Students as Political Animals: Exploring Understanding of Political Issues in Social Science Education

School subjects such as social science have versatile goals that can be described as internal and external (Husbands, Kitson & Pendry 2003:29). The internal goals are closely connected to the academic disciplines (Cf. Young 2013) and the external goals are formulated by the political sphere and includes, among other things, the democratic values society wants students to be incorporated in as well as students engagement in public deliberation. These different goals can give birth to dilemmas for both teachers and students when they engage in highly political topics. In educational research these challenges have been discussed as epistemic cognition, motivated reasoning and conceptual change (Sinatra, Kienhues & Hofer 2014) but correspond mainly to internal goals of school subjects. In order to understand the structures of the dilemmas this paper focuses on students’ understanding prior to teaching and how they reason about different political views on the welfare state. The data consists of written responses, year 10 students, on two different accounts of the good welfare state, one liberal and one social democratic. The data was used to identify possible thresholds (Meyer & Land 2005) in students’ analytical frames of reference, and normative reasoning. Even though several students recognise ideological ideas, few students approached the topic from a social science perspective, distinguishing facts from opinions. One key issue, possibly a threshold, is that students fail to recognise the difference between ‘politics’ and ‘the study of politics’. The study contributes to the understanding of the influence of normativity on students’ thinking and an attempt to bridge the dilemma of combining internal and external goals of teaching and learning.