Citizenship Education and Multiculturalism : The Needs of Educators within the Contemporary Multicultural Context

Within the last decade, citizenship has emerged as a key topic of debate within social, political and educational spheres. The heightened interest in this area has been marked by the government’s positioning of citizenship as a core subject within secondary education in Britain in 2002. The establishment of citizenship education within the current school curriculum came about as a result of the Final Report of the Advisory Group on Citizenship (Crick Report), published in September 1998, and the consultation that ensued. This Advisory Group was convened amongst mounting fears for the health and stability of British democracy. At the centre of these concerns was the perceived political apathy of young people in Britain. This problem has come to the fore amidst rapid changes within the modern world that have influenced the nature of societal relationships and have shifted and strained traditional boundaries of citizenship. Despite the commendable claims of the Crick Report, the intersection of current citizenship education and contemporary theories of multiculturalism is an essentially contentious one. Since the development of the citizenship education syllabus a number of criticisms have been raised concerning the ‘narrow liberal’ ideologies that have been detected within the report (Olssen, 2004). It is against the backdrop of these debates that questions have arisen concerning the adequateness of the current citizenship education agenda for contemporary multicultural society. This paper is based on a piece of research that has explored the views and beliefs of citizenship educators (coordinators and teachers) and young people from black and minority ethnic (BME) communities, concerning the citizenship agenda. In particular, this research has investigated the preparedness of citizenship educators to meet the needs and aspirations of young people from BME groups and what they feel is required in terms of training and professional development to enable them to meet these needs more effectively. The evidence gathered, indicates that citizenship as a recently developed area of study, poses a number of challenges to educators. It is important that these challenges are adequately tackled within teacher-training in order to enable educators to confidently construct a portrayal of citizenship that is appropriate for the post-modern multicultural society and can meet the needs of BME young people living within this context.