Mandating the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Civics Exam: Conceptualizations of Citizenship and Political Trauma

• In Event: Challenging Curricular Expectations in Social Studies Education

Abstract

Recent research has demonstrated heightened political trauma among students in the context of the Election of 2016 (Sondel, Baggett, & Dunn, 2018). Coinciding with the election of Donald J. Trump has been a movement within states to mandate successful completion of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) civics exam as a requirement for high school graduation. In this paper the researchers utilized directed content analysis to examine conceptualizations of citizenship within the high school civics standards of the eight states that currently have such legislation. Findings suggests that the analyzed standards portray an untroubled epistemological assumption of U.S. society that provide teachers with few tools for engaging in a pedagogy of political trauma (Sondel et al., 2018).

Authors

• Aaron Paul Johnson, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

• Paul J. Yoder, Eastern Mennonite University