Episode 2: Conversation with Dr. Piers Von Berg

Jul 9
29 min read

Updated: Aug 2

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TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Rowena Azada Palacios (00:01)

Hello listeners and welcome to this episode of conversations4citizenship. I am Rowena Azada Palacios from London Metropolitan University. And in this episode, we will be talking about civic identities. Now the definition of civic identity can differ from context to context, but it can be best understood as a sense of civic self, who can embrace beliefs and emotions about the self as a participant in civic life. Civic identities are not static, but they're dynamic and malleable. And thus, it's not easy to explain how and why individual citizens adapt, perform, and enact certain civic practices and interpret citizens.

Thus, it is not easy to explain how and why individual citizens adapt, perform, and enact certain civic practices and interpret civic identities in multiple social structures. Our guest today is Dr. Piers von Berg from the school of society and culture at the University of Plymouth. He has done research work on civic identities and citizenship education. Piers, thank you for joining us today. I will turn you over now to Stella who's hosting this episode.

Dr. Stella Mi-cheong Cheong (01:29)

Thank you, Rowena. Thank you, Piers. First of all, I wonder about your life stories, and life trajectories as a researcher as lecturer, and barrister. Prior to working on the doctorate, I know you were a barrister and a lecturer. So, how has your own professional experience shaped as a barrister, lecturer and researcher shaped the research questions that you have pursued? Above all, why did you become interested in citizenship education, civic identity and agency?

Dr. Piers Von Berg (02:03)

It's a bit of a long story. So, I'll try and keep it short. Thank you for asking about my background, it played a really important role in bringing me to my studies of civic identities and in my doctorate in education, and it started for me back in 2001, when I first became involved in citizenship education in the Caucasus whilst working in Azerbaijan. Now, this was before my life as a barrister when I was working in international development, and I was designing citizenship education courses at university and then on an international development programme for secondary schools. And I worked there for six years. And I found that the student’s interests in what they cared about what affected their lives, what they could influence were something that wasn't really addressed in university study. And it was something that the students were really keen to get involved in. And when I returned to the UK to work as a barrister, I worked in the area of family law involving children, and particularly involving young offenders in the criminal justice system. And it was actually by sheer coincidence that a former colleague that I'd worked with, in the Caucasus, contacted me in around 2014, and asked if I could contribute a chapter to a book about working in citizenship education. And that's when I contacted my former students. And we did a little bit of research on their experiences in the courses. And this course was over 13 years afterwards because a lot of time had moved on. And I was so struck by how these young people had drawn some really important lessons from the experiences in the classroom that affected some major life decisions that they were taken. And it was really that research that led me to my education doctorate and thinking about what sorts of pedagogy at university where help students to think about how they fit into their communities, and how they could take part in their communities. And that was my research question.

Dr. Stella Mi-cheong Cheong (04:15)

Wow, so fascinating and powerful. So, thank you for sharing your long-life trajectory and your experience that appears. Piers, how can you define civic identity? And how does this construct and reconstruct civic and political behaviour?

Dr. Piers Von Berg (04:34)

Well, I think you need to start with citizenship. And I think it's despite the many disputes around citizenship, most agree that at a basic level, citizenship involves membership in a political community. So, my students, often when we talk about it, say, Well, I'm a British citizen, or I'm an American citizen, or I'm a French citizen, so that identify as being part of a state. And it is, I think the beliefs and values that go along with that, that form the civic identity part, that a person starts to become attached to, emotionally often a particular place. And we talk about belonging. And I think that's part of a person's civic identity that they have particular beliefs, such as feeling at home, feeling safe, feeling secure, feeling, that everyone around them speaks the same sort of language and that they fit in. And that's where they belong. And that is accompanied by the way in which they would see things leading to particular values, and the ways in which they would expect things to happen under certain norms. And so I would say that that would be their civic identity because it would be their beliefs and values and norms that underpin their citizenship. And, obviously, that's going to vary hugely, the different contexts you visit, and not just geographical or cultural or temporal, but obviously, for the individual themselves, and the particular overlapping, and multiple communities in which they can find themselves. Because those states of mind are going to be dynamic, they're going to evolve. And they're going to change throughout a person's life course, as they make changes to or develop the stories that they tell themselves, and they tell others about who they are. So, I hope that explains it a little bit.

Dr. Stella Mi-cheong Cheong (06:37)

Then piers, it just popped into my head while you were speaking, if the civic identity, the membership is specific society, then how about the global citizen? Can you define the global citizens’ civic identity?

Dr. Piers Von Berg (07:20)

That wasn't an area I looked at, actually, because I wanted to help my students understand their immediate connections in the community that they found themselves, in my case here in Plymouth, and I found that from my first experiences with citizenship education, it was important to have things that the students could relate to, that they could see in their everyday lives. And whilst I don't have any sort of critical or negative objections to the idea of global citizenship, it wasn't a route that I went down, I would imagine from what I know about it generally, that it would involve some ideas of a person seeing themselves as part of a greater whole, part of humanity, part of a global community perhaps. And so thinking that perhaps following from those sorts of beliefs, and perhaps particularly values about thinking about cosmopolitan citizenship, about how people see themselves as considered brother and sisterhood, transcending borders, leading to ideas of sort of cooperation between peoples, regardless of where they're from, and yet also acknowledging those differences. That wasn't a level that I got today.

Dr. Stella Mi-cheong Cheong (08:05)

Yeah, I do agree! After reading your thesis, then I realised that your research focused on the higher education level. So when we think about citizenship education, most people think of the way it is taught at the primary and secondary school level, but you focus on the possibility of citizenship education at the university level. So why the interest in the university level compared to the primary and secondary school level, because you've already experienced, what are the most distinctive differences between citizenship education in higher education and primary and secondary school?

Dr. Piers Von Berg (09:08)

That's a really good and I think, important question and one that I really did not find a lot in the literature, thinking about citizenship education at higher education. There just seems to be an assumption that it's a secondary level. And indeed, I imagine people working at the primary level might find the same sort of absence of sort of discussion about their level of education. For me, when a person joins a university, that's the age that they're normally becoming a citizen at the age of 18 is often the point where you achieve that legal status to vote, to serve in public office. And so, I was really interested in the transition to adulthood where the majority of my students aged between sort of 18 to 22. And for someone interested in identity, this is a thing that has occupied identity theorists such as Erikson, looking at the various stages of identity development and crises that happen and I thought that looking at what young people were interested in how they related to their communities was really pivotal at that point, because many of my students were, even if they were living at home, they were suddenly in a community that they will probably never going to be in ever again. It was so much broader than the school, they were meeting other young people or mature students from all over the country, in some of the bigger universities from all over the world. That’s a third of our cohort at my previous institution were foreign students. And they were meeting students at different classes, different and all sorts of much wider identities now because we have more students now identify as trans, we have a more, you would say, in some ways, more open sort of civil society in the UK, where you have a range of student groups representing the LGBTQ community. And so, this sort of huge like, sometimes thought of as an international airport lounge of just incredible diversity was a wonderful place to explore how student identities were being changed as they interacted and encountered all of these differences. I also think it's really important to take citizenship education at higher education seriously, because whether we like it or not civic learning happens at university if it's not deliberate or planned as an educational activity, students, nonetheless are absorbing all sorts of new ideas, norms and social identities, which increasingly now are very consumerist in the UK, where we have an elite privatised higher education sector. And there have been repercussions on students' lives with the restriction and the amount of time, and the popularisation of space by commercial entities within the university. And so whether we like it or not, students are being socialised at universities. And this perhaps goes to something we can talk about later, I think it's incumbent on us to think about competing in that space for students’ attention, rather than treating their identities as something that should be commodified or should be shaped for the world of work. And so, because of this sort of lack of attention in this field, I think there's huge potential. This is a part of the population that is really starting to think about their identities and their agency and how they fit in, they're making all of these life decisions that at this point in their lives, there are competing ideologies there. And there's not a lot of other work going on. So, I found it quite exciting. And, important for those reasons.

Dr. Stella Mi-cheong Cheong (12:50)

Wow. Yes, very interesting. Because personally, I've never thought about the commercial aspect in terms of citizenship education. Thank you, Piers. All right. So, our next question is really interesting. After reading your thesis, I also found a very fascinating aspect in terms of pedagogical approach, because you employ critical reflective thinking or transformative learning and Forum theatre activity, which is quite good. So, I wonder, why is your particular interest in this these kinds of pedagogical approaches? And can you explain more specifically, how you apply these pedagogical approaches to your doctoral thesis? And what were the most surprising discoveries you made? In the course of your research?

Dr. Piers Von Berg (13:44)

Stella, in answering that question, can I just say that you've repeated the phrase, after reading your thesis several times now, and I'm so grateful. I'm not sure how many people are going to read it. But you really have. And so thank you very much. I really appreciate it. It's not often that someone else takes the trouble to read your doctoral thesis and look at what someone devoted years of their life to and all that energy and ideas, why those pedagogies. Okay, so I came across forum theatre when I was working in development work, and we had a sort of simple approach to the community training that we would do, which was that people would remember a little bit of what they saw, maybe a little bit more of what they heard, they would remember even more of what they were saying, whilst they were listening, and, and seeing things and they would remember the most of what they were saying and doing. And so it's kind of that old adage of learning by doing, but really, when it was translated into foreign theatre, I saw some really quite powerful examples of learning. So, the reason I chose these pedagogies as ways of collecting data is that they seem to be very powerful forms of learning that would help the students to explore their identities and agency. So, forum theatre is a form of participatory theatre devised by Augusto Boal, and while creating a form of like a game, where, if you're not familiar with forum theatre, it involves a group of people playing out several scenes where a protagonist experiences acts of oppression. So, for example, a person is being evicted by their landlord, or a person is being victimised or harassed in a certain way. And it's a play with an unhappy ending. And the audience is then invited when the players repeated in front of them to stand up, come onto the stage intervene and try to avoid the unhappy ending. And so it's a way of experimenting with the agency, a way of trialling out different ways to address social issues. And importantly, the ideas for the play are drawn from the life experiences of the players and the audience. And so when I, I took part in some training courses on foreign theatre when I came back to the UK, and we drew together as a group of four or five people our experiences in education, and we constructed the play, and because it was from our life experiences, we didn't need a script, we knew how it worked, and we were very emotionally invested in it. And we could really act it out, and then give something that the audience can also relate to. So here you're drawing on the identities of the students, and by putting them together in a group drawing on what they understood as the issues that they cared about, and then to practice the agency to try and tackle the problems. The answer to the second question now is, I wanted to help the students understand the issues beyond their immediate experience from the theatre has often been criticised as a way of something that leads to young people in particular simply individualising. That the oppression saying this person is just an unpleasant land, it's not related to the wider structures of how the legislation puts landlords in more powerful positions, as opposed to renters, for example. And so it's important for young people to see those wider structures and contexts. So I invited the students to spend some time in the city with charities that worked with people who had really been excluded from the community or were trying to be included. So, charities work with refugees, people in financial crisis, or homeless persons. And then I invited the students to come back into the classroom to then think about the issues that they cared about once they'd seen the context of their wider city. And then we experimented with those issues in the foreign theatre place. And part of this was the idea of transformational learning that I wanted the students to experience something that would challenge their identities, their norms, beliefs, and values, that they would have that critical incident that would lead them to question what they believed in. And so that would enable the process of change and learning. So for example, one of my students who came from a small town in the Southwest, and told me that it was shocking when she went to a refugee's house because they had mattresses on the floor. And I asked her, Well, why was this so shocking? And she said, well, at home, when we're watching the news on television, my father is always saying how the refugees are coming here to take our jobs. And when I went and saw this refugee's house, it was completely different. And this person was laughing and smiling and chatting and made us cups of tea. And so the norms, beliefs and values this young lady had grown up with, were being challenged in a critical incident, in the experience with the charity. And when we were coming back into the classroom, we were then talking about the issues that she cared about. And so, she was identifying intolerance and discrimination, and relating it to how other people not just herself are being treated, and then putting it into a forum theatre scene of how a person coming to a job centre, who didn't speak English, was treated by somebody else who didn't understand that they couldn't speak English. And so we were bringing into tension ideas of belonging, exclusion, and othering. So, your third question about surprising discoveries, I went back to the literature as you do when you collected qualitative data, and I was looking at the ideas of othering of how we place others into an unequal position and consider them as almost objects and lacking human dignity. And one of the ways in which I collected data was to allow them to give me anonymous feedback so they could say whatever they wanted, and I wouldn't know who it was, and they could express their views and several of them talked about the humanising of others. That goes back to what the young lady said about the refugee that she was laughing. She was joking. She was a person. She had a story. She had an identity as well. And students talked a lot about it.How they were starting to think about what it meant to be homeless. And I could see that they were doing this because they were giving specific examples. So one of the male students, a young man, who had done some volunteering work before, was really quite surprised. But what he discovered from this experience, is that he said, the homeless persons that I met feel alone, they feel that they're invisible. And so, the sense of being marginalised and excluded and not mattering at all, not having any human dignity was expressed very concisely and clearly by the student. And I was really surprised at how these examples of empathy, understanding the feelings of another of being able to explain them. And being then led to other examples of compassion, where students said, they were just in the charities, they weren't actually doing anything more than maybe making a cup of tea for people, I just, I just wanted them to see, look and listen here is that they said that, by simply listening to a person, they were able to acknowledge how that person felt acknowledged that person as a human being. And this in itself, appeared to me as an act of agency. So, what was so surprising was that they had experiences that challenge their identities, and critical incidents, but at the same time were opportunities to act with the agency to act with compassion. And so I started toying around with ideas of this moment where the feeling of being a citizen and the practice of being a citizen, are happening at the same time and interacting, because that moment where you're engaging someone in a conscious conversation face to face, something that we've really missed during the pandemic is a moment where we do engage in empathy because we can see the facial expressions, we can see the emotions being expressed. And some people that work on deliberative democracy do this called a Human Library. And it's been used in various different parts of the world, you've probably heard of it was some very surprising results with individuals with very different political backgrounds and ideologies and upbringing, talking face to face about some basic issues in life and finding areas of agreement. So that was surprising and interesting, lead to some theoretical ideas lead to some ideas around the methodology that I'm trying to develop, and so on and so forth.

Dr. Stella Mi-cheong Cheong (23:03)

Honestly, I really like this approach. And I really appreciate your detailed explanation and how you apply this approach to your research. And I'd like to employ this approach in my further research as well. Thank you, Piers. All right. Let's move on. The next question is also about your research and doctorate thesis. Well, I also looked at a lot of work in your thesis, you look into university students' experience with a community. So, to what extent do you think that doing volunteer work with your own community can shave there's more political behaviour, such as the way they vote, for example, and, as you mentioned, to lead or enable them to participate in any volunteer activity within the community, or the way they think about the national policy? So just tell us about your thoughts.

Dr. Piers Von Berg (24:13)

Thanks very much for your comments about the research. One of the scary parts about doing this research was just not knowing how all of these pedagogies would interact and work with the students and there were moments when we felt a little bit lost together. And it was one of those moments in a classroom where you sort of really need to hold the students and make them feel secure that we could experiment with those things. And I want to pick up on what you said about communities in your question. Because I and the students and experienced some interesting moments of being in a community. So, I had students from various social science subjects, most of whom I didn't know. And we were part of a school, a school of society and culture. We were on our campus or university campus, which is set in a small city on the south coast. Plymouth. I found that when I was asking the students in the interviews in the focus groups about what they thought about the role of citizenship education at university and what they thought they were getting out of university, they said some really interesting things about this activity, they said that this activity, what didn't have any compulsion, they didn't feel they were under any pressure, it goes back to what I was saying about how the university time-space has become so populated now with demands on our time and quite pressure for students. We had these activities in a classroom. And I think that that classroom was a liminal space, in the sense that we were on the edge of, or perhaps in between, I'm trying to work with those ideas of moments are two different meanings of liminality. Are you on the edge of something? Or are you in between things? And I think that we were in between the normal activities that a lecturer would organise that would be assessed and led by the lecturer because this was led, but it wasn't assessed at work, for no credit, it was voluntary, and it was close to their extracurricular clubs where they would volunteer for something, it would be quite enjoyable, it would involve going off into the community, but it wasn't led wasn't organised by students. And there was a learning element. And they really enjoyed that space, playing around with me with these different ideas. And they said that they felt that it showed that the university and the lecturers cared more about them. That's what one of them said or words to that effect. And so, I think that there are some interesting ideas there around the university community, that how liminal spaces can help students feel more integrated into their community, whilst at the same time they're stepping outside of it. And especially, of course, with theatre activities, which are sort of stepping back and looking at ourselves. Then you asked me about volunteering and being in the community. And as I was saying before, this was a point where the students stepped outside what they were comfortable with. Now, they would go past, as they told me, a homeless person begging outside TESCO, quite often, they would see, as they told me, people on the other side of the street going into the local charity shop, they will see the refugees on television at home. But they found it. Again, they were using words like shocking quite a lot, being engaged in face-to-face conversations or simply sitting with a chat, a charity worker and the debt clinic, listening to someone explain how they were so terrified to open their mail because they thought there would be no builds inside it. And that of face-to-face interaction with people on the edges of their community, again, in a liminal space, one might say, of the homeless shelter, where new possibilities are perhaps enacted. Again, this is a really good opportunity for them to question and reflect on parts of their civic identity.

Dr. Stella Mi-cheong Cheong (27:51)

I completely agree. The next question is about the current situation. The conversation4citizenship podcast aims to explore all issues concerned with citizenship and human rights education. This says, We'd like to hear more about your thought on how citizenship education in higher education can contribute to promoting agency and power in citizens in the COVID and post-COVID era.

Dr. Piers Von Berg (28:42)

Firstly, I think that this is an important research question going forward. I think that you mentioned COVID. I think that the times that young people are going to university are increasingly uncertain. I know that risk and uncertainty have been a theme in sociology since the end of the Cold War. But now at a point where we have existential ideas around climate change, we have considerable uncertainty around the economic sort of picture, certainly here in the UK. That is, it's a tough time to be a young person, particularly when there's so much information available, perhaps all of this and with the use of social media and TikTok information that's conveyed in a very graphic, often video form. Again, I think that universities are missing a trick not drawing on citizenship education, ideas, and youth work to support the young people going through their degree programmes and going through the transitions to adulthood. So, broadly, there are some things to explore. I think that the further research questions that came out of my study, were How would some of these participatory and sort of innovative pedagogies be supported by the institution? How could they be built into normal curricula study? Now my answer, I think I've already partly got an answer to that, which is, I think that they shouldn't I think that they thrive in the liminal space in between curricular and extracurricular study. And if that's the case, how would the institution respond to that? And that's an important question because the institution pays people like me there are wages. And I'm supported to do as part of my job research. So, I think there are some interesting questions for further research there around how the institution would support lecturers innovating in these sorts of ways and exploring these sorts of questions around not just civic identity, I think the global point that you mentioned is important when we start to think about the bigger canvas with these issues of climate change that I mentioned. And then you asked the agency, the agency question, what do we understand as an agency in my study, there were moments of compassion, which perhaps others might feel less excited by because these are things that on the one hand, could be very momentous for the individual and very meaningful. But if we start to map it out, as you were saying, into the wider world of higher education, that's a world that works a lot on quantifiable things, numbers, particularly revenue, but also indicators of student satisfaction, research that is achieving certain levels of international recognition. And whilst research around belonging and community and compassion is research that perhaps could be considered innovative, it's hard to put numbers or percentages by it, to say, well, this is the things that we have changed, because universities are very keen on things that they've changed, but they want to be able to attach a number to it, partly because of how they're part of the managerial system that's audited, but also so they can use it for marketing purposes as well. That's not to say that success stories and things like that are an important part of how we sort of think about our impact. I'm just a little bit more cautious about how my particular type of research looking at how students belong in their communities might be accepted by the wider higher education institution. I'm not sure if those priorities might align. I think in the post-COVID world, this is the last thing I say, I have consciously been given very long-winded answers. I think in the post-COVID world, there is a really important, even more, important than it was pre-COVID agenda around mental health. And prior to COVID, it was really an epidemic in higher education. It's now a part of my role. As a lecturer, I spend my time helping students through sometimes a mental health crisis, not of course, as a mental health practitioner, but just signposting them sometimes the first port of call is a personal tutor. I sense I don't know that the pandemic and COVID made that worse. So, prior to that, one of the main themes that came out of my research was that students are feeling very isolated, very lonely, and quite cut off. The pandemic can only have made that worse. So, I think that there's in the post-COVID world, helping to build communities for young people, both sort of within the University and beyond the university and helping them feel part of those communities. It's incredibly important.

Dr. Stella Mi-cheong Cheong (33:40)

I agree that the separate point that you mentioned, the compassion and belonging, that their community, those kinds of affective dimensions that have been ignored, honestly, and the theory or practice, but the pandemic enables us to rethink those kinds of value and norms for me, I have inspired that you are in Tronto's (2013) book, ‘Caring Democracy’ because she, I highly recommend this book, she argues the care is not just mean, the sense of pity she extends the meaning of caring or care is kind of it is the responsibility. And as you mentioned, compassion or so we all as human beings who struggle or challenge during the Covid or post-Covid, we have to teach those kinds of affective factors or aspects of compassion and a sense of belonging. Alright, so following up on this question, I'd like to ask you, as a lecturer, what suggestions do you have for other lecturers who might also be interested in integrating citizenship education into their own teaching in higher education or other institutions?

Dr. Piers Von Berg (35:05)

Thanks. Stella. Yeah, this is a really difficult question for me, because when I did this research, it took up quite a bit of time, and quite a bit of energy as part of my normal research activities. And because it was action research, I was speaking pizzas before my workshops to feed my participants as it's something that takes up quite a lot of your energy. And I think there's some interesting work going on at the moment around the well-being of staff engaged in these kinds of activities in higher education that are involved in community engagement and service learning within the current climate of higher education that the points that I mentioned in my earlier answer. And so that's why I think it's very challenging. How do activities that involve cultivating the students as citizens fit into the priorities of universities that are trying to ensure that students reached the end of academic programmes and that those students remain relatively satisfied with the university's programmes? And that 18 months after graduating, they are in professional work. And in the very first place, these people are attracted to come to the university. Those points constitute important metrics in the league tables, where these privatised institutions compete against one another for the attention of school pupils and other applicants that are coming to study with them, who are there, in most institutions, their main source of revenue. So it's within that world that trying to sort of carve out time in our workload allocation, the number of hours that we're allowed to do these activities, and having conversations with heads of school associate Dean's in charge of education and student experience is a really both appointed practice. And I think a really interesting area of research. And once I've done some of the writing on this, I would really like to design my next research intervention as one that involves not only other teachers but decision makers in the university to explore questions of how this activity is perceived. How does it fit with some of the key performance indicators? Can it be integrated into staff’s workload allocation? Perhaps some of those questions, I'm not sure if those are the exact research questions, I think, even if these sorts of activities for my part, if they're carried out in liminal spaces, which is not necessarily part of the curriculum, then they're still part of my workload allocation. How are these hours going to be justified? I have some reasons for that, which is, I think that clearly, these sorts of activities can help sustain the student's well-being the mental health point, it can help students feel integrated into the community by quite simply making friends and feeling that they belong in the city, which they are not often they're not from that city. It's a new place that they're living, and it generates new ideas and questions and New Horizons, for where they want to go with their degree and where they want to go after they have been at university. There's no getting way that people go to university to advance in life. And I think these activities can start to challenge some of the norms, beliefs and values underpinning that journey. And so it can stimulate ideas for students if maybe they want to form a particular extracurricular society, maybe they want to choose other modules, or maybe you've moved to a different programme after the ideas they've gained from these types of activities. And so I think if we start to imagine it as rather, either the commercial world of universities or citizenship, but we've got to kind of accept this reality and think complementary terms. How can the two coexist? How can they complement each other without one being undermined or just being turned into a marketing exercise, and just a performative kind of bad-wearing exercise? And so those are the sorts of things that I'd really like to explore, not on my own, but in collaboration with other lectures, and in dialogue with decision-makers at an institution.

Dr. Stella Mi-cheong Cheong (39:24)

Wow, Piers, once again, thank you for sharing your thoughts and experiences inside. Thank you. Again, I'm going to stop here because my colleague, Rowena might have other questions. So, I will pass it over to Rowena.

Dr. Rowena Azada Palacios (39:37)

Thank you so much, Stella. Piers, that was really, really inspiring. And while you were speaking, there were just so many thoughts going on in my head. And I think underlying your research is really a critique of the university itself, or at least the university in its current form, which I found very powerful. So, my question is, I'm having gone through this entire journey of doing this research and doing all of these experiments with your students. How has this entire research journey changed the way that you teach and how has it changed your own identity as a lecturer?

Dr. Piers Von Berg (40:13)

That's a really good question. I was just listening to what you said when he said to experiment with the students. It was also an experiment for me, as well, I was exercising my own civic identity and agency in doing this activity, and the choices, the political choices that I was making the ethical choices had to explain to the students think about and justify to them. And for me, it was very challenging because my doctoral research was done within a full-time job, and done within an environment that was quite challenging for the ethos of what I was doing. I'll make no bones about it. Universities have adopted ideas of citizenship and citizenship education and put them into programmes in liminal spaces outside of courses, with results that some of the research tells us are actually undermining some of the ideas of citizenship because they're being done to promote the employability of the students. And I found certainly in my first scoping research with the students that there was a lot of cynicism amongst students around universities promoting these sorts of ideas because they didn't think it was genuine or authentic. They were quite acutely aware of some of the things which I've mentioned about the higher education environment. So, for me as the lecturer when I came out the other side of it, I felt quite bereft, actually, not knowing what course to take with this type of work, not feeling that it really belonged at a university and asking, Well, does it belong in university, and as you said, it was a critique of the university. And as I was saying to stellar an answer to the other question, I think that once you've finished your doctorate, you've taken that moment to have a deep breath, had some rest and rested your brain more than anything else, and started to put the ideas out there. I've just tried to finish an article at the moment, but with some of those ideas out there, you start to come out of the other side of it. And you start to think, okay, maybe there is a further stage to take us to, because, with participatory action research, it's emotionally quite draining. It's a lot of activity, you need to fit it into your every day. And so, I think for me, I would like to stay engaged with those questions that I mentioned to stellar and explore what that would mean, for me as a lecturer. What kind of citizen would I become as a lecturer? Because at universities, they talk about academic citizenship, which often is, did you provide a service to the university? Did you provide a service to the community? We actually spend six months of the year in a classroom with students where people are learning, all sorts of things that have civic content, what are we doing there? That's one of the things that I want to explore as can lecturers have a role as civic educators within obviously, all of the constraints and opportunities to the environment. That we have unanswered questions, I'm afraid at the moment, but some really worthwhile challenges.

Dr. Rowena Azada Palacios

Thank you, Stella, and Thank you, Piers.

Dr. Stella Mi-cheong Cheong (43:25)

Do you want to share or mention anything else to your work that has not yet come up or reflections on this episode?

Dr. Piers Von Berg (43:30)

I think that it's important for people working in the field of citizenship education and human rights education to engage with people with different political views. And with those with views that could be from different sides of the political spectrum because all sorts of political choices are made in this sort of education. And it is a very political sort of education that we're doing. And I hope that whilst I think it's very helpful to network between ourselves, I hope that I have opportunities to step outside that environment where there are more challenging responses and objections and denials to the sort of work that I'm doing because I think that would certainly help for me to learn, and to engage with others who might not normally see this type of work. And I think it's also in the same vein, helpful to have conversations with those outside the citizenship education, human rights and that field, with those who are teaching day to day and running academic departments in universities who have a lot of life experience, to lend, who have particular views to contribute, but also can learn from the work that we're doing. So, I think it's valuable, I think, for this type of work because it aspires to be transformative. It seeks to change the social conditions in which it finds itself that it engages constructively and biologically with the other actors and the other people in that world. And that, of course, also must include students and indeed other actors in the university such as those working to support the students in various service roles or, indeed in the student unions. So that would be my final thought. My very last thought would be to say thank you very much for this opportunity. It's so glad that as I said that anyone actually reads a thesis and then asks you questions about it and is really interested in the work. So, I really appreciate the interest and for giving me this opportunity to disseminate it through your podcasts to other people that can hear about it.

Dr. Rowena Azada Palacios (47:20)

Thank you, Piers, it was extremely interesting and inspiring and as someone who also lectures, it actually gives me quite a few ideas of how I wait. Think about my own teaching. So thank you. Thank you, Piers, and many thanks for your time. And for your really interesting contribution. It was really great to talk with you and have this conversation. As I said, I was inspired as well by everything that you shared from your experiences. And as somebody who lectures me, it's also given me a lot to think about my own teaching. So to close the episode, I'd like to thank our listeners for listening to conversations for citizenship. We hope you enjoyed this episode. Be sure to subscribe to Conversations 4 Citizenship. And look for us on Twitter @c4c_ed (conversations4citizenship). A transcript of today’s conversation with Dr Piers von Berg can be found at www. conversations4citizenship.com. In the upcoming episode, we will be speaking with Prof. Jonathan Corpus Ong from the University of Massachusetts - Amherst whose research is about disinformation, global media ethics and digital politics. This episode of Conversations4Citizenship was produced by me, Dr Stella Cheong, Dr Adam Lang and Kamille Beye, recorded and sound mixed by Dain Jeong. Thank you!

EPISODE SUMMARY

In the second episode of Conversations4Citizenship, Dr. Stella Mi-cheong Cheong interviews Dr. Piers Von Berg at the University of Plymouth, who shares his insights into the experience of citizenship among undergraduate students and what pedagogical innovations can help foster citizenship education at a UK university.

EPISODE NOTES

In this episode, we speak to Dr. Piers von Berg about the citizenship education that enables students to nurture civic identities and civic agency in the UK. He starts his conversation about why he became interested in citizenship education at the university level. He regards university as a perfect place to explore how student identities were being changed as they interacted and encountered a range of differences. Other than that, he talks about the concept of global citizens and the role of citizenship education in times of pandemic.

Piers through her doctoral research describes how he uses an action research approach, drawing on the critical theories that include Friere’s ideas of authentic reflection, Mezirow’s theory of transformational learning and Boal’s forms of Forum and Image Theatre. This episode is hosted by Stella Cheong, together with Rowena Palacios. We hope all listeners enjoy this episode.

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the podcast through Apple, Google, Spotify or Amazon Music. You may also follow @c4c_ed on Twitter; we look forward to hearing your feedback and your stories. If you would like to explore the possibility of participating in our podcast, do not hesitate to reach out through the online participation form or email us at info@conversations4citizenship.com

List of further readings

Von Berg, P. (2021). Cultivating the civic identities and agency of undergraduates at a university in the UK (Doctoral dissertation, UCL (University College London)).
Von Berg, P. (2019). 'Exploring the development of a hybrid and synthetic meaning of citizenship at a British university law school'. Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning, 7(2), 52-74. https://www.ajol.info/index.php/cristal/article/view/191947
Gooch, K and von Berg, P. (2019). 'What Happens in the Beginning Matters in the End: Achieving Best Evidence with Child Suspects in the Police Station'. Youth Justice, 19(2), 85-101. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1473225419868840?journalCode=yjja
Von Berg, P (2018). ‘Civic Education at Higher Education: Lessons from Azerbaijan’ in Hazeldine, G, Morgan, D and Salem, A (eds.), Higher Education in Post-Communist States: Sociological Perspectives. Stuttgart: Ibidem.
Von Berg, P and Rich, B. (2017). ‘One strike and you are out? Judicial review of criminal matters and interpretation of the procedural rule on ‘totally without merit’ applications’, Criminal Law Review, 6. https://pearl.plymouth.ac.uk/handle/10026.1/13284
Von Berg, P (ed) (2014). Criminal Judicial Review. London: Hart Publishing. https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/criminal-judicial-review-9781849468305/
Von Berg, P. (2014). ‘Children, Young Persons and Juveniles’, ‘Remedies’ (with Ball, D), ‘The Police’ (with Taylor, R), ‘Magistrates’ Courts’ (with Parkes, S) in von Berg, P (ed) Criminal Judicial Review. London: Hart Publishing.
Von Berg, P (2013). ‘Children’s evidence and new EU Directives’, Archbold Review, Issue 3, April 12, 2013. https://www.archbolde-update.co.uk/PDF/2013/Archbold%203-2013%20v%203.pdf
Von Berg, P (2004). ‘Civic Education and Young People in Azerbaijan: results and implications, in Papoutsaki, V and Zurabishvili, T (eds), Caucasus Higher Education in Transition. Tbilisi: Civic Education Project, Caucasus.
Von Berg, P (2002). ‘A Question of Method: Challenges of Teaching in Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan’, in Salem, A (ed), A Question of Method: teaching social sciences at post-soviet universities. Budapest and Washington DC: Civic Education Project.