Bers on civics: moving from designing curriculum to supporting experience
Filed at 1:18 pm on December 5, 2006 in Civic Engagement • 1 comments
How do we leverage youth’s interest in new technologies by developing technology-based educational programs to promote civic engagement?
Participation in virtual life does not replace traditional civic actions. However, research suggests that adults are more likely to vote and participate in the civic sphere if, as youth, they were involved in community-based organizations or extracurricular activities. As the Internet is becoming a new way for youth to be involved, how can we design technologies purposefully aimed at civic education?
In my own research I have developed the Zora three dimensional multi-user environment. It provides tools to design and inhabit a virtual city, and it can become a safe “social laboratory” to experiment with skills and attitudes to become good citizens and to develop civic identities.
Educational on-line environments such as Zora can engage youth in chatting as well as doing, discussing as well as creating, thinking as well as producing. Zora is an example of ‘praxis-based’ education. Praxis-based models focus on how young people can be given opportunities for engagement and decision making to experience citizenship, and are in sharp contrast with ‘knowledge-based’ models focused on the teaching curriculum and what people should know about citizenship. How do we reconcile these models in the test driven and politically confined environment of most public schools? How do we design technologies that can be used in after-school environments or from home to promote civic identities?
The distinction between knowledge and praxis permeates the world of education and is consistent with two different approaches for developing educational technologies, identified by Seymour Papert as instructionist and constructionist. While the instructionist approach sees the effectiveness of a technology in its instructional efficacy and it’s potential for transmitting information, the constructionist approach conceives the computer as a tool to help learners have experiences that will support their own construction of knowledge. Thus, technologies for supporting citizenship education can be situated and evaluated in the praxis-constructionist; and knowledge-instructionist axes. Zora is an example of the first type.
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Comments (1)
1: Margaret Corbitc at 4:41 pm on Sunday, January 28, 2007
We have found in our online outreach program, SciFair, that youth and their coaches and college mentors often frame their projects within a context that relates directly to their communities. For example, they will build a quiz race course that takes visitors upstream in a watershed to learn about the fisheries. Or teams will explore and then build a community of the future. The medium, online multi-user virtual worlds, seems to inspire futurism. They get excited about sharing their worlds with others and coaches tell us this enhances their motivation.
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