Educating Brokers of Democracy: Education for democracy in teacher education between global politics, pedagogical norms, and teacher cultures

• In Event: Education and the Making of Democracy: Attitudes, Perceptions, Tensions, and Educational Imaginaries

Proposal

In a global perspective, democratic values are under siege in ways that make historians draw parallels to the heated political conflicts of the 1930s. Democracy cannot be taken for granted, even in countries that have staged themselves as global defenders of democratic values since the second world war. As a reaction an agenda of education for democracy has gained global momentum the past few years, e.g., in the UN. This paper aims at re-examining the path from intentions to implementation of education for democracy in teacher education programmes comparatively. Thereby taking note of the central role of schoolteachers as frontline professionals that are to implement education for democracy in concrete institutional settings. Democratic education or education for democracy can be understood in a variety of ways, highly depending on national frames of interpretation. The aim is to re-contextualize in concrete settings receptions and local variations of the global script of education for democracy, recently re-launched by the United Nations and the European Union. This recontextualization aims at unpacking and critically re-evaluating national approaches taking note of possible alternative paths in current and future teacher preparation.

Given the combined national and global aspects of this aim, three contexts are selected for comparison: The Nordic countries, the United States, and South Africa. These contexts are characterised by longstanding or more recent commitments to democracy as both a form of governance, as an ideology, and a way of life (Hansen, 2010). However, initial observations show differing approaches to education for democracy in the respective systems of teacher education, in policy, programmes, and practice. As one example, current Danish teacher education includes the subject “General education: Knowledge of Christianity, life-enlightenment and citizenship” that is intended to convey democratic civic values, knowledge of the Christian heritage, and includes the Grundtvigian term of “life-enlightenment” in the title. The clustering of these concepts indicates the intricate connections between national political history, religion, and pedagogical norms in the assigned active creation of citizens as part of teachers’ obligations (Københavns Professionshøjskole, 2019).

Democracy is a highly value laden concept with far-reaching implications for education. On the one hand this discursive chain of positive societal effects of education for democracy can be found in numerous policy texts and forms a dominant world level development and educational ideology (Schriewer, 2009). Critical analysis has, on the other hand, pointed to a more ambivalent usage of the term, e.g., mobilizing the concept of democracy for the advantage of national agendas or specific national cultural traits (Haas, 2011; Hansen, 2010).

The persistence of nation states as units of comparison in a time of globalisation can theoretically be underpinned by referring to Elias’ view of the nation-state as a survival unit within an environment of other, potentially hostile, states. The nation-state must (still) organise itself to procure at least a sufficient defence. This defence should be regarded in the broadest possible terms, ranging from soldiers and military weapons to culture, ideology, and social organisation (Elias, 1978; Reeh, 2016). Long before the overt discourse of ‘competition states’, religion, cultural nationalism, and mass education have served the object of mobilising the population for state survival and wars to come (Høyrup & Bolving 2007; Reeh, 2016). Teachers can, tentatively, be seen as actively mediating between state and civil society and having the concrete obligation to further the ideology of the nation state in question, and shape children into citizens accordingly. This reading informs the study with an observation of the almost ubiquitous necessity of educating coming generations as also belonging to specific survival units, offering a balanced view of the national and transnational aspects of education for democracy.

Ideas of a converging world culture of education that arguably has strong implications for education for democracy, have been contested by scholars who argue for the persistence of diverging national and local interpretations (Boli & Ramirez, 1987, Meyer et al. 2010, Schriewer 2009). International trends are not just implemented; they are adopted through actions of strategic reference, interpreted in culturally specific reception processes and blend with existing institutional traditions and cultural specificities. The global spread of a world-level development and educational ideology thus must be analyzed in the light of the persistent diversity of socio-cultural interrelationship networks (Schriewer, 2009).

The policy and programme analysis will methodologically take form as a critical discourse analysis (CDA) in the form that Norman Fairclough has developed (Fairclough, 1992). The body of evidence can thus be situated in the nexus of national political struggles, global power relations, as well as hegemonic producers of texts as e.g., OECD, EU, and the UN. The advantage of CDA is that it combines a focus on the significance of language with an acknowledgment of the influence of non-discursive forces (e.g., economic, and hegemonic political power forces).

Main Research questions:
1) What divergent paths from political intentions to implementation of education for democracy in teacher education programmes can be found in the Nordic countries, the United States, and South Africa?

2) How do these paths reflect national historical interpretations of democracy as well as display differing re-contextualizations of the global script of democracy in concrete contemporary settings?

3) How can answers to the above questions inform possible alternative paths to education for democracy in current and future teacher preparation?

Research sub-questions:

- How can education for democracy be analysed as a world-level development and educational ideology or global script carried by institutions like the UN and the EU?
- How is education for democracy included in national programmes of initial teacher education in the selected contexts?
- How is the democratic teacher discursively created in these documents?
- How are aspects of education for democracy integrated in the organisation of teacher education (participatory methods, as well as students’ engagement on the organisational level)?
- How and to what extent are aspects of education for democracy implemented in the individual parts of teacher education curricular?

Author

• Jesper Eckhardt Larsen, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences