Assumptions of Citizenship Education: a Case Study in Spanish Initial Teacher Education

Author(s):

Marta Estelles Frade(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2016

Network:

10. Teacher Education Research

Format:

Paper

Session Information

10 SES 07 D, Literacy, Citizenship and Physical Education

Paper Session

Time:

2016-08-24

17:15-18:45

Room:

NM-Theatre P

Chair:

Ratha Perumal

Contribution

The last decades have been especially rich in discourses, reports, technical documents and policies regarding citizenship education. Considering this explosion, it is not surprising that current curricula, which organize initial teacher education programs, include, among their stated purposes, preparing teachers to help their future students to grow as global, participatory and ethically engaged citizens. However, we know little about how teacher educators prepare their students to be citizens. This paper analyzes how a group of teacher educators from a public university in Spain understand citizenship education, exploring the net of tacit assumptions and idealized visions that they seem to share, regardless of their formal conceptualizations.

In recent years numerous investigations have focused on the study of perceptions about citizenship education (Carr, 2008; Castro, 2013; Faden, 2012; Hahn, 2015; Martin, 2008; Patterson et al., 2012; Willemse et al., 2015; among others). Most of them analyzed formal aspects of (pre-service) teachers’ discourses, such as the importance and meaning given to concepts like democracy, participation, social justice and/or global citizenship (Carr, 2008; Castro, 2013); the defining characteristics of their ideal citizen or citizenship education (Davies et al., 1999; Hahn, 2015; Martin, 2008); or their reflections on their teaching practices linked to citizenship education (Willemse et al., 2015). These studies are important as they delve into observable, conscious, deliberate and self-regulated ways of reasoning and interpretations that, although complex and often contradictory (Evans, 2006; McCowan, 2011), play a role in determining our daily actions.

However, the functioning of our cognitive system, and therefore the representations we make of the others and the world, cannot be explained only in terms of the deliberate, conscious and self-regulated rational exercises (Ariely, 2010; Damasio, 2012; Kahneman, 2012; Lakoff, 2008; Westen, 2008; among others). The tacit assumptions, usually unspoken, and the intuitive thinking that underpin our common sense (mixture of notions, judgments, feelings, values and passions) as well as the unconscious and automatic reactions play a key role on what Bourdieu (2007) calls our “practical knowledge”. When Kahneman (2012) talks about two systems in the mind, System 1 (fast, automatic, intuitive and emotional) and System 2 (slow, deliberative and logical); or when Giddens (1995) distinguishes between “discursive consciousness” (our verbalized and reflective registry of the reality around us) and “practical consciousness” (our understanding nested in conventions, habits and daily routines), these authors recognize that we must take into account both dimensions to try to understand how we think, judge and make decisions.

For Fischman and Haas (2012), recognizing the importance of automatic and unconscious understandings of citizenship education can provide professionals and researchers conceptual tools to go beyond idealized models of education for citizenship and discourses based on the Cartesian tradition of the “cogito, ergo sum”. After all, those models risk being translated into extremely impractical pedagogical models.

Building on this understanding, this paper aims to explore the complex world of how teacher educators prepare their students to be citizens paying attention not only to rational and explicitly structured discourses, but also to those unconscious ways of understanding citizenship education. From this perspective, understanding of how teacher educators signify citizenship education requires an exploration of the assumptions (with implicit hierarchies unchallenged) that they take for granted when talking about citizenship education.

Method

This qualitative research collected data from a group of nine teacher educators dedicated to the initial training of elementary teachers at the University of Cantabria (Spain). This paper focuses on the data collected from semi-structured interviews, although it is part of a larger project that also involved document analysis and classroom observations with the same group of teachers. The interview questions were based on previously conducted studies (Carr, 2008; Davies et al., 1999; Martin, 2008; Patterson et al., 2012) because we wanted to allow for rational discourses to arise in the interviews while taking into account all those less subject-to-conscious control aspects. The analysis of the collected data was performed using two different methods: interview coding and metaphorical analysis. The interview coding was carried out first to frame the second analysis. It used a category system based on the three orientations of citizenship described by Westheimer and Kahne (2004): personally responsible, participatory and justice-oriented citizen; and the citizenship education themes: type of citizenship involvement promoted, location of citizenship education in the curriculum and type of knowledge that should be taught, adapted from the model developed by Patterson et al. (2012). Responses were initially coded independently on each classification and then, in another coding process, both systems were considered. The metaphorical analysis was conducted in two phases. The first consisted of the identification of metaphorical expressions in the interviews, taking into account the complexity often involved in this process, as indicated by Todd and Harrison (2008): “[t]he identification process is not always clear. For one thing, the boundary between a literal and a metaphorical phrase can be fuzzy” (pp. 482-483). The second phase of analysis aimed to identify the source and target domains of the selected metaphors and, if appropriate, gather them in conceptual metaphors. This process was carried out using the frame based on the works on metaphors in political language of Hernández (2004) and Amar (2014) as a reference.

Expected Outcomes

Far from finding perfectly rational and formalized constructions, perceptions around those concepts seem to be characterized by ambivalence, breadth and ambiguity. After doing the general coding, three teachers were categorized as personally responsible, three as participatory and three as justice-oriented. Five conceptual metaphors were found: citizenship as an engine, democracy as a goal (or finish line), citizens as plants, education as a light and citizenship education as a game. This paper suggests that even for teacher educators explicitly interested in citizenship education, automatic ways of thinking play a key role in their perceptions. These automatic intuitions, expressed through metaphors, appeared in interviews that correspond to seemingly different ways of conceptualizing citizenship (personally responsible, participatory or justice-oriented). In other words, we found a shared net of assumptions that goes beyond rationally constructed discourses of citizenship. The discussion of these findings considers the implicit hierarchies of these shared assumptions that define what is deemed as real, desirable and possible in citizenship education. Implications for teacher education are also contemplated as these implicit assumptions often result in the promotion of pedagogical models in teacher education that are excessively impractical.

References

Amar, A. A. (2014). La política es un juego: un análisis de la metáfora política en la prensa española. European Scientific Journal, 10(4). Ariely, D. (2008). Predictably irrational: The hidden forces that shape our decisions. HarperCollins. Bourdieu, P. (2007). El sentido práctico. Siglo XXI. Carr, P. (2008). Educating for democracy: With or without social justice. Teacher Education Quarterly, 35(4), 117-136. Castro, A. J. (2013). What Makes a Citizen? Critical and Multicultural Citizenship and Pre-service Teachers’ Understanding of Citizenship Skills, Theory & Research in Social Education, 41(2), 219-246. Damasio, A. R. (2012). Y el cerebro creó al hombre. Destino. Davies, I., Gregory, I., & Riley, S. C. (1999). Good Citizenship and Educational Provision. Falmer Press. Evans, M. (2006). Educating for Citizenship: What Teachers Say and What Teachers Do. Canadian Journal of Education, 29(2), 410-435. Faden, L. Y. (2012). Teachers constituting the politicized subject: Canadian and US teachers’ perspectives on the ‘good’ citizen. Citizenship Teaching & Learning, 7(2), 173-189. Fischman, G. E., & Haas, E. (2012). Beyond Idealized Citizenship Education Embodied Cognition, Metaphors, and Democracy. Review of Research in Education, 36(1), 169-196. Giddens, A. (1995). La constitución de la sociedad. Bases para la teoría de la estructuración. Amorrortu. Hahn, C. L. (2015). Teachers’ perceptions of education for democratic citizenship in schools with transnational youth: A comparative study in the UK and Denmark. Research in Comparative and International Education, 10(1), 95-119. Hernández, M. L. (2004). La metáfora política en la prensa venezolana: Un estudio lingüístico cognitivo. Opción: Revista de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales, (44), 55-77. Kahneman, D. (2012). Pensar rápido, pensar despacio. Debate. Lakoff, G. (2008). The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st Century Politics with an 18th Century Brain. Viking. Martin, L. A. (2008). Elementary and secondary teacher education students’ perspectives on citizenship. Action in Teacher Education, 30(3), 54-63. McCowan, T. (2011). Rethinking citizenship education. A curriculum for participatory democracy. Continuum. Patterson, N., Doppen, F., & Misco, T. (2012). Beyond personally responsible: A study of teacher conceptualizations of citizenship education. Education, Citizenship and Social Justice, 7(2), 191-206. Todd, Z., & Harrison, S. J. (2008). Metaphor analysis. In S.N. Hesse-Biber & P. Leavy (Eds.). Handbook of emergent methods (pp. 479-493). Guilford. Westen, D. (2008). Political brain: The role of emotion in deciding the fate of the nation. PublicAffairs. Westheimer, J., & Kahne, J. (2004). What kind of citizen? The politics of educating for democracy. American Educational Research Journal, 41(2), 237-269.

Author Information

Marta Estelles Frade (presenting / submitting)

University of Cantabria

Education

Santander

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