295 22 Civic Education MARIO CARRETERO Autonoma University of Madrid, Spain HELEN HASTE Harvard University ANGELA BERMUDEZ Deusto University, Bilbao, Spain Civic education is currently a field of vibrant research and practice that is producing significant pedagogical innovation. However, it is a contested field with intense discussions about its goals and what teaching and learning processes should be privileged. These discussions reflect a transition from “tradi- tional” models of civic education to “new civics” that con- siderably extend the definitions of civic participation and the purposes of civic education. Underlying this transition is a basic tension between pedagogy that emphasizes the acqui- sition of knowledge through teacher instruction and peda- gogy that emphasizes praxis, interaction with tools, objects, experiences, and people as the means to gain understanding. The former implies a “top-down” model, the latter, a more “bottom-up” model. In civic education they parallel a tension between seeing the purpose of civic education as increasing knowledge primarily about the nation’s political institutions and history, and the purpose being to develop understanding, skills, agency, and motivation through hands-on experiences with civic issues and actions. In this chapter we discuss the contributions of educational and developmental psychology to this renewed understand- ing of civic education, in particular, to redefining key learn- ing processes, curriculum orientations in formal and informal learning environments, and different pathways to develop- ment. To conclude, we consider three examples of emerging research and practice that relate to “new civics”: Civic educa- tion through new media, student engagement in critical delib- eration of controversial issues, and how historical narratives and concepts are used in the construction of civic identity. Developmental Theory and Civic Education Models of human development are the infrastructures that inform civic education. Advances in developmental psychology are affecting how civic education is conceived. For example, the term “political socialization,” widely used in several social sciences, assumes a social learning theory model, in which the passive individual is molded by environ- mental factors such as conditioning and reinforcement; civic education is one agent of that molding process. However, for several decades, the emergent cognitive model within devel- opmental psychology has cast the individual instead as an active agent in learning, selecting, organizing, and making meaning of experience and information. Further, this active model of the person has been extended by a neo-Vygotskian perspective which takes account of the individual’s cultural context and experience. Cultural models of development focus on the growing individual‘s social and cultural context, the narratives, val- ues, knowledge, and norms of action to which the growing individual is exposed in different sociocultural settings, interactions, and experiences that promote or inhibit effec- tive and relevant learning. Learning results not only from formal teaching of information, but also from individuals’ interaction, dialogue, and performance of action within their social context. Meaning and understanding, therefore, are co-constructed and negotiated in social and cultural interac- tions, not merely processed in individual cognition. In cog- nitive developmental approaches, the individual actively is successively restructuring and reflecting, producing increas- ingly complex and abstract understanding. Within culturally oriented approaches, the active process also involves negoti- ating meaning through dialogue with others and with cultural resources. These theoretical developments transform a view of civic education that was focused on the teaching and learning of factual knowledge and conventional values, primarily aim- ing to socialize the students as newcomers into an existing Carretero, M., Haste, H. & Bermudez, A. (2016). Civic Education. In L., Corno & E.M. Anderman (Eds.) (2016) Handbook of Educational Psychology, 3rd Edition, Chapter 22, pp. 295-308. London: Routledge Publishers.