The DemocracyXChange Program Advisory Committee (PAC) shapes the summit’s program and ensures that it reflects the diversity, interests and needs of Canada’s democracy sector. In the coming weeks, PAC members will share their thoughts about democratic engagement. Meet: Gabe Sawhney, Mackenzie Taylor, Akaash Maharaj and Bailey Greenspon.
Month: August 2020
COVID-19 and the Future of Democracy
Open Democracy Project is partnering with Distant, Not Disengaged to explore what the pandemic is teaching us about how people are organizing, stepping up and creating lasting change. What is the recipe that turns advocacy efforts into wide-spread social movements? How will this shape the future of our democracy?
Our guests will be announced shortly and will include specialists in community organizing, corporate activism, the arts, and youth-led movements. This event is open to all, and we encourage anyone who has started or is taking part in a COVID-19 social movement to join us and share lessons from your work. Register.
Massey Dialogues: Day of Democracy
On September 16 at 4pm EST Open Democracy Fellow Sabreena Delhon will participate in a Massey Dialogues session marking the International Day of Democracy. The discussion will examine shifting expectations of institutions and explore whether they can evolve to meet new standards of accountability. Can democracy be strengthened in the recovery from COVID-19? Everyone is welcome to join the discussion on the Massey College YouTube channel.
Editor’s Letter: Back to School
Pandemic pods, #SafeSeptember, outdoor classrooms, masks, droplets and ballistic ranges. This is the new vocabulary with which to navigate going back to school. A return that is fraught with activation and anxiety.
The activation is seen across the country as citizens push their elected officials to confirm smaller class sizes and adequate resources to meet high health and safety standards. The Ontario Parent Action Network has organized thousands of citizens to call on increased government investment for a safe return to school for students across the province. Their efforts have yielded an additional $1 billion in federal and provincial funding. The anxiety is that not all groups have been so successful. In these instances families with means can advocate for themselves or their own school while those already disproportionately impacted by the pandemic face a further entrenchment of existing racial and class-based inequality. Watch for the Ontario Parents Action Network in our September Sector Spotlight and our monthly Bulletin.
Public schools are foundational to democracy – they are meant to produce an engaged citizenry and underscore the importance of civic participation. The start of the 2020/2021 school year marks a critical juncture for how we practice democracy and make change. What will come next for our public institutions?
This is one of the key questions guiding programming for DemocracyXChange. We have exciting updates to share with you over the coming weeks about speakers and sessions.
Did you know that we have a discussion group on Slack? Email us if you’re interested and we will be in touch with an invitation. If you know of a group that we should feature in our Sector Spotlight we want to hear from you – this month we profiled thoughtful and responsive work from CIVIX, the Law and Design CoLab, Leading in Colour and the Institute for Change Leaders. Finally, we are putting together important conversations about the future of democracy with Massey College and Distant, Not Disengaged – we hope that you will join us.
Institute for Change Leaders
Duncan Pike from Institute for Change Leaders on how the pandemic is underscoring the power of solidarity and storytelling.
Tell us about the Institute for Change Leaders. How would you describe its purpose and what makes it unique?
Our mission at the Institute for Change Leaders is to ensure organizers are continually developing the skills that they need to win social change. The Institute does this by teaching organizing strategies and providing a platform for the growth of a network of organizers.
Our trainings are unique because most student time is spent in small-group settings where students practice specific skills, and receive coaching from experienced organizers. The Institute has already taught over 5,000 students, and cultivated a team of 30+ small group facilitators. We deliver our full curriculum in regular weekend sessions at Ryerson University, and we work with organizations to deliver tailored trainings in their workplaces.
Our curriculum comes from Marshall Ganz, a Harvard professor who codified the relationship-building organizational framework we teach after years of organizing with the Civil Rights and United Farm Workers movements. He was a key trainer and organizing strategist behind President Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. The Institute offers the first accredited Marshall Ganz-based community-organizing course in Canada.
We are all navigating the global pandemic in different ways. What’s a key insight from how Institute for Change Leaders is responding to the crisis?
We experimented with online trainings in 2019, and by early this year we felt quite confident with our ability to meet our own standards of instruction and coaching over video. In that sense we were fortunate that our mission could be carried out online with relatively little disruption. This isn’t to say that there haven’t been obstacles. Relationship-building is at the core of our methodology and approach to achieving social change, and whatever the conveniences of Zoom, it’s possible that nothing can fully replace the spark of face-to-face meetings for developing strong personal connections.
That said, one of our key teachings is the power of personal storytelling to connect over shared values and experiences, and overcome obstacles of time, space, and sketchy internet connections. We’ve made use of this lesson in order to build solidarity within our own community, setting up online mindfulness sessions, organizing-focused books clubs, and drop-in opportunities for alumni, facilitators, volunteers and staff to connect to share their own experiences of the pandemic.
Over the past few months we have seen groups seize this moment of uncertainty to advance racial and economic justice in their communities. What are your thoughts on this moment in community organizing?
The pandemic has exacerbated pre-existing social, racial and economic inequalities, and movements to confront them have taken on a corresponding intensity and urgency. We’ve seen this energy first hand across a number of different issue areas and communities.
In early April, we partnered with the Association of Early Childhood Educators of Ontario (AECEO) to run an online training for over 200 early childhood educators (ECEs) and parents to provide them the skills they need to build power, confidence and solidarity. It was an amazing journey, and privilege to work with such an inspiring, dedicated group of changemakers. 10 days after completing our training, ECEs held a Virtual Rally of 1,500 demanding a reopening plan that ensured quality and safety for all. 21,000 viewed this rally and both levels of government listened. In July, the Government of Canada announced $625 million in federal funding for the child care sector, a promising step in the struggle for decent work for ECEs and the fight for a publicly funded system.
In June we had the pleasure of hosting long-term care (LTC) workers in a handful of connect and share sessions, where LTC workers were able to build solidarity over shared stories and shared laughs. The sessions gave an outlet for workers on the frontlines of dealing with COVID and press surrounding the maltreatment of long-term care residents. They also came up with strategies and tactics on how to fix long term care so seniors can live in dignity, and workers get decent wages with stable, rewarding employment.
And this August we co-hosted a joyful celebration with 200 graduates of the Black Youth Leadership Program, a joint project of ICL and For Youth Initiative (FYI), that worked with youth from across Ontario to develop their leadership skills and confront anti-Black racism in their communities.
The pandemic continues to do enormous damage, and the struggle to shape our post-Covid future will be intense, but it’s difficult not to feel hopeful when working with such amazing groups of activists and organizers.
What’s one big challenge you see Canada’s democracy facing? How are you working on this challenge, what solutions do you propose?
The greatest challenge Canadian democracy faces continues to be the domination of our political system by those with the greatest economic power, and the corresponding dispossession and disempowerment of working class, racialized, Indigenous, and historically marginalized peoples. The only solution to this is for the majority of people who are not represented by the political system to organize themselves, develop solidarity and political power, and build bottom-up institutions that work for the many. We hope that our efforts to teach grassroots organizing skills may contribute a small part to this struggle.
Could you share an idea or initiative related to increasing civic engagement or democratic participation that inspires you?
ICL is a part of the Leading Change Network, a global community of organizers, educators, and researchers that teach the Ganz methodology for social change. They host regular meet-and-connect sessions with members from around the work to share knowledge, tell stories, and build international solidarity. It’s incredibly inspiring to connect with organizers from other countries, learn about their work, and find areas of common experience. During the last session I spoke with a woman doing work with formerly incarcerated peoples in Oakland, an economic development activist from Nigeria, and a social entrepreneur from Palestine, with whom we are now collaborating on a proposal. Looking beyond your own backyard, and your own country, can be invigorating, and is a reminder that the challenges we face are ultimately global in nature.
Tell us about how Institute for Change Leaders is making its work more inclusive and building engagement with different communities. Any tips or lessons to share with others in the sector about decreasing barriers to participation?
We are constantly working to expand our training to be more accessible to working class, racialized, and Indigenous communities who have the most to gain from building the skills we teach.
To give one example, most curricula about successful organizing campaigns do not include Indigenous content. To help Indigenize our courses, we chose to highlight a case study of Attawapiskat’s struggle for a new school from 1979 until the new school was built in 2014. This campaign is known as Shannen’s Dream, after the late student leader Shannen Koostachin. We examined how Shannen and her contemporaries engaged students, teachers, and citizens from across Canada to amplify the voice of youth from Attawapiskat, and integrated these lessons into our course material.
The movement’s campaign strategies are a powerful illustration of Ganz’s theories and a stirring example of Indigenous power and leadership. We piloted the new curriculum in Indigenous environments with feedback from participants and specialists in Indigenous studies. We plan to continue to develop case studies highlighting the power communities have when they organize collectively and politically.
Are there specific asks that the Institute for Change Leaders has for the broader sector — things you need help with, problems you’re trying to solve or wishes you have?
Sustaining the participation, strength and health of this community over the long-term will be an ongoing challenge amid the pandemic, and we would love to hear from others in this sector about how they’re responding.
For people looking to engage with you, how can they get involved? Who can they contact?
Visit our website and our social channels (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram). You can also get in touch by emailing changeleaders@ryerson.ca. And this fall Olivia Chow will be teaching SSH502: Community Action Research, a three-month credit course at Ryerson University on community leadership, organizing and action. This course teaches hands-on organizing skills so you can inspire your community to take action for social change. This course will be supported by a team of experienced organizers who will provide small group and one to one coaching. .
The Institute for Change Leaders in a nonprofit organization dedicated to ensuring progressive organizers and community-based organizations are continually developing the skills they need to transform the resources they have into the change they want. We do this through teaching organizing strategies and providing a platform for the growth of a network of organizers.
This is an unprecedented moment for democracy in Canada so we created Sector Spotlight to learn about how leading practitioners are responding to it. Have ideas for our next Sector Spotlight? Get in touch!
Leading in Colour
Serisha Iyar from Leading in Colour on how to creating space for racialized youth in current democratic systems can create a different future.
Tell us about the Leading in Colour. How would you describe its purpose and what makes it unique?
Leading in Colour was founded on July 25, 2019. After experiencing the rejection of racialized experiences in activist movements firsthand, I decided to create a space where racialized leaders, particularly youth, could come together to learn and mobilize. This focus on racialized youth as experts in their own traumas, lived experiences, needs, strengths, cultural competencies and more is unique in the Canadian landscape of work.
At Leading in Colour we equip young people with the necessary tools needed to conduct their advocacy efforts. We offer FREE training opportunities for racialized youth under 26 years old in the form of webinars, workshops, and events where they can develop their advocacy skill set. We currently offer three specific programs, our online training fellowship program, the Digital Institute for Activism; our podcast, Leaders of Colour; and our teach-in webinar series, Emerging Experts. These programs offer opportunities to both navigate the colonial systems of democracy at play and allow for visions of a different future.
We additionally work with partner organizations to provide programming for their constituents that is built on the frameworks of anti-oppression, anti-racism, intersectionality and decolonization.
We are all navigating the global pandemic in different ways. What’s a key insight from how Leading in Colour is responding to the crisis?
In order to reach youth across what is currently Canada, Leading in Colour since day 1 has been dedicated to developing spaces for action and training entirely online. We have had opportunities to work in-person within varying communities but have remained committed to doing this work via video conferencing, phone calls and hosting webinars, workshops and courses online. As such, we didn’t have to navigate or change our work much when the pandemic struck but were rather well-placed to continue our work and draw in new folks to engage while other organizations sorted out how they would adapt. While our digital framework has been inaccessible for some youth who live in rural communities which particularly affects our engagement with Indigenous youth, we have been able to bridge this by working with partner organizations and other youth-led networks to ensure we have some capacity for outreach beyond those who are just in front of us. We continue to strive for better developments in this area as we grow our organizational capacity.
Over the past few months we have seen groups seize this moment of uncertainty to advance racial and economic justice in their communities. What are your thoughts on this moment in community organizing?
My hope is that the momentum continues and that folks don’t simply jump on the bandwagon of activism only to discard it once the pandemic is over and they are consumed with other interests. Activists have been mobilizing nonstop far before the pandemic began, the media’s decision on when to showcase and when not to showcase this work plays into how those who aren’t as familiar with anti-racism efforts see it. For example, now, in August, there continue to be huge marches in solidarity around police violence against Black communities in the US yet there is minimal coverage compared to earlier in the summer. Yet, this work continues. I think this moment in community organizing is highlighting a whole field of social issues that governments need to be held accountable for.
What’s one big challenge you see Canada’s democracy facing? How are you working on this challenge, what solutions do you propose?
White supremacy. Working within the current democratic system I think is a huge challenge for racialized youth especially when it comes to accessing space, power, and decision-making opportunities. Understanding how we can navigate the Canadian political sphere to seek justice for their communities is critical to this. At Leading in Colour we work on this challenge by creating accessible learning opportunities for racialized youth around how the system operates and what they can do to have their voices and that of their communities heard. As far as solutions go, far too often we say that representation is the way in which we can have our voices heard in Canada’s democratic system. However, this isn’t the be all and end all of resolutions. We need to enable racialized youth who decide to take part in colonial systems of government to do so in ways that support themselves and their communities. Navigating systems of white supremacy often comes at a great cost and our hope to help support one another through this by preparing for what’s to come.
Could you share an idea or initiative related to increasing civic engagement or democratic participation that inspires you?
I am a huge fan of Platform (formerly known as Young Womxn’s Leadership Network). They have consistently been committed to reshaping the political landscape by putting the lived experiences of racialized women and gender-diverse youth at the centre of their work. Their programs have built civic leadership capacity among hundreds of young people by empowering and educating their constituents. Their work is critical in supporting survivors of sexual assault in the field and continually redefine what leadership in these positions of power could look like if we followed their lead.
Tell us about how Leading in Colour is making its work more inclusive and building engagement with different communities. Any tips or lessons to share with others in the sector about decreasing barriers to participation?
Leading in Colour is committed to understanding the nuanced experiences of diverse racialized communities that live in what is currently Canada. We actively work towards developing anti-oppressive educational materials for racialized communities around subjects like anti-Black racism, Islamophobia and anti-Indigeneity with the hope of fostering unlearning of internalized behaviours and ideologies and promotion of analytical discourse and active allyship aimed at building solidarity across racialized communities. The main lesson to be learned for others is to step back and create space for racialized youth to lead the way for both themselves and their communities. We are not future leaders, we are currently leaders, and as such have the expertise, skillset, knowledge, capacity and ability to do the work that those in positions of power cannot.
Are there specific asks Leading in Colour has for the broader sector — things you need help with, problems you’re trying to solve or wishes you have?
Leading in Colour, like many other racialized youth-led organizations, is not privileged to have the same access to funding and resources as our counterparts. As such, we are consistently at a disadvantage yet, we continue to do critical work that is unpaid for the dreams of our ancestors, the visions we have for ourselves, the future of our communities and the generations to come. Until we can commit to restructuring the colonial ways these spaces have been developed; it would be worthwhile if the broader sector sought out our leadership beyond tokenism and used their platforms to share with us (organizations led by and for racialized youth) access to the spaces they so easily take up in the interim; perhaps then our voices would be amplified in ways that enabled support.
For people looking to engage with you, how can they get involved? Who can they contact?
Follow us on social media: Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Visit our website and check out our podcast Leaders of Colour.
Leading in Colour is a grassroots organization led by and for racialized youth. We equip young people with the necessary tools needed to conduct their advocacy efforts. We offer FREE training opportunities for racialized youth under 26 years old where they can develop their advocacy skill set. We currently offer three specific programs, our online training fellowship program, the Digital Institute for Activism; our podcast, Leaders of Colour; and our teach-in webinar series, Emerging Experts.
Law & Design CoLab
Avery Au from the Law and Design CoLab on seizing the opportunity to strengthen the public’s understanding of the justice system and grow a broad coalition for systemic change.
Tell us about the Law and Design CoLab. How would you describe your purpose and what makes you unique?
The Law & Design CoLab’s mission is to use design and digital media to make legal education and advocacy more impactful. We’re an Ontario-based nonprofit that has a unique model of skills-based volunteering. Our members include both lawyers and professionals from creative industries like UX/product design, advertising & marketing, graphic design, and web development.
We scope projects by reviewing the research and consulting broadly with legal experts. Then, collaborating in small flexible teams, CoLab members work to conceive and create multimedia to amplify the impact of legal advocacy.
We hope that our work can help foster a culture of cross-disciplinary collaboration in Canada’s justice sector and strengthen civic engagement with justice issues.
We are all navigating this pandemic in different ways. What’s a key insight from how the Law & Design CoLab is responding to the crisis?
Thankfully, we haven’t had to make many changes to our work style since our team has always been a digital-first collaboration. Even before the pandemic, we often held online meetings where members participated from several different locations across Canada.
This spring, we decided to focus our efforts on building out an educational website for the Unlock Bail Reform project having a wide range of interactive features. This highly collaborative effort was facilitated using a variety of digital tools including G Suite for Nonprofits, Slack, Zoom, Calendly, Figma, GitHub, Miro, Airtable, Evernote, and Hubspot.
Currently, we’re ramping up our outreach – which is being done exclusively online – in an effort to secure institutional and corporate partners who can enable the next phase of multimedia for the Unlock Bail Reform project.
This moment is prompting crucial conversations about the structural inequality and violence faced by Black and Indigenous communities. How does this relate to the work of the Law & Design CoLab?
Structural inequality is a major problem in Canada’s justice sector that is felt in virtually every part of Canada’s civil and criminal legal systems. Right now, with both the pandemic and the global protests supporting Black Lives Matter, there’s an unprecedented level of public attention and concern being directed towards Canada’s justice sector. As legal advocates, we have an incredible opportunity to strengthen the public’s understanding of the justice system and grow a broad coalition for systemic change.
The CoLab’s work on bail reform is deeply connected to structural racism and inequality. Bail is often described as the most important decision in the criminal process because it’s highly determinative of a lot of outcomes that follow. By understanding harsh realities of the bail process, we also gain insight into problems with the criminal justice system more broadly, namely: how insufficient investment in social programs and community health, an underfunded legal aid system, and a culture based on fear harm the lives of vulnerable people and compromise our moral principles.
That being said, a core commitment of the CoLab is to engage audiences in a way that does not overwhelm them with hard truths or make them feel that change is hopeless. We see our efforts as “sustaining and building” momentum for change because leaders in the legal profession have worked for years to change the bail system’s status quo and have achieved some major successes.
We also believe it’s important to recognize that there are many things to be proud of in our legal system and legal culture, especially in comparison to other countries around the world.
What’s one big challenge you see facing in Canada’s democracy? How are you working on this challenge or what solutions do you propose?
A central set of challenges facing Canadian democracy is how we’ll adapt to rapid changes in our information ecosystem and their impact on our personal and social lives – challenges like disinformation, echo chambers, virality, polarization, among many others. Of course, this same rapid change has also opened amazing opportunities to reach and connect with people using interactive digital formats.
We see our work at the CoLab as part of an emerging genre of civic-minded strategic communications that leverages multimedia to engage a broader audience and galvanize action on urgent, social challenges. There’s a lot of room for innovation to discover more effective approaches. We admire many groups who publish multimedia content in this genre including news organizations, like Vox and Pro Publica, and justice-sector nonprofits, like the Vera Institute and the Bail Project.
Could you share an idea or initiative related to increasing civic engagement or democratic participation that inspires you?
Returning to the theme of fostering new kinds of civic education and engagement, there are many US organizations in the justice space that we find inspiring, for example Movement Alliance Project, Brooklyn Defenders, Media Justice, or Color of Change to name a few. We aim to bring this type of innovation to Canada by partnering with leading nonprofits and legal experts.
We’re also inspired by the many organizations who are committed to discovering how to develop and deliver human-centered legal information and services, for example the Legal Design Alliance and the Stanford Legal Design Lab.
Tell us about how the Law & Design CoLab is making its work more inclusive and building engagement with different communities. Any tips or lessons to share with others in the sector about decreasing barriers and increasing participation?
We’ve found that our volunteers – who work as lawyers, legal experts, and creative professionals – come from a very wide range of ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Part of this diversity can be attributed to our effort to cast a very wide net when advertising volunteer opportunities and events. For example, last February we held a large Creative Design Challenge and made an open call to creatives of all types that was distributed widely across social platforms and promoted by higher ed programs and cultural/community centres.
Are there specific things you need help with, problems you’re trying to solve or wishes you have for the broader sector?
Securing sustainable funding is a major challenge across the nonprofit, especially during this pandemic. Right now, we’re focusing our efforts on building corporate partnerships that can provide the in-kind and financial support to enable rich multimedia and thought-provoking events for the next phase of the Unlock Bail Reform project.
For people looking to engage with you, how can they get involved? Who can they contact?
Follow us on social media: Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook. To learn more about supporting our efforts or volunteering with us, please reach out to us at info@lawdesigncolab.ca.
The Law & Design CoLab is a volunteer-led nonprofit based in Ontario. We use design and digital media to make legal education and advocacy more impactful. We have a unique model of skills-based volunteering. Our members are both lawyers and professionals from creative industries like UX/product design, advertising & marketing, graphic design, and web development. We work with legal experts and community stakeholders to conceive and create experiences that amplify legal advocacy efforts. Our work is part of an emerging genre of civic-minded strategic communications that leverages multimedia to engage a broader audience and galvanize action on urgent, social challenges.
This is an unprecedented moment for democracy in Canada so we created Sector Spotlight to learn about how leading practitioners are responding to it. Have ideas for our next Sector Spotlight? Get in touch!
CIVIX
Jessica Johnston from CIVIX on how simple digital literacy skills as the best defence against information pollution.
Tell us about CIVIX. How would you describe your purpose and what makes you unique?
CIVIX is a Canadian civic education charity dedicated to developing the habits and skills of citizenship in students under the voting age. We build experiential learning programs for use by K-12 educators that focus on electoral participation, government budgets, and elected representation. Our flagship program is Student Vote, a parallel election for students under the voting age. During the 2019 federal election, 1.2 million students cast a ballot in the Canadian after participating in a unit on democracy and elections delivered using CIVIX curriculum materials. Over the past two years, our focus has expanded significantly to include a deep emphasis on informed citizenship, a response to the current crisis around digital mis- and disinformation. We’ve built curriculum materials around themes such as reliable sources, algorithms and filter bubbles, and verification techniques. We’re fortunate to have an expansive network of engaged educators across the country who sincerely value and use CIVIX programs and resources.
We are all navigating the global pandemic in different ways. What’s a key insight from how CIVIX is responding to the crisis?
Of course no one has been unaffected by this crisis. With schools being closed, teachers, students, and parents have been categorically impacted as education has moved to the home. This has been a huge challenge for all involved. CIVIX’s role at all times is to support educators, with quality tools and programming that can be flexibly deployed. With the shift to remote learning, that flexibility has become even more crucial. We developed new tools over the spring, specifically to address the ‘infodemic’ brought about by COVID-19 — this is the proliferation of false and misleading information online related to the pandemic, the hoaxes, conspiracy theories, faulty expertise and the like. We called this verification module CTRL-F: Find the Facts, and built it specifically for teachers to use with students at home. We created two pathways, including a student-facing site, which was an experiment for us, as our materials have always been teacher-facing first.
We are in the midst of revising the CTRL-F module for re-release in the fall. Flexibility will be even more important with the return to school, since there is still so much uncertainty around what the year will look like. The situation could also look very different in different regions. So we are building flexible tools that teachers can deploy in ways that best suit their individual needs.
Misinformation on digital platforms is a critical threat to democracy. Tell us about the Ctrl-F project – who is the target audience and how was it developed?
CTRL-F: Find the Facts is a verification module that teaches simple digital literacy skills students can use to determine the reliability of any piece of information. CTRL-F is the keyboard shortcut for ‘find’ and the idea is that we can all develop a habit of using quick strategies to investigate news and information to determine what to trust.
The project is a continuation of our work on information literacy, which we began in earnest in 2017, as the world was really coming to grips with just how much of a threat to democracy the spread of false and misleading information is. We knew electoral processes around the globe had been targeted with disinformation, and that even the accidental spread of less overtly harmful false information was creating a polluted online information environment where it’s hard to tell what is credible.
In researching how we might address these challenges in the classroom, we found a promising body of literature from practitioners who advocate simple digital literacy skills as the best defence against information pollution, with the research to back it up. The term for this set of skills is ‘lateral reading’ and the techniques involve leaving the page where you find the information — opening a new tab and doing a keyword search, or looking on Wikipedia to find context about an unknown person or group. This is what professional fact-checkers do to quickly and accurately assess new information. It may sound simple, but the strategies are pretty powerful and form the core of CTRL-F.
To develop these tools, we teamed up with digital literacy expert Mike Caulfield and Jane Lytvynenko, who covers disinformation as a senior reporter for BuzzFeed news. The learning module itself combines a series of instructional videos with hands-on examples that allow users to apply the skills immediately to a variety of real-world cases. It was designed with middle and secondary school students in mind, but the strategies it teaches are essential life skills no matter your age.
What are your goals with the CTRL-F and what has been the user response?
We have a number of goals with CTRL-F, in terms of supporting teachers and students. Ultimately, it’s our hope that this programming will help to create the next generation of informed citizens. A big-picture goal with this work is to change the way digital information literacy is taught in Canadian schools.
Lateral reading strategies are effective, but not as widespread as one might hope. When students learn source evaluation, the typical approach involves analysis of the text itself. Strategies are often packaged in the form of a checklist. Students may be instructed to look for typos, dates, about pages, authors, or URL suffixes. They may be taught that .org is more reliable than .com, for example, although anyone can purchase a .org domain name.
Checklists are time-consuming to apply and often offer conflicting signals. They can easily backfire and lead students to draw incorrect conclusions, in which they feel confident, because they’ve applied the strategies they’ve been taught. The more efficient and effective strategy is to conduct simple research to discover context before devoting time and attention to something that may turn out to be junk, or worse.
Response to our verification work has been overwhelmingly positive. Teachers get it. They see the value in these tools and skills, which connect to every subject and can be used day-to-day in all aspects of our online lives. We’ve also had positive responses to the public-facing site as a tool for use in libraries and by other community groups.
What do digital literacy skills, students and teachers have to do with democracy?
A healthy democracy requires that the public not only has access to quality information but that it is equipped with the skills necessary to locate this information. Because so much of the information we use to make sense of the world comes to us through online channels — and because it’s increasingly difficult to sort fact from fiction and everything in between — the ability to determine whether a piece of online information is credible has become an essential skill of citizenship.
While the problem of false or misleading information online affects people across age groups, CIVIX operates from the belief that ongoing civic education beginning at a young age can be a bulwark against the worst effects of information disorder: political apathy, cynicism, and a general distrust of institutions. Our digital literacy initiative aims to support teachers in empowering students with the knowledge and skills required to locate information they can trust so that they can make informed choices that are in the best interests of themselves and their communities.
Could you share an idea or initiative related to increasing civic engagement or democratic participation that inspires you?
Just over a year ago, CIVIX assembled a local team in Colombia that has been working non-stop to develop and deliver civic education programming across the country. What they have been able to achieve in a short amount of time is incredible. In October 2019, more than 76,000 students learned about government and the electoral process, researched local candidates, and debated about topics relevant for them and their communities before casting a Voto Estudiantil (Student Vote) ballot in a parallel election coinciding with Colombian municipal elections. The team is also actively adapting CIVIX digital literacy materials to be suitable for the Colombian context, working closely with teachers to help them empower a new generation of informed, engaged youth.
For people looking to engage with you, how can they get involved? Who can they contact?
You can visit our website or find us on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. You can also email us at hello@civix.ca.
CIVIX is a national registered charity dedicated to building the skills and habits of active and informed citizenship among young Canadians. CIVIX provides experiential learning opportunities to help young Canadians practice their rights and responsibilities as citizens and connect with their democratic institutions. Student Vote, the flagship program of CIVIX, is a parallel election for students under the voting age, which coincides with official elections. In the 2019 federal election, 1.2 million students cast ballots from over 8,000 schools.
This is an unprecedented moment for democracy in Canada so we created Sector Spotlight to learn about how leading practitioners are responding to it. Have ideas for our next Sector Spotlight? Get in touch!