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THE AESTHETICS OF THE OPPRESSED by Augusto Boal, translated by Adrian Jackson. London: Routledge, 2006. 133 pp. $120.
THE THEATRE OF URBAN: YOUTH AND SCHOOLING IN DANGEROUS TIMES by Kathleen Gallagher. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. 192 pp. $50.
Although Dewey's emphasis on the civic purposes of education was influential in the first half of the twentieth century, these ideas were overshadowed in the last half century by concerns for economic competitiveness, efficiency, and academic achievement (Levinson, 2007). However, following the events of September 11, 2001, the interest in citizenship education is once again growing in U.S. schools. Now against the backdrop of the controversial war in Iraq, increasing transmigration, and the upcoming presidential election, the language of citizenship is finding its way back into academic and lay discourse in education, albeit in a form quite different from that used in the twentieth century.
Previously, U.S. citizenship education was informed by the traditional conceptualization of U.S. citizenship as "assimilationist, liberal, and universal," in which immigrants were expected to give up their first languages and cultures to become full citizens of the nation-state (Banks, 2008, p. 129). These ideas are now being seriously questioned and challenged. The discourse around citizenship has expanded to include the idea of cultural citizenship, which supports the cultural rights for citizens from diverse cultural, ethnic, racial, and language groups so that citizens' different home cultures, languages, and identities may coexist and dialogue with their American identity rather than be subordinate to it (Banks, 2008; Rosaldo, 1994). In addition to being informed by ideas of cultural citizenship (Rosaldo, 1994), citizenship education is also being increasingly influenced by ideas of transnational citizenship (Maira, 2004), which identifies the practice of citizens maintaining contact with, and traveling back and forth between, their home countries and their legal countries of residence. The breadth of citizenship education has thus expanded from merely educating students about the legal and constitutional rights of citizens to creating dialogue around the multiple identities and sense of belonging that inform our civic attitudes and actions. Citizenship theorists (e.g., Banks, 2008; Westheimer & Kahne, 2004) are now advocating for a reimagination (see Banks, 2008; Nussbaum, 2002; Westheimer & Kahne, 2004) of citizenship education that involves not only educating students about rights and...