Citizenship Education and the Persistent Nature of Classroom Teaching Dilemmas

Abstract

The field of social studies has labored to define its central purpose chiefly through endorsements of citizenship education. Although scholars have provided extended conceptual accounts concerning citizenship education, few empirical studies exist to provide portraits of this education in practice. Searching for contextualized, classroom-cased images of citizenship education, the researchers mined data on the pedagogical activities of three elementary school teachers, and present vignettes of classroom practices “read” using Cornbleth's (1982) three types of citizenship education: the illusory, the technical, and the constructive. The findings demonstrate variations both within each teacher's treatment of citizenship education and between their approaches. In trying to understand these variations and to address the question ‘Can citizenship education be taught?’ the authors conclude that the persistent classroom teaching dilemmas the teachers encountered (e.g., content coverage, decision-making authority, time demands) clearly influenced how they constructed citizenship education opportunities for students.