Patterns and variations of pedagogical practice for youth civic engagement and activism across six countries

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Monday II)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Youth activism, engagement and the development of new civic learning spaces across six countries

Proposal

Literature throughout the 20th century reveals the steady exploration of a wide and expanding range of pedagogical understandings/principles, orientations, and learning experiences (in theory and praxis) related to civic engagement learning in formal and non-formal schooling contexts this past century. Earlier studies focused mostly on classroom and school-wide pedagogical practices that explicitly encouraged planned and deliberate attention to knowledge acquisition, conceptual understanding, and higher order thinking (‘learning about’ and ‘thinking about’ rather than ‘engaging in’) as important capacities for informed engagement; later in the century, there was increasing attention to public issue investigation (from the local to the global), critical judgment and communication, personal and interpersonal understanding, provision for community engagement, and a focus on real life themes, issues, contexts, and performances. In recent decades, classroom, school-wide, and community-based civic engagement pedagogies (including those outside of formal education) have continued to be studied and developed, with increasing attention to an increasingly complex range of different interconnected dimensions (e.g., equity and diversity, social justice, experiential/service learning, local to global dimensions) and knowledge bases informing pedagogical practice.

Drawing on extensive literature reviews across the six countries involved in the project – Australia; Canada; Singapore; Hungary; Lebanon and the United Kingdom – this paper extends the educational focus of paper 2 by examining pedagogical patterns and variations in practices of, and for, youth civic engagement and activism. Our analysis will consider various pedagogical orientations/distinctions (e.g., formal/informal, transmission/transformative, local/global, face-to-face/digital) in relation to the ways in which young peoples’ engagement and activism within their political communities has been, and is, characterised as “changing”.


In doing so, the paper will argue that focus on actual pedagogies for youth engagement and activism across the six countries has, in recent years, been relatively scarce. We will argue that pedagogical discussion typically centres on a rejection of passive, adult-led approaches in favour of active, youth-led approaches. While the latter focus on recognising and supporting youth agency, facilitating new forms of youth activism (such as through digital and social media) and creating open, democratic learning spaces, we will suggest that these have become part of an ‘assumed’ pedagogy with remarkably little robust evaluation as to their validity. In addition, we argue that while a number of recent scholars advocate for active forms of learning, very few justify these in real detail beyond generalised notions, such as responding to youth identities, providing inclusive learning opportunities and promoting social justice. In setting out these arguments, we illustrate our points with particular examples from Australia and Canada. At the end of this paper, and making links between theory and practice, we set out the key features of a ‘promising practices’ guide for civic educators being developed by the network.

Authors

• Andrew Peterson, University of Birmingham

• Mark Evans, OISE, University of Toronto