How Does a New Pedagogical Model at Glemmen Upper Secondary School Affect the Students´Competency in Citizenship and Civic Education?

In 2019, Glemmen Upper Secondary School in Fredrikstad was given a mission from Østfold County (now Viken County) to develop and implement a new pedagogical model in order to facilitate holistic, personalized, student-engaging, realistic/relevant, and social in-depth learning through a structural reorganization. A multi-disciplinary pedagogical model has subsequently been in development at Glemmen Upper Secondary School, in which subject content is organized according to overarching topics. These topics will be presented to students as Learning Missions, through which the students will hopefully be invigorated to explore relevant content and choose appropriate learning methods themselves. The transition to the new model will entail major changes. It will be challenging to combine the implementation of the Subject Renewal with the creation of entirely new structures for teaching and the multidisciplinary approach. Subject teacers from various disciplines will have to go out of line to cooperate in the process of developing specific class material. In this project, I want to research Glemmen Upper Secondary School´s process and the implementation of a new pedagogical model. I have chosen to use competency in the cross curricular topic citizenship and civic education as a starting point. According to the core values in Subject Renewal, school shall ?stimulate the pupils to become active citizens, and give them the competence to participate in developing democracy in Norway.? (regjeringen.no) However, there is a need for increased knowledge concerning how schools can facilitate for students developing democratic participation and political efficacy. Will a shift to a pedagogical method that is designed to increase the students´ participation in society and the local community influence the students´ sense of co-determination, belief in democratic institutions, and their ability to participate in such institutions (political efficacy)?

Beginning August 2020, the Norwegian national curricular reform Subject Renewal (Fagfornyelsen) will be incrementally implemented in Norway. Simultaneously, and in accordance with the implementation of the new curriculum, Glemmen Upper Secondary School will replace traditional teaching methods with a new pedagogical model. The primary objective of this Ph.D. project is to systematically research the implementation of this new educational model at Glemmen Upper Secondary School in order to analyze how the transition to a multidisciplinary and student-engaging pedagogical model can increase the students´ competency in the cross-curricular theme Citizenship and Civic Education and hence improve the students´ political efficacy. Will a shift to a pedagogical method that is designed to increase the students´ participation in society and the local community influence the students´ sense of co-determination and belief in democratic institutions and also their ability to participate in such institutions? A secondary aim is to research whether the new pedagogical approach can reveal indications as to why there is a trend, as was discovered in the comparison of results between the International Citizenship and Civic Education Study (ICCS) 2009 and the ICCS 2016, of an increasing gap in competency between the males and females. The third and final aspiration of this Ph.D. is to institute a culture among the teachers at Glemmen Upper Secondary School of researching the effects of one´s own teaching practice, so that when the research for this Ph.D. is finished, research routines at the school will have been systematized. Gert Biesta´s three dimensions of education will be used as the theoretical framework and the methodological approach includes action research and a mixed-method study. The Ph.D. will be part of a research collaboration entitled “Democracy, Equality, Learning, and Mobilization for Future Citizens (DEMOCIT)” at Oslo Metropolitan University.