Young Citizens of the World


Book Description

This text takes a clear stance: Social studies is about citizenship education - citizenship not only as a noun, but as a verb, something one DOES. Based on this clear curricular and pedagogical purpose, it lays out a holistic and multicultural three-part process for civic preparation: becoming informed, thinking it through, and taking action. Six outstanding teaching strategies and teaching/learning projects throughout bring this framework life.




Young Citizens of the World


Book Description

This text takes a clear stance: Social studies is about citizenship education - citizenship not only as a noun, but as a verb, something one DOES. Based on this clear curricular and pedagogical purpose, it lays out a holistic and multicultural three-part process for civic preparation: becoming informed, thinking it through, and taking action. Six outstanding teaching strategies and teaching/learning projects throughout bring this framework life.




Young Citizens of the World


Book Description

Young Citizens of the World takes a clear stance: Social studies is about citizenship education that is informed, deliberative, and activist—citizenship not only as a noun, something one studies, but as a verb, something one DOES. Its holistic, multicultural approach is based on this clear curricular and pedagogical purpose. Straightforward, engaging, and highly interactive, the book encourages students (and their teachers) to become informed, think it through, and take action. Each chapter is written as a civic engagement which is teacher-ready for use in elementary classrooms. A set of six teaching strategies that are constructive, inquiry-driven, dramatic, and deliberative bring the curricular framework to life through intensive, integrated meaningful studies of special places, important people, and significant times. Readers are invited to rehearse the projects in their social studies education courses and then to reinterpret them for their classrooms. The projects are supported by important resources for teaching, including supportive children’s literature, links to internet sites, and visual sources and by a Companion Website that enhances and extends the text.




Young Citizens in the Digital Age


Book Description

This book explores alternative approaches for engaging and understanding young people’s political activity and looks at the adoption of information and ICTs as a means to facilitate the active engagement of young people in democratic societies.




Teenage Citizens


Book Description

Most teenagers are too young to vote and are off the radar of political scientists. Teenage Citizens looks beyond the electoral game to consider the question of how this overlooked segment of our citizenry understands political topics. Bridging psychology and political science, Constance Flanagan argues that civic identities form during adolescence and are rooted in teens’ everyday lives—in their experiences as members of schools and community-based organizations and in their exercise of voice, collective action, and responsibility in those settings. This is the phase of life when political ideas are born. Through voices from a wide range of social classes and ethnic backgrounds in the United States and five other countries, we learn how teenagers form ideas about democracy, inequality, laws, ethnic identity, the social contract, and the ties that bind members of a polity together. Flanagan’s twenty-five years of research show how teens’ personal and family values accord with their political views. When their families emphasize social responsibility—for people in need and for the common good—and perform service to the community, teens’ ideas about democracy and the social contract highlight principles of tolerance, social inclusion, and equality. When families discount social responsibility relative to other values, teens’ ideas about democracy focus on their rights as individuals. At a time when opportunities for youth are shrinking, Constance Flanagan helps us understand how young people come to envisage the world of politics and civic engagement, and how their own political identities take form.




Voice, Choice, and Action


Book Description

Compiling decades of fieldwork, two acclaimed scholars offer strategies for strengthening democracies by nurturing the voices of children and encouraging public awareness of their role as citizens. Voice, Choice, and Action is the fruit of the extraordinary personal and professional partnership of a psychiatrist and a neurobiologist whose research and social activism have informed each other for the last thirty years. Inspired by the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, Felton Earls and Mary Carlson embarked on a series of international studies that would recognize the voice of children. In Romania they witnessed the consequences of infant institutionalization under the Ceaușescu regime. In Brazil they encountered street children who had banded together to advocate effectively for themselves. In Chicago Earls explored the origins of prosocial and antisocial behavior with teenagers. Children all over the world demonstrated an unappreciated but powerful interest in the common good. On the basis of these experiences, Earls and Carlson mounted a rigorous field study in Moshi, Tanzania, which demonstrated that young citizens could change attitudes about HIV/AIDS and mobilize their communities to confront the epidemic. The program, outlined in this book, promoted children’s communicative and reasoning capacities, guiding their growth as deliberative citizens. The program’s success in reducing stigma and promoting universal testing for HIV exceeded all expectations. Here in vivid detail are the science, ethics, and everyday practice of fostering young citizens eager to confront diverse health and social challenges. At a moment when adults regularly profess dismay about our capacity for effective action, Voice, Choice, and Action offers inspiration and tools for participatory democracy.




Building Better Citizens


Book Description

Educating for citizenship was the original mission of American schools, but for decades that knowledge—also known as civics education—has been in decline, as schools have shifted focus to college and career, STEM, and raising reading and math scores. But over the last few years, spurred on by political polarization and a steep decline in public understanding, civics education is seeing a nation-wide resurgence, as school leaders, educators, and parents recognize the urgency of teaching young people how America works—especially young people who have been marginalized from the political system. But this isn’t your grandmother’s civics. The “new” civics has been updated and re-tooled for the phone-addicted, multi-cultural, globalized twenty-first century kid. From combatting “fake news” with fact checking in Silicon Valley, to reviving elementary school social studies in Nashville, to learning civic activism in Oklahoma City, journalist Holly Korbey documents the grassroots revival happening across the country. Along the way, she provides an essential guidebook for educators, school leaders and caregivers of all types who want to educate a new generation of engaged citizens at a critical time in American democracy.




Conditional Citizens


Book Description

This book challenges readers to recognise the conditions that underpin popular approaches to children and young people’s participation, as well as the key processes and institutions that have enabled its rise as a global force of social change in new times. The book draws on the vast international literature, as well as interviews with key practitioners, policy-makers, activists, delegates and academics from Japan, South Africa, Brazil, Nicaragua, Australia, the United Kingdom, Finland, the United States and Italy to examine the emergence of the young citizen as a key global priority in the work of the UN, NGOs, government and academia. In so doing, the book engages contemporary and interdisciplinary debates around citizenship, rights, childhood and youth to examine the complex conditions through which children and young people are governed and invited to govern themselves. The book argues that much of what is considered ‘children and young people’s participation’ today is part of a wider neoliberal project that emphasises an ideal young citizen who is responsible and rational while simultaneously downplaying the role of systemic inequality and potentially reinforcing rather than overcoming children and young people’s subjugation. Yet the book also moves beyond mere critique and offers suggestive ways to broaden our understanding of children and young people’s participation by drawing on 15 international examples of empirical research from around the world, including the Philippines, Bangladesh, the United Kingdom, North America, Finland, South Africa, Australia and Latin America. These examples provoke practitioners, policy-makers and academics to think differently about children and young people and the possibilities for their participatory citizenship beyond that which serves the political agendas of dominant interest groups.




Bring the World to the Child


Book Description

How, long before the advent of computers and the internet, educators used technology to help students become media-literate, future-ready, and world-minded citizens. Today, educators, technology leaders, and policy makers promote the importance of “global,” “wired,” and “multimodal” learning; efforts to teach young people to become engaged global citizens and skilled users of media often go hand in hand. But the use of technology to bring students into closer contact with the outside world did not begin with the first computer in a classroom. In this book, Katie Day Good traces the roots of the digital era's “connected learning” and “global classrooms” to the first half of the twentieth century, when educators adopted a range of media and materials—including lantern slides, bulletin boards, radios, and film projectors—as what she terms “technologies of global citizenship.” Good describes how progressive reformers in the early twentieth century made a case for deploying diverse media technologies in the classroom to promote cosmopolitanism and civic-minded learning. To “bring the world to the child,” these reformers praised not only new mechanical media—including stereoscopes, photography, and educational films—but also humbler forms of media, created by teachers and children, including scrapbooks, peace pageants, and pen pal correspondence. The goal was a “mediated cosmopolitanism,” teaching children to look outward onto a fast-changing world—and inward, at their own national greatness. Good argues that the public school system became a fraught site of global media reception, production, and exchange in American life, teaching children to engage with cultural differences while reinforcing hegemonic ideas about race, citizenship, and US-world relations.




Becoming Citizens in a Changing World


Book Description

This open access book presents the results from the second cycle of the IEA International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS 2016). Using data from 24 countries in Asia, Europe and Latin America, the study investigates the ways in which young people are prepared to undertake their roles as citizens in a range of countries in the second decade of the 21st century. It also responds to the enduring and emerging challenges of educating young people in a world where contexts of democracy and civic participation continue to change. New developments of this kind include the increase in the use of social media by young people as a tool for civic engagement, growing concerns about global threats and sustainable development, as well as the role of schools in fostering peaceful ways of interaction between young people. Besides enabling the evaluation of a wide range of aspects of civic and citizenship education, including those related to recent developments in a number of countries, the inclusion of test and questionnaire material from the first cycle of the study in 2009 allows the results from ICCS 2016 to be used to examine changes in civic knowledge, attitudes and engagement over seven years.