Teachers’ Beliefs on Fostering Democratic Values and Skills in Bangla Language Classroom
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Abstract
This paper advocates the necessity of developing democratically responsible citizens to build a sustainable society, recognizes the importance of practicing democratic skills and values in building democratic citizens, and subsequently explores the teachers’ beliefs and views on fostering democratic values and skills in Bangla language classrooms through teaching-learning practices. In doing so, this paper uses primary data collected from 4 teachers with semi-structured interviews respecting the constructivist perspective. In addition, this study focuses on five democratic values and skills: shared decision-making, knowledge generation, acceptance of diversity, informed decision-making, and participatory evaluation, as necessary for secondary-level students in Bangladesh. This paper finds that the participant teachers highlighted the scope of fostering democratic values and skills through classroom teaching-learning practices and acknowledged the importance of facilitating them in the Bangla classroom in order to develop future democratic citizens. The findings also pointed out some challenges to the seamless practice of those values and skills. This paper calls for policymakers to revise the existing secondary curriculum and a particular intervention in teacher training programs.
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