Which kind of citizens do we need?

What is this episode about?
In civic education, we repeatedly discuss the question of which images of citizens are actually set in educational processes. At its core, this is about the question of the goals of political education - but also about starting points. Do we believe that citizens are disenchanted and want to change this or do we believe that the goal of political education is to motivate people to participate in elections? Do we believe it is about activism or about preventing a riot? Anja Besand summarizes this debate by stating that educational processes will look different depending on this.

Before we start:
This episode is just under 30 minutes long and works with an extremely large amount of visual material, so it is not suitable for audio-only playback.

The central question is:
Which citizens is civic education about? Which descriptions do we start from in educational processes and which descriptions do we align educational processes with?

Who am I listening to?
The author and speaker in this episode is Prof. Dr. Anja Besand. She is the Director of the John Dewey Research Center and holds the Chair of Didactics of Civic Education at the TUD Dresden University of Technology. You can find out more about her here.

Literature for further reading:

• Ackermann, Paul (2004): "Der interventionsfähige Bürger scheint mir ein realistisches Leitbild für die politische Bildung zu sein", in: Pohl, Kerstin (ed.): Positionen der politischen Bildung 1. Ein Interviewbuch zur Politikdidaktik, Schwalbach/Ts., pp. 88-103.
• Breit, Gotthard/ Massing, Peter (2002): Die Rückkehr des Bürgers in die politische Bildung, Schwalbach/Ts.
• Buchstein, Hubertus (2009): Impositions of democracy. Von der normativen Theorie des Bürgers zur institutionell vermittelten Präferenzkompetenz, in: Ders.: Demokratietheorie in der Kontroverse. Baden-Baden, pp. 73-106.
• Detjen, Joachim (2000): Citizen role models in civic education, in: Politische Bildung, H. 4, pp. 19-38.
• Pohl, Kerstin (2019): Politically active citizens - a model for civic education? Dissier for the bpb accessible online
• Salomon, David (2012): Mature citizens or wards of citizenship? On the criticism of civic role models in political education, in: Kluge, Sven/Lohmann, Ingrid (eds.): Schöne neue Leitbilder. Yearbook for Pedagogy, Frankfurt/M., pp. 73-86.
• Sander, Wolfgang (2008): Discovering Politics - Living Freedom. Didactic foundations of political education, Schwalbach/Ts.

Self-assessment tasks:

Question 1: Have you chosen a figure from our wooden citizen set? Which one is it and why did you choose this figure? Outline the consequences of choosing this character for educational processes.

Question 2: In the play, different concepts are presented on how to discuss the question of citizens' role models in political education (Ackermann, Deichmann, Sutor, Sander, Salomon, Besand). Which position do you sympathize with and why?

Question 3: One can talk about goals for civic education on the basis of images of citizens, but there are certainly other ways to answer this question. What other strategies for determining goals can you think of and what advantages and disadvantages do they have?