A comparative analysis of teachers’ participation in civic organizations and teaching-related correlates

• In Event: Citizenship and democratic education in formal and non-formal contexts

Proposal

The fostering of civic engagement among adolescent students is a recurrent theme in educational and political research. In democratically constituted societies, citizens who are civically engaged and knowledgeable about how their governments function are essential for the continuance of democracy. However, civically engaged democratic citizens are not born – becoming an active and democratic citizen is a developmental process, and this development is shaped by multiple contexts and socialization agents. Torney-Purta and Amadeo (2011) suggest that children and adolescents develop the knowledge, skills and dispositions that are central to participatory citizenship in adulthood in a particular niche characterized by different contexts. These authors identify three particularly influential contexts: daily life settings, such as family, school, peers, the media; historically rooted customs and cultural beliefs; and the beliefs and expectations of adults that surround youths, especially parents, kindergarteners and school teachers.
Furthermore, adolescence has been identified as a particularly important period for the political socialization of young people (McIntosh & Youniss, 2010) – it is a time when political attitudes, interests and motivations are nurtured. While a vast amount of research has studied the role of family socialization and the transmission of values, attitudes as well as behaviors from parent to child, schools are important learning environments as adolescents grow up. In fact, schools are expected to help foster the knowledge, skills and dispositions supporting future engagement and participation. By means of formal learning in school lessons (e.g., open discussions or lectures) as well as through informal civic experiences in extra-curricular activities (such as school parliaments and service learning), young people can acquire citizenship-related knowledge and skills. Consequently, teachers in all subject areas have a role to play in fostering civic engagement among students.
Previous research has provided ample evidence on the parent-child transmission of political values and shown that nurturing school climates support youths’ expectations to participate in the public sphere (Campbell, 2008; Neundorf, Niemi, & Smets, 2016). However, research has rarely attended to teachers’ participation in community groups and political organizations, and little is known about how such participation is associated with students’ attitudes towards citizen participation and whether these patterns differ across democratically constituted countries. The present study aims to fill this gap using representative data from the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) collected in 2009. Building on recent research suggesting that teachers are role models whose involvement in school governance and whose relationships with students and other teachers at school can influence the civic development of adolescents (Reichert, Chen, & Torney-Purta, 2018; Sampermans & Claes, 2018), this analysis employs a person-centered approach to examine differences in teachers’ civic participation and its potential for the civic development of their students.
Using data from 12 Asian and European countries that participated in the ICCS 2009, the present analysis goes beyond previous research and attempts to answer five research questions (RQs).
• RQ1: What are the relative frequencies of teachers’ self-reported participation in activities promoted by societal organizations?
• RQ2: Are there distinct groups of teachers characterized by different patterns in their participation? Following Dalton’s (2008) distinction between dutiful and engaged citizenship, we hypothesized that one group would primarily be engaged in activities promoted by more formalized organizations, such as trade unions; another group of teachers should be primarily engaged in activities associated with postmodern sensitivities (Hooghe, Oser, & Marien, 2016). While we assumed that it would be possible to identify more than two groups of teachers with distinct participation profiles, we had no hypothesis as to how many additional groups we might identify.
• RQ3: How do these distinct groups differ from each other with respect to teachers’ characteristics? For example, men have been found more frequently to be party members, attend demonstrations, and contact politicians, while women tend to engage in private activism (Ondercin & Jones-White, 2011). Furthermore, Dalton (2008) argued that younger generations are driving a value change and that younger cohorts are more active in less traditional political activities, whereas older cohorts engage in political parties and similar acts. Hence, there might be differences among the profile groups. Eventually, teachers of civics-related subjects should be more prone to participate in civic and political activities.
• RQ4: What is the association between membership in these groups and teaching-related practices? Knowles (2017) found that teachers supporting a more conservative ideology of civic education are more prone to employ teacher-centered methods, compared to other teachers who are more likely to use student-centered methods in class. Hence, it is reasonable to expect that participation profiles are associated with teaching methods.
• RQ5: How are these profile groups associated with students’ participation-related attitudes? Teachers are important agents in adolescents’ political socialization (Thornton, 2005; Torney-Purta & Amadeo, 2011). Therefore, it is of interest to analyze whether the identified profile groups would show distinct associations with students’ participation-related attitudes, including their support for citizenship norms and their willingness to participate in civic activities in the future.
Relative frequencies were calculated, and two-level latent class analyses were modeled. Four groups of teachers characterized by distinct participation profiles were identified and labeled “Indifferent”, “Community involvement”, “Professional participation”, and “Engaged”. Measurement invariance tests confirmed that the participation profiles can be meaningfully compared across all countries. Differences in the distributions of teachers across countries were less clear-cut than in a recent study on teachers’ goals of civic education (Reichert & Torney-Purta, 2019). Three-step approaches correcting for classification bias were used to predict latent class membership by teacher characteristics and to link the teaching-related variables to the profile groups. The same approach was used to predict students’ participation-related attitudes; however, due to the sampling design in ICCS a decision was made to aggregate teacher and student data at the school level for this analysis. Distinct differences in terms of teacher characteristics, teaching approaches, and student dispositions were identified. These results are important for the field of citizenship education as they suggest the importance of role models and the potential of implicit value transmission at schools; the findings provide avenues for practitioners and policy-makers alike to provide nurturing developmental niches for adolescents.

Authors

• Frank Reichert, The University of Hong Kong

• Weihong Liang, University of Hong Kong

• Judith Torney-Purta, University of Maryland