Educating for 'Public Good': A critical study exploring how philanthropic citizenship is encouraged in primary education

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This research proposal seeks to understand, how do primary school children learn to be philanthropic citizens? In doing so it aims to advance theoretical and empirical knowledge concerning the contested concept of philanthropic citizenship education in schools and identify pathways through which we may increase children's propensity to meaningfully engage as both current and future citizens. Philanthropic citizenship is a dimension of citizenship behaviour, associated with intentions and actions that intend to produce public benefit for example helping, mutual aid, volunteering, social action, charitable giving and campaigning.From dressing up for Children in Need, donning a red nose for Comic Relief or participating in local community projects, children regularly contribute towards charity and social issues through giving of their time, talent and treasure. But while children may be involved in these fundraising and voluntary action activities from an early age, our research suggests that they are rarely given the opportunities to meaningfully engage in giving decisions. This includes a lack of discussion about which causes they support, how they support those causes and why. Importantly, our research has found through engagement with these more tokenistic fundraising mechanisms, where children for example are encouraged to give £1 for a reward such as a red nose or cup cake, we often teach giving as a transactional act, negating to support children to critically engage in the cause behind the giving, which is counter-intuitive to cultivating active, philanthropic citizenship which seeks to consider longer term social change (Body et al., 2020).There is a significant gap in research and literature regarding how children learn to give and the educational approaches adopted in cultivating philanthropic citizenship, particularly among primary school aged children. This is problematic, as a multi-disciplinary review of educational, social and psychology theory and research highlights a child's primary school years as crucial in the development and normalisation of positive civic behaviours. Furthermore, citizenship literature highlights how pedagogical approaches to philanthropic citizenship in education has real consequences for the type of giving activities and engagement we encourage, and indeed the type of society we imagine, this requires further investigation. Finally, a review of policy reveals a desire to establish giving and helping behaviours as a 'habit' with the Civil Society Strategy identifying schools as a vital space for cultivating these civic behaviours, however there is very little knowledge or research about what is happening in schools or indeed what good practice looks like. Coupled with this, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to calls from the United Nations Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organisation to 'commit to strengthen education as a common good', and to 'promote student, youth and children's participation and right in the co-construction of desirable change'.Therefore the aim of this research is to produce a timely, comprehensive study about how, what and why primary school children are encouraged (or not) to participate in charity and voluntary action through philanthropic citizenship. In doing so, it explores what are schools trying to teach children about charity and voluntary action, how is such learning implemented and to what ends.The benefits of the research are far-reaching, as well as advancing theoretical knowledge, the empirical evidence will support school curriculum development, teacher training and the development of positive philanthropic citizenship activities within schools, to benefit children. The research will also benefit the multiple stakeholders who informed this proposal, including charities delivering philanthropic citizenship programmes and their funders, by providing detailed data to assist in programme construction and targeting resources.