Sharon Anne Cook

Civic learning: moving from the apolitical to the socially just

This study examines the knowledge and skills that characterize civic learning for young people. Building on a literature review, it reports an exploratory case study with students and teachers in four secondary schools in the Ottawa, Canada region. The perspectives of researchers co‐operating with educators and students against a backdrop of provincial government curricula and secondary literature on youth citizenship engagement provide an enriched understanding of the state and potential of civic learning. It concludes that current civic learning is primarily characterized by procedural knowledge and compliant codes of behaviour that do not envelope students in collective action for systemic understandings of political issues. This study argues for renewed efforts to put social justice at the heart of student learning. To present a convincing civic educational programme, schools should prepare students to analyse power relationships, investigate the ambiguities of political issues, and embrace opportunities for social change.

From "Evil Influence" to Social Facilitator: Representations of Youth Smoking, Drinking, and Citizenship in Canadian Health Textbooks, 1890-1960.

One route to uncovering schooling’s goals for an improved citizenry is to track certain subjects of the compulsory curriculum. In this case, health is investigated, and especially its messages on smoking and drinking. First introduced as scientific temperance instruction (in the 1880s), renamed hygiene (from about 1910), then as health (from the mid‐1920s), and expanded to encompass as well physical education and personal development from the mid‐1940s, health curricula were an important vehicle for turning impressionable youth into personally and socially responsible citizens. An explication of the Ontario (Canada) health curriculum between 1890 and 1960 provides an insight into the changing official prescription of the good citizen. It also shows how changed notions of health in the modern age are from the 19th‐century antecedents, and, especially, how self‐interest has become central to that definition. Accordingly, the lessons around smoking and drinking have moved from these products being an ‘evil influence’ to one of social facilitation.

Reflections of a Peace Educator: The Power and Challenges of Peace Education With Pre-Service Teachers

Abstract This retrospective essay examines one long-standing peace and global education initiative for pre-service teacher candidates. The article probes the meanings of peace education and of global education embedded in the program, as well as the program’s apparent consequences: What understandings of peace education did the pre-service candidates in this program demonstrate, through their own words and the teaching plans they produced? What skills did the pre-service candidates seem to acquire in curriculum design? My reflections are based on my own experience as a faculty member and coordinator of the program, as well as retrospective understandings derived from ongoing examination of questionnaires, focus group discussions, interviews, and especially, almost 200 curriculum products (lesson and unit plans) created by pre-service candidates in a special “global cohort” and in the general pre-service population at the same university. The article provides a literature review of the main definitions of peace education, as well as the characteristics of peace pedagogy, and discusses two main challenges faced by the core faculty in this peace education program. In particular, teacher candidates’ understandings of peace education often seemed limited, especially in relation to their competence in developing curricula for other strands of global education. Second, teacher candidates often had difficulty acquiring the relevant knowledge base and teaching materials necessary for facilitating the complex pedagogies associated with peace education. I conclude with some observations about how our program’s pre-service teacher candidates seemed to understand and respond to the challenges of peace education.

Oral History as Peace Pedagogy

Llewellyn and Cook argue in this chapter for oral history as a form of historical thinking that supports peace pedagogy. From the work of oral historians of mass atrocities to oral histories within truth and reconciliation processes, the connection between oral history and human rights is clear. Few scholars have articulated, however, how oral history education may support more robust peace education in the face of its languishing status in Canadian schools. Peace education attempts to address systemic injustice, including underlying causes, through (re)-building healthy relationships. Oral history can support such learning. Drawing on critical pedagogy, they focus on the democratizing and consciousness-raising potential of oral history for peace education. Oral history provides perspectives of those who have been marginalized over time, which potentially shake our historical consciousness and redress harms. Furthermore, oral history methodology, in particular shared authority, opens space for dialogic encounters that may disrupt injustice and build community. Llewellyn and Cook provide exemplars of oral history projects for peace education from an extensive survey of international education initiatives that focus on teaching about conflict and/or reconciliation. These exemplars illustrate how oral history can renew peacebuilding pedagogy in education—learning that is humanized, transformative, and affective.