Controversial issues
Citizenship education, by the nature of the issues it addresses, is likely to arouse strong feelings. Students should not be sheltered from learning how to deal with these sensitive and emotionally-laden issues as it will help them to develop an important range of skills.
These include the capacity to:
- listen sympathetically, but critically, to others’ views
- sift fact from opinion
- weigh up conflicting views
- express opinions in a calm and rational manner, even if those views spring from deeply-held beliefs.
The Crick Report, which laid the foundations for the citizenship curriculum, suggests two strong reasons for teachers being prepared to tackle controversial issues:
‘... at the immediate and practical level, it can be argued that controversial issues are important in themselves and to omit informing about and discussing them is to leave a wide and significant gap in the educational experience of young people, and is to fail to prepare them for adult life. Many controversial topics are major issues of the day: moral, economic, political and religious issues which young people ought to know about either because the issue could directly affect them or because they will in some way in a democratic society have opportunities to take a part in influencing the outcome.’
QCA, Crick Report, page 57
Thinking about teaching controversial issues has implications for students, teachers, governors and senior managers in terms of drafting a policy for the teaching of controversial issues.
A variety of resources and advice now exist for teaching controversial issues. In particular, the 
Citizenship Foundation publishes briefings on topical controversial issues on its Web site. These may be a bank of source materials to help approach an issue, advice on how best to tackle the subject, or a potted history of the issue. The Association for Citizenship Teaching publishes case studies and lesson plans on its Web site, some of which may be useful for planning lessons on controversial topics. Some specific Weblinks are provided below:
Citizenship Foundation – Teaching Controversial Issues
Citizenship education: the global dimension – Teaching controversial issues