How to Teach Civics to Home School Students: Hand Them Camcorders and Send Them to Record Local Government Meetings
Sept. 7, 2010
This is a great story. A Blawnox, Pennsylvania lady attends the city council meetings with a camcorder. She then posts snippets.
This enrages at least some members. They voted to close the meetings. The ACLU stepped in and demanded that they open up or else face a lawsuit.
The city councils of America have a problem. Their meetings are open to the public. This creates an opportunity for home school parents who want a course to fill state requirements that students take a course in civics. The first semester should be devoted to a detailed study of the United States Constitution: its origin and its interpretation by the Supreme Court. Second semester is devoted to attending a city council, county commission, or school board meeting.
The student records everything. He picks up copies of all handouts. Then he goes home and posts the videos on Blip.tv. Blip.tv has no restrictions on length. He then posts the embedded video on his website or blog. He then summarizes the highlights. He scans the handouts, creates PDFs, and posts these as links on his website. He can edit the digital file with the free software that is today included in all new computers, either iMovie or Microsoft Movie Maker, and post snippets on YouTube. The snippets should include a constantly visible URL of the site (lower left-hand corner).
He creates a local site that monitors everything the agency of government does at its meetings. This will become a stopping place for the local newspaper and TV station reporters.
The site includes a calendar of future meetings.
It could arrange the past posts by topic.
In this unique instance, using the Archive option makers sense: dates of meetings. (Normally, it's better to post links to old articles by title/topic rater than date.)
He need not make comments. All he needs to do is create a public record of everything that happened.
He can give the site to another student over the summer -- a student who is taking a civics course. Or he can keep the site and help the next student create one of his own.
The local home school community thereby spearheads a way to monitor the local governments. It has the data on what has been going on.
The idea here is to make it difficult for local units of government to hide. Not many people will monitor any of this. A student can be the early warning signal of what's coming.
How would the local city council protest? Blocking access will get it a lawsuit. City councils do not want to pay for lawsuits that they are likely to lose, and which will backfire if they win. I can see the headline:
City Council Blocks Local Civics Student
Council Says the Public Has No Need to Know
That's a civics lesson!
This is not a busy-work project. This is a real-world project that has high educational value.
The idea here is for students to do the grunt work. Their parents can benefit from this: filling a school requirement. So can the political activists in the community.
The students can put the projects on their college applications. They might even get college credit for the project. Portfolio courses count.
This is a way for home school supporters to say, "Here is what our students are capable of doing."