Objectives: While some studies have indicated that young people’s perceptions of politics focus on top- down ideas, studies have also found that young people perceive politics as being about change and shaping society. Further, researchers have argued that traditional civics instruction focuses on complex democratic processes, without enabling students to apply it to political issues. This strengthens the need to consider how to make social science education more relevant for students. The purpose of this paper is to present mutual understandings of political issues from students and academics in social science and discuss some guiding principles for defining such issues in social science education.

Theoretical framework: To analyse the data, we build on Christensen’s (2015) model of knowledge domains in social studies (topical issues, structures, and processes; social scientific disciplines; students’ life- world; democratic values). We supplement this with conceptualisations of the political from political theory.  

Methods: This paper is based on data from interviews with six 16- year-old students and five social science academics in Norway about how they understand and define political issues. The students This paper focuses on participants’ responses to the question ‘Is it possible to talk about issues as being more or less political?’  

Results:

Collective: Primarily, political issues that affect society, national political issues, or beyond, were seen as more political than issues affecting smaller groups of people.

Contemporary: The contemporary nature of political issues is most clearly represented in the students’ responses. All the examples of political issues mentioned by the students were contemporary issues in that they were currently ongoing.  

Conflictual: The conflictual nature of political issues is a theme in both students’ and academics’ responses. Such conflicts are characterized by disagreements relating to values and priorities in terms of resource use.

Contextual: Context was described as an important criterion both by students and academics, cutting across the principles of collective, contemporary, and conflictual. The students frequently mentioned that “big” and “important” issues are the most political, while the social and political context was highlighted by several academics.  

The combination of disciplinary and student perspectives in the guiding principles enables educators to discuss issues and problems with their students and work towards in-depth understanding sensitive to students’ life-worlds. Consequently, this study contributes to social science education by suggesting an empirically founded framework to use when teaching about political issues