Citizenship

Through my schooling, I don’t remember much about citizenship education and don’t think I really had a class where that is what we learned. Citizenship is one of those topics that tended to be incorporated in other places in the curriculum. Most of the citizenship education I got was probably through social studies class. When I was in grade 10 wellness it was a requirement to do 10 hours of volunteering and I remember at the time I was already very involved in my school council that I didn’t really struggle to get hours or find places to volunteer. Most of the other students in my class struggled a lot to find places to volunteer and most of us struggled with understanding what can count as volunteering and what doesn’t. I come from a smaller school so for us we all always helped and did volunteering we just didn’t realize that we could say what we were doing was volunteering. Other than that, I didn’t really get any citizenship education that was explicit and rather it was incorporated in other subjects.

             When I think back to the types of citizenship that I did learn about the most prominent one would be the personally-responsible citizen as we were taught to donate to organizations and “do our part” without really knowing what our part was. It was also encouraged that as young high school students we get out in the community and help out through volunteering whenever we could. I was part of my student council and so I did a lot of planning for events such as food drives making me fall into the participatory citizen category while still participating and being a personally-responsible citizen. In schools, it’s not the most encouraged to become a justice-orientated citizen as this may backfire on schools if a student were to stand up against the school, but this type of citizen was never really talked about as much as the other two types and kind of brushed over. Although I never knew the names or types of citizenship it was still explained to us in a way where there is a distinction between types of citizens.

             It would be beneficial if students learned the different types of citizens rather than just being told to do our part or be better people. I never explicitly learned the different types of citizens and that can be beneficial to students to learn what type of citizens there are and allows the students to further learn about citizenship. As I said earlier, I never really had citizenship education as it was just added into other subject areas and talked about for a brief second. As citizens, it is important to understand the types which can also help us understand what it means to be good citizens and do our part in the community. If we have a community that acknowledges whether or not they are participatory citizens it can help other people also want to help more or get involved in the community. Having this education more explicit can also possibly create more justice-orientated citizens.