New Directions in Citizenship Education: Globalization, State Standards and an Ethical/Critical Social Studies Curriculum

This dissertation is a result of the study of the citizenship standards in the K-12 social studies standards documents of ten U.S. states. As a qualitative textual study, it considers the content of the standards in light of recent thinking in the field of citizenship studies. Through discourse analysis it examines the emergence of global citizenship discourse in the standards as well as other traditional and emergent citizenship discourses. It employs discourse mapping as an analytical tool for reading the vision of citizenship that is presented by the standards. A governmentality framework is used to understand how standardization works to limit citizenship possibilities for students. It draws upon Foucault's notion of care of the self to conceptualize an ethical/critical social studies curriculum. This project is informed by postmodern theories of citizenship and imagines how these might be useful in creating a more robust and democratic citizenship education.