Social capital and civics and citizenship: Developing a framework for activist education

participants. This paper explicates a framework that can be used to analyse how effectively programs are developing active citizenship and activism amongst the participants, especially with a view towards their ongoing participation in civil society. Such a framework will be of use to practitioners seeking to analyse their programs, as well as policy makers interested in developing new programs of civics and citizenship education, or evaluating existing ones. Foregrounding the research in the context of civics and citizenship education in Australia, I illustrate the development of the framework through an activist education program, Justice Citizens, which took place in a Western Sydney high school. Justice Citizens is a useful example to examine the efficacy of the framework; it was a student-centred film voice project that required students to engage with issues in their local communit

What should learning designers learn?

There is widespread interest in employing designers who focus on learning, performance and education technology in many industries at a global level. In Australia, learning designers are in demand in Education, Corporate Training, Finance, Charity, Non-Government Sectors, and also in Start-Ups and Entrepreneurial arenas. This demand is despite the fact that the role of the Learning Designer is incredibly varied, contextually-based, and also unclear to many employers - and students! This suggests that there is currently an opportunity for learning designers and academics who deliver learning design content to define what it means to be a learning designer. This paper presents an Australian case study which uses design-based research methods in a pre-production mode to identify the key principles that informed the development of a course of study (what others may refer to as a program). How those principles were operationalised within the course design and more are discussed in an effort to reposition understandings of knowledge, skills and abilities for this field

Refreshing critical pedagogy and citizenship education through the lens of justice and complexity pedagogy

© The Author(s) 2018. Maximal citizenship educators are committed to advancing an approach to citizenship learning with the following staple features: learner-centred; experiential; problem- and action-oriented; racialised, classed and gendered analysis of power; and strengthening the public sphere and democracy. This type of approach to education shares many similarities with the principles of critical pedagogy. However, there have been valid arguments that Frankfurt School Critical Theory inspired pedagogy still tends to focus on class, at the expense of gender and race, analyses. This article seeks ways to refresh and extend the language and theoretical frameworks used by critical pedagogues. To do so, it will deploy the terms justice pedagogy and complexity pedagogy. The adjective ‘justice’ does the same work as ‘critical’ in signalling the commitment to using education as a means to bring about a more socially just world. The recent rise in scholarship in complexity thinking lends itself to conceptualising critical pedagogy in necessarily fresh ways. This article draws attention to the kindred nature of guiding concepts in complexity thinking and critical pedagogy, including grassroots organising, distributed decision-making and emergent learning, before presenting a description of how such approaches might refresh critical pedagogy through a critical citizenship education programme using justice pedagogy. This example illustrates the way that justice pedagogy can inform decisions about appropriate teaching and learning strategies for children and young people today growing up in an increasingly globalised world

Civics and citizenship education: What have we learned and what does it mean for the future of Australian democracy?

The ambitious project to nationalise the Australian Curriculum has prompted great interest among policymakers, academics and civics teachers in Australian schools. The government-led citizenship education initiative Discovering Democracy (1997–2007) comprehensively failed to meet its objectives, most prominently the stated goal of developing active citizens. This article has twin objectives: to explore the ways in which government-directed civics education programmes have fallen short; and to argue for a shift in our approaches to civics education, in terms of both content and delivery, drawing on the surplus model, which credits students with unique ideas, knowledge and experiences. We draw upon Justice Citizens, an alternative approach to Civics Education that foregrounds students’ own interests and abilities as central to their development into active citizens as an example of the educational practices that can promote and strengthen active citizenship among school students. From this programme and other research, we discuss four student-centred themes that should inform further civics education curriculum development. </jats:p

Leveraging Social Media and Scholarly Discussion for Educator Empowerment

This paper shares insights from an international community of educators who have been using social media as a virtual space for a scholarly reading group: #edureading. The collection of educator narratives presented in this paper show how social networks on Twitter and Flipgrid were used as inclusive environments for teacher-led professional development. This paper is both a report of research involving five practitioners inquiring into their collective experience, and an exercise in building the scholarly capacity of the #edureading group. The accessibility of the social media platforms, as well as the collaborative, inquiry-based approach to scholarly reading, emerge as key themes in the educator narratives. The findings of this research emphasise that professional learning occurring in virtual spaces is open to social mediation using the norms of social networks, rather than the norms of workplaces, jurisdictions or education sectors, and that this can lead to a greater sense of empowerment for educators</jats:p