Introduction

Many paths to sustainability had been listed at the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, and education was already mentioned as one of the most vital paths. UN, later, declared 2005-2014 as the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development. In 2015, the UN presented 17 goals for countries to implement a new sustainable development agenda. These goals – varying from no poverty to climate action and gender equality to life below water – included quality education and were adopted by world leaders at a UN Summit (UN, 2016).

All these years, the UN has called for quality education for all, and called for a change in the way we think and act. As the lead agency for Education on Sustainable Development, UNESCO (n.d., para. 5) repeatedly stressed on global citizenship and the promotion of civic skills as that “Empowering learners to live responsible lives and to address complex global challenges means that education has to promote competencies like critical thinking, imagining future scenarios and making decisions in a collaborative way.”

These are common competencies that everybody believes to be important to create more civilized communities, but in fact, we need to know more about how to promote such skills in our schools. Education should promote skills like critical thinking or decision making or collaborating as also mentioned as civic skills, but foundations for civic skills need a more grounded establishment in the literature. There is still a scarcity of empirical studies that investigate the promotion of civic skills, and even a larger gap among standards and means of accountability that measure civic outcomes. Policymakers and citizens are concerned with preparing young people for college and a competitive, global job market, and schools have generally sidelined their civic missions in an era of standards and accountability focused on other subjects such as math or reading (Levine, 2007). It is, however, vital to place emphasis on youth’s civic skills development because civic skills are life skills, and necessary for a sustainable future.

Purpose of the Study

Despite the various challenges that public schools face today, they are most likely the very institutions to play a critical role in individuals’ civic skills development (Flanagan, Cumsille, Gill, & Gallay, 2007). We often complain that youth’s civic competencies are steadily decreasing (Coley, & Sum, 2012), and we are quick to blame public schools for this decline (Levinson, 2012). However, there are few studies that have examined how school teachers actually promote civic skills. Therefore, the purpose of this research study was to broaden our understanding of teachers’ perspectives about factors that fostered or impeded students’ civic skills development. To be able to understand the very root of the problem the following research questions were asked:

1)      From teachers’ perspectives, what factors foster students’ civic skills?

2)      From teachers’ perspectives, what factors impede students’ civic skills?

Theoretical framework

Central to the phenomenon of this research, most high-stakes accountability policies suggest that student achievement is to be measured and this measurement is attributed to the teaching quality of teachers. There is a value that we ascribed to teaching in this sense. The concept of subjectification can tell us that although the use-value of teaching (for example, teaching self-confidence or being a good citizen) is important, it is mainly the exchange value (for example, scoring high on a test) that policymakers or education interest groups consider when deciding on curriculum, funding, or evaluation. Critical theory invites us to question this situation and lets us think whether life success is something that can be measured, and what the consequences would be if we do so.

Coley, R.J., & Sum, A. (2012). Fault lines in our democracy: Civic knowledge, voting behavior, and civic engagement in the United States. Educational Testing Service. Flanagan, C., Cumsille, P., Gill, S., & Gallay, L.S. (2007). School and community climates and civic commitments: Patterns for ethnic minority and majority students. Journal of Educational Psychology, 99(2), 421. Levine, P. (2007). The future of democracy: Developing the next generation of American citizens. Medford, MA: Tufts University Press. Levinson, M. (2012). No citizen left behind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. UN. (2016). Sustainable development goals. 17 goals to transform our world. New York, NY: Retrieved from http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/ UNESCO. (n.d.). Education for sustainable development. Retrieved on December 5, 2016 from http://en.unesco.org/themes/education-sustainable-development/ Yin, R. K. (2008). Case study research: Design and methods. Los Angeles, CA: Sage publications.