Developing a Characterisation of Citizenship Education: Issues Arising from Work Undertaken in a Higher Education Network

Overview & Synopsis

In order to understand better the way in which the emerging field of citizenship education is being characterised we reflect on work emerging from a higher education network (citizED) for citizenship education. Three of the four authors of this article are closely involved in that network. CitizED was established with funding from the Teacher Training Agency (TTA) (now the Training and Development Agency for Schools, TDA) in order to establish a network and provide resources to support the initial training of citizenship teachers. We analysed download data from the network's website, a sample of the resources produced by the network, and interviewed a sample of users and developers. In this article we identify who is using the resources, how they are using them and what form of citizenship education is developing as a result. We argue that there is now a clear citizenship teacher education community that uses common resources for a variety of purposes. We suggest that there is some consensus in relation to the official characterisation of citizenship, but that "turf wars" still exist in this contested field. (Contains 1 figure and 2 tables.)