2.3.1 How can educators support young people’s civic engagement?

The Social Justice Youth Development (SJYD) framework (Ginwright and Cammarota, 2002) offers a basis for identifying the ways in which educators can support young people’s civic engagement. Within the SJYD framework, youth and adults work together with a common vision of social justice. The adults’ main aim is to support young people in developing critical consciousness to ‘challenge, respond to, and negotiate the use and misuse of power in their own lives’ (Carey et al., 2021) – an aim that fits well with addressing the climate crisis.

Ginwright and Cammarota (2002) propose three stages of development that might foster this critical consciousness:

1. Self-awareness which is required to achieve a positive sense of self, social, and cultural identity. This stage encourages young people to use their communities to explore how power, privilege, and oppression threaten their identities and capacity for self-determination.
2. Social awareness fosters young people’s capacity to think critically about the issues confronting people within their own communities.
3. Global awareness urges young people to learn and develop their emotional response to the ways that majority systems have historically marginalized minorities throughout the world, and to those minorities’ choices of resistance to oppression.

Research has shown that the strength of civic attitudes and the extent to which young people act to address issues of injustice may be associated with their interactions, social networks and experiences with difference and diversity (Powers and Webster, 2021). Many of these experiences start with young people acknowledging forms of discrimination and inequality in their own classroom and other school settings, for example, by noting situations when teachers treat students differently or over-inflate the achievement of students from majority backgrounds.