Taking a structural approach to civic education in Aotearoa New Zealand

Description

Conventionally, civic education has sought to enhance students’ sense of civic agency by fostering civic literacy and other relevant capacities, with a particular emphasis on civic action in relation to formal political and civic institutions. Yet students’ diminished sense of agency has as much to do with the complex, endemic, and seemingly intractable issues that characterize current politics—climate change, settler-colonialism, socioeconomic inequality—as it does with disenchantment or difficulty engaging with formal institutions.

This chapter discusses an upper-level undergraduate course from Aotearoa New Zealand that puts this question of agency at its centre, and takes a uniquely structural approach to addressing it. We identify two key features of this structural approach to civic education, showing via student testimonies that a strong majority of students observe this course has had significant impact on their sense of civic agency, and that the course’s structural approach was a primary contributor to this.