By Jessica Alletson, Social Science Teacher @ Glebe Collegiate Institute
This past year, Ms. Jessica Alletson wrote an incredible article that was recently published by the OHASSTA periodical Rapport, in which she mentions the role Civic Mirror played in her civic education delivery. It was so good and so inspiring that we asked if we could share it in full.
Civics: the course most students dread taking, most teachers dread teaching. We can all come to the conclusion that what is taught in civics is important, but the question is, how do we make it important to our students?
I recently attended a conference during Canada’s Democracy Week honouring Canada’s democracy, which interactively discussed how to teach and model democracy in our schools. This interactive discussion, put on by Elections Canada, hosted by CBC and TVO journalist Piya Chattopadhyay showcased a variety of speakers; Marc Mayrand (Chief Electoral Officer for Elections Canada), Ilona Dougherty (President and co- founder of Apathy is Boring) Frances Leblanc (Canadian Association of Former Parliamentarians),Taylor Gunn (President, CIVIX), and Joel Westheimer (University Research Chair in Sociology of Education, University of Ottawa). The connecting piece in each panellists’ personal history was that they all became interested in becoming involved in democracy at a young age, and they are all passionate about the fact that the missing link between Canada’s declining rate of involvement in democracy is the lack of youth involvement.
As educators, how should we approach the great task of instilling this interest in politics in our own students? Taylor Gunn suggested that instilling passion into the classroom begins with teachers, “engaged teachers engage students” he advised. Ilona Dougherty urged teachers to offer students opportunities to get involved; 45% of students who are not engaged in school activities said the reason was that they were never asked to be involved.
In my civics class this semester, I had the pleasure of running The Civic Mirror, an online simulation based program that turns classrooms into countries and students into citizens. Imitating real-life, students must care for their family of seven, providing housing, food, healthcare and education. Each student is also assigned a secret agenda outlining specific political and social objectives that must be accomplished to earn status points which are instrumental in ‘winning’ the simulation. As students learn about Canadian legislative, judicial and electoral policies in class, they emulate them within their fictional country, electing a government, running a house of commons, and upholding laws in a simulated courtroom.
Since each student is different, each will interact differently with democracy, and will become a different kind of citizen. At the conference, Joel Westheimer discussed three types of citizens that exist in the real world, the first is personally responsible, someone who votes, pays taxes and upholds the law. The second is simply a participant in democracy, and the third advocates for social justice, wanting to change societal norms. These three types of citizens emerged within my classroom, and it was interesting to see the classroom dynamic that stemmed from this experience. Our simulated society worked because no two people were exactly alike, just as it is in the real world.
I have never seen students more excited about subject-matter – they are connected and engaged in an authentic way. I have logged into the Civic Mirror platform during my prep period, only to find that my students were logged on in other classes doing their civics work! It stands to reason that if students become engaged in politics at an early age, it will fuel their drive to participate actively in democracy later on in life. One can only begin to imagine how powerful Canada’s youth will be in changing our country for the better. In the meantime, it is up to us as educators to plant the seed of political engagement, and wait to see how it will grow.
Jessica Alletson is a Social Science Teacher at Glebe Collegiate Institute in Ottawa, Ontario.
Follow her on Twitter @jessicaalletson.
View the Full Issue of Rapport that the article appeared in.
Civic mirror rox!