Children’s perceptions of democratic values: Implications for democratic citizen education

South African Journal of Childhood Education

 
 
Field Value
 
Title Children’s perceptions of democratic values: Implications for democratic citizen education
 
Creator Botha, Annalie Joubert, Ina Hugo, Anna
 
Subject — Children’s perceptions of democratic values; democratic citizenship education; active attitude of listening —
Description A new generation of children are learning the importance of democratic values at a level which makes sense to them. Appropriate ‘democratic values’ for South Africa are set out in the Constitution, and the national curriculum aims to equip all learners with the knowledge and skills necessary for meaningful participation in society. In many schools, these values – responsibility, respect and the freedom of self-expression – are merely posted on the walls of classrooms, but are not integrated into the subject content. This article proposes that teachers need to determine children’s perceptions of the values in question, and these should be the starting point for teaching democratic values. Young children need to understand and experience values in the classroom, suitable to the development of their moral reasoning. To concretise concepts of values, we used the ‘pledge tree’ activity in an intervention, in which 9-year-old children wrote their values on paper ‘leaves’ which they then posted on a huge polystyrene tree. The paper reports on this experience as a research investigation, capturing children’s ideas.
 
Publisher AOSIS
 
Contributor
Date 2016-12-01
 
Type info:eu-repo/semantics/article info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion — —
Format text/html application/epub+zip application/xml application/pdf application/pdf
Identifier 10.4102/sajce.v6i1.343
 
Source South African Journal of Childhood Education; Vol 6, No 1 (2016); 8 pages 2223-7682 2223-7674
 
Language eng
 
Relation
The following web links (URLs) may trigger a file download or direct you to an alternative webpage to gain access to a publication file format of the published article:

https://sajce.co.za/index.php/sajce/article/view/343/412 https://sajce.co.za/index.php/sajce/article/view/343/411 https://sajce.co.za/index.php/sajce/article/view/343/413 https://sajce.co.za/index.php/sajce/article/view/343/646 https://sajce.co.za/index.php/sajce/article/view/343/370
 
Coverage — — —
Rights Copyright (c) 2016 Annalie Botha, Ina Joubert, Anna Hugo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
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