Civics Education in the New Normal
Are Canadian students being set up for success as adults in a democratic society? A functional democracy requires its citizens to participate fully in its collective institutions, which exist to serve the public interest and create public value. In this episode, we are looking at the role that civics education plays in creating a healthy, happy society. We believe that a strong civics education provides up & coming citizens with the relevant knowledge and toolsets necessary for participating respectfully in the political process to achieve the social outcomes that they want. Some observers claim that current civics curricula are inadequate in preparing students for their adult roles as civic participants.
In this episode, we have invited two experts to join us for a conversation about the role of civics education in contemporary democracies. Our first guest, Rebecca Rajcak, will speak about the landscape of the modern civics classroom in Ontario, and what could be improved, from an educator's perspective. Our second speaker, Dimitri Pavlounis, will join at 11:30 to discuss the role of civics education more broadly, how civics education is linked to democratic outcomes, and his work with CIVIX - a non-profit organization which leads the popular student vote programs in civics classrooms across Canada.
Further Reading:
Hess, D. E., & McAvoy, P. (2014). The political classroom: Evidence and ethics in democratic education. Routledge.
Pavlounis, D., Johnston, J., Brodsky, J., & Brooks, P. The Digital Media Literacy Gap: How to build widespread resilience to false and misleading information using evidence-based classroom tools. CIVIX Canada, November 2021.
Guests:
Rebecca Rajcak is Program Leader of English, Canada & World Studies, Social Sciences & Humanities, First Nations, Métis & Inuit Studies, and Library Services at a high school in Burlington. She teaches English, Civics and Careers, special education, and I-STEM classes. She holds a Master’s Degree in Literature from Queen’s University, as well as Bachelor degrees in English (UofW) and Education (Western). Rebecca is a dedicated and passionate anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-oppressive educator, and chairs as a mentor on her school’s student Equity Club.
Dimitri Pavlounis is the Research Director at CIVIX, a Canadian educational charity dedicated to building the skills and habits of active and informed citizenship among youth through experiential learning opportunities. He recently helped lead a large-scale national evaluation of CTRL-F, a digital literacy program aimed at helping students navigate our polluted information environment. Prior to joining CIVIX, he completed his PhD in Media Studies at the University of Michigan and taught numerous courses in media studies and digital studies at colleges and universities in the U.S.
Producers:
Connor Fraser - Executive Producer
Maria Cvetkova - Junior Producer
Host: The first question that we would ask is, what is civics education and what is its purpose? What are we trying to teach our students here?
Rebecca Rajcak: Civics education is a course that explores the rights and responsibilities associated with being an active citizen in a democratic society. Students explore issues of civic importance and the influence of social media, while also developing their understanding of the role of civic engagement and the political process in the local, national and global arenas. Students apply these concepts of political thinking and political inquiry, the process to investigate and express informed opinions about a range of political issues and developments that are both of significance in today's world and also of personal interest to them.
This course is important because it introduces students to the political spectrum of ideas, and how Canada's government is formed. It introduces learning of digital literacy and critical thinking skills, the mechanisms of government, indigenous governance systems and structures, as well as the historical foundations of the rights and freedoms we enjoy in Canada, ways in which government policy affects all of our lives, as well as the economy and also ways for students to just better serve their communities.
Host: Could you briefly walk us through Ontario's current civics curriculum for high school students and how would an average student experience the course?
Rebecca Rajcak: The course begins with introducing students to political systems and how societies are governed. Civics is a branch of politics that focuses on the rights and responsibilities associated with citizenship, the role of governments, and how people can get involved with the political process and take action on issues of civic importance.
So, the study of civics then supports students in becoming informed, engaged, and active citizens in the various communities to which they belong, whether at the local, national, or global level. The course is typically organized into three broad areas of learning: Political inquiry and skill development, civic awareness, and then civic engagement, service, and action. Students learn to analyze issues, events, and develop things that are important to them by asking focused questions, gathering information, evaluating the information, drawing conclusions, and communicating their results and their final products.
Kids typically then experience the course as being very project-heavy or project-centered. What I mean by this is that the course has students complete one project in a week, or a week and a half, deliver or produce the final product of that, and then move on to the next unit and subsequent project until the course is over in eight weeks. What I find this generally does is, result in either greater apathy or confusion about our political system.
Trends show that students are more likely to become disengaged from their learning in one of two scenarios. They are bored or they are just frustrated. If they are bored, they turn to other sources of information for their political understanding. They have to navigate a lot of misinformation that comes along with social media sites and fake news sites and all the content that goes with that. On the flip side, struggling learners who may not benefit from a class that is structured and project-heavy may become apathetic towards the whole political system in general. They leave it not really caring or feeling the need or desire to become involved with the simple step of just going to the polls and voting.
Host: In what ways is the way we teach civics in Ontario not aligned with the goals of what a robust civics education should be? You mentioned earlier that the course is only eight weeks long. Is that a constraint? Is the length of the curriculum also an issue? Or is there something deeper about the way we're teaching civics that's also part of the story here?
Rebecca Rajcak: I think it's a combination of both: The length, and also how we're teaching it. It's really difficult to cover all the content you would like to cover in eight weeks. Such as political issues, getting kids to be passionate and excited about being agents of change, how to get involved in their community to bring about the change that they would like to see in the areas that are important to them, like affordable housing or affordable tuition or things that are generally more important to a youth audience, so that there is that desire to become involved.
If the course is however delivered either too quickly or in a way that doesn't passionately engage students, they may feel it's not as important a course like maths or sciences that they should invest a lot of energy in. Especially, if there's not a passionate educator to deliver it in a way that would get them excited about how to become agents of change and embrace politics in a way that doesn't have to always end in conflict or division as it has been lately.
Host: You mentioned earlier about the difficulty of having to navigate the whole media landscape that's filled with misinformation, disinformation, fake news, etc. How could we incorporate critical thinking in the digital space in the classroom so that students have the tools to be able to decipher between what's maybe biased news and what's more authentic, genuine information?
Rebecca Rajcak: I'm glad you asked because there's been a lot of discussion around chat GPT lately too. How it is changing the digital landscape of our classrooms. I think learning how to identify and be able to spot sources of misinformation and fake news is a great starting point.
Students spend a lot of their time on social media. So, learning how to harness that power in a positive way should be encouraged. Recently, I mentioned in our conversations about the use of chat GPT in our schools and the pitfalls or benefits this technology could bring to our classrooms. Especially, since this technology is not going away. So, it's better to teach our students how to effectively engage with it as critical thinkers and as another tool to support their learning.
I refer to it with my students as having a personal assistant with you at all times. That assistant is the entire catalogue of the internet. So, in using the internet, you're going to get all the good, with all the bad too. Knowing how to sort through that information and teaching students to be able to recognize what’s important, what’s not, what needs to change and what requires more research should be topmost. So, being able to teach students how to be asking the right critical thinking questions becomes even more super important.
I see careers and civics as an opportunity for this technology to be explored deeper with the inquiry work that they do. On the flip side, the self-reflective work that they do with civics is paired with careers and navigating those two landscapes and also teaching how to have effective research skills in general, where students know how to be able to recognize an inaccurate source and not trust it as a reliable source of information is important.
Host: I want to pick your brain about something. Currently, the civics and careers classes are introduced in grade 10. What do you think about maybe moving that to grade 11 or 12? Reason is that students are either turning 18 or have already turned 18 in grade 12 and they're now at the voting age. I think it would be more beneficial to have a civics class in grade 12 and also grade 11, and not grade 10.
Rebecca Rajcak: I agree with that because when students are able to actually vote for the first time, they are usually not living at home. They might have relocated to their post-secondary school city, and their voters’ cards might be sent to their actual parents' addresses. How would they then vote in the city where they are? Also, all the new questions that a new voter might not know how to answer might discourage their following through with it. So, in a lot of ways, yes, I think moving this to grade 11 or grade 12, when the student is perhaps more mature to handle these conversations would be appropriate.
Grade 10 in general, is a challenging year for students, from experience. I don't know what it is about that special year, but it is the money pot year. It's a challenging year for a host of reasons, as students begin to navigate young adulthood. So, moving it to grade 11 or 12 when they can be having deeper and richer inquiry discussions and research would be a valuable conversation to be made.
Host: When I was in grade 10, I was like 14, and I was not thinking about these types of topics
Rebecca Rajcak: Exactly. The world's a scary place at 15.
Host: Does the curriculum require that teachers incorporate critical thinking in the digital space? From what you described earlier; it seemed a bit fluid right now. Is the curriculum actually mandating teachers right now to include some lessons to teach students how to use this content properly and in a healthy way?
Rebecca Rajcak: Yes. It is part of the curriculum to cover digital literacy and understanding sources of misinformation. I, being an English teacher and also connected to library services at my school, naturally build that in as an educator. So, I am connected to the world of research and I properly document my sources and our research, thereby having the combination that's needed in that situation.
It's not so much of just doing a quick lesson on how to identify a fake news site, but also building it in, as an intentional practice in your classes on how to have students spot a reliable source, doing an annotated work, citing pages where they have to identify, summarize the source and then answer the question: “how is this source going to help me in the research that I'm doing?” This will help them think and interact a little bit more with the text source than what they typically do today on Google: cut and paste, scan, and put into the document; and then you get this hodgepodge of a buffet of options where some might be accurate, and some might not. All they’re just hoping for is the final grade.
The question then is: how do we build in that critical thinking all throughout, so that they're constantly questioning whether a source is referred to once or in multiple platforms, which might be a general red flag when the story is not repeated anywhere else on the major sites. Or is it something that they found on a social media website? So, I think navigating the digital spaces, should be part of the curriculum, to go over digital literacy, but it has to be paired with knowing how to do effective research, too. If students aren't necessarily going deeper with their research skills in a grade 10 course, how deep can you really go? I think it needs to be built in as a regular unit, which might be something that's overlooked in a grade 10 civics class.
Host: Is digital literacy only worked on in the civics classroom or is it something that spans the other courses?
Rebecca Rajcak: It is built-in throughout a lot of subject areas, but predominantly with careers. They get the career literacy side of things on how to budget financial literacy, and then it's paired nicely with civics to look at when we talk about government budgets and the amount of money that maybe governments are spending. That also feeds into understanding the digital literacy aspect of that, and then also navigating the digital landscape that students are constantly getting their sources of information from, too. It is built in through the other subjects, but there is a greater opportunity to go deeper within civics, especially since in grade 10, they also are taking history. That is a year that they are learning a lot of these research skills and how to go deeper with that inquiry process.
Samantha Tristan: Rebecca, you mentioned that there is a high volume of projects in civics education right now. What are examples of good projects for students to complete and why?
Rebecca Rajcak: Great question. I like to frame my entire civics class as opportunities for more assessment rather than projects. So, as teachers, we go down that rabbit hole of thinking that we have to mark everything to have that data for where the student’s skill set lies in the class. A lot of that could be translated into more feedback given to students on the lower stake tasks so that they have an opportunity to improve and practice before they hand something in for a major evaluation.
That gets away from being a project-heavy course, and a way that I like to do that is to center student’s voice and choice; allowing them to choose their own learning path. That way, it gets students excited about the content as well. So, one of the ways that I like to do this is to embed what used to be called Civic Mirror when I was in high school, but we actually don't have access to the license at our school right now. We, however, created our own version of a Civic Mirror game, which is unlike traditional textbook or lecture style of delivery. Students can organize their own nation, and it makes learning a little bit more exciting because they can hopefully never forget the immersive play-based approach that they're taking with this.
How I organize that is students organize themselves into a political party, and they have to research what makes up a good political party, and what are the things that are needed to have a strong political leader. They have to design a platform, make a campaign and then drawing on an earlier activity that we do with Civics Canada, they then organize student votes in an election year. Our students also like to run student votes where the students vote on the election results as if it were a real thing, to compare it to the actual election results of society, just to see whether those numbers are similar or different, and where they compare.
So, we continued learning how to do the student vote. What they use is the Civics Mirror game that I rebranded and created for my students to keep this going when we aren't in an election year so they learn the skills, early on, where they have to organize by-weekly elections amongst themselves, and then a winning party is elected for two weeks, and they are in charge of the classroom or in charge of the space for two weeks and they have to design and pass a bill into law if we use monopoly money and also food and energy stamps to indicate food and energy. Then at the end of the week, we settle accounts and if the people are happy, they can re-elect the party that's in, or if they are unhappy and displeased, then they can hold another election, and campaign with the other groups, and then the students can re-elect different parties.
What this does is, build in learning without an actual project attached to it. So, in a class that is project-heavy, if I were to turn this into an assignment, kids might want to do it, but I actually get buy-in with a completion grade, where, I tell them: come with your group prepared to do this political speech. You will get a completion grade for doing it and I will treat it as an assessment for homework. That way, the students are a little more interested in doing the work so that we can follow that up with a reflection, and then that would be the evaluation.
I'm not really sure if I answered your question but I think I did in a roundabout way where I kind of addressed how I would structure it in a way that it isn't project-heavy, and gets a decent amount of grades within the eight weeks that we have.
Host: I don't know about you Connor, but my civics class was not at all like this. This sounds great. This is amazing. Thank you, and I'm happy you mentioned the completion grade as opposed to an actual assessment because I typically find that if it's assignment after assignment, it makes it more of work that I have to do. I would actually genuinely be interested in learning about this stuff but because it's an assignment, that interest kind of fades away.
Host: One final question that would be interesting to end on is, does the curriculum right now encourage or leave open the possibility of a deliberative classroom where current political topics are discussed, like House of Commons, Senate, how the machinery of government works, or are there sufficient opportunities in the curriculum for students to have and practice those debating skills on issues of current importance?
Rebecca Rajcak: Yes, for sure. I would start off a civics class by going over all the basic stuff on forms of government like the municipal, federal, all the different levels of government, and talk about the different types like what's a monarchy and what's a dictatorship and what does fascism mean. I try to make it relevant by turning it back into their world. I find that maybe I was just an unusual child who read a lot of news when I was in high school, but I find that teenagers don't really read the news now.
So, I tried to encourage them to read the news and to be active readers and consumers of the news. I like to incorporate thought books into my classes where students are sketch noting and I have a segment where they are actively responding and engaging with the news. I feel this is really important in helping to build political awareness and also worldly context, which is what we tend to be missing in conversations, and then also building in healthy discourse like how to have a healthy conversation that doesn't lead into conflict or strife.
What I really tried to focus on in my classes is taking a rights-based approach which does align ourselves with the way our society is structured. I also encourage open political debate in my classroom, and if I have any conversation that's going to infringe on human rights of another person in that room, then they have to learn to attack the idea and not the person. Those springboards and those elements are there, and it's about the delivery and the impact versus intent.
Host: Sounds like your students are very lucky to have a passionate teacher who really cares about civics despite the fact that it's only an eight-week course.
Rebecca Rajcak: Thank you. Yes, I think it's important to have that passion.
Host: Absolutely. I guess that's all the time we have today, Rebecca. Thank you very much. It was a pleasure chatting with you and learning about civics curriculum.
Rebecca: Bye. Thank you for having me.
Host: Can you tell us about your work with civics and what you love about working with them?
Dimitri Pavlounis: Civics is a non-partisan charity. We are dedicated to building the habits and skills of citizenship among youth under the voting age by creating experiential learning programs. So, our flagship program, as has been mentioned already, is Student Vote, which is a parallel election program that we run during every federal, provincial, and municipal election across the country.
We also have programs in financial literacy. We have a program that puts students in contact with elected representatives. We have a digital literacy program, and we also run a lot of teacher professional development events across the country. In terms of my own work, we are a relatively small team where everybody does a little bit of everything. So, I do everything from resource development to workshop delivery.
As you mentioned already, I spent the majority of my time at Civics, working on the development of our digital literacy program. Now, I spend most of my time evaluating our programs and making sure that they are aligned with the best practices in civic education. I find that a really rewarding work, and I find working at civics to be really rewarding because you do see tangible impacts. Working with teachers is just the best thing in the world. You just had Rebecca on, and I think you could see the excitement from a passionate teacher. Working with those people day in, day out is really invigorating and makes you feel that you're contributing to a broader cause. That's what I enjoy the most about working at civics.
Host: If I could ask you, what does civics education mean to you, or what do you see as its purpose?
Dimitri Pavlounis: That's a good question and it's a question that could probably take up all of the time. Technically, civics is the study of political processes, the role of government, the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. We always say the goal of civic education is to equip students with knowledge, skills, values to become informed, engaged citizens in their communities at the local, national, or global level, right? Even more fundamentally for me, I think that civics education is about thinking deeply about how we should live together as a public and learning how to engage with democratic systems and processes through which we could create the changes that we want to see.
Host: What does your research say about how civics education impacts the strength of democracies in terms of either voter turnout or well-being, or polarization, etc.?
Dimitri Pavlounis: This is kind of the magic question that people always ask to know whether civic education results in a more active citizenry. So first, there's a little bit of bad news, which is that unfortunately, and especially in Canada, there are very few longitudinal studies on civics education. Very little that shows conclusively that civic education, isolated from all other environmental variables, causes people to be more active citizens.
There are so many ways to define what civic engagement means. There are so many reasons that people choose to engage or not. Civic education can really only be a small part of that broader puzzle, but there is some good news. There is some evidence that connects civic education with some positive outcomes. For example, Elections Canada has found that many people who don't vote claim that they lack the knowledge to do so competently. So voting is, of course, not the only form of political engagement. Lots of people with a great deal of political knowledge may still choose not to vote, but the evidence does show that people who feel knowledgeable about current events are more likely to vote.
Elections Canada also found that young people who voted were much more likely to say that they learned about politics in high school and that they participated in an election simulation like Student Vote. There's also a mounting body of evidence showing that students who engage in exactly what you were talking about at the end of the last session, who engage in regular classroom discussion around political issues, tend to be more likely to vote, more engaged in class, more interested in politics, more likely to follow the news, more likely to engage with different opinions, and more likely to listen to those whose ideas differ from theirs. So, I think what's important here is that we can't just attribute any positive effects to, civic education in general, but rather to certain best practices of civic education.
So, a student who only learns about the levels of government, or how a bill becomes a law, is much less likely to demonstrate the skills of citizenship than is a student who learns about all those things, but who also participates in simulations of democratic processes, and spends a good deal of time talking about authentic political issues. So, while those two students might check yes on a survey asking them if they receive civic education, in reality, their experiences are not at all equivalent.
Host: Would they carry on those skills and habits and best practices for the remainder of their lives? For example, if they've already been set up with the tools and knowledge in high school, Are they more likely to take that and continue to vote throughout their adulthood?
Dimitri Pavlounis: Again, because there are so few longitudinal studies, it's really hard to track and there are so many different factors that can affect why somebody may or may not choose to engage with certain issues. We are however, starting to see a little bit of evidence that, if those skills are built and if they do get the foundation throughout their schooling, they're much more likely to continue that further in their lives, because it just becomes a habit of their daily lives. It's also important that students aren't introduced to these skills when they're 17. These are habits that need to be built up, refined, and nurtured throughout life. That we should be preparing young people to be participants in a democracy basically as early as possible.
Host: That's a good point. Starting from the last thing you said, we've really focused in the last conversation on civics education in high school. It really starts as early as elementary school. The curriculum starts introducing students to the political process when they're very young. That's another kind of dimension to civics education that we haven't talked about as much on the show. Also, you mentioned the dependency path that, if you start participating in voting when you're 18, you're much more likely to do so throughout your life, as opposed to if you don't start early.
There are some graphs from Statistics Canada that show very clearly, how that's very path dependent. The lack of research that you mentioned, like lack of longitudinal studies on civics education and its impacts on democracy, is surprising. There's a lot of information complexity here because obviously, people develop their attitudes towards democracy from a variety of different sources, not just through school. So, it's very complicated to determine cause and effect but given the importance of civics education, it's interesting to see how there's that lack of research. It seems like through civics, you are really filling a gap here or contributing to a gap that almost needs to be filled. Do you, from your experience, know if there are any other countries where longitudinal studies have been done on civics education? What do they tell us?
Dimitri Pavlounis: A lot of what I said is drawn from longitudinal studies done in other countries. There is some research coming out of the US. That's where I've been looking, but even then, a lot of that is new and the conditions in the US are very different from the conditions here, although we share a lot of things in common. Our degree of polarization in Canada is very different from the US. We, of course, have impediments to voting in Canada, but they are nothing like the impediments that you see in the US. So, it's not quite equivalent, but that is where a lot of the research is coming from that is focusing on what teachers are actually doing in the classroom and what is happening to those students afterward.
Host: Should civics education be political? As in, should there be political discussions in a civics classroom?
Dimitri Pavlounis: My short answer to that is yes, absolutely, and not only that, but all classrooms should be political. To clarify what I mean by this, however, (because people often conflate political with party politics), when I said civics education should be political, I mean, exactly what you were saying, Connor. I don't mean that they should be partisan or push a political party's agenda. Instead, I mean that civics education should be about empowering students to see themselves as active members of a democracy and to think deeply about authentic political issues and questions. These are really complex questions about how it is that we should live together as a public because the classroom is a space where students can practice being political beings. They can practice being people with their own beliefs and opinions, and how to address issues that matter to them. It's a space where they can test out ideas, where they can express their own opinions, where they can learn to disagree with others, where they can be exposed to different ideas in a relatively low-stakes way. For a lot of students, the classroom might actually be the only place where they encounter people with experiences and viewpoints different from their own. So, I think to not take advantage of the affordances of the classroom would be squandering a huge educational opportunity to prepare students for democratic life.
Host: I wholeheartedly agree with that. I think, as you mentioned, just the opportunity to view and engage with a diversity of ideas is fundamentally important. It's not something that I remember receiving as a high school student. So, I really do value that.
You said you do run a digital literacy program. How do you teach students to use the Internet constructively and informatively to be able to discern between real and fake information?
Dimitri Pavlounis: This is a big question that might require a little bit of unpacking. The program we run is called Control-F. It's a digital literacy program right now, primarily for grades 7 to 12, and of course, digital literacy is this huge umbrella term, but Control-F focuses specifically on teaching the habits and skills required to evaluate and assess online information.
So, empowering teachers to teach students how to distinguish between true and false, and more importantly, how to navigate all the misleading, emotionally charged, agenda-driven information that falls into that gray area between true and false, which is probably the majority of the content that we encounter.
In terms of where critical thinking piece comes in, it is such a tricky phrase for us because it's become a kind of ubiquitous social good, which loses some meaning along the way. So, one of the most important things we've learned, especially in terms of engaging with information in the online space, comes to us from Mike Caulfield, who's a digital literacy expert at the University of Washington, with whom we worked really closely on our project. What he says is that, when it comes to online information, critical thinking in the traditional sense is extremely important, but it only works if we already have the proper context, so that when information is coming at us fast and it all looks the same, it's really important to contextualize our information before we start giving it our critical attention.
So, there's a lot of research out there, including our own, that shows that the issue that students have with online content isn't that they aren't thinking critically. Students are actually pretty smart and pretty good at thinking critically. The problem is that they start using their critical thinking skills without having established the context that makes actual critical thinking possible. For example, they come across something and start reading it and looking for logical fallacies before they even know what it is they're looking at.
Before we start critically thinking about something, it helps to know, for example, if the thing we're looking at comes from a news organization with professional standards or an organization known for producing disinformation. A real critical thinker would treat each of those items very differently. In fact, a lot of disinformation actually works by asking us to think deeply about questions before we have the context required to make sense of them. So, this is especially important with students when dealing with information about controversial issues, and political issues, since one thing we've learned is that students are very sensitive to bias. It's really important to teach students how to deal with bias, but also that there is a fundamental difference between something that is intentionally designed to mislead the public and something that is created with the best intent to inform the public. For example, whose choice of topic might show some political slant? The former is not worth our time. The latter might be just because something is biased or it doesn't necessarily mean that it's bad or not worth engaging with. If that was the case, we have to reject most of what we consume. We might think about the bias differently if we know that the information is coming to us from a professional journalist or a subject matter expert or a political advocacy group.
So, again, the first step is to always establish the context, and only then can we make use of our critical thinking skills. Funny enough, this is the area where we seem to have a little bit of resistance, where some teachers don't want their students to seek out outside information to gain the context. Instead, we want the students to rely on their gut. It almost feels like asking students to leverage the Web as a resource feels like cheating. So, sometimes teachers will say, “well, I just want my students to look at the content and really think about it and think about whether it makes sense.” Those strategies backfire again and again. It’s a remnant of traditional pedagogy that puts so much stock in this idea of the individual intellect but we're in a digital culture. We're in a network culture. We need to learn how to properly leverage the network collective intelligence of the Web and use it for proper purposes. So that's kind of one battle that we're trying to fight.
Host: I can understand the intent. We have things now like chat GBT that can just come up with an answer, which may not be the right answer.
Dimitri Pavlounis: Yes, it sometimes gives faulty information. I think it's come up a lot. I think we overestimate the quality of its responses.
Host: It's trained by other people who could deliberately be giving it false information.
Dimitri Pavlounis: Right, and sometimes the synthesis doesn't make sense. If you ask it to cite its sources, it often makes up sources that sound like they could be legitimate sources, but they don't actually exist. It might even attribute something to, say, the CBC, but then the article was never published anywhere. So, we really just want to make sure that we understand the limitations of our technology and learn how to leverage it in ways that work for us. We shouldn't be working for the tech.
Host: No using chat GBT for assignments. No. Thank you, Dimitri, for that. We actually have a guest in studio who would like to ask a question. So, I'll turn it over to her. Samantha, go ahead.
Samantha: Thank you for a great discussion. Since the civics curricula are developed by the respective provincial government, education is something that falls under the purview of the provincial government. There are, of course, different curricula across the country. I'm curious which province, in your opinion, has the most comprehensive curriculum and what could other provinces take from it to enrich their curricula?
Dimitri Pavlounis: That's a really good question, and I'm going to circumvent the question a little bit, but hopefully in a way that makes sense. I think the first thing you have to establish is that by and large, province to province, civic education is seen as the domain of social studies and this might come as a surprise given the tenor of this discussion, but in a lot of provinces, civic education is already very well represented across the social studies curriculum. In New Brunswick for example, civics is a model that I would champion. Civics is an explicit part of social studies from grades three through ten in Ontario. We have that individual eight-week civics course in grade 10, but the social studies curriculum from the primary levels includes a citizenship education framework that aims to ensure that, every grade and course in social studies, history and geography, students are given opportunities to learn about what it means to be a responsible, active citizen in the community.
There are some provinces with some aspects of their social studies curricula that haven't been updated since the 90s and those don't quite reflect best practices. Instead of picking on those provinces, I do want to address some of the larger issues of curriculum. I believe that civics should be integrated across the curriculum. So, provinces like New Brunswick and Ontario, are having the right structure, and I think the approach that many provinces are taking of integrating it across social studies is a really good start.
Curriculum documents are ultimately aspirational documents. They outline desired student outcomes, but they don't determine what happens day to day in every classroom. So, curriculum documents can recommend resources, but they can't mandate methods or best practices. Rebecca spoke to this as well. Social studies tend to not be prioritized or well-resourced, especially in relation to subjects like STEM subjects, teachers at the pre-service level, and service level. So, training to be teachers or while they're teaching is not given a lot of opportunities for formal training in civics education.
Teachers across the country have very few opportunities for professional development at all and the time they do have is quickly dwindling, so there is this gap between the aspirations of a beautiful curriculum document and the on-the-ground reality where the curriculum becomes very difficult to implement. So that's one issue. The other issue, though, is that even within the social studies curriculum, civics often becomes optional when students arguably need it most right as they're preparing to become more independent, and have more opportunities for civic agency. So as students enter the upper grades:11, and 12 across provinces and they have more choice of what electives to take, it becomes very easy to unintentionally opt out of civics.
Provinces typically still require students to take some upper-level social studies classes, but at that level, unless you're taking political science, for example, with a lot of those classes, it's often up to the individual teacher on what to prioritize, and there's no guarantee that those courses will contain a strong civic education component. For example, in Ontario, let's imagine you're taking grade 11 philosophy. Teachers can choose from a variety of topics, one of which is political philosophy. There's a version of that class where students really dig into philosophical questions at the heart of democracy, but there is another version of that class where students talk about aesthetics instead. I'm not saying that one is more valuable than the other at all, just that when it comes to a lot of those upper-level classes, what may be a civics class for one student just isn't for another.
The last thing I want to say about the curriculum is that on a fundamental level, I think that civics education is much bigger than social studies and it shouldn't just be the job of the social studies teachers to equip students with the skills of citizenship. The questions of civics are fundamental to every discipline. What if we imagined a science class or a math class that revolved around civic issues? Issues related directly to the communities in which these students live? What if in a technology class, students had to engage, for example, in deep policy discussions about how and whether to regulate AI? So, there are some teachers who are absolutely doing this work already. Many teachers see themselves as civic educators regardless of discipline, but personally, I'd like to see this as an expectation rather than as an option.
Host: So, because teachers had to have that discretion of implementing the curriculum and the methods and ways that they would like, there seems to be a lot of discrepancy across different classes and obviously across different curricula I guess, as well.
Dimitri Pavlounis: Yes. If we circle this back to the question of digital literacy, I think this might actually be the best way that we've seen to illustrate this gap between curriculum documents and reality. So, we, as part of our program, did a study of students in Canada to see how they go about evaluating sources and claims online, and then evaluating our program. As Rebecca mentioned, all digital literacy is part of the curriculum. It is part of all provincial curricula. All provinces have incorporated digital literacy into curricula somewhere and all provinces have stated that it is a curriculum objective that students learn how to evaluate and assess the reliability of online sources. That is in every provincial curriculum.
Yet, when we look at what over twenty-three hundred students from across the country actually did when they encountered information online, we saw that they were pretty terrible at evaluating sources. I mean the vast majority were unable to differentiate between content put out by a professional research organization and content put out by a hate group. In a lot of cases, they were bad at this precisely because they applied outdated skills that they had learned in school.
In this case, we have a curriculum expectation, but there's not a consolidation of best practices. Many teachers were tasked with teaching digital literacy but were provided with outdated resources or not given opportunities to have professional development in current evidence-based best practices, and to be clear, this isn't the fault of individual teachers. This is the result of a system that requires teachers to teach brand-new material, much of which might be unfamiliar to them. In this case, unfamiliar to a lot of people with very little resources and support. So, if you look again at the curriculum documents in this case, there doesn't appear to be this gap, but in reality, it's quite serious.
Host: So, it's also not even just as much as making sure the students are educated, but it's also giving the opportunities for teachers to continue learning and developing professionally throughout their time.
Dimitri Pavlounis: Absolutely. I mean, digital literacy changes quickly, and even best practices in civic education, change over time. There's emerging research coming out that's showing that certain practices work, and certain practices don't work and if you're a teacher on the ground trying to teach day to day and you aren't given proper resources or even time to seek out professional development on your own, what are you going to do? It's what we've noticed because we run professional development events, and so we've heard from teachers who would love to come to our events and just can't, because they don't have the time. It might not be the time in some cases. There aren't enough supply teachers, for example, so the district won't allow them to take a PD Day because there is nobody to substitute for them.
There are these kinds of larger systemic problems and when it comes to civic education specifically, because it's not the priority of the curriculum, when teachers have, for example, department-wide or even provincial-wide PD, sometimes other subjects are given priority over it. So, they might have to go to (if you're an elementary teacher), PD about math education, which is important, but civic education, we would argue, is important as well.
Host: Not to mention, of course, the pace at which the digital world is changing and it will continue to get more complex.
Host: Dimitri, this was amazing. I think it was great to have, first Rebecca on the show for like a current on-the-ground perspective on how civics is being taught in Ontario, and then you on the show to talk about the national programs that you guys deliver at civics.
Dimitri, just for people who are listening, gave us a couple of resources. We're going to leave those on the episode page on our website, www.beyondtheheadlines.net. Thank you, Dimitri, for being with us.
Dimitri Pavlounis: Thank you so much. It was great talking to you.
Host: Thank you so much. See you next week.
