Understanding citizenship, supporting students and teachers, and pushing back

While ‘teacher-bashing’ and even the ‘teacher-proofing’ of schools and curricula have always been a concern, it took on added resonance from the late 1970s as neoliberalism (an even more aggressive laissez-faire form of free market capitalism than had been the norm since World War II) began to hit its stride in the Regan/Thatcher 1980s (Apple, M. W., 1979). What correspondence theories of the hidden curriculum miss. The Review of Education/Pedagogy/Cultural Studies, 5(2), 101-112.; Giroux, Educational Theory 38:61-75, 1988). This has hardly abated since and has been even more vociferously enacted in today’s climate of authoritarian approaches to and views towards economics, governing, and teaching (McLaren, Post13 digital Science and Education 1:311-334, 2019). Against this backdrop ‘blaming the teacher’ (while simultaneously subjecting public schools to almost endless austerity measures), we have been researching how teachers understand their own ‘lived citizenship identities’ in terms of building collective forms of connection and belonging (Cary and Pruyn, 2021a). The findings presented in this chapter come from a larger international, multi-year, qualitative research endeavour (The Citi-zenship Project) that has sought to understand the citizenship identities of youth, teachers, parents, and academics.