Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Youth in Debate with the West: Citizenship within and
beyond the European Classroom
Principal Investigator: Dr. Norma Mendoza-Denton
Co-Principal Investigator: Maisa C. Taha
Project Summary
In 2006, Spain was one of the latest countries to implement the European Union’s “Citizenship”
focused curricula, part of recent EU cultural initiatives (Sassatelli 2002). The constituent classes—
“Education for Citizenship and Human Rights,” and “Ethics and Civic Education”—have garnered
inconsistent protest across the country from parents who oppose what they consider state indoctrination in
secular values. An issue that remains unaddressed, however, involves the presence of non-European
immigrant youth in classrooms and how they and their Spanish peers process and respond to lessons on
European selfhood/citizenship. The purpose of the proposed research is to understand how the teaching of
so-called global ideals for human thought and behavior (Citizenship) is received, experienced, and
answered at the local level. I will use a combination of textual analysis and ethnographic data collection
methods to trace the connections between broad ideologies of the desirable, modern citizen-self and local
responses and re-articulations of morally sound subjectivities. This approach is guided by a conceptual
framework from linguistic anthropology wherein face-to-face interactions and language use are shown to
contain the building blocks of larger social inequalities. The resulting analysis will move beyond studies
of multicultural education that bemoan a lack of integration, to explain what happens at the local level to
the so-called universalized values that claim to overcome such issues.
Research will focus on student-student and student-teacher debates/discussions inside and outside
of Citizenship classrooms at three high schools in southeastern Spain. I concentrate on youth as politically
agentive players in shaping conversations about the “good” life, liberal values of freedom and equality,
the modern self, and the crosscutting influences of identity, which functions both locally and
transnationally. I posit that the presence of Moroccan Muslim students, especially, has politicized the
schools and communities where they live, nearly by default. The responsibility thrust upon these youth to
represent the Muslim East to the Christian West (García Sánchez 2009) ties in with global paranoia and
Islamophobia, while Citizenship classes and everyday conversations remind them subtly and not-sosubtly that their cultural practices and beliefs may be at odds with those of their host communities.
By looking at debate arising about and around Citizenship based themes, this study hypothesizes
that youth effectively democratize multicultural educational space while drawing attention to how EastWest ideological divides structure institutional communication practices and affect minority students’
access to academic opportunities. It is important to conduct this research in southeastern Spain since
popular discourses of liberal modernity actively erase recent memory of economic and socio-political
similarities with less-developed countries.
Ethnographic research will take place over the course of eleven months in the province of
Almeria, from September 2010 to the end of July 2011. Independent funds will be used to finance the first
four months of research. Data collection methods at each of the three high schools will include
observations in and outside of classrooms, interviews and focus groups with students and teachers, and
examination of pedagogical, legislative, and historical texts related to Citizenship lessons.
Institutional support both in the U.S. and in Spain will help ensure the effective completion of
research objectives within the timeframe allotted. Findings will advance understandings of youth as
political agents, multicultural education in transnational settings, and the persistence of East-West
dividing ideologies within liberal thought systems. The final analysis will have important intellectual and
practical implications for scholars, policymakers, and educators in the EU and around the world and will
be shared with study participants and institutional collaborators.