The two types of citizenship education that were the main focus in my K-12 schooling were the Personally Responsible Citizen and the Participatory Citizen. I think that these two types of citizenship education were used because they are the easiest to implement in a classroom setting. These types are also easiest to teach because they do not require conversations that are centered on politics or other controversial subjects. These types are also easier than the Justice Oriented Citizen because they do not require a deeper look into the cause of issues; instead they only focus on the surface of the issue.
My school did a lot of Participatory Citizen teaching. In our Christian Ethics classes we would often organize food drives through events such as Haunted Houses that required a food bank donation for entry. In grade 11 my Environmental Science class also organized a community wide clean up to encourage people to go out into the neighborhood and pick up garbage on Earth Day.
There were also instances at my school where we engaged in Personally Responsible teaching. Before organizing a full community wide cleanup, my class would just go out into the community of the school and pick up garbage ourselves.
I remember those types of teaching being really impactful because it made me feel as if I could make a difference in my community and that it wasn’t that difficult to help others. I always enjoyed those experiences and I feel like I gained a lot from them. Justice Oriented learning was missing however. I think it would have been very beneficial to learn about the root cause of issues so that we could better understand how those issues could be solved and what steps would move us, as a society and a community, in the right direction to solve the issues.
I think that the two types of learning that I experienced made it possible for everyone in the classroom and school to feel like they were contributing to a good cause. I also think that it made teaching social justice and community involvement a lot easier for the teachers. It was also a lot more hands on and interesting for the students. I think that since Justice Oriented learning was missing, it made it difficult to understand how the problem could be solved fully. Instead of picking up garbage every week, we could learn to address the issue of why there was so much litter on the ground in the first place and how we could lessen it (perhaps by placing more garbage cans around the community). I think that all three approaches are extremely valuable and they are all important to include in a classroom.