Political distance and civics teachers’ habitus: good or bad practice for inclusive citizenship?

The social development of an increasing distance between everyday live of young people on the one hand and formal politics on the other hand has been described as political distance (e.g. Steinwede et al. 2016 [FES], Albert et al. 2019 [Shell]) or "discomfort with politics" (Bremer & Trumann 2019). Even though, it doesn’t mean that young people are not politically interested, it shows the difficulties to translate 'being political' in everyday life into formal politics (Pfaff 2006). These difficulties are furthermore highly pervaded by social inequality (Calmbach et al. 2020 [SINUS]) and therefore impose a special challenge for political representation, democracy and citizenship education in particular. How can citizenship education fill the gap and make citizenship more inclusive? Under which circumstances can the practice of civics teachers contribute to that goal? The paper takes a sociological approach to civics teachers as social actors, who not only draw on the citizenship education curriculum, but also their moral patterns of interpretation and political views. This is the result of an empirical qualitative and internationally comparative study (Germany and Israel) intending to take a closer look at these patterns of interpretation. Therefore, extended focus groups ("Gruppenwerkstätten", Bremer 2004) were conducted and habitus-hermeneutically analyzed (Bourdieu 1982, Bremer & Teiwes-Kügler 2013). The results indicate that the political views correspond to milieu-specific politics-related experiences and moral attitudes of the teachers. The findings of the study further suggest that different political views of the teachers are accompanied by certain pedagogical goals and conceptions of more or less inclusive citizenships. These habitus-specific political views only allow pupils of specific social backgrounds to access citizenship and politics and exclude pupils of other social backgrounds. Overall, four syndromes of political views could be uncovered, showing different proximity-distance ratios vis-à-vis formal politics and are differing from each other in their affirmative-preservative or critical-transformational thrusts ("defending", "reformist", "rebellious", "resigned"). They also aim for different citizenship ideals. This general finding can be confirmed both in Israel and in Germany. The findings show that habitus-specific political views are interrelated with teaching goals and ideals of good citizens. Civics teachers do not only form a vocational group, but are heterogenous social actors with their own biographical (political) socialization that becomes a relevant compass in their teaching (“longue durée of the habitus", Lange-Vester 2003). Therefore, political views can serve as an analytical and reflexive category in (further) teacher training in order to detect partly unintended exclusions from democratic education and citizenship. Teachers should therefore distance themselves from one’s own political socialization (Eis 2016) and tie their teaching practice back to the different habitus of the students (Bremer et al. 2018) in order to make citizenship socially more inclusive and finally more democratic.