In episode 5 of Conversations4Citizenship, Hans Svennevig, who is the subject leader for PGCE citizenship at the IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society, shares practical examples and reflections on the role of citizenship education with us. He also talks about challenges as opportunities to develop high-quality citizenship teachers that can encourage learners within their communities to improve democracy in our world.
In this episode, we speak to Hans Svennevig about citizenship education, particularly, the PGCE citizenship programme at the IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society in the UK. Hans is a veteran educator who has dedicated his career to promoting citizenship education in schools throughout England. As the subject leader for PGCE citizenship at the IOE, Mr. Svennevig has been playing a pivotal role in shaping the next generation of citizenship teachers and equipping them with the requisite skills and knowledge to promote democracy and civic engagement in their communities. Over the course of nearly two decades, Hans has taught citizenship education at various educational institutions, including GCSE and citizenship A-level, and firmly believes that challenges present opportunities to develop research-informed practice-based citizenship teachers who can inspire and encourage informed participants within their communities to improve democracy worldwide. He says that this belief is the driving force behind Svennevig's leadership in developing citizenship education and producing high-quality citizenship educators. He credits his own teaching and leadership roles to the wealth of experience and expertise in the field of citizenship and human rights education taught by Professor Hugh Starkey. In this episode, Hans offers practical examples and reflections on the role of citizenship education in fostering a positive impact on future generations of citizenship educators.
Notes. Citizenship education has been in the English national curriculum since 2002, inspected by Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills in the UK). Although Citizenship education is said to be part of the curriculum in the UK, it is included in the Welsh ‘Curriculum for Life’, the Northern Irish curriculum as ‘Local and Global Citizenship’ and Scotland as ‘Modern Studies’.
We hope all listeners enjoy this episode, which is hosted by Adam Peter Lang, Kamille Beye., Rowena Azada-Palacios and Stella Micheong Cheong, Please subscribe to the podcast through Apple, Google, Spotify or Amazon Music. You may also follow @c4c_ed on Twitter; we look forward to hearing your feedback and your stories. If you would like to explore the possibility of participating in our podcast, do not hesitate to reach out through the online participation form or email us at info@conversations4citizenship.com.
Further information regarding PGCE Citizenship Programme at UCL-IOE by visiting the website: Citizenship PGCE
List of further readings
Stella Micheong Cheong 00:18
Hello, listeners, welcome to an episode of conversations4citizenship. I'm Stella Cheong from University College London. In a democratic society, schools have been recognised as a representative space for learning democracy as a rehearsal place to prepare children and young people to become responsible, active, and rights-respecting citizens. Since schools cannot practice the values and practice of democracy just by existing as a physical space, the roaring capacity of teachers to teach civic knowledge and values to learners who will become citizens in the future is crucial. So we wanted to know about professional programmes for teachers who could foster their citizens who would be willing to engage in building a more democratic, just and peaceful society and teach citizenship education as schools as well as higher education. In order to discuss this, we invited Hans Svennevig to have a conversation on citizenship education, focusing on his latest research about teacher training in the UK. Hi, Hans, how are you?
Hans Svennevig 01:37
Hello, thank you very much for having me on this podcast. I'm very much looking forward to having this conversation with you all.
Stella Micheong Cheong 01:45
Oh, thank you very much for joining us today. Without further ado, I'm handing over to my colleague, Adam now for today's episode. Adam.
Adam Peter Lang 01:55
Thank you very much. I'm Adam Peter Lang from UCL and Hans, we are delighted to have you here with us today. Now, Hans, we know that you've personally been involved in a range of research projects relating to citizenship education and peace education. But we wanted to start first by telling us briefly about little more about your role at the IOE, UCL Institute of Education.
Hans Svennevig 02:20
Thank you, Adam. So I am the subject leader for PGCE citizenship at the IOE. And ultimately, what that means is I am I have the amazing, wonderful privilege and pleasure of teaching and leading a programme to develop the next generation of citizenship teachers so that specialist citizenship teachers within schools in England. So that is what I do. So how I came about into this role, I actually had the pleasure of being taught to be a citizenship teacher. And now Professor Hugh Starkey when he was the course leader, as I am for my student teachers when he was the course leader at the University of Leicester. So, he was what I am, I suppose now to my student teachers, and I trained under Professor Hugh Starkey, and then went on to be a teacher of citizenship. And I have taught there for just under 20 years in citizenship education, and I've worked in a range of different institutions, so in schools in citizenship education, within further education, and now within higher education, and I've taught citizenship at GCSE, citizenship A-level, the A-level doesn't exist, unfortunately anymore. But I did teach the A-level when it did exist. And I've also been involved in teacher education, vocationally, and now, indeed, as the subject leader for citizenship education, in terms of the opportunities and the challenges the role presents. I mean, there are a lot of challenges. And I'm sure we'll go into it at some point in this podcast. But all the challenges I see as opportunities to develop very research informed practice-based citizenship teachers that are able to encourage a Stella said at the beginning of the podcast, students, children who become very active, informed participants within their communities working to improve what we understand as democracy in our world. And some of the challenges relate very much to the complexity of the world that we exist in right now. So, now as we're developing this podcast, cop, 27 is in session and we're asking these fundamental questions about how we resolve the problems of climate change. How do we make sure that they don't become worse than they already are? How do we improve sustainability education, and these are all challenges that young people face but opportunities for really high-quality citizenship education that is developed by specialists, citizenship teachers. And so ultimately, my role is to lead the development of that of teacher education around citizenship education and produce high-quality citizenship educators. And ultimately, I find it an incredible role, opportunity and absolute privilege to do that work.
Adam Peter Lang 05:24
Well, thank you, Hans, actually, you've referenced you, Hugh, Professor Hugh Starkey, he kicked off our inaugural season one, obviously, you're working on training teachers in formal education to take up teaching roles in schools in the UK, I suppose or beyond. That's the formal system. Have you got experience working in the informal system of education? Or do you think the two sorts of a crash or can work together? What's your feeling about that?
Hans Svennevig 05:24
So, when do you mean informal education? Are you talking about the range of youth clubs and scouting movements and these aspects of informal education? Or do you mean informal education as self-taught in formal education? Because I think there's a different way of thinking about those different aspects. So just want to clarify what you mean.
Adam Peter Lang 06:11
Well, I'm not I can't explain myself very well. I just wondered whether you felt that if are there tensions that you face that phrase it slightly differently in terms of training teachers in the formal systems in citizenship. Because it's obvious it's a controversial topic at times?
Hans Svennevig 06:30
Well, I would, I would say that citizenship education should always be not just a discrete subject, if it's done really well, in a school, if it's done really well, in a school, it should be almost the heart, lungs and blood system, the living body of a school. And so in that way, it seeps into informal settings. In the past, I've worked I worked in a further education college, and in Further Education, it's not just about what some may think about advanced level qualifications, A-level, for example, in the English context, it's about vocational qualifications. And so in the further education context, we had citizenship education at the heart of that institution. And so it was not just within citizenship as a subject, it was within all of the programmes. So the vocational programmes had citizenship education within them. And the most amazing thing I probably I've ever seen in citizenship education was a teacher lifting out a car engine, from a car with students around the engine and talking about the different parts that make up the engine. And then following that question with how does this relate to citizenship education and the students, the vocational students of motor vehicles being able to talk about how different parts of the manufacturing process of an engine were related to citizenship because of the democratic rights that country didn't have in one place that some parts came from in terms of sustainability and oil, and how the environment was impacted by cars and all sorts of wonderful topics such as that. And that is in that vocational setting. Beyond that, in an informal setting, the institution held youth clubs, and in the youth clubs, students were taking part in citizenship-based action through an organisation called Citizens UK. And they helped facilitate the students or the young people in this youth club arena to think about the change that they wanted to see in their local communities. And that leads to, for example, intergenerational projects where young people can work within their communities outside of school within a youth setting to develop things like playground equipment, or local community centre, having a repair centre, that the young people show other people how to repair their devices, and so on. And so I think citizenship education, when we're thinking about a formal setting, such as a school for it to be done really well, the school becomes a community hub, and that community hub, therefore, links into the informal settings that you speak of. So I don't think that there's a clash between the two, I think the two can work in unison together to develop strong, democratically educated young people.
Adam Peter Lang 09:32
That's a very interesting answer, Hans. And I thank you so much for those examples that really illuminate what you're talking about in our podcast. We are quite interested in looking at citizenship education, particularly as it developed during the pandemic. That's where we set ourselves up and as a result of the pandemic, but also other geopolitical dynamics that are going on. So do you want to reflect on anything about the pandemic and other geopolitical dynamics that make you and your students, sort of reimagined realign or move forward in the area that you work in?
Hans Svennevig 10:05
I referred to Professor Hugh Starkey earlier and Professor Hugh Starkey, very much talks about how young people are not citizens in waiting. They are already citizens. And I think that that links to my previous comments about community hubs and having citizenship education throughout those community hubs. I think this is very important when we think about misinformation, malformation, disinformation and media literacy, which is a key component of citizenship education, and particularly rose during the pandemic years if not before that, of course, it's always been around but was particularly used in terms of vaccines and that kind of area. And then we have as a related to the climate emergency and citizenship education for years has been talking about how do we address this emergency. And how can we enable young people to use active citizenship to work on these areas, if we use the idea of Friday climate strikes by Greta Thunberg, as an example, that is young people thinking about the world in which they live and wanting to do something about it, and raising that attention to as adults and as adults having to listen to them thinking about what we do about this emergency? So that is an active citizenship element that is existing and deals with these geopolitical dynamics as you refer to them, but I think that there's more to it. Where now in a world where we can see the rapid increase of technology now, not all people have access to that technology, asking the question, who is actually teaching about how we're going to engage with, for example, a Metaverse and these complicated ideas of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), and so on, who is going to explore issues about privacy when we think about these companies harvesting our data, who is having these conversations about private companies and their use of social media information such as what is now being discussed in terms of Twitter, if it's not citizenship, who else will be doing that? So these are issues that are emerging within the citizenship education space that need to be further developed and considered, especially when we think about things like AI, and automation and these kinds of aspects, those things are programmed by individuals. And so those programmed aspects are biassed by the biases of those individuals. So we need to teach citizenship education to help programmers not have biases in certain areas, especially when we think about the intersection between race and gender and LGBTQ plus representation and so on. That is workforce citizenship education. And ultimately, if we don't have strong citizenship education, there's no one else teaching about these things in the way of exploring and challenging some of these complex emerging themes. And ultimately, that's what I think is why we need to how did you put it reimagine what we teach about citizenship education in the curriculum, so that we're developing transferable skills too, in effect, future-proof young people.
Adam Peter Lang 13:39
Very interesting. Again, you mentioned technology that's very interesting, actually, and how it's changing at such a pace. I did actually witness one of your colleagues showed me actually something very interesting Virtual Reality programme about knife crime. And that was very, very powerful. I saw that. So that goes back to a bit of a point you were saying it the beginning there are challenges but when all these challenges, there are opportunities. Is that what you would say with is that how you address that with your students to be critical, but to embrace some of these changes?
Hans Svennevig 14:07
Yes, definitely. The student teachers that come to the programme are full of optimism. And the programme is demanding programme. It is a demanding profession to be a teacher is a very demanding profession, and it has a lot of highs and lows. But it's about seeing the larger picture of inspiring young people to make a change and learn about the world in which they live. So when we think about student teachers doing that, it's about harnessing their optimism and then engaging with their optimism to bring in a rich, diverse set of lesson materials and ideas to the classroom that not only teach the students about complex themes, such as how to teach controversial issues effectively or legal literacy or financial literacy and institutions working within that space, but also to inspire the teachers who are delivering this so that they can continue working in that sphere. I think one of the biggest challenges in teacher education, or teaching in general is retention. So how do you harness optimism to improve retention, that's the kind of creative space of teacher education. So it's inspiring, and it continues to be a meaningful profession that is valued and respected.
Adam Peter Lang 15:39
Because at the end of our summer term, we interviewed some of your students actually. And they were very enthusiastic and very optimistic. They were also giving us practical challenges as well. I just wondered, do any of your students are there any particular themes or any particular areas or threads emerging from them in terms of what they want to talk to you about or what they want to research that might be interesting to our listeners?
Hans Svennevig 16:06
So the themes that often come up, whether that's from the student teachers themselves or from other researchers in citizenship education, or other people who teach citizenship education more widely, and more broadly, in terms of the international sphere is always what is citizenship education. Now, I kind of chuckle to myself when I say this, because I've been asked that question 20 years ago, and I'm still asked that question to this day. And the different components that make citizenship education. I've referred to some of them in this discussion, but more widely is citizenship education, just about learning about civics. Here's Starkey and others. I agree with this. Bernard Crick, who was chairing the development of citizenship education in England would say that it's about active citizenship within that context of civics. But when you go broadly to an international audience, people talk about moral education. What that means in the UK context, we talk about values and value education. And that brings in things like fundamental British values, are they even fundamental? Are they British and all this kind of discussion? And the key concern around all of these aspects I always think about is where are they coming from. Who is tasked with developing citizenship education and what it means? What is their agenda in that? And what is the purpose of things like moral and other value-based education within citizenship education, ultimately, I would see citizenship education as being able to teach students how to ask critical questions, not just looking outside the box, as the phrase is, but looking at all angles of the box, Looking below it, above it, and through it, and ultimately, when programmes start to bring in other elements that are not necessarily related to citizenship education, but calling them citizenship education. My own, main concern is that if these are reductive, or some form of trying to de-professionalise the skills and knowledge of teaching, those are my concerns around that area. However, the opportunities in bringing in multiple elements of topics and ideas are to build a broad coalition of citizenship educators who are tackling some of the problems that I've related to today, for example, the climate so on but also international humanitarian conflicts, or improving local democracy and communities of participation, making sure that active citizenship isn't just about this idea that active citizenship is only about political activism and fighting against some kind of authority. But it's about as I said before localism and local ideas about community work and building hubs of practice building young people to work with the people around them. And then eventually, they become older people, don't they so older people working with the young people around them, and that kind of aspect. And when we go back to your question about what is it that young people who take on this problem or any person's taking on this programme because we have a lot of mature students come to this programme as well? What is it that they talk about? They talk about these areas of transferable skills related to peace, conflict related to democracy, and cosmopolitan citizenship, as you start. He talks about the talk very much about how we get young people to debate controversial issues and a safe one educated describes it as a brave way of discussing not just the issue, but the very places that those issues come from, you know, the phrase, arguing the view, not the person comes to mind because ultimately, we're in a very divided world that continues to be divided by different people with different power motivation reasons. And it's about pushing away the clouds and digging through to the real meaning that people just want to live and work and be together. And ultimately, whenever you go out in society, most people just want to be happy and content in their lives, and how do we ensure that that happens? And that's really what teachers always talk about? How do we make sure that we're not in a divided world?
Adam Peter Lang 20:41
Thank you. I mean, you just pick up on a couple of those. So some of the very practical now, how do you recruit your teachers to the PGCE? You hinted they have quite a lot of mature students, but I'd be interested in the diversity of your PGCE students. And then you touched again, on an aspect which I don't think it's just peculiar to the UK about retention of teachers. But I think that's a very important matter. But what are your views on that within this, we feel in this podcast is a bridge really, between practitioners and theory. And we're trying to put bridges to do that? Do you find your students welcome that? Or do they all want to just get out there and teach?
Hans Svennevig 21:22
So, I suppose there are two parts? How do we recruit and then the theory and the ideas? So in terms of recruitment, teacher retention is problematic. I think one of my key worries is that this year, nationally, so that's beyond citizenship. For all subjects, the teacher education market is 25 to 30%, down in recruitment, and I find that particularly worrying because what does that mean for the future years, for teachers who are under exceptional pressure already, their class sizes will grow if there isn't someone to take up the rolls and so on. Today, we've read in the news about cuts in educational funding for schools themselves, who can't pay their bills, because of energy bills and other such problems. So it is very concerning to think about what the landscape for a teacher will be in terms of class size and demanding for one year, two years, three years, four years five years. So, teachers who are recruited to the programme, are people who have full of that optimism to make a difference in young people's lives. And so often, the way that the recruitment occurs apart from the simple, they have to apply to be a teacher of idea for you apply, and then they go, they write a personal statement about why they want to be a teacher and why they want to teach citizenship education, drawing some of their perhaps volunteering or other experiences with young people or not in terms of applying apart from that logistical aspect. And then as interviewing them, and asking about subject knowledge and those aspects, apart from that, the people who apply are usually already very passionate about the idea of teaching and why teaching is not every day is the same job because it isn't every single day is different every single day that I have taught or done something within education has been very varied and different to the day before. And that makes it very inspiring to do, of course, sometimes that is very difficult because you can't rely on the day before to motivate you in terms of a kind of simple routine of things. Every single student might say a different thing. And that makes it exciting and rewarding. Working with people is always a challenge. And so you have to take strength from the downtime as well. But we recruit because of word of mouth, really. And really links to the second thing, how do student teachers respond to research and practice? And yes, they do want to go straight in and do their practice and be a great teacher, but we do temper their spirits with that, that we say You know, this is an experience-based professional and develops over experience. But to get the experience you need to have research-informed skills and knowledge and the more you read, and practice and we model a lot of this to them, but the more you read and practice helps in terms of your skills and your knowledge output. Just to touch on this last year, my colleagues including Starkey bid for Centre for Teachers and Teaching research money to fund research around what citizenship knowledge is. So we developed these teachers and citizenship knowledge projects and we brought in experts and then school practitioners to discuss various topics such as race and race or influencing political decisions, and the use of select committees and things like that, or, for example, the teaching of controversial issues around conspiracy theories and media literacy. And so, what we were particularly interested in is where teachers develop their subject knowledge, and then practice base knowledge for citizenship education, because there are so many different avenues for citizenship education. And it's not always quite clear where those avenues are. And that has helped us to really centre on the new this current new group of student teachers about how to develop their knowledge. And we now have a model of teacher knowledge that's come out.
Adam Peter Lang 21:24
How many of you have gone in a year ago? Is it a one-year course?
Hans Svennevig 22:01
So it's a nine-month programme. (Yes) That is quite short. When you look at teacher education programmes around the world.
Adam Peter Lang 25:55
It was just... I am just interested in whether you had a certain number of students in your cohort each year, and roughly how many that is.
Hans Svennevig 26:03
Yeah, so the cohort number varies each year. Interestingly, I was particularly worried in the pandemic, how many we would have, but we had more than we've ever had, we had the largest group ever in. (Very interesting), very interesting, isn't it? And then it varies. So last year, we also had a very large group. But when I say large, we had, we used to have a cap on numbers. So it used to be 25 students. Now we don't have a cap. So it's still a small group in the sense of sheer volume, but it's a bit of a chicken and an egg scenario. Because you don't want to have a lot of student teachers, if you don't have enough placements that do high-quality citizenship to put them into to ensure that expert teachers, yet at the same time, how do you create strong quality citizenship placements if you don't have strong subject specialists?
Adam Peter Lang 26:59
I just wondered, there is a debate in the UK we don't want to be too parochial because it's an international podcast. But there is a debate about whether citizenship should be officially on the curriculum in schools. Do you have any views on that?
Hans Svennevig 27:12
So I do think citizenship should definitely be on curricula, what that means per country context, as, as I alluded to before, it's about the ideological stance of different governments and what they think about citizenship education. But ultimately, I think citizenship education as all education should go through some form of decoupling from ideological politics. Now, theoretically, what that would actually mean is highly open to debate and probably lots of people would say that it's impossible. However, Teacher Educators, teachers are trained in their profession, they are highly skilled professionals, and any form of trying to de-professionalise or just make teaching into some kind of read-a-book and then off you can go and do it fails to recognise the exceptional complexity around teaching and teacher education. And then when you bring citizenship education to it, citizenship educators have to be highly skilled in law, human rights, politics, media literacy, financial literacy, and a wide range of other aspects. So to try to de-professionalise, it really fails to see the value in developing our society. And one has to ask why would someone want to de-professionalise teaching and make it less valuable than it is. So I do think it should be on curricula on national curricula. It should be discreet, but it should also be throughout the curriculum as a heart of the school model, as described before the Association for citizenship teaching in the UK or in England, particularly, it's doing a lot of work around improving the volume of citizenship education in schools and is doing currently a large research project to do that. So, that's one way of doing it in England, but widely shouldn't citizenship be everywhere, in every school in every educational setting, informal higher education, or formal because we're all part of society. We're all democratic citizens of a society. Of course, in the countries that don't have democracies, we would hope that would be the aim.
Adam Peter Lang 29:37
Well, that's a good sort of rhetorical question with which to finish this section of the interview, Hans. That's been fascinating. I really enjoyed our conversation. I'm going to pass it over now to Rwanda and Stella who have probably some follow-up questions.
Rowena Azada-Palacios 29:51
Thank you, Hans. That was really interesting. I want to pick up on something that you said earlier, and I want you to give I want to give you a chance to expand on it. You were talking earlier about teaching in general making a difference in people's lives in response to you know, pundits who seem to think that citizenship education is not important and that shouldn't be prioritised in the curriculum. How would you describe the kinds of differences in people's lives that you've seen in your many years as a citizenship educator?
Hans Svennevig 30:22
This week, I've mentioned this example to several different people. And for the audience, it's only Tuesday. So you can see how many times I've been saying this week. For it to come up. I remember when I worked in a further education college that I talked about, and those examples, for example, that I talked about, for the motor vehicle students. But there was another example whereby we worked with students that had very complex backgrounds. I mean, a lot of teachers will talk about complex backgrounds, but these students really had such trauma-filled lives that I can't even get the heart of them. I'm hesitating with this, because it's quite emotional, emotionally complicated. But basically, they had the most trauma-filled experiences that probably one of us in our entire life would have, and still not that kind of experience. And they were very, very angry about, obviously, the experiences that they had had and faced and continued to have. And the way that that anger manifests itself is in conflict. And then they're angry with any authority that is in front of them, whether that's me or the principal, or whoever it is. And we thought, well, we need to help these young people as you do in education. And we worked with an organisation that did active social action, they have a series of lessons where they develop social action skills with young people, and in particular, the transferable skills of presenting oneself talking to audiences learning about an issue they care about. And so anyway, it culminates in them presenting to an audience and this audience, we had this citizenship Community Awards. And so they would present what they've been doing. And just before and I remember this so distinctively, just before this presentation that these students would give, we were behind the scenes, you know, backstage, and this young man, 17 years old came to me, and he had been doing this citizenship type work for a few years. So this is now in further education. It has done it in pre-16, GCSE type of area. But now he's 17. And he came to me and he said, There is no exploitive way that I can go out there and face all those people, why the hell would they care what I have to say? And yet he and his group of students had built, they were carpentry students, they'd built a house on wheels, like quite a large house, maybe the size of a small car. Yeah, they'd built this house on wheels. And they'd wheeled it around their community to raise awareness of homelessness in their community. And they asked people in their community to put messages on this little house about how they value their home, and what would they do without their home. And they had done that to raise awareness of homelessness and to raise awareness of a local charity that they had come to learn about and support. And they were so passionate about it because they'd made something this house that they were wheeling around and talking about it. And so they were connecting to their community, they were doing active citizenship, raising awareness. And then they were supposed to present this to this group of collected community representatives, which included people from the fire brigade, and the police, some of them have been in trouble with the police. So this was a very stressful situation. And obviously teachers and some of the other students. And so when he was asking me, why would they care? Why would they care about what I'm going to say? It was like a heartbreaking moment for me to see that's ultimately the problem. Young people want to be heard. How are they going to be heard? What kind of work are they going to do to be heard? And I just said, Well, you've taught me more about my role as an educator, than many anyway, I don't think it helped him but he just needed to talk to someone. He went out on the stage with his group and this wheelie house thing. And then they had to speak and they didn't say anything. And I'm just standing there in the pack where the heart in my home thinks I've got so much to say and so much value to present. Clean Slate what you do at this point. And of course, they just stood there and they didn't have, it was just very, very painful because he just please say something, and then slowly emerged, and in their own way in their own expression in their own vocabulary without the exploitive this time, they knew that part. They explained what they did. And it wasn't necessarily in the presentation order that you would expect to see. But it was great. And it was just so transformative, absolutely incredible. And of course, everyone was very happy, and so on. A different set of students in the same event, presented in a similar way and talked about the mental health struggles that they individually had experienced. And one of them again, and so heart-wrenching, talked about the loss of a family member through suicide. And they talked about why we need to invest financially and for awareness building in charity work, that of the charity that they were representing. Now, that was then and you could think, well, they did that. That was great. Why is that helpful for citizenship education generally? How is that going to transfer into their wider lives? Well, the student who presented about mental health awareness went on to work for the charity that they were representing. (Oh, wow. wow). And the young people who created that wooden house on wheels completed their qualifications. Now, you might say, well, they might have completed them anyway, I raised some doubt on that, because the anger towards any authority figure at all was so wide that they were all almost about to be expelled, that kind of thing. So I would say that citizenship education doesn't just transform the individual to work within society to be an active citizen, because some people won't go on to be active citizens. But they'll know about those skills. And there'll be able to transfer that knowledge to something wider in their lives and in their community lives. And I just always think about that young man. And he said, Well, why does anyone care what I say? And we, as an older generation, need to care what they say, because they're going to take on the world. But further than that, that young man completed his qualification and went on to be a carpenter. And another such person I similar experience with went on to be a plumber, and one of those plumbers went on to teach plumbing. So that is like a knock-on spiral effect.
Rowena Azada-Palacios 37:50
No. Wow. That's so so powerful. Thank you so much, Hans. Stella?
Stella Micheong Cheong 37:54
Well, I'd like to ask you, your personal experience, your personal opinion, in terms of the role of teacher that I just want to ask you, if you choose if you select one things. So, what was the greatest challenges that we face in the future in terms of teaching citizenship education, in schools, as well as higher education?
Hans Svennevig 38:21
the greatest challenge that we face in the future in terms of citizenship education? I think the greatest challenge is that citizenship education isn't funded in the way that it should be, and doesn't get the support in terms of specialist teacher education they should have. And of course, I run a course about delivering teacher education. So you could say, well, I'm biased in that way. But I think specialist teachers aren't just trained in university practice. They're also trained in the job. And so we need more high-quality places for citizenship education to train specialists. So I would say that that's the greatest challenge. And why is that important to deal with because we live in this polarised world. And the only way I see that we're going to start to work more together and listen to each other is if we have the skills of knowing how to do that. And where do you learn those skills. You learned those skills in school, the citizenship teachers, they weren't citizenship teachers, but the citizenship teachers that I had in school, it was a geography teacher and an English teacher and a head teacher. And they weren't teaching citizenship education in the way that we know about it, because it wasn't on the curriculum. At that time. It was informally in the curriculum, but it wasn't made a discrete subject. So they were teaching principles of how do you talk and relate to each other? How do you debate different issues? What is important in our society? What kind of forward thinking ideas politically are important? How do we develop? They were teaching about all of those things. If they and taught me those things, I wouldn't have known those things. And so it is crucial to I don't know what the word is, unplowed polarise our society to get away from this polarised thinking that we talk to each other. And how do we talk to each other? How do we talk to very different people that we're not usually coming across? We do that by being open and asking critical questions to each other and being able to answer them. If someone asks you to do something not be offended by that, but answer in a welcoming way. You can't do that unless you're taught that. And if you're not taught that it won't happen. And so strengthening citizenship education is essential to help us come together, as Starkey talks about learning to live together. So that's essential for citizenship education.
Stella Micheong Cheong 40:58
Precisely. Yeah. Before closing the episode, do you want to share or mention anything to do with your work that has not yet come up?
Hans Svennevig 41:10
Yeah, I think a couple of things that I haven't talked about, I talked about climate change, and citizenship education dealing with that. But also, I think we should think about disaster education. Commonly, people involved in disaster education, think about some kind of risk-based mathematical financial based elements do with disaster education, or disaster. Education is very much to do with people and what people do in disasters when they're faced with them. And in the climate emergency, people are going to have more disasters occurring to them, including in this country, a lot of people think there's not going to happen in this country, Derby is where you see the cause of flooding, for example. And citizenship Education has an area it can play in terms of building community response to disasters. And I would say that wherever whatever project I'm involved in, whether it's in peace education, disaster education, whatever it is involved in, it's always about strengthening and furthering citizenship education. So I am also involved with a colleague at the IOE, who's the subject leader for religious education in a peace education, special interest groups that we do ask for anyone to participate and be involved in peace education. In this context, it's not about thinking about, we're all sitting on clouds and everything is peaceful and wonderful in the world. It's about recognising that conflict exists, and how do we ensure that conflict doesn't spill over into violence? How do we improve the structuring inequalities in our society, which has structural violence and those areas, so I'm involved in that as well. And UCL has its new centre for climate change and sustainability education. And I'm also involved in that and developing better curriculum awareness and areas of the citizenship curriculum that deal with climate change and sustainability education. I would note the climate change, education and sustainability education are two distinctive fields, but come together in that area. And then the other thing I haven't mentioned, is citizenship education doesn't just exist, obviously with myself and delivering PGCE citizenship at the IOE. But there is a range of other people involved in citizenship education, I alluded to the association for citizenship teachers, a research project to strengthen citizenship education in schools, but also it would be remiss of me not to mention Amit Puni, who is the course leader for citizenship and social science in Kingston University, and he's currently doing his PhD and I can't wait to read it because it's about critical race theory and race and racism and those areas, I would say that he is also someone that is very important in citizenship education and the work that citizenship education is involved in.
Rowena Azada-Palacios 44:03
Thank you so much, Hans. This was an excellent, rich conversation, and we look forward to reading more about all of the work that you're doing and your colleagues as well. I will now close this episode. This is Rowena speaking. So, to all of our listeners, thank you so much for listening to our conversation today, with Hans on conversations for citizenship. We hope you enjoyed this past episode. Please don't forget to subscribe to conversations4citizenship, and the podcasts and you can also find us on @c4c_ed. We will be posting a transcript of today's conversation with Hans at www.conversations4citizenship.com. In our next episode, we will be speaking with Dr Richard Reyes from Sapienza University in Italy, about multiculturalism and citizenship education. This episode of conversations4citizenship was produced by me, Adam Peter Lang, Kamille Beye and Stella Cheong. Thank you so much, Hans. Thank you to all of our listeners and take good care everyone.