Citizenship and Teaching are Connected?
As a born and raised Canadian citizen, I always had an understanding of what the definition of citizenship truly was. My understanding was a citizen is an individual who resides in a certain location for a long period of time. It also tends to be an individual who loves the country they are a part of.
Up until this week’s learning material: I as a soon to be teacher was not aware that education, teaching and citizenship are as interlinked as they truly are. Amidst the sad truth, I always knew that I wanted to be the type of teacher who helped her students in more ways than one. One of them being understanding the importance of being a respectful, involved and caring individual. I hoped to preach on the importance of loving and respecting all people. So activism and participating in being a good citizen has always been an interesting method I would implement in my classroom. In my understanding of being a good citizen and implementing citizenship in the classroom, my passion to preach a positive message of loving everyone fits right into that ideology.
Treaty Education and its connection to citizenship in the classroom? The curriculum of treaty education is lax. There are many mentions of Canada’s treaty history within the social studies and history curriculum across Canada, but specifically in the prairies. As the prairie province you would assume Saskatchewan would understand the importance of educating our younger generation on the treaty relationships formed within this province.
As a soon to be teacher, hearing the words “we entered into those treaty relationships as liars” (Capello, 2019), and the curriculum not involving any of the treaty history is a disturbing problem. A disturbing problem that I am beginning to understand revolves around being a better citizen. Such as embodying the mentality of a justice, participatory or personally responsible citizens.
As teachers it is our job to take the disturbing moments from our past and present and help guide them into making a better classroom, curriculum, education system and a world for our future students!