Twenty reasons why cross-curricular citizenship education might struggle to take flight in secondary schools: an autoethnographic review

This paper combines an autoethnographic approach with a literature review of general and discipline-specific research linked to the theme of cross-curricular citizenship education ('CE") from the 1990s to the present. It identifies 20 reasons why cross-curricular CE struggles to take flight in secondary schools. These reasons are organized into four categories: structure, epistemological, attitudinal and pedagogical. While the focus is mainly upon citizenship education in English (and, to lesser extent, in Australia), the paper suggests that the barriers identified exist in most nations.