Educating for Culturally Competent Citizenship
AQPC Annual Symposium Québec City, June 2016
Alan Sears
[email protected]
Issues in Canadian Citizenship
Issues in Canadian
Citizenship
Issues in Canadian
Citizenship
Issues in Canadian
Citizenship
The Complex Contemporary Diversity of the Canadian
State
• National Minorities
• Indigenous Minorities
• Immigrant Minorities
“Canada is distinctive in having to deal with all
three forms of diversity at the same time and in the extent to which it has not only legislated but also constitutionalized, practices of accommodation.”
Kymlicka (2003)
Complex Questions of Canadian Citizenship
• What are reasonable accommodations for diversity?
• How are the rights of different kinds of minority groups enshrined in law in Canada?
• Are these rights adequate and adequately protected?
• How should we enact constitutional guarantees of minority language education rights?
• How do we balance fiscal responsibility and rights to educational services?
• What does it mean to be treaty people?
• How can we build positive relationships between indigenous peoples and settlers?
The Québec Context
“After a year of research and
consultation, we have come to the conclusion that the foundations of
collective life in
Québec are not in a critical situation.”
Gérard Bouchard and Charles Taylor, 2008
The Global Context
“Growing ethnic and religious diversity in Europe poses both opportunities and
challenges to Europe- and policy-makers and societies as a whole. It is expected that this
diversity will continue to increase.”
Van Driel et al., 2016
The Global Context
China How to incorporate the citizens of Macau and Hong Kong into the Chinese state.
Singapore How to create a single national identity among Malay, Chinese, South Asian Communities while maintaining the creative and economic advantages of diversity.
European Union How to develop a pan European sense of identity and citizenship while maintaining and celebrating national distinctives.
Brazil How to include Afro-Brazilians and Indigenous Peoples in the national story.
England Should Britishness be taught in schools and, if so, what is it?
China/Hong Kong The relationship of the citizens of Macau and Hong Kong with the Chinese state.
Singapore How to create a single national identity among Malay, Chinese, South Asian Communities while maintaining the creative and economic advantages of diversity.
European Union How to develop a pan European sense of identity and citizenship while maintaining and celebrating national distinctiveness.
Brazil How to include Afro-Brazilians and Indigenous Peoples in the national story.
England Should Britishness be taught in schools and, if so, what is it?
Cultural Competence
“Intercultural Competence refers to the ability that people can develop through exposure to the ‘other’ or experience and education as to this respect. It is perhaps best defined as:
‘the ability to communicate effectively in cross-cultural situations and to
relate appropriately in a variety of cultural contexts’ (Bennett, 2004, p.
149).”
Quoted in Van Driel et al., 2016
Culturally Competent Citizenship
• Culturally competent citizens see ethno-cultural diversity not as a problem for democratic societies to “solve,” but an important and complex element of civic context.
• Culturally Competent Citizens Are Reflectively Self-Aware: They have a critical understanding of the situated and contingent nature of their own culture and worldview.
• Culturally Competent Citizens Avoid the “Big Sort”: They find points of contact and engage in personal, cultural, and civic activities with
individuals and communities different from themselves.
• Culturally Competent Citizens Understand How History Works As a Vehicle for Personal and Corporate Identity Formation: They know something about how people and groups (including their own)
understand themselves temporally; how they situate themselves in the past, present, and future.
• Culturally Competent Citizens Are Religiously Literate: They recognize the central role of faith and religious life in identity formation for individuals and groups and strive to understand religious perspectives.
Ethno-Cultural Diversity as Civic Context
Questions about the reasonable
accommodation of immigrant groups, the preservation of official language minority rights, and the fostering of Aboriginal rights, the balancing of
state power, security, and individual
rights permeate political and social
discourse in Canada.
Ethno-Cultural Diversity as Civic Context
“It is the citizen route that we wish to emphasize, for three reasons.
• First, in strictly quantitative terms, it carries much more weight than the legal route . . .
• The second reason for emphasizing the citizen sphere lies in the advantage or the necessity of encouraging citizens to resolve their own conflicts and reach compromises that satisfy both parties instead of divisive verdicts . . .
• Third, the values to be promoted in respect of the citizen route are precisely those that underpin
interculturalism, i.e. exchanges, negotiation, agreement and reciprocity,
rather than confrontation and division.”
Bouchard & Taylor, 2008
Ethno-Cultural Diversity as Civic Context
“The investigation of the cases that received the most widespread media attention during this period of turmoil reveals that, in 15 of 21 cases, there were striking distortions
between general public perceptions and the actual facts as we were able to reconstitute them. In other words, the negative
perception of reasonable accommodation
that spread in the public often centred on an erroneous or partial perception of
practices in the field”
Bouchard & Taylor, 2008
Ethno-Cultural Diversity as Civic Context in Europe
"The Spanish state is considered to be a multinational state (e.g. Stojanovic, 2011) with at least three different national
identities prevailing within it (the Castilian / Spanish identity, the Catalan identity, and the Basque identity) that coexist in multiple combinations.”
Sant et al., 2015
Reflective Self-Awareness
As a Canadian born individual, I have viewed myself as not really having an ethnicity, except that of
being Canadian….As an adolescent, I met some
people from different backgrounds (Jewish, Scottish, British, Catholic, Armenian, African, Mexican, French Canadian, Italian, Spanish). I came to know the
above ethnicities/cultures and was fascinated by their different beliefs, customs, traditions,
languages and food. I inwardly wished I had a more interesting family origin/culture. - Elaine
Reflective Self-Awareness
• Ethnic identity is an external element and not something that is internal or intrinsic to one’s identity.
• Expressing one’s ethnicity is always a matter of individual choice.
• Not understanding that identity is also, in part, group-defined and that the
expression of certain aspects of one’s
ethnic identity is – or at least might be – in some ways involuntary.
Avoiding “The Big Sort”
“One challenge to creating a political classroom that does not reify the behaviors and values of polarization is
structuring courses so that students encounter people who are different from
themselves in ways that make democratic deliberation truly democratic.”
Hess and McAvoy, 2015 – The Political Classroom
Avoiding “The Big Sort”
“School policies that encourage ethnic mixing create conditions for inter-ethnic cooperation and fostering tolerance.
However, simply bringing young people from different backgrounds together physically is not sufficient to reduce prejudice and
develop positive intercultural relations;
schools need to create the conditions for all children and school staff to develop their
intercultural competence.”
Van Driel et al., 2016
Understanding How History Works
“Currently, despite transformations in school curricula and historical content in many countries, the teaching of
history is still intimately related to the construction of individual identity and the transmission of collective
memory . . . From this perspective, identifying the purpose of history
education revives the tension between the enlightenment and romantic
objectives and the issue of whether history teaching should produce
educated citizens of the world or patriotic nationalists.”
Carretero et al., 2012
Understanding How History Works
“In contrast with students elsewhere, Catalan students seem to narrate a decline history.
Whereas American students (Levstik &
Barton, 1998) and English students (Lee, 2004) narrate a progressive history and German students (von Borries, 1997) and Northern Irish students (Barton, 2002)
narrate an ambivalent history, Catalan
students narrate an ambivalent history that, in the Catalan case, ends with a traumatic event or dramatic climax.”
Sant et al., 2015
Understanding How History Works
“Je me souviens”
"History exists as a hard-won achievement. It makes
higher demands than
'memory,' not because its individual practitioners are superior to anyone else, but because it is a public form of knowledge.”
Lee, 2012
Being Religiously Literate
“Liberal democracies, including
Québec, all adhere to the principle of secularism, which can nonetheless be embodied in different systems. Any secular system achieves some form of balance between the following four principles: 1. the moral equality of persons; 2. freedom of conscience and religion; 3. the separation of Church and State; and 4. State
neutrality in respect of religious and deep-seated secular convictions.”
Bouchard and Taylor, 2008
Being Religiously Literate
“We don't live in a secular age; we live in a pluralist age.”
Berger, 2016
Being Religiously Literate
“The religion and belief dimension is a critical aspect of a child’s social-emotional
development. It also has the potential to
promote respect for diversity. Yet at present it is insufficiently addressed in European school systems. Member States should develop
strategies to implement education about religion, belief and value systems that are inclusive and at the same time will not be seen as a threat to secularism.”
Van Driel et al., 2016
Culturally Competent Citizenship
• Culturally competent citizens see ethno-cultural diversity not as a problem for democratic societies to “solve” but an important and complex element of civic context.
• Culturally Competent Citizens Are Reflectively Self-Aware: They have a critical understanding of the situated and contingent nature of their own culture and worldview.
• Culturally Competent Citizens Avoid the “Big Sort”: They find points of contact and engage in personal, cultural, and civic activities with
individuals and communities different from themselves.
• Culturally Competent Citizens Understand How History Works As a Vehicle for Personal and Corporate Identity Formation: They know something about how people and groups (including their own)
understand themselves temporally; how they situate themselves in the past, present, and future.
• Culturally Competent Citizens Are Religiously Literate: They recognize the central role of faith and religious life in identity formation for individuals and groups and strive to understand religious perspectives.
