ABSTRACT
As a country in the Global South, China’s development of citizenship education has occurred much later than in western countries. However, as a burgeoning area, citizenship education has attracted more and more attention from educators and scholars. With practitioners’ endeavors and attempts, a lot of amazing achievements have been made, while a variety of difficulties and problems also challenge the practice and research about it. To provide a more comprehensive understanding of citizenship education for those who are interested in this topic, in this chapter, I intend to represent some real situations in both the practice of citizenship education and the process of conducting relevant research. Mainly based on my two-year ethnographic study in two Chinese public schools, this chapter aims to picture some vivid circumstances by presenting and analyzing the specific and detailed examples generated from the reality of education and research. There are two parts in this chapter. Part 1 will describe the real situation of the implementation of citizenship education in Chinese public schools, while part 2 focuses on researchers’ experience of undertaking citizenship research in China. By elaborating and examining these realities, I hope this chapter could assist people who engage in citizenship education to develop a better understanding of this field and get prepared before carrying out their practice.
