Politics, ideology, and democratic citizenship education: The pedagogy of politically active teachers in Porto Alegre, Brazil and Toronto, Canada (Ontario)

This dissertation compares the pedagogy of fourteen secondary teachers in Porto Alegre, Brazil and Toronto, Canada. The majority of the study participants were social studies teachers, and all were politically active with varying commitments in political parties, teacher unions, and/or social movements. Social studies education, because it holds the primary responsibility for the development of citizens, reflects the ways that societies conceive of good citizenship. The teachers' experiences with citizenship, and the values and meanings they hold about citizenship, powerfully influenced their pedagogical practices. In this study, pedagogy is conceived broadly as the meanings, values, and practices that underlie teaching, and as a political act shaped by the sociopolitical contexts.; The data was collected at macro and micro levels: (a) biographical experiences and beliefs; (b) classroom teaching; (c) school contexts; and (d) educational and political contexts. Porto Alegre and Toronto were as locations selected for their political and educational differences in order to shed light on the role of these contexts in shaping practices of citizenship education. Thus, a key objective was to understand the conditions under which democratic citizenship education is practiced.; In the analysis, attention was paid to the teachers' enactment of progressive and innovative citizenship education, considering the limits and possibilities of the educational, political contexts. These teachers struggled to exercise their agency by translating their political experiences with their pedagogical practices. The findings show that their pedagogical agency occurred within the broader contexts of Brazilian and Canadian practices of, and beliefs about, education and democracy. In Toronto, a restrictive official curriculum and inhibiting political context influenced the teachers' understanding of democratic citizenship education to emphasize progressive teaching strategies, especially student-centeredness and cooperative learning. In Porto Alegre, due to an open curriculum and progressive, class-oriented political and educational practices, the teachers focused on democratic curricular content to emphasize critical political consciousness, socio-political knowledge, and class analysis. The inhibitions and opportunity structures that these contexts generated, especially through the official curriculum and collective political-educational groups, powerfully shaped the teachers' pedagogy while allowing for the exercise of individual agency.