Reconceptualizing civic education for young children: Recognizing embodied civic action

Payne, Katherina A.; Adair, Jennifer Keys; Colegrove, Kiyomi Sánchez Suzuki; Lee, Sunmin; Falkner, Anna; McManus, Molly; Sachdeva, Shubhi

doi:10.1177/1746197919858359

Cited by 43 publications

(37 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…The data shared here comes from the Civic Action and Young Children study, a multisited large-scale project to understand how children act civically, or in ways that benefit or act on behalf of others, when they are offered conditions that support their agency (Payne et al, 2020). We collected data with 11 teachers, 68 children, and 20 parents in four U.S. public preschool classrooms, of which one was an inclusion classroom.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reconceptualizing Assistance for Young Children of Color With Disabilities in an Inclusion Classroom

Park

Lee

Alonzo

et al. 2021

Topics in Early Childhood Special Education

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In this article, we draw on DisCrit to critically analyze how a group of early childhood educators approached assistance with young children of color with disabilities in a Head Start inclusion classroom. Using examples from data collected over one school year, we demonstrate how child-centered assistance advances justice for young children of color with disabilities who are often subjected to a surveillance culture in schools. We critique assistance that aligns with the medical model of disability and aims to change young children of color with disabilities to conform to ableist, racist expectations of schooling. We offer examples of assistance practices that contrastingly aim to support young children of color with disabilities to pursue their own interests and purposes. Through these counterstories, we reconceptualize assistance as a practice that can support young children of color with disabilities to be more fully themselves.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reconceptualizing Assistance for Young Children of Color With Disabilities in an Inclusion Classroom

Park

Lee

Alonzo

et al. 2021

Topics in Early Childhood Special Education

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Despite research that would suggest student abilities to conceptualize citizenship in dynamic ways, civics education within US schools relies largely on political knowledge acquisition through rote memorization (Au, 2009;Banks, 1997;Gould, 2011;Kahne et al, 2000;Payne et al, 2019;Rubin, 2007;Ross 2000). In an extensive review of American civics texts from 1990 until 2003, researchers Abowitz and Harnish (2006) suggested these texts as dominated by non-critical, civic republican and liberal notions of citizenship.…”

Section: Citizenship In Us Schools-what Does It Look Like?mentioning

confidence: 99%

What does it mean to be civic-ready? Uncovering citizenship conceptualizations in US states that require the ‘citizenship test’

Johnson

2020

Education, Citizenship and Social

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There is a growing trend within civics education within the United States to adopt the USCIS naturalization civics exam (commonly referred to as the ‘citizenship test’), which consists of 100 multiple choice questions, to determine the civic readiness of students. This study explores civics education within eight US states that have adopted the ‘citizenship test’ model through the lens of citizenship conceptualizations evidenced within their high school civics state standards. Utilizing a directed content analysis, the researcher located more than 230 standards within three citizenship discourse categories: civic republican, liberal, and reconstructionist. Citizenship within the examined state standards, was largely conceptualized as civic republican in orientation (96%) and nested within untroubled assumptions of US society and desires for a common American identity that often crowded out attention to diversity and conflict and in doing so, mirrored exclusionary practices common to standardized, high-stakes assessments including the USCIS naturalization civics exam.

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“…One reason for this lack of connection is that traditional classroom instruction often focuses on dimensions of knowledge related to the impacts of problems on physical systems (e.g., the impact of increased carbon dioxide in our atmosphere to temperature or natural systems), but less often knowledge about the root causes of the problems, strategies for change, and alternatives and visions for where society should go (Jensen, 2002). However, when instruction is centered on embodied civics (Payne et al, 2020) and requires students to actively engage in aspects of both knowing and doing, for example planning a community event around green energy, researchers have documented an increased student impetus for taking civic action (Birmingham and Calabrese Barton, 2014). At a college level, this type of action instruction is traditionally reserved for settings such as service-learning, which has been shown to successfully increase motivation for civic engagement (Celio et al, 2011;Felten and Clayton, 2011).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Students’ Civic Engagement Self-Efficacy Varies Across Socioscientific Issues Contexts

2021

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In STEM learning focused on science literacy, socioscientific issues instruction is often proposed as a way to bolster students’ civic engagement, however few studies in science education have explicitly examined this connection. We define civic engagement as the work of influencing legitimately public matters using means within the existing political structure. In this work we investigate students’ feelings of self-efficacy for this type of civic engagement in the context of four socioscientific issues (prairie dog conservation, food insecurity, biofuels and water conservation). This study was in the context of a large enrollment introductory science college course, where students used a structured decision-making process to examine alternative policy solutions to complex socioscientific issues. We qualitatively examined students’ response about their perception of the importance of the issue, their self-efficacy in exploring actions they could take to impact the issue, and the effectiveness of those actions. We found that students’ ideas about impact and effectiveness varied across the four different issues contexts due to students’ sense of the issues’ importance and scale. Generally, students’ ideas about actions they could take to impact the issue were narrow and rarely included political actions like voting. We also found post instruction increases in students’ civic engagement attitudes and skills related to social justice, interpersonal and problem-solving skills and political awareness. Finally, we suggest that socioscientific instruction must have an explicit connection to policy-level decisions and reveal how individual actions can influence the societal system. Our course using a structured decision-making process in the context of socioscientific issues is one model to help students make these connections.

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Reconceptualizing civic education for young children: Recognizing embodied civic action

Cited by 43 publications

References 33 publications

Reconceptualizing Assistance for Young Children of Color With Disabilities in an Inclusion Classroom

Reconceptualizing Assistance for Young Children of Color With Disabilities in an Inclusion Classroom

What does it mean to be civic-ready? Uncovering citizenship conceptualizations in US states that require the ‘citizenship test’

Students’ Civic Engagement Self-Efficacy Varies Across Socioscientific Issues Contexts

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