Citizenship and Citizenship Education: A Qualitative Exploration of Students’ Perceptions at Gaya District of Bihar, India

Abstract

For many decades performance and achievement in academics remained the prime focus in educational research. Therefore, researchers of education emphasized on the variables that influence this achievement which by nature are the measures of cognitive or scholastic factors and thus ignored non-cognitive or non-scholastic variables. However, realizing that out of many, one of the prime goal of whole educational process is to prepare learners for life after school, researchers expanded their concerns towards the variable that are non-scholastic or non-cognitive by nature. One such area that focus on developing the learners into ideal/ good citizen by inculcating the citizenship competencies is citizenship education and schools have been considered as major context for producing good citizens. Keeping these consideration in mind a qualitative study was designed in order to explore the students' perception towards citizenship as well as towards citizenship education. For this purpose, descriptive survey method was adopted by using self constructed open ended questionnaire in order to collect data from 106 elementary grade (6th-8th) students from 02 government schools. Data were analysed by extracting the units of meaning from students’ responses that   were multiple coded condensely in order to categorize them by considering the similarities and differences among them. This categorization further facilitated in construction of meaningful patterns. Findings revealed that for majority of students, citizenship is a disposition or value that has aspects of non-cognitive factors that get manifested in behavioural terms. They entirely missed the cognitive aspects that naturally inherent in values and norms. It is also revealed that learning and teaching processes are primarily focused on textbook based value instruction rather than value clarification. Implications of finding were discussed and suggested for classroom practices.