Norwegian Teacher Educators' Attentiveness to Democracy and their Practices

Abstract

The aim of the study is to gain insight into teacher educators‟ attentiveness to democracy, i.e. how they understand democracy and how they describe their own practices of instilling democratic competencies and values in pre-service teachers. Through using a questionnaire modified from the Global Doing Democracy Research Project, we elicited responses from 153 respondents. The material was analysed using “thin” versus “thick” notions of democracy and three categories of citizenship. The results of this study indicate that teacher educators primarily understand democracy as a societal structure, a way of politically organizing a society in which elections are a core activity. Hence, their practice reflects this somewhat thin understanding of democracy. Overwhelmingly, they perceive the two dominant ways of promoting democracy to be to encourage students to take part in formal participatory structures and to engage students in discussions and debates within the classroom.

Norwegian Teacher Educators' Attentiveness to Democracy and their Practices