Revisiting the Tension Between Critical Inquiry and Democratic Education

• In Event: Critical Inquiry in Social Studies Education: Clarifying Directions for Research and Practice

Abstract

Purpose: Recent scholarship has forced the field to rethink deliberation of issues as the gold standard of civic education (e.g., Conrad et al., 2024; Gibson, 2020; Hlavacik & Krutka, 2021; Author, 2017, 2018, 2021; Krutka & Hlavacik, 2022). Some of this work has focused on the distinction between open and settled issues, particularly the ways in which teachers can use different criteria to determine openness (i.e., the epistemic criterion, the political criterion, and the politically authentic criterion). That work has generally argued that when one or more criteria frames an issue as settled, even if other criteria frame it as open, teachers should have the power to decide on openness in ways that align with their instructional goals and safety of their students. For example, if issues are epistemically settled but open on either the political criterion or the politically authentic criterion, teachers should choose to frame the issue as settled if treating it as open implicates students’ identities or reinforces social injustice.

Perspectives: However, where the tension comes into play is that when all three criteria frame an issue as open, a democratic perspective would generally believe that teachers should teach it as open, even if the issue implicates students’ identities or potentially reinforces social injustice. If we teach open issues as settled simply because we do not want to give voice to a particular opinion (which has been deemed valid according to the various criteria), then we run the risk of suppressing democratic dialogue (cf. Freedman, 2007; Applebaum, 2009) and can reasonably be accused of indoctrination.

Mode of Inquiry: Theoretical/conceptual argument.

Results: A good example can be found in a recent study on an elementary inquiry into whether sports teams should be forced to get rid of Indigenous mascots (Author, 2023). A teacher might hold a personal opinion that Indigenous people should not be considered mascots, and that position might be the critical position that promotes justice; however, when the authors ran the issue through each of the criteria, they could not reasonably state that the issue was settled on any of them. Therefore, they supported the teacher in the study teaching the issue as open in her classroom.

Significance: This tension is one that remains unresolved within inquiry-based approaches to civic education. Scholars have offered approaches that could be viewed as compromises (e.g., the civic litigation approach offered by Hlavacik and Krutka (2021), as well as the directive versus non-directive teaching delineations that have been offered in the field of educational philosophy (Gregory, 2014; Warnick & Smith, 2014). This essay further explores this tension and grapples with the question of how criticality can exist within the larger context of democratic education.

Author

• Wayne Journell, University of North Carolina - Greensboro