Tacit Assumptions of Citizenship Education

What is it about?

Current curricula, which organize initial teacher education programs, include, among their stated purposes, preparing teachers to help their future students to grow as global, participatory, and ethically engaged citizens. However, we know little about how teacher educators prepare their students to be citizens. This article analyses how a group of teacher educators from a public university in Spain understand citizenship education, exploring the net of metaphors and idealized visions they seem to share, regardless of their formal conceptualizations. The discussion of the findings considers the implicit hierarchies of these shared assumptions that define what is deemed as real, desirable, and possible in citizenship education. Implications for teacher education are also contemplated.

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Why is it important?

This article explores how teacher educators prepare their students to be citizens paying attention not only to rational and explicitly structured discourses, but also to those unconscious ways of understanding citizenship education.