Haast, B. (2018, March 28). Review of Civvics and Citizenship Education in Australia: Challenges, Practices and International Perspectives, by Peterson, A. & Tudball, L. (Eds.) Education Review, 25. http://dx.doi.org/10.14507/er.v25.2288 March 28, 2018 ISSN 1094-5296 Peterson, A., & Tudball, L. (Eds.). (2017). Civics and citizenship education in Australia: Challenges, practices and international perspectives. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Pp. 284 ISBN: 9781474248198 Reviewed by Byron Haast Minaret College Australia In 2008, Lin Manuel Miranda began working on one of the most successful civics lessons ever created in Hamilton: An American Musical. Engaging students in Alexander Hamilton’s journey through creating a nation’s financial system and the surrounding debates detailed in essays and cabinet discussions would be a daunting task for any polished civics teacher. In the same year, in Melbourne, Australia, education policy wonks and politicians gathered to hash out the Melbourne Declaration, which would become the main statement of intent for Australia’s new national curriculum. The Australian Curriculum would eventually see the introduction of a stand- alone Civics and Citizenship subject – heavily influenced by a Shape discussion paper. A number of lofty goals established by these policy documents for the Australian Curriculum Civics and Citizenship (ACCC) and the conceptualisation and achievement of these goals by school administrators and teachers forms the rationale behind Peterson and Tudball’s Civics and Citizenship Education in Australia. Education Review /Reseñas Educativas 2 It is ironic that a subject which aims to study government processes be so beholden to political whim, but the ACCC has survived into the latter half of the decade having mostly fended off a politically motivated review in 2014 (the primary level curriculum was rolled into a more traditional Humanities and Social Science curriculum). According to co-author Tudball, the ACCC has cut an impressive path as it aims to focus on both the cognitive domain--knowing, understanding and reasoning--and the affective behavioural domain—engagement, perceptions, and behaviour. While both domains, explained extensively by Lin Manuel Miranda’s 2-hour and 45-minute civics lesson, form the focus of this volume, the affective behavioural domain receives the most attention. One of the great debates addressed throughout the book is how do we, as educators, teach students to participate in ‘civics’? Should they be activists? Should they hold Judeo- Christian values? Should they act democratically? These are all pertinent questions which the book goes a long way to answering. As mentioned above, the dominant focus revolves around engagement, perceptions, and behaviour. Tudball writes, “It is essential therefore for schools to provide programmes that develop civic knowledge and model democratic practice in out-of-classroom learning activities” (p. 24). This theme runs deep throughout the book in almost every chapter and readers will gain a strong understanding that the best way to utilise the solid curriculum foundation outlined above is to provide activity-rich, values-based, interpretive approaches that encourage debate and participation. These approaches recognise that students are citizens now and do not have to wait until they are legal adults to engage in the democratic process. Murray Print’s chapter begins with an impressive overview of policy formation surrounding Civics and Citizenship education (CCE) in Australia from the 1980s to 2015. It’s a story of programs tied to governments of various stripes as CCE attempts were tied to “political ideology, federal election outcomes and bureaucratic whim”. Print suggests that there are three distinct periods apart from what he calls ‘the Interregnum’ between 2004 and 2009. What occurs either side of this timeframe are a number of notable developments, unparalleled on a global scale due to the national consensus forged by a series of ministerial declarations. Bipartisan efforts included a series of reports – Prime Minister Paul Keating’s Whereas the People … Civics and Citizenship Education in Australia – and the Liberal-National Coalition’s generally successful Discovering Democracy. These efforts were largely confined to ‘thin’ efforts, focused on the knowing and understanding elements of curriculum. The Melbourne Declaration emphasised the need for students to learn moral and ethical integrity, appreciate Australia’s diversity in all its facets, understand its system of government, and acknowledge the value of indigenous cultures. At this point readers may begin to grow tired of abstract academic debate around things like ‘power asymmetries’ and the ‘hybridity of identities’, but fortunately the book details a number of grounded case studies in effective civics education. In one such excellent case study, Tudball explains what this kind of teaching might look like by detailing an example of the Melbourne Maroondah cluster of secondary colleges working to learn and share the stories of recently arrived refugees. Another case study occurs later in Peter Brett’s chapter on education for sustainability (EfS). Tracing a history of government commitment to sustainability from the Department of the Environment and Heritage’s Education for a Sustainable Future: A National Environmental Education Statement for Schools to ACARA’s subsequent commitment to the sustainability CCP, he establishes a clear EfS rationale but also notes a lack of action on issues like global warming, deforestation, and mass extinction, and a surprising lack of integration of sustainability into classroom teaching. Brett provides the 110,100-member Australian Youth Climate Coalition (AYCC) an example of ‘thick’ civics education. AYCC programs, including an energy-saving initiative ‘Switched on Schools’ Review of Civics and Citizenship Education in Australia by B. Haast 3 and ‘Don’t risk the reef’ succeeded in creating political mass and concessions or rethinks on their aligned policy debates, which Brett cites as evidence that it is possible for students to think global and act local. Brett also identifies a critical literacy dimension within EfS and CCE that encourages critical engagement with contemporary issues. With a myriad of political agendas and the rise of ‘fake news’, students need to learn to think critically and assess the information flows surrounding various issues. While the book deals with definitions of ‘civics’ it also grapples with the concept of ‘citizen’ in a rapidly changing world. Walsh notes a number of these changes by underscoring the impact of growing worldwide economic integration, multicultural societies, compression of time and space through technologies, development of polities and citizens that transcend nationalism and nation states, and supranational government structures like the EU. This chapter asks an extremely thought-provoking question: what does it mean to be a citizen in a world in which the nation- state is becoming arguably less important? Walsh identifies several models of citizenship including cosmopolitan citizenship and intercultural citizenship before explaining that CCE should develop student attachment to the global community. In some regards this chapter almost describes a kind of crisis for the ‘citizenship’ aspect of CCE and it could have gone further to assuage this notion in a world were only 48% of 18-29 year-olds support democracy (p. 112). Walsh identifies two implicit assumptions within global citizenship education: ‘democracy is for everyone, and democracy itself is not laden with values, often liberal ones’. This thought- provoking statement highlights the main issues with an overzealous embrace of a progressive CCE agenda. CCE has the potential to expose students to depressing global trends such as terrorism, transnational movements of people, arms trades, civil wars and food insecurity, but it is the ‘stories of hope’ that educators must focus on, as Henderson explains. The possibility of embracing the global community and joining its ranks of ‘global citizens’ is a story for hope and it is this kind of citizenship that educators will have to increasingly embrace in the 21st century. Despite some light bubbling opposition, Australia remains an incredibly multicultural and diverse nation. Australia is one of the most diverse nations on earth with 26% of its population born overseas and a further 20% having at least one overseas-born parent (p. 134). There remains stringent bi-partisan support in parliament for multiculturalism and 85% of Australians support the policy (p. 134). This diverse ethnic and social makeup engenders an inevitable debate surrounding the source of our national values, the place of Asia within the national zeitgeist, the status of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and a growing radicalisation issue within the Australian Muslim community. Peterson and Tudball discuss the intriguing panacea of ‘interculturalism,’ which encourages greater dialogue and interaction between different cultural groups. This diversity makes the 2014 politically inspired review all the more problematic as it called for greater emphasis on Judeo-Christian values. There is no explicit reference to any major religion in current CCE curriculum documentation; however, Peterson and Bentley argue that there are plenty of implicit links. They construct a convincing argument that students should engage with religious ideas and perspectives. Accepting, identifying and engaging with Australians from diverse faith backgrounds is an incredibly important point for a book about a nominally secular subject to make (particularly given the current challenges faced by the Australian Muslim community). Several further challenges are routinely noted throughout discussion of CCE in an Australian context while remaining relevant to CCE education in other nations. First, CCE has an image problem as it has been considered less intellectually rigorous and valuable than history and geography. Second, and perhaps more consistently stated throughout the book, is the need for comprehensive professional development within the CCE area. Thankfully Education Review /Reseñas Educativas 4 the book offers an excellent example of a cost- effective and brilliant standard of professional development at a large school in Townsville, North Queensland. The school allotted two pupil-free planning days at the beginning of the school year. On the first day, two guest speakers were invited to act as provocateurs and challenged the staff to conceptualise students as full members of the school and reflect on natural sites for CCE learning. Teachers then selected an area of interest, responded to professional reading materials, and then were required to brainstorm in small groups and generate three strategies that could be implemented over two years. Henderson explains that they also audited classroom practice in terms of inquiry-based learning, collaborative approaches, active learning strategies as well as critical, creative and higher-order thinking. As the book supports an integrated whole-school approach to CCE, this is a great ‘how to’ guide for any school interested in implementing such a program. Finally, discussion is made explicitly relevant to the context of other nations through a wide-ranging comparative chapter. Comparative perspectives are included in the final section of the book, and they involve a run- down of CCE in Canada, England, the United States, Hong Kong, and Singapore. While there are some similarities, such as Canada’s inclusion of First Nations’ peoples, much of the curriculum frameworks lack a federal policy narrative, as explained by Evans, Hahn and Kennedy. This is not to say that different states aren’t running modified versions of the Australian Curriculum (e.g. Victoria), but even the nomenclature of CCE in other countries sets a distinctly different tone to that used in Australia. For example, the Singaporean Character and Citizenship curriculum, Hong Kong’s national and moral education, and character education in Canada. It is fair to say that these programs are not as broad in their remit as the Australian CCE experiment and they often focus on employability (in the case of Canada), Western history (in the case of the United States), and values (in the case of Singapore). In comparison, Australia’s CCE is breathtaking in its inclusion of all the interests discussed above from cultural inclusion to Australia’s engagement with Asia. Civics and Citizenship Education in Australia is a comprehensive analysis of the CCE curriculum in Australia. The book offers an insight into the cumbersome and lengthy process which resulted in an unexpected new dawn for CCE with the creation of the Australian Curriculum and a standalone CCE subject. This context provides an excellent backdrop to the analysis that follows with discussion that ranges from the local active citizen to the global forces changing the very definition of the word ‘citizenship’. While the book engages in lofty academic discussion around theoretical models, there is a lot to be gleaned from consideration of various case studies and thought-provoking consideration of the CCP. The book leaves this reader with a sense that the curriculum leaves too much to be accomplished for the allocated 20 hours of class time, but its emphasis on an integrated whole-school approach tempers this criticism. Civics and Citizenship Education in Australia is a theoretical and practical building block that enables teachers and schools alike to pursue CCE with the hopes of producing citizens like Alexander Hamilton. About the Reviewer Byron Haast teaches Grade 12 Geography and Global Politics at Minaret College in Victoria, Australia. He is passionate about encouraging students to critically examine global events through a fact-based worldview in a bid to create engaged global citizens. Review of Civics and Citizenship Education in Australia by B. Haast 5 Education Review/Reseñas Educativas/Resenhas Educativas is supported by the edXchange initiative’s Scholarly Communications Group at the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University. Copyright is retained by the first or sole author, who grants right of first publication to the Education Review. 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