Chapter 6: Collapsing the Supranational and The National: From Citizenship to Health Education in the Republic of Cyprus

Citizenship education has had a long tradition of being mobilized, within modernist schooling, to inculcate particular types of national identity and citizenship. Considering the tensions that late-modernity has brought about in terms of international relations, globalization, and the renewed role of supranational organizations such as the European Union (EU), it perhaps comes as no surprise that citizenship education has remained at the forefront of educational policy and reform at supranational (e.g., European) and national levels over the last 20-30 years. Policymakers and stakeholders across these levels discuss and ascribe different meanings to “citizenship” and how it could or should relate to “identity” amidst constant political, economic, cultural, and social change. In the context of Cyprus, the focus of this chapter, such debates have added layers of complexity as a postcolonial and conflict-sensitive context where matters of state, citizenship, and identity have been in flux and, at times, an object of armed conflict and war. More recently, these matters were brought to the fore when, in 2004, the Republic of Cyprus (RoC) entered a process of educational reform which, in the school year 2010-2011, culminated in the introduction of new curricula across all subjects and levels of formal public education. This change included the introduction of a new subject area (and interdisciplinary theme) titled Life/Health Education. In our previous work, with a particular interest in this period of educational change (2004–2012¹), we explored via thematic and content analysis a series of policy and curricular documents (including citizenship and health education syllabi) produced during this period, initially the permutation of European and intercultural education discourses when the two intersected (Theodorou & Philippou, 2013), and later how discourses of European, intercultural, and health education were mobilized in the formation of the ideal citizen (Philippou & Theodorou, in press). With these analyses as the background, our focus on exploring constructions of citizenship in health/life education in this chapter is grounded in previous findings that indicate (a) how this curriculum area, rather than citizenship education, became primarily responsible for constructing the ideal citizen, and (b) how previous health discourses surrounding these curriculum documents also created connections with notions of citizenship. Our study rests on citizenship and health education research, which is unpacked in the first part of the chapter. We move on to discuss methodological aspects of our analysis and our findings before concluding with a discussion of the policy and curricular challenges health education discourses produce for citizenship education, as their intersection, we argue, enables and constrains the formation of particular types of citizens towards particular directions.