Teaching Toward “the World As It Can Be”: Civic World Making in a Preservice Teacher Education Program

• In Event: Civic Collaborative Learning Spaces: Reimagining the Civic Across Disciplines and Contexts

Abstract

Objective:
Recognizing the fundamental role that teachers play in shaping youth civic identity in a particularly polarizing moment in U.S. public education, this paper explores how preservice teachers develop and articulate pedagogical approaches for civic education across subject areas.

Perspectives:
This paper builds upon scholarship on civic literacies (Author b, 2023), world building through social design (Gutierrez et al., 2020), and communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Centering civic social design and community-driven collaboration, these theoretical perspectives allow us to imagine new civic possibilities within current schooling contexts.

Methods:
Our methodologies build on a framework of social design and social design based experiments (e.g. Gutierrez et al., 2020). Co-constructing inquiry groups with a group of nine preservice teachers (PSTs) throughout the duration of their preparation program, this study builds on the current and historical contexts of teaching and enacting civic learning in K-12 transdisciplinary contexts. PSTs interested in exploring the role of civics in their teaching were recruited from both secondary and elementary strands.

Data sources:
We draw from collected field notes from six monthly inquiry meetings during the 2022-2023 school year, student-constructed artifacts within the inquiry meetings, and transcripts of semi-structured interviews with all nine cohort members.

Findings:
We identify five factors that shape how preservice teachers (PSTs) enter classrooms to enact civic-focused pedagogies across subject areas in K-12 contexts. The factors include: PSTs’ definitions of civic discourse; their civic experiences prior to entering the teaching profession; PSTs’ understanding of the role of teachers in disciplinary classrooms; their individual motivations and goals as teachers; and the contexts of their student and first year teaching placements.

Inquiry groups and interviews also revealed the possibilities that emerge from the collaborative, interdisciplinary, inquiry-driven space for preservice teachers that serves as a model for civic discourse and civic literacies that reimagine collective social futures. In bringing together elementary and secondary PSTs from ELA, Social Studies, Science, Math, and World Languages in a space that centers their questions and experiences, we challenge boundaries that are often reinforced within teacher education programs that limit our understanding of the civic. This process also contributes to how PSTs develop and articulate their approaches to civic education and the values of collective learning that they aspire to bring to their future classroom.

Scholarly significance:
Pushing against neatly-bound typologies of “kinds” of civic education approaches or teacher beliefs, these factors extend across partisan and disciplinary boundaries, centering the rationale that all teachers are civics teachers. This work also has implications for how teacher education programs create learning ecologies that model the forms of inquiry and civic discourse across differences that PSTs can build in their future classrooms, and the dynamic ways that teachers develop their civic beliefs.

Authors

• Rita Kamani-Renedo, Stanford University

• Antero Garcia, Stanford University