CITIZENSHIP EDUCATION IN THE SPANISH CURRICULUM

The citizenship education has been considered for many years within the European context as a fundamental subject for the development of democratic societies. The youth need to know the mechanisms that allow them participating in an active and democratic way within the society they live in. For instance, in Spain the Organic Educational Law from 2006 included the citizenship education as a specific subject in elementary school and as a cross-curricular topic in other subjects. In lower high school the area of Citizenship Education and Human Rights was created and it was taught in the fourth grade. Finally, in upper high school the citizenship education was included in the subject of Spanish History, gathering the fundamental relationship between this subject and the historical knowledge of our past, in order to create a critical consciousness about the world we live in and which allows us participating as free citizens. However, after the approval of the latest educational law (Organic Law for the Improvement of the Educational Quality), the subject for citizenship education disappeared from the curriculum. In this paper, we make a curricular analysis to understand the situation regarding the development of citizenship competences reviewed in the subject of Spanish History from the second grade in upper high school, in four different autonomous communities: Catalonia, Valencian Community, the Murcia Region and Andalusia. For this purpose, we compare the legislated curriculums by the Organic Educational Law from 2006, based on 4 categories: - The first category concerns the presence of aspects related to the citizenship education, in the purposes of the Spanish History subject, understanding that this subject has to be conceived, and therefore taught, as a relevant matter for the youth's democratic and citizenship development. - The second category we consider, gathers an explicit reference to the citizenship education in the planned and developed objectives, because as long as this study is included in the teaching objectives, it will have to be eventually developed along the content and evaluation sections, and therefore during the everyday in the classroom. - The third category gathers the content's proposal and its development, with the intention of identifying if the contents go beyond the "traditional" aspects of the subject and if they are linked to the youth's realities and their educative needs. - The fourth category is focused on the evaluation criteria that evaluate the students according to the proposed objectives and contents, trying to identify if the evaluation gathers exclusively subject's conceptual aspects or if it evaluates the citizen competences developed by the students. In conclusion, we make an assessment of the changes made by the Organic Law for the Improvement of the Educational Quality from 2013.