Informal Civic Learning Through Engagement in Local Democracy: The Case of the Seniors' Task Force of Healthy City Toronto

Abstract

This chapter explores the dimensions of informal civic learning of a local democracy initiative known as Healthy City Toronto (HCT). It examines one of the programmes of HCT, the Seniors’ Task Force, particularly the content and process of the participants’ learning. This study is part of an international research project that explores the pedagogical dimension of participatory democracy, with a focus on the informal learning acquired by citizens in programmes of shared decision making at the level of municipal government. It attempts to shed light on these issues by addressing three areas that are relatively underrepresented in the research on citizenship education: adult populations, informal learning and local democracy. First, a cursory literature review suggests that most large-scale research on citizenship education, from the pioneering work by Almond and Verba (1963) to the recent international study coordinated by Judith Torney-Purta (2001), has concentrated heavily on K-12 schooling, and particularly on secondary school programmes. These studies range from curriculum analysis to observation of teaching practices to surveys of students’ civic knowledge and attitudes. Moreover, the field of adult citizenship education, at least in countries with high immigration rates like Canada, tends to be understood almost exclusively as courses for the naturalization test, and is sometimes conflated with English as a second language (ESL). Second, research on citizenship education seldom pays attention to the area of informal learning. The low attention given to informal learning in the field of citizenship education is not an anomaly, as it reflects an overall neglect for this area in educational research and policy (Livingstone, 1999; Eraut, 1999a, b). Since citizenship education focuses on school settings, most references to informal learning tend to be limited to the discrepancies between the formal curriculum and the hidden curriculum, such as the assessment of the democratic or anti-democratic nature of the classroom environment. Informal civic learning outside of educational institutions is rarely addressed.