As Professor Harris delivered his final remarks, he provided a copy of the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution. He in fact provided five copies of it.
There’s the text presented as a single paragraph as you’ve seen on posters or at the back of the textbook. There are then two versions of separating key components of the text. Are there three distinct phases present or six imperatives? Are they actually phases and imperatives or something else? Three versions play with enlarging key text like “WE” or presenting words in boldface: Union, Justice, Domestic Tranquility, Constitution.
It’s an interesting question. Do you see something different when the same text is presented in different ways? Does one technique or another suggest there is something more there or something less?
Our treatment of the Preamble as well as the other pieces of our constitutional kit often starts and stops with reading the words as though everything is said through those marks on paper. What do they mean to you? What are you doing as a classroom teacher to support our achieving those goals?
These are the questions Professor Harris presented us and questions we should deliberately discuss professionals committed to the very best in civic education. If our goal is promoting constitutional citizenship, we must consider what constitutional teaching demands of us.
This post is the first in a series interpreting the goals of the Preamble as professional educators and discussing how our work supports those goals. Please leave your thoughts in the comments as we start this project and return to the site to discuss each facet. We need your voice.
To set this thing up on the launch pad, what are your thoughts on the role of the teacher as an officer of the Constitution? Is that aligned to your thinking on your role as a teacher? Are there inherent strengths or challenges to this proposition?
I think what interests me most about this suggestion is wondering how a constitutional understanding of teaching and learning might affect our decision-making in education. I can see it might lead to really interesting conversations with students as they imagine their own responses! That’s the kind of citizenship program I’d like to see take root.
Maybe “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity” is the summary statement, with the preceding phrases being the components of the summary. I could see asking my students what they think is necessary to secure the blessings of liberty in today’s world–might prove fascinating, even insightful!
Teacher as constitutional officer…well, why not? Think about classroom management: we enact the Preamble daily as a matter of course. But there has to be more to it. One of the blessings of liberty is a liberal education. Are we as teachers committed to providing our students with as full an education as possible, or are we merely struggling to meet the minimum requirements? My own teaching style is global, eclectic, and occasionally symphonic, but I know I can go from one extreme to the other in the time it takes to change classes!
Next question: what does this say about teacher education programs? Mine was woefully inadequate–or maybe I was. How do we recruit good students to become good teachers? How do we reach education profs and policy makers? How do we get the message across that constitutional thinking is the essence of a good education? How do we convince parents and principals, coaches and kids?
In other words, how do we reconstitute our education system?
I think that as a teacher I have a responsibility to help students develop the skills necessary to be an active citizen of our unique system. These include critical thinking (although I now prefer “compositional thinking”), an understanding of how to analyze problems using a variety of different perspectives, and encouraging students to embrace civility. Teaching students to analyze and study in this way leaves us vulnerable, scared that a student may expose us in some way. It is through confidence and understanding of ourselves that we become able to exemplify constitutional thinking and thus constitutional teaching, in our classrooms.
On teacher education programs, I think the way to get constitutional thinking into the programs in a more meaningful way is to simply discuss with more people the meaning of constitutional thinking. It can begin in our homes, schools, classrooms, communities, etc. At a local and state level begin demanding more constitutional thinking from our officials. To quote Mahatma Gandhi, “Be the change you want to see in the world.”