Character and Citizenship Education: What More Can We Do - Research Paper Example

?Character and Citizenship Education: What more can we do? Literature Review Introduction In the twenty-first century the world has become increasingly linked due to a number of different factors which include increased possibilities of international travel, modern technological advances in communications such as internet and mobile devices, and increased interdependence in trade and industry. These trends are largely driven by multi-national corporations operating in markets stretching across traditional nation-state boundaries. The term “globalization” is often used to describe this complex new phenomenon. In some ways life has become more unified, as culture is spread globally, but in other ways there is more diversity as people mix together and share their culture with each other. There is therefore also a new pluralism in the way that societies operate. It is no longer possible for a state or a region to pursue its own agenda secluded from the rest of the world and even the largest and most dominant societies, like the United States, must now take account of the many views and approaches that have currency in the world. People migrate more, and this means that any society is likely to contain people who hold a variety of different values, and follow different religions, with consequently different lifestyles and behaviors. In addition to this diverse population there is also an increase in the speed of change in society, and a need to equip all citizens to function within the high technology and fast-changing world of work and an often complex and multi-cultural family setting. For educators concerned to fulfil their obligations in the area of character and citizenship education (CCE) this pluralistic context presents a number of considerable challenges. The present study considers the way that globalization has significantly impacted the need to review CCE in schools to ensure continued relevance and currency for a sustainable future. The task of CCE has been defined in various ways, according to different theoretical perspectives. Behaviourist approaches work on a principle of rewards and punishments, based on the idea that children can be moulded using these means towards appropriate behavior. Behaviorists assume that children are inherently unable to make good choices, and must be educated, often using quite strict controls, into moral decision-making. This is the idea behind some nineteenth century European and American schooling practices, and there are relics of it in modern authoritarian regimes, such as can be found in some fundamentalist faith based or militarily-focused institutions today. The teaching of values in this context means making sure that children adopt the strict rules of a paternalistic society. Humanists, on the other hand, assume that children are born with the capacity to be good, and to make their own moral decisions. This approach advocates encouragement and choice, rather than coercion, and has been both praised as a more authentic way to support the development of deep moral thinking, and criticized as unrealistic and ineffective in modern contexts. Lockwood defines character education (the more traditional part of CCE) as follows: “Character education is any school-initiated program designed to shape directly and systematically the behavior of young people by teaching explicitly the nonrelativistic values believed to directly bring about good behavior,” (Lockwood, 2009, 100) and modifies this with an addendum called “developmental character education” which reaches into areas like citizenship and making sound judgements. This is a good starting point for the inculcation of basic ideas, but it does not go very far in addressing some of the complexities of globalized education. Some sociological theories, such as those of Durkheim (1973) advocate a focus on group activities, since they assume that morality will emerge in the interaction of individuals with one another within a larger group context. Children learn to attune their individual impulses to the needs of the group, and this then forms the basis of future moral decisions. Another such theory was advanced by Habermas (1990) who prefers an emphasis on the way that people communicate with each other and saw education as the place where core agreements take place between student and teacher which in turn foster the acquisition of reasoning skills and the development of identity. This process is called “Communicative action” and again stresses the importance of the group, including the teacher and the school institution as well as the children, in forming moral foundations for future life. There are also newer approaches including the caring approach and the critical one (Winton, 2008) and some which identify core international values of social justice which cross over different religions and historical periods. (Starkey, 1992) At the present time it is clear that the teaching of CEE is attracting a great deal of attention among theorists, but there is no clear consensus on the most valid approach for it, or the best critical underpinning for it. Consequently there are many different suggestions regarding how it should be designed, and beyond the inculcation of very basic rules of school organization and discipline, what its goals should be. This literature review sketches out some of the main contemporary debates and considers the key challenges and issues that face educators in this field at the present time. It identifies the main gaps in the current state of research and identifies promising avenues for future work in establishing how educators can teach values without indoctrination and yet at the same time promote deep thinking and responsible citizenship. Literature review development. Many educators and researchers hold the view that children are generally not born with a strong sense of right and wrong, and that the purpose of education is to present children with a carefully graded and designed set of opportunities to develop such a sense and practise choosing virtuous ways of behaving. Lickona, Wynne and Ryan are three scholars who follow this line of thinking. They focus on moral development and character education and see these as elements in the fundamental structure of society. They cite the democratic foundations of the United States as a reason for teaching CEE, because government by the people can only work if the people understand and respect the democratic values that were implicit in the founding fathers’ creation of the United States: “Those foundations included respect for law and the rights of others, voluntary participation in public life, and concern for the common good.” (Ryan and Lickona, 1992, 3). As American society grows away from this original core values, so educators and observers increasingly worry that children will neither observe them in action all around them, nor be able to adopt them as they grow up. Modern developments in Western societies such as a more materialist and individualist approach, along with rising crime rates and a growing tolerance for social habits such as drinking, smoking and drug taking which were frowned upon by the previous generations, lead some scholars to report a crisis in social disorder, cynicism and selfishness. Against this supposed background, CEE is seen as a necessary corrective to a situation that is spiralling out of control. This results in a rather rigid and programmatic approach: setting down core values and requiring educators to instil them, using forceful means if necessary, in order to achieve the wider goal of saving society from moral decay and impending disaster. Lickona (1996) suggests eleven principles for doing this, starting with the need for each school to set out its own definition of character and carefully build a school-wide approach which moulds the students into the agreed values. While agreeing with some of the causes and problems faced by Western Societies, Lockwood argues against a narrowly behaviorist approach: “true moral behavior rests on sound principles and dispositions and is not solely a conditioned reflex.” (Lockwood, 1985/86, 10) He uses the metaphor of the courtyard to describe how behavior shaping such as “an orderly environment, common courtesy and so on” (Lockwood, 1985/86, 10) is a useful and necessary early step for schoolchildren, but it can only ever be like a courtyard, in other words a precondition, for the real work of moral education which brings the ability to reason and choose morally without external sanctions. The work of Alfie Kohn goes even further and questions some of the trends in American teaching of CEE and points out that there are two main definitions of “character education”: a broad definition which includes everything that is taught outside the academic curriculum, and a narrower one which is “a particular style of moral training, one that reflects particular views as well as particular assumptions about the nature of children and how they learn.” (Kohn, 1997, 428) In Kohn’s view there is a tendency to focus on the narrow view, which hinders rather than helps children because it encourages educator to focus on compliance rather than a more open and questioning attitude to moral choices. In other words the teaching of obedience (in return for rewards or as a way of avoiding punishment) is not the same as the imparting of an ability to work out from first principles what a child should do in a given situation. It is clear that there are a range of approaches and opinions on the best way to go about CEE and they tend to focus around how far the schooling environment should attempt to modify behavior and enforce compliance to a particular set of rules, and how far it should encourage a much wider and freer reflection on these issues, and try to foster the development of internal moral codes rather than institutional ones. In Japan, for example, character education is very highly regarded, but it is tied in with two other priorities, namely “connection” and “curriculum.” (Lewis and Tsuchida, 1998, 36-37) The children learn to become a part of a close-knit school community which prepares them with the skills to form social attachments in later life through the various groups and organizations that are such a big part of Japanese society. Individual and collective moral frameworks are thus developed simultaneously, in keeping with traditional Eastern philosophies like Confucianism and Shintoism which stress the importance of kinship, respect and orderly participation in collective ventures. Personal ties of loyalty and belonging are therefore very strong forces in the building of character and values in Japanese children. In a stable society with a strong ethnic identity and relatively low levels of immigrant population, this system works well. There is a question, however, how long Japan can maintain this approach as globalization moves on apace and Japanese citizens become more exposed to the values and morals of other cultures. One country which has already begun to face up to this dilemma is Singapore, largely due to its small size and dependence on international trade to maintain the standard of living of its people. Older isolationist views are still held by particularly older members of society, but researchers report a new awareness that modern life requires more flexibility: “In a multicultural society, citizenship need not be static in terms of a set of rights and responsibilities; instead, it is always being made through practice.” (Pun, 2007, 224). In the United Kingdom there has been a pre-millennium pessimism about the way that moral and spiritual standards seem to be falling, in a phenomenon labelled “declinism” (Beck, 1998, 3) . Beck’s analysis takes in also the increasing tendency towards individualism and specialism in education, which results in a fragmentation of knowledge and a lack of conceptual frameworks in which to hold vast quantities of detail. In the UK there is a tension between the traditionalists who want to turn the clock back to an age when religious and moral education was a standard part of state schooling through the Religious Education curriculum, and modernists who move away from the religious underpinning and closer to the realm of “citizenship” and democracy training. Beck argues that the differences between the two may be considerable, but they are not particularly relevant to the modern debate because schools in the UK are focused on performance indicators in “proper subjects” (Beck, 1998, 68) which relegates any input in the realm of morals, values, religion or citizenship to an inferior position. This is a bigger obstacle to the design of effective CCE programs in the UK than any debate about their content or focus. Joan Stephenson agrees with this analysis of the British state school system: “In this climate, with no National Curriculum slot labelled Values education ... schools and teachers must continue to educate children to the best of their ability. Some schools and teachers are aware of the problem and some are not.” (Stephenson, in Stephenson et al. (Eds), 1997, 134) The theorists have evidently failed to establish a believable rationale for values education, and so the responsibility on teachers is perhaps even more extreme in the UK than it is in the United States, where values education is largely accepted in principle, even if there is little agreement on its content and how it should be delivered. ======================================================== -hinge heavily on the need to look at CCE with reference to Nel Nodding’s theoretical framework ( I only have the books, please find your own journal resources) and Banks’ four levels of multicultural education with emphasis on social action approach (Developing a multicultural curriculum in a predominantly white teaching context: lessons from an African American teacher in a suburban English classroom) and seamless enactment of CCE in schools. -what are the views presented by critical theorists such as Peter Mclaren, Nel Noddings, MichAel Apple with respect to CCE and the gaps in current curriculum or CCE framework -what are the criticisms against character education that does not embrace the developmental perspective or care theorists perspective? ============================================================= There are many curriculum implications for twenty first century schools and citizens, and one of them is need to ensure that multiple views of knowledge are presented. Noel Gough makes the point that the application of Western Science to problems in the environment is only one possible approach, and that there may be hidden cultural assumptions in much modern science teaching in the west. This can lead to a situation where leading educationalists “maintain a culturally imperialistic view of science through the use of rhetorical strategies that privilege Western scientists’ representations of ‘reality’ and reproduce the conceit that the knowledge Western science produces is universal.” (Gough, 2002, 1225) This has consequences for Western nations, because it cuts them off from the valuable areas of knowledge that exist in other locations, but it also causes problems in post-colonial contexts, where resistance is often blocked or suppressed. As people increasingly experience multiple locations in life, and overlapping identities and group memberships, there is a new moral task to be addressed: “In the context of globalisation, individuals need to rethink the relationship between identity and difference ... As a location is simultaneously a dislocation from other positions, pedagogy therefore becomes a process of constant engagement, negotiation and (en)counter, in which the latter signifies the relatedness of a position and the diverse modes of investment in it.” (Edwards and Usher, 2007, 141) Globalization, therefore introduces a need for more complexity, and less rigid “identity building” within the fixed parameters of one school, in one country, following one particular notion of democracy. It is clear that if we are to avoid Eurocentric error sin our teaching, then we must increasingly strive to make room for other views, such as those from Buddhism, post-colonial theory, feminism, etc. There will often be more than one approach and more than one proposed solution to global isssues, and our curricula should encourage the type of open and collaborative thinking that welcomes new perspectives. If, as Nel Noddings suggests, “our technological capacity has run far beyond our moral competence to manage it” (Noddings, 2005, 1) then we need much more than the sticking plaster of a basic school behavior moulding. We need something much more robust than that. Instead of determining whose values and morals should be taught, the priority should therefore be how to encourage a constant awareness of overlapping and at times contradictory world views. Children today are often caught between the stipulated curriculum, which is what the official school position is, as represented in its written codes and rules, and the enacted curriculum which is what actually happens from day to day. Besides this tension there is also the influence of factors such as hidden curriculum such as the need to adhere to external pressures and the desire for a smooth and trouble free routine, rather than an explicit raising of important issues and exploration of difficult or contentious issues. Economic and social pressures on schools often result in a failure to meet stated objectives, and values education can come rather far down the list of priorities for some schools. One way through this post-modern maze is to focus, as Belanger (2006) does, on a multidimensional matrix of factors in any educational context. This approach transcends the content model of some CCE curriculum design and covers both explicit and implicit values. This model provides a way of analysing what currently happens in a school and looking for ways to improve this, as well as identifying any gaps or problems. Conclusion. The literature review above demonstrates that the subject of CCE is still very much under discussion at theoretical and at practical levels in the field of education. There will always be faith based or conservative schools who look backwards to more traditional teaching of a single and rather static value system. For schools which are truly pluralistic in their student population and in their staff recruitment policies, however, there is much to be done in formulating new ways of building community values, individual moral values, and a globalized consciousness which takes account of aspects like environmentalism, respect for difference and the ability to negotiate accommodations and understandings with multiple other groups. No longer can we assume that identities and values coalesce in a single shared culture, but we must assume a state of layered identities and fluctuating cultural influences. The CCE frameworks of the future need to find ways to advocate active citizenry to create greater harmony and synergy for the betterment of the society. The challenge is to provide the scaffolding upon which children can build their own moral codes and values, in a way which respects their cultural heritage, which may well consist of a mixture of several major belief systems at the same time. The study which follows explores ways of achieving this ambitious aim. References Beck, J. (1998 ) Morality and Citizenship in Education. London: Cassell. Belanger, W.A. (1993) Imparting Values - a multidimensional perspective, Journal of Moral Education 22, (2), 111-123. Benninga, J.S. and Wynne E.A. (1998) Keeping in character: A time-tested solution. Phi Delta Kappan 7 (6), 439-445. Durkheim, E. (1973) Moral Education. London: The Free Press. Edwards, R. and Usher, R. (2007) [First published 2000] Globalization & Pedagogy: Space, Place and Identity. London and New York: Routledge. Gough, N. (2002) Thinking/acting locally/globally: Western Science and Environmental Education in a Global Knowledge Economy. International Journal of Science Education 24 (11), 1217-1237. Habermas, J. 1990. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. London: Polity. Haydon, G. (1997) Teaching about Values: A New Approach. London: Cassell, Hill, B. V. (2008) How Learners Respond to the Teaching of Beliefs and Values. Journal of Education and Christian Belief 12 (2), 101- Kohn, A. (1997) How Not to Teach Values: A Critical Look at Character Education. Phi Delta Kappan 78 (6), 428-439. Kristjansson, K. (2006) Emulation and the use of role models in moral education. Journal of Moral Education 35 (1), 37- Lewis, C. and Tsuchida, I. (1998) The Basics in Japan: The Three C’s. Educational Leadership 55 (6), 32-37. Lickona, T. (1996) Eleven Principles of Effective Character Education. Journal of Moral Education, 25 (1), 93-100. Lockwood, A.L. (2009 ) The case for character education: a developmental approach. New York: Teachers College Press. Lockwood, A.L. (1985/86 ) Keeping them in the courtyard. Education Leadership. Dec/Jan, 9-10. Milner, H.R. (2005) Developing a Multicultural Curriculum in a Predominantly White Teaching Context: Lessons from an African American Teacher in a Suburban English Classroom. Curriculum Inquiry 35 (4), 391-427. Mithra, H.G. (2010) Value Education: Whose Concern? Asia Journal of Theology. 24 (1), 129-152. Noddings. N. ( ) Educating Moral People: A caring alternative to character education Noddings, N. (Ed.) (2005) Educating Citizens for Global Awareness. New York: Teachers College Press. Nolan, Elizabeth H. "Religious Education in Public Schools Dealing with Diversity in Spiritual Traditions at the Chalkface," Religious Education, Vol. 87, No. 4,Fall, 1992. Pun, S-h. 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(2008) The appeal(s) of character education in threatening times: caring and critical democratic responses. Comparative Education 44 (3), 305-316. Read More