European Journal of Education Policy and Practice - Volume 1, Issue 2, 2025

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.

There has been much debate about using role play in the classroom. It can be particularly problematic where the issues being looked at involves discrimination. Starting from an examination of the research into the benefits and demerits of using role play as a learning pedagogy in learning about genocide, this article goes on to report on a case study of such an approach in a high school in Scotland. The entire year group (aged 12-13) were involved. The learning was to use the simulation to show how ‘othering’ can be dangerous. The research involved both observation and questionnaires to both those discriminated against and those who were not. The findings outlined in the article suggests that there was some valuable citizenship learning but whether it needed the difficult circumstances of the simulation to achieve this is much less clear and is open to debate.