| dc.description.abstract | Policymakers in Dutch education put increasing emphasis on citizenship education. Since 2006, schools are required to teach citizenship. Although a new legislative proposal was submitted in June 2018 to clarify citizenship education for schools, it remains unclear how teachers should put citizenship education in practice. Moreover, relative to many other countries, the different education layers in the Netherlands show large diversity in knowledge on citizenship. To teach citizenship in the VMBO education layer may therefore be challenging. Additionally, students from different non-Dutch backgrounds have less knowledge of and experience with Dutch citizenship. This factor further contributes to the challenge of teaching citizenship in the ethnic-cultural diversity of the metropolitan context. The aim of this thesis is therefore to gain insight into how geography teachers interpret and apply citizenship education in their geography lessons in VMBO education in Rotterdam.
This thesis will first discuss the various types of citizenship education and the accompanying competences. Three types of citizenship are distinguished: participatory, personally responsible and critical justice-oriented citizenship. For various knowledge components, skills, attitudes and values are linked to each type of citizenship. In addition, this study explored how the geography course contributed to citizenship education and how the geography contribution differs between the three types of citizenship education. Through a survey, geography teachers in Rotterdam were asked to what extent they pay attention to citizenship education and how they apply citizenship education in geography lessons. Using a case study research methods, in-depth interviews with teachers and focus groups with students were carried out in three selected schools.
The results of this study show that geography teachers in Rotterdam use citizenship in their geography education in different ways. The difference lies in how teachers apply citizenship education, and to which citizenship-linked competences and goals they pay most attention in their education. Possible factors that can explain these differences are the location of the schools, the student population or the identity of the schools. The geography teacher of the different schools have in common that they often use interactive teaching methods in which students speak and listen, learn to formulate their opinions, argue their views, engage in discussions with classmates and learn to empathize with someone else's opinion. In addition, students participate in the school environment by doing research and looking critically at governmental policy on local neighborhoods. At all three schools, teachers in particular mention skills and attitudes as important citizenship competencies, in which empathy, formulating one's own opinion and developing a critical attitude are given a lot of attention.
With regard to the types of citizenship, it is striking that participatory and personally responsible citizenship receive the most attention in geography education, with different emphases put on different parts of those types of citizenship between the Rotterdam schools. Critical justice-oriented citizenship receives less attention. To increase critical justice-oriented citizenship education, and improve understanding of citizenship in education in general, it is advised to increase geography’s teachers’ awareness of the citizenship definition and its different types, and to further investigate effectivity of different citizenship education methods | |
