Creating Agents for Change by Expanding Conceptions of Citizenship

• In Event: 49.038 - Critical Global Citizenship: Education for Global Understanding and Local Justice

Abstract

Education in the United States developed as the cure to social ills plaguing the country during the mid-to-late-nineteenth century. The US was in the midst of its Industrial Revolution and faced an influx of immigrants, which combined to increase unemployment and urbanization. During this social upheaval, the major public concern was where the children of the poor and recent immigrants would get a “proper” moral upbringing as they joined the ranks of American citizens (Merriam, 1931). Education’s role was a highly contested topic because schools would act as “formal institutions designed to play a critical role in the socialization of the young, the maintenance of social order, and the promotion of economic development” (Katz, 1989, p 6). The current political climate has similar levels of turmoil as the most recent technological revolution created a paradigm shift that rivals that of the Industrial Revolution.

The assumption that social cohesion and civic engagement are the result of citizenship education is a classic Functionalist perspective, and explains the political importance of citizenship education discourse in turbulent times; however, the political framing of a citizenship crisis is really a failure to recognize that modes of citizenship are evolving beyond traditional measures, e.g. voter participation and volunteerism. Individuals and groups who are marginalized or otherwise different from the majority have their participation in citizenship erased (Nicoll et al.,2014). Though there is an expansion within citizenship discourse from a formal legal relation between the state and the individual to individual and collective participation, the construction of citizenship as tied to a nation-state becomes increasingly anachronistic and an ethos of global citizenship has begun to be increasingly evident in citizenship education scholarship (Appiah, 2008; Banks, 2008; Segall 2013).

Recognizing that global citizenship does not fit within the boundaries that are policing the grand narratives (Barthes, 1972; Lyotard, 1984) surrounding citizenship, this presentation analyzes how our global citizenship curriculum creates a more complex conception of citizenship with broader opportunities for expression by contrasting it with traditional civics curricula and assessments using document analysis. I then examine students as actors within a global framework of citizenship using a two-year case study that develops agency in the secondary school setting through expanding the community to include students of a state university located in the same small city, and by broadening the curriculum of a social studies elective to shift between global issues and those within students’ communities. Analyzing one-on-one interviews and focus groups with both student participants and school personnel, student coursework, field notes, and data collected as participatory action research by students, results show the impact that one classroom has on the individuals who are involved, the school and community. As students are given the tools necessary to be social actors, change happens both at the individual level, as one student goes from feeling helpless in the face of a EEOC violation to winning a racial profiling case against local law enforcement; and the institutional level, as school personnel talk about a cultural climate change.

Author

• Sahtiya Hosoda Hammell, University of Virginia