Civic Education: Teachers' knowledge and role.

Abstract

Educational attainment depends on a range of mechanisms that affect the teaching and learning process, among which we highlight teachers’ knowledge. Our research aimed to build an approach to Citizenship Education teachers’ knowledge based on the analyses of several Civic Education teachers’ conceptions and practices regarding this issue. This paper focuses on a exploratory study whose main purpose was to understand the conceptions, practices and contexts related to the teaching and learning process of the non-disciplinary curriculum area of Civic Education in Portugal basic schools. The interpretive analysis of the teachers’ “voices” resulted in the proposal of a teachers’ knowledge framework, based on Grossman’s model as well as on the input from other recent studies. We believe that this framework that this framework can help teachers’ educators and contribute towards the definition of guidelines for the design, implementation and evaluation of teacher training programs in the scope of the non-disciplinary curriculum area of Civic Education and towards the debate on teacher education policies in the field of Citizenship education.