Educators have to be open to the possibilities of live campaigns and events that can provide educational opportunities. There are several types of campaigns that are appropriate, actions that can be taken by educators and election moments that should be exploited.
Action Leads to Learning
Political and civic participation is learned by action in collaboration with other citizens. Such action, however small, enables people to learn the skills of working together and making decisions, unmasks the social contracts and dynamics that underlie community life, and exposes people to one another's strengths and weaknesses, to models of civic action, and to the dilemmas of the common good.
While the majority of citizens engage in such action for a mixture of self-interest and altruism, many political and social campaigns begin because of a personal experience, frustration, or loss. There are those social movements with a model of activism that coaxes people to learn and grow through a sequenced and carefully selected exposure to different campaigns and to different tasks in those campaigns. Political parties provide such an opportunity for citizens. Those involved in voter and civic education need to consider ways to use existing opportunities for civic participation and where these do not exist there is a need to create them.
If learning is a disciplined reflection on experience, then such experiences must not only be lived but also reflected upon. While a number of civil society organisations do build in such opportunities for education and reflection, many do not, to their and their members' detriment.
Types of Campaigns
Educators need not attempt to limit the possibilities open to citizens but it is important that they are open to two possibilities:
- Civil society organisations, social movements or local groups of citizens will undertake a campaign that clearly has implications for the promotion of civic participation and democracy. Educators should look for ways to connect with the organizers of such campaigns and offer a range of services to them and to their members that will enhance the effectiveness of their campaign, and in the process ensure that it results in long lasting change in those who participate.
- An issue might emerge that has the ability to mobilize citizens. Educators will work with civil society and other potential allies to establish a social campaign around the issues.
In both circumstances, educators have to be aware that while their motivations are primarily educational, it is unlikely that the participants have the same motivations. Those engaging in civic campaigns expect to change their lives, whether it means ensuring a traffic plan for their neighbourhood, obtaining the right to a forty-hour work week, reclaiming ancestral land, passing legislation, or overthrowing a corrupt mayor. They may be realistic enough to realize that they will not achieve all their objectives, and may be happy to have come through the campaign having learned how to do things better in the future, but they are unlikely to be satisfied with a better understanding of the electoral system.
They may, however, during the campaign, learn a great deal about the electoral system and about the role of local, regional, and national politicians, the importance of seeking allies, of using what democratic institutions are available, and of the possibilities of obtaining and maintaining public support for their cause.
Civic education thus cannot escape the demands of political activity; but educators can approach the matter in a nonpartisan way and with a belief that people can collaborate to achieve social goals, and that these goals need not be predicated by conflict and contradiction.
Such views will be tested by campaigns. The educational opportunities are great and especially significant for those involved. The risks and challenges to the educator are larger in similar proportion.
Ways of Building in Educational Opportunities
Citizens in pursuit of a goal want to learn. They want to increase their understanding of the issues facing them and to increase the skills they need to organize themselves. It may be, however, that those who already have these understandings and skills are peripheral to the campaign or uninvolved. Often, leadership is thrust upon those who feel unprepared.
So, the first task of educators is to ensure that they can get close to such people and provide them with support and encouragement. If educators are in organisations that have a reputation of supporting human rights and labour organisations as well as other civil society groups, then it is likely that in the course of providing this support, the opportunity for education will emerge.
Other organisations may have a strategy of leadership development that has resulted in the creation of a wide range of aware citizens who have received some skills training and already have links with this organisation. When a campaign starts they are likely to turn to those who trained them for further support.
Having established this relationship, or having been identified as a trainer or educator by the organisation leading the campaign, educators should consider the ways in which the campaign is planned, organized, and carried out as opportunities for sharing understanding and skills.
Strategic planning exercises increase people's awareness of social issues and social forces; planning exercises increase skills in planning and in organizing, in mobilizing resources and in building alliances; preparation for particular activities assists in developing a range of personal skills that have civic consequence as well as more general consequences. Amongst such skills might be those of advertising, letter writing, administration, bookkeeping, record keeping, communication, printing, and distribution of materials.
Educators should insist on two additional activities being introduced into the campaign plan. The first is the use of rehearsal before any public activity, whether a piece of street theatre, a neighbourhood market, a door to door visiting programme, or a direct protest action. Such rehearsal and simulation has the benefits of better preparing people, especially the inexperienced individuals or teams, for the activity.
They will have the additional educational benefits of establishing a reference framework for the activity and also of developing critical distance amongst the participants even in the heat of the moment.
All these will stand people in better stead for the second educational intervention, which is post-activity debriefing and reflection. In addition to thorough campaign evaluation, debriefing should encourage personal and organisational learning.
Election Campaigns
Because of the power of civic activism as a learning tool, educators involved in nonpartisan programmes such as voter education should direct people who are interested in becoming involved not only to assist in the voter education programme but to support a contestant or join the election administration.
Those who have organised or even worked in, a voting site or a counting station have an understanding of, and likely commitment to, elections that cannot be achieved by a voter education workshop however exciting. Those who have worked in a political campaign, (whether successful or not), have some understanding of political life and a point of reference for future political activity that enables them to make sense of any future education.
Again, it is worth repeating that experience on its own, without disciplined reflection, may not result in extensive learning. Those who are involved in party campaigns and in election administration therefore need to consider educational interventions, both for individual and organisational learning.
