Lesson video

Hello, my name is Mrs. Blachford, and I'm a Citizenship teacher, and today I'm really excited cause I'm going to be your citizenship teacher.

Our lesson today we're going to be looking at, what it means to be an active citizen, so let's get started.

So in our lesson today on active citizenship, we are going to be doing three things, we're going to look at what does it mean to be an active citizen? We're going to look at how we might bring about social change, and we're also going to look at the skills that we're going to need if we want to be an active citizen.

You are going to need some equipment, for our lesson today as well, so you're going to need a pen and some paper, I would also really recommend that you find yourself a quiet place to work so you're not disturbed at all during our lesson, so if you want to pause the video now while you're go and do that, and then get yourself started as soon as you feel comfortable and ready.

The first thing we need to do in our lesson today is make sure that we have a really clear definition of what we actually mean by active citizenship and active citizens, So I've taken this from the website of the Association for Citizenship Teaching, and they say that, "active citizenship is a process "to involve pupils in learning "how to take part in democracy, "and use their citizenship knowledge, "skills and understanding, "to work together in trying "to make a positive difference in the world around them.

"An active citizen, "is someone who cares about their community enough "to change it." And we're going to be looking at some people today who do just that.

The first of those is Bayard Rustin, and you may or may not know who he is, he may be a new name to you either way, let's have a look at something he said, and actually this is one of my favourite quotes when I'm thinking about what it means to be an active citizen.

So he's said that, "we need in every community, "a group of angelic troublemakers".

I want you to take a moment, have a think about what we can infer from this quote, what did Bayard Rustin actually mean? When I look at this quote, it sums up for me, what we mean by active citizenship, so in order for us to bring about social change, we need people who are actually willing to stand up and fight and to actually bring about that change.

In our lesson today, we're going to look at some of the people who have done just that, and we're going to start with Bayard Rustin.

So who was Bayard Rustin? So he was a life-long civil rights activist, he first met Dr.

Martin Luther King Jr, who was actually probably the best known civil rights leader in 1956 when he travelled to Alabama to lend support to Dr.

King and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which you may know about already.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott was a civil rights protest during which African Americans refused to ride the city buses in Montgomery, Alabama, to protest against the segregated seating, and also following the arrest of Rosa Parks, who refused to give up a seat to a white man.

He bought the techniques of non-violence to the American Civil Rights Movement and it was actually him that convinced Martin Luther King Jr, to embrace non-violence and do without armed guards whenever he was protesting.

Bayard Rustin is probably best remembered as the architect and the organiser of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, that was one of the largest non-violent protests ever held in the United States, with 250,000 people attending, near the end of the march, Rustin read aloud the list of the marches 10 demands of this revolution, right before King hand delivered those to President Kennedy, as a valued advisor, he helped King become an international symbol of peace and non-violence, which is why we still learn about him today.

Bayard Rustin spent his life as a civil rights activist, and he persisted in his efforts to speak up and write what he felt was wrong, and for this reason, I think he's a fantastic example of an active citizen, and actually somebody I think we all should be learning about in schools and in citizenship.

Going to ask you to do a task now, so I'm going to ask you to pause the video in a second, so I want you to write a paragraph which explains what you've learned about Bayard Rustin, and why you think he's a good example of an active citizen, so pause the video now to complete your task and then you can start again once you've finished.

So, I'm just going to give you a bit of feedback, this is a possible answer you might have come up with or something similar.

So Bayard Rustin, was a civil rights activist all his life, he brought non-violence to the forefront of the civil rights movement and to the attention of Dr.

Martin Luther King, he's best known for being the architect of the March on Washington, one of the largest non-violent protests in US history.

He's a good example of an active citizen, because he spoke out about something he felt was wrong, he took peaceful action to try and bring about change, and inspired others to do so too.

Let's have a look at a second example, so this is Jamie Oliver, again, you may know him, he's quite a well known celebrity chef, and he was actually already well known as a TV chef when he decided to campaign for healthier school meals in the UK.

In 2004, he led a successful campaign to ban junk and processed food from school canteens, and in 2005, tight nutritional guidelines were brought in, guidelines that will probably still be in effect in your school canteens, so people were not all in support of Jamie Oliver cause he managed to ban Turkey Twizzlers and there was outrage from some parents and children who loved to have it as part of their school dinners, so it wasn't popular with everybody.

He achieve this through a range of methods, so, almost 300,000 people signed an online petition on the feed me better website that he set up, and that was delivered to 10 Downing Street on the 13th of March 2005.

He got experts involved in his campaign such as nutritionists and doctors, who the government would actually listen to, and he used his celebrity status to get media coverage, so he was interviewed on TV, he had lots of newspaper articles, magazine articles, and all of those helps him to raise awareness of campaign and got the attention of the government more importantly.

Since then, he's gone on to campaign on a number of other issues around healthy eating, He campaigned for the government to introduce the sugar tax on soft drinks which have more than 5% sugar, and that was introduced in 2018, and importantly, the money that is raised from the levy, which is the money that goes to the government, will be spent on funding breakfast clubs and sports in schools.

One of his most recent campaigns is aimed to protect kids from junk food marketing, he wants the government to introduce a 9pm watershed on junk food advertising on TV, and for controls to come into place over what kids can see in terms of adverts on TV and also online, in the street and any transport that they might use, and he uses a hashtag #Adenough, which is on social media and helps him to raise awareness and gain galvanise people to join his campaign.

So, similarly to our last task, I'd like you to write a paragraph, this time explaining what you've learned about Jamie Oliver, and why you think he's an example of an active citizen, so you can pause the video now and then resume once you've finished your paragraph.

And just some feedback then, so this is something similar to what you might have, so Jamie Oliver is a well known chef who decided to take action to improve the quality and nutritional value of school dinners.

He also was successful in putting pressure on the government to introduce a sugar tax on sugary drinks.

He's now campaigning to try and protect children from junk food adverts He's an example of an active citizen because he used a variety of methods to campaign for change on an issue he feels passionate about.

He raised awareness in the media, he lobbied the government and got experts on board to support his campaign.

We're going to look at a third person now, again, who you may or may not know, I'd be surprised if you didn't know, this is Greta Thunberg, and she's a Swedish Environmental Activist, So she began a global movement by skipping school, not something we'd normally advise of course, but she started this in August 2018, and she spent a day camped out in front of the Swedish Parliament, holding up a sign painted in black letters on a white background, that read, "school strike for climate".

She since then has gone on to do numerous things and meet incredible number of people, she addressed the 2018 United Nations Climate Change Conference and students strikes have taken place every week somewhere in the world, in the 22 months since she did that, she has addressed heads of states at the United Nations, met with the pope sparred with the President of the United States on social media, and in 2019, she met with heads of state at the UN Climate Action Summit, because she didn't want to fly to New York where the summit was taking place, she sailed to North America, her influence on the world stage has been described by The Guardian and other newspapers as the Greta Effect.

So I'd like you to pause the video here and I'd just like to write a paragraph, which explains what you've learned about Greta Thunberg and why you think she's an example of an active citizen, and then you can resume the video once you've finished your paragraph.

And a possible answer here, so, Greta Thunberg is a Swedish environmental activist, who's gained international recognition for promoting the view, that humanity is facing a crisis arising from climate change.

She's known for the speeches she's made both in public and to political leaders and assemblies in which she criticises world leaders for their failure to take sufficient action to address the climate crisis.

She's an example of an active citizen, because she's made a real impact, important people are listening to her, and she's inspired young people to find their voices.

So, active citizens can use many different methods to bring about this social change, some of these terms were introduced in the first lesson of this unit, some of we've introduced today, and some perhaps are going to be new to you.

So for each of the questions that follow, you need to think about which description matches the key term at the top, so let's see if we can match the key term to the right definition.

So our first key term is petition, it's got four options to choose from, option one, joining together as a group and taking to the streets to campaign.

Option two, gathering signatures to show support for a cause.

Option three, meeting with the person who represents you either locally or nationally, and option four, refusing to buy a product or use a service as a protest.

If you had option two, very well done, so petition is where we gather signatures to show support for a cause.

Our second key term is boycott, again, same four options here, so option one joining together as a group and taking to the streets to campaign.

Option two, gathering signatures to show support for a cause.

Option three, meeting with the person who represents you either locally or nationally.

Option four refusing to buy a product or use a service as a protest.

Well done if you had option four, so boycott is where we refused to buy a product or use a service as a protest, remember back to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, where the civil rights movement, African Americans refused to ride the city buses in Montgomery, Alabama, to protest against the segregated seating and the arrest of Rosa Parks, so that was a really famous example of a boycott.

Our next key word is lobbying, so option one, joining together as a group, taking to the streets to campaign.

Option two, gathering signatures to show support for a cause.

Option three, meeting with the person who represents either locally or nationally.

Option four, refusing to buy a product or use the service as a protest.

If you had option three very well done, so lobbying is meeting with the person who represents you either locally or nationally, so that could be a local councillor, or it could be a member of parliament who has been elected to represent that local area.

And then this is our final key term, protest march, option one joining together as a group and taking to the streets to campaign.

Option two, gathering signatures to show support for a cause.

Option three, meeting with the person who represents you either locally or nationally, and option four refusing to buy a product or use a service as a protest.

And well done if you had option one, so protest marches were joined together as a group and take to the streets to campaign, really well done.

So I just want us to pause for a moment and think about the importance of citizenship education, so I've got a quote here from the website of the Association for Citizenship Teaching, and they say, "citizenship education develops knowledge, "skills and understanding "that pupils need to play a full part in society "as active and responsible citizens".

So within citizenship, we consider the society we live in, and we also quite often compare that to other countries, and how we can make a contribution to our society as active informed citizens.

In order to do that, we begin by starting to develop our knowledge and understanding, of how our country works, we can all make a difference when we care about the issues in our communities, whether that be local, national, or the global communities that we're all part of.

Today in our lesson, we've considered three people who we believe are examples of active citizens, we've thought about the types of actions you might take, we're now going to think about the skills that you might need to develop to be an active citizen, and we're going to start by producing a mind map, so let's have a look at an example of a mind map to get you started.

So in the middle, we might do this as a circle, you could do it as a rectangles, so we're going to have the skills needed to be an active citizen because that's what our mind map is going to be about, and then coming off that, you can see I've already started giving me two for free here, two skills that we might need in order to be an active citizen, the ability to do research, and the ability to use good communication.

So from those, we might for example, from communication I might put listening skills, or I might put being able to present an argument clearly, in research, I might put being able to use the internet to do a search for information.

So I'd like you to pause the video here and have a go at that task.

Some feedback then, so here's some of the skills that you might have added to your mind map, so communication skills we talked about, but we also might have critical thinking, so we might have to look at the information and decide what we're going to do with it and which information is useful.

We analyse information, we might analyse data, is it useful? What does it tell us? We evaluate that information, so we've analysed it, we've looked at it, what does it tell us? What are we now going to do with it? Is it useful to our campaign? Is it useful to be able to do anything with that information? Research, we need to be able to find out information.

We need to be able to work with others, often we need other people to support us whether that be to bring about the change, but maybe to get information from, maybe to ask them what their views are, but we need other people to work together to help us.

We need to be confident, we need to present ourselves in a way that other people are going to believe what we're saying but also be want to be part of that campaign perhaps with us.

We need to be resilient, things don't always go to plan, so need to be ready to pick ourselves up and have a go again or try a different way to bring about the change we want.

Create reasoned arguments, we need to build a back what we're saying, with some perhaps evidence that we've created, and put this in a coherent way, a way that we can present to others.

Decision making, so we need to be able to take that information and decide what to do, but we also need to think about, who is it best to contact to be able to bring about that change as an active citizen? So who are we going to get in touch with to help us bring about change? And we may actually represent in the views of others, often the issues that we choose affect other people, so we might actually be trying to represent the views of others, and it's really important, we do that in a fair way and also in a way that makes sure that they are represented clearly and well.

So I'd like you now to pause the video in a moment, and this is kind of our final task of our lesson, so I'd like you to choose an issue, you think is important in your local community, and consider how you would make a change or raise awareness of that issue, and to do that, I'd like you to design one of two things, either a slogan or an image that could be displayed on a poster to raise awareness of your chosen issue, so you can pause the video now to have a go with that, and then resume the video once you have finished your task.

So just a recap on our lesson today, brings us to the end of what we've been doing today, and hopefully, you will now be able to do these three things, so just have a pause and have a think, can we now define what is meant by active citizenship? Can you give an example of an active citizen? And can you tell others some key skills that are needed to be an active citizen? If you're able to, I'd really love if you could take a picture of your work and ask your parent or carer, to share it with your teachers, so they can see the fantastic things that you've learned today and if you'd like to, I'd really love it if you did, could you ask your parent or carer to send a picture of your work to @OakNational on Twitter so I can see your work too.

Really well done today, don't forget to complete the exit quiz now, and good luck with that, all that's left for me to say is a huge thank you for you taking part in the lesson today, take care and enjoy the rest of your learning today.