Student Action Civics — In Classrooms Across the Globe

Smart and caring teachers are guiding students to become thoughtful and active citizens in classrooms in all sorts of schools, in all sorts of places. Here are two stories that showed up on the Web last week.

Here’s Matt Colley working with 9th grade students in Oakland (CA) Technical High School. In a nicely made video on the Teaching Channel you will hear his explanation of how he teaches critical thinking and small-group discussion skills and then guides students to consider choices of social issues to address, analyze them, and decide how to address them. And you’ll see the students at work on this as well. Readers who know about tools like the root cause tree — and perhaps read my blog post about it — will find Colley’s work very familiar. Happily, such valuable analytic tools are becoming more and more widely used.

A second video provides more of an overview of the work, described by Colley along with educators Chela Delgado and Young Whan Choi plus education professor Joseph Kahne. It also gives information about the Oakland schools organization, Educating for Democracy in the Digital Age. Interestingly, the group describes itself as promoting students’ readiness for college, career, and community.

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Now read a post by Education Week guest blogger Adam Carter, who teaches social studies to middle school students at the Schutz American School in Alexandria, Egypt. Carter’s four steps for a social action project –

· Study the issue

· Research what actions are being done to reverse or alleviate the problem

· Come up with a class-led potential solution

· Turn ideas into action.

Happily, these are very similar to those employed by many of us who are promoting and doing this type of teaching. The processes of students choosing an issue, and reflecting as a final step are the main pieces that could be productively added. In the example project Carter shares, it’s especially interesting that the students became involved in an actual micro-credit lending effort, which means more direct involvement with a recipient, rather than just donating to a non-profit.

With summer here, I hope you’ll do a bit of reading and inquiring to prepare yourself — or teachers you work with — to help students embark on civic action projects and set them on a path of active and responsible citizenship, as our schools were meant to do.

Civic Action in Schools

Written by

By Steve Zemelman, Director, IL Writing Project; author, “From Inquiry to Action;” co-author, “Subjects Matter” & “Best Practice;” Restorative Justice advisor

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