Picking up on a topic this blog has been addressing
since the posting, “Practical Turn” (March 19, 2024),[1]
this posting continues its promotion of a consumer government approach to
civics education. To remind readers, the
adoption of that approach is seen as an initial step toward a civics curriculum
based on a liberated federalism construct which features a more local, interactive
role for students with their government.
It would do this by encouraging a sense, among
the citizenry, of a partnership in which each citizen has an emotional stake in
advancing the common good – a tangible commitment. To make the case for this adoption, the ensuing
postings chose as a pedagogic model, the jurisprudential model,[2]
by which to develop decision-making, value clarifying lessons that could be
designed for this consumer government course of study.
This choice was not meant to be mandatory, but
as a responsible option to illustrate what could be done in developing suitable
lesson plans to achieve the overall goals outlined earlier in this blog. This chosen model calls on students to make
value judgments on controversial issues and this blog’s promotion opens its
options to non-value conflict situations.
Another variance is that what is being promoted, unlike the original
model, opens instructional options beyond exclusively employing inquiry-based
lessons.
Other lesson strategies can be employed
especially if lessons do not address controversial topics. Finally, the option promoted here analyzes a
variety of problem situations as they might be related to governmental actions
and/or problems at different geographical levels or locations. Those levels, as described earlier, range
from the immediate environment of students to the global settings, but at each
level they can and do affect the local political environments of those
students.
Strategies and materials to be successful, they
must be particularly sensitive to the fact that a large portion of the students
for which this approach would be used, would be from a non-college-bound
population. Experience shows, by making
the curriculum relevant, practical, and less abstract, these less academically
motivated or disposed students will find resulting lessons as more useful.
To augment this attribute, strategies must
maintain low abstraction content. Relations
between inquiry activities, for example, and problem areas need to be presented
in as natural a manner as possible.
Readings should be short and lesson exercises limited in scope, but as
the course progresses, a cumulative effect toward sophistication should be built
in and encouraged among students.
And with those thoughts, this promotion has two
more areas of concern – ideas regarding evaluation of instructional strategies
and evaluation of the proposed curricular change. These two topics will be what the next two
postings will address. Again, if
readers, who have not done so, wish to read up on the totality of this rationale
for consumer government, they can, using the archive feature of this blog,
begin with the above cited posting, “A Practical Turn.”
[2] Fred M. Newman and Donald W.
Oliver, Clarifying Public Controversy:
An Approach to Teaching Social Studies (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1970). An earlier version can be found in Donald W.
Oliver and James P. Shaver, Teaching Public Issues in the High School
(Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company,
1966).
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