"I Didn't Have a Lesson": Educational Disjuncture and the 2016 Election

• In Event: Disrupt, Resist, Refuse: Civic Engagement as Critical Social Action

Abstract

This paper explores underlying tensions in the response of one New York City middle school to the events following the 2016 presidential election. The school’s faculty made sincere, sustained efforts to express support for immigrant and Muslim students. However, despite the school’s commitment to social justice, minimal instructional time was devoted to the consequences of the election; with the exception of a few Social Studies lessons, political conversations were generally reserved for the school’s student support spaces. Perhaps inevitably, presidential politics leaked beyond these extracurricular holding containers. My analysis draws upon Rubin’s (2007) typology of youth civic identity to examine what students might learn from their school’s moves to simultaneously address and erase politics from the curriculum.

Author

• Alexandra Freidus, New York University