Democracy, Q-Sort and Remembrance Day for Lost Species
Welcome to this week’s issue of Traversing, as always if you find this newsletter to be interesting, if it helps to inform your thinking about progressive education or if you think it might help others, please subscribe, share it with your friends and neighbors and share your comments and questions.
Democracy, Q-Sort and Remembrance Day for Lost Species
Last week Rep. Kevin McCarthy spoke for more than eight hours to delay the house vote on the Build Back Better Act and this promoted a dive into the Act itself and the Q-Sort qualitative research methodology at City of Bridges. This exploration also prompted a larger question about the value of schools in the promotion of democratic participation.
I’ll dive into the larger question, but a little background on our process last week is a good place to start.
I was first introduced to Q-Sort when I was exploring potential methodologies for my Ph.D. dissertation, I eventually settled on Hermeneutic Phenomenology, which I will discuss another time, but Q-Sort was on the list. If you are interested in a detailed exploration of the methodology you can find it here, but for the sake of this purpose, a more concise description from Better Evaluation is:
Q-methodology (also known as Q-sort) is the systematic study of participant viewpoints. Q-methodology is used to investigate the perspectives of participants who represent different stances on an issue, by having participants rank and sort a series of statements.
Q-Sort asks participants to rank statements or items on a chart that looks like in inverted normal curve, like this:
At City of Bridges last week, the students were grouped and then asked to rank the 43 elements of the Build Back Better Act using the Q-Sort template. This activity was framed around the realities of law-making process namely that in order to pass legislation different representatives will have different priorities and therefore choices will have to be made about what is and is not included in the final piece of legislation.
Unsurprisingly, different groups set different priorities. One group concluded that the climate change measures were the most important and therefore ranked them the highest, while another group concluded that the childcare subsidies and increased funding for CHIP were the most important and therefore ranked them the highest. As we went through the results of their work, it was quickly evident that even among a student body who shares many progressive values, there was still significant variation in the elements of the legislation that they felt to be the most important.
The activity itself was a valuable exploration of current federal policy that will, if passed or frankly if not passed will have a significant impact on the lives of the young people involved and the activity was also a valuable introduction to a research methodology that strives to straddle qualitative and quantitative realms, but in my opinion the most important element of the activity was that it illustrated the challenges of operating in our representative democracy.
I will be the first to admit that there are challenges, weaknesses and disfunction in our system of government, and yet it is also uniquely structured to allow for people’s voices to guide and shape the nation where we live. Essential to the power of those voices is robust participation in the process and as we know the percentage of eligible voters who participate in presidential elections rarely breaks 60% and in local elections that participation rate can be as low as 20%.
In order to make significant progress in the pressing issues of our modern era, including climate change and support for childcare and health insurance for children as selected by a couple of the groups of City of Bridges students last week, we need greater participation in the democratic process.
I am fully in support of programs and activities to encourage adults to vote, but we also need to ensure that young people, who will soon be able to patriciate in democracy, have the knowledge, skills and understanding that will enable them to vote, run for office and engage in the work of local, state and national governance.
I wonder what schools would look like if instead of evaluating them based on test scores, evaluated them based on the percentage of graduates who voted or support their communities, states and nation through public service and democratic participation.
With Gratitude
People, Places and Things
In this section of the newsletter I share people, places and things that have inspired and taught me valuable lessons about rethinking learning.
November 30th is the 10th Remembrance Day for Lost Species. This day began in 2011 and was organized by a group of artists from a number of European countries and has spread to become a global event.
I first became familiar with this day a number of years ago when they highlighted the Tasmanian Tiger or Thylacinus cynocephalus. The Thylacine was a marsupial carnivore who lived in Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea until they were driven to extinction though introduced species and hunting. The last known thylacine died at the Hobart Zoo in 1936. I have always been fascinated by the thylacine, and this interest led me to Remembrance Day for Lost Species.
On Tuesday, City of Bridges High School held a Remembrance Day event and students created art in honor of extinct, threatened and endangered species.
I wanted to share this global event with them and I would also like to share it with you. If you would like more information, you can check out their webpage here.
Thank you as always.
See you next week!