This post is part of a serialized collection of chapters composing my recently completed Master’s of Education degree at the University of Victoria. You can access the other chapters on this site here, and access a pdf of the completed paper on the University of Victoria library space here.
Summary
This project presents a unit framework for critical citizenship for the digital age. It addresses youth apathy in democracy, cultivates student voice and engagement in collective affairs, prepares critical thinking to produce emergent knowledge, and uses digital tools to leverage individual publishing and global communication. Building on sociological research and educational philosophy concerned with democracy and postmodern conceptions of citizenship and critical pedagogy, the unit framework presented here contains a series of assignments that can be employed in the development of critical skills such as self-expression and community building.
The assignment sequence can be used within a variety of units and lessons, with any age of student(s); while the metacognitive challenge of many of the assignments may need to be adapted to the younger grades, establishing a cycle of inquiry, action, and reflection at an early age may create lasting habits of mind that will be useful in later years of development. Beginning with an ‘establishing snapshot’ of the learner’s existing knowledge and thoughts about a topic at hand, emerging questions and goals for study in the coming unit, the plan presented here includes optional elements leading toward a variety of summative opportunities to represent learning. Following this summative effort, a self-assessing and reflective assignment provides the turn to extend an individual unit’s learning toward future work and the continuation of a critical praxis.
The unit plan is arranged to provide individual students opportunities in documenting and reflecting upon their individual growth, as well as nurturing collective insights and meaning- making among a community of peers. This process of developing individual voice and in shaping that of one’s community is central to the democratic ideals of critical ontology and the Enlightenment values described in chapter one.
Personal Beliefs and Educational Philosophy
As a result of conducting this project, I have seen my professional beliefs and educational philosophy evolve and develop more nuance in their aims and objectives. I still feel that our institutions have lagged behind the progression of society’s social, political, epistemological and technological orders, and that individual teachers’ work to transgress institutional limitations and boundaries can be of great value in creating worthy schools for the 21st century. However, I have also come to realize that our institutions are able to address these challenges if communities of willing teachers, administrators, students, and parents take ownership over and engage meaningfully in their own communities of practice. My own role in this institutional response has also become more clearly organized, cogent, and grounded in theory as a result of conducting this project.
Within any system, the progressive inclination can often become compelled toward anarchy as the paradoxical value of freedom comes into conflict with the necessity of uniformity in implementation. Just as this presents a challenge in our modern democracies, so too does it challenge our schools. The progressive citizen or educator confronts a system (of government or schooling) which itself is resistant to change as a matter of necessity, but which is still founded upon principles of renovation and revolution. As more and more participants in the system are drawn to apathy as a result of the complexity of these machinations, it is easy to feel that nothing short of a baby-with-the-bathwater sea change in course will create the conditions for sustainable growth and progress. In the years prior to my engagement with these graduate studies and this project, I often felt the urge of this anarchic sentiment as an undercurrent in my educational philosophy. This tension, I have come to realize through an analysis of pedagogy, transformative learning, and critical ontology, is symptomatic of what Gregory Bateson (1972) referred to as the “double bind,” or the “contraries” which drive an organism toward transformation. Paulo Freire (1970) referred to these moments as “limit acts,” by which we are compelled to achieve “the permanent transformation of reality in favour of the liberation of the people” (p. 102). This ultimate transformation, I have come to understand, is not a singular goal toward which we might strive so that our work is complete, but rather the ongoing goal of our own work as educators, both in the development pedagogy, as well as the habits of mind in the young people with whom we work. The traditions of democracy, born in European revolutions of politics, economics, and technology at the dawn of the Enlightenment period, were not established such that these paradigms could shift just once; rather, they were established such that the shift, once begun, might never stop.
To this end, I have come to see myself more capable of achieving change from within than I had previously. My reading into the history and potential of our democratic systems, from the public school level on through to our Canadian constitutional law, has made me more confident that the seeds for systemic change need not arise through a complete overhaul of the system itself. From the time of Immanuel Kant, to Pierre Elliot Trudeau, and still today, an ongoing process of renewal is foundational to the system we have inherited, and this has been no small thing to realize. For such ongoing transformation to be realized, I feel that my objective has been more clearly trained on cultivating my own ability, along with my local communities’ capacities, to engage in discussions which bring about a more inclusive representation of assembled interests.
Professional Implications
This project has had several impacts on my own life and study that will have further implications on my future practice, as well as those with whom I work. By forcing me to delve deeper into these ideas, and execute a prolonged defense and examination of the foundations of my recent years’ of practice, this graduate study has given me numerous ideas and inspiration for future academic study, informal inquiries, and professional collaboration. I have taken steps to improve the clarity and argumentative strength in my writing, and am further able by way of this theoretical familiarity with work in my field to articulate the why of my practice to others, traversing diverse content areas within the vastness of teaching and learning.
At numerous points in this course of study, I have contemplated taking these efforts further: working toward an M.A. thesis, Ph.D. dissertation, or other forms of publication – books, presentations, or keynotes. In many ways, this learning experience has been an exercise in narrowing my focus toward the tangible such that it can be expressed across these various public platforms. This work – developing research methods, exploring research ethics in working with human subjects, and synthesizing the results of more than a year’s study – has provided me the ability and opportunity to share my perspective with a wider audience of practitioners and academics, educational leaders and policy-makers in my community as well as online. The experience has impacted my general practice of writing and reflection and will doubtless leave me approaching many aspects of my professional growth into the future with a critical eye shaped throughout this process.
In the years prior to embarking on my graduate studies, I curated and contextualized my work with young people on my professional blog and with a range of colleagues in my building and online. These informal inquiries have shaped my own and my colleagues’ practice, and have been informed by the willing collaboration of countless students in the process. In addition to being free to engage in more of these spontaneous or extra-curricular endeavours as they arise, I am looking forward to the chance beyond these graduate studies to apply the framework and knowledge I have developed in recent years to nurturing my various communities of practice and inquiry. Whether these experiences become the fodder for future academic study or not, they will most certainly have been shaped by the challenge to articulate a vision for learning about citizenship in the 21st century and a burgeoning digital age.
These new endeavours will naturally include collaboration with my colleagues and peers at my own school, as well as in my learning networks beyond – in my district, the province, and around the world through online spaces and social media. Through much of my academic reading and consideration of my own citizenship, I have come to a new awareness of the ability of my voice to influence not only my local community, but the world beyond, as well. Having gained this experience and ability to make my own perspective heard and to shape discourse and dialogue around areas of school policy, professional development, and as our local union representative, I have acquired an outsized opportunity to help shape the reality and identity of my local learning communities. But I also have come to realize that to follow Freire is not merely to present students with the opportunities to rehearse personal and collective transformation. Indeed, to follow Freire, educators are called upon to enact an ongoing critical praxes of our own, in our own communities alongside those of our students.
Taken together, the skills and experiences attained through my graduate studies have provided me with the impetus to continue on in an engagement with the generative theme of public schooling in British Columbia in the hope that it may be transcended. In doing so, my hope is to allow that more full and active participation in the ongoing creation of our various local, national, and global communities, as well as the eventual elimination of the barriers others may meet in realizing their own participation. The process of Enlightenment demands that I do.