Teacher Training for Citizenship Education

This chapter is a reasonably short one; perhaps that speaks to the paucity of research into how best to prepare teachers so that they can effectively undertake civics and citizenship education. In some jurisdictions, this is perhaps related to the way civics and citizenship is taught. For example, in New South Wales, Australia, civics and citizenship is integrated into other subjects, such as History and Geography. The lack of a visible subject on a teacher’s timetable means that many teachers seen civics and citizenship education as an add-on, rather than fundamental to schooling in Australia. This tension has been explored widely in other jurisdictions, too, perhaps most notably in the Crick Report in England. Other reasons might be the fact that civics and citizenship education can sometimes be ‘crowded out’ by a constant focus on literacy and numeracy, especially amongst the training of primary school teachers.