Recently, the National Academy of Education released a report, edited by Lee, White and Dong, entitled Educating for Civic Reasoning and Discourse. Naturally, it falls within my areas of interest, although the phrasing of civic reasoning and discourse, as opposed to something like active citizenship education, is a term that I don’t personally use, for a variety of reasons. It’s an interesting comparison, too, with the recently released review of the Australian Curriculum, which I’ve examined from the point of view of civics and citizenship education.
The report itself takes the form of a series of chapters by well known researchers and educators in the field. I will comment on them individually (or at least those that interest me) in later posts, but for this post, I’m going to concentrate on the Executive Summary, which was drafted by all of the authors.
The first thing is that it makes the case that civc education has never been more important. There are some semantic differences here – civic in this case is used to relate to the civic sphere or civil society, not as it is usually used in other settings, to refer to the institutions or mechanics of governance, and citiziesnhip refers to other forms of particiaption. I find this segregation unhelpful, because I think the division between the two is increasingly arbitrary, and a valid conception of citizenship needs to do both.
However, I am interested in their definition of civic reasoning:
To engage in civic reasoning, one needs to think through a public issue using rigorous inquiry skills and methods to weigh different points of view and examine available evidence. Civic discourse concerns how to communicate with one another around the challenges of public issues in order to enhance both individual and group understanding.
To me, this is more than civic reasoning – we’re now moving into what I would call civics and citizenship education proper. I was also pleased to see a focus on a broader definition of citizenship than the strictly political definition that is often used. This wider definition is more inclusive, and the report makes clear that they intend everyone, regardless of citizenship status, to participate in civil society.
The executive summary makes the following recommendations for practice:
- Education for civic reasoning and discourse should integrate issues of identity development as well as moral and ethical development.
- Learning the complex demands of civic reasoning and discourse requires attention to self-examination of implicit bias, problems of conceptual change, and weighing multiple points of view.
- Civic learning should occur in classroom climates that are conducive to student discussion and engagement. Teachers should encourage student voice and engagement by respecting and drawing on diverse student experiences.
- Education for civic reasoning and discourse should be taught through project-based, inquiry-oriented curricula and practices.
- Learning to engage in civic reasoning and discourse should explicitly include strategies to help students gather, analyze, and thoughtfully circulate information in digital and other media, including identifying and combating misinformation.
- All of the core subject areas can contribute to the range of knowledge, skills, and dispositions that students need to develop in order to investigate problems that emerge in the public domain.
- Teachers and administrators should be effectively prepared to create high-quality civic learning opportunities that (a) are addressed across the curriculum, (b) build on the strengths and experiences of students, and (c) take students’ developmental needs and trajectories into account.