Abstract:

In the last twenty years, on the impetus of numerous international and European institutions, a large number of civic education programs have been designed and implemented throughout the world at every school level (Damiani, 2021) which offer food for thought on what, in ultimately, it means to be a good citizen today.
The present work therefore aims to explore some educational practices considered significant with respect to the theme of citizenship education by connecting it with the themes of democratic (Bîrzéa, 2000) and social (Balzano, 2020) citizenship, the protagonism of young people and the achievement of skills (Sen 1999, 2010; Nussbaum, 2011), analyzing their theoretical assumptions and objectives.
To this end, starting from a narrative review (Bourthis, 2017) on the topic of citizenship education, the design and implementation of different school projects will be analyzed as presented in some papers (Butler & Milley, 2020; Hoskins, Janmaat & Villalba , 2012; Pham & Duong, 2021) considered significant as they highlight specific aspects of educational practice while maintaining a broad pedagogical gaze on citizenship.
The history of civics at school corresponds to an ever-increasing interest in the subject by some of the major supranational institutions (Conseil de l'Europe, 2005; UNESCO, 2015; Maastricht Declaration on Global Education, 2002; Eurydice, 2017 ; Agenda 2030) for the development and empowerment of a growing participation of children and young people. At the same time, a new impetus should be recorded in scientific production as regards the theme of education and democracy (Biesta; 2006; Caccioppola, 2022) which has characterized the pedagogical debate since the beginning of the 20th century.
The teaching of the constitutional structure of each country is accompanied in schools by the necessity to provide democratic citizenship fundamental skills, i.e. responsibility, creativity, communication, respect for otherness (Council of Europe, 2017) and the ability to choose (Puka and Beshiri, 2013; Snyders, 1986). If the capability approach makes it possible to address the theme of citizenship education by referring it to key competences to be achieved, the multidimensionality of the phenomenon emerges from the literature for which educating to be citizens means accompanying young people to manage the complexity of a fragmented world, affirming civil, political, social and cultural rights, activate participation in what concerns the community and ultimately design one's own identity (Gagnon, Pagé, 1999), in addition to the importance that should be assigned to the dimension of pleasure, self-realization, desire (Santerini, 2019).
From this point of view, the practices analysis can help to reconstruct the elaborated structure of the phenomenon, restoring its complexity. Furthermore, the reconstruction of the multiplicity of dimensions involved challenges us to identify a theoretical-epistemological framework that can interpret how they intertwine in the concreteness of each experience.

Keywords:

Citizenship education, citizenship, civics, school.