Team-based citizenship education

Formulation of problem

In recent years, the topic of citizenship has become increasingly important in education. Citizenship competencies are included in the new learning outcomes for secondary education as a separate set of key competencies to be attained. As a result, schools need to significantly increase their efforts regarding citizenship.

The collaboration between teachers to integrate citizenship in the curriculum is challenging. Citizenship education is often fragmented, while an integrated, school-wide approach is essential to help effectively attain citizenship competencies. Professionals are asking for tools that can help school teams in this process.

Project approach

This research aims to leverage knowledge about teamwork in education to develop tools for reflection and counselling to support school teams qualitatively implement citizenship competencies. An educational design research is used to provide an answer to the research questions. Together with professionals, we start with refining the formulation of the problem, while at the same time thoroughly researching the literature on the topics of team-based working and citizenship. After that, we study good practices across different schools. We analyse a number of case studies to inspire the development of tools for counselling and reflection. These tools are developed in co-creation with professionals. In the next step a number of schools will test the developed tools. Finally, we assess the usability of the tools and manage their implementation and distribution in professional practice.

Output

We develop a new theoretical framework with successful school team characteristics in the context of citizenship along with team-based tools for reflection and counselling to work on citizenship education in school. Additionally, we aim to write a research article about the design research.

Researchers

• ama.amitai@kdg.be
• ruben.macquoy@kdg.be
• lies.vercauteren@kdg.be