Citizenship Teaching & Learning - Volume 12, Issue 3, 2017

Political didactics is a field that has long resisted examination of teaching efficacy. Of particular importance are questions concerning what teaching personnel know and where their content-based expert knowledge comes from, what is to be taught and how teachers deal with problems in understanding content. Teachers’ professional knowledge can be divided into ‘content knowledge’ (CK), ‘pedagogical content knowledge’ (PCK) and pedagogical knowledge. Beliefs regarding teaching and learning processes, pupils have active or passive, receptive or constructive roles ascribed to them. These roles are generally distinguished as the basic positions of constructivist and transmission-based concepts of teaching and learning. This study collected the results for German gymnasium teachers (N=196). 38.6 per cent of respondents were female, on average the age of respondents stands at 43.5 years old (SD=11.4). The assumptions about the structure of subject-specific professional knowledge are checked by comparing a one-dimensional IRT model with various multidimensional ones. The model comparison shows a statistically significant model improvement for the two-dimensional model distinguishing between CK and PCK. PCK can be divided into normative political didactic discourses in one dimension and lessonbased items in a second dimension. Investigation of the structural assumptions shows that politics teachers’ beliefs on teaching and learning can be integrated into overlapping belief syndromes. Cognitive constructivist orientations go hand in hand with greater subject interest, while transmission-based orientations tend to be related to less interest in politics. There is a slightly significant small negative correlation between a constructivist orientation and lesson-based knowledge (LBK). Those who have been teaching for a long time attain lower scores in the subject-specific didactic part of the test. Participation in further training only has an impact on normative and not on LBK.

In Pakistan, the school subjects of Social Studies, Civics and Pakistan Studies are explicitly used to construct Pakistani national identity and young people’s sense of citizenship. This article draws upon interviews with 27 Pakistan Studies teachers from a town in the Punjab region of Pakistan. The interviews aimed to explore the teachers’ perceptions and teaching practices with respect to teaching about regional, national and global identity content within the area of Pakistan Studies. The research found that in seeking to reconcile conflicting binary policy discourses most of the teachers continued to subscribe to relatively traditional pedagogical practices constrained by an examination system that overwhelmingly assesses students’ knowledge of textbook content. Most of the teachers had more inclination towards developing students’ national identity based upon Sunni Islamic values rather than multi-layered identities, reflecting more localized cultural diversity or global outlooks and viewpoints.

This study aimed to investigate teachers’ opinions in terms of human rights education (HRE). The study was conducted in four schools including two faith schools and two secular schools in England and in Malaysia. Semi-structured interviews of eight teachers, four from England and four from Malaysia, were used as a qualitative instrument to collect data for this study to know the needs of students in terms of HRE. The data of interviews were fully transcribed and scrutinized and, for each question, the responses were categorized. A further coding process then took place to identify categories that could be grouped together. This study provided the most promising findings to develop HRE among students. The findings revealed that in England, students study human rights in relation to moral responsibility, social involvement and political literacy; in Malaysia students start their topics by knowing themselves, friends and family, school and community. The results also revealed that in England, a belief in God underpinned HRE in the faith school but not the secular, whereas in Malaysia such a belief underpinned the curriculum regardless of type of school.

The process of civics and citizenship education is a complex and multifaceted affair. Research in Australia and elsewhere has indicated a dearth of civics and citizenship understanding. To assist their students, schoolteachers need to be in command of the knowledge, understandings and dispositions related to civics and citizenship education. This article discusses teacher readiness for teaching this subject in primary schools, by asking a cohort of first year pre-service teachers to respond to a test recently administered to a sample of year six children (aged about 11 years) in Australia. The results were somewhat disconcerting, with numbers of the pre-service teachers furnishing incorrect answers. Patterns of incorrect answers and reasons for these are analysed, in the context of the student cohort and the education they have received to date, and the education they are to provide upon graduation. Beyond this, the test paper itself, and some of the assumptions it appears to make, as well as some of its silences, are also put under scrutiny. Some brief implications for teacher education, teaching, learning, assessment and socially just futures are also included.

In democratic societies fostering democratic citizens is an important goal of education and includes the experience of democratic relations. But how do teachers interpret and carry this out? Are there differences between the levels of schooling, and if so, what? In an explorative study, interviews with teachers from preschool to high school were conducted and analysed to elicit practical arguments. The informants described their mission as intertwined in everyday activities and teaching democracy ‘as a way of life’ in the spirit of Dewey. For example, the task of fostering quality in relations, such as empathy, was only discussed by preschool teachers, whereas the task of balancing equal relationships was addressed by all the informants at all levels. It also became clear that the progression of democratic learning runs parallel with addressing ever-present relational issues of a democratic nature.

This article explores the citizenship practice of an Australian kindergarten teacher, Marjorie Caw (nee Hubbe) who was born in 1893, a few months prior to the achievement of women’s suffrage in South Australia. First, the Hubbe family is located politically and socially in the Australian context. Then the article positions Marjorie as a young citizen teacher at the Adelaide Kindergarten Training College and Grey Ward Free Kindergarten between 1911 and 1913. The next section focuses on the implications of her German surname during the First World War and exposes the precarious nature of citizenship status. Marjorie married in 1922 and the final section analyses citizen mother Marjorie’s understanding of active citizenship in the diverse rural community of Kojonup, Western Australia. The article argues that citizenship is not only a legal concept but also involves complex political, social and affective relationships which change over time and in different contexts. Marjorie’s citizenship practice was a classed, raced and gendered process of inclusion and exclusion in the first half of the twentieth century.

Education, Globalization and the Nation, K. M. Chong, I. Davies, T. Epstein, C. L. Peck, A. Peterson, A. Ross, M. A. Schmidt, A. Sears and D. Sonu (2016) London: Palgrave Macmillan, 224 pp., ISBN: 9781137460356, h/bk, £63.00

Muslim Cosmopolitanism: Southeast Asian Islam in Comparative Perspective, Khairudin Aljunied (2017) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 192 pp., ISBN: 9781474408882, h/bk, £75.00

School Leadership, Citizenship Education and Politics in China: Experiences from Junior Secondary Schools in Shanghai, Shuqin Xu (2016) Singapore: Springer, xvii+195 pp., ISBN: 9789811016417, h/bk, £66.99