The ‘Failures’ of Civics and Citizenship Education in Australia

Abstract

This chapter begins with a brief summary of the long history of civics and citizenship education both in Australia and overseas. In providing this summary, I will identify some of the key findings from various studies of civics and citizenship education. I will also recognise and discuss the diversity of views of civics and citizenship education in Australia and around the world (and the different emphasis placed on participatory or direct action in terms of activism and the purpose of civics and citizenship education.

Research Portrait Four: The Montage

Despite my disappointment with the first couple of lessons, I quickly found that I looked forward to each Justice Citizens session. I believe it was due to the fact that I had ownership of this program and I was embracing the freedom offered by a student-derived curriculum. I was not determining the content, structure, outcomes and assessment of this lesson; instead, the students did these things themselves, while I guided and advised. I recognised the shared construction of meaning that was taking place between all of us in the room.

After these first lessons, I realised I would need to modify my approach to Justice Citizens. While the students were open to discussing their thoughts about communities, for many this was the first opportunity they had had to do this. In the banking model of education as described by Freire (1970), students are simply there to have knowledge ‘deposited’ in their heads, knowledge they will then reproduce in the form of examinations. There is no place for them to argue about what knowledge is, or what knowledge is important. In fact, there is usually very little choice even about how they might learn.

When confronted with the opportunity to do precisely that, most of the students were naturally hesitant. It must have been a challenge to reconsider their roles within school, and how they might subvert the dominant regime. I realised I would have to teach them how to challenge their beliefs so that they could engage with their education instead of seeing it as something that is done to them.

My first plan was to propose that young people around the world were capable of engaging in meaningful social change. For example, I found pictures of student groups in Chile protesting about the poor quality of their education and closing down schools and universities. I told them about young North Americans challenging the legal system over wrongful convictions, and French students causing change to the laws regarding the minimum wage.

I presented these propositions individually to the students in the classroom. For each proposition (for example, young people can take on multinational corporations and win), I asked students to consider if it would be possible for young people could do this and then move to a side of the room according to their point of view. To start off, most students milled in the centre of the room, unsure about this new game. I would then show the accompanying pictures and stories of the young people taking action on the issues at hand, and we would discuss what they thought about it. Soon they began to spread around the room to demonstrate their opinions.

This was the first surprise: most students spent their time in the ‘completely possible’ section of the classroom. This meant that they accepted the idea that young people could challenge corporate interests, change laws, overcome wrongful convictions, close down school systems and much more. Further discussion with the students was enlightening. Nick, a basketballer, very active in the local church and a leader in the class, explained it best. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘It’s possible for young people to do all of these things. It’s just not possible for us to do those things.’ When I pressed him on why that might be the case, he said it was because they didn’t know how. No one had shown them.

My second surprise was related to how easily the students and I could misunderstand each other. One of the propositions was ‘Young people can challenge large corporations about their health’. It was based on a number of schools in North America that had campaigned successfully to prevent McDonalds opening a restaurant on their campuses. Most students agreed that this was completely possible. However, there was a lot of confusion when I showed them the story to which the proposition referred. Daniel explained the confusion: ‘So, they were protesting to stop McDonalds’ coming into their school?’

I agreed.

‘Oh, that’s wrong. Why would they do that? I thought they were protesting to get McDonald’s built at their school!’ Quite a few students seemed to agree with Daniel.

On another occasion when we spoke about the Chilean students protesting about education, the students originally supported the idea of the schools being closed, but only because it sounded like an extra holiday. These conversations were confronting to me; they showed how illiterate the students were about the ways they are influenced by dominant groups in society. I would return to this notion of literacy repeatedly over the course of Justice Citizens. While the students in my class, for the most part, had a functional literacy in that they could read and write English, they were ignorant of the way oppressive forces shaped their understanding of the world.

The next activity was designed to identify the students’ own interests and their feelings of capability as change agents. I distributed a post-it note to each students and asked them to write their name on it. Then I projected a two-circle Venn diagram on the board. In the circles were the words ‘I care about this’ and ‘I can do something about this’ (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1

The Venn diagram

Above the Venn diagram was a topic such as ‘self-esteem’, ‘healthy eating’, ‘social media’, ‘body image’, ‘the environment’, ‘homelessness’, ‘teen violence’, ‘drug and alcohol abuse’. For each topic, I asked students to place their post-it note in the position they felt was most appropriate. The purpose of this activity was to encourage students to consider what issues they are interested in. I had taken the topics from the Mission Australia survey (Fildes et al. 2014) about young people. According to this survey, these were the topics and issues that young people in Australia were most concerned about at the time.

What was interesting during this exercise was the range of responses. I was expecting—and hoping—to see a pattern in the responses that could lead to a discussion about that particular issue. Instead, the whiteboard looked like it had been liberally dusted in yellow post-it notes. There was no consensus on the sorts of topics they either cared about or could do something about.