Deliberation of controversial public school curriculum: Developing processes and outcomes that increase legitimacy and social justice

Public schools in the United States are charged with facilitating public deliberation of controversial school curriculum. This often entails managing the negotiations between multiple stakeholders who have very different positions on the proper design and implementation of curriculum. To maintain legitimacy as caretakers of the public interest in a liberal democracy, public schools are asked to recognize all legitimate perspectives in such disputes. But what happens when a perspective is not considered legitimate or in the public interest by the dominant community? When disputes over curriculum ensue, the rights of individuals to have their perspectives included in the curriculum must be considered in tandem with the public school’s primary responsibility—to teach students to nurture a democracy. This essay synthesizes frameworks from deliberative democracy theorists to better understand the ways that the process and outcome of public school curriculum deliberation can increase in legitimacy and responsiveness to issues of social justice. To develop and illustrate this theoretical framework, I examine the case of a small group of activists who challenged a curriculum’s claim that the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII was clearly a mistake. Activist wanted the curriculum to say that the internment was done out of military necessity. I conclude that Gutmann’s guidelines of non-discrimination and non-repression must be synthesized with Habermas’s guidelines for a proceduralist model of deliberation

Synthesizing Multicultural, Global, and Civic Perspectives in the Elementary School Curriculum and Educational Research

Social networks and communities are rapidly expanding and changing due to the accelerating pace of globalization. In this article, we examine new possibilities for the reform of curriculum and educational research in a way that is responsive to increasingly multicultural and global communities. Drawing on literatures in the areas of multicultural, global, and civic education, we conducted a critical qualitative case study of four elementary school teachers. The teachers, two in the United States and two in the United Kingdom, are known to be exemplary at synthesizing multicultural, global, and civic education. We, the two authors, one a female from China and the other a male from the United States, employed duoethnography methodology to utilize our different positionalities as researchers in our description, analysis and interpretation of the data. As the exemplary teachers in our study illustrate, education needs to be culturally responsive, socially just, well-integrated, and empowering. We conclude with findings that have implications for the reform of curriculum and educational research methodology

Transnational Civic Education and Emergent Bilinguals in a Dual Language Setting

Inclusion is a fundamental aspect of social studies education in general and democratic education in particular. Inclusion is especially important when we consider the possibilities for transnational civic culture and education. The theoretical framework of this study is based upon concepts of positionality, identity, and belonging as they are related to student understanding of communities. A dual-language, third-grade classroom provided the site for this ethnographic study. Data included participant observations, interviews with the teacher and students, and artifacts of student work. Findings illustrate how the students in the study understood the complexity of their identities at a young age and how the teacher used culturally sustaining pedagogy to foster a third space where this understanding was encouraged

Examining Justice in Social Studies Research

Our article is an extension of a project involving a content analysis of two social studies journals, Theory andResearch in Social Education (TRSE) and The Social Studies. We performed an analysis on all articles in thesejournals from 2006-2016. Our findings from the analysis indicated a narrow frame of perspectives related toepistemologies and methodologies, and an increasing interest in examining a range of researcher andparticipant positionalities. We interpreted the range of perspectives in social studies journals in light of thepossible impact upon democratic education and social justice through Sen’s (2009) framework for theorizingjustice. We illustrate aspects of this framework by presenting positionality and autoethnography as methodsfor increasing epistemologies and perspectives in social studies education and research

The Discursive Field of After Postmodernism in Educational Theory

‘After’ postmodernism implies a time when an episteme, discourse, social movement, or era was over. It also implies that there was a space where postmodernism happened in relative isolation rather than on a discursive field where ‘after’, even if heterogeneous and fragmented, was isolated from other ‘after’s. However, discourses do not function in isolation but interact with other discourses on a discursive field (Snow, 2004 Snow, D. A. (2004). Framing processes, ideology, and discursive fields. In D. A. Snow, S. A. Soule, & H. Kriesi (Eds.), The blackwell companion to social movements (pp. 380–412). Malden, MA: Blackwell.10.1002/9780470999103[Crossref], , [Google Scholar]). An intertextual dimension of ‘after’ is helpful for understanding how the ‘after’ of postmodernism is connected on a discursive field. This places postmodernism in a struggle with other discourses, some that seem to dominate the field and others that seem to be marginalized on the field. This understanding of ‘after’ might indicate marginalization but may simultaneously indicate liminality on the discursive field

Deciding What Is a Controversial Issue: A Case Study of Social Studies Curriculum Controversy

Frame analysis was used to examine how competing stakeholders framed a sixth grade curriculum controversy over whether the WWII internment of Japanese Americans should be categorized as a controversial issue. Teachers and administrators in a northwestern U.S. school claimed that the internment was clearly wrong and not controversial, but these claims were challenged by a small group of activists. Three data sets were analyzed: 11 semi-structured interviews, 40 public documents, and curriculum materials. Although activists could not change the school\u27s claims, they were able to change the curriculum. Findings illustrate the ways that stakeholders in social studies curriculum controversies negotiate whether an issue should be categorized as controversial. Categorizations were dynamic and contingent on historical, contemporary, and ideological contexts

Review of the Book, How Children Become Moral Selves: Building Character and Promoting Citizenship in Education

When I first read the title of Russell’s book, How children become moral selves: Building character and promoting citizenship in education, the association that entered my mind was Bennet’s (1993) book entitled The Book of Virtues. His book serves as a manifesto of sorts for conservative activists who are intent on reinforcing the hegemony of Eurocentric male morality on new generations of children. Claims in the curriculum to a central vernacular of virtues are often based upon “White, middle-class, heterosexual conceptions of character development” (Johnson, 2008, p. 67). My initial interpretation of Russell’s title as part of this conservative movement was incorrect, but my reaction illustrates how conservatives have taken hold of character education in schools