Implementation of the Nigerian civic education curriculum to develop effective citizenship in young learners: stakeholders perspectives

Abstract

Independent Nigeria is confronted with a plethora of citizenship (socio-political) issues and problems which various informal citizenship advocacy programmes have been unable to resolve. Also, sundry formal school programmes like social studies curriculum used to develop effective citizenship failed due to implementation lapses. This failure led to the severing of citizenship issues from social studies to form a new subject called civic education. Thus, this research was conducted to appraise the effective implementation of the school civic curriculum at the basic and senior secondary levels in Lagos and Ogun states, in the south-western geo-political zone of Nigeria. Three sets of stakeholders who are key civic curriculum implementers were selected as participants: twenty-nine teacher educators at colleges and universities; two hundred and ninety-eight civic teachers and five hundred and seventy learners at basic and senior secondary levels. Open and closed questionnaires and focus group discussion were administered on these participants. The study adopted an ethno-nationalistic, critical and global citizenship theoretical framework to underpin the study. This was because the issue and activity based curriculum objectives were to develop effective citizenship along nationalistic (political) citizenship with the marginal intent of developing critical/global (apolitical) citizenship. The study showed that classroom civic curriculum implementation focused more on learners' knowledge constructions with less emphasis on developing skills and dispositions due to inadequate school extracurricular programmes. In line with the objectives, teachers focus more on political knowledge at the expense of nongovernmental (apolitical) issues. The above findings were due to the inadequate recruitment of civic teachers leading to personnel improvisation which entailed seconding teachers lacking civic content knowledge and pedagogical skills to teach the subject. Also, the study showed eclectic pedagogical classroom practices whereby teachers mixed active (learner-based) pedagogies with didactic (teacher-based) teaching style to implement classroom civic education. The study also found that focus on knowledge construction and teacher-centred pedagogies reflected inadequate and/or irregular training which resulted in civic teachers' self-empowerment to improve their content knowledge and teaching skills. Teachers lacked mediation tools like textbooks and other teaching aids to properly implement civic content in the classroom. Evidently, implementation lapses that hindered social studies objectives are also a barrier to effective implementation of civic education curriculum in our schools.