Learning to Teach Citizenship: A Lifelong Learning Approach

Where do civics teachers learn about the content and methods of civics education? What is the impact of these learning experiences on their teaching approaches? Driven by these questions, we undertook a study with civics teachers in Ontario, Canada. Whereas citizenship education is often understood as occurring exclusively in formal schooling, and the preparation for teaching civics is usually conceived as occurring in pre-service teacher training, in this study we uncovered civic learning that occurs in nine formal, informal and nonformal settings: early family socialization to primary school, secondary school, pre-service training, other university programs, workshops and conferences, civic participation, the media, and the teaching of civics itself. In relation to the first question, the teachers reported that through a variety of lifelong and lifewide experiences they acquired different amounts and types of learning on civic knowledge, civic values, civic and political skills, political beliefs, and civics teaching. In order to address the second question, we explored the relationship between the civic learning experienced by teachers, on the one hand, and the content and methods of their teaching, on the other. The settings were found to differentially influence the competencies an