Lee Jerome

Teaching (about) Britishness? An investigation into trainee teachers' understanding of Britishness in relation to citizenship and the discourse of civic nationalism

This research was prompted by the developing political discourse proposing the teaching of Britishness and British values in the context of the United Kingdom. This discourse will be reviewed in the first part of the article, in the context of previous work which has sought to assess how Britishness and related concepts might be promoted through education. The second part will be based on questionnaire responses from a sample of students following post-graduate initial teacher training programmes in a number of higher education partnerships. It indicates that, while political discourse and educational policy have sensitised trainee teachers to the agenda, there remains a deep uncertainty and misgiving about this as an educational objective.

Service Learning and Active Citizenship Education in England.

This article compares the English tradition of active citizenship education with the US tradition of service learning. It starts by outlining service learning and noting some of the defining characteristics as well as some of the tensions. It then discusses the model of active citizenship that has been promoted in England’s secondary school curriculum, considering how this has been defined and how it has been implemented. The two traditions are then compared to highlight the substantial areas of overlap between the two models, sharpen some of the distinctions and consider why there have been limited connections between them in practice. This discussion raises several issues that link to foundational questions about the nature, scope and purpose of citizenship education which are discussed in relation to the changed political context in England after the establishment of the coalition government.

Staffing, status and subject knowledge: what does the construction of citizenship as a new curriculum subject in England tell us about the nature of school subjects?

Almost a decade ago, the new subject of citizenship was created in the English National Curriculum and several universities were funded to train teachers in this new subject. This presented a rare challenge, namely how to train people to teach a subject that did not exist in schools, and in which they were unlikely to have a specialist degree. In this article we have taken the opportunity afforded by the tenth birthday of the report in which Crick recommended this curriculum reform to reflect on that experience from the perspective of teacher educators. Through reflecting on the case study of citizenship education in England we highlight several themes that are of more general interest to teacher educators. The key issues that have emerged in this case study relate to the general problems of translating central policy into classroom practice; the nature and aims of subjects in the curriculum; and the identities of teachers in secondary schools. The article illustrates how teacher educators responded to the formidable challenge of creating (or at least contributing to) a new subject and a subject community.

Power, Pedagogy and Participation: ethics and pragmatics in research with young people

This article addresses issues of methodology and ethical reflexivity when attempting to investigate the opinions of young people. Drawing specifically on three studies of young peoples understandings of citizenship and their views on topical issues, two from England and one from Lebanon, the authors present ways in which the ethical and practical challenges of such research can be met. While acknowledging the power relationship between researchers and informants, they suggest that what they call ‘pedagogical research approaches’ built on a participative methodology can open up a space where both parties benefit. They argue that, when working in schools, teacher educators can take advantage of this status to present themselves simultaneously as insiders and outsiders. The authors have devised what are intended to be non-exploitative research instruments that permit the gathering of useful qualitative data during a short encounter. They illustrate their approach with examples of classroom activities they have developed to provide simultaneously a valid learning experience and usable data.

What Do Citizens Need to Know? An Analysis of Knowledge in Citizenship Curricula in the UK and Ireland.

Abstract Contemporary citizenship education tends to focus on the development of skills through real experiences, which has led to a relative neglect or simplification of knowledge and understanding. This article outlines a framework for analysing citizenship curricula drawing on Young’s notion of ‘powerful knowledge’ and ‘knowledge of the powerful’ and on Shulman’s account of subject knowledge, which includes substantive concepts and epistemic criteria. These ideas are used to analyse the citizenship curricula in the four nations of the UK and Ireland to assess the extent to which they provide an adequate account of knowledge and understanding of citizenship. The article concludes that it is important to reconsider the relationship between the genuinely educational aspects of citizenship education (where ‘powerful knowledge’ opens up new and diverse understandings) from the normative aims, which are more akin to a form of socialisation (where ‘knowledge of the powerful’ closes down certain possibilities).

Interpreting Children's Rights Education: Three Perspectives and Three Roles for Teachers.

In this article, I argue that the world-view adopted by Children’s Rights Education advocates influences the form of education they present. In the first part of the article, I discuss three perspectives: (1) the legalistic perspective, which sees Children’s Rights Education as a matter of technical implementation; (2) the reformist-hermeneutic perspective, which focuses on the interpretation and elaboration of core children’s rights texts; and (3) the radical view, which sees Children’s Rights Education as part of a broader political struggle for education. In the second part, I consider the implications of each of these perspectives for teachers and argue that only the latter tradition positions teachers as agents of change, while the others reduce teacher agency. The article argues that the first two perspectives are unlikely to achieve radical change for children, and that Children’s Rights Education advocates must engage more overtly with the politically contested nature of education.

Revisiting subject knowledge in citizenship education: Understanding power and agency

Citizenship educators have not yet developed a satisfactory framework for describing the conceptual knowledge at the heart of their subject and the complex ways in which students develop understanding. By focusing on how young people (10–18 years of age) use the core citizenship concepts of power and agency, this research provides an insight into how students learn. Our analysis of young people’s work reveals that many of them are operating with a pre-political or politically naïve understanding of the world which limits their ability to understand power and agency. Some students have gone on to develop a greater sense of their own agency within complex chains of influence, which demonstrates a more nuanced understanding of power and agency, rooted in a more political reading of world. We conclude that our findings may help citizenship teachers to plan more consciously to tackle this area of conceptual understanding.

Identifying an Educational Response to the Prevent Policy: Student Perspectives on Learning about Terrorism, Extremism and Radicalisation

ABSTRACT School responses to the Prevent agenda have tended to focus primarily on ‘safeguarding’ approaches, which essentially perceive some young people as being ‘at risk’ and potentially as presenting a risk to others. In this article, we consider evidence from secondary school students who experienced a curriculum project on terrorism, extremism and radicalisation. We argue that a curriculum response which addresses the acquisition of knowledge can build students’ critical capacity for engagement with radicalisation through enhanced political literacy and media literacy. We further argue this represents a genuinely educational response to Prevent, as opposed to a more restrictive securitised approach.

Promoting a Rights-Based Perspective in Initial Teacher Education

In this chapter we set out to do three things: (1) Explain why London Metropolitan University adopted a rights-respecting approach to teacher education and illustrate what implications this had for our programme. (2) Discuss three themes that have emerged from our evaluations about the impact of the course on the student teachers. (3) Focus on the English course to illustrate how a rights-based approach can be used to re-imagine and re-construct a training programme.

Children’s Rights and Teachers’ Responsibilities

As a teacher educator in England it feels like we have simultaneously lived through the best of times and the worst of times in the past decade. We have seen schools recording year on year progress, with rising examination outcomes and more young people staying on at university. In a parallel development, teachers have become professionalised like never before, with higher pay, better codified professional expectations, and a clearly defined career path with rewards for advanced and excellent teachers.