We are grateful for the opportunity to dream along with Carol Lee about the core components of a school curriculum that can prepare students to tackle the complex challenges facing our pandemic-scarred country with creativity, empathy, and common cause. Yet, our reverie is disrupted as we look around at a system that, despite resolutions made by critical educators and researchers over the past 18 months to reimagine education for a “new normal,” is instead choosing to double-down on old learning models and visions of civic life that were not fit for yesterday, let alone tomorrow. We understand that educators are tired, students are exhausted, and everyone is looking for a sense of normalcy right now. But what might have felt like normal civic instruction doesn’t necessarily equate to good civic instruction. While there are many reasons for the retreat into siloed subject areas and “just vote” paradigms of civic engagement, we think that one culprit is an outdated approach to educator preparation that has left some teachers unprepared to adapt to new learning conditions and needs. So, we ask: What new frameworks of teacher education are needed to prepare tomorrow’s teachers to realize Lee’s curricular vision?
Though there are many ways we might begin to reimagine teacher education today, we want to emphasize two components that are immediately actionable: addressing the historical antecedents of our work and challenging assumptions of what “counts” as civic engagement.
Pushing on history
As Lee notes, teachers will be better prepared to foster transformative civic learning across the curriculum when they come to understand the deep historical and sociocultural roots of their content areas. Teacher education programs must ensure that prospective teachers understand the social and political histories of their own subject areas, from the ways in which fields like biology and history professed now-debunked theories about race, to ongoing debates over who belongs in the literary canon. This should help aspiring practitioners see that the choices they make about what and how to teach are inescapably civic in nature and have implications for how their students will come to understand and participate in democratic life.
At the same time, teacher education programs should also delve into the social and political history of the teaching profession itself, including its intersections with the racial justice and labor movements that have helped to shape today’s working conditions in schools. Of course, we recognize that teacher education is already packed with existing requirements. Thus, rather than calling for new courses to be added to the curriculum, we argue that this historical content must be featured more prominently in methods classes and social foundations classes that most programs already offer.
Pushing on engagement
We take for granted that civic engagement is important. However, in our own work, we have argued that the country’s existing civic institutions may not be capable of responding to newly emerging challenges (Mirra & Garcia, 2017), which means that we must also practice civic “interrogation and innovation.” By interrogation, we mean that teachers and students should have opportunities to question traditional, textbook-based approaches to teaching and learning about civic life, which tend to suggest that civic engagement entails little more than understanding how the U.S. government functions, following current events, and voting in elections. And when they begin to explore other ways of participating in civic life, that is when innovation becomes necessary.
Many young people begin asking questions about and participating in civic life long before their schools, or society at large, recognize them as developing citizens. For example, they might speak at school board meetings, attend protests, or engage in the forms of digital and on-the-ground organizing that are so important for social movements today. But such engagement doesn’t appear out of nowhere. If youth choose to play an active role as citizens, it is because their teachers, parents, and other adults have patiently cultivated their interest in civics over time, perhaps even beginning in the early grades. To lay a strong foundation for civic learning and engagement, teachers often create lessons and activities that may not look like traditional civic learning at all, finding ways to connect all kinds of academic work — from studying math and statistics to reading and responding to novels — to important debates about public life.
Toward civic ecosystems for social transformation
In summarizing her powerful vision of a civics-focused curriculum, Lee calls for a “larger ecological system of supports.” We could not agree more. In our ongoing projects that focus on youth participatory action research (Mirra, Garcia, & Morrell, 2015), we often see that a wide range of adults — not just teachers but also administrators, school staff, parents, and community members — play important roles in shaping and transforming the teaching and learning that goes on in school. For that matter, students themselves often pursue interests and take actions that lead to meaningful change in their schools and communities.
As important as it is to prepare teachers to integrate civic learning and practice across subject areas, it is equally important to recognize that young people and families are civic actors in their own right. Lee’s outline of the “ideal” future school guides us to work toward the day when all teachers come to identify themselves as teachers of civics who through their work with students contribute to the design of new democratic possibilities.
References
Mirra, N. & Garcia, A. (2017). Civic participation reimagined: Youth interrogation and innovation in the multimodal public sphere. Review of Research in Education, 41, 136-158.
Mirra, N., Garcia, A., & Morrell, E. (2015). Doing youth participatory action research: Transforming inquiry with researchers, educators, and students. Routledge.
This article is an invited response to “A curriculum that promotes civic ends and meets developmental needs” by Carol Lee, part of Kappan‘s Reimagining American Education: Possible Futures series, sponsored by the Spencer Foundation.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Antero Garcia
Antero Garcia is an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University, Stanford, California.
Nicole Mirra
Nicole Mirra is an assistant professor at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, and the author of Educating for Empathy: Literacy Learning and Civic Engagement.
