Building Bridges: The Academic and the Professional in Educating Active Citizens in England and New Zealand

In light of intersecting crises including insecurity, misinformation and inequities, educating active citizens is an important goal for citizenship education. There are, however, divisions over how active citizenship should be taught and learned. In this article we argue that it is possible and necessary to work together to develop successful education for active citizenship by building bridges. The metaphor of the bridge is attractive to us as we, as more and less experienced citizenship education practitioners and academics based principally in England and Aotearoa New Zealand with similar but distinct ideas, are ourselves attempting to create meaningful connections across what can be significant barriers. We provide some of the background to citizenship education by describing challenging aspects of the social and political situation in our countries. Attempts that have been made, with mixed success, to develop citizenship education, are summarised. Our discussion elaborates on the value and tensions of the drive to ensure that all publicly funded researchers achieve impact beyond academia. Then, using England and New Zealand as case studies, we discuss platforms for positive thinking, action and reflection. We draw attention to the value of partnerships in policy. Partnerships play an important role for networking and the processes central to citizenship education. We illustrate how building bridges can raise the status of citizenship education, particularly educating for active citizenship, with inclusive and distributed leadership involving policy makers, NGOs, academics, practitioners, students, and their families.