Wading Through the Currents of Civics Education: Residing in Tensionality to Examine an Action Civics Curriculum

• In Event: Sunday Roundtable Session 1:15 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Youth Experiences of Social Studies and Civic Education (Table 13)

Abstract

We produce and then reside in Aoki’s (2005) notion of tensionality by using the approach of theoretical triangulation (Denzin, 1970; Patton, 2002) to examine an action civics curriculum, Youth Act. Our analysis employs three distinct theoretical lenses, curriculum as political text, racial text, and communal knowledge text, to show the possibilities of considering curricula from different perspectives that are in-tension with one another. Although the Youth Act curriculum incorporates experiences that challenge students’ taken-for-granted beliefs (Bowers, 1984), the curriculum also appears to privilege students from dominant racial backgrounds, others and excludes students from marginalized backgrounds, and lacks opportunities for students to acquire civic knowledge.

Authors

• Nate Scholten, Baylor University

• Brooke Blevins, University of Idaho