ED4620 Fall 2013

Designing a Civic Engagement Project

General Feedback

Overall, this project was well done. You selected good issues, connected them well to the
curriculum, and drew on course resources to demonstrate how your plans represented accepted
good practice in community engagement learning.

The best papers shared a number of feature including:

A clear connection to important social issues. These papers identified the issues, showed
why they were important and explained ways to connect them to students, to help
students see direct relevance in addressing them. The best papers drew on a range of
outside sources to demonstrate the importance of the issue and some basic information
about it. On student, for example, drew on information from Immigration Canada and
the Pearson Foundation to illustrate growing diversity in Canada in general and Canadian
schools in particular.
A clear and well articulated connection to the curriculum. These papers went beyond
simply listing curricular outcomes that were generally connected to the issues involved to
showing specific ways their plan addressed key elements of curricular outcomes. For
example, one student developed a project for the grade six curriculum focused on
welcoming international newcomers to school. She went through each unit of the
curriculum providing specific examples of how the project might be used to meet specific
outcomes.
Making specific use of course activities and materials in the design of the plan. Several
papers, for example, took the stages outlined in the article by Penney Clark as a
framework for designing their own project. A number drew on other relevant assigned
readings and the most impressive went beyond this to draw on other professional
literature both from the field of social studies and elsewhere.
Giving students some choice in developing their own ways to engage around the issue
identified. Several of the readings suggest that student interest and achievement increase
when they have voice in deciding how to engage. While all projects identified the issues
or concern that students would address, a number outlined alternative ways that students
might engage or found other ways to allow student voice in the project. The very best
projects focused on providing a framework for students to do their own learning about the
issue and make their own decisions about how to address it. In this context students
developed specific guidelines for students as to how to investigate the issue and collect
data for making their choices. One project on responding to the recent typhoon in the
Philippines, for example, developed a chart as a guide for students to assess the work of
various aid agencies to assess which were more or less effective. The students could then
choose which to support. Another project included a set of steps to lead students through
a study of homelessness in their community and develop a range of responses to it. One
thing I really liked about this project was it allowed students to come up with different
ways to take action and did not force all into the same activities.
Going beyond general description to working out specific lesson and project plans
including suggested materials. The very best projects identified a range of specific
material for students to work with in pursuing their projects.

Weaker papers were characterized by:

The biggest issue I had here was projects that did all the work for the students. These
projects identified the issue, selected the information for presentation, decided on the
action students would take, and the products they would produce. Some projects did this
while specifically mention that a clear criterion for successful projects set out in several
of the course readings was the importance of student choice and ownership. It is possible
to identify the issue and then let students investigate it themselves and decide on ways of
proceeding. Your role then becomes not so much telling them what they have to do as
designing good guidelines for collecting and assessing information and clear processes
for making decisions about what to do. If you do everything for them and force everyone
to respond in the same way, the issue is really yours, not theirs. There is a lot of civic
learning that takes place in figuring out how to address issues, dont take that away by
doing it yourself.
For some, the service was the central theme and more detail was provided describing it
than describing the civic learning that was expected. For school civic engagement
projects, the key focus is civic learning; the engagement/service is a vehicle for that.
Dont forget that order of priority.
Very general directions to students of equally general comments about that to tech.
Statements like research a charity or teach the background information are not, in
themselves very helpful. It is a good idea to have students investigate community
partners but you need to provide guidance for doing that a frame work, set of key
questions or the like to scaffold students through the experience. It is also a good idea to
teach or provide the opportunity to learn background information but probably
impossible to teach it all and you should identify at least examples of the important
aspects of it.
Very general connections to curricula or course materials. They would say things like
this project would fit the grade 8 curriculum, or provide a list of very general curriculum
outcomes with no specific ideas about how the project would address them. Several
identified history curricula as linked to their topic but then did not propose any activities
to engage students with historical material.

Grade Report
A+ 2
A 3
A- 7
B+ 2
B 2
B- 3