Welcome to Living Citizenship
This new and original idea emerged from the study of an international educational partnership between Nqabakazulu School in Kwamashu township in Durban, South Africa and Sarum Academy in Salisbury, UK.
What is Living Citizenship?
Living Citizenship is the idea that people can live out their values more fully through their actions as citizens. In doing so they:
Engage with the issues facing us as citizens
Are committed to social changeAre motivated by their personal values to act
Are committed to improving the lives of others
Where has the idea come from?
The idea emerged from a desire to address the question how can we learn to be good citizens? Citizenship education is taught in schools and there can be a curriculum for citizenship but there is little guidance on how to deliver citizenship education, ie pedagogy. If the desired outcome is good citizens then how can this be delivered? Through adopting an action research approach to studying the influences on the participants of an international educational partnership I coined the phrase Living Citizenship to describe how the participants had agreed values and activities to drive the partnership forward. It seemed to me that they were acting as living citizens in that they were seeking ways to improve their own lives and the lives of others through their actions. In the YouTube video clip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOPU2OPMxdE I explain in more detail how the idea of Living Citizenship emerged through the partnership.The idea of Living Citizenship emerges from the feeling that something is wrong, that there is something unjust in this world, that I am not able to express myself and live out my values as I would want to. I recognised when I visited Africa for the first time that there were things going on that challenged the way that I live my own life and that challenged me to seek better ways to live my own life and influence others to do the same. When I connect that with my choice of career as an educator responsible for educating young people then I can see a connection between my perception that things are not as they should be and my abiity to influence the education of others. As I began to establish the partnership with the South African school it became apparent that there were things in the South African community that contradicted my notions of justice and equal opportunites. It became my mission, my passion to alleviate some of those factors that were getting in the way of these values that I hold dear. I could see how these values could come together through the partnership.The glue that brought them together was the Zulu notion of Ubuntu. I discovered this notion in conversation with my friends and colleagues at Nqabakazulu School. They brought this to my attention through conversations about Zulu culture and Zulu notions of education, family, belonging and community. The notion of community seems so much stronger in the Zulu culture than in our own. Ubuntu provided the glue that brought together values and perceptions and influence on educators and on communities. As the partnership developed over subsequent years I could see emerging a shared perception of the values that we were carrying. The perception was that we were all about trying to increase social justice, provide more equal opportunities and demonstrate Ubuntu across cultural and racial divides. The activities that we developed as part of the partnership, eg. the marketing and selling in the UK by students in my own school of jewellery made by students and parents of pupils in the South African school came to symbolise the values of social justice, equal opportunities and Ubuntu. They brought our communities together and got other communities involved in the partnership. These sorts of activities deserved to be recognised in some form and it was from these types of activities that the notion of Living Citizenship emerged. It seemed to me that the people that were getting involved in these activities, driving them forward, sustaining them and making them work were living out their values. I call this 'Living Citizenship because I see them as being active citizens and living out their values in such a way as to improve the lives of others and bring communities closer together.
