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In a public health crisis where social distancing, or physical distancing while in public spaces, is the new normal, social media offer respite from being alone. Recent statistics show spikes in social media usage worldwide during the Covid-19 pandemic. More than just easing loneliness, such freely available digital tools offer affordances for education in an emergency.

This paper summarizes insights from literature reviews of over a decade of research and recent case studies on the benefits of teaching with social media in K-12 education.

The authors highlight three affordances of social media for fostering active learning, community building and civic participation and describe how social media can be used in conjunction with conventional learning management systems. Furthermore, the authors argue that the unprecedented health crisis that is faced today requires the participation of responsible citizens of all ages; K-12 public education is on the front lines of preparing informed and active citizens and the integration of social media as part of remote education plans can help.

The paper includes instructional guidelines for K-12 teachers and instructional designers in various settings who seek to integrate social media as part of their strategy for teaching students at a distance and facilitating their civic participation.

This paper fulfills an identified need for evidence-based and pragmatic approaches to K-12 online teaching and learning using technologies already widely in use (i.e. social media).

This chapter aims to provide insight into conceptualizing and understanding the experience of civic engagement through voluntary service for high school students in the United States today. Unlike prior studies of youth civic life that are predominately quantitative and rely on correlates of youth civic engagement, this qualitative research explores the meanings and rationale youth attribute to being members of their communities. Youth service work emerges in two general forms. Some young people have an altruistic orientation: they are dedicated to help the less fortunate in their communities, but at the same time, they lack strong ideological investment. Other students have an activist orientation: they are committed to activist politics, but cannot connect their political concerns to school-based service. These two orientations to service develop in the context of school programs that encourage – or require – episodic single acts of volunteerism as a form of civic education. Diffuse associational forms and loose, individually based networks thus shape the context and content of youth volunteerism. These associational forms imply the practice of “networked democracy” by young Americans. Although networked associational ties offer young people weaker forms of collective organization, they also allow students to connect to and experiment with many different ideas, issues, and forms of expression.

This qualitative multiple-case study research attempts to examine controversies associated with national education and national identity by exploring the perceptions of national identity of Hong Kong secondary school teachers. Since the resumption of Hong Kong's sovereignty by China in 1997, national identification with Chinese has been a policy priority. Hong Kong has seen an increase of national education, which aims at cultivating a Chinese national identity.

The study was conducted with case study method with a convenient sampling method on ten purposively chosen sample of Hong Kong secondary school teachers, who are responsible for citizenship education in their schools. It is a qualitative research design with each teacher interviewed twice to obtain in-depth interview data.

The findings reveal that teachers perceive their national identity with different emphases, which include both elements of civic and ethnic nationalism. Also, Hong Kong teachers showed a diversified perception of their national identity both before and after 1997, and it was found that political, social and personal events exerted influences upon their national identification. These have implication for understanding identity issue and teaching citizenship education in Hong Kong.

This paper attempts to make a contribution towards understanding teachers’ perceptions of national identity by revealing that Hong Kong teachers perceive their national identity with both elements of civic and ethnic nationalism, and their perceptions are mediated by political, social and personal events. Furthermore, multiple levels of identities, namely, local, national, and global levels, should be observed.

In Michigan’s state-wide social studies test, eleven-year-old students have been expected to defend or challenge a piece of public policy, citing a core democratic value in their written argument. In this study thirty-six fifth graders across three schools were asked to define a number of these values and to talk about them. Few students made explicit connections between these values and civic life. Many students spoke to the role of the physical classroom environment in reinforcing the rote learning of definitions. Boys and girls cited different sources for their knowledge. Differences in the quality of responses across schools illustrate how students’ understandings of citizenship were shaped by teachers’ practices and individuals’ experiences in their communities.

The aim of the text is to present a historical foundation of the changing conceptualization of citizenship and to outline the present trends in citizenship theory from a social and educational perspective. Based on a 132literature review from the 1990s and the first decade of the new millennium, an attempt is made to describe possible changes in school curricula in order to demonstrate the diversifying content and role of civic education. These considerations must be placed in a broader context of the transforming content of current public debates on citizenship and nationhood, including the increasingly ethnicity-oriented views of nationhood in many European and non-European countries, accompanied by the rise of anti-immigrant discourse.

While living in the information age is not new, the continued spread of dis/mis/information in tandem with rising partisanship has made clear the educational need for robust and critical information and media literacy education (Bulger and Davison, 2018; Garcia et al., 2021; Reich, 2018; Wineburg and McGrew, 2016). Given that most young people (and adults) today get their information and news about the world through online sources, including social media (Pew Research Center, 2018; Garcia et al., 2021), it is imperative for the health of the American democracy that students’ school-based civic learning opportunities include digital civic learning, too. This paper aims to offer a study into one such schooling landscape in a large and diverse public school district in the USA.

A mixed-method approach – including an online survey and face-to-face group interviews – was used to understand the opportunity landscape more broadly and glean insight into the texture and nuance of youth perspectives and experiences on digital civic learning.

Analysis of data reveals a dearth of consistent and routine opportunities for digital civic learning within the Rio Public School District context.

Empirical research that examines and makes visible students’ lived experiences and perspectives with digital civic information is essential if as educators and researchers, the authors are to successfully design for more and better of these experiences.

Contemporary trends in leadership education emphasize paradigms of learning and educational practices associated with developing responsible citizens, furthering higher education’s civic mission. Yet, few introductory leadership courses include an explicit civic component (Johnson & Woodard, 2014). Service-learning is a high-impact practice designed to link the classroom and community in meaningful ways (Kuh, 2008). This application brief illustrates how Kansas State University faculty, students, and community partners engaged in a semester-long service-learning experience for the purpose of exercising leadership to make progress on the social issue of food insecurity. We describe how service-learning can be a catalyst to explore and engage the learning nexus of social challenges, leadership, and civic engagement in an introductory leadership course.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationships between the civic mission of schools and students on participation in school governance through an empirical study. It articulates the importance of school mission on nurturing citizenship of high school students.

The research used a mixed method with questionnaire survey in the first phase and qualitative interviews in the second phase. Quantitative data were obtained from a survey completed by 3,209 students and 495 teachers (including principals) from 51 secondary schools in Hong Kong. Qualitative data were collected from 41 individual interviews with principals and teachers and 17 focus group interviews with 56 students in five case study schools.

Both students and teachers believed that good citizenship qualities should include students’ participation in school governance. Schools in general took up the civic mission to nurture good and participatory citizens. A mission of nurturing students to become good and participatory citizens made a significant and positive contribution toward achieving students’ actual participation in school governance. However, students’ actual impact on major school policies was minimal. A paradox existed whereby students, knowing their influence over managerial issues was much circumscribed, still gave it a higher rating than their teachers.

The paper contributes an empirical model for school leaders to develop school vision for promoting student participation in school governance. Based on a large-scale research supported by public funding, the paper contributes an empirical model for school leaders to develop school vision for promoting student participation in school governance. It further adds to the literature on relationship between citizenship education, civic mission of school and student participation in governance.

In China, it is the continuation of citizenship education in primary schools, which lays the foundation for citizenship education in senior high schools. So the authors have chosen citizenship education at the junior high schools stage in mainland China as the purpose of this paper is to provide answers to three research questions: (1) is ideological and moral education citizenship education at junior high schools in China? (2) What is the content of citizenship education at junior high schools in China? (3) What are the characteristics of citizenship education at junior high schools in China?

This paper adopts the methods of literature review and text analysis. Text analysis means that researchers must study from the surface to the depths of a text and grasp the profound meaning which cannot be found otherwise by general readers. Of course, there are many modes of text analysis. Here, we mainly adopt intertextuality and dialogue analysis modes to understand citizenship education and its characteristics from the Ideology and Morality textbooks. The analysis of the textbooks has been carried out from three perspectives (i.e. the concepts, contents and teaching methods of citizenship education), where the focus is on the analysis of the textbook content. Through literature review, this study presents a critique of the definitions, and of analogous and conflicting ideas, to provide answers to research questions RQ1 and RQ2. Because of the authority and representativeness of the Ideology and Morality textbooks in citizenship education studies at the relevant stage in mainland China, they are chosen and are subject to text analysis from three perspectives (i.e. the concept, content and teaching method of citizenship education), to answer RQ3. The paper’s argument is built on an appropriate base of theory and concepts.

Through a textual analysis of Ideology and Morality for junior high schools in China, we can report the following findings: First, the junior high school ideological and moral course is citizenship education with Chinese characteristics. Second, the contents of citizenship education in junior high schools in China include the identification of the Chinese state and nation, the enhancement of citizenship education based upon the unity of right and obligations, and the importance of the contents and requirements of such civic knowledge as a means for public consciousness education. Third, the methods involve classroom instruction and the participation in practical activities.

The Ideology and Morality course in junior high schools in China is representative of a citizenship education that has Chinese characteristics. The citizenship education at this stage is peculiar, but its construction is far from perfect. Besides, this special form of education is now facing challenges from burgeoning nationalism and globalization, which is creating pressure for the improvement of the theories of citizenship education presented in this period, the standardization of its content and the change of its methods of delivery. This paper sheds light on this issue to some extent.

While LIS scholarship emphasizes the need to be multi-literate by equipping people with critical information literacy, digital literacy, and media literacy skills to combat the phenomenon of fake news in the contemporary information society, the concept of political information literacy is still in its infancy. This chapter addresses this gap by developing an understanding of political information literacy and challenges the premise that information professionals and information organizations should remain neutral in the face of phenomena like censorship through noise and disinformation. In this endeavor, it reviews contemporary information environments vis-à-vis the growth of fake news and misinformation, and current information literacy approaches utilized by information organizations. Thereafter, it explores several cognitive barriers, such as the role of confirmation bias, information avoidance, information groupishness, and information overload, which affects people’s ability to process information. Finally, it encourages information professionals to hold regular information sessions on politically charged topics, tackle the cognitive factors increasing misinformation, and cultivate multidisciplinary approaches to confront fake news.