Citizenship Education Through the Use of Class-developed Materials

Résumé du livre

"This booklet is one of the parts of the Federal Textbook on Citizenship. Its primary purpose is to make it possible for applicants for citizenship to prepare themselves more adequately to become good citizens. The importance of citizenship education is too obvious to need restating here. In practice, the effectiveness of citizenship education depends largely upon the degree to which the class members take part in the activities of the community. Such participation is almost impossible for class members who cannot read and understand what their fellows in the community are reading and talking about. Inasmuch as many candidates for citizenship do not yet speak or read the English language fluently, the teaching of reading is a very important part of the citizenship teacher's work. Teaching reading to adults, however, poses great problems. Perhaps the greatest of these is to find textbooks that build sound and appropriate vocabularies and at the same time have content challenging to adults. Adult interests vary so widely from one locality to another, and even between groups in the same community, that it is practically impossible to build a reading text that will fit the interests of adult students everywhere. Working in close cooperation with their students, many teachers are solving this problem in part by developing their own reading materials, fitted to the particular needs of the group and growing out of their interests. Such material we have here called class-developed materials. The procedure presents no great difficulties. The techniques of developing reading materials in the class have been used by enough teachers to make possible the presentation of a basic pattern that can be adapted to any group. The purpose of this manual is to describe some of these techniques."--