CITIZENSHIP EDUCATION: A LITERATURE REVIEW OF EXISTING EVIDENCE IN THE ARAB-PAN CONTEXT

The importance of active citizenship education has been vastly demonstrated recently in both formal and non-formal education. This paper is a systematic review of academic literature that examined the existing evidence from studies evaluating and analyzing the active citizenship components in schools compulsory curriculums, including the curriculums of civic studies, civic and moral education, citizenship education and social national studies covering years 2008 to 2016. The literature review performed included a total of 11 documents (7 Masters theses, and 4 doctoral theses). The strategy followed consisted in locating documents by a reliable search strategy; establishing the criteria for the selection of documents to analyze from the documents located and rigorously analyzing the documents selected based on clear and precise criteria and dimensions. This study had a panoramic view of the recent civic education curriculum and citizenship education trends in the formal education in many countries. In general terms, the literature review analysis has emphasized the necessity of a unified criteria and learning objectives for citizenship education. The study also demonstrated a gap in global citizenship education curriculums. Furthermore the curriculums impose more focus on the social and humanitarian aspects of citizenship than the political aspects of CE and CSE formal curriculums in the Arab countries. Many studies tackled the teacher’s training in CE deficits, and the divergent between school textbooks and the students’ daily life. Plenty of lessons learnt, comprehensive models for CE, advices on using media and technology to build active citizenship, curricular and extracurricular activities that can be used in developing CE curriculum were located. A necessity to follow international standards on setting the curriculum objectives in each country has emerged, in order to provide a unified integrated global citizenship education that respects diversity and cultural specificities.