771336

research-article2018
ESJ0010.1177/1746197918771336Education, Citizenship and Social JusticeEstelles and Romero

Article
ecsj
Education, Citizenship and
Social Justice
Tacit assumptions of citizenship 2019, Vol. 14(2) 131­–148
© The Author(s) 2018
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initial teacher education DOI: 10.1177/1746197918771336
https://doi.org/10.1177/1746197918771336
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Marta Estelles and Jesús Romero

University of Cantabria, Spain

Abstract
Current curricula, which organize initial teacher education programs, include, among their stated purposes,
preparing teachers to help their future students to grow as global, participatory, and ethically engaged
citizens. However, we know little about how teacher educators prepare their students to be citizens. This
article analyses how a group of teacher educators from a public university in Spain understand citizenship
education, exploring the net of metaphors and idealized visions they seem to share, regardless of their
formal conceptualizations. The discussion of the findings considers the implicit hierarchies of these shared
assumptions that define what is deemed as real, desirable, and possible in citizenship education. Implications
for teacher education are also contemplated.

Keywords
automatic thinking, citizenship education, metaphors, tacit assumptions, teacher education, teacher
educators’ perceptions

Introduction
In recent years numerous investigations have focused on the study of perceptions about citizenship
education. Most of them analyzed formal aspects of (pre-service) teachers’ discourses, such as the
meaning given to concepts like democracy, social justice, and/or global citizenship (Carr, 2006,
2008; Castro, 2013; Price, 2008; Rapoport, 2010); the defining characteristics of their ideal citizen
or citizenship education (Anderson et al., 1997; Davies et al., 1999; Faden, 2012; Hahn, 2015; Lee
and Fouts, 2005; Logan, 2011; Marri et al., 2014; Martin, 2008, 2010; Patterson et al., 2012); or
their reflections on their teaching practices linked to citizenship education (Akar, 2012; Sunal
et al., 2009; Willemse et al., 2015). These studies are important as they delve into observable, con-
scious, and self-regulated ways of reasoning and interpretations that, although complex and often
contradictory (Anderson et al., 1997; Evans, 2006; McCowan, 2011), play a role in determining
our daily actions.

Corresponding author:
Marta Estelles, Department of Education, University of Cantabria, Avda. de los Castros, 52, 39005 Santander, Spain.
Email: marta.estelles@unican.es
132 Education, Citizenship and Social Justice 14(2)

However, the functioning of our cognitive system, and therefore the representations we make of
the others and the world, cannot be explained only in terms of the deliberate, conscious, and self-
regulated rational exercises (Ariely, 2008; Clore and Ortony, 2000; Damasio, 1994, 2012; Haidt
and Bjorklund, 2008; Kahneman, 2012; Lakoff, 2008; Lakoff and Johnson, 1986, 1999; Westen,
2008). The tacit assumptions and the intuitive thinking that underpin our common sense (mixture
of notions, judgments, feelings, and values) play a key role on what Bourdieu (2007) calls our
‘practical knowledge’. When Kahneman (2012) talks about two systems in the mind, ‘System 1’
(fast, automatic, intuitive, and emotional) and ‘System 2’ (slow, deliberative, and logical), or when
Giddens (1995) distinguishes between ‘discursive consciousness’ (our verbalized and reflective
registry of the reality around us) and ‘practical consciousness’ (our understanding nested in con-
ventions, habits, and daily routines), these authors recognize that we must take into account both
dimensions to try to understand how we think, judge, and make decisions.
Building on this understanding, this article aims to explore how teacher educators prepare their
students to be citizens paying attention not only to rational and explicitly structured discourses, but
also to those unconscious ways of understanding citizenship education. In order to do it, this quali-
tative research collected data from a group of teacher educators dedicated to the initial training of
elementary teachers at the University of Cantabria (Spain).

Literature review
Assumptions in citizenship education
The representations we make of the world – including those related to citizenship education – can-
not be completely explained if we forget that many of our actions respond to automatic and barely
conscious ways of thinking acquired through various processes of socialization. Aligned to this,
research by Lakoff (2002, 2008) and Fischman and Haas (2012, 2015) considers citizenship as an
embodied concept individually and socially developed, which is understood and reasoned through
a process that is largely automatic, unconscious, and full of direct or indirect experiences, with
periodic interruptions of conscious thought. This evidence is not, however, taken into account by
the majority of political reforms (Lakoff, 2002, 2008; Marcus, 2002) and education for citizenship
programs (Fischman and Haas, 2012, 2015). For this reason, Marcus (2002) called the rational
actor implicit in these reforms as the ‘dispassionate citizen’.
Most of the research cited in the previous section and the majority of the programs for citizen-
ship education frame their debates within a framework that is underpinned by two tacit assump-
tions: first, that education is the key tool for creating citizenship (Fischman and Haas, 2012, 2015;
Romero, 2012; Romero and Estellés, 2015) and second, that citizens are mainly rational and con-
scious actors (Fischman and Haas, 2012, 2015). In relation to the first assumption, although several
studies seem to point to a positive correlation between education and citizenship (Andolina et al.,
2003; Hahn, 1999; Mellor et al., 2002; Tonge et al., 2012; Torney-Purta and Amadeo, 2003), many
others have highlighted the vagueness of that association (Berinsky and Lenz, 2011; Bowman,
2011; Eagles and Davidson, 2001; Kam and Palmer, 2008, 2011; Lopes et al., 2009; Romero,
2012). Thus, the education–citizenship relationship seems to be rather uncertain. The second prem-
ise is closely linked to the first because the advocates of education as the primary cause of active
citizenship usually take as a reference, even implicitly, the agency models focused on individuals’
behavior (Lopes et al., 2009). Theory of the rational choice is particularly important among those
models. It considers the action as a consequence of the reasoned balance of pros and cons, as a
result of which people would participate politically based on rational knowledge.1 For this model,
education plays a key role in the acquisition of political knowledge, habits, and critical thinking
Estelles and Romero 133

skills essential for decision-making, although educational action rarely adopts the rational shape of
permanently active and cultivated citizens (Benedicto and Morán, 2002; Romero, 2012).
For Fischman and Haas (2012, 2015), recognizing the importance of automatic and unconscious
understandings of citizenship education can provide professionals and researchers conceptual tools
to go beyond idealized models of education for citizenship and discourses based on the Cartesian
tradition of the ‘cogito, ergo sum’. After all, those models risk being translated into extremely
impractical pedagogical models. But how do we explore those unconscious and automatic forms?
One of the characteristics of that latent component of our social representations often have a meta-
phorical nature expressed, at least to some extent, in the language we use (Bourdieu, 1977; Lakoff
and Johnson, 1986; Vygotsky, 1978 among others). Since the research program initiated by the
cognitive linguists Lakoff and Johnson in the 1980s, much evidence has been found to support the
claim that our thinking and conceptual systems are largely structured through metaphorical maps
that help us understand quickly and automatically abstract concepts in terms of close physical
experiences (Kövecses, 2010; Lakoff, 2007, 2008; Lakoff and Johnson, 1986; Lizcano, 2006;
Wagner et al., 2011). Metaphors, although not the only ones, are fundamental aspects of our uncon-
scious thinking processes. As a result, our daily language referred to social phenomena is full of
metaphors. The study of teachers’ understandings through the metaphors they use is an increas-
ingly popular way to pursue this end in educational research.2 In the field of citizenship education,
however, the only example available that considers this framework is the one developed by
Fischman and Haas (2012). In this work, they analyze the impact of the metaphor of ‘nation as a
family’ and its two idealized constructions of the Strict Father and the Nurturant Parent described
by Lakoff (2002, 2008) to understand citizenship education.
This article considers the need to contemplate not only the formal content of discourses but also
the net of metaphors and assumptions that are taken for granted when talking about citizenship
education. For this reason, the sample selected for this study is comprised of a group of teacher
educators from a public university in Spain who would have, we assume, a richer formal discourse
than their students or other teachers, as it is suggested in other studies (Carr, 2008; Logan, 2011).
Considering that, the selection of this group may reveal, if appropriate, the urgency to pay attention
to those ways of thinking less subject to conscious control. It also allows us to deepen our under-
standing of how teacher educators prepare their students to be citizens.

Citizenship and teacher education

The last decades have been especially rich in discourses, reports, and policies regarding citizenship
education. Thus, it is not surprising that current curricula which organize initial teacher education
programs include, among their stated purposes, preparing teachers to help their future students to
grow as global, participatory, and ethically engaged citizens (Logan, 2011; Pryor and Pryor, 2005).
In Spain, the implementation of citizenship education as a compulsory subject to be taught at ele-
mentary and secondary levels in 2006 also responded to a supranational recommendation issued by
the European Parliament (Engel, 2014; Gómez and García, 2013; González and Beas, 2012; Puig
et al., 2010). Before that date, the formation of citizens was considered an educational aim by the
democratic constitution adopted in 1978 but national curricula paid little attention to it (González
and Beas, 2012). The inclusion of this subject and the university reform for the implementation of
the European Higher Education Space have led to many teacher preparation programs to contem-
plate citizenship as an educational aim (Bolívar, 2007). This aim, however, has not always been
implemented as a core course but often as a cross-curricular theme without clear or common guide-
lines (Estepa, 2012). As a result, teacher educators, who were interested in this aspiration, voluntar-
ily took the responsibility of including this goal in their courses. Yet, we know little about how
134 Education, Citizenship and Social Justice 14(2)

teacher educators prepare their students to be citizens, although a growing body of empirical
research has indicated the importance of preparing pre-service teachers to become effectively
engaged in a democratic society (Carr, 2006, 2008; Logan, 2011; Luna Rodrigo, 2014; Pryor and
Pryor, 2005). Furthermore, this demand becomes even more urgent considering the narrow under-
standings future teachers have about citizenship education and democracy, either in Spain (Borghi
et al., 2012; De la Montaña, 2012; Vera et al., 2012) or in other countries (Fry and O’Brien, 2015;
Marri et al., 2014; Martin, 2008, 2010; Peterson and Knowles, 2009; Ross and Yeager, 1999; Sunal
et al., 2009). In this regard, it cannot be forgotten that teachers’ practices linked to citizenship edu-
cation depend, at least to some extent, on values and beliefs that are not fully conscious (Kennedy
et al., 2002; Patterson et al., 2012; Willemse et al., 2015).

The current study

This study aims to deepen our understanding in the complexities citizenship education in teacher
education programs involve. Some of them concern teacher educators’ perceptions. However, far
from being an easy field to explore, visions of citizenship education are explicit and rational as well
as tacit and barely conscious, partially expressed through metaphors. For this reason, the overarch-
ing research question what does a group of teacher educators think about citizenship education?
was divided into two interrogations:

•• What do these teacher educators say about citizenship education?

•• What metaphors do they use when talking about citizenship education?

These objectives require a profound understanding of how they signify citizenship education
and an exploration of the assumptions (with implicit hierarchies unchallenged) they take for
granted when talking about citizenship education. Thus, instead of aiming at generalizing results,
this investigation opted for a qualitative methodology and an interpretative approach to gain a deep
insight on the meanings subjects give, not only explicitly but also tacitly, to citizenship
education.
This study is part of a larger project that explores how a group of teacher educators from a pub-
lic university in Spain think about and do citizenship education in their courses. It involved docu-
ment analysis, semi-structured interviews, and classroom observations. As the purpose of this
article is limited to what they think, the main data source comes from the interviews.

Participants
The study selected a purposeful sample of teacher educators from a medium-sized public univer-
sity in the north of Spain, the University of Cantabria. Why this university? In Spain, teaching in
elementary schools is a regulated profession, which means that any university that offers a degree
in elementary teacher education must meet some requirements established nationally,3 according
to the parameters stipulated by the European Higher Education Area. Those requirements refer to
the number of credits programs have to impart and a few general skills, including ‘democratic citi-
zenship’, that any elementary teacher has to achieve. Apart from those conditions, each university
and faculty have the autonomy to set their own goals and guidelines in accordance to national
principles. The purposes arranged by the Faculty of Education of the University of Cantabria were
contained in a document for the external auditing of the degree in Primary Education (Servicio de
Gestión Académica de la Universidad de Cantabria, 2008) that shows a strong inclination for edu-
cating democratic citizens (Estellés, 2013). Hence, by choosing this university we could guarantee
Estelles and Romero 135

the institutional framework for teacher educators interested in citizenship education was going to
be favorable. The next step in the research had to do with identifying those teacher educators
explicitly interested in citizenship education within that university. The criteria used for sample
selection were (a) faculty members in charge of any core course in the Elementary Education
degree program, (b) whose teaching syllabi make explicit reference to any matter related to citizen-
ship education. Thus, in order to select them, we examined all the teaching syllabi of the core
courses taught in the degree. We chose those syllabi that in their ‘learning outcomes’, ‘course
objectives’ or ‘course content’ include any of the four main aspects of citizenship education,
according to the definition given by Eurydice Report (Eurydice, 2005, 2012: 17): (a) political lit-
eracy, (b) critical thinking and analytical skills, (c) attitudes and values, and (d) active
participation.
From 29 teacher educators responsible for any compulsory course, we found 9 teacher educa-
tors that explicitly included in their syllabi aspects of citizenship education. All agreed to partici-
pate. Although all of them seem to be interested in promoting democratic citizenship, their profiles
were very varied. Three were female and six were male. Their ages ranged from 34 to 67 and their
professional categories were very diverse: two were part-time teachers, two were assistant lectur-
ers, three were contracted lecturers, one was a tenured associate professor and another was a ten-
ured full professor. All of them were part of the Education Department but had different knowledge
areas of expertise: two of them belong to the Educational and Developmental Psychology area, two
others to Didactic and School Organization, two to Didactics of Social Sciences, two to Didactics
of Experimental Sciences, and one of them to Theory and History of Education.

Data collection
For data collection, we carried out nine individual semi-structured interviews. The interview ques-
tions were based on previously conducted studies (Carr, 2008; Davies et al., 1999; Martin, 2008;
Patterson et al., 2012) because we wanted to allow for rational discourses to arise in the interviews
while taking into account all those less subject-to-conscious control aspects. Most of the questions
were previously outlined and open-ended. The first part of the interview was focused on the rea-
sons why they consider citizenship education important; the second was dedicated to how they
think it should be addressed in teacher education; the third was related to what extent they believe
they are preparing their students to be citizens; and the last sought to describe what a good citizen
is. The order of the different parts was not followed in the same way in every case as its sequence
depended more on the development of each interview. Before the interviews were conducted, par-
ticipants were informed about the aim of the study and were encouraged to ask any questions they
might have. Each teacher educator was interviewed either in person or over a video conference
throughout the month of May 2013. All the interviews were carried out in Spanish, as it is the
mother tongue of both teacher educators and researchers. The interviews lasted around 1 hour and
a half. To ensure accuracy, they were audio recorded and transcribed in full. The participants were
assigned pseudonyms to ensure confidentiality and, after the transcription, were asked for feedback
on the interview transcripts. For this article, all the quotations from the interviews presented were
translated into English.

Data analysis
The analysis of the collected data was performed using two different methods corresponding to
each objective of the study: interview coding and metaphorical analysis. The interview coding was
carried out first to frame the second analysis. To carry out this coding, a previously outlined
136 Education, Citizenship and Social Justice 14(2)

Table 1.  Citizenship and citizenship education orientations.

Personally responsible Participatory Justice-oriented

Definition ‘The personally responsible
citizen acts responsibly
in his or her community
by, for example, picking
up litter, giving blood,
recycling, obeying laws,
and staying out of debt’
(Westheimer and Kahne,
2004: 2)
Type of Obeys laws
citizenship Votes
involvement Recycles, gives blood
Works and pays taxes
Acts responsibly in his or
her community
Has a volunteer spirit
Serves as a good example
Respects authority
Productive member of
society
Type of Social, political, and civic
knowledge institutions
National constitutions
and laws
Emphasizes values such
as honesty, self-discipline,
integrity, law-abiding and
hard work
Based on character
education
Rare use of non-
government content to
teach citizenship
Location As a subject
in the
curriculum
‘Actively participate[s] in
the civic affairs and the
social life of the community
at local, state, and national
levels’ (Westheimer and
Kahne, 2004: 3).
Actively involved in the
political process
Civic participation
transcending particular
community problems or
opportunities
Takes an active role in
doing what is right
Helps improve life on the
planet for everyone
Social and moral
responsibility of
participation
Resolving conflicts
peacefully
Teaches how government
and other institutions work
for organizing efforts to
care for those in need
Some use of non-
government content to
teach citizenship.
Transversal to all subjects
‘Justice-oriented citizens
critically assess social,
political, and economic
structures and consider
collective strategies for
change that challenge
injustice and, when possible,
address root causes of
problems’ (Westheimer and
Kahne, 2004: 3).
Letter writing, petitioning
or protesting on matters of
the common good
Understands and fights for
rights
Questions the social
structures and the
naturalized social practices
that generate injustice
Makes the world more just/
fair
The study of unfair
conditions under which
people live and on-going
social problems
Frequent use of non-
government content to
teach citizenship
As an interdisciplinary
topic that articulates the
curriculum (the core of the
curriculum)

Source: Adapted from Patterson et al. (2012: 196).

heuristic tool was used in order to focus the gaze on some specific aspects of citizenship education.
Specifically, it used a category system based on the three orientations of citizenship described by
Westheimer and Kahne (2004): personally responsible, participatory and justice-oriented citizen;
and the citizenship education themes: type of citizenship involvement promoted, location of citizen-
ship education in the curriculum and type of knowledge that should be taught, adapted from the
model developed by Patterson et al. (2012). Responses were initially coded independently on each
classification and then, in another coding process, both systems were considered using Table 1 as
a guideline.
Estelles and Romero 137

Table 2.  Citizenship categorization.

Pseudonyms Initial coding Recoding

Paula Participatory Personally responsible
Jorge Personally responsible Personally responsible
Elia Participatory Participatory
Ignacio Personally responsible Personally responsible
Martín Participatory Participatory
Daniel Justice-oriented Justice-oriented
Alejandro Justice-oriented Justice-oriented
Roberto Justice-oriented Justice-oriented
Lucía Participatory Participatory

This cross-coding procedure helped to distill the citizenship education orientations further and
it led to some variations between the overall initial categorizations and the second ones, as is
shown in Table 2. The results obtained in this first level of inquiry provided a context for the meta-
phorical analysis as it was focused on the references the participants made to citizenship and
education.
After that, the metaphorical analysis was conducted without any prior classification, consider-
ing the scarce literature that exists about metaphors in citizenship education. The metaphorical
analysis was carried out in two phases. The first consisted of the identification of metaphorical
expressions in the interviews, taking into account the complexity involved in this process, as indi-
cated by Todd and Harrison (2008): ‘[t]he identification process is not always clear. For one thing,
the boundary between a literal and a metaphorical phrase can be fuzzy’ (pp. 482–483). The second
phase of analysis aimed to identify the source and target domains of the selected metaphors and, if
appropriate, gather them in conceptual metaphors. This process was carried out using the frame
(Table 3) based on the works on metaphors in political language of Hernández (2004) and Amar
(2014) as a reference. It collects the metaphorical expressions included in the discursive fragments
and the descriptions of the ontological and epistemic relationships from the identification of the
source and target domains of the metaphors. As Hernández (2004) explains,

The internal structure of conceptual metaphors is analysed as follows: we will call source domain to the
domain that provides its concepts and target, the domain over which these concepts overlap. Ontological
correspondences whose function is to show the analogous relationships between the most important parts
of each domain are postulated. But there are also other correspondences: the epistemic ones. These ones
do not connect substructures between the two domains, but represent the knowledge that is imported from
the source to the destination. (p. 6)

Findings
Conceptualizations of citizenship education
Personally responsible.  For three teacher educators, the exercise of citizenship is mainly linked to
the exercise of voting rights, respect, and community service. See, for example, responses such as
the following from Jorge, ‘I think a citizen is the one who votes’, or the next sentence from Paula,
‘For me, the citizen is the one who takes time to listen to another person, who is attentive to the
needs of other people around him in the day to day’. Although in these three interviews answers
might be related to the categories mentioned above, the type of knowledge considered to be taught
138 Education, Citizenship and Social Justice 14(2)

Table 3.  Framework for the metaphorical analysis. Example: ‘Politics is a game’.

Conceptual Metaphorical Source Target domain Ontological Epistemic

metaphor expressions domain relationships relationships
Politics is a He went out Soccer The president Politicians make In soccer and in
game with a red card should leave mistakes as soccer politics, a red card
political life players commit fouls means expulsion
or abandonment
Throw in the Boxing The politician In boxing the loser In both political
towel abandoned his drops his towel as a and boxing
political career sign of defeat. In politics struggle, the towel
after a defeat a politician withdraws itself is considered
from politics when he a symbol of
cannot continue fighting continuation
his enemies

Source: Adapted from Hernández (2004) and Amar (2014).

when it comes to citizenship education differs depending on the emphasis given to each of them.
Jorge, for example, insists on the need to know the European Constitution, the functioning of the
political system, and so on: ‘if right now at any university you start asking colleagues about the
concept of Europe, about the European Constitution, about the European Parliament, about what
happens there … Nobody knows anything!’ For Paula, this aspect is also important (‘I think it is
great […] to explain what a democratic process is’) but stresses that is not enough and highlights
certain necessary skills and competencies (‘empathy’, ‘conflict resolution’, etc.) to carry out that
participation in the community: ‘to exercise [citizenship] in a real way we need to have those think-
ing skills and that appropriate moral development to carry out an action’. Because, she explains, ‘I
think that what has influenced me the most (in my training as a citizen) has been the development
that I have gained in my personal skills that are prior to those citizenship skills’. That is why she
insists on the need to develop those ‘previous’ personal skills. The importance of character educa-
tion is also highlighted by Ignacio, who emphasizes the relevance of encouraging respect through
citizenship education. For him, it should be done by ‘encouraging discussion in class, so that stu-
dents can see the different opinions that their partners have’.
Regarding the issue of how to integrate citizenship education in the curriculum, the decision is
clear for the three of them: through a subject. See the following response from Ignacio: ‘I believe
that it must be included, in a mandatory form, just as a core subject’.

Participatory.  Three teacher educators viewed the exercise of citizenship as decision-making on

common issues. For instance, Lucía noted: ‘I do understand democracy as it is etymologically
defined: the government of the people. This means that we have to participate’. Two of these teach-
ers, Martín and Lucía, state that participation should be taught through what they call ‘teach by
example’ and the participation of students in their learning processes and in the management of the
classroom/school/college. That is, through methodology: asking for students’ opinions, debating,
forming groups, conducting research in classrooms, and so forth. For Elia, however, participation
goes beyond that:

Understanding things should also mean creating opportunities for their participation as citizens, in which
they can contribute with their views and make some kind of change, for example through initiatives such
as service learning.
Estelles and Romero 139

For the three teachers, the option of transversality seems to be the right one. See, for example, the
following answer from Elia:
Q: How do you think citizenship education should be included in the curriculum?
R: I think transversely. This year I have to teach this subject and that also makes me under-
stand a little better, contrary to what I thought, it is possible that all the issues like personal
and social development, citizenship, democracy, participation, and all that, can be devel-
oped through the ordinary curriculum.

Justice-oriented.  Three teacher educators understand participation closely linked to the creation of a
fairer society. For instance, in the following passage from the interview of Roberto, it may be seen
how his response underlies the idea of participation as activism and involvement in campaigns or
protests and teaching as part of that activism for the sake of a more just society: ‘citizenship is
made in NGOs, trade unions, political parties, and families but also within citizens’ movements.
School is an institution, among others, that can help to do that and it’s important, why? Because
many hours are spent in school’. They all agree that relevant social problems should be the subject
of study for citizenship education and they make a relationship between the knowledge of social
problems and a more just society. As Alejandro says,

If we do not encourage this state of knowledge, of analysis, action on social issues, we will be unable to
act. So, really, through education we are not only trying to help build future generations of students but we
are actively contributing to the possible and desirable resolution of these problems.

Also, all three agree on the importance of guiding the school curriculum toward the formation
of citizens. See, for example, the following response from Daniel:

Rather than a subject such as ‘citizenship education’, in which a number of issues that have no place in the
official curriculum are taught… […] I think the first thing we as faculty should think is precisely that the
aim of school is to create citizens and a particular society. And depending on the model of society we want
[…] I think we have to place education for citizenship in the first line of work of school.

Metaphors related to citizenship education

After doing the above analysis, the identification of metaphors related to citizenship education
took place. Four main conceptual metaphors were found: citizenship as an engine, democracy as a
destination, citizens as plants, and education as a light. These metaphors emerge in interviews of
teacher educators with different conceptualizations of citizenship education, considering previous
analysis. In order to clarify the relationships between the findings of both analyses, Table 4 sum-
marizes in which interviews these metaphors arise and what conceptualization of citizenship edu-
cation corresponds to each one.

Citizenship as an engine.  This image of citizenship is evident in expressions of seven teacher educa-
tors, in examples like the following: ‘citizenship has great power, a great power to transform those
aspects that are not suitable’ (Martín), ‘citizenship can get us out of our current state of ruin’
(Jorge). Ontological relations of this metaphor are based on the consideration of citizenship as an
abstract entity that includes a set of individuals with certain power of organization and action; and
an engine as a machine that generates a movement. Epistemic relations are made through the fol-
lowing association: as a motor produces a movement through energy, citizenship leads to social
140 Education, Citizenship and Social Justice 14(2)

Table 4.  Relationships between the categorization and the metaphorical analysis.

Pseudonyms Conceptualization of Conceptual metaphors

citizenship education

  Citizenship as Democracy as Citizens as Education

an engine a destination plants as a light
Paula Personally responsible X X  
Jorge Personally responsible X X X X
Elia Participatory X X
Ignacio Personally responsible X  
Martín Participatory X X  
Daniel Justice-oriented X X  
Alejandro Justice-oriented X X X X
Roberto Justice-oriented X X X
Lucía Participatory X X  

change (usually improvements) through that group of individuals. A variant of this metaphor is
(citizenship) education as an engine that appears in phrases like: ‘that citizenship will be formed
in schools and there is nothing so transformative, enduring, positive, valuable, and powerful as
education and culture’ (Alejandro). Contrarily, lack of education, knowledge, or citizenship gener-
ates immobility: ‘a Spain anchored in ignorance, superstition and detachment of culture and
knowledge’ (Alejandro). In both metaphors a constant association between education (linked to
schooling in many cases), citizenship, and social improvement is made. Also, the responsibility of
teachers in this process is often idealized: ‘We have the enormous responsibility of educating those
citizens who are going to move and mobilize the whole country’ (Jorge), ‘education and culture
[…] will be the base engine that will transform future teachers who in turn will have the mecha-
nisms to model, hopefully with more success, the world where our children will live’ (Alejandro).

Democracy as a destination.  The allegory of democracy as a destination (or finish line) is based on
the idea that democracy is a state, not a process, whose achievement involves many difficulties and
also on the notion of a finish line or a destination as the end of a race or a game (ontological rela-
tions). Finish lines as well as democracies are the aim toward which someone’s actions are
addressed and in whose way or path there are potholes, bumps, and obstacles to be overcome in
order to reach them (epistemic relationships). Fischman and Haas (2012) also identified this repre-
sentation of democracy, as a part of the Strict Father model of understanding the nation and citi-
zenship education. For this model, ‘democracy is a purpose realized or destination reached. Thus,
the goal of citizenship education should be to maintain the status quo’ (Fischman and Haas, 2012:
182). The image of democracy as a destination is present in seven interviews and is expressed in
two ways: either as a target that has already been reached that needs to be protected, or as a state in
which we have not yet achieved since individuals have not covered all the steps necessary to
achieve it. An example of the first one might be found in Jorge’s interview:

Democracy is not free. Getting to democracy has been a way in which many people have fallen, which has
been hard to get, it’s been a long and painful way and it must be cared for. If we don’t care for it, we destroy it.

Paula’s interview best exemplifies the second vision: ‘I think that very few citizens come to the
last stage of moral development, the stage at which we should be in order to actually be in a
democracy’.
Estelles and Romero 141

Citizens as plants and education as a light.  This metaphor was present in four interviews and is based
on the following premises: students in order to become citizens must be trained as well as living
plants need a number of conditions (water, temperature, etc.) that allow their vital development.
Thus, the following correspondence is established: students have within them the germ/embryo/seed
of citizenship that needs to be cultivated, maintained, and watered (conditions) in order to be born,
to grow, and sprout their branches and this organic process takes place through educational action.
Hence, expressions like the following ones are formulated: ‘democracy is a necessary condition,
shall we say, all those fruits or those plants can only arise if there are certain conditions, right? That
is, if you don’t plough, sow, and water the ground, the seed doesn’t grow or grows poorly’ (Rob-
erto) and ‘the issue is to graft the model of citizen that we want on the entire education system’
(Jorge). In expressions like the above, the organic actions of farming, seeding, plowing, and graft-
ing are performed implicitly by the teacher-gardener.
This metaphor is frequently used together with the metaphor of education as a light, in which
the power of education and citizenship are often overstated: ‘In these times of uncertainty and
darkness it is necessary to seed light. And what is that light? The light of reason, culture and educa-
tion, the light of understanding, which is given by the school, education, and culture’ (Alejandro).
Again, in the process this metaphor defines teachers play a key role: ‘What is, therefore, our chal-
lenge? Sow small seeds of light in these times of darkness and uncertainty’ (Alejandro).

Discussion
Aligned to other studies (Carr, 2008; Logan, 2011), we found in the first analysis that teachers’
perceptions on citizenship corresponded with all three notions of the ‘good citizen’: the participa-
tory, the personally responsible, and the justice-oriented citizen. Yet, what is even more relevant is
that despite the fact that formal conceptualizations have been varied, metaphor analysis has shown
some shared understandings of democracy, citizenship, and education that might be subject to
some interpretation.
A common denominator in the vast majority of the interviews, which is especially evident in the
images of education and citizenship as an engine, is the excessive closeness of the links among
education, citizenship, and democracy, following the logic: more education, more citizenship, and,
therefore, more democracy. Apart from the fact that the above relationship may not happen, this
presumption hides some perverse implications (Fischman and Haas, 2015; Romero, 2012). This
story tends to focus on the subjective field of the individuals. As a consequence, it hides that the
degree of (in)competence of citizens is not the main threat to modern democracies, but rather other
social phenomena such as increasing inequality (Laparra et al., 2012; Piketty, 2014; Sandel, 2013;
Stiglitz, 2012, 2015). In other words, considering education as the most important (and almost
only) factor of citizen participation involves moving the responsibility of the creation of those
prerequisites of a solid political culture to those individuals (Evans, 2015; Romero and Estellés,
2015). Thus, individuals are in charge of these preconditions of democratic life, hiding the inci-
dence of the institutional framework and other structural reasons. This individualization of social
risk can also be traced in the narrative present in the programs of education for citizenship and the
academic literature on the topic (Romero and Estellés, 2015).
Another repeated assumption that is, implicitly or explicitly, held in a lot of expressions linked
to the allegories of education as an engine and education as a light is one that deems ideas as the
main drivers for human action, based on the Cartesian tradition of the ‘cogito, ergo sum’. This
idealized consideration of our actions as a mere result of what we say or think seems to have its
educational translation when citizen participation is not seen as a relevant matter in their teaching
action. Instead, their teaching practices seem to be much more focused on political literacy and
developing certain skills (empathy, conflict resolution, respect, etc.). That is, it is postponed to a
142 Education, Citizenship and Social Justice 14(2)

virtual future the application of these skills and knowledge to the understanding of public affairs
and political intervention on them. Thus, they assume skills can be developed in abstract and
knowledge is sufficient for acting. These two assumptions can be subject to review under Clarke
(1999): the development of mind and consciousness is a condition of citizenship but they cannot
be developed from social isolation; the exercise of citizenship contributes to the development of
the mind and consciousness (and therefore cause it at the same time). Both assumptions outline a
kind of indirect approach to citizenship education: we, teacher educators, take care of those pre-
conditions (pure knowledge, thinking skills, empathy, respect, etc.) in abstract, and then students
will be the ones who so well-equipped will face public controversies throughout their lives.
Another shared assumption has to do with their role as teachers, which is well defined through
the metaphors emerged. One can observe, for example, that in the education–citizenship–democ-
racy sequence, the ultimate responsibility rests on the teacher who triggered the succession of virtu-
ous deeds; in the metaphor of citizens as plants they are planted and watered by the teacher/
gardener; and in the metaphor of education as a light, the teacher is the one in charge of turning on
the switch. This archetypal image of the teacher as a hero that can overcome all systemic deficien-
cies and achieve the educational success of their students is prevalent in both defenders and detrac-
tors of progressive pedagogies, as Fischman and Sales (2010) highlighted. In this context of
redemption, their mission can be carried out through two different ways depending on the inter-
views: sometimes the teacher is a transmitter of knowledge and in others she or he is an enhancer
of the development of certain skills. The best example of this is the metaphor of citizens/students as
plants or seeds about to germinate thanks to the action of the teacher/gardener. This idea is founded
on a concept of education based on the extraction of ideas, innate abilities, and the germs that lie
within the students and the teacher-gardener has to take them out (Mateos, 2008: 45). From this
perspective, as Mateos (2008: 45) explains, education is understood as a process of ‘inside-out’ as
opposed to the models of inculcation of ‘outside-in’ in which the student is a tabula rasa.
The main assumption that lies behind the image of the democracy as a finish line is that it deems
democracy as a state instead of a process. Democracy is not only a destination or something to be
preserved or maintained, but it is always in fieri, is a way of living with others. It is a process in
which we produce and reproduce the conditions of life in common; as these conditions are not
always fair and genuinely democratic, as they are subject to changing circumstances, democracy
must be made every day. In some expressions, that democratic state is linked to the acquisition of
certain skills or achieving some psychological stages. In others, it has more to do with the particu-
lar history of Spain of 40 years of dictatorship and how much it costs to leave it behind and col-
lectively achieve a democratic regime. From this perspective, it is noted that this state is no lifetime
guarantee and, therefore, there is always the risk of being reversed. Although these representations
are not equal, both obviate that democracy necessarily involves walking, which means neglecting
those forms of deliberation and struggling within it (Fischman and Haas, 2012). This way of under-
standing democracy also has an effective pedagogical translation because its aim then ‘should be
to maintain the status quo’ (Fischman and Haas, 2015: 52). On the contrary, the idea of democracy
as a process implies a different way of understanding the relationships between citizenship and
learning, because instead of conceiving it as the result of the instruction, it is learned through the
participation in real political practices (Lawy and Biesta, 2006: 45).

Implications for teacher education

This article suggests that even for teacher educators explicitly interested in citizenship education,
automatic ways of thinking play a key role in their perceptions. These automatic intuitions,
expressed through metaphors, appeared in interviews that correspond to seemingly different ways
Estelles and Romero 143

of conceptualizing citizenship (personally responsible, participatory, or justice-oriented). In other

words, we found a shared net of assumptions that goes beyond rationally constructed discourses of
citizenship. These implicit assumptions often result in the promotion of pedagogical models in
teacher education that are excessively impractical. For instance, this is the case of the indirect
approach to citizenship education based on the illusion of the development of skills in abstract and
the myth of knowledge as enough to promote civic action. This approach reduces the idea of citi-
zenship to ‘a set of dispositions, skills, practices, and ideals that can be “delivered” and then per-
formed by purely conscious rational subjects in institutions that are often not even organized
democratically’ (Fischman and Haas, 2012: 185). This model of education based on the idea of the
citizen as dispassionate (Marcus, 2002) ignores the importance of emotion and lived experiences
in learning, resulting in ineffective programs of citizenship education (Knight Abowitz, 2008;
Schugurensky, 2010). In this regard, it is not surprising that civic participation was the most over-
looked dimension of citizenship education, even though research has shown the importance of
engaging students in authentic democratic situations (Biesta and Lawy, 2006). Also the considera-
tion of learning citizenship detached from the body and emotion disregards that ‘emotional pro-
cesses are required for the skills and knowledge acquired in school to transfer to novel situations
and to real life’ (Immordino-Yang and Damasio, 2016: 32).
Furthermore, these assumptions involve an idealization of the relationship between education
and citizenship that rarely question the role of power in shaping democracies. As Apple (2008)
warns, the romanticizing of the public sphere often leads to poor teacher training for dealing with
the complexities of reproducing social inequalities through schooling. Against these idealized
models of citizenship education, we better encourage teacher educators to embrace the following
connection that Biesta (2007) summarizes:

I argue that it is an illusion to think that schools alone can produce democratic citizens. In so far as action
and subjectivity are possible in schools and society, schools can perform the more modest and more
realistic task of helping children and students to learn about and reflect upon the fragile conditions under
which all people can act under which all people can be a subject. A society in which individuals are not
able or not allowed to act, cannot expect from its schools to produce its democratic citizens for it. (p. 740)

In conclusion, taking into account the metaphorical ways of understanding citizenship educa-
tion may provide teacher educators tools to overcome the limitations of the disembodied educa-
tional models, providing ‘insight into the forces that shape identity and consciousness’ (Kincheloe,
2004: 58).

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publi-
cation of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes
1. In relation to political decisions, research (Brader, 2006; Caplan, 2007; Marcus, 2002; Stiglitz, 2012;
Westen, 2008) shows that most of our actions and political decisions are far from being the product of
reflection and rational thought. Regarding moral reasoning, the procedure is similar: automatic intui-
tions are often responsible of our final moral judgments, including those related to what we understand
144 Education, Citizenship and Social Justice 14(2)

by a good citizen (Haidt, 2012), and we just look for reasons that support our primal insights (Haidt and
Bjorklund, 2008).
2. See, for instance, the research focused on (preservice) teachers’ metaphors in relation to teaching (Alger,
2009; Bullough and Stokes, 1994; Patchen and Crawford, 2011), professional identity (Leavy et al.,
2007; Saban, 2010; Thomas and Beauchamp, 2011), learning (Mellado et al., 2015; Saban, 2004), stu-
dents (Parks, 2010), evaluation (Eren and Tekinarslan, 2013), educational technology (Coklar and Bagci,
2011; Gok and Erdogan, 2010),
or gender (Rebollo et al., 2013).
3. Legislative Ordinance ECI/3857/2007 of 27 December, which establishes the requirements for verifi-
cation of official university degrees that qualify for the practice of the teaching profession in Primary
Education.

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