Citizenship education and complex thinking: Reconfiguring the competency based curriculum

Abstract

Citizenship education in contemporary educational contexts has largely been developed through a logic of operationalization focused on individual performance. However, this perspective presents significant limitations for understanding the complexity of formative processes. This article proposes an epistemological reconfiguration of the competency-based approach through the articulation of complex thinking, transdisciplinarity, and epistemologies of the South. From an analytical-interpretive perspective, the study problematizes the tension between competency-based curricular rationality and the relational, emergent, and situated nature of educational formation. As its main contribution, the article introduces the notion of dialogization of competencies as an analytical category that reinterprets competencies as dynamic and relational configurations emerging from the interaction among subjects, knowledge, and contexts. This perspective broadens the understanding of citizenship education beyond its reduction to measurable performance and contributes to the development of pedagogical and evaluative approaches consistent with the complexity of contemporary educational processes.