Active Citizenshipin the 21st Century

The Role of the Local Classroom in the Global World

Rationale for Teaching Active Citizenship

One characteristic of the millennial generation of students who are populating America’s high school classrooms today is comfortably similar to, and simultaneously oddly unique from, the generations of students who came before them. Like their parents and grandparents, the millennials have a deep-seeded desire to serve but unlike the two generations who preceded them, the millennials do not have a readily accessible outlet for their service endeavors. American high schools must provide those outlets.

Challenges to Incorporating Active Citizenship in the 21st Century Classroom

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has created an environment overly obsessed with academic achievement to the neglect of teaching civility and life lessons

In the 20th century, parents could be relied upon to teach these critical life lessons; in the 21st century, schools are increasingly compelled to assume this responsibility

Challenges to Incorporating Active Citizenship in the 21st Century Classroom

Students in the 21st century require an academic preparation more rigorous to what their 20th century predecessors needed and received

Students in the 21st century require a life preparation different from the one their 20th century predecessors needed and received

Challenges to Incorporating Active Citizenship in the 21st Century Classroom

In the contemporary 2010 economic and political environment, schools -- like all public institutions -- are being forced to do more productive work with fewer resources

Incorporating active citizenship into the classroom can assist students in reaching high academic standards and learning the lessons they need to succeed in the borderless 21st century

The Essential Questions of Active Citizenship

Active citizenship into the traditional classroom should be focused on helping students to answer several overarching essential questions

The Essential Questions of Active Citizenship

To what degree does a human being have a responsibility to be actively in engaged in his/her community?

In what respects is it necessary and appropriate for a person to be actively engaged in his/her community?

What talents and propensities do I personally possess that I can utilize to become an active citizen?

ObjectivesTo meet the needs of 21st century learners, any active citizenship curriculum must meet a minimum of twelve of the following criterion:

1. Student centered (x)2. Learning and doing (x)3. Using information  4. Facilitator (x)5. Flexible grouping configuration based on individual student needs (x)6. Multiple instructional and learning modalities to  include all students7. Higher­order thinking skills (x)  8. Interdisciplinary (x)9. Collaboration (x)10. Performance­based assessments (x)11. Multiple sources of information, including technology (x)12. Technology fully integrated into the classroom  13. Teachers addressing the learning styles of all learners  14. Learning how to learn (x)15. Using a variety of types of information to complete authentic projects (x)  16. Students acting as a professional in the discipline (x)

Student CenteredActive citizenship is, and must be by its nature, personally centered. Active citizenship can and will be introduced by the teacher but for students to truly learn about and engage in active citizenship it must be student-centered. While a teacher may be able to lecture at students about specific facts like government powers that are enumerated, reserved and shared, it is not even possible for a teacher to directly instruct students on how to be active citizens. As its name dictates, active citizenship requires activity. Direct teacher instruction personifies passive student “learning.”

Learning and Doing

Students will learn how to be active citizens through the process of trial and error in which they will become actively involved in their communities. There are neither textbooks nor formal how-to manuals to be a highly productive active citizen. The only way to learn how to maximize the effects a single person or a group of people can have is to do and to learn from the doing.

FacilitatorIn the imagined final classroom form, this teacher anticipates the creation of an active citizenship center, based at Susquehannock High School, financially fueled by its own attached social business and creatively fueled by the ideas and desires of the students who “own” and operate it. In this way, the teacher will serve as nothing more than a facilitator, a resource and a member of the Board of Directors, who will be an important advisor to the students who he mentors but limited to an advisor nonetheless.

Flexible Grouping Configurations

At its best, active citizenship allows students to find unique opportunities to serve their community. Students with a multitude of skills are destined to cooperate with different classmates depending upon the particular skill or skills they choose to use at any given time. Ideally, students will find multiple opportunities to serve and, in so doing, will necessarily be working with different groupings of their classmates. Also, in creating a social business to support the active citizenship efforts, students who rarely socialize or work together will be compelled to because they share similar abilities to operate the business.

Higher Order Thinking SkillsHigher ordered thinking skills are defined as those that require cognitive functions at or close to the top of Bloom’s Taxonomy; for example, synthesis, analysis, explanation and comparing and contrasting are all higher order thinking skills. Actively engaged in trying to ameliorate society’s problems necessarily requires higher order thought processes. There is nothing to be gained by memorizing and regurgitating facts in one’s role as an active citizens.

InterdisciplinaryTo write that there are enough problems in the United States and around the world to “go around” seems at the least to be cliché and at worst to be the sad reality. The problems that need creative solutions in order to be solved are so many and so different that they meet the very definition of being interdisciplinary. Problems are not isolated to socio-political issues, environmental concerns or science and technology challenges. The problems faced by society span across every imaginable topic area.

CollaborationThe problems faced by society span across every imaginable topic area. Each of those challenges crosses multiple topic areas therefore demanding collaboration among professionals who seldom communicate in their professional settings. In 2010, society’s problems are not “cookie-cutter” ones that can be classed into a single discipline; if they were, they would not plague society on an ongoing basis. Too seldom do professionals collaborate as they need to, one of the reasons why these problems continue to persist. Acting as professionals in their fields, students will need to collaborate.

Performance Based Assessments

While traditional assessments have long been assessed using traditional evaluation methods, working with students to develop themselves as active citizens is by no means a traditional academic assignment. Hence, it is imperative that a student’s participation as an active citizen be assessed using performance based assessments. What good is a test to evaluate a student’s comprehension of active citizenship?

Multiple Information Sources Including Technology

Just as the Internet democratized information distribution and communication when it became popular late in the 20th century, technology is democratizing the opportunities for global citizens to become active citizens. To engage an effort to teach students about active citizenship sincerely, it must involve bringing all tools into the classroom, especially technology.

Learning How to LearnWhile active citizenship endeavors are bound to have as much, and likely more, effect on the global and human landscapes as Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) did starting in the mid 1980s, they are still understaffed and under resourced in 2010. Hence, active citizens who are engaged in trying to maximize the value of their efforts must be able to first make their way as innovative contributors but, just as importantly, they are going have to learn how to learn, that is to evaluate their efforts and to use that learning to make the necessary and appropriate changes to their efforts.

Variety of Information TypesWhile it seems as though the thoughts being used to explain how the active citizenship proposal will meet 12 of the 21st century teaching and learning goals are redundant, some of those thoughts will be repeated yet again to explain how this goal will be achieved. To actively engage as citizens, students will find it necessary to accumulate information from myriad sources, academic, intellectual, formal and informal, information gathered from naturalistic field studies, social networking sites and information supported by detailed statistical analyses. Information gathered from all of these sources must be gathered and analyzed to complete authentic projects in which engaged citizens serve their fellow citizens.

Students Acting As Professionals

Make no mistake that just because active citizenship is usually considered outside of the realm of profit maximizing business endeavors, it is not amateurish. Pioneers in the field of active citizenship, and especially in the area of social business, are engineering new methods to professionalize the fields. Among the most innovative and cutting-edge introductions that are on the horizon are new accounting methods that can be used by social businesses, new software systems to support their unique double bottom-line business models and new human resource protocols that will be needed to serve the needs of these businesses. Despite all of the professionalization that is on its way down the social business pike, the people who are working in social businesses are still too few. Because of that, everyone who is being introduced to social business and active citizenship is expected to become a professional in the field immediately. High school students will not be an exception. In this field, they will not act as professionals, they will be professionals.

Resources / ReferencesSabato, Larry J. A More Perfect Constitution. New York: Walker Publishing Company, 2007.

Tisch, Jonathan and Karl Weber. Citizen You. New York: Random House Publishing, 2010.

Yunus, Muhammad. A World Without Poverty. New York: Perseus Books Group, 2007.

Yunus, Muhammad. Building Social Business. New York: Perseus Books Group, 2010.

Timeline

Days 1-5: Read selected excerpts from Jonathan Tisch’s book Citizen You and host a series of class discussions about the essence of active citizenship and the role it can and should play in the daily lives of the students

Days 1-5: Complete daily entrance passes and exit slips that the students will use to define and refine their understanding of active citizenship

Timeline

Days 6-15: Read selected excerpts from Muhammad Yunus’ books A World Without Poverty and Building Social Businesses and Larry Sabato’s book A More Perfect Constitution

Days 6-15: Participate a minimum of once daily in a blog discussion about the nature of active citizenship

TimelineDays 16-20: Search and post a minimum of three addresses for RSS feeds that provide information on an area of societal need that the student might be able to help ameliorate using his/her individual skills and abilities

Days 20-25: Create and post a podcast explaining the active citizenship endeavor the student is proposing, enumerating details of his/her abilities that will enable the student to assist in the manner they are suggesting

Timeline

Days 26-30: Complete first draft of a proposal to prepare for and engage in a self-designed active citizenship endeavor

Days 31-35: Post at least one original blog entry with a link to an abstract of the student’s active citizenship proposal; comment on a minimum of five other students’ proposals and offer suggestions for renovations

Timeline

Days 35-40: Apply peer recommendations to students papers to revise and improve their active citizenship proposals

Days 40-45: Meet with parents to review active citizenship proposal and solicit feedback that can be incorporated into the next draft proposal

Timeline

Days 45-50: Apply parent recommendations to students papers to revise and improve their active citizenship proposals

Days 50-55: Meet with teacher and two small group of peers (dynamic groupings) to review active citizenship proposal and solicit feedback that can be incorporated into the next draft proposal

Timeline

Days 55-60: Apply teacher and small group recommendations to students papers to revise and improve their active citizenship proposals

Days 60-65: Journal daily about the student’s personal reflections on the active citizenship at which they have arrived

TimelineDays 65-75: Complete any final revisions to the student’s active citizenship proposal and submit a “final draft” to the teacher for evaluation and further consultation

Days 75-180: Become an active citizen by carrying out the personal action plan the student has written. During that time, students will continue with periodical 1/1 meetings with the teacher, small group meetings, class discussion, journal entries and blog discussions and responses.

Timeline

Lifetime: The penultimate goal of this endeavor in active citizenship has only little to do with a class assignment. The larger and by far more meaningful goal is to help students understand the necessity for and value of them becoming active citizens; further, it is to assist them in metacognitively understanding the skill set they might employ to be the most effective active citizen they can be.

Capstone Project ObjectiveThe consummate goal of this personal endeavor is to publish and market an integrated curricular approach to teaching active citizenship within the American public high school classroom. While the capstone project is academically significant, it is still too narrow in terms of its timeframe to accomplish the effort’s final goal. Instead, the immediate goal of this capstone academic project is to develop, implement and begin to review an integrated curricular approach to teaching active citizenship in a single high school social studies classroom. Following this semester, the effort will continue with a first revision of the curriculum and the implementation of the revised curriculum. As the years progress, and make no mistake that this effort is intended to be an enduring one, the revisions will continue as will the work to scale the curriculum to size so that eventually it can be implemented in all classrooms, not just social studies classrooms and, then, in the years following that, can be implemented in high schools other than Susquehannock High School.

Resources

Support for the initiative will be required first and foremost from the district and high school’s administrators. This author is confident that the support not only exists but that it is unadulterated and will withstand some significant criticism should it arise. That is not to say that the administration has provided carte blanche approval; collectively, they have asked that the initiative be implemented with some specific considerations. All of those restraints are relatively minor and none should adversely affect the opportunity to teach active citizenship. Namely, Julie Syzsmasek, the District’s Assistant Superintendent, Sandy Lemmon, the District’s Director Curriculum and Instruction, Brian Cashman, Susquehannock High School Principal, Dr. Robert Bryson and Kim Adkins, Susquehannock High School’s Assistant Principals and Matt Amberman, the District’s Secondary Social Studies Supervisor have all approved of the effort. Some have shown unmitigated enthusiasm and others more cautious optimism but all are on-board.