As described in Chapter Four, citizenship education was introduced to English secondary schools as a social policy that sought to bring about cultural change in encouraging active citizenship. The aims of this research are therefore to explore how active citizenship is understood in schools and to investigate what informs these understandings. The research was informed by the general theories of democratic citizenship discussed in Chapter Two, which illuminate the contested nature of citizenship, and the theories of education described in Chapter Three, which present critical accounts of the recognition and practice of key elements of active citizenship in educational contexts. Drawing on this literature, this project was approached with scepticism about how these active elements might be incorporated into teaching and learning in state schools in England, alongside other National Curriculum subjects. Research questions were formulated to explore how teachers’
and pupils’ understandings of policy aims, the aims of state education more generally and their experiences of citizenship education might inform their understandings of active citizenship.
From this position of scepticism, the work of hooks (1994) offered lenses with which to focus on accounts of classroom practices as a sources of oppression as well as opportunities for liberation. In her book Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, hooks argued that teachers' use of power over learners reduces natural enthusiasm for learning to obedience to authority. She therefore called upon teachers to ‘transgress those boundaries that would confine each pupil
to a rote, assembly-line approach to learning’ and approach learners as individuals
‘even if the situation does not allow the full emergence of a relationship based on mutual recognition’ (hooks 1994:13). hooks (1994:14) criticised the ‘banking system’ of acquisition of knowledge as a transferable commodity, in the belief that learners should be active participants, rather than ‘passive consumers’. hooks cited Henry Giroux and Peter McLaren’s (1993) work on critical thinking and pedagogy, which suggests that the critical thinking central to active citizenship must be demonstrated by:
... pedagogical practices engaged in creating a new language, rupturing disciplinary boundaries, decentering authority, and rewriting the institutional and discursive borderlands in which politics becomes a condition for reasserting the relationship between agency, power, and struggle. (Giroux and McLaren 1993, cited in hooks 1994:129)
Constructing Citizenship
While hooks’ treatment of the oppressive and liberating possibilities of higher education set the tone of the exploration of the main research aim, her invocation of critical pedagogy offered a link to those theorists who provided a scaffold (Goffman 1959; Walsham 1993, 1995) of concepts that would address the research questions by guiding the analysis of teachers’ and pupils’ accounts of their experiences. The approach to the data was therefore informed by issues in education to which critical pedagogy had drawn attention, and which were identified in Chapter Three as significant for the teaching and learning of citizenship. The key concepts of:
education as a public good or private right; co-intentionality and praxis; and the valorisation of common sense and the accommodation of adversaries helped to frame elements of teachers’ and pupils’ experiences the research sought to explore. The significance of these concepts was not expected to be revealed by respondents’ use of these specific terms, rather research instruments were designed to elicit reflection on examples of classroom practices, the emergent themes of which could then be subject to critical analysis informed by theoretical concepts.
Youdell (2006) draws on Butler’s use of performativity to understand how the roles of teachers and pupils are constructed through discourses in schools. Her work is useful in terms of applying the above concepts to this study’s participants. For
example, Youdell (2006:514) describes how school practices may involve intentional and unintentional discourses:
On the one hand, [Butler’s work] suggests that subjects do not necessarily regurgitate discourse unwittingly. On the other hand, however, it suggests that discourses are not necessarily cited knowingly and that they are not necessarily known explicitly to the subject and/or audience. As such, subjects need not be self-consciously alert to the discourses deployed in order for their familiar and embedded meanings to be inscribed. Furthermore, the analysis suggests, again after Butler (1997a), that discourses do not need to be explicitly cited in order to be deployed. Rather, multiple discourses are referenced through the meanings, associations and omissions embedded in the historicity of apparently simple and benign utterances and bodily practices.
Therefore, a pupil may talk about their citizenship education in terms that validate it as a private right, or as a public good, unaware that they are contributing to that particular discourse.
Using the concept of education as a private right allows for the interpretation of data presenting themes relating to the instrumental nature of schooling in terms of a Freirean understanding of ‘banking’ (Freire 1970) or the professionalisation of education in terms of coded forms of knowledge (Bernstein 1973). As Giroux uses Gramsci to illustrate, such an understanding of education constructs those most able to succeed as ‘a mere container in which to pour and conserve empirical data or brute disconnected facts which he will have to subsequently pigeonhole in his brain’ (Gramsci 1916, cited in Giroux 2011:55). Bernstein’s (1973) term ‘educational knowledge code’ describes the set of principles that shape a curriculum, the appropriate forms of pedagogy and the means of evaluating teaching and learning.
Bernstein describes the English National Curriculum as a collection type curriculum, made up of subjects with strongly classified content and a strongly framed pedagogical relationship. Teaching and learning in citizenship lessons could therefore be expected to be influenced by what Critical Race Theorists call the
‘business as usual’ (Delgado and Stefancic 2000) of schooling.
Co-intentionality and praxis are useful concepts for the interpreting of data that relates to emergent themes of whether pedagogy reflects Freirean understandings
of communication and co-production or more closely resembles ‘narration’. This research agrees with Freire’s (1970) contention that the realisation of opportunities for learners to truly reflect upon, and become active participants in, their learning would be an appropriate approach to pedagogy for active citizenship. Praxis, rather than coercion, is then the drive for changing understandings, as a truly participatory learning experience must be co-intentional, rather than dominated by a particular position. Any ‘cultural and political baggage’ teachers bring to the classroom should therefore be declared and ideally used as a ‘theoretical resource’ (Giroux 2011:75), whereby the teacher allows her teaching to be informed by naming the conflicting discourses at work within and beyond the school and opening them up to debate.
Using the concepts of the valorisation of common sense and the accommodation of adversarial debate allows for the interpretation of data presenting themes that build on the idea of participation to question the adoption of models of knowledge whose content Bernstein (1973) would determine to be ‘strongly classified’, as well as the adherence to a strongly framed pedagogical relationship that precludes adversarial debate. Youdell found that educational forms such as the banking model created, not merely reproduced, inequalities, which she saw as having consequences ‘that reach far beyond the school and are a key reason why education ... is a site of political struggle’ that rejects the common-sense privileging of market values (Youdell 2011:14). Giroux’s (2011) interpretation of Mouffe’s work is also useful in its rejection of common-sense conflations and connections between complex, discrete concepts such as civil freedoms and market freedoms. A Mouffean adversarial approach would require these ideas to be opened up and engaged in agonistic combat, which affirms the true freedoms of each adversary to be heard and respectfully challenged. In this way, learners’ views and experiences from within and outside formal education are legitimised as valid knowledge and as helping to build a radical imaginary.
Constructing Young People
The methods of this study therefore challenge dominant constructions of the child as a lacking subject, an ‘immature’ adult, less able to behave rationally or demonstrate self-discipline or reflexivity: a risk to society (Nolas 2011). As Alldred and Burman (2005) note, analysing accounts in terms of the status they occupy is especially significant when studying ‘adults’ interpretations of children’s experiences. Children’s ‘voices’ cannot be heard outside of, or free from, cultural understandings of childhood and the cultural meanings assigned their
communication’ (Alldred and Burman 2005:177-178). Alldred and Burman saw a Foucauldian understanding of the power of expert knowledge as especially pertinent when considering discourses of ‘child’, ‘adult’, ‘pupil’ and ‘teacher’ (it could also be applied to the framing of ‘researcher’). Critical pedagogy’s Foucauldian treatment of power dynamics in the classroom (Giroux 1983; McLaren 1995) is then useful in countering the subjectivation of pupils in a subordinate role. Beyond the teacher-pupil relationship, the hierarchy of disciplines, within the hierarchy of members of the school, within the hierarchy of institutions of the education system is a particularly visual, if not visible institutional structure. Order seems so fundamental to education in England and as Deacon (2006:183) points out –
... it is worth bearing in mind the degree to which modernity's vision of a progressive accumulation of scientific knowledge, the grouping and partitioning of curricula, the evolutionary differentiation and classification of learning cycles and phases, and the separation of ages and standards, so central to modern systems of education, are products of historically contingent disciplinary procedures.
The stratification that has resulted from the phenomena Deacon describes has been accompanied (as it has coalesced with) a discourse of deficit that defines young people as lacking and in need of expert intervention. Nolas (2011) calls for a more nuanced understanding of what young people get out of their participation.
She describes how the idea of 'drift' has shaped youth development policies that focus on 'constructive activities' to reduce delinquency, whereas her own work with youth supports the findings of quantitative studies that find promoting young people's agency within their communities is more effective in tackling social problems than 'forensic' approaches based on outcomes to do with drugs and teen pregnancy. This study’s focus on the processes of citizenship education in cultivate understandings of citizenship was not concerned with ‘forensic’ outcomes and aimed not to reinforce an instrumental vision of education.
This research therefore made no assumptions about the relationship between the pupils’ education and their participation in society as active citizens. The issue of whether students had applied their citizenship learning "in real life" was therefore last on the interview schedule, to be asked if examples of active citizenship had not already been expressed. Responses to this question were also revealing in that it had the desired effect of accessing pupils' reflections on active participation outside school, even where they explicitly denied that this was in any way 'inspired' by their
citizenship education. Framing the interview as about pupils' experiences of citizenship education, as the subject of the research, therefore elicited responses that spoke directly to the core themes of how teaching and learning is experienced without precluding important discussion of its wider impact.
As well as recognising the validity of young people’s knowledge generally, this research also sought to include diversity in the broad terms of gender, ethnicity, (dis/)ability, and socio-economic background, as section 5.5 will discuss. Following a Mouffean anti-essentialist approach, however, the aims of the research would not be complemented by the categorisation of respondents in terms of their distance from the normativity of Whiteness (Du Bois 1973) or privilege of ‘passing’ for
‘default’ identities (Robinson 1994). Documentation of these characteristics did not therefore inform the analysis of interview data and the use of gendered pronouns merely follows the convention of the English language. Feminist theorists of education in particular have observed that white, middle-class, masculine, heterosexual, non-disabled forms of knowledge tend to be normalised and privileged in schools (Walkerdine 1989; Paechter 2001). It could therefore be anticipated that young people perceived as belonging to other identity categories are likely to experience domination in multiple forms, not only the form of lacking power in relation to teachers, but a commitment to valuing the unique contributions of young people determined the pursuit of an equitable approach that aimed to interpret accounts without making essential assumptions.
Corresponding to this in engagement with teachers, the concept of pupil voice was an important area of inquiry that spoke to the themes of co-intentionality and praxis, and the valorisation of common sense and accommodation of adversarial debate.
Ellsworth describes how pupil voice (1989:308-9) functions to:
... efface the contradiction between the emancipatory project of critical pedagogy and the hierarchical relation between teachers and students. In other words, it is a strategy for negotiating between the directiveness of dominant educational relationships and the political commitment to make students autonomous of those relationships (how does a teacher "make" students autonomous without directing them?). The discourse on student voice sees the student as
"empowered" when the teacher "helps" students to express their subjugated knowledges. The targets of this strategy are students from disadvantaged and subordinated social class, racial, ethnic, and
gender groups — or alienated middle-class students without access to skills of critical analysis, whose voices have been silenced or distorted by oppressive cultural and educational formations. By speaking, in their "authentic voices," students are seen to make themselves visible and define themselves as authors of their own world. Such self-definition presumably gives students an identity and political position from which to act as agents of social change. Thus, while it is true that the teacher is directive, the student's own daily life experiences of oppression chart her/his path toward self-definition and agency. The task of the critical educator thus becomes "finding ways of working with students that enable the full expression of multiple Voices' engaged in dialogic encounter”...
The scepticism evident in Ellsworth’s account suggests the complexity of theoretical and practical issues that might coalesce to enable or threaten the practice of pupil voice. In-depth qualitative research therefore offers opportunities to explore this complexity from the two sets of perspectives of teachers as potentially
‘empowering’ and pupils as potentially ‘empowered’.