ABSTRACT
Requirements for more ‘active’ forms of citizenship participation from children and young people within schooling often rest on unstated emotions of care or empathy. Drawing on research in five New Zealand secondary schools, the chapter examines the interplay of care and young people’s social actions within an active citizenship education programme. The paper reports on how teachers established ‘caring’ classrooms and how their students responded – those who ‘cared’, and those who didn’t care (as much). Analysing these responses through three theoretical approaches to emotion in educational research revealed the significance of young people’s emotional engagement in their acts of citizenship. It also illustrated the fluidity and pervasiveness of emotions of care when implementing active citizenship education policy and the dynamic ways emotions were constituted within socio-spatial contexts such as classrooms.
