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Percentages of respondents indicating reasons for not offering personal social action achievement standards
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Since 2013, one internally-assessed Social Studies achievement standard at each of the three levels of the
National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) has required students to actively participate in a
social action. Whilst these new personal social action standards hold the potential to support transformative
citizenship education, prev...
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This article explores the effect of high-stakes assessment on the representation of epistemic knowledge in the enacted curriculum—that is, the curriculum experienced by students in the classroom. Epistemic knowledge concerns the processes for constructing and evaluating theories that explain phenomena in the natural and social worlds. Knowledge-bui...
Citations
... Zealand is the open, conceptual nature of the New Zealand curriculum and low levels of prescription (Sinnema, 2015). This means that social-studies teachers can choose to select global or local studies and not necessarily present a range of scales, or engage with GCED with any depth (Parmenter, 2010;Peterson et al., 2018;Wood, 2012Wood, , 2013Wood, Taylor, Atkins, & Johnston, 2017). For example, in a comparison of GCED between Japan and New Zealand, Parmenter (2010) found that New Zealand's less centralised school system meant that it was difficult to know what teachers were teaching for GCED in comparison to Japan with a highly centralised education system and usage of common textbooks. ...
... One further significant challenge to GCED in New Zealand is the divide between high and low socioeconomic school communities in their knowledge and experiences of citizenship education (Schulz, Ainley, Fraillon, Kerr, & Losito, 2010). This finding has been confirmed in school-based studies in New Zealand which found that students from wealthier communities were receiving a more "globally-oriented" citizenship curriculum than those from poorer communities who were encouraged to focus on their local area (Wood, 2012(Wood, , 2013Wood et al., 2017). Teachers' logic for these spatial orientations reflected expectations of their students who they perceived as being destined for a more local or global future. ...
... A mixed methods approach underpinned data gathering during the two years of the project (2015-2016). The research team comprised a collaborative partnership between four university researchers and five secondary school classroom teachers (Wood et. al., 2017). The aim was to explore teachers' practices and young people's experiences of the personal social action achievement standards in Senior Social Studies, from the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) in New Zealand, and to identify strategies and approaches that would support students to participate actively in critical ...
... The cases discussed here and others from our study (e.g., see Wood et. al, 2017) demonstrate that student voice and agency need to be understood as a negotiation between young people, young people and their peers, and between school and community members, in dynamic ways: ...
Student voice and youth citizenship participation programmes in school at times rest upon simplistic and naive assumptions of the hierarchies of power that are embedded in regulated spaces. Such assumptions can also result from the prevailing models of youth participation that often rely on oppositional notions of power between students and adults. In this chapter, we critique these positions by interrogating the exchanges of power between secondary school students and teachers during the implementation of a participatory social studies curriculum project in which students took ‘personal social action’ for assessment credits. Drawing on research with five schools in Aotearoa New Zealand involving classroom observations, student focus group interviews (n = 93), teacher interviews and collaborative research, we share two case studies which explore the influence students or teachers had on controlling the social action process. Our findings illustrate a highly dynamic and intergenerational process in which the locus of power continually moved between adults and students during the course of the social action process. The need for complex understandings of power-sharing is required if young people are to participate in student voice and citizenship action in the context of highly regulated school spaces.
... A key difference is that in NZ, this process is integrated with the mainstream curriculum and assessment. In 2015, around 5 000 NZ students were undertaking these participatory social action standards and there was evidence of steady annual growth (NZQA, 2016;Wood, Taylor, Atkins & Johnston, 2017). ...
M. (2018). Pedagogies for active citizenship: Learning through affective and cognitive domains for deeper democratic engagement. Abstract This paper reports on a two-year study that explored teachers' pedagogical approaches when implementing an active citizenship curriculum initiative in New Zealand. Our aim was to identify pedagogies which afforded potential for critical and transforma tive citizenship learning. We define critical and transformative social action through a fusion of critical pedagogy and Dewey's notion of democratic education. Data included teachers' classroom-based research as well as classroom observations and intervie ws with students. Our study suggested that citizenship learning through both affective and cognitive domains can provide for deeper opportunities for students to experience critical and transformative democratic engagement. Highlights • Active citizenship requires learning across both affective and cognitive domains. • Critical pedagogy and Deweyan theory underpins critical, transformative citizenship. • Teacher expertise is required for deep learning in active citizenship education. 2
... Although evidence suggests that youth are more engaged than we think, this engagement is occurring externally to conventional forms of participation such as voting, instead focusing on activities like volunteering (Wood, 2017). The last three general elections have seen falling electoral enrolment rates in age groups between 18 and 39, despite enrolment technically being compulsory in New Zealand (Electoral Commission, 2015, p.45;New Zealand Government, 2017). ...
... Further, information on the 2017 election is available through the Electoral Commission in 27 languages, and English Language Partners NZ has also produced a resource for its work with refugees and migrants (Electoral Commission, n.d.; English Language Partners NZ, 2017). There are numerous other examples, including civics education workshops run by ACE Aotearoa with a focus on prison inmates (ACE Aotearoa, 2015, p.23), the work of Active Citizenship Aotearoa (Wood, 2017), and the Victory Community Centre in Nelson, a community hub connecting the local school and wider community with a focus on building connection and engagement (Stuart, 2010, p.86). However, this work will have limited impact while there is no coordination between efforts and few resources available for community CCE. ...
The 2013 Constitutional Advisory Panel recommendation for a national strategy for civics and citizenship education in schools, kura (Māori-medium schools) and communities provided the opportunity for an important conversation about building civic knowledge in Aotearoa New Zealand (Constitutional Advisory Panel, 2013, p.8). This article explores possible next steps for implementing this recommendation. It is broken up into two parts: a case for change, and potential next steps.
This chapter addresses challenges of educating beginning teachers to respond to ‘twenty-first century’ learning imperatives. These include rethinking purposes for learning in response to the addition of new curriculum elements such as competencies or capabilities; using a wider range of pedagogies that respond more appropriately to diversity, including epistemic elements in curriculum knowledge and making more effective use of e-learning, often in combination with working in ‘modern learning environments’ (Osborne 2013). If established teachers are struggling to respond to these complex challenges, how are beginning teachers to learn to teach in ways they were not taught themselves? The chapter draws on evaluations of two recent teacher learning initiatives, and a recently completed literature scan, to explore the challenges of mentoring beginning teachers for today’s classrooms, not those of last century. The Manaiakalani Digital Teacher Academy (MDTA) paired a beginning teacher with a mentor teacher for the whole of their first year of teaching in schools in a low socio-economic area of Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city. The Mind Lab by Unitec initiative aims to support more effective use of e-learning and has involved teachers from a number of regions of New Zealand. Elements of these two initiatives that support teaching and learning in the twenty-first century classroom are discussed, as are limitations and next questions.
