Middle School Students’ Civic Engagement in Fraught Political Times and Places

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 7:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Critical Curricular Inquiries in Precarious Times: Student Agency, Transformations, and Place

Abstract

This paper explores how middle school youth develop multifaceted forms of civic awareness in the context of systemic and racialized socio-political precarity and inequity. Drawing on interviews from a middle school civic learning program in Washington, DC, we show how students enact lived civic awareness/engagement through feeling and noticing complexity and disjuncture; rethinking engagement and possibility; and claiming agency and taking action on their own terms. These practices challenge dominant assumptions that youth are apathetic or disengaged because of their limited participation in normative civic forms that have historically excluded or failed them. Grounded in abolitionist education, critical civic learning, and decolonial scholarship, we frame civic awareness as an evolving, relational disposition rooted in lived experiences and critical imaginations.

Authors

• Samuel Burmester, University of California - Santa Cruz

• Rachel Talbert, Teachers College, Columbia University