The school as practice ground Youth citizenship in schools as communities

The research presented in this dissertation explored how schools function as practice grounds for youth citizenship. Through this perspective schools are understood as communities, in which students are not only in the process of becoming citizens, but already are citizens and do citizenship. The first part of this dissertation focuses on how different schools function as different practice grounds for citizenship, using in-depth case studies of four Dutch secondary schools. In the second part of this dissertation the relationship between within-school citizenship experiences and students’ citizenship outside the school walls is explored using a large-scale quantitative dataset. It is examined how the experience of having voice (participating in discussion and having influence at school) is related to students’ attitudes towards 'voice' in the sense of contributing and listening democratically, and how students’ sense of school membership is related to their generalized social trust. The combined findings firstly indicate that applying the perspective of schools as practice grounds illuminates unused citizenship potential of schools. This unused potential is specifically located in the relationship between students and teachers, as role models and proximate authority figures, as well as in students’ experience of school community membership. Secondly, how diversity is addressed within the school community was shown to be a relevant, but often overlooked, part of students’ citizenship experiences. These findings show that applying the perspective of schools as practice grounds for citizenship generates valuable insights on citizenship education for educational practitioners, policy makers and researchers.