Talking about citizenship skills is different from speaking about civic education. In the latter, the goal is for students to memorize a series of rights, responsibilities, parts of the Constitution, etc. However, when we talk about competent citizenship, the goal is for the student to perform in relation to the world around her or him.
For young people to develop their citizenship skills, it is first necessary to promote their critical thinking, reasoning, and creativity. To go deeper into the topic of citizenship and civic formation, Lilia Calmet, director of Educational Projects for the Wiese Foundation, participated in the series “Educational Dialogues”, as part of our institution’s Educational Quality program.
What do citizenship skills encompass?
According to Lilia Calmet, citizenship skills mean that all people need to learn and develop our ability to act in society, relating with others in a just and equitable way, recognizing that all human beings have equality of rights and responsibilities. Furthermore, we must learn to understand other cultures and have the desire to enrich ourselves with what they have to offer.
Citizenship skills, according to Calmet, also imply the ability to take a position regarding a topic that involves the population; and it is through this manner that we can contribute to shape the country into the nation that we want to live in.
Development of critical thinking, reasoning, and creativity through citizenship skills
To attain citizenship skills, or a formation in citizenship and civics, it is necessary to develop a series of abilities, which are:
- The ability to reason, as it allows students to discuss and formulate concepts with respect to what is a subject of law, what is exclusion, what is discrimination, etc. In this way, they can have a deeper understanding of these and other concepts and can relate with other people without discriminating against them, without violence or any type of exclusion.
- The ability to reason also allows them to create and understand norms connected to ethics and moral autonomy. And it is through reasoning that discussions about liberty, equity, etc. should be aroused, leading to the formulation of norms that allow those concepts to be respected.
- Creativity is the third important capacity for citizenship skills. Through creativity, we can think outside the box to resolve conflicts without falling into the same behaviors as always.
- In citizenship skills, critical thinking is also important since it allows us to have the capacity to participate. However, to be able participate, it is also necessary to possess a series of skills, such as:
- Identifying problems
- Planning actions
- Evaluating what has been done, etc.
Critical thinking also allows us to have the capacity to deliberate, or to adopt clear and substantiated positions, and, at the same time, to infer what is behind others’ positions.
According to Lilia Calmet, in order to work on students’ citizenship skills, it is necessary to open the doors to the classrooms and integrate them into a broader group: a community, a region, a country, the whole world. In this way, students will be able to look at reality, discuss it, and participate based on it.
The complete video is about “Citizenship skills and critical thinking, reasoning and creativity”:
