Where Do We Go From Where? Elusive Disciplinary Grounds for Defining Young People's Political Thinking

• In Event: 29.083 - New Directions in Research on Civic Knowledge and Practice

Abstract

For more than two decades, history education scholars have drawn from disciplinary grounds – in other words, the substantive and conceptual knowledge and investigative and interpretive practices of historians – to articulate how history learning and teaching might be conducted in schools (Donovan & Bransford, 2005; Monte-Sano, 2008; VanSledright, 2011; Wineburg, 2001). Those scholars generally suggest that teaching young people to “do what historians do” is useful because historians’ tools and methods can help those learners make sense of and build powerful, well substantiated arguments about complex social problems, both past and present. Yet there are no similarly strong disciplinary grounds for delineating young people’s political thinking and proposing particular learning and teaching interactions to strengthen it. This paper addresses why that is the case and what the implications are for social studies educational research and practice.

One reason is that various relevant disciplines – normative political theory, empirical political science, and political psychology – draw upon distinctive substance, concepts, and sense-making tools and generally “do not borrow and build across disciplinary tables” (Beaumont, 2010, p. 552). The full paper illustrates examples of that dilemma and proposes conceivable consequences for social studies curriculum and instruction. Practically speaking, studying political phenomena and engaging in policy activism sometimes are characterized as exclusive, or even divergent, activities – the former involving systematic investigation, interpretation, and advancement of arguments about political behaviors and institutions, as political scientists do (e.g., Ansolabehere, Rodden, & Snyder, 2008), and the latter involving participation in political advocacy by joining networks and forging relationships with and applying pressure on policy actors, as political activists do (e.g., Boyte, 2004).

To illustrate a pedagogical challenge associated with this dilemma, the author discusses a contrast between political thinking and discourse as: (1) a process of interrupting naïve intuition through inquiry and empirical evidence (like a “judge or scientist seeking truth”); and (2) a process of justifying positions, post hoc, that reinforce socially cultivated intuitions and affections (like a “lawyer defending a client”) (Haidt, 2001, p. 820). From there, the full paper addresses the implications of these and other dilemmas for researchers who wish to use disciplinary knowledge and practice frameworks to study adolescents’ political development.

Author

• Kevin W. Meuwissen, University of Rochester