Six years ago, Roberta Bondar led an Ontario-government working group on how to "re-integrate" environmental education into Ontario schools. The working group's report called for, among other things, increased curricular attention to "inquiry based learning," "action projects," and real world engagement. 

 

This host of pedagogical ideas (and others like them) is part of a larger shift in education policy towards what is often referred to as "transformational learning."

 

While there's a lot to this idea, at base, transformational learning refers to the notion that students learn better when they're interacting with the world around them, when they can help to direct their own learning, and when they're actually engaged. And, at least among educators and researchers, the need to incorporate more transformational learning practice into the classroom has become fairly noncontroversial.

 

And more and more, at least in Ontario, these ideas are being seen as key to fostering, as the Bondar report puts it, "responsible environmental citizenship."

 

But what does responsible citizenship even mean? And how can such a thing be taught?

 

That's the question recently taken up for by Learning for a Sustainable Future (LSF), Canada's leading educational nonprofit and think-tank. Launched in 1991, LSF was founded in partnership with Environment Canada to respond to the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development.

 

"We're committed to getting 21st century skills into the classroom," says Dragana Djukic, project coordinator with LSF. "We want youth to be engaged inside and outside the classroom, we want teachers to do inquiry learning with their students, and we want youth to feel empowered so they can make a change in their school and their community. And last year we thought, 'this all kind of looks like responsible citizenship.' So we teamed with Deloitte [a Canadian financial services firm] to host a series of roundtables on responsible citizenship across Canada."

 

The definition of a responsible citizen, at least as articulated in the LSF literature, is quite broad, referring to anyone who acts "in the best interest of human and ecological communities" and who is committed to a sustainable future. 

 

The roundtables, which brought together policy makers, educators, and researchers asked two connected questions: "What do children and youth need to know, do, and value by the time they leave school in order to ensure they are responsible, active, and contributing citizens? And how can formal education be reoriented to meet these goals?" 

 

 

But, says Djukic, the ideas generated by a roundtable of youth delegates revealed something unexpected. While the term "responsible citizenship" resonated at the policy level or as a tool for educators, it had little resonance with actual students. LSF invited 22 youth to discuss creating a code of responsibilities and duties that Canadian youth could abide by. However, as LSF staff soon discovered, the delegates had little interest in such a plan. 

 

"When we threw this out to the youth they said, 'We're already following rules, we have responsibilities and duties at home and at school…why would we want to create more responsibilities and duties?' The language didn't appeal to them and it seemed like it was placing an additional burden on them," Djukic says.

 

Instead, the youth delegates opted to spend their meeting time thinking through ways to give students a stronger voice. The result, LSF's newest project: an online platform where students and teachers across Canada can share their visions and action plan for their school and community. The platform, called the Our Canada Project, went into development shortly after the delegate meeting last October and officially launched this past May. 

 

Featuring an interactive map where users can upload their "visions" or "action projects," Our Canada lets visitors easily view, and comment on, multiple projects taking place across the country. Still in its nascent stages, Our Canada has only a handful of posted projects, but Djukic, who is leading the program, is hopeful that with additional funding and the recruitment of youth ambassadors, the site will grow as a hub for students who may be practicing responsible citizenship—even if they'd rather not use the language.

 

 

In Toronto, you'd be hard-pressed to find a more exemplar model of this type of learning than Josh Fullan's Maximum City program. Fullan, a University of Toronto Schools (UTS) teacher, launched the summer course on sustainable urbanism in 2011. He recognized a course like this was not being offered in any schools, even though four out of five Canadians live in a city.

"Based on my existing years of teaching experience, I knew that students learned best and engaged most deeply in authentic subject areas that were related to their day-to-day experience," Fullan says. "I knew that if I built this curriculum well and made it applicable to the real world, students would engage in it really well because they were interested in this kind of learning experience."

 

By recruiting a team of guest experts—including urban planners, designers, and journalists—Fullan built the curriculum to get students engaged with the city by allowing them to ask their own questions, develop their own solutions, and take their learning and research outside the classroom. By all indicators, Fullan has been successful. Not only has he managed to keep students engaged in the summer months (the student testimonials attest to this fact), but he has developed over 200 hours of urban studies curriculum that has begun to get picked in civics, science, and geography classes across the province (including, especially, at Fullan's home-school UTS).

 

Fullan, much like the students at the LSF roundtable, has come to two important conclusions about teaching sustainability. One, young people are not apathetic, they just need to be given a platform, and two, that "civic literacy" rather than "responsibility" or "leadership" is a better name to explain what he's trying to foster in his students. 

 

"Words like leadership or responsibility have a lot of baggage to them and I think it can put pressure on kids. But civic literacy is hugely important to Maximum City. The idea is that if you raise civically literate young people you end up with a better city, with a better civic environment, because they're now engaged and knowledgeable stewards of their environment. I know it sounds grandiose, and it kind of is, but that really is what we're reaching for in the program."

 

The most important lesson demonstrated by Maximum City, says Fullan, is that students, if engaged properly, don't need to be coerced into civic literacy, they're excited to be part of the project. Fullan points to Maximum City's unit on Toronto transit as an example. While students and young people are not generally asked to be part of the transit conversation, Fullan has found, that when they are, they've got a lot to say about it. 

 

"Transit is one of the biggest issues facing our region, but young people, even though they're a huge stake holder in this (because most young people don't drive) they are not included in the city-building conversation on transit. But they ride the bus every day. They know all the frustrations and successes. And so when you ask them for their ideas and input you get you get terrific results. You get a really engaging conversation. You get deep learning. You get fresh ideas. The solutions aren't always elegant, but they're always innovative."

 

"The presentations we had about transit and the guest experts was really inspiring," says Catherine Vlasov a UTS student who completed the Maximum City program in 2012 when she was in the tenth grade. Vlasov, who lives in Mississauga, but commutes to school downtown, was so inspired by the transit conversations at Maximum city that when she heard that the Toronto urban policy nonprofit CivicAction was putting together a council of "transportation champions" she sent a letter asking to join.

 

"Since I was a little kid I've always had to be driven everywhere. And to this day I can still get very few places without a drive from my parents or my friends' parents and that's why I got involved in CivicAction. I knew that I had a problem and that other youth had a problem and I thought someone should start the conversation," says Vlasov.

 

"The program showed me that there were ways to get involved that I otherwise would never have known about... Since I've told people I'm on the council, I have so many friends and other students coming up to me with their ideas. There is so much interest among students they just don't know how to contribute to the process. It's sort of mind blowing in a way."

 

"Catherine has been an incredible Regional Transportation Champion, making her ideas and opinions heard in a room full of CEOs, former mayors, labour leaders, and presidents of colleges and universities," says Linda Weichel, Vice-President at CivicAction. "Catherine has also taken transportation investment conversations to high school students across the GTA through social media and events. We're now working with her to develop plans for the November phase of CivicAction’s Your32 campaign."

 

Catherine had a vision, and went on to take an action. Exactly like the kinds of projects Djukic hopes to see on the My Canada Project website. 

 

And it didn't take a code of responsibilities, or lessons on how to be a leader. It just took asking the right questions. 

Katia Snukal is Yonge Street's Civic Impact editor.