Citizenship,communitiesandadultlearning.docVIP

Citizenship, Communities and Adult Learning Paper presented at SCUTREA, 32nd Annual Conference, 2-4 July 2002, University of Stirling Pam Coare and Rennie Johnston, University of Sussex, UK ‘We need both ‘good citizens’ and active citizens’ (Crick. 2000: 2). ‘Citizenship’ has become the framing discourse for many of the social and educational policies of the current New Labour government. This rhetoric of citizenship is not, of course, unique to Britain. Rather it is part of a wider European focus that reflects the way in which national boundaries and identities have become more fluid, with the language of citizenship evident in many key documents and policies of the European Commission. Of course, ‘citizenship’ is a concept that carries significantly different meanings for disparate individuals and groups and, as Lister points out, it does not always have positive connotations for everyone (Lister, 1997). Different traditions such as Communitarianism, which stresses the primacy of community and the socially situated individual and Liberalism, with its emphasis on the autonomy of the individual with legally held rights, have defined two different approaches to citizenship, that of status and that of practice (Oldfield, 1990). Both traditions have emphasised the relative importance of different aspects of the civil, political and social themes originally espoused by T. H. Marshall in his seminal work ‘Citizenship and Social Class’ in 1950. Lister suggests that we could most usefully see these two traditions as complementary: ’In this way citizenship emerges as a dynamic process in which the two dimensions of status and practice interact with each other, linked through human agency’ (Lister, 1997: 8). As adult educators working in community settings and using practices that grow out of the traditions of community development and social purpose adult education, we are concerned with developing that ‘dynamic process’. However we are working within a pedagogy