What Kind of Citizen?
My citizenship education was very much a personally responsible citizen. With every election, we learned how to fill out a ballot and had a school vote. We were never given any information about who the candidates are and what their parties stood for. Often, when asking friends after they just voted for the one name, they recognized: the person already in power in our district. Just like Dr. Mike Cappello said in the podcast, we learned to stand at appropriate moments. Each day announcements would begin with a treaty acknowledgement followed by no action. This approach to the curriculum prepared us to be good citizens who vote (but do not know what they are voting for), follow the rules, obey laws, and be responsible. This approach did not teach us that we can take action to organize community efforts. We did not learn that we needed to challenge social structures and systemic oppression. We were only taught to donate when we can and follow the rules.
In the article What Kind of Citizen? The Politics of Educating for Democracy by Joel Westheimer we learn about three different types of citizens. The personally responsible approach to citizenship tells us what kinds of citizens the schools and government would like to make. As Dr. Mike Cappello said, Saskatchewan, rooted in colonial views and racism, does not want to produce what the article calls justice-orientated citizens. So, they create personally responsible citizens to maintain the status quo. This teaches us that here, in Saskatchewan, the government and curriculum makers do not want change. The curriculum makers value the status quo, and they want to produce citizens that do not challenge the status quo. They want to create polite, law-abiding, tax-paying citizens who allow the same systems of oppression to keep others down. They want to create citizens who do not know how to address areas of injustice or how to affect systemic change.
If a place aims to create participatory citizens, they want to develop active members of the community. The curriculum makers value the community and have students learn how they can organize and build community programs. They want to create the citizens that, as the article states, can “organize the food drive” instead of just contributing to it. If a place takes an approach to create justice-orientated citizens, they strive to make their community a better place truly. Curriculum makers value teaching about social injustices and how to address the root causes of these issues. They want to produce citizens who can critically think and challenge the status quo. They want to create the best kind of citizen.
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Hi Brooke,
Thank you for your post, and before commenting, I’d also like to thank you for something else, and that is that I’ve noticed you are the classmate in this course who often is willing to start-off discussions, whether we are in the larger course setting or within the breakout room settings. This is so appreciated as sometimes, though not always, I feel a bit under confident about contributing my thoughts so your leadership in this area has helped me, thank you.
When reading your blog on this topic, the first thing that came to mind was that even though our schooling happened in different eras, and perhaps with different political parties in place during those eras, we both were educated with personally responsible citizenship. This leads me to understand that our province wants to have members who will have certain characteristics, including recognizing the need to help others, and to show responsibility in all that we do, though in Dr. Cappello’s podcast, it was reinforced that we must also show responsibility in all that we think.
In our class on October 16th, Professor Hildebrandt mentioned that each level of citizenship, as identified in the “What Kind of Citizen? The Politics of Educating for Democracy” article is valuable, a contributing member of society, though we need to offer an education that can provide learnings for all types of citizenship. We need everyone’s input or “piece of the puzzle” in order to formulate or activate the “whole picture.”
In another course I’m taking this semester, one of our viewings was the documentary “The Need to Grow” which taught us the impact that some agricultural practices are having on our soil. This documentary meant a lot to me as my knowledge in this area is very, very limited and though I learnt from everyone’s viewpoint in the documentary, I’d like to share one of the participants stories from the documentary as I believe it exemplifies the personally responsible, participatory and justice-oriented forms of citizenship that we are learning about in this course. In the documentary, we meet Alicia, who as a girl scout noticed that there were GMOs in the cookies they were to sell for fundraising purposes. Her Mother was raising her children to have healthy eating habits, so knowing that GMOs were not a healthy ingredient in food, Alicia and her Mother went above and beyond to bring attention to this ingredient in the cookies. It took 4 years but eventually the GMOs were taken out of the cookies. She was also one of the people responsible for starting a garden, and a seed library at her school, and she went even further and made a seed library at two other schools.
Alicia’s example is one that I hope to bring into my future classroom in that we can take an issue, whether it is environmental or otherwise, and go more deeply into it, really look at it and act upon it. I will leave you with a question that I have been thinking about, and it is as a future educator, do you already know of any issues you would like to delve into with your students?
Thank you for your time. Take care. Leanne
Hey Leanne! Thank you so much for your kind words! It means a lot to me that people appreciate my starting of conversations when sometimes I feel like I should just stay quiet! That is such a great question you ask! I hadn’t really specifically thought about it. I know I would like to include the voices of minority groups in literature in my classroom! Maybe when addressing the social injustices of these groups, I can talk about how to organize a protest, and what they can accomplish.
Have a great week!
Brooke