Basic Education, Civic Education Curriculum Studies

This thesis is to conclude the trend and characteristics of the reform & development of citizenship education in current fundamental education by case study of England and American counterparts; also, I propose some constructive suggestions for the curriculum reform in China.First of all, I clarify the concepts of " citizen", "citizenship", "citizenship education" and "citizenship education curriculum", which helps to not only distinguish citizenship education, moral education, and political education, but also provide the framework for analyzing citizenship education curriculum. By doing so, the research avoids possible confusion caused by different understanding of above concepts.After that, in the second part, I begin the research of citizenship education curriculum models by case study of corresponding standards in England and America. In this part, I show the Goal, Content, Implementation of the citizenship education curriculum which are embodied in the standards, then, I conclude the elementary characteristics of them.The third part of the thesis describes how America takes the social studies as the major subject in implementing citizenship education curriculum. I focus on the textbooks on social studies published by four major textbook publishers in America, and analyze the characteristics of the content organization and editing design in those textbooks. Finally, I do the case study in the following two units: "School" and "Live in our country".The last part of the thesis is the analysis of history and current situation of citizenship education curriculum implementation in China. By analyzing the latest 'Morality and society' standard and a textbook published by "Liaohai Publisher", I describe some policies of citizenship education curriculum reform in China and the problems, also, I propose the suggestions on how to improve it:1. first we should clarify what are the necessary qualifications that a citizen should have;2. secondly, we should define the "citizenship education curriculum" , and assure its pivotal role in the fundamental education;3. also, we should strengthen the research on effective pedagogical methods both in theory and practice;4. we should strengthen the training of the teachers;5. finally, we should also pay attention to the role of hidden curriculum in the school.