Active Learning – Active Citizenship: towards a Curriculum Framework for development
Brian Hudson
Sheffield Hallam University
How did we get started?
This development arose in response to a number of subject priorities identified from QAA subject overview reports as outlined in the FDTL phase five invitation to bid from HEFCE of September 2003. Following our successful application, we intend to work across subject areas with students in Education Studies, Teacher Education and Applied Social Studies at Sheffield Hallam University and with students of Politics in our partner institution at the University of Lincoln. We have set out with the aim of enhancing the teaching and learning of citizenship and political literacy by developing resources and approaches that integrate the use of ICT and multimedia involving the use of virtual learning environments and open and flexible approaches to learning. We intend that the resources will address inter-related strands of (1) social and moral responsibility (2) community involvement and (3) political literacy. A cross-cutting dimension will involve, where appropriate, the tension between the global and the local in today’s complex, rapidly changing and interdependent global economy.
Where are we going?
We are still at an early stage in the development of this project and our initial progress has been in response to discussions around the questions of where are we going and how do we get there. Unsurprisingly our ideas are still in a state of flux and our thinking is constantly evolving. However we have a shared understanding that this development will be primarily issues-based rather than content-driven and we see the overall development as being about issues, questions and resources rather than simply the development of resources per se. This has led us to think in terms of a curriculum framework for citizenship as such issues inevitably arise from a central concern with values, attitudes and beliefs. Furthermore we have started to conceptualise this framework in response to the direction offered by Andrews and Lewis (2000) and more recently by our external evaluator Karl Donert (Donert, 2005) in terms of:
· active citizenship as participation,
· cultural citizenship as belonging (in relation to tradition, heritage and social identity) and
· global citizenship as taking responsibility
The emphasis on global citizenship is echoed in the recent position statement of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE, 2005) in relation to teacher education. This is based on the recognition of the global nature of education, the interdependence of educators and the need for ‘a generation of globally oriented educational leaders and educators capable of preparing young people for life in a global community’. The AACTE aims to transform teacher education to assure that ‘all teachers prepare all young people for their life as citizens in our global community’.
In thinking about an all embracing description of citizenship, Andrews and Lewis (2000) propose the term ‘comprehensive citizenship’. However our thinking has turned towards the notion of ‘critical citizenship’ which Alan O’Shea (2004) describes as being based on an attempt to ‘intervene in society more actively than usual’ (ibid, p95). This is conceived as a project of social inclusion which aims of provide students ‘with the tools to grasp the sociocultural relations within their society and their own position within it’ (ibid, p95) so as to empower them to intervene more effectively within their communities. It is based on a pedagogical approach that aims to develop the ‘competencies needed for the workplace, while also retaining the dimension of social critique by working from students’ existing cultural capital and social identities’ (ibid, p95). This approach arises from debates within Cultural Studies which O’Shea draws attention to:
… the rise of the cultural industries and the ‘knowledge economy’, the neo-liberal expansion of the market into the public sector, the incorporation of the university into the knowledge economy, and the opening of university access to a larger percentage of young people. In the ‘new universities’ at least, a typical student is now less focused on developing socio-political awareness than on ‘employability’, and tends to see work in the ‘socially useful’ public sector as less glamorous than that in the cultural and media industries. But the skills required by employers in this sector overlap substantially with those for ‘critical citizenship’
(O’Shea, 2004, p95)
This links with ideas of personal and political emancipation through ‘ideology critique’ which is highlighted by Boyce (2002) in relation to teaching and by Hudson (2003) in relation to educational research. In particular Boyce (ibid, p1) draws our attention to the ways in which ‘persons become aware of how social and political systems work and become conscious of themselves as agents, they can identify and critique domination’ which reflects the process that Paulo Freire refers to as ‘conscientisation’. Furthermore this direction of thinking has drawn us to consider ideas of ‘social enterprise’ (C-SAP, 2005a) which is founded on the idea of promoting the ‘creation of teaching and learning and research activities for students linked to real communities of need’. These activities are not seen to be grounded in market imperatives but rather in the concepts of critical citizenship, social justice and human rights. Some examples of such ideas put into practice can be seen in the FKUC project (C-SAP, 2005b), The American Democracy Project (AASCU, 2005) and The Higher Education and Development of Moral and Civic Responsibility Project (Carnegie Foundation, 2005).
How will we get there?
The next stage of our work will involve identifying themes for developing inquiry-based approaches to learning and fusing these with project-based approaches to online learning involving the use of ICT and multimedia. We intend to adopt a ‘critical’ action research approach (Carr and Kemmis, 1985) an overriding goal of which is the aim to change the social world for the better. Such change is seen to arise from improved shared social practices, the shared understandings of these social practices by the community and also the shared situations in which these practices are carried out. Such thinking is based on an understanding of ourselves as engaged in such shared social practices (both students and tutors) as the agents, as well as the products, of history. This approach will be based within a design research framework (Hudson, 2005a and 2005b) with the aim of developing a widely shared scholarship of teaching.
References
AACTE (2005) Integrating a Global Perspective into Teacher Education, Position Statement of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE), 07 March 2005.
AASCU (2005) The American Democracy Project, American Association of State Colleges and Universities, [WWW document] URL http://www.aascu.org/programs/adp/about/default.htm (Visited on 04 June 2005)
Andrews, R. and Lewis, G. (2000) Citizenship Education in Wales: Community, Culture and the Curriculum Cymreig. Paper presented at the BERA 2000 Conference, Cardiff University, 7-10 September.
Boyce, M. (2002) Teaching Critically as an act of praxis and resistance, Electronic Journal of Radical Organisation Theory, Vol. 2, No. 2. [WWW document] URL http://www.mngt.waikato.ac.nz/research/ejrot/Vol2_2/boyce.pdf (Visited on 04 June 2005)
Carnegie Foundation (2005) Higher Education and the Development of Moral and Civic Responsibility Project (MCR) The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, [WWW document] URL http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/MCR/index.htm (Visited on 04 June 2005)
Carr, W. and Kemmis, S. (1986) Becoming Critical: Education, Knowledge and Action Research. London: Falmer Press.
C-SAP (2005a) Academic Capitalism: Enterprise and Entrepreneurship in the HE Curriculum, The Higher Education Subject Centre for Sociology, Anthropology, Politics (C-SAP). [WWW document] URL http://www.c-sap.bham.ac.uk/events/past_events/old_event.htm?id=57 (Visited on 04 June 2005)
C-SAP (2005b) Furthering Knowledge of Undergraduates in the Curriculum ( FKUC), A C-SAP project, The Higher Education Subject Centre for Sociology, Anthropology, Politics (C-SAP). [WWW document] URL http://go.warwick.ac.uk/fkuc (Visited on 04 June 2005)
Donert, K. (2005) GTIP Think Piece - Teaching About Europe, Geographical Association. [WWW document] URL http://www.geography.org.uk/projects/gtip/thinkpieces/europe/ (Visited on 04 June 2005)
Hudson, B. (2005a) Networking as/for knowledge transformation and innovation: from research-based practice to the scholarship of teaching, International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL) 2005 Conference, Vancouver, British Columbia, 14-16 October 2005 (Under review)
Hudson, B. (2005b) Research-Based Practice: on the relationship between action research and design research in the context of the development of an international on-line MSc programme, LERU Invitation Seminar on Research-Based Teaching in HE, League of European Research-Intensive Universities, University of Helsinki, 22-23 March 2005, 37-39. [WWW document] URL http://www.helsinki.fi/ktl/yty/leru-registration/index.htm (Visited on 19 May 2005)
Hudson, B. (2003) Approaching educational research from the tradition of critical-constructive Didaktik, Pedagogy, Culture and Society 11, 2, 173-187.
O’Shea, A. (2004) Teaching ‘critical citizenship’ in an age of hedonistic vocationalism, Learning and Teaching in the Social Sciences, Vol. 1, No. 2.
Bio data on the Core Development Team
Project Director Professor Brian Hudson, Division of Education and Humanities, National Teaching Fellow
Project Manager Mike McManus, Division of Applied Social Studies,
Senior Lecturer in Social Policy
Associate Director Janet Kay, Division of Education and Humanities,
(Education Studies) Senior Lecturer and Course Leader for BA (Hons) Early Childhood Studies
Associate Director Dr Gary Taylor, Division of Applied Social Studies,
(Applied Social Studies) Senior Lecturer in Social Policy
Associate Director Professor Hugh Bochel, Department of Policy Studies,
(Politics) University of Lincoln
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