H. Jerome Freiberg in the article “From Tourist to Citizens in the Classroom” tackles the critical nature of creating an experiential community within the classroom oriented around care, cooperation, democracy, and organization. Having students be members of the class is of the utmost importance to facilitating the positive experiences necessary to create a functional system of citizenship. This citizenship in certain examples offered by Freiberg takes the form management positions for all students to reinforce responsibility, commitment to the larger class, and to a certain degree: discipline.

In large bolded letters the article posits: “Too often, classroom management systems built on trust and support in early grades are replaced with compliance and obedience systems in latter grades.” This paradigm is the very thing I realize I am trying to sidestep in the process of determining how to make content relatable; the connection isn’t obvious immediately I’m sure but hear me out.

Content can easily dictate classroom climate; this can subsequently affect engagement for any number of reasons; compromised or inspired engagement is the tributary from which a students individual curiosity or inquiry may or may not stem, and so it is no wonder that when that content is subject to that same paradigm that establishes the secondary classroom a place of compliance and obedience-based systems, it is both the stale content and the paradigmatic appeal to control behind it that stifles the learner. So with all that being said, how can relatable content build citizenship or vice versa? That it seems is the million-dollar question. Here’s what I think:

1.) One’s relationship with anything (content, another individual, an idea, an object) is tremendously perspective based, and perspective is often subject to the environment within which it is grounded.

2.) That environment within which the perspective is anchored is composed further still of many relationships (responsibilities to oneself, one’s colleagues, and the application of a subjective system of understanding/judgement to those previous two things). One’s ability to reliably depend on their own agency, and the agency of those around them is where confidence emerges from cooperation. Within this mutually constituent cooperation lies trust, and within trust in oneself and one’s colleagues is citizenship.

3.) The concept of the classroom citizen then is a learner who is dedicated not simply to a study, to marks or even to structure, but to themselves and their colleagues.

4.) Therefore in successfully facilitating citizenship you are not making material relatable at all, but the classroom community of which the individual is an active citizen. Therefore everything that the class produces (material or otherwise) becomes relatable, becomes connected, becomes valuable to the learner.

This process of inquiry helped me to realize that that the vanguard of relatable content is not necessarily in the material, but in the experience the content emerges from.

The article is available here:

H. Jerome Freiberg – From Tourists to Citizens in the Classroom

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/8ju8ot8pg5vv8gh/AAC8cvOE0FXHrvuGpYyIjLw_a/Unit%201?dl=0&preview=Freiberg-From+tourists+to+citizens.pdf