"They Think Detroit Is Just Litter": Youth Challenging Injustice Through Participatory Research and Civic Engagement

• In Event: Socializing Civic Debate Through the Disciplinary Literacies: A Hope for Public Education

Abstract

he country’s founding documents imagined a republic whose structures provided opportunities to engage in democratic debate that considered tensions between rights of the individual and the limits of federal and state governments, informed by a set of core principles articulated in the Bill of Rights. From our beginnings, these debates have been riddled with the contradictions of our history, from African Enslavement to genocidal wars against the indigenous populations, acts that contradict belief systems with which we have wrestled throughout our history. Several compelling questions then are what is the role of education, what is the role of knowledge building within and across domains that interrogate human functioning and the order of the natural world to prepare citizens in such a democracy to wrestle with these tensions as they present themselves both in our history and in our contemporary political debates. The conundrums entailed in our collective wrestlings around these tensions are particularly evident in the most recent presidential election of 2016.

Historically and today, civic debate entails complex questions that impact important aspects of our collective and individual lives for which there are not simple right or wrong answers; questions that ideally require weighing competing evidence, critically examining warrants for claims, both of which entail knowledge and dispositions. This symposium addresses the question of the role and possibilities of public education as a site for building such requisite knowledge and dispositions, particularly in terms of the specialized roles that disciplinary literacies can play. The papers interrogate not only how specialized disciplinary literacies can socialize epistemological stances around relevant knowledge building entailed in civic debate, but also how disciplinary epistemologies debated in the academy may open or close opportunities for wrestling with complexity and considering alternative points of view. Learning to engage in civic debate includes skill sets in argumentation and the ability to weigh competing sets of data (Torney-Purta, 2002), including the criteria upon which one draws in such evaluations (Hillocks, 2011; Toulmin, Rieke, & Janik, 1984). Thus the practical uptake of what orientations to disciplinary literacies are available to whom in public schooling also remains a critical question of the symposium. Gutmann (1999) in Democratic Education argued that in a democracy, public education is the primary venue available to socialize such dispositions.

NAEP Civics Assessments reveal only small percentages of students demonstrating proficiency. Other studies have shown difficulties students have in distinguishing fact from fiction in digital media and political arguments (Kahne & Bowyer, 2017; Stanford History Education Project 2016). However, the papers in this symposium go beyond typical conceptions of civic knowledge to address how reading, writing and problem solving in literature, history, science and mathematics offer generative opportunities to socialize civic debate around some of the most important issues of our time and the complexities of coordinating such debate (Hess& McAvoy, 2014) in public education. (485)

Authors

• Enid Marie Rosario-Ramos, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

• Jennifer Sawada, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor