Democracy, Dialogue and Innovations in Engaging Civic Education

In 2019, a national poll conducted by the Morris J. Wosk Centre for dialogue found that 60% of Canadian’s thought civic education is currently insufficient. In this inaugural session of our Doubling Down virtual event series, we hosted a conversation with those leading successful experiments in civic education. We learned about emerging school-based innovations such as Participatory Budgeting, the Canadian Ethics Bowl, and “knowledge-to-action” models championed by City Hive and SFU’s Semester in Dialogue. We discussed the core competencies we need to be teaching students to help overcome the challenges of the future and what kinds of education models we can use to motivate young people toward a life-long commitment to civic duty and policy engagement.