Influence of Teacher's Characteristics on Civic Education Implementation in Nigeria

Abstract

There is evidence of dissatisfaction of millennials with democracy and rising populist support for non-democratic forms of governance and nationalism among them. This presents challenges for civic education implementation and calls for promotion of constructivist civic teachers. Motivated by the need to apply deep civic education in inhibiting non-democratic beliefs and promoting viable strong democracy through active citizens, the present study employed a descriptive survey to investigate the influence of teacher's gender and educational background on teacher's implementation of civic education using data collected from randomly selected 16 secondary school civic education teachers and 320 secondary school students comprising 20 students of each teacher participating in the study. Two instruments were used for data collection on teachers’ initial and continuous training in civic education, and teachers’ implementation of civic education. Two research questions answered using mean and standard deviation, and three null hypotheses tested at 0.05 level of significance using correlation, Mann-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis H Test guided the study. The findings showed that a high number of civic teachers did not receive prior training in civic education as well as do not engage in lifelong learning or continuous training in civic education and teaching practice. Civic teachers do not also actively engage students in civic instructions. A positive relationship exists between teacher’s training in civic education and teacher’s implementation of civic education. While civic teachers’ educational background did significantly influence implementation of civic education, gender did not. The findings were associated to a number of factors including lack of cognition of the power of civic education in constructing, reconstructing and transforming (dys)functional societal ideologies. Promotion of lifelong learning among teachers, training of teachers in civic contents and methods, and utilization of ICT for instructional purposes were recommended.