Citizenship education in Latin America: Priorities of School Curricula

This work focuses on the curricula of six Latin American countries – Colombia, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Mexico and Paraguay – which at the close of the past decade agreed to be part of the project Regional System of Evaluation and Development of Citizenship Competencies (SREDECC). With the support of the Inter-American Development Bank, SREDECC developed the Latin American module of the International Civic and Citizenship Study (ICCS- 2009) undertaken by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), in addition to encouraging the participation of the countries in that study (Cox 2010; Schulz, Ainley, Friedman and Lietz 2011).

This document comprises four parts. The first section takes stock of the state of democratic belief in the region, drawing upon the most significant opinion studies of the past decade, so as to offer broader meaning bases for curriculum analysis and, more generally, for educational work in the field of citizenship. The second section describes the organizational (or structural) characteristics of the curricula of the six countries and presents a framework of categories for their comparative analysis. The subsequent section describes and analyses the contents of the six curricula examined and how they deal with the values, institutions and citizenship relations in their civic (political) and civil (coexistence) dimensions. On the basis of the most significant findings, the closing section includes some reflections regarding curriculum development with regard to citizenship.