Studying Politics or Being Political? High School Students’ Assessment of the Welfare State

Purpose: This article examines high school students’ understanding of the welfare state as a political issue and discusses how it can be approached in the classroom. The study was conducted within a social-science educational context and departs from a perspective from which educational goals can be seen as intrinsic (goals closely connected to the academic disciplines) or extrinsic (goals formulated by the political sphere, e.g. students’ deliberation on political issues). These variant goals can pose a dilemma for teachers and students alike as they engage in highly political topics. Design & methodology: To explain the structure of the dilemmas of teaching issues that can be understood politically in a social-science context, this paper focuses on students’ assessment of such topics before teaching and how they generally reason different political views on the welfare state. The data consist of written documents produced by tenth-year students in response to two accounts of the best welfare state. Using a qualitative content analysis, the data were analysed to identify students’ approaches to a political issue and their normative reasoning. Findings: The results display an understanding of the welfare state that is consistent with extrinsic goals, i.e. as an issue to engage with as a political entity rather than exclusively as a social scientist. It was noted that students experience difficulty in recognising the difference between politics and the study of politics. Practical implications: The study contributes to an understanding of the influence of normativity on students’ thinking and represents an attempt to bridge the difficulty of combining intrinsic and extrinsic goals in social-science education

Trust as subject content: Advancing students’ reasoning on democracy through displacement

Purpose: The article explores how the tension between embracing and scrutinising democracy can be productively overcome through social science teaching about democracy that focuses on trust as a subject content. Design/methodology/approach: Empirical materials were collected through focus group interviews before and after an inquiry-based teaching segment on trust, and the materials were analysed qualitatively through three grounded themes. Findings: It is argued that working with the displacement of subject content in inquiry-based teaching about democracy enhances the possibilities for students to deepen their knowledge about democracy, while enabling them to scrutinise the democratic system critically. Research limitations/implications: The article reports from a small-scale study of four classes in two upper secondary schools in Sweden, and the study provides tentative observations and conclusions that should be investigated further in future research. Practical implications: The article shows how trust as a subject content can contribute to problematising students’ understandings of democracy, and how the displacement of content can be important in formulating compelling questions and in designing inquiries on democracy

Between the lifeworld and academia: Defining political issues in social science education

Highlights: • We identified four aspects for defining political issues. • Political issues are collective. • Political issues are conflictual in nature. • Political issues are contemporary issues. • Issues are political due to contextual factors. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to discuss mutual understandings of political issues among students and academics. The aim is to suggest a framework that teachers can use to address politics from both the discipline’s and the students’ perspectives. Design/methodology/approach: This study is based on semi-structured interviews with twelve students in six upper secondary schools and eight social science academics in Norway and Sweden. Findings: We identified four guiding aspects for defining political issues in social science education to connect disciplinary thinking with students’ views of the political. These aspects are: 1) collective, 2) contemporary, 3) conflictual, and 4) contextual. Limitations: This study relied on interviews with a selection of students and academics and what they chose to express. The results may not be applicable to other samples. Implications: The framework presented can be used in social science education to understand and discuss the nature of political issues

Being Engaged and Knowledgeable : Social Science Thinking Concepts and Students’ Civic Engagement in Teaching on Globalisation

The question of whether or not school makes a difference in preparing students for democratic citizenship has been debated for a long time in political science and curriculum studies. These discussions are mostly based on the results of international surveys measuring students’ political attitudes, values and participation. However, we first need to define what kind of prepared citizens are needed. This article takes on the definition issue and presents new perspectives by exploring how teachers in Social Science (Samhällskunskap) and their students in Sweden reason about engagement when they address complex societal issues such as globalisation. Based on interviews with a number of teachers and students I will argue that in order to understand what is going on in school we need to interpret Social Science teaching in terms of first- and second-order concepts, where the second-order concepts could be seen as "how to think like a social scientist". I will make a case that there is a didactic dilemma for teachers trying to educate students who are both trained in disciplinary thinking and leave school as politically engaged. However, this dilemma is not unsolvable and I will hold a position that it might contain answers to some of the questions that political scientists deal with in terms of engagement

Civic consciousness: A viable concept for advancing students’ ability to orient themselves to possible futures?

In history didactics the concept of historical consciousness has become an important theoretical framework in developing a meaningful history education. One significant aspect of historical consciousness is to give students a “usable past” to orient to possible futures. Previous research has shown that history is important when students think about the future but that their use of history in meaning-making is simplistic and based on present-day-thinking. Much research has focused on advancing students’ ability to use history in orientation to possible futures, but less attention has been focused on contemporary studies and its role in the process of orientation. By introducing a tentative concept, civic consciousness, the issue of students’ orientation is explored by studying students’ perspectives on democracy in past-present-future. The data consists of 142 narratives and reveals a pattern of normative stances, process orientation and action orientation. These aspects are considered to be important components of civic consciousness and these have implications for how social studies educators should address the challenges of preparing students for the future

Social Studies as Socialisation, Qualification and Subjectification

In Sweden, social studies is the assigned subject with the major responsibility for political education. Schools’ overall assignment can be defined using Gert Biestas three concepts of the functions of education: socialisation, qualification and subjectification. Firstly, schools have a role in socialising students into society, passing on values and knowledge. Secondly, the school system should contribute to students’ qualification as citizens, helping them advancing their civic and critical literacy. Thirdly, education should give students’ the possibility to be independent subjects. The functions, or dimensions, are separate, but meet in all kind of education and generally aim at political participation. Teachers are faced with several educational challenges; legitimising perspectives vs. critical thinking and allowing students to “be citizens” as well as qualifying them, thus seeing them as “citizens to be”. This paper explores and discusses theoretically how Biesta`s educational functions relate to social studies teaching by discussing the subject`s function

Preparing for Citizenship : The Value of Second Order Thinking Concepts in Social Science Education

Social Science as a school subject aims at making students knowledgeable in societal issues as well as preparing them for citizenship. Despite the strong position of Social Science in the Swedish school curricula, little research has been done in the field. Previous research has mainly concentrated on factual knowledge and conceptual learning, or the role of deliberation in class activities. Less research has focused on the role of disciplinary thinking and how that might promote learning to think like a social scientist while at the same time preparing students for citizenship. By using a conceptual framework from history didactics, Social Science education is in the following text explored in search of second order thinking concepts. Also, the relationship between these concepts and democratic socialisation is discussed. By focusing on one substantial case, this study tries to reach beyond the various topics commonly covered in Social Science education. The research was conducted by observing teaching in Social Science and interviewing six experienced teachers. Using this conceptual framework, ideas on how to organise, analyse, interpret and critically review discourses in society were constructed as six proposed second order thinking concepts of Social Science: social science causality, social science evidence and inference, social science abstraction, social science comparison and contrast, social science perspective taking and the evaluative dimension. The argument is that when students work scientifically they develop a way of thinking about society and they challenge their set opinions about different topics. Therefore, second order thinking concepts are important for learning Social Science and at the same time preparing students for a life as citizens

Engaging with Scale and Place: Geographical Thinking on Migration in Middle-School

This article addresses the challenges of teaching migration as a complex content in middle-school geography educa-tion. In this collaborative educational design research project between a researcher and teacher in Sweden, students engaged with data and different types of knowledge to develop powerful geographical knowledge. The article provides empirical exam-ples of powerful geographical knowledge through descriptions of how middle-school students’ (12-year-olds) understandings of migration changed through teaching. The article highlights students’ preconceptions about migration and describes the teaching intervention with contextual content, and substantive and procedural concepts. It also addresses how students’ reason-ing developed after the teaching.Research on Subject-specific Education (ROSE), Karlstad Universit

Vart bör samhällskunskapsdidaktiken gå? Om ett splittrat forskningsfält och vägar framåt

Social Science (Samhällskunskap) is the assigned school subject with the major responsibility for political education in year 1-12 (Sandahl, 2015c; cf. other Nordic countries in Christensen, 2011; Børhaug 2011). Even though Social Science is considered important and well established in schools, it has been described as in a “stage of crisis” for several decades due to its lack of a academic equivalent (Bronäs & Selander, 2002). Furthermore, researchers interested in social science education come from different communities of enquiry such as pedagogy and political science resulting in a diverse and sprawled research community. Departing from Michael Young’s (2013) notion of ‘epistemic community’, this article discusses the need to define and demarcate the research field of social science ‘didaktik’. Moreover, the article suggests a field of research interest that might help shape a community where researchers from different backgrounds can contribute. The argument is that a strong research community can provide answers to the alleged crisis of the school subject