Current Realities of Civic Education: Perspectives From the Margins

• In Event: Civics in the Margins: Teaching, Learning, and Embodying Civics in Communities of Color

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss issues with traditional education and the ways it marginalizes both Black and Latinx students, exploring the chasm between traditional civic education and the civic realities of students of Color. We began this discussion by looking within, reflecting on our miseducation as students of traditional civic education, articulating the ways traditional civic education impacted our personal civic identities and the ways this lens failed to help us make sense of the world around us. We close the paper by reimagining civic education in communities of Color as teachers and teacher educators who needed the very education we now dream of.
Our conversations were situated in aspects of Black critical patriotism (Busey & Walker, 2017) and testimonio (Delgado Bernal et al., 2012). Black critical patriotism subverts liberal democracy, ascribes personhood to Black people, and focus on the ways Black people resist racial oppression. Highlighting rejection of “the exploitation and degradation of Black bodies, land, and resources” (Busey & Walker, 2017, p. 461), the tenets of Black critical patriotism include Black physical resistance, Black political thought, and Black intellectualism.
A tenet of Latino critical race theory (LatCrit), testimonios are the intentionally political stories of Latinx people that situate “the individual in communion with a collective experience marked by marginalization, oppression, or resistance” (Delgado Bernal et al., 2016, p. 1). Through testimonios, Latinx community members speak truth to power, and “hear and read each other’s stories through voices, silences, bodies and emotions, through the goal of achieving new conocimientos, or understandings (Delgado Bernal et al., p. 5).
We engaged in duoethnographic (Sawyer & Norris, 2012) methods for this paper. We shared dialogue on the civic education we experienced in our schools and communities, the sense of belonging missing from our civic education, and what we learned about our civic identities. We made ourselves vulnerable to explore how the civic education we received did not fail us, as the race-evasive education we received did not prepare us for a social context in which race is ubiquitous. Finally, we discussed the kind of civic education we envision for students of Color, one that centers the experiences and perspectives of people of Color in ways that our schooling did not, and how to work towards providing this for all students.
Reflection and ongoing self-examination of beliefs/biases are critical in moving toward the type of civic education we want students to have. We surfaced the exhausting hyper-vigilance that must be maintained to challenge the status quo while being labeled “controversial” Black women resulting from passion towards teaching history and the influence of racism and racial inequity. Going forward, we challenge ourselves to be mindful of certain questions that must be continuously revisited: In learning, what issues are affecting us the most right now? How do we get ourselves to notice critical issues and make sense of them? When we notice them, what are the underlying systemic issues and structures we can identify that need to be challenged in our world?

Authors

• Erica D. Kelley, KIPP Northern California

• Carla-Ann R. Brown, University of Florida

• Rasheeda T. West, University of Florida

• Elizabeth A. Washington, University of Florida

• Jesus Tirado, Auburn University

• Gabriel Rodriguez, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Timothy Monreal, University at Buffalo - SUNY

• Tommy Ender, Rhode Island College