What’s your understanding of citizenship? How can we relate Treaty Education to citizenship?
In basic terms, citizenship means to belong to a country and to participate actively by paying taxes and working towards bettering their countries economy, etc. But citizenship goes much deeper than that. To be a “good” citizen, an individual must not only act as personally-responsible citizen but to also take action as participatory citizen and justice-oriented citizen to create a friendly and nurturing environment for others in our country. Joel Westheimer claims that citizenship is not a democracy of sport, meaning that citizens must take action to be justice-oriented citizens. As future educators, bringing critical thinking into the classroom can help enforce this desire. Mike Capello reminds us that Indigenous education and Treaty knowledge has been overlooked in the curriculum in the recent past. In order to maintain an inclusive classroom, educators must allow all cultures and perspectives towards citizenship to be welcomed and taught in the classroom as well as strive towards aiding our students to be justice-oriented citizens throughout their education to better our society.