Teachers and Citizenship Knowledge (TACK)

Project members have been involved in research related to human rights and some contributed to Addressing Extremism Through the Classroom, a research report from the Centre for Teachers and Teaching Research.

• Hans Svennevig, IOE (project leader)
• Dr Alex Elwick, IOE
• Gemma Gronland, IOE
• Jeremy Hayward, IOE
• Professor Hugh Starkey, IOE
• Dr Lee Jerome, Middlesex University

and also

• ACT (Association for Citizenship Teaching) Higher Education Network - a core partner in the project, offering CPD and disseminating project results through its professional journal Teaching Citizenship.

This project addressed the core question of the nature of a knowledge-rich citizenship curriculum.

There is currently no single definitive source of the key concepts essential for understanding citizenship.

Schools in England must promote democracy, freedom, the rule of law and tolerance (the fundamental British values), which can be contextualised in international frameworks such as human rights.

Since these are all core citizenship concepts, we are at the forefront of responding to major contemporary concerns, such as resilience to extremism; combatting conspiracy theories and misinformation; understanding and acting on climate change; making sense of the rise of global protest movements including BLM, Rhodes Must Fall, Extinction Rebellion.

The research employed a variation of the dialogic framework for action research proposed by Daly et al. (2020). 

By drawing together teachers, student teachers and academics who are already in the established networks of the IOE PGCE and ACT, we aim to build a series of honest, critical and unsettling collegial conversations to focus on subject knowledge. 

We ensured synergy between the needs and aspirations of the PGCE students, the Citizenship PGCE programme as a whole and the wider citizenship community represented by ACT. 

We planned a series of six masterclasses to reflect on important contemporary topics in citizenship education, including climate change, human rights, extremism and radicalisation, conspiracy theories and media literacy, race and racism, conflict and peace.

Each masterclass included:

• A teacher-led case study with a focus on their account of key knowledge.
• Introduction or response by expert sharing views on the core knowledge to understand the topic.
• An invited audience of mentors, PGCE students and members of ACT.
• A conversation focusing on the various conceptions of knowledge, facilitated by the research team.

These generated professional conversations which have not been reflected in the literature to date. Such conversations are unlikely to happen in individual schools with few specialists.

In progress – these will be released over time.

Downloads:

• Project report