How Do Civics Teachers in Austria Understand Political Neutrality and Practice it? Implication for Re-politicizing Japanese Social Studies Education

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Bibliographic Information

Other Title
  • オーストリアの政治教育の教師は政治的中立性を どのように理解し実践しているか? ― 日本の社会科教育の再政治化を目指して ―

Abstract

<p>  This article aims to clarify how civics teachers in Austria understand and practice political neutrality in order to think about the strategies to ‘re-politicize’ social studies education in Japan. A recent survey reports that many schools in Japan mainly are focusing on understanding the election system and practicing mock elections in classes, and few schools discuss how each political party deals with controversial public issues. This ‘empty-shell citizenship education’, in other words, ‘de-politicized social studies education’, is not helping to educate good democratic citizens. Therefore, we focused on Austria, which gives voting right from 16 and is well-known as one of the countries that actively deals with controversial issues in schools, to think about strategies to realize ‘solid and robust citizenship education’ and ‘re-politicized social studies education’ in Japan. In detail, we give attention to political neutrality because the concept has been an obstacle for Japanese social studies teachers to deal with controversial issues in their classrooms. Based on semi-structured interviews with three research collaborators and observations of their lessons, we tackled the afore-mentioned question. As a result of our inquiry, we discovered the following four implications for the goal of ‘re-politicizing’ social studies education in Japan (1) Understanding the necessity of teaching controversial issues in lessons, (2) Understanding political neutrality flexibly, (3) Improving gatekeeping ability of teachers, and (4) Improving teachers’ ability to explain their own gatekeeping. Even though the context surrounding schooling is different, the cases of three history/civic education teachers in Austria suggest new insights into understandings of the value of teaching controversial issues and the meaning of political neutrality to social studies teachers in Japan.</p>

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Details

  • CRID
    1390572433052255488
  • NII Article ID
    130008151278
  • DOI
    10.20799/jerasskenkyu.92.0_1
  • ISSN
    24329142
    0289856X
  • Text Lang
    ja
  • Data Source
    • JaLC
    • CiNii Articles
  • Abstract License Flag
    Disallowed

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