Identifying an Educational Response to the Prevent Policy: Student Perspectives on Learning about Terrorism, Extremism and Radicalisation

ABSTRACT

School responses to the Prevent agenda have tended to focus primarily on ‘safeguarding’ approaches, which essentially perceive some young people as being ‘at risk’ and potentially as presenting a risk to others. In this article, we consider evidence from secondary school students who experienced a curriculum project on terrorism, extremism and radicalisation. We argue that a curriculum response which addresses the acquisition of knowledge can build students’ critical capacity for engagement with radicalisation through enhanced political literacy and media literacy. We further argue this represents a genuinely educational response to Prevent, as opposed to a more restrictive securitised approach.

Keywords:

• citizenship education
• extremism
• radicalisation
• terrorism
• Prevent
• risk society

7. Acknowledgements

The data presented here was collected by the authors as part of their evaluation of the ‘Building Resilience’ project run by the Association for Citizenship Teaching. The evaluation report and details of the project are available online: www.teachingcitizenship.org.uk/act-building-resilience-project.

8. Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Association for Citizenship Teaching