Teachers’ Ideas about Strategies for Social Action: A Cross-national Comparison

• In Event: Guiding Social Justice: Educators as Duty Bearers for Student Action

Proposal

This paper presents findings from a cross-national study of teachers’ understanding of developing students' ideas about strategies for social action, particularly ideas about how civility or incivility should be included in the curriculum, in the United States, Singapore, and New Zealand. Teaching for and about social action is part of social and civic education in most countries, regardless of country-specific configurations and designations. Existing curricula, however, have become eclipsed by the polarization, political turmoil, and transformation or breakdown of traditional forms of public participation in many nations. Rather than reinscribing failed approaches, educators need new ways of thinking about teaching for social action, especially with regard to circumstances that justify civility and incivility.

Research on teachers’ thinking holds the promise of providing such perspectives, because it is teachers who stand at the intersection of students, curriculum, and the wider public sphere, and thus who are likely to have the realistic and well-developed ideas about possibilities and challenges involved in such efforts. It is also teachers who ultimately serve as gatekeepers of classroom curriculum and instruction, and whose ideas must therefore be taken into account in developing new approaches. International comparisons are especially instructive in this regard, because varied social and political cultures significantly impact thinking about civic participation, and such comparisons both illuminate constraints on curriculum and open up teachers to new ways of thinking derived from differing contexts.

Literature review

Many social educators agree that a central purpose of the field is to help students understand and take part in social action. Depending on the context of the national education system, this goal has been articulated as engaging students with public problems or controversial social issues (e.g., Hess & McAvoy, 2015), critical explorations of race and ethnicity (e.g., Busey & Dowie-Chin, 2021, Rodríguez, 2018), economic inequalities, including global disparities and oppression (e.g., Ho, 2021; Sant et. al. 2018), and transnational environmental issues (e.g., Chang, 2014; Reid, 2019). Most of these efforts are devoted to helping students understand social issues and becoming committed to public participation. However, there has been little systematic exploration or critical evaluation of how schools can introduce students to a range of specific strategies for social action.

While studies exist of teachers’ perspectives and understandings of social justice and of their professional roles (e.g., Pantić, 2017), civic education ideologies (Knowles & Castro, 2019), structural barriers such as meritocratic policies (e.g., Ho, 2021), or multicultural education and diversity (e.g., Silverman, 2010), there has been little explicit investigation of teachers’ thinking about approaches to teaching for social action—such as which strategies are appropriate given specific goals and circumstances, or the degree to which civility is necessary or incivility is justified. There has been even less attention paid to the perspectives of teachers from different national contexts, despite the existence of studies that have demonstrated how teachers’ ideas are shaped by their economic, political, and social contexts (e.g., Baildon & Sim, 2009).

Conceptual framework

The conceptual framework derived from two sources: 1) a new typology for thinking about teaching about social action, and 2) the role of discretion or practical wisdom in making decisions about strategies for social action. The typology consisted of four types of strategies for social action
• Influencing governmental decisions
• Influencing businesses or nonprofits
• Influencing public opinion/attitudes
• Providing direct assistance
The first of these has long been the subject of research by political scientists and typically has been the focus of curriculum in social and civic education, but young people in recent years have increasingly been drawn to the other three types, sometimes referred to as “nonconventional” political participation, yet school curricula and research with teachers have not systematically incorporated these.

Making decisions about social action rests on what is known in the Western philosophical as practical wisdom and in Confucianism as discretion. This requires being able to weigh up situations and decide on the most appropriate course of action in a given circumstance, rather than adhering to invariant procedures or formulas (Kraut, 2018; Li, 2014; Theile, 2006) This requires restraint, timeliness, flexibility, and pragmatism (Thompson, 2007). Crucially, it also requires attention to when civility is the most appropriate form of social action and when incivility is justified, based on the goals of an action, the immediacy of the circumstances, and cultural norms (Barton & Ho, 2022; Kim, 2011).

Research methods

This research involved teachers from the United States, Singapore, and New Zealand. The countries were chosen for their differing cultural, political, and educational contexts; collectively, findings from these settings have the potential to achieve the study’s purpose of shedding light on the influence of contextual factors on teachers’ understanding and illustrating considerations that might not be apparent in a single setting. Within each country, secondary teachers who were engaged in social education (regardless of the course designation in their country), and who were known to be concerned with preparing students for social action, were selected based on personal contacts of the researchers.

Data were collected through task-based, open-ended, in-person interviews with four classroom teachers in each of the three countries. Interviews began with an elicitation task in which participants were asked to select, from a group of 12 potential case study examples, those that they would like to see included in a hypothetical new curriculum in their country on “taking part in social action.” The task-based portion of the interview wase followed by open-ended questions that asked participants about their ideas related to the purposes of teaching about social change, their current and past experiences with the topic, their perception of students’ responses, and experienced or potential obstacles they see in teaching about social action.

Interviews were analyzed both deductively, based on the elements of discretion identified above, and inductively, to identify patterns in teachers’ thinking (Bingham & Witkowsky, 2022). Analysis involved multiple cycles of coding (Saldaña, 2021), including cross-case analysis that combined responses from different respondents within and across countries (Patton, 2001), and constant comparison that drew from responses to each elements of interviews (Corbin & Strauss, 1990).

Authors

• Keith Barton, Indiana University

• Li-Ching Ho, University of Wisconsin-Madison