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Conference stresses democracy

James Mayfield never liked civics classes.

“It was like chloroform, it put me to sleep,” he said, laughing.

But now Mayfield, 72, doesn’t have trouble staying awake when he talks about how he made a career out of a subject he once despised.

Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the University of Utah, Mayfield has worked with the U.S. Agency for International Development for the past 40 years, returning in June from a yearlong stint in Hillah, Iraq as an international development advisor with the Iraq Local Governance Project. He was one of six panelists at Friday’s “Education for Democracy” conference held in the Union.

The conference was a joint project between the University’s Social Philosophy and Policy Center, the Department of Political Science and the International Democratic Education Institute.

Fluent in Arabic, Mayfield supervised five Iraqi states — about 40 percent of the country’s population — in the effort to educate citizens there about democracy through a hands-on approach. Using 250 Iraqi facilitators, most with undergraduate and master’s degrees, his team helped the residents establish neighborhood councils, assisting with the election of the council representatives.

According to Mayfield, the positive reaction to the councils — and what the citizens asked of the new board — was awe-inspiring.

“This was the first time in history where they understood that they could vote,” he said. “It was very interesting to watch how quickly the Iraqi citizens began to put pressure on these councils that were established.”

Discussing the importance of teaching democracy in the world, the way Mayfield did in Iraq, was the purpose of Friday’s conference, said event moderator Albert Dzur, an assistant professor of political science at the University.

“The conference is undermined by the idea that democracy is more than good constitutions and well-formed institutions,” he said. “The necessary support for democratic structures and the culture of democracy, the culture of citizenship — this is why education for democracy matters.”

And it’s not just content that needs to be taught, said Alden Craddock, assistant professor in the University’s School of Teaching and Learning and director of the newly-established International Democratic Education Institute on campus. But instead, democracy education consists of knowledge, skills and attitudes, he said.

“We can’t just stand on content, but along with that we have to teach skills and attitude,” he said. Opening two months ago on campus, the IDEI partners with various countries in teacher training programs and focuses on how to best teach democracy, how to deliberate with others, making students better citizens and helping them to make choices based on facts, Craddock said. Sharing what works in some countries and doesn’t in others is central to the institute, he said.

Working with a similar program at Ohio State University for the past decade, Craddock has found that the ability to share teaching tactics with other countries has shown that active teaching and learning are the “most important and most widespread,” elements in teaching democracy worldwide.

“For many of you in the United States that may seem very common, but it’s not necessarily that in other places,” he said. “Active teaching and learning is basically having participatory instruction in your classroom, not stand and deliver as I’m doing right now … If you want to teach democracy, you have to be democratic, so your classrooms must be places of democracy. Remove the authoritarian structure of a teacher standing in front, speaking down to the students who are passively pursuing knowledge.”

But education about democracy goes beyond mere techniques, said panel member Grzegorz Mazurkiewicz, program director of the Center for Citizenship Education in Warsaw, Poland.

“The question is not how to teach civics, but how to reach those who need it,” he said. “A serious group of every society is excluded from democracy and society agrees with this. That almost in every society there is a kind of agreement that ‘those guys they’re not citizens,’ although, officially, they are citizens.”

Mazurkiewicz says the double standard of democracy he has seen in Poland is evidence that education in the classroom alone is insufficient to bring societal change. Politicians in Poland, he said, use politics as stepping-stones for better careers, not as a “means to create a democratic society.”

“I am saying it is not enough,” he said. “You cannot teach by active methods … to live in a society that does not allow these things. You cannot ask students to take a voice for themselves if teachers, adults, parents do not want to listen to them. This double reality is true.”

That’s why, according to Craddock, teaching skills and attitudes along with knowledge are “crucial to being democratic citizens.”

“In my sense, I don’t think that we can just expect in a society that’s in turmoil — in a society where we have cross pressures and interests — that we can leave this just to hopefully arise out of interactions with human beings and the goodness of nature,” he said. “But that we can also, as educators, set forth examples and help students understand the processes for taking what they see around them and making it better.”

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