Promoting Civic Engagement in Schools in Non-Democratic Settings: Transforming the Approach and Practices of Iranian Educators

Established in 2011, the Online School of Civic Education (the Online School) is intended to give Iranian teachers and educators the opportunity to reflect, experiment, and create classroom experiences aimed at teaching their students how to think, rather than what to think. The Online School was developed to provide teachers and educators inside Iran with an alternative to existing top-down, ideological, and teacher-centered civic education in Iran. The Online School's approach is to encourage teachers and, by extension, their students to think independently and analytically about their surroundings through activities and reflection. We argue that it is possible to provide teachers with experiential training in democratic civic education despite and within the context of the existing civic education paradigm in Iran, which defines citizenship in terms of devotion to religious ideology. We argue that, through this model, not only can teachers gain meaningful insight into the practice of democratic citizenship, but they also can enact changes in their classroom behavior and lessons that pass such understandings on to their students.