Challenges of teaching citizenship education

Challenges of teaching citizenship education

Citizenship education in schools and colleges appears to have been faced with a number of challenges. These challenges, according to Kerr and Cleaver (2004), fall under the domains of citizenship education’s definition, its subject matter and goals, appropriate instructional methods and assessment. A study conducted by Fairbrother (2004) in China identified the following as the challenges of citizenship education: citizenship is an untested subject, the school has to prepare students for university entrance, the activities of citizenship education is organized from top to down and based on rote learning (p. 9).

In addition to these challenges, Ahmad (2004) found in Malaysia that there were insufficient teacher training, limited resources, and an exam-oriented education system. Dean (2005) added that in Pakistan students acquire knowledge, but do not learn skills required for effective participation in democratic life. The role of teachers’ personal, political and education experiences also pose problems in teaching citizenship education. Kerr (1999) reports that in England and Wales, most of the teachers have a general degree and that they do not have specific training in citizenship education to teach citizenship education effectively.

The researcher wanted to find out whether the above challenges are also common in the colleges of education in Ghana. The responses range from 5 to 1. Where 5 represents strongly agree; 4 represents agree; 3 represents undecided; 2 represents disagree and 1 represents strongly disagree. In discussing the results, the general analysis will assume there is a general agreement between tutors and teacher trainees when there is less than 0.5 differences between the means of each group. When there is 0.5 or greater difference, there appears to be evidence of challenges facing the teaching of citizenship education between the tutors and teacher trainees. Table 15 summarizes the data from the survey items.

Table 15 shows that the tutors’ mean ratings of the challenges of teaching citizenship education, ranked by the tutors’ means ranged from 4.5-3.9 and that of teacher trainees ranged from 4.2-3.6, indicating an overall agreement of the challenges. One challenge, “citizenship education is not examined as a subject on its own,” was rated as the major challenge of citizenship education by the tutors, but much lower than the perceived level of challenge by the teacher trainees. This challenge was rated by trainees as the second highest. This finding is in support of Kankam’s (2001) study that found that social studies students in Ghana in the early development of social studies were not interested in learning social studies education because it was not on the certification examinations. Generally, people will not put in great effort in areas where they are not getting the direct reward. This might have been reflected in the teaching/learning of citizenship education which is taught under social studies. In Ghana, it appears that people place great emphasis on the number of students who have passed the end of year examinations, and accord teachers and those students passing the exams with respect and honour. Teachers and students generally, therefore, seem to show much more seriousness in the examinable subjects than the non-examinable ones.

Of the challenges listed, the challenge of “there are difficulties in having clear definition for citizenship education” was rated by the tutors as the lowest (3.9) of all the eight challenges of citizenship education. The trainees mean rating of 4.0 on this item is not substantially from the tutors’ rating. Apparently, the tutors and the trainees feel that the other challenges are greater than the challenge of defining citizenship education. Defining citizenship education seems not be a major challenge for the respondents because most of the issues on citizenship education are enshrined in the Constitution of Republic of Ghana. And that the respondents might have little or no problem in defining it. It may be assumed that the definition of citizenship education may be based on the needs and demand of individual countries. This may explain why Arthur (2002) found out that English teachers viewed citizenship as involved in a community, whereas their German counterparts defined it as a set of responsibilities and obligations. In the same vein, Ichilov (2003) found that great differences existed regarding perceptions of citizenship and political issues between teachers in Arab schools and their counterparts in Hebrew schools.

Five of the statements were rated very similar by the tutors, with the mean ratings ranging from 4.2- 4.0. The trainees mean scores were similar to the tutors on the following items: “teachers require expert knowledge in teaching citizenship education,” “citizenship needs financial resources,” and “there is lack of teaching learning resources for citizenship education.” On the issue that “teachers require expert knowledge in teaching citizenship,” both teacher trainees and tutors with their respective means of 4.0 and 4.2 expressed their agreement with the statement. This finding might be attributed to the fact that the teacher trainees have seen the inadequacy of their tutors and they feel they are teaching a course without little satisfaction. The tutors might have also recognised their lack of satisfaction because they have not had adequate training in the teaching of the subject. This finding in the colleges of education in Ghana supports that of Ogunyemi (2011) and Davies, Gregory and Riley (1999) that suggested that insufficient preparation of teachers is one difficulty encountered in the development of citizenship education.

Interestingly, the challenges “College authorities do not give their support to citizenship education” and “Teachers are not adequately prepared to handle citizenship” were perceived quite differently by the tutors and teacher trainees, with the tutors apparently perceiving these as major challenges, means of 4.2 and 4.0, but the teacher trainees were not in agreement, with their mean scores of 3.6 and 3.6 respectively. The two challenges would naturally be better understood by tutors, since they are the ones who report to college authorities and may not discuss these concerns with their students. In addition, there may be issues associated with how important the college authorities perceive the teaching of citizenship education. The long-standing problems of social studies such as little number of periods on the time table, threat to other subject areas, and low recognition (Ogunyemi, 2011) are evidence that the authorities not accord the programme the needed support.

Naturally, since the tutors are at the forefront of teaching citizenship education, there is the high tendency of facing the challenge of not getting the college authorities’ support for citizenship education. But, of course, the teacher trainees may have also seen the inadequate support the college authorities offer for the teaching of citizenship education.

The tutors are being frank that they have not been adequately prepared to teach citizenship education. This is probably because they were trained in social studies education in general, but not in citizenship education in particular. The teacher trainees tended to see the realities on the ground, whether they have been adequately prepared to teach citizenship education or not. Kerr (1999) confirms the inadequacy of teachers’ preparation when he stated that there is no specialist teacher for teaching citizenship education per se, but the teachers who are responsible for carrying out such a task are the teachers of social studies, social sciences, history and geography. He asserted that there is no specific training either in pre-service or in-service teacher education in citizenship education but such preparation is only provided for teachers of related subject areas such as social studies, geography and history. Yet specialist teachers have been trained in England since the introduction of citizenship education as a subject. In Botswana too, Adeyemi (2003) found that the social studies teachers had listed inadequate preparation as a challenge militating against students’ achievement in citizenship education.

CHAPTER EIGHT