Teacher Learning and the Difficulties of Moving Civic Education Forward. A Response to “Beyond the Invisible Barriers of the Classroom: iEngage and Civic Praxis”

In “Beyond the Invisible Barriers of the Classroom: iEngage and Civic Praxis,” the authors reported on the experiences teachers encountered during a weeklong Youth Engage Civic Institute Camp and the degree to which what teachers learned in the camp was able to move their thinking and practice toward a more critical, justice-oriented approach to civic education. The authors’ analysis thus “considers the ideological shifts the counselors [teachers] made and the likelihood that they will teach beyond the formal classroom as they return to more traditional environments” (Magill et al., 2020, p. 2). In that, the authors were interested not only in what teachers learned at the camp and how it impacted their thinking about civic education but, also, in issues of contextual transfer: whether the teachers were inclined to make the learning gained at the camp material in their future teaching in classrooms back home. This response both questions the ability of a weeklong professional development to change teachers’ civic imagination as well as the ability of studies using traditional qualitative frameworks to get at the complex psychic processes involved in attempts to shift teachers’ understanding about practice. Specifically, the piece focuses on concepts borrowed from psychoanalytic theories in education to explore the manner in which learning also always involves not learning and the processes of ignorance and resistance teachers might be using to both embrace and reject change at the same time

Critical Inquiry, Conceptual Clarity, and Contextual Limits. A Response to “Re-centering Civics: A Framework for Building Dispositions and Action Opportunities”

In Re-centering Civics: A Framework for Building Dispositions and Action Opportunities, the authors presented a framework to help social studies teachers in any subject or grade level re-center civic education. The authors’ article draws from the C3 Framework and C3Teachers.org to offer six civic dispositions teachers might focus on cultivating with their students, and the article highlights ways in which student engagements with any historical inquiry might be steered toward real-world civic action. In this response, we underscore the strengths of Re-centering Civics while also outlining a necessary, critical attention to the concepts undergirding the authors’ framework. Our response builds from Re-centering Civics by offering examples of how the concepts at play in the initial article might be reconfigured, how teacher questioning can be made more critical, how issues of diversity and power can be more effectively attended to, and how the everyday, contextual limitations of teachers might affect their ability to carry out this framework. Our response aims to strengthen the authors’ admirable project, one we are fully aligned with: integrating thoughtful, critical, and deliberate civic education—and meaningful action—into social studies education writ large

Deliberating Public Policy Issues with Adolescents: Classroom Dynamics and Sociocultural Considerations

Classroom discussion and deliberation have been widely touted in the research literature as a centerpiece of high quality civic education. Empirical studies, however, of such processes are relatively few. In a public policy deliberation on immigration conducted in three Midwestern high schools during the academic year 2015–16, the authors found that analysis of a set of deliberations on the subject of immigration policy in the United States reveals the ways in which sociocultural identity aspects of the settings and participants influenced the processes and dynamics of these classroom events. Reflecting upon this analysis suggests a set of factors that reveal the degree to which classroom deliberations are shaped by factors other than rational consideration of the topic

Disturbing practice : reading and writing (social studies) teacher education as text

Although preservice teacher education comprises only a small part of student teachers' socialization into the teaching profession, it nevertheless has an important impact of student teachers imagination through an educative world it renders both possible and the intelligible. Anchored in a secondary social studies methods course at the University of British Columbia, and following six of its student teacher participants through their university- and practicum-based experiences, this year-long ethnographic study explores the production of knowledge and knowing in presevice teacher education. As such, it examines how particular versions and visions of education, teaching, and learning are made possible as well as on what they, in turn, make possible for prospective social studies teachers learning to teach. Exploring how teachers' ways of being are dependent, in part, on student teachers' ways of becoming, this study examines what happens to student teachers during their preservice education and, as a result, what they make happen because of what happens to them. Examining the complex relationship between the knowledge student teachers are given and the knowledge they themselves produce, this dissertation considers not only what student teachers choose to say and do but also what structures their choices. Disturbing the practice of teacher education by examining how discourses use and are used and what, in the process, gets covered over, silenced, and ignored, this dissertation attempts to extend the traditional exploration of how prospective social studies student teachers learn to manage ideas and theories in the teacher education classrooms to the examination of how the use of ideas and theories in those very classrooms manages those who attempt to engage them. Organized as a multivocal text in which the running narrative is interrupted and interrogated by the researcher's own reflexive comments about the impossibilities of knowing and those of the participants about the study and its textualization, this dissertation focuses on the problematics and possibilities in the process of learning to teach, highlighting and publicly engaging them in order to bring more of what we do in university-based teacher education classrooms into the fold of the discussion both about and in teacher educationEducation, Faculty ofCurriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department ofGraduat

Burke, Kenneth, and Avner Segall, Christianity and Its Legacy in Education, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 43(No. 5, 2011), 631-658.

Analyzes the relationship between religion and education; examines historically the remnants of Christian thought in U. S. schooling (dates-B.C./A.D.; terms-dean, mission,academic gowns; apple-as metaphor; childhood-as innocent or deviant; conversion-regulation of behavior, et cet.); addresses implications of this analysis

Beyond Pedagogy : Reconsidering the Public Purpose of Museums

VI, 178 p.online resource

Critical Theory and History Education

Chapter 11 in The Wiley International Handbook of History Teaching and Learning, edited by Scott Alan Metzger and Lauren McArthur Harris. Chapter description: This chapter explores the epistemological underpinnings of critical—postmodern, poststructural, postcolonial, feminist, and psychoanalytic—theories in history education and their potential in, and impact on, the field. Following an introduction about the impact critical theories have had on the discipline of history and what those might mean in K-12 history education classrooms, the chapter includes an examination of how those theories have been used to explore: (1) representations of race and gender in textbooks, standards, and curricula; (2) difficult knowledge and the affective in encounters with history; (3) history education as experienced in history museums and monuments. Book description: A comprehensive review of the research literature on history education with contributions from international experts The Wiley International Handbook of History Teaching and Learning draws on contributions from an international panel of experts. Their writings explore the growth the field has experienced in the past three decades and offer observations on challenges and opportunities for the future. The contributors represent a wide range of pioneering, established, and promising new scholars with diverse perspectives on history education. Comprehensive in scope, the contributions cover major themes and issues in history education including: policy, research, and societal contexts; conceptual constructs of history education; ideologies, identities, and group experiences in history education; practices and learning; historical literacies: texts, media, and social spaces; and consensus and dissent. This vital resource: Contains original writings by more than 40 scholars from seven countries Identifies major themes and issues shaping history education today Highlights history education as a distinct field of scholarly inquiry and academic practice Presents an authoritative survey of where the field has been and offers a view of what the future may hold Written for scholars and students of education as well as history teachers with an interest in the current issues in their field, The Wiley International Handbook of History Teaching and Learning is a comprehensive handbook that explores the increasingly global field of history education as it has evolved to the present day

Thinking Deeply, Thinking Emotionally: How High School Students Make Sense of Evidence

This mixed-methods study analyzed adolescents’ evaluation of the trustworthiness of different kinds of evidence and their reasons for why they trusted (or did not trust) them. Specifically, we analyzed adolescents’ rankings of seven kinds of evidence in the abstract and in the context of a settled historical event (school desegregation) and whether differences existed between their rankings. We explored the reasons adolescents provided for trusting or not trusting sources and whether differences existed between these reasons in the abstract and in context. We also explored whether rankings differed across sociocultural identities. We found that, on average, adolescents’ rankings, as well as their reasoning, differed when the evidence was presented in the abstract versus in the context of school desegregation. We also found that emotion and personal relationship with the topic are compelling factors in determining students’ trust in sources—a finding that has previously been overlooked in the scholarship. This study provides implications for K–12 social studies education, teacher education, and civic identity and citizenship studies