Whose Knowledge, Issues, and Practices? Marginalized Students’ Civic Experiences Inside and Outside of Israeli Schools

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Sunday 8:00 am Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: Democratic Education in International Contexts (Table 7)

Abstract

While youth’s alienation from official politics has been sufficiently documented, marginalized young people’s informal political involvement has been only scarcely researched. Such research challenges mainstream conceptions of what counts as political and raises important questions about the nature of democratic education and civic learning. To explore how young people engage in civic learning and possible tensions between civic learning at school and in informal contexts, we conducted a qualitative participatory study with high schoolers in Tel Aviv/Jaffa. The findings document tensions between institutional and educators’ visions of civic learning and students’ vivid civic realities. Such tensions provide insight into how formal education processes could be repaired by connecting it to youth’s informal civic learning processes and promoting their political subjectification.

Authors

• Aline Muff, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

• Aviv Cohen, Hebrew University of Jerusalem