Suchergebnisse

AbstractOver the last fifteen years, most national public education systems have added some component of 'global citizenship education' to their existing civic education curricula. This move to expand the confines of citizenship education has generally been applauded as a way in which schools might better prepare students to understand and address the challenges and possibilities of globalisation. However, a close analysis of curriculum documents in Canada tends to highlight the fact that in terms of civic education, significant ideological tensions exist between global citizenship and national citizenship. In this article, we draw on Canadian civics and social studies curricula from across Canada to examine the different sources of civic tensions between the 'national' and the 'global'.

Conversations with teachers and professional development leaders enable us, as researchers, to highlight the ambiguous promise of action research within the context of mandated teacher professional development in the province of Alberta, Canada. From this departure, we investigate how educators believe action research projects influence their professional practices and we explore the question of the validity of using state-mandated action research projects as a means of bringing about authentic teacher professional development. Using conversations, we recount the experiences of three teachers who took part in two separate action research projects. As the conversations we present underscore, many teachers involved in state-mandated school-based projects found themselves caught between competing discourses of personal empowerment and individual autonomy on the one hand and externally driven measures of accountability and excellence on the other. In this complex and ambiguous location and within the context of their involvement in action research projects, the three teachers in this study negotiated their own understandings of professional development.