A New Understanding of Civic Participation: Citizens in Action or Citizens in Waiting?

Abstract

The central point of this chapter will be the apparent lack of understanding about young people’s conceptions of active citizenship (although, of course, I will acknowledge that academics such as David Zyngier have been arguing against this for a long time). This lack of understanding has led to young people being mis-characterised as easily led, or as apathetic or as selfish. There is some clarification needed here: I’m not arguing that these traits don’t necessarily exist, but it seems unfair to say they exist amongst all young people. Rather, there is a need for a more nuanced understanding of what it means to be a young person in Australia in the twenty-first century. This will lead to a discussion of what level of activism is acceptable amongst young people. Curriculum often constructs young people as ‘citizens in waiting’—that is, they are passively storing up knowledge in order to act later (if at all). This chapter argues that this is an outmoded notion—young people have tools (see Chapter 4) that enable them to organise and act much more effectively—or at least with wider reach than ever before. I will conclude this chapter by suggesting that we should begin with the students at the heart of the discussions of civics and citizenship education—what are they doing, what are they thinking about, how do they consider themselves ‘active’ or not, and construct our approach to citizenship education around these ideas.

Research Portrait Seven: Interview with Talent, Part Two

As a side note, a couple of students still wanted to find out more about refugees. But again, the context was crucial; they wanted to talk to refugees about what it was like living in Australia, in Penrith.

My second idea about refugees was more of a long shot. I was receiving some funding through Penrith City Council, and their community cultural development officer had put me in touch with a young man called Yadav Timsina, a Bhutanese refugee studying to be a nurse at a nearby further education college. He agreed to be interviewed on camera by a delegation of my students. I knew which students I wanted to take with me: Emmalee, who had asked me the question about refugees the previous lesson, and her friend Liz. They agreed and we met Yadav at his college’s library after school. Emmalee, Liz and I had gone through a couple of basic filming techniques, and I had asked them to construct some questions without my help. I wanted them to take the interview in the direction they wanted.

As we waited for Yadav in the library, Liz and Emmalee nervously paced the room. They were out of their comfort zone; neither had been to this college before, and dressed in their school uniforms they looked out of place amongst its older students. Yadav arrived and was eager to help, but he was nervous too. He said he was worried about what he might be asked, and how well he could answer. I looked at Emmalee and made an ‘over to you’ gesture. She smiled, giggled apprehensively, and switched on the camera. The next 45 minutes were surprising. From the moment she turned on the camera Emmalee assumed a totally new demeanour. Gone was the shy school student, and instead here was a determined neophyte journalist.

In our conversations in previous lessons Emmalee had agreed with many of the comments about asylum seekers being dangerous to the Australian way of life. Not surprisingly, she and Liz led off in that direction, asking why Yadav had felt the need to flee Bhutan. As Yadav laid out the details of his life—fleeing the country one night, spending the next 12 years in Nepal in a refugee camp, and then finally being resettled in Australia without his brothers and sisters—I could see Emmalee’s and Liz’s ideas about refugees changing. They had probably never met anyone who had been through such upheaval, and to hear it from someone who lived near them and was only a few years older than they were made the interview process even more powerful.

The most telling section of the conversation, though, happened towards the end when Liz and Emmalee asked Yadav about his experiences in Australia. Yadav started off by saying everyone had been friendly to him, but Emmalee changed tack and asked whether he had ever experienced racism. After pausing, he said that sometimes on the train he gets called things like ‘dirty Indian’, even though he is Bhutanese. When Emmalee asked how that made him feel, he responded that he felt pretty bad.