Update (by Neil Selwyn)
This updates the original Literature Review of Citizenship, Technology and Learning, published in September 2002 - see below - and should be read in conjunction with that report.
The update is available to download in pdf format - see box below.
Executive summary
There is little high calibre empirical research focusing on technology and citizenship. There is, however, a sizeable theoretical literature which is beginning to consider general issues of citizenship and technology, complementing the practical work that is currently taking place in schools. Using this knowledge base we can begin to map out the roles that technology can play in teaching and learning within citizenship education.
What is citizenship education?
Citizenship is now a statutory element of the UK National Curriculum at secondary school level (Key Stages 3 and 4) and a non-statutory element of teaching and learning in primary education (Key Stages 1 and 2). In broad terms, the National Curriculum defines citizenship education around the three strands of:
- knowledge and understanding about becoming informed citizens
- developing skills of enquiry and communication
- developing skills of participation and responsible action.
Despite the mandatory nature of the subject, the National Curriculum gives schools and teachers great flexibility to develop their own innovative approaches to citizenship and develop their own curriculum content.
It is clear that schools and teachers can use information and communications technology (ICT) to achieve these aims of understanding, enquiry and participation. Yet it is also clear that ICT can be (and is currently being) used to support only limited forms of citizenship education. From this perspective, the way that ICT is used to facilitate citizenship education is crucial - implying a design responsibility on the part of educational technologists and software developers to allow effective and expansive teaching and learning. From a theoretical perspective there are different ways of teaching and learning citizenship. Some of the most important distinctions are:
Passive citizenship:
being the product of an education which seeks to develop knowledge, understandings and behaviours of citizenship
Vs.
Active citizenship:
which augments this passive model with an ability to critique, debate and propose alternative models of the structures and processes of democracy.
Education ABOUT citizenship:
providing students with sufficient knowledge and understanding of national history and the structures and processes of government and political life
Vs.
Education THROUGH citizenship:
students learning by doing through active, participative experiences in the school or local community and beyond. This learning reinforces the knowledge component
Vs.
Education FOR citizenship:
encompasses the ‘about’ and ‘through’ strands and involves equipping students with a set of tools (knowledge and understanding, skills and aptitudes, values and dispositions) which enable them to participate actively and sensibly in the roles and responsibilities they encounter in their adult lives.
Most commentators see effective citizenship education as where citizenship ‘for’ and ‘through’ education are encouraged - involving active participation, learning through doing, the development of values, attitudes and dispositions and using a variety of resources. Although more difficult to provide, it is these elements of the citizenship education curriculum that educationalists and technologists need to focus their future
efforts on when developing ICT applications.
Developing technology as a subject of citizenship education
A key technological issue yet to be addressed adequately by the education literature is how ICT should be approached as a topic of citizenship education. The National Curriculum highlights the area of new technology and media as a relevant element of citizenship curricula, but leaves considerable flexibility of definition and development of content on the part of schools and teachers. Much thought and effort needs to go into developing innovative yet rational ICT elements in schools’ citizenship curricula.
There is no doubt that the networking of ICTs and the globalisation of society is redefining the notion of citizenship. On this basis some technologists and government agencies are currently lobbying for an ‘e-citizenship’ element to be integrated into citizenship education - with the aim of preparing learners for life in the expected ‘online society’.
Yet the present e-citizenship debate has direct precedent in the ‘public understanding of science’, ‘computer literacy’ and ‘science-technology-society’ debates which took place throughout the 1980s and 1990s. These movements have been only partially successful in UK education - and serve to warn us with regard to future activity.
In particular we should be wary of over-emphasising the potential use of technology in society as opposed to its actual use. There is clearly a need for the development of a sensible curriculum which moves beyond a functional model of ICT knowledge and additionally aims to demystify technology and explore its wider societal consequences. This can be seen as an ‘ideological’ model of technology and society. The emphasis of an ideological approach is on considering how and why ICT has been constructed and shaped, rather than attempting specific functional definitions of ICT and society. From this perspective we can offer the following areas of citizenship and technology which could be developed in a maximal model of citizenship education:
- awareness of the social implications of ICT for individuals
- awareness of the implications of ICT at a societal level
- awareness of the ‘social shaping’ of technology by social, cultural, political and economic influences
- addressing questions of equity in access to, and use of, ICT
- awareness of issues of power and control associated with new technologies in society
- awareness of the historical precedents as well as the future potentials of new technologies.
Using ICT to facilitate citizenship education
In terms of facilitating the teaching and learning of citizenship there are four different applications of technology as a tool which can be identified:
1. Using ICT as a source of citizenship information
The provision of information via the world wide web and CD-Rom databases is the most popular citizenship application of ICT in current practice and fits in readily with the National Curriculum strand ‘knowledge and understanding about becoming informed citizens’. This is a good example of ICT being used to promote education about citizenship. In theory this use of ICT allows learners access to a wide range of information, opinions and perspectives from around the world that would otherwise be inaccessible. Despite being a growing area of activity there is little or no research examining the effectiveness of ICT in delivering citizenship learning in this way, with the scant educational literature that is available consisting only of reflexive reports of the development of online citizenship resources.
Although research focusing on what and how students learn from such resources is scarce, parallels can be drawn with the established body of research focusing on young people’s use of news media and their subsequent levels of political participation and knowledge. Although some early psychological research concluded that higher levels of news media use were correlated positively with levels of political participation, the general academic consensus now questions the lasting effects of exposure to news media. This lack of direct evidence could suggest that increased access to citizenship information and resources via media should not be seen as necessarily leading to increased levels of citizenship. From a pedagogic perspective the passive presentation of citizenship information via ICT is not best practice - and should not be seen as an area of cutting edge development over the next decade.
2. Using ICT as a means of engendering citizenship discussion
The role of ICT in encouraging discussion of citizenship matters should be seen as a more appropriate area of development - fitting with the National Curriculum strand: ‘developing skills of enquiry and communication’. There has been some development of ICT-based simulations of social situations with the aim of stimulating discussion amongst learners but, again, little specific research has been carried out into the effectiveness of such software. There are suggestions from one study that software designed explicitly to involve group discussion and decisionmaking when coupled with non-ICT based lessons in communication skills can be effective. However, research into the use of general simulation environments in education is more ambivalent - reporting that learners sometimes have difficulty in setting their own goals and framing their learning activities in a relatively unstructured environment. We can conclude, therefore, that any citizenship simulations should be structured and closely aligned with the offline citizenship curricula of the classroom, and the necessary role of the teacher should be recognised.
Online and networked communication packages form another source of ICTbased citizenship learning to promote discussion. Yet the little empirical work carried out on educational discussion groups - alongside earlier work on noneducational groups - has reached mixed conclusions as to the social and educational benefits of such interactions. Online discussion groups can therefore be seen as offering complementary arenas to real-life communities and networking amongst learners.
3. Using ICT to help learners produce citizenship materials
A third area highlighted in the education literature - but with little direct empirical background - is the area of using ICT to enable students to be producers of citizenship cultural products. This area is potentially the most exciting and fruitful area of ICT development for citizenship education - fitting closely with the National Curriculum strand: ‘developing skills of enquiry and communication’. Production of cultural products such as websites, videos and animations focusing on citizenship issues is sometimes time-consuming and technically demanding, but the processes of active design and production could be seen as offering a more valuable citizenship learning experience than the passive consumption of ready-made products. This should be seen as a key area for ICT development over the next 5 years.
4. Using ICT for whole school citizenship activities and practices
The final, and perhaps most innovative, application of technology to citizenship education takes the form of ICT-based whole school citizenship activities and practices - fitting with the National Curriculum strand: ‘developing skills of participation and responsible action’. This is based on the widely held belief that the school and classroom are key sites of learning about power, authority, control and notions of fairness and justice. There are a range of formal ‘student voice’ structures and policies that can be adopted at a whole school level. Schools can be encouraged to use the informal school curriculum as a vehicle to promote citizenship through the use of school councils and other class decision-making activities. There are obvious ICT applications to this element of citizenship education (ie inter-school virtual communities and e-democracy) but very little research and software development to support its use.
Future directions for educational research and practice
Whilst there is much theoretical writing there has been little, if any, high calibre research carried out in the area of citizenship and technology. The research studies that do exist are, on the whole, small scale, often in case study form, providing exploratory and reflexive accounts. Whilst providing a useful background to the issues raised, issues of sampling, measurement of outcomes and weak generalisability hamper the existing small body of literature to the extent that broad empirically informed conclusions can not (and should not) be drawn. There is evidently a pressing need for well-thought out and rigorous research to be carried out - addressing a range of questions:
- how can ICT best be used to facilitate active rather than passive citizenship learning?
- which types of online/networked interactions facilitate the most effective discussions between communities of citizenship learners?
- how can ICT-based democracy best be applied in classroom and whole school settings?
- do ICT-based democracy and ‘student voice’ applications lead to implicit and/or explicit citizenship learning?
- in what ways does students’ production of digital citizenship resources engender citizenship learning?
It must be recognised that some questions that educationalists and policymakers would like to ask about citizenship and technology cannot be rigorously researched and satisfactorily answered. For example, it is difficult to try to measure many of the outcomes of citizenship education and, it follows, the effectiveness of ICT in creating informed citizens. The dearth of robust research in the area of citizenship education is partly a result of the difficulty of adequately measuring progress in an area with broadly defined outcomes. The key and cutting edge questions surrounding citizenship and new technologies are more likely to be theoretical and exploratory rather than empirical and definitive.
Whilst this review has been able to identify areas of future activity for educators and technologists (see Summary of Implications) there is a definite need for careful practice in this area. It should be concluded that the area of citizenship education is one which is best approached with caution by educational technologists wishing to make a lasting, valuable impact on educational practice. Citizenship education is an area of the curriculumwhich is ripe for the misapplication of ICT - as a quick fix to a new and ill-defined area of education which some teachers and schools are ambivalent or hostile towards. Commercially there are already suggestions of companies merely repackaging existing software with a ‘new’ citizenship tag. Although the existing software and resource base is useful it concentrates too much on passive citizenship education. This review of literature highlights some of the areas and approaches which will be more fruitful - in promoting active, participative, learning through and for citizenship.
