Beyond Facts and Acts: The Implications of “Ordinary Politics” for Youth Political Engagement

• In Event: Is “Political Apathy” a Danger for Our Future Democracy? Possibilities for Better Educational Practices

Abstract

Paulo Freire, the late Brazilian educator and author, was fond of telling a story he heard from a Spanish factory worker living and working in Germany. The worker was hoping to organize his colleagues politically to fight for working conditions. But every time he tried to elicit the other workers’ views and enroll them in an organizing course he had designed, he got blank faces and stony silence. When the workers did talk, they appeared apathetic and uninformed, wanting only to earn their money and return to Spain once they had made enough. Not wanting to give up and knowing that the workers enjoyed playing card games after work, he began to join them. Slowly, through informal discussions about their daily experiences on the job and in the community, politics became one of the more lively and central discussion topics in their social gatherings. Political action soon followed.
Although this story derives from efforts by a labour organizer to mobilize German guest workers, citizenship education and political science researchers everywhere could draw an important lesson from it as well: the common research findings that indicate political ignorance or apathy (especially among youth) might be the result of unimaginative research approaches rather than a lack of knowledge, interest, or concern. Our research group learned this lesson after conducting a secondary analysis of our data from a study of Ottawa-area high school civics classes. The two-part study initially conducted for the Government of Canada (Westheimer et al., 2005) and then in conjunction with the Canadian Policy Research Networks (Llewellyn et al., 2007) found that many students were often disengaged, uninformed, and unaware of key issues, debates, and policy deliberations facing Canadians prior to the 2008 general election. These results initially confirmed the findings from numerous other studies that demonstrated declining levels of youth political engagement, voter interest and knowledge. This, however, was only part of the story.
The secondary analysis of the data resulted in two interrelated findings. First, like the Spanish guest workers, the students we studied demonstrated a keen interest in “ordinary,” every-day issues that affected them and their families and friends and, at times, substantial insight into the larger social and political forces at play even though typical school-based civic education outcome indicators showed an alarming lack of knowledge or interest. Second, the subsequent analysis revealed important youth assets deriving from their daily experiences that mitigate against the various youth deficit models prominent in civic education theory and practice. Both findings showcase the importance of moving beyond civic education based on either of two assumptions: first, that youth lack knowledge (facts), or, second, that youth lack civic experiences (acts). This paper draws on these findings to suggest lessons for youth civic engagement practices both in and outside of schools (References will be presented at the symposium).

 

Authors

• Joel Westheimer, University of Ottawa

• Kristina R. Llewellyn, University of Waterloo