This research was prompted by the developing political discourse proposing the teaching of Britishness and British values in the context of the United Kingdom. This discourse will be reviewed in the first part of the article, in the context of previous work which has sought to assess how Britishness and related concepts might be promoted through education. The second part will be based on questionnaire responses from a sample of students following post-graduate initial teacher training programmes in a number of higher education partnerships. It indicates that, while political discourse and educational policy have sensitised trainee teachers to the agenda, there remains a deep uncertainty and misgiving about this as an educational objective.
This article represents a snapshot of ten state secondary schools in the north of England immediately prior to the implementation of the statutory inclusion of citizenship in the revised National Curriculum. It includes data from interviews with the citizenship coordinator of each school and offers a range of responses by schools to the change. The two authors respectively, bring to the study their experience of Educational Management and Humanities and offer two different perspectives on the management of change, curriculum planning and implementation. Practical issues of status of the subject, resources, structures and staff development sit alongside contested issues of philosophy, content, pedagogy and outcomes.
Whilst recognizing the qualities and the commitment of the citizenship coordinators, a number of issues are raised that might give cause for concern at the medium to long‐term future of this curriculum development.
For the last 40 years a tradition of educational analysis has identified and traced the processes of cultural reproduction present in educational practice which support continued exploitation, oppression and inequalities. A significant figure in this tradition of critical pedagogy is the Canadian educationist Henry Giroux, in turn building on the work of Paulo Freire and, antecedent to Freire, Antonio Gramsci. This article will summarise the main tenets of critical pedagogy and its prescriptions for education aimed at resisting unjust power and promoting equality and social justice. However, it will be suggested that this analysis and its prescriptions encounter theoretical limitations that tend to render these prescriptions impotent and that a more nuanced understanding of the play of power on the individual and through the institution of the school might imply different forms of resistance.
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