The activities and exercises set out here add another layer to the treatment of key topics and themes in Unit 1.
To recapitulate the logic of the study guide:
Week 1: begins with a survey of public debate on issues of citizenship and then introduces the problem of the civic deficit.The Unit ends with some documents which model various ways of being a citizen.Week 2: provides an overview of democratic traditions.
Week 3: introduces debates about multiculturalism and citizenship.
Week 4: considers a variety of approaches to the education of citizens in a pluralist, multi-ethnic society.
Some of the themes which emerge from this Unit will be explored further here.
The civic deficit will be linked to democratic traditions as we map the contours of the public sphere.
The concept map tool will allow you to compare and contrast the features of two influential ways of thinking about democracy: civic republicanism and the liberal tradition.
In debates about democracy current in Australia and internationally, there has been a revival of interest in the concept of civil society. The Barry Hindess reading in the dossier is one instance of this; but it is a concept we return to in Unit 3, where we explore recent work on associational democracy, social capital and rights discourse.
Here we are interested in the notion of civic virtue, an idea usually associated with the republican tradition. Civic virtue might be glossed as ‘public spiritedness’ or ‘active citizenship’. The question for people involved in citizenship education is how an appreciation of the value and importance of civic virtue can be transformed into a set of dispositions such as tolerance, respect for others, self-reliance and so on.
Finally, this site allows us to think about a new dimension of citizenship - virtual citizenship - and a new element of the public sphere - the Internet. This is a hot topic at the moment, though many claims about the impact of the Net and its democratising promise have not been subject to much scrutiny. In working through the activities set out here, you have the opportunity to become a practising Netizen and to arrive at an informed view of its possibilities.