TEACHING STRATEGIES FOR CONSUMER GOVERNMENT
Picking up on a topic this blog has been addressing since the posting, “Practical Turn” (March 19, 2024),[1] this posting continues its promotion of a consumer government approach to civics education. To remind readers, the adoption of that approach is seen as an initial step toward a civics curriculum based on a liberated federalism construct which features a more local, interactive role for students with their government.
It would do this by encouraging a sense, among the citizenry, of a partnership in which each citizen has an emotional stake in advancing the common good – a tangible commitment. To make the case for this adoption, the ensuing postings chose as a pedagogic model, the jurisprudential model,[2] by which to develop decision-making, value clarifying lessons that could be designed for this consumer government course of study.
This choice was not meant to be mandatory, but as a responsible option to illustrate what could be done in developing suitable lesson plans to achieve the overall goals outlined earlier in this blog. This chosen model calls on students to make value judgments on controversial issues and this blog’s promotion opens its options to non-value conflict situations. Another variance is that what is being promoted, unlike the original model, opens instructional options beyond exclusively employing inquiry-based lessons.
Other lesson strategies can be employed especially if lessons do not address controversial topics. Finally, the option promoted here analyzes a variety of problem situations as they might be related to governmental actions and/or problems at different geographical levels or locations. Those levels, as described earlier, range from the immediate environment of students to the global settings, but at each level they can and do affect the local political environments of those students.
Strategies and materials to be successful, they must be particularly sensitive to the fact that a large portion of the students for which this approach would be used, would be from a non-college-bound population. Experience shows, by making the curriculum relevant, practical, and less abstract, these less academically motivated or disposed students will find resulting lessons as more useful.
To augment this attribute, strategies must maintain low abstraction content. Relations between inquiry activities, for example, and problem areas need to be presented in as natural a manner as possible. Readings should be short and lesson exercises limited in scope, but as the course progresses, a cumulative effect toward sophistication should be built in and encouraged among students.
And with those thoughts, this promotion has two more areas of concern – ideas regarding evaluation of instructional strategies and evaluation of the proposed curricular change. These two topics will be what the next two postings will address. Again, if readers, who have not done so, wish to read up on the totality of this rationale for consumer government, they can, using the archive feature of this blog, begin with the above cited posting, “A Practical Turn.”
[1] URL: https://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/2024_03_17_archive.html.
[2] Fred M. Newman and Donald W. Oliver, Clarifying Public Controversy: An Approach to Teaching Social Studies (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1970). An earlier version can be found in Donald W. Oliver and James P. Shaver, Teaching Public Issues in the High School (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1966).
