ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews literature on political culture, participation and citizenship education in Brazil, illustrating how focus group research improves existing knowledge in these fields. It outlines focus group discussions about education as one of the most important issues in the country. The chapter presents discourse of supply (DaS) around opportunities to act upon these issues. It provides participants’ discourse about citizen action, in which they evaluate the efficacy and legitimacy of different participation strategies in light of problems identified in their DaS. The importance of education for political participation, or citizenship education, is ever present in political theory. A citizen capable of participating in public decisions or exerting active citizenship is still considered fundamental to democracy, understood in its thinner or thicker sense. Research on citizenship education points to a significant variety of content and practices. Schools merely offer an ‘opening’ for citizens’ education that can be used either to question social inequality or to reproduce elitist knowledge.
