Research seminar: “Widening the participation gap: the effect of educational track on political engagement”
Dr Germ Janmaat, UCL Institute of Education
3.00 to 4.30 pm, Thursday 29 January 2015, Room 736, UCL Institute of Education, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL
Inequalities in political participation are widely recognised to be problematic as they make democratic government less responsive to the needs of the politically disengaged and thereby undermine the public legitimacy of liberal democracy. This seminar will assess the extent to which tracking contributes to these inequalities. Tracking is postulated to enhance the participation gap because of cross-track differences in the curriculum and in peer socialization. The results of two studies will be presented, which examine whether this predicted outcome can be observed among adolescents in England. The first study uses the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England (LSYPE) while the second is based on the Citizenship Education Longitudinal Study (CELS).
Germ Janmaat is Reader in Comparative Social Science at UCL Institute of Education, and leader of the theme ‘Education, Inequality and Social Cohesion’ within the Centre for Learning and Life Chances in Knowledge Economies and Societies (LLAKES). He is mainly interested in the socio-political outcomes of education and has published widely on this topic. In 2013 he was awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship for a project on education and civic attitudes using longitudinal data sources. The current seminar will present two pieces of research he conducted as part of this fellowship.
The seminar is free to attend, but prior registration would be helpful: to register, please contact llakesevents@ioe.ac.uk.