Developing A Questionnaire For Active Citizenship And Activist Pedagogy

Keren, Ketko-Ayali; Muşata, Bocoş

doi:https://doi.org/10.15405/epes.22032.56

Developing A Questionnaire For Active Citizenship And Activist Pedagogy

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Abstract

To apply the activist pedagogy approach effectively for schoolteachers, it is necessary to have an activist orientation and sufficient knowledge and tools to engage students in promoting socio-political actions for change. This article describes the development of a questionnaire measuring activist pedagogy knowledge, attitudes, and practices of teachers. The active citizenship and active pedagogy (ACAP) questionnaire may be applied for a variety of purposes, including (1) enabling individual teachers to measure their own activism orientation in education and reflect on their improvement of knowledge, attitude, and practice; (2) evaluating training programs for pre-/in-service teachers; and (3) providing researchers with a new instrument to measure ACAP-related issues in future studies; for example, studying the relationship between teacher characteristics related to multicultural identities as related to the ACAP approach, or examining the impact of ACAP on teachers’ orientations and knowledge, attitude, and practices when significant and extreme socio-political events occur. The questionnaire was developed in seven stages. It was based on two questionnaires, an indicator and a scale of active citizenship and social activism adapted to education. The contents were informed by a literature review, interviews, focus group, and the researcher’s experience as educator and social activist. The questionnaire was administered to 91 high school teachers in Israel in order to assess its validity and reliability. The results indicate that the questionnaire is sufficiently valid and reliable.

Keywords: Active citizenship, activist pedagogy, activist teachers, questionnaire, teachers

Introduction

Activist pedagogy is an informal educational approach available to activist teachers to educate for socio-political change (Catone, 2017). In discussing activist pedagogy, a distinction must be made between its macro- and micro-political senses (Kostiner, 2003). Macro-political activist pedagogy refers to policy changes, usually through legislation and reforms, whereas micro-political activist pedagogy refers to sociocultural theories on how to transform consciousness and society for a better world, most often by education – in and outside the classroom.

In its present form, activist pedagogy emerged at the beginning of the 21st century (Marshall & Anderson, 2008; Sachs, 2003), perhaps as a direct and natural continuation to changing education policies in developing countries, designed to promote active citizenship as a required skill for schoolchildren (Golubeva, 2018). Various researchers (e.g., Kennedy, 2007; Wood et al., 2018) examined the implementation of active citizenship programs in schools as part of the required skills for the 21st century. They found a lack of student involvement in the community and more generally, absence of active citizenship practices in dealing with political issues. In addition, it was not clear whether existing programs had any impact on the students’ future as members of their societies, mostly because most programs ended up focusing on content and knowledge, and less on practices and actions.

Societies saturated with hatred, division, racism, refugee crises and basic insensitivity to the other need to develop a pedagogy that is more active and relevant than one focused on acquiring theoretical skills for active citizenship. They need to take another step further for action as an outgrowth of the critical pedagogy originating in the 1960s and 70s with social-educational activist Paolo Freire (1921-1997). Critical pedagogy focused mainly on challenging the status-quo in order to liberate the students from oppressive forces (Freire, 2018). The events in the second half of the 20th century, as well as research on active citizenship showing that critical thinking had become irrelevant in schools (Weinberg & Flinders, 2018), contributed to the development activist pedagogy. Ketko-Ayali and Bocoş (2021) described the need for a conceptual evaluation of activist pedagogy and developed a framework for implementing the approach. The currently developed questionnaire is a step in that direction.

Another important justification for this questionnaire is that despite the growth of research on activist pedagogy, there are still not enough teacher training programs on active citizenship education combined with activist pedagogy (Catone, 2017; Wood et al., 2018). The present study is part of a broad research project examining the development of a program for teachers interested in an integrative activist approach to their teaching in any subject matter. The article focuses on the need to develop a research tool for quantitative research, because to the best of our knowledge, the available measures are inadequate for assessing ACAP.

Therefore, there was a need to develop a validated and up-to-date instrument to evaluate whether teachers want to foster an activist approach in education or the effectiveness of ACAP training programs, or to provide data for any related research purpose. The questionnaire will be described here focusing on its reliability and validity.

Problem Statement

The issue of activist pedagogy attracts growing attention among education practitioners and researchers. However, as far as we know, there is no questionnaire to measure activist pedagogy. A review of the literature revealed some questionnaire indicators measuring active citizenship in education and scales measuring social activism (Corning & Myers, 2013; Hoskins et al., 2006; Hoskins & Mascherini, 2009) but no questionnaire that measures knowledge, attitude, and practice of ACAP and an activist orientation to education. In addition, activist pedagogy is an educational approach that has mostly been studied qualitatively. We therefore needed to develop a questionnaire as a research tool for gathering additional data on activist pedagogy from a quantitative perspective as well.

Research Questions

Is the questionnaire developed specifically to study about active citizenship and activist pedagogy sufficiently valid and reliable?

Purpose of the Study

Developing a questionnaire as a research tool to contribute knowledge on activist pedagogy from a quantitative perspective and examine its validity and reliability. Given that, to the best of our knowledge, not such instrument is currently available, the questionnaire, particularly as a quantitative instrument, can provide answers to three fundamental questions: the ontological, epistemological and the methodological question (Corbin & Strauss, 2015; Denzin & Lincoln, 2011; Tracy, 2014).

Research Methods

The ACAP questionnaire was developed in seven steps. Experts in research methods such as Artino et al. (2014, p. 464) suggest seven steps for developing a valid questionnaire. The first to third steps could be joined together to a single step (“1-conduct a literature review; 2- conduct interviews and/or focus groups; and 3- synthesize the literature review with interviews and focus groups”). Cohen et al. (2013) suggest eight steps, and add Artino et al.’s first step, as a third: “Generate the topic/constructs/concepts/issues to be addressed and data required in order to meet the objectives of the research (this can be done from literature, or a pre-pilot…)” (p. 379). This is one example that shows differences between the two researchers’ suggestions, we relied on both suggests steps’ studies for the procedure of developing and determining the validity and reliability of the questionnaire with some steps that were parallel or could be synthesize, we used steps that fitted to ACAP questionnaire the best and came up to seven, below there is the description of the steps we have used and the references:

Step One

Determine the purpose and research questions and the specific questionnaire items based on the literature review, focus groups, and interviews (synthesizing steps 1,2,3 from Artino et al., 2014, p. 464, and steps 1,2 from Cohen et al., 2013, p. 379). We added sources and used the following ones:

Literature review of studies on active citizenship (e.g., Golubeva, 2018; Kennedy, 2007; Youniss & Levine, 2009) and activism pedagogy (e.g., Catone, 2017; Marshall & Anderson, 2008; Sachs, 2003).
Two focus groups, each including seven Israeli high school teachers interested in the ACAP approach. The teachers were recruited based on the researcher’s personal acquaintance, followed by the snowball technique.
Semi-structured in-depth interviews with twenty activist high school teachers in Israel.
Two questionnaires, an indicator and a scale of active citizenship and social activism adapted to education (Corning & Myers, 2013; Hoskins et al., 2006; Hoskins & Mascherini, 2009).

The researcher’s 25 years’ experience as an educator in various roles in formal and informal education, as well as a high school teacher. In recent year, she has been engaged in social activism as a blogger and as a member of a municipal council committee.

Step Two

“Determine the population and sample” (Cohen et al., 2013, p. 379 [step 2]). The participants were high school teachers who were interested in ACAP issues or were activist teachers themselves, who could be potential participants. For example, pre-/in-service teachers who can use the questionnaire for evaluating their training programs or individual teachers who can use it to measure their own activist orientation in education and reflect on their improvement of knowledge, attitude, and practice in examining the relevance of the activist pedagogy approach to socio-political issues and social justice. They were selected to inform us about the phenomenon under study because they were involved in ACAP issues in Israel.

Step Three

“Decide the kinds of measures/scales/questions/responses required” (Cohen et al., 2013, p. 379 [step 4]). The questions were examined repeatedly to ensure that the items covered participant demographics, as well as all the relevant content sections: knowledge, attitude, and practice, as follows:

Personal and demographic data, including information on political or social involvement, teachers’ subject matter, etc.

Attitudes, divided into three parts:

Behavioral intentions for ACAP.
Personal beliefs about ACAP
Perceptions of ACAP as it relates to school activities.

Practice: Tools and skills for implementing ACAP.

Knowledge: Concepts and context related to ACAP.

The responses ranged on a five-point Likert scale.

Step Four

Write and develop the questionnaire items and check that issues arose from our step 1 has been addressed (synthesizing step 4 from Artino et al., 2014, p. 464 and step 5 and 6 from Cohen et al., 2012, p. 379). Below are examples of questions for each part of the questionnaire (the full questionnaire appears in Appendix A).

For the Personal Details part, we asked questions such as:

Gender: Male/Female /Other/No Answer.

How many years are you teaching? _______/No Answer.

Teaching subject: (Humanities /Science /Math /Arts /Languages /Social Sciences /Other/No Answer)

Active member in a social/civic/political organization: Yes/No/No Answer

If you answered Yes, and only if you want to share, please write the name of the organization.

For the Attitude as Behavioral Intentions for ACAP part, we presented statements and asked: To what extent is it reasonable for you to do the following during teaching? Here are some examples:

If a student calls another student, “homo” or “dirty Arab” etc., I will stop the lesson and talk to the whole class about it.