A Study Of Canadian Citizenship Education Against The Multicultural Context

The multicultural context and federal system shape the features of Canadian citizenshipeducation, which respects students' different cultural identities of their own stirps as itcultivates Canadian citizen with national identity in order to realize multicultural identity andnational identity.The thesis consists of an introduction, four-chapter main text and a conclusion.Chapter 1 examines the historical evolution of Canadian citizenship education based onthe analysis of the changes of its nation policy.This part mainly describes different goals andcontents of citizenship education in assimilation times, the melting-pot times and currentmulticulturalism times, from which reflects that nation policy has a great effect on theorientation and implication of Canadian citizenship education.As the main component of the thesis, chapter 2 and chapter 3 describe Canadianeducation in multiculturalism times. Chapter 2 concretely analyzes the citizenship outlook andcitizenship education outlook of liberal multiculturalism.This chapter examines thecitezenship outlook theory of liberal multiculturalism, which is represented by the theory ofWill Kymlicka, including differentiated citizenship identity, group-differentiated rights andcivic virtue. Furthermore, this part analyzes essential opinions of the citizenship educationoutlook with respect to the instructional objectives, contents and approaches. The practice ofCanadian citizenship education is examined in chapter 3. As a result of federal system,Canadian regions master the education jurisdiction and release citizenship educationcurriculum documents. Consequently, through analyzing the citizenship education curriculumdocuments in each province, this part describes and concludes their instructional goals,contents, access and teaching approaches by comparison so that illuminates the feature andoutline of Canadian school citizenship education.On the basis of the examination of the former three chapters, chapter 4 mainly reflectsand discusses two issues concerning the relation between unity and plurality and challengesconfronting Canadian citizenship education. Aiming at the second issue, there are three mainaspects discussed and evaluated. The first one concerns the flaws of the internal theoryunderlying Canadian citizenship education, the second one deals with the gap between thepractice and theory, and the last one discusses the challenge from the external environment.