Practicing Citizenship: Taking Informed Action

The Inquiry Design Model – Conceptual Principles: Provide tangible opportunities for taking informed action

Though it sometimes feels like education is focused only on preparing students for their future jobs in the workforce, we need to be conscientious about preparing them for their job as active, participatory citizens. Remember that third “C” of the C3? Preparing student for civic life means preparing them to act as citizens. When I ask students what it means to act as a citizen, their typical response is “to vote.” And isn’t it convenient that they can’t vote yet? In their eyes, they’re off the hook for a couple more years! Though we certainly want to emphasize the importance of our students participating in elections, this is only one facet of acting as citizens.

As I have in previous years, I taught for the Kentucky Governor’s Scholars Program for five weeks this summer. For one of my classes, our compelling question was: what goes into your water? With this question, students would consider what impacts the content of water, as well as the forces affecting access. The Taking Informed Action piece was the most important part for me in the planning process. I knew I had a topic that lent itself well to this part of the C3, but hadn’t completely made up my mind as to how we should take action.

In a future post, I will discuss some of our student-created TIA activities. However, as luck would have it, we were provided with a great TIA task – we were given the opportunity to meet with and ask questions of Kentucky’s Attorney General, Andy Beshear. As you can imagine the students’ responses to this news were lackluster at first. “So, what does an attorney general do?”

We had spent the first four weeks exploring our topic in local and international contexts. When we learned we would speak with Beshear, this allowed us to focus our research around this topic, but also to consider more deeply his office’s role in addressing our concerns – of course, we discussed in more detail what it was that his office does. We spent a day looking into his background and policies, then deliberated over the best questions to ask him.

Ultimately though, I had little control over what would happen – they would choose to raise their hand or not. Beshear would be selecting them. Based on some of our discussions, I was concerned about what would be asked. All questions were not equal!

In a group of 90 students, mine asked questions, and follow-up questions, that reflected their studies over the preceding weeks. I’m pretty sure it’s a good thing when the Attorney General kept prefacing his answers with “wow, that’s a good question.” They clearly showed that they were informed and understood his role in addressing their concerns.

Taking Informed Action is at the end of the inquiry, but that doesn’t mean you should consider leaving it off. In the process of preparing for this meeting, they deepened their understanding of the connections between our topic and their lives. On top of that, it allowed them to reinforce the role of various public figures in addressing such concerns.

This particular TIA was dropped in our laps – but you can recreate it in your own classroom. Regardless of the extent to which you have access to political figures, the most valuable part was the process of preparing our questions. Conscientiously creating this deliberative space set the stage for them to take informed action.

Find your elected official

Contacting the Congress