Learning to Teach Citizenship in the Secondary School

A companion to school experience

Liam Gearon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317596394
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Secondary Education

Praise for previous editions…

'A comprehensive and illuminating resource on both citizenship and citizenship education.'
– David Hicks, Times Educational Supplement

What is the role of citizenship? How can it be taught effectively?

Learning to Teach Citizenship in the Secondary School is an essential resource for students training to teach citizenship in the secondary school as well as teachers of citizenship looking for fresh ideas and guidance. Written by leading experts in the field, the book is underpinned by the latest research and theory and explores a variety of inspirational approaches to teaching and learning in a subject which provides a critical underpinning to the whole school curriculum.

This new, third edition has been comprehensively updated and restructured to emphasise the role of citizenship across the curriculum, exploring a wider range of subjects including geography, modern foreign languages, mathematics and science.

Key topics include:

• historical origins and contemporary contexts
• developing subject knowledge and skills of enquiry
• effective lesson plans, schemes of work and assessment
• citizenship beyond the classroom: community-based work and learning outdoors
• citizenship across the curriculum: English, drama and media; history, geography and religious education; modern foreign languages; mathematics and science; and RE
• research in citizenship.

Including key objectives and chapter summaries, together with carefully developed tasks to support your own professional development, Learning to Teach Citizenship in the Secondary School is designed to develop theoretically informed good practice in citizenship education. It is a source of support, guidance and creative ideas for all training citizenship teachers and those teaching the subject as non-specialists, and offers specialists new insight into this crucial subject.

Part I

Citizenship

Historical origins and contemporary contexts

1 A history of citizenship in Britain

Derek Heater

Introduction

Understanding what is meant by the concept and practice of citizenship and providing learning and encouragement to take this social status seriously in the present are complicated and difficult enough; so why should we concern ourselves about the past?

There is room here for only the thinnest of outline answers to this kind of question about the purpose of history, an issue that has exercised the minds of innumerable historians, philosophers of history and educationists.

One of the most basic responses is to posit the following case. It is a necessity to comprehend the relationship between the present and the past. This understanding is necessary because knowledge of each illuminates the other; and the accuracy and profundity of the understanding of the two perspectives can well have significant effects. As the distinguished nineteenth-century English historian H.T. Buckle declared in his History of Civilization in England, ‘There will always be a connection between the way in which men contemplate the past and the way they contemplate the present’ (quoted Marwick 1970: 244).

A few words, therefore, about the negative dangers attendant upon a faulty understanding or ignorance of history and the positive benefits of a sturdy knowledge.

At worst, lacking a firm command of history or depending on a twisted collection of ‘facts’ can lead to prejudice and hatred, even violence. Think of some ethnic English people’s hostility to, in chronological order, Jewish, Irish, Caribbean and Islamic immigrants being accorded the same civic rights as the host community. And think of some of those new resident people’s unwillingness to assimilate the host community’s traditions and lifestyle. Furthermore, think of how sound historical comprehension of the circumstances and reasons for this demographic mingling could have helped mitigate the tensions.

Turning to more intellectual issues, misunderstandings can occur if one reads the past development of citizenship anachronistically or as ‘Whig’ history. Citizens should be conscious, for instance, that current civil, political and social rights have by no means always been enjoyed; that their achievement is a story of intermittent struggles, not smooth progress; and that their ancestors’ successes should be prized and vigilantly guarded. The story of the Chartist movement and the immediate failure to obtain their Six Points is a well-known example.

On the other hand, the valuable experiences of the past should not be dismissed or forgotten. Not everything that is present-day is new. And not everything introduced as fresh is necessarily novel: reinventing the wheel is an awful waste of time in politics as well as mechanical engineering. A clear example, for readers of this book, of simply reviving, as opposed to onerously reinventing, ideas of an earlier vintage is the presence in the Crick Report in 1998 of the work he had undertaken on Political Literacy and Key Concepts in the 1970s (see Crick and Porter 1978, and Crick 2000: ix, 59–96).

This warning and recommendation brings us to the positive advantages that can accrue from a sound grasp of the history of citizenship: to prize the benefits we now enjoy. First, we have the obvious argument that, because of pressures and concessions, progress has been made over the centuries. Without backtracking very far, the case study of the development of women’s rights is a clear lesson.

Second, with some judicious awareness of comparative history, it is possible to appreciate that Britain has developed its own characteristic style of citizenship. To present just a few differences from one example: the American form. Compared with the USA, Britain has no vivid revolutionary tradition; it has no written Constitution; (leaving aside recent devolution) it has no customary federal structure; it has a strong history of Imperialism, though not of internal slavery. The current attitudes towards, and meanings and practices of, citizenship in the two countries differ at least to some degree because of their different histories. A realisation of these dissimilarities can throw into sharp relief the specifically British tradition.

This brings us to a third advantage of historical knowledge, namely, recognising the complexity of citizenship. In Britain, its meaning and practice have constantly changed over time; studying its history renders this statement a platitude. Accordingly, some acquaintance with the historical processes of variation will make it easier to accept that the present condition should not be assumed to have been, nor will it continue to be, static.

The fourth consideration is that the very process of thinking historically while pondering about citizenship provides a depth of understanding of which one would otherwise be bereft. History offers a chronological context; it offers a narrative of pertinent events; it offers causative connections.

Moreover, and finally, we must notice the value, for the especially interested British citizens, of being introduced to the history of political theory. As a consequence, studying the great British thinkers such as the Levellers, Hobbes, Locke, J.S. Mill, T.H. Green and T.H. Marshall and their contributions to the concepts of citizenly rights, responsibilities and activities in everyday civic life sheds fascinating illumination onto our subject.

OBJECTIVES

At the end of this chapter you should be able to:

✓ understand key aspects of the history of citizenship;

✓ understand some of the ways in which this history of citizenship relates to citizenship in education.

Problems relating to British history

But, what is this history of British citizenship that it is so essential to learn and understand? As with any facet of history as a subject to read and study, there is too much to digest. So what should be the principles of selection? This has been a particularly acute problem in English schools since the 1960s. Furthermore, the debates, sometimes acrimonious, that started then, about what, when and how to teach the subject are still unresolved. Perhaps the widest agreement among the teaching profession, the news media, politicians and the public at large is the deep ignorance that abounds. At a teachers’ conference in May 2008, for instance, the headmaster of the private Brighton College announced that, in the words of a journalist, ‘he felt impelled to introduce a basic history course for 11- to 13-year-olds because so few had even a basic grasp of British history’ (Cairns 2008). Even so: how much will they have remembered when they leave school; and what about the demands of the National Curriculum for state schools?

The issue of selection faces the writer also. I have but a few thousand words for this chapter. I hope that I have chosen material that will allow the reader to comprehend the main features of the lengthy and complex story and to recognise the background to the present pattern.

The history of citizenship is in general a confusing, complex story, and the British tale, for all its distinctiveness, and in some ways because of it, shares that character. It is possible to say, for example, that the status of citizen has existed for most of the past two millennia. However, what the status, even the word, meant was very different in, say, Roman, medieval, Tudor, Victorian or twentieth-century times.

A simple etymological examination of the word and its relatives is itself educational. We start with the Latin word ‘civis’, meaning citizen. From this came the word ‘civilis’, meaning civic. But, also, ‘civil’ in the sense of polite. By the early sixteenth century the English words ‘civil/civility’ had indeed extended, like the Latin antecedents, from their original political meaning to the behavioural connotation. A citizen was courteous, socially well-mannered.

To return to the political usage, ‘citizen’ derives from Latin and Norman-French words that had strong allusions to an urban connection. Thus the English word ‘city’ emerged in the thirteenth century from the Latin ‘civitas’, itself deriving from ‘civis’ and diversifying into a portmanteau word meaning ‘city’, ‘state’, ‘citizenship’. The post-Conquest word for a person identified with a city was ‘citesein’.

Two especially interesting points follow. One is that the first Britons to carry the status of citizen were accorded that title by the Romans – they were cives Romani, the earliest, as far as we know, being residents of Verulanium, now called St Albans. The second comment is that, for centuries, the terms ‘citizen’ and ‘citizenship’ were, in fact, confined to cities. Some pedants maintained that sole usage even to a century ago. And, of course, that usage has not died: it survives alongside the word’s state/national meaning. As a British national I am a citizen of the United Kingdom; as a resident in a ward within the bounds of Brighton and Hove I am a citizen of that city.

The medieval and Renaissance ages

The reality of citizenship (even though not by title) in a medieval municipality – whether a city or a mere borough – indicated a status, held by those members who had the franchise. This provided sets of activities, rights and responsibilities as defined in the municipality’s royal charter.

By this system, which was strongly sustained throughout the Middle Ages, the citizens elected and stood for the various local offices, engaged in and oversaw general administrative needs, justice (including the jury system), policing and the management of the economy and environment. It was citizenship in a very real and active, albeit somewhat elite, sense. The following very brief excerpt from Lincoln’s city charter is indicative of the use of the term ‘citizen’ and the tight detail of the regulations: ‘four men worthy of trust shall be elected from amongst the citizens... to keep an account of outgoings, tallages, and arrears belonging to the city, and that they shall have one chest and four keys’ (Bagley 1965: 76).

Towns with the lower rank of borough were organised by similar arrangements, though the title of ‘citizen’ was denied, the equivalent being ‘burgess’. Any expansion of the use of the term was, in fact, inhibited in both medieval and modern times by several factors. One was that the country had thoroughly rooted Anglo-Saxon and feudal traditions, which had no need of the wide concept of citizenship as developed by the Romans. Another, in modern times, was the continuation of the monarchy, which ensured that the British people were considered legally and constitutionally as subjects of the sovereign, not citizens of the state.

Nevertheless, during the Middle Ages and, more so, at the time of the Renaissance, knowledge of classical literature burgeoned. Many of these works contained information and discussions about the principles of citizenship, especially civic virtue, which so coloured ancient Greek and republican Roman political thinking and practice. These ideas were absorbed and expressed in a British context by scholars known as the Humanists. True, in developing their civic proposals their vocabulary rarely contained the word ‘citizenship’. Even so, as most wrote in Latin, the temptation to think of citizenship in state terms was surely there.

Let us take one of the most distinguished sixteenth-century scholars, the Scotsman, George Buchanan. He argued that good citizens (notice the qualifying adjective) should participate in national government. An English translation of one of his key sentences, defining citizens in this sense, runs thus: ‘Those who obey the laws, who maintain human society, who would rather undergo every hardship and every peril for the well-being of their fellow countrymen, than, through cowardice, grow old in dishonourable ease’ (Burns 1951: 64).

The Civil War

But leap forward the traditional human life-span of three score years and ten to the period of the Civil War and we reach a recognisably modern discussion about citizenship, notably through the penetrating arguments of the radical group called the Levellers.

From the thirteenth century the endowment of the franchise existed in a meaningful, though again elitist, sense through the parliamentary as well as the municipal system. When antagonism between king and pa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of Tables
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Citizenship – Historical Origins and Contemporary Contexts
• Part II: Learning to Teach Citizenship
• Part III: Citizenship Beyond the Classroom
• Part IV: Citizenship Across the Curriculum
• Part V: Researching Citizenship – Local, National and International Contexts
• Bibliography
• Index