Informed by the theoretical considerations discussed earlier, a key concern of this project was its endeavour to facilitate respondents’ accounts to be voiced to in their own terms. As such, while concepts such as the different functions of education, praxis, and common-sense debate were important in theorising the research, care was taken not to transfer these ideas to respondents as assumptions about how citizenship education might be experienced. This was particularly crucial for interviews with pupils, who could not be assumed to have considered the concepts that might lie within and behind the citizenship curriculum (whereas teachers could be expected to have engaged with these concepts to at least the level necessary for planning their teaching). Interview questions therefore provided signposts to elements of citizenship education of interest to the research.
Interviews with teachers sought to address the research questions of how active are teachers’ and pupils’ understandings of citizenship? and what forms of knowledge are engaged with to construct conceptions of active citizenship in schools? Interview questions were therefore crafted to reveal the significance of active citizenship and different forms of knowledge to pupils’ narratives. Pupils’
conceptions of citizenship were located by the question “what does citizenship mean to you?” – compounded with probes of “where do you get those ideas from?”
and, if necessary, direct suggestions of their school, family, community and/or the values of society – and the similarity of this opening question with that used with teachers allowed for the role of the school in representing citizenship values to be assessed.
Most pupils spoke of citizenship as a school subject before any reference to personal perceptions but they were then explicitly asked how their citizenship lessons had affected the conception they had put forward. In order to gauge their engagement with core concepts, pupils were then asked to describe what they understood the terms political literacy, community involvement and social and moral responsibility to mean. A probe, usually phrased: “thinking about those areas, what do you think your teacher is trying to achieve in a citizenship lesson that isn’t covered by other subjects you learn about in school?” then prompted pupils to consider wider implications, such as whether it might be seen as a solution to a problem, or whether it was aimed at creating a certain type of citizen.
Once they had been given the opportunity to spontaneously propose sociological reasons for the existence of citizenship education, pupils were directly asked “do you think that’s something we need in Britain today?” and asked to consider each strand in turn and explain their answers. The relevance of each of the three strands to any national need was then probed, usually with the question “do you think any one is more important?”, if the participant’s answer had not already signalled their inclination towards a particular strand. Pupils were then asked to narrow their focus to the needs of their immediate peers by addressing the issue of whether their class
“needed” what they had just described. Again, the relevance of each of the three strands was directly probed. The question of whether classmates with different backgrounds might need this more than others was indirectly probed by concentrating the participant’s mind on their particular class.
The question “how does the way citizenship is taught compare with teaching in other lessons?” encouraged pupils to draw distinctions between citizenship and other subjects so that any ‘unique’ features of citizenship pedagogy might be described. Probes were often necessary to establish the existence or absence of significant differences, including the interviewer’s direct reference to the “set-up” of the classroom, the positioning of participants in the lesson, the use of teaching and learning aids and, quite often, the imagining of the perceptions of an observer denied knowledge of the content of the lesson.
In order to directly prompt discussion of ‘active’ citizenship and the community involvement strand that was less likely to be considered in responses to the earlier questions about lesson content, pupils were asked whether their citizenship education gave them “opportunities to get out and “be a citizen” – “put into practice what you’ve learnt?”. This question was somewhat ‘two-tailed’, in that it enquired as to children’s ‘active’ endeavours and the presence or absence of their citizenship education functioning as an enabling or driving force in any such activity.
As a counterweight to the role of their school in their civic life, pupils were asked whether there were “any issues covered in citizenship that you have discussed with friends or family?”. Although phrased as one-directional, this question actually uncovered the dynamism of ‘citizenship issues’ between different domains of their everyday life. Issues considered relevant to citizenship may have been discussed at home as a result of, parallel to, or independently of citizenship lessons; and the resulting depictions served to illustrate the place of citizenship in young people’s lives. Answers to this question fed into the enquiry of whether, if an issue was
“important to” the young person, and she/he felt it was relevant to citizenship, they felt they could “bring it up in class”. As well as furthering the narrative of how the young person might independently show interest in a social or political issue, this question directly questioned their sense of agency in school. This also linked back to the participant’s description of the characteristics of a citizenship lesson.
The concept of agency was then further explored in order to investigate whether classroom discussion exhibited the deliberative nature expounded in the Crick Report. Pupils were asked “what happens when you are having a discussion and people have different views?”. The “people” referred to in the question were deliberately left unidentified and respondents were free to interpret the enquiry in line with their description of a typical classroom discussion. They were then directly asked what happened when they disagreed with their teacher’s view. Pupils’
portrayals of the nature of debates in citizenship lessons were crucial to addressing the study’s central themes of the encouragement of critical reflection and respect of pupils’ autonomy.
The final question for pupils, which in some cases provided the opportunity to end the interview on a note of a small personal achievement and in any case drew the conversation to a natural conclusion that reflected that of teachers’ interviews, prompted the young people to think of a time that they had “used” something they had learnt in a citizenship lesson “in a real-life situation”. Pupils were thereby
encouraged to widen their focus from the specific, school-based experiences they had been concentrating on and think again of the broader themes with which they had begun the discussion. Responses provided a check on teachers’ perceptions of whether pupils “applied” their learning and gave evidence in support of or against the active nature of young people’s citizenship.
Ultimately, it was the interviewer’s task to encourage pupils’ reflection on their experiences that went deeper than the ‘self-regulation’ (Walkerdine 1985) they were used to conforming to in school. This was a challenge as interviews were conducted in school, with pupils in uniform, usually fresh from a time-tabled lesson, who – despite the interviewer’s conscious efforts to create a more balanced dynamic – treated the interviewer as they would other adults in school who expected and rewarded their deference (in fact, some used the experience of being interviewed to rehearse formalities such as shaking hands). This positioning was exemplified by one pupil who whispered “was that right?” after completing her response to a question. Deeper reflection was encouraged, however, by questions that asked pupils “what happens” in instances such as disagreements in lessons, which invited them to take a critical approach to dynamics of power and consider how their experience might be otherwise.