Justice Pedagogy and Active Digital Citizenship

Work led by Keith Heggart explores civics and citizenship education from the perspectives of practitioners and participants, and especially the role that technology enhanced learning fulfils within this field.

As part of the Justice Pedagogy framework, engagement, advocacy and critical interrogation of the public sphere (however and wherever it manifests) is central to the development of active citizens. Currently, Keith’s work is exploring ways that this theme might be explicated through practical applications in different sectors (e.g. schools, GLAM etc).

Keith’s recent book focuses on this topic

This book explores alternative models of civics and citizenship education. Specifically, it uses Justice Citizens, a participatory research and film-making project, as a tool to examine young people’s ideas about active citizenship and participation in public spaces. It introduces a framework that seeks to explore the diverse and apparently contradictory nature of young people’s active citizenship. The framework draws on complexity theory combined with critical pedagogy and democratic education to formulate an approach to developing active citizenship among young people. This approach extends theories of both critical pedagogy and education for citizenship, and by doing so seeks to explain the variegated nature of young people’s engagement with civil society. This book contains a valuable repository of ideas and resources for application for teachers to use in schools and classrooms. Academics engaged in initial teacher education, at both primary and secondary levels, will find the framework of use when describing the importance and new approaches to civics and citizenship education within the current school and policy environments. Read more in Jane’s UTS Social Impact case study

• Visit Keith’s site to read more

Keith did a long interview for the Teachers’ Education Review (TER) podcast with host Steven Kolber. Listen to the episode here or watch the video below.