Civic and voter education should be culturally sensitive. The manner in which the education programme approaches people, the language/s used, the methods adopted, the communication means employed, and the styles of the educators all have to take into account the constituency's cultural and religious predilections.
These predilections can be a barrier, a trap, or a window. Whichever they are, educators will always have a dialectic relationship with them. Education is, by its very nature, subversive of the status quo. It offers insights into new vistas, and these may encourage individuals and groups of individuals to reflect critically on the norms that they take for granted. Given that voter education programmes are driven not only by the needs of the electorate but also by the demands of the state, educators will want to be cautious in their interactions with people's culture and religion.
There is no requirement to call these norms into question if they are in conflict with the election message. And yet, civic and voter education will inevitably expose practices that do not conform with increasingly universal values. This is a dilemma with which educators will have to contend. The horns of this dilemma are most stark in countries that do not have a democratic system of government. Even in democratic countries, however, it may arise within minority groups.
The Barrier
Culture and religion may represent a barrier to the educator because they create societies that have their own symbols and language. These societies are not always closed, but when they do recognise outsiders they may be suspicious of them.
They may have established opinions and traditions about the role and accessibility of education and about what democracy is and whether it is acceptable. In turn, different cultures may have strong opinions about who can or cannot educate men, women, or even children. They may have concepts of leadership and authority that are at odds with the general equality proposed as the bedrock of representative democracy.
At the very least, there may be unspoken subtleties about educational methodology. Teaching and learning styles may have been set by their own cultural and religious practices, so that innovations such as small group work, interactive teaching methods, exercises in critical thinking, the use of evaluative questionnaires, and the use of audio-visual aids may result in scepticism, or affable but reluctant tolerance.
The Trap
Of course, these barriers may easily turn into traps that can snare educators. Culture and religion can be used to ensure that ordinary people who may well want good education about the election or their rights as citizens are denied access to this education. In these situations, any lack of cultural or religious sensitivity will not be treated with tolerance but used as an excuse to undermine the educational programme. For this reason, educators will want to weigh these sensitivities carefully in order that they do not become stumbling blocks.
The Window
Most propitious, of course, is when educators understand the context in which they are going to work, or have crafted their programme in such a way that they have created a team that understands this context. Then they are provided with a rich source of idioms, analogies, traditions and anecdotes that can provide learners with new ways of understanding their own reality and the election or civic lessons are being conveyed.
To give just one example, it might be useful to consider those South African educators who had to find a way to help people understand the secret nature of the vote. In discussions with women from traditional societies, they found that pregnancy provided an allegorical insight. Generally, the gender of a baby is not known prior to birth. But they also discovered that this allegory could not be successfully used in the education programme because of a taboo of talking publicly about pregnancy. As a result, another image was chosen for discussion - that of the seed planted by the farmer. No one knows what gender the seed is until it grows. The illustrations that were used to reinforce the verbal discussions did, however, feature a pregnant women. She votes, but her condition is not discussed. It is noted, however, especially by women, and the concept of the secret vote is communicated - in secret.
