of citizenship taken up in the two Ministry resource documents, our study revealed that that the resource documents profiled a more participatory form of citizenship than in the curriculum.