It’s October 25th in the year 2024, a presidential election year in the United States. With election day just 10 days away, a heightened sense of anticipation pervades our media outlets’ airwaves. (Reminder: There is no school for students at Summers-Knoll on election day, November 5th.) How do educators help children develop an understanding of governmental and political processes in age-appropriate ways?
In school, students learn how to work together with their classmates to form a classroom community; the classroom community is co-constructed by the students through the leadership of the teacher; the school community is co-constructed by the teachers and the students through the leadership of its administrators. As mentioned in blogs from earlier this year, at SK, teachers spend the first several weeks of the school year building their classroom communities, establishing norms and class agreements, and building relationships. With teachers’ guidance, over time, students learn how to work independently and together in pursuit of their academic and social-emotional goals.
When entering school in the early grades, children relate to the world from self-centric point of view. Young children are driven by their personal wants and desires, and in school, they leverage myriad opportunities to develop linguistic repertoires that enable them to articulate those wants and desires, play with friends, communicate their opinions and feelings, ask questions, express their ideas, participate in group discussions, and solve problems.
As children move through the elementary grades, they become more aware of the world around them; they begin to de-center themselves and turn their gaze outward. They start to realize – and become more interested in – the reciprocal nature of friendships and relationships with other people. They become much more attuned to their own agency, their ability to choose, notions of “right” vs. “wrong,” and “fair” vs. “unfair.” They develop tools and skills that enable them to communicate their needs and opinions, listen to and understand other people’s perspectives, empathize, disagree, recognize and respect differences, and navigate interpersonal conflicts peacefully when they arise.
With this deeper sense of self within a landscape of a broader world that is governed by both nature and human-made systems, children begin to become conscious of how their individual actions, choices, and participation affect their relationships and their broader communities. Teachers capitalize on this expanding awareness through incorporating governance practices, content, and vocabulary into their instruction (e.g., voting to participate in democratic decision-making, the meaning of words like “majority,” the difference between a rule and a law, petitioning for change, writing opinion pieces, presenting proposals, distinguishing between fact and opinion, critically analyzing texts and works of art, debating hot-topic issues).
In the upper grades, students learn about the history of local, state, and federal systems of governance and how they currently function in the U.S. as well as other countries’ forms of – and approaches to – governance. Older students’ gain increased opportunities for community service and leadership among their peers. Like concentric circles rippling outward from a stone that’s been thrown into a pond, as children mature, both their opportunities and responsibilities expand in school and at home.
Ideally, throughout their years in school, students are provided an abundance of opportunities to develop the knowledge, skills, and strategies necessary to become critical thinkers and conscientious human beings who care about the world and who participate in society through exercising their rights, freedoms, and agency to choose. The future is theirs.