Preparing Active Citizens: Exploring Ethical Issues of Providing Educative Experiences for Youths
different role than that of the teacher, relieving the tension that teachers such as Schultz have faced between being “the teacher” and mentoring students through a discovery process. Indeed, to formally separate these roles, the college students who enter the classrooms are referred to as “mentors,” not “teachers.” The close proximity of age between the mentors and the 7–12 students can, at times, be challenging for the mentors. Although the mentors may fear that the students will not respect them, the 7–12 students surveyed after their Generation Citizen experience value this relationship in a way that is different from the one they have with their teachers. As one twelfth grade student commented about her relationship with her mentor, “… it’s not completely like a teacher because she kind of builds a relationship with the kids and learns our names a lot faster. We build a bond with her. Not like a friend, more like a mentor. She comes in and it’s not like ‘Oh, you have to do this or else,’ but instead is like our helper.” This intermediary relationship between “friend” and “teacher” enables mentors to serve as a guide through an authentic educative experience rather than the authority in the classroom. Implicit in this student’s reflection is the idea that her teacher determines what the students will be doing each day in class. In this setting, the student positions herself as a recipient of the information her teacher provides.33 Her mentor, however, is viewed as less of an authority, enabling the student to develop a relationship whereby she is “helped” to learn. As another twelfth grader succinctly commented on this type of relationship, “It’s like a big sister—little sister thing.” Although these relationships are important to developing a rapport with students that enables student-led activities, they are not sufficient. In addition to these relationships, mentors must be provided the skills to make productive use of those bonds. Without training in mentorship, the college students may look to their previous student-teacher relationships for guidance, reverting comfortably to their observations of how teachers “should” act.34 In an effort to develop mentorship skills and strategies, mentors are invited to weekly professional development meetings, similar to those used in other education-related fields. Of the more than 80 active mentors, 88% regularly attend these meetings, making them an important educational tool as they develop in the role. What makes these meetings different from teacher professional development opportunities is that they focus on how to engage students in deliberative civic action, not on the transmission of content and/or the construction of testable knowledge. For example, mentors learn to draw out and build on student voices utilizing strategies such as
questioning effectively and leading “one mic” sessions with their students, whereby everyone in the class actively participates in building substantive conversations. These practices resonate with the students; “Everyone learns to speak with one mic. When someone is talking, we’re like, ‘Shhh, you can’t talk,’ explained one twelfth grade student. Although all students are encouraged to contribute, these skills hone students’ abilities to listen, even when they disagree with the speaker, developing listening skills that deepen democratic discourse.35 These deliberative skills also extend to one-on-one interactions between students and their mentors. Mentors are taught to approach student work with a critical, yet friendly eye, encouraging students to consider diverse perspectives and alternative approaches to their work. Another twelfth grader explained the difference between her mentor and her classroom teacher this way: “She’s like a teacher because she taught us things we didn’t know. And she’s not like a teacher because she helps us. If a students is doing her work, a teacher would be like ‘here’s what you’re doing wrong.’ A mentor would say, ‘I like that idea. Here’s my opinion, here’s my input.” Although this student’s response is overly generalized, it serves as an example for the ways in which mentors are trained to do discourse with their mentees. These critical encounters reflect ways in which mentors “help” rather than “tell” in their instructional roles as mentors. Enabling students to work with each other and with their mentors through authentic democratic interactions ensures that mentors are not acting like, nor being treated like, traditional teachers. As a result 67% of mentors report that at least three-fourths of their classes consistently engaged in the action civics lessons. Through this participation, 95% of students were able to come to consensus on a focus issue and actively work on developing it towards an action plan by the end of one semester, demonstrating the efficacy of the studentled project model given mentor involvement and guidance. Importantly, this model also enables teachers to limit the number of roles that they need to balance in order to implement an action civics curriculum.
It is the studentled component that students value the most.
Developing Mentorship Relationships In describing considerations regarding studentled curricula, the assumption has been made that modifying traditional student-teacher relationships to increase students’ ownership of their learning best facilitates the types of
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