Florian C. Feucht, Ph.D. (Special Issue Editor)

A vital aspect of democracy is the ability of individual citizens to engage in knowledge creation and evaluation in a critical manner. In today’s controversy - and information-rich society developing one’s own beliefs and values, evaluating a constantly growing body of new knowledge, and having an understanding of current politics is becoming an increasingly complex and demanding challenge. In this context, education for citizenship is an important undertaking to provide individuals with skills, values, knowledge, and beliefs needed to successfully participate in democratic processes and to foster a culture of active civic engagement.
Under this conceptual umbrella, a call for contributions to a special issue went out to the fields of peace and democratic education seeking manuscripts from educators, practitioners, and researchers to explore questions, such as: What is the nature of the skills, values, and beliefs necessary for democratic participation, and in what situations do they occur and matter? What role does (citizenship) education play in addressing such skills, values, knowledge, and beliefs? What pedagogical methods best develop these democratic capacities? Do current educational frameworks account for the demands of today’s democratic citizenship? In response to this call, a large amount of quality manuscripts was received from a diversity of disciplines ranging from psychology to teacher training and development, to democracy, health and environmental education, and to philosophical foundations of education. Due to the quality and diversity of the submissions, the decision was made to publish not one special issue, but a sequence of three, a trilogy entitled “Skills, Values, and Beliefs for Today’s Democratic Citizenship” – with the first issue subtitled “Psychological Competencies”, the second “Teacher Training and Development”, and the third “Philosophical Foundations of Education”. Because these three categories are fairly broad, some articles roam in their overlaps. Furthermore, I would like to note that only the first issue entails discussions of its article contributions because it is much smaller in scope than the consecutive issues. The following articles comprise this special issue:

“Good” Americans and “Bad” Americans: Personal Epistemology, Moral Reasoning, and Citizenship. By Lori Olafson

Conflict, Affect and the Political: On Disagreement as Democratic Capacity. By Claudia Ruitenberg

Epistemic Understanding and Sound Reasoning Skills that Underlie Effective Democratic Engagement. By Michael Weinstock

Teachers’ Epistemological Stances and Citizenship Education. By Gregory Schraw, Lori Olafson, Michelle Vander Veldt, & Jennifer Ponder

Argumentation, Anger, and Action: Citizenship Education In and Out of the Classroom. By Lisa Bendixen (Discussant)

Democracy as Public Deliberation and the Psychology of Epistemological World Views and Moral Reasoning: A Philosophical Reflection. By Dale Snauwaert (Discussant)

To download the articles, please click on ‘Journal’ above.