Curriculum as Citizenship

In my K-12 schooling I can recall experiencing all three types of citizenship (Personally responsible Participatory, Justice-oriented). The personally responsible citizenship is one that I remember most from my learning experience. We did lots of volunteer work, fundraising, and learning about this specific type of feel-good community involvement. I can recall learning about this form of citizenship from K-12 in different ways according to my age at the time. It created a vision of an ideal citizen in my mind and I viewed it as something to mirror as closely as I could in order to fit into society. When learning about the people we were supposed to be in classes we focused mainly on the personally responsible type of citizenship with some participatory citizenship learning as well. In classes we learned A LOT about problem solving and decision making (so much, that the memories make me cringe) so we got a good dose of that but I’m not sure it helped us to become participatory citizens simply because we didn’t branch out from the simple processes. I think if we talked more about the purpose behind the methods, we might have taken away more form the experience than drawing out T-charts of pros and cons in order to solve a conflict that was provided to us in writing. Justice oriented citizenship was not in any part of my school curriculum, the only reason I say we learned it is because we had a frequent substitute teacher that loved to talk about current events and pose logical questions for us to discuss and critique. At the time I considered it a way to get out of our assigned school work but It came to mind when we talked about that particular form if citizenship in class. Overall, I would say my education was largely formed around the personally responsible form of citizenship. There are many ways that a person can help shape society and I think its important that students are able to learn about what kind of citizen they want to be.

Curriculum as Citizenship: link here