implementing education for democracy
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It's easy to talk about why democracy education is important. It's easy to pull together content about democracy.. even stuff for kids. But it's a lot hard to conceptualize what the practice of democracy education should look like. Clearly it doesn't just involve sitting and listening to lectures about democracy. But then what? Building on some of the work I did last year on education for democracy, I have developed a new guidebook for educators on how to put some of the theory into practice, and how to support some of the content with authentic experiences doing democracy.
The guidebook is actually an application of something deeper that I'm working on.. Aroundsquare's social transformation model. I'm exploring how we might, if we really want it, undertake to make some meaningful changes in our societies, in our organizations, and in our schools. I'll be elaborating on this in future posts, but essentially, it involves taking a situation, a context, a status quo.. deconstructing it to identify the factors involved with it, and identifying the values and principles embedded in those factors. Once we've done that, we can start a process of reorienting those factors to reflect the values and principles that we actually want. In this case, those associated with democracy. That's how we change the hidden curriculum from something bad into something good.
