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Introduction
The purpose of this context paper is to review the recent research and policy that may have implications for the Snapshot project. It first outlines the key relevant aspects of the English citizenship curriculum, then provides a summary of some of the latest critical and theoretical thinking in the area. Secondly, it summarises the key relevant aspects of the discussion on new technology and media and their implications for the citizenship curriculum. Thirdly, it provides a short analysis of the role of computer games in learning, and congruencies there with the aims of the citizenship and media studies curricula. Finally, it identifies a number of implications for the design of the Snapshot project arising from these readings.
Citizenship in the curriculum
In England, schools are now required to teach a citizenship curriculum to students from Year 3 in the primary level up to the end of GCSE. Snapshot is being designed for use by students from the upper end of Key Stage 3 (age 13-14) through Key Stage 4 (15-16). The themes in these stages are wide-ranging and reflect local, national and global concerns, topical political, spiritual, moral, social and cultural issues, as well as specific subjects such as human rights, the privacy laws, multiculturalism, children's rights, and the role of the media in society. Owing to this diversity in the citizenship curriculum, this document will next briefly describe the area most relevant to the project: media. The subject of the media in citizenship is run in a series of discrete units throughout the key stages, but also figures more widely across every area of the citizenship curriculum; children are expected to develop an understanding of the role of media across many citizenship debates.
By the end of Key Stage 3 students are expected to be able to demonstrate knowledge of how significant the media's role is in putting across different views, understand how topical issues are portrayed and other events (such as sports) publicised; they should also understand how the media can promote particular causes, and its effects on individuals' rights and responsibilities.
In Key Stage 4 students are expected to take part in discussions about content and technical aspects of media production, recognise the importance of editorial decision-making processes in the media, to be able to ascertain bias in reports, and recognise the role that media plays in shaping and/or manipulating public opinion. They are also expected to be able to act as producers of media, and to actively participate in the development of a news story through different media (newspaper, radio, TV, internet) through which they may explore differing opinions and views, and to be able to debate issues such as the importance of a free press.
Throughout the media in citizenship schemes there is also an emphasis on developing skills of participation and responsible action to allow them to become active stakeholders in their schools and communities rather than simply consumers. This is of course a highly theorised area, and it is worth here exploring some key points from the debates.
Citizenship, participation and social responsibility
Citizenship as an explicit curricular subject is still in its infancy, having become a statutory subject in England in September 2002, based on the framework of the 1998 Crick Report (Crick 1998). The report proposed that citizenship education should provide 'moral and social development', encourage 'community involvement', and develop students' 'political literacy', but it is not an uncontroversial report: other researchers have contested its definition of citizenship. Davies (1999), for example, has identified nearly 300 definitions of citizenship education. At the level of curricular implementation in schools, too, there are some tensions. Notably, the restrictions imposed on students' participation in shaping institutional practices at some schools can be counterproductive to the key messages of citizenship education (Deakin Crick et al 2004). A further issue has been lack of clarity, which has led to the confusion, identified by the CSV report on citizenship one year after introduction as a statutory subject, of some teachers between active citizenship and volunteering:
Active learning in the community demands that young people are fully involved in the preparation and planning and, most importantly, have opportunities to reflect on their learning (CSV 2003: p7).
Nevertheless, citizenship has broadly been introduced by the DfES with some flexibility, allowing educators to focus on the needs and concerns of relevance to their students in order to achieve the general objectives, rather than imposing a top-down approach to educating for some notional, and national, citizenry. Citizenship is a process; it is not a learning objective in and of itself.
In a review of the literature on citizenship, Neil Selwyn endorses a 'maximal' approach to citizenship education which emphasises educating for citizenship. This sort of approach encourages learning through doing - by participating in active experiences in the school, community and beyond - and also highlights the importance of equipping students with a set of tools (knowledge and understanding, skills and aptitudes, values and dispositions) which enable them to participate actively and sensibly in the roles and responsibilities they encounter in their adult lives (Selwyn 2002: 8-9). Arthur and Davison (2000), similarly, discriminate between passive citizenship education which seeks to develop knowledge, understandings and behaviours for future participation in UK democracy, and active citizenship education which enables young people not only to develop knowledge, understandings and behaviours, but also to develop the skills to "critique, debate, and even take a leadership role in proposing alternative models of the structures and processes of democracy" (11). Such 'social literacy', as they term it, empowers learners to engage and participate in social activities - not simply to learn about culturally accepted social activities and behaviours.
Indeed, participation has become one of the buzzwords of the citizenship campaign, not only in the UK but across Europe. Amongst others, Marc Jans (2004) identifies the growing popularity of child participation strategies in citizenship education as symptomatic of the changing conditions of contemporary society, and the circumstances brought about by the same economic, political and social imperatives which affect adults' lives; namely, by two, seemingly opposite, tendencies in late modern society: globalisation and individualisation. Children and young people nowadays (in the West, at least) are likely to share the same cultural and leisure pursuits as those on other quarters of the globe; at the same time they are able to claim their own individual agencies outside of the institutions of the family, school and work, and to develop their own lifestyles and (sub)cultures, as well as rights, values and norms, that are separate from those of the adult sphere. It is this apparent set of opposites which has brought about the discourses of participation which "aim to bring about new connections between the individual and the community" (Jans 2004: 30). It is, then, no longer acceptable for the concerns and attitudes of adulthood to be impressed upon childhood as a model of citizenship to be learned and subsequently entered into. Children's citizenship education needs to, and is beginning to, offer young people opportunities for participation in the complexities of actual citizenship rather than simply preparing them for future citizenship.
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