No abstract

The implementation of global citizenship education (GCE) represents a challenge for the school system in Italy in terms of curriculum planning, teaching methods and contents. After a thorough overview of the Italian educational scenario on GCE, this article aims to present a learning unit on GCE related issues implemented in an Italian 8th-grade class. The study then highlights the educational implications in translating GCE international models into the Italian classroom practice. Its main assumptions focus on the key elements for students’ effective learning and on the limitations that characterise the Italian educational system in relation to GCE at the curriculum, school and teaching levels. The implications highlighted in this article are strongly intertwined with the need to plan and implement GCE jointly, within a whole-school approach, and the relevance of the modalities in which GCE instructional contents are selected and presented.

No abstract

No abstract

IEA surveys traditionally include a teacher questionnaire among the contextual questionnaires aiming at collecting data on school factors that could be associated with students' cognitive outcomes. This chapter discusses how data collected from teachers has played a role in IEA studies on civic and citizenship education from the Six Subjects Survey to the Civic Education Study (CIVED) 1999 and the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) 2009 and 2016. Elements of continuity and discontinuity are identified over time in relation to the content and the structure of the teacher questionnaires adopted in each survey, looking at the conceptions of civic and citizenship education that informed the instruments' development and at the changes that occurred over time in the delivering of civic and citizenship education at school. The use of data collected through the teacher questionnaire in IEA international reports as well as in secondary analyses is presented. A substantial increase in informative secondary analyses using teacher data has been registered in the last years, confirming the importance of the teacher questionnaire despite the difficulties in finding direct strong associations between teacher data and students' outcomes. Civic and citizenship education is one of the school education areas most characterized by gaps between principles and official regulations, between intended and implemented curricula, and between theory (or ideals) and practices. The information gathered through the teacher questionnaire is of great relevance for a better understanding of the characteristics of the schools as learning environments and provides policymakers and researchers with data from the perspective of teachers on the democratic experience students actually have at school.