ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an account of how a school in south-east London has begun to develop a community of practice in the area of citizenship education. The joint authorship of the chapter has its origins in a paper written for a conference in March 2001.1 At that point the school was in its early stages of developing its citizenship focus. Anne Hudson, Assistant Headteacher Coordinating Citizenship Education, and Anna Douglas, PGCE Social Science Tutor at Goldsmiths College, had begun to share ideas about citizenship education and planned to work collaboratively in the training of student teachers. The school has moved on considerably since then. This chapter aims to reflect emerging practice, and our thoughts about the pedagogy that might support citizenship education. We do not claim that these ideas are ours alone. They have been informed by our involvement and interaction with students, teachers, trainers and community practitioners.2 We use the term ‘community of practice’ to indicate the important link between social relations and knowledge which develops through activity (Lave and Wenger 1991). A community of practice represents, as Mercer suggests, ‘the way in which groups of people use their ability to share past experience to create joint understanding and co-ordinate ways of dealing with new experience’ (2000: 116). We note, as the school progresses with becoming a school for citizenship, that there is a great deal of thinking and discussion about what is being done and why. This chapter intends to give a sense of this social learning through involvement in practices, indicating where theory has helped us reflect more deeply about evolving practice.
