Citizenship behaviors development of university students through participation in cultural affairs

Citizen participation in decision-making and social affairs is a desired and necessary part of community development and a key concept of democracy. What informs citizens of their civic rights, responsibilities and duties is citizenship education, which is influenced by activities and experiences within the contexts of home, school, university and the wider community. In this research it has been made an attempt to introduce the university as a small community where citizenship education can be practiced through engagement of students in decision-makings and implementations related to the cultural activities. For this purpose content analysis method was employed to analyze the news of the official website of the student and cultural affairs of the University of Tehran (UT) as the largest and most recognized university of Iran. Interviewing experts in cultural affairs, analyzing their view points with analytic hierarchy method (AHP) and comparing the AHP results to that of the content analysis, led to reveal the lack of attention to the students’ needs and tastes by the university administrators which represents decreasing the opportunity of citizenship development in the university. Finally a participatory model is proposed according to which, students should be involved in the whole cultural planning process in order to develop their citizenship behaviors.