**1. Introduction**

What is citizenship education? Why teach it? How to teach it? These are common questions teacher candidates in my teacher education program wonder as they prepare to become elementary school teachers. Teacher education is where preservice teachers are introduced to curriculum subjects (content knowledge) and methods for those subjects (pedagogical content knowledge). And so, what of elementary school subjects and citizenship education? Unlike literacy, science, and mathematics, citizenship education is not a traditional subject area. Traditionally, citizenship

education may be nestled inside of standard subject areas like social studies; yet, depending on how social studies is taught, citizenship education may not exist at all. Teacher education is the ideal place for introducing and connecting foundations of education to practice; that is, inspiring and demonstrating the power of rationale development for teaching subject areas and reflecting on how and why to teach what is required.

Citizenship education can be the philosophical underpinning or vision for teaching in the elementary school classroom. This chapter explores how citizenship education may be developed as a perspective and pedagogical approach to teaching. By developing a vision or perspective for citizenship education teachers can incorporate contemporary approaches like critical inquiry-based pedagogy to teach citizenship in all subject areas. Social Studies will be used to demonstrate how content can be used to activate strong understanding and engagement with citizenship. The first part of the chapter explores perspective taking and the contemporary pedagogical concepts of inquiry and critical pedagogy and how they work together. Drawing examples from previous studies of elementary school teachers, this chapter include portraits of classroom teachers' work using a critical inquiry-based approach. The second part of the chapter shows how resources can be used in teachers' planning to design learning that is nestled in citizenship education. Government curriculum documents as well as teaching resources can support perspectives when applying a critical-inquiry lens to citizenship education.
