Educational Struggles and Citizenship Education. The Case of Poland

Overview & Synopsis

The aim of the paper is to analyse the relation between educational struggles and citizenship education in contemporary Poland. It adopts the critical pedagogy perspective and broadly defines the concept of educational struggle as struggling over the content of education, as social tensions in the field of education, as well as the students' and teachers' capacity to perform educational change. Critical discourse analysis of the current grammar and secondary curricula in conducted. It is assumed that struggling, as a transformative and critical activity, plays important role in terms of citizenship education. In the case of Poland, two tendencies are distinguished--struggle as exercising the right for education, and struggle over the content of history. Moreover, the authors analyse representations of struggle in formal education, and explore the issue in the context of Polish cultural tradition, especially related to historical education.