Citizenship education: emerging meanings in the context of social crisis

Abstract

Objective: This paper is contextualized in the Chilean social crisis of 2019 that confronted society with the discussion about the legitimacy of the main foundations of its political, social and economic system. It aims at describing the meanings attributed by history and geography teachers’ trainees to citizenship education, considering their experience of participating in the crisis.

Methods: The study was conducted through content analysis following a qualitative approach. The corpus reviewed corresponds to seven first person accounts, that were analyzed from three aprioristic dimensions (civic skills and abilities, civic knowledge and values ​​in citizenship education formation) and two emerging dimensions (emotions and pedagogical functions of citizenship education).

Results: The findings show that citizenship education, as an area of ​​knowledge that is a component of the educational system, acquires meanings in which conceptual dimensions of the theoretical field, skills and civic competences coexist, in addition to value-based orientations, in which it is impossible to subtract the emergence of the emotional as a reflexive domain that leads to the construction of pedagogical meaning.

Conclusion: The main conclusions show that the challenges in teacher education lie in integrating the dimensions of citizen formation in reflective exercises, assuming that crises are learning scenarios in which democracy is built through civic self-intervention.