In: Citizenship as a Challenge
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Abstract
Are young people compliant, standardised, or agentive citizens in the making? How do they, or how might they, represent the future-oriented multi-literate citizens envisaged in Aotearoa New Zealand’s schooling curriculum? The author’s experiences as a teacher educator, and her sustained involvement in national history and social sciences curriculum and assessment initiatives, inform her interest in the cultural politics of curriculum. From a critical pedagogy stance, the chapter examines ways in which New Zealand’s curriculum policy shaping conceptualises young citizens across thirteen years of primary and secondary years of learning. Accordingly, the national curriculum is conceived as a culturally constructed and contested site of intentions, pedagogical approaches, and standardised outputs. Cross-disciplinary notions of citizenship are examined in the contexts of curriculum policy, and discursive production. Whilst national curriculum decision-making ‘plays out’ through dynamic processes and structures, the enacted curriculum continues to socialise teachers and young people within enduring master narratives. Assumptions of who counts, or who is visible as a citizen in a future-focused society are viewed as questionable, particularly when legacies of nostalgia and desire frame experience. How might curriculum spaces and possibilities rethink citizenship and future-oriented narratives of representation?