Civic Education in the Trump Era: Teachers' Perspectives on Civics Reform in a Politically Diverse District Context

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 25
  In Roundtable Session: Engaging Students in Systems Change: Embracing Multiple Research-Practice Partnership Stakeholders in Transformative Student Voice Work

Abstract

Given the extreme political polarization that characterizes this second decade of 21st century American politics, how do public school teachers make sense of what it means to support the functioning of a healthy democracy? In an era when the institution of democracy itself has been called into question both domestically and at the global scale, how do American public school teachers with ideologically diverse perspectives think about how to prepare young people to participate in our democracy? Informed by a commitment to including teachers as key stakeholders in decisions that impact their lives and those of their students, this study examines how teachers and district leaders conceptualize students’ civic education and civic capacity in a large and ideologically diverse district context.
In particular, this analysis provides timely insight into what civic education means to public school teachers from an ideologically, racially, and socioeconomically diverse district and identifies tensions relates to how to scale civics reform in a politically polarized time. As is the case in many of the other research-practice partnerships or collaborations discussed in this symposium, our change effort has been driven through working with teachers and instructional leaders, rather than from a district-wide mandate. In its third year, at the time of the writing of this analysis, our research-practice partnership (Penuel & Gallagher, 2017) is a collaboration between the Social Science department of a large district in Southern California and educational researchers from a local University partner-- a partnership which emerged as a function of a joint interest in how to best amplify and scale civic learning and civic engagement across disciplines in meaningful and equitable ways.
From a “zone of mediation” perspective, any reform effort inevitably undergoes a variety of normative, technical, and political forces (Oakes, 1992; Oakes et al., 1998)-- and in so doing, is often conceptualized, enacted, and experienced in ways different than intended by initial reformers. In our case, the highly partisan climate of this political moment, in tandem with the lived realities of educators as they teach in the “age of Trump” (Rogers et al., 2017; 2019), has both encouraged and delimited a wide range of pedagogical orientations and responses. Analysis of data from teacher and district leader interviews and participant observation from partnership meetings suggests three key tensions: teachers’ conceptualizations of ‘civic education’ itself largely varies; teachers’ imaginations about what is possible is shaped by contemporaneous socio-political circumstances as well as their own political ideologies; and teachers recognize an increasingly grave need for students to leave school with a host of civic skills and dispositions, but do not feel systematically supported to consistently provide such opportunities. These findings have implications for both research and practice, including 1) the importance of teacher voice in the design, implementation, and evaluation of research-practice partnerships; and 2) a design sensibility that takes seriously the ways in which teacher ideologies shape the implementation of educational initiatives related to fundamental democratic principles, and what that means for supporting and enacting professional learning and development, especially at scale.

Authors

• Daniela Kruel DiGiacomo, University of Kentucky

• Erica Hodgin, University of California - Riverside

• Joseph E. Kahne, University of California - Riverside