Cities, citizenship and civic learning: Introduction to the special edition
Gert Biesta
Brunel University London
Gillian Cowell
University of Stirling
Abstract
The city – both as idea and as reality – remains an important reference point for thinking through
questions of citizenship and democracy. From an educational point of view the city can therefore be
seen as an important site for civic learning, that is, for the learning relevant for democratic
citizenship. One important question this raises is how we might best understand and theorise
processes and practices of civic learning – a question with important ramifications for pedagogic
practices that seek to enhance and promote democratic citizenship. The three papers brought
together in this collection pursue these theoretical lines through an exploration of civic learning in
the context of practices of civic action in a range of geographical locations and settings, and through
a range of different actions and activities. In each case the focus is not on the transmission of
existing civic identities so as to reproduce the existing socio-political order, but on far more difficult
and, in the eyes of the authors far more important, processes of democratic invention and
intervention, action and activity that seek to establish public relationships and contexts and
practices that promote the establishment of such relationships. These processes, as the
contributions show, are neither easy, nor are they without tensions and contradictions. Yet the
careful documentation and critical analysis conducted by each of the authors brings into view very
different dimensions of civic action and civic learning than what official statistics tend to reveal
about so-called ‘active’ citizenship.
Keywords
Public pedagogy, civic learning, adult education, citizenship
The city – both as idea and as reality – remains an important reference point for thinking through
questions of citizenship and democracy. From an educational point of view the city can therefore be
seen as an important site for civic learning, that is, for the learning relevant for democratic
citizenship. One important question this raises is how we might best understand and theorise
processes and practices of civic learning – a question with important ramifications for pedagogic
practices that seek to enhance and promote democratic citizenship. In his book Learning Democracy
in School and Society (Biesta, 2011), Gert Biesta has introduced a distinction between two modalities
of civic learning: a socialisation conception and a subjectification conception. The first sees civic
learning as a process through which individuals adopt existing civic identities so that they become
part of the existing socio-political order. This approach to civic learning thus basically accepts the
existing socio-political order and sees the main pedagogic challenge in terms of the inclusion of
individuals in this order. The second conception does not focus on how individuals can adopt
existing civic identities, but rather starts from the ways in which individuals exert political agency
through their engagement in the ongoing ‘experiment’ of democracy (on this idea see also Biesta et
al., 2013), in order then to trace what may or may not be learned from such engagement. Rather
than focusing on the reproduction of the existing socio-political order, the main pedagogic challenge
here therefore has to do with the enhancement and promotion of forms of civic action. Civic action
necessarily has a public rather than a private orientation, as it is concerned with forms and modes of
human togetherness that have an explicit interest in plurality and difference and in their ongoing
democratic renegotiation (see also Wildemeersch and Vandenabeele, 2007). This means that the
question of ‘publicness’ – of public relationship, the public sphere and hence of public forms of
pedagogy (see Burdick et al., 2014) – play an absolutely crucial role in any attempt to make sense of
the contemporary condition of democratic citizenship.
The three papers brought together in this collection pursue these theoretical lines through an
exploration of civic learning in the context of practices of civic action in a range of geographical
locations and settings and through a range of different actions and activities. In each case the focus
is not on the transmission of existing civic identities so as to reproduce the existing socio-political
order, but on far more difficult and, in the eyes of the authors, far more important processes of
democratic invention and intervention, action and activity that seek to establish public relationships
and contexts and practices that promote the establishment of such relationships. These processes,
as the contributions show, are neither easy, nor are they without tensions and contradictions. Yet
the careful documentation and critical analysis conducted by each of the authors brings into view
very different dimensions of civic action and civic learning than what official statistics tend to reveal
about so-called ‘active’ citizenship (see, for example, Hoskins et al., 2006).
In the first paper, From map-reading to map-making: Civic learning as orientation, disorientation and
reorientation, Cowell and Biesta combine Biesta’s conceptions of civic learning with insights from
cartography in order to analyse processes of map-reading and map-making by civic action groups in
local community settings in south west Scotland. From cartography they take the distinction
between maps as ordered presentations where the space represented in a map form allows for
individuals to know in advance the pathways, routes, features and layouts of places prior to being
there, and mapping as a practice, as always in the process of being made and remade, always
moving and changing. They connect the former to a socialisation conception of civic learning where
what is already laid out and explained in map form – the ‘order’ – only allows individuals to exist
‘within’ the lines of the map. They argue that this reduces the ability for individuals to experience or
participate in creating something new that lies outside of the lines drawn by others, and hence
reduces their citizenship to acts of map-reading. Here the map sets out how and where the
individual should participate in their locality: the visible spaces. Map-making, on the other hand, can
be understood in terms of a subjectification conception of civic learning, allowing action in both
visible and invisible – lost and abandoned – spaces in both damaged post-industrial locations and
areas with conserved pasts. Their paper discusses this in much detail in the context of an empirical
study that sought to deconstruct the map-reading ‘order’, exposing it to reexplorations by
individuals, who in turn construct alternative maps that make visible the damaged and unknown
places – new maps created from civic action – towards their emergence as political agents.
In the second paper, The trouble of ‘living with others’: Language, community and politics of
belonging, Simon Warren focuses on Irish language education in southern Ireland. Set within the
empirical problem involving struggles over the legitimacy of the Irish language as a public good –
particularly in relation to it as a medium for education in an Irish secondary school – Warren
provides an analysis within the realm of a politics of belonging. He builds on the concept of
‘throwntogetherness’ (Massey, 2004) by connecting it to a conceptual framing of the articulation of
a politics of belonging set out by Brubaker (2010). Warren constructs his analysis around three
dimensions: individual versus group rights, public versus private language and de-territorialised
versus territorialised language. He develops this framing of a politics of belonging in relation to
Biesta’s notion of civic learning as ‘subjectification’ (Biesta, 2011). In particular, Warren enters into a
discussion with Biesta’s evocation of the work of Jacques Rancie` re, and explores the way in which
the cultural politics of language in the empirical setting can be interpreted using Biesta’s approach.
He finishes his paper with a question: ‘Rather than try to escape the aporia, the seemingly awful
choice between the private and the public, between the particular and universal, or between justice
and freedom, I ask if I simply have the option to enact democracy and see ‘‘what follows’’?’
In the third and last contribution, The artist can’t escape: The artist as (reluctant) public pedagogue,
Caris and Cowell focus on public art and the role of the public artist, where the public artist seeks to
inspire community participation as a central and irreplaceable aspect of democratic engagement.
The authors’ central concern is around exploring the new forms of citizenship that might be enacted
as a result of situation art practices. The ‘situation art’ they explore is conceptualised as a form of
citizenship-as-practice (Lawy and Biesta, 2006) concentrating on art as constructing human
interaction, that is to say, where artists organise events as ‘situations’ that are centrally concerned
with the democratic participation – the citizenship practices – of the ‘audience’ without making
demands on what that participation might be, if anything. Concentrating on the possible educational
interventions that might make civic action possible, Caris and Cowell engage in a discussion on
whether artists might be seen as ‘public pedagogues’, even if they may not see themselves in this
way. Connecting with Cowell and Biesta (this issue), they evoke the work of psychogeographers in
the Situationist International movement (Debord, 1957), which they connect with Biesta’s (2012)
theory of public pedagogy. In this work, Biesta distinguishes between three ‘modes’ of public
pedagogy: (1) public pedagogy as a pedagogy for the public (instruction); (2) public pedagogy as a
pedagogy of the public (conscientisation); and (3) public pedagogy as a pedagogy that enacts a
concern for publicness (interruption). Caris and Cowell thus explore how particular artistic
interventions connect with the notion of the creation of public space, where neither the artist nor
the participant can claim to know in advance what the purpose or form of the activity will be,
thereby also raising important questions about the pedagogic ‘work’ conducted along these lines.
Through discussion of a number of cases they show how such artistic interventions can be
understood as ‘tests’ of the quality of the public sphere, in terms of the ways artist and participant
together make both themselves and their surroundings public.
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