Today I had the pleasure of being invited back to participate in another Connected Learning webinar, led again by Craig Watkins, this time exploring the themes of civic engagement underlying next week’s Digital Media and Learning Conference in Chicago.
As usual I mostly listened, and I recommend you do the same, but I also made some contributions here and there –about the role of digital media in supporting youth to be civic engaged, how I got involved in all this, about research connecting interest-driven learning with civic engagement, and why I think the DML conference is the bomb!
If you like, you can watch the full webinar below:
Watch live streaming video from connectedlearningtv at livestream.com
I won’t have a chance to look at the full webinar for a few days, but I want to make a connection between your work teaching democratic citizenship and what is happening in American public education at this moment. As you probably know, Rome is burning, in the form of the rebellion against the corporatization of public education and the imposition of an obsessive standardized testing regime. It is critical that students are actively involved in the reversal of those policies and the redesign of K12 education. No one knows better than students what works and what doesn’t work in the classroom. High school students have borne the brunt of the horrors of the last two decades of misguided educational “reform” policies. Their input will be invaluable, Student protesters in Seattle, Texas and Colorado are modeling exemplary democratic engagement right now. We are facing an unprecedented opportunity for young citizens to take responsibility for their own education. It is the teachable moment of our lifetime. I hope your work enhances the opportunity of this moment by providing students with new tools and deeper understanding of democratic participation.