ABSTRACT

This chapter explores one of the most innovative areas of e-schooling, how ICT can help to make citizenship education become real for young people through enabling them to work with partner schools. This approach to citizenship education can best be described as education for citizenship, using Selwyn’s1 term (2002); we argue here that it is through working and negotiating with pupils in other schools that valuable citizenship skills are being learned which have relevance not only in Northern Ireland but elsewhere. Recent evidence highlights the diffi culties of teaching citizenship well. According to a 2006 newspaper report2 on the teaching of citizenship in England, over a quarter of the lessons were judged to be inadequate.