Teaching a Minimal Citizenship

This chapter explores how politics curriculum teachers understand and practice CE in classrooms. It presents three Chinese teachers’ citizenship teaching case by case. The chapter reveals that the investigated teachers adopted a minimal CE approach and didn’t strictly follow the official discourse on CE. Drawing on theories of social structure and agency, the chapter explains how teachers’ CE practices are shaped by the interplay between teacher agency and the social structures of standardized testing and official textbooks. It further identifies the sources of and space for negotiation with official curricular content.