A Crucial Element of Democracy

This is a blog by Robert Gutierrez ...
While often taken for granted, civics education plays a crucial role in a democracy like ours. This Blog is dedicated to enticing its readers into taking an active role in the formulation of the civics curriculum found in their local schools. In order to do this, the Blog is offering a newer way to look at civics education, a newer construct - liberated federalism or federation theory. Daniel Elazar defines federalism as "the mode of political organization that unites separate polities within an overarching political system by distributing power among general and constituent governments in a manner designed to protect the existence and authority of both." It depends on its citizens acting in certain ways which Elazar calls federalism's processes. Federation theory, as applied to civics curriculum, has a set of aims. They are:
*Teach a view of government as a supra federated institution of society in which collective interests of the commonwealth are protected and advanced.
*Teach the philosophical basis of government's role as guardian of the grand partnership of citizens at both levels of individuals and associations of political and social intercourse.
*Convey the need of government to engender levels of support promoting a general sense of obligation and duty toward agreed upon goals and processes aimed at advancing the common betterment.
*Establish and justify a political morality which includes a process to assess whether that morality meets the needs of changing times while holding true to federalist values.
*Emphasize the integrity of the individual both in terms of liberty and equity in which each citizen is a member of a compacted arrangement and whose role is legally, politically, and socially congruent with the spirit of the Bill of Rights.
*Find a balance between a respect for national expertise and an encouragement of local, unsophisticated participation in policy decision-making and implementation.
Your input, as to the content of this Blog, is encouraged through this Blog directly or the Blog's email address: gravitascivics@gmail.com .
NOTE: This blog has led to the publication of a book. The title of that book is TOWARD A FEDERATED NATION: IMPLEMENTING NATIONAL CIVICS STANDARDS and it is available through Amazon in both ebook and paperback versions.

Friday, October 6, 2017

THE ACTION PART OF THE DEAL

The last posting made a connection between dialogue and action.  Simply stated, the connection is that talking leads to collective action.  But one needs to be careful.  Talking does not necessarily lead to action and, if it does, it does not necessarily lead to the action one would judge beneficial or logically derived from such talk.  In other words, talking is usually a precondition, but other factors are involved in getting people to act in ways the collective says they should.
          In its treatment of change, this blog reviewed many of these factors from mental domains (the real, the ideal, the physiological) to the sociological/political environment of a family, an organization, a community, or a nation.  The one message that one can derive from that review is that change or social action can be very complex.  In terms of change, those who are dedicated to facilitating change need to be conscious of that complexity and understand that there is no sure recipe for success.
What a debate does, in a competitive format, is to allow a person to voice concerns over obstacles standing in the way of implementing a plan.  Students, in determining in what action they want to participate, can review their own feelings, those of their fellow students, and those of the community or other significant people who would be involved in such an effort.
With that warning, this posting shares some ideas of what kinds of actions students can initiate and work to accomplish.  The reader is reminded, that the unit under development calls on students to study an international issue, that of foreign trade.[1]  A challenge with such an effort is how does such a unit get students to meaningfully act on an issue that does not immediately make itself known locally.  Yes, some of the consequences can be locally felt, but the actual trading processes do not.
This challenge will be addressed in an upcoming posting.  This posting will look at the types of issues or topics over which secondary students can address and act.  Based on the work of Jerome Bruner and others, the argument for students being actively involved in developing and implementing political-action plans has been made.[2] 
Examples that have been given are political issues such as poverty and racial relations.  Bruner described this type of learning as having student investigate, first hand, the “occupations” or ways of life of those who live in their communities.  This is in the tradition laid down by John Dewey and described earlier in this blog.  To summarize the philosopher’s concern, most of what schools usually do – exposition and “book learning” – isolates students from real life and lacks the ability of instilling “the spirit of service.”[3]
In the literature of educational studies, such action-learning is generally called experiential education.  There is empirical evidence to suggest that experiential education succeeds in many of the aims that federation theory highlights.  That is, by students going out and dealing with the people affected by social and governmental policy and practice, they more readily engage emotionally and develop a sense of self in relation to the concerns they are investigating and upon which they are acting. 
That would be a sound foundation to instill social capital.  An insightful description of this effect, of overcoming a more self-centered view, is offered by Pamela J. Conover and Donald D. Searing:  “while most students identify themselves as citizens, their grasp of what it means to act as citizens is rudimentary and dominated by a focus on rights, thus creating a privately oriented, passive understanding.”[4]  To usher them out of this self-serving and unengaged view, nothing is more effective than political participation, especially when it is focused on relevant, local concerns.
That insight can be traced to the writings of Tocqueville in the eighteen-hundreds, a favorite writer of this blog.  More specifically, voting and giving money is not enough; what is called for is political action.  William Damon further concludes that nothing is more effective in terms of moral education than programs “that engage students directly in action, with subsequent opportunities for reflection.”[5]
More to the point, these actions can include the following: 
·        showing up for and taking part in political meetings;
·        scheduling and putting on political meetings which can be platforms to express political opinions or demands;
·        organizing and carrying out fund drives;
·        canvasing an area to gather signatures in support or against bills or other initiatives;
·        seeking to attain membership on political boards;
·        joining or starting a political club;
·        participating in debates or other deliberations over a social and/or political issue relevant to student lives; and
·        starting an educational plan that leads to an occupation that has public value.
This writer is aware of a couple of organizations that are dedicated to advance students in the pursuit of these types of activities.  They are The National Action Civics Collaborative (NACC) and SOS Outreach.[6]
          But what about the school itself?  Can it be a more accessible and perhaps a more realistic environment by which experiential learning can take place?  When one considers a school in these terms, the name John Dewey again pops up.  His writing included a vision which characterized a potential role for schools; i.e., one cannot think of a better location to encourage students to engage.  They attend this place 180 days a year.  It is where their friends are.  It is where political decisions affect them directly.  This is how Dewey saw a school site or, better stated, a school community.
He, therefore, thought of it as the ideal place to encourage and facilitate students being involved and creating a more democratic site.  And more importantly, if it is democratic enough, it can create a democratic culture – a way of doing things that reflect the values of those who attend that school.  As such it can be the site for political, experiential learning to take place.  As Theodore Sizer points out, the school site and how it is run can do more to teach democratic values than any other source.
There have been several writers who have addressed this potential source of experiential learning.  For example, Sizer writes:  “Students learn much more from the way a school is run,” … “and the best way to teach values is when the school is a living example of the values to be taught.”[7] This quote hints at the type of concerns over which students could investigate and deliberate. 
This can include every day concerns such as student discipline, school physical maintenance, social problems among students like bullying, instances of sexism or racism, or, with deference for expert input, questions concerning curriculum.  In choosing actual policies in which students could have a say, a teacher needs to give that choice some reflection.  Schools are not experiments, they are places where public business is conducted with real consequences.  So, the areas of operation that students should be invited to express their input, perhaps given a degree of decision-making discretion, deserves serious thought.
This writer was at one time the faculty advisor for student government at a middle school.  He and another teacher wrote a plan, called “Brainstormers,” that created a new model for student government.  Part of the innovation was to get administration to hand over “authority” over one aspect of school life. 
That aspect was extracurricular activities.  The central student body council determined what extracurricular activities could be scheduled and where they could take place.  Of course, any decisions were subject to oversight by administration, but, on a day-to-day basis, that oversight was not felt.  The aim was to identify that segment of campus life that students could handle and was age-appropriate for them to determine with real consequences.
Hopefully, the reader can find such a potential opportunity to socialize students to democratic life as a viable way to teach civics.  At this point, the writer, unlike many of his prior colleagues, does not see this as being “the way” for all schools or all teachers.  He has previously written about how a teacher needs to be of a certain type of teacher who feels comfortable with such experiential teaching techniques. 
Further, when one talks of a school-wide effort, the supportive philosophy needs to be widely shared among that school’s faculty and staff.  If a teacher, who wants to engage in experiential learning strategies, stands alone in terms of these ideas in a faculty, he/she needs to be conscious of that fact and plan accordingly. 
But, if he/she is committed to apply this experiential learning approach, with a bit of creativity, this writer believes the opportunities are there in most schools.  He/she should begin by contacting supportive organizations that can provide supportive ideas and resources.  Perhaps this blog can be but one such source.



[1] That development has been the topic of the past various postings; if the reader is new to this blog, he/she might review a few of those postings.

[2] “Civic Education,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2013/2007, accessed on October 1, 2017, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/civic-education/ .

[3] Ibid.

[4] Pamela J. Conover and Donald D. Searing, “A Political Socialization Perspective,” in Rediscovering the Democratic Purposes of Education, eds. Lorraine M. McDonnell, P. Michael Timpane, and Roger Benjamin (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2000), 91-124, 108.

[5] “Civic Education,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

[6] The writer is not recommending membership in these organizations.  His knowledge of them is limited to his awareness that they exist and is mentioned in related sources of information.  One such source is “Civic Education,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.


[7] Thomas R. Sizer, Horace’s Compromise:  The Dilemma of the American High School (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1984), 120, 122.

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