Session 1 - 11th April 05 11.55 – 12.45

Title:           Share my Story: E-learning and Citizenship

Presenters:   Geoff Trodd & Karen Bhamra

Organisation:        Harrow Council Adult & Community Learning

                                Service (ACL)

Summary:

The national priority of active citizenship is potentially an important vehicle for widening participation in learning and for the development of learning communities and has been identified as one of the wider benefits of learning. However, many of those that organisations are seeking to engage, through a variety of strategies, may feel the most cut off from the host society and any sense of belonging to a wider community. Seeking to promote active citizenship in this context through a traditional curriculum or teaching/learning approach, therefore, is unlikely to succeed.

One way of approaching notions of citizenship and a sense of belonging is to enable learners to construct their own ‘world view’ through voicing and sharing their own life experiences and by providing the tools to represent and reflect on their place in a wider society as ‘citizens’. This life history approach has been used in a number of contexts to provide an entry into constructing perspectives on citizenship and the process of ‘speaking out’, capturing  learner voices, has provided a means for developing learning for inclusive citizenship.

The project run by Harrow ACL Service has sought to move this approach into a new agenda by utilising the potential of e-learning for empowerment and  creating new communities in the development of active citizenship with targeted groups of learners seen as disenfranchised or ‘excluded’ . Working with learners at a mosque and a group of Sri Lankan women, the project is using  e-learning as a vehicle to make the idea of citizenship more meaningful by providing a link between citizenship, ICT skills and language skills through a modular e-learning resource used as a blended learning tool of bite-size sessions. These cover the writing of personal stories, selected ESOL skills to develop language and an introduction to citizenship building on the personal writings to widen out to a common idea of citizenship, underpinned by appropriate ICT skills. As the ESOL module is optional the programme can be used  with a variety of groups. The intention is that through an e-learning programme learners are enabled to construct their own account of citizenship to be practiced within their chosen contexts.

The use of e-learning does raise a number of issues to be explored: how the mediation of technology as well as a tutor shapes the learning process, for example, or whether the tools used shape an existing community or create a new one. It also gives the practitioner an opportunity to link theory and practice in a way often missing in everyday work.