Guidelines for Citizenship Education in Teacher Education: Linking Research and Practice in Citizenship Education

The central thrust of education for citizenship asks some of the key questions surrounding our education system – what is education for? What is the role of the school in developing positive attitudes amongst young people? How can controversial issues be raised in the classroom? and how do we develop critical citizens? These questions do not have definitive answers but one of the real bonuses of the discussion which took place around education for citizenship was precisely that the focus was on the whole nature of education and exactly what should our education system be trying to develop in young people. At the same time, and in some ways counter to this, there has been a renewed emphasis on target setting, particularly concentrating on exam results, which can tend to distort the nature of schooling and can mean that wider issues are relegated to the background; as teachers have concentrated on the exam targets and PISA comparisons, issues such as citizenship tend to get squeezed from the school day. Nonetheless, over the last 20 years there has been much good practice and some negative experiences, some of it highlighted in this article.