Leading civic learning in a laboratory against democracy: the case of Virginia

• In Event: Opportunity, Appropriation, and Risk: Illuminating the Shifting Relations Between History and Citizenship Education

Proposal

At CIES 2017, I presented a first version of this paper on dissent in the State of Virginia, in light of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Gavin Grimm's transgender court case against Gloucester County Public Schools, the Dulles Airport and northern Virginia student protests against President Trump’s Muslim ban and a landmark student-led movement to remove the name of a Confederate soldier from a public high school. In the years hence, political polarization in Virginia has intensified, and following the murder George Floyd, public sentiments reflected a deepened red-blue of the Commonwealth. In his final years in office, former Democratic Governor Ralph Northam had launched an EdEquity initiative that sought to make a turn towards diversity-equity-inclusion, culturally responsive teaching, racial literacy and truth in history, including treatment of 1619 as a year marking the arrival of the country's first slaves to Virginia shores and the birth of nascent republican government in Williamsburg. The VDOE and the General Assembly's Commission on Civic Education prepared to embark on CRT and service learning, and to give teeth to the Commonwealth’s revised policies and educational goals to make students civic-ready during their time in school, per the revised Profile of a Virginia Graduate.
But in 2020, during the COVID pandemic and national period of racial reckoning, a conservative political backlash ensued. While Black Lives Matter members occupied the Robert E. Lee statue for months, and as city officials removed Confederate monuments in the capital, Virginians were unhappy with the sacrifices associated with the state’s COVID response, which consisted of school closures, mask mandates and online learning. The 2021 election of Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin brought change with it, in the form of an executive order banning the teaching of divisive issues, anti-diversity-equity-inclusion policies, bans of books on race, sex and gender across districts, parental choice and bills of rights calls, adoption of conservative fact-based curriculum standards in the tradition of E.D. Hirsch’s cultural literacy. The EdEquity website was brought down.
This paper will present research on curricular changes during the April 2021-March 2022 period, and on the responses of district and school leadership to changes in the policy environment for civic learning. Specifically, this paper will explore secondary school leaderships’ enactments of civic learning, in light of the recent trend towards “laboratories against democracy” (Grumbach, 2022).

A body of research is now examining the leadership of civic learning in terms of the practices that support quality and “thicker” conceptions of citizenship. These are commonly associated with educations for democracy aligned with deliberative, agonistic, cosmopolitan and critical democratic educations, in contrast with “thinner” conceptions associated with neoliberal and elite educations (Sant, 2019). Tichnor-Wagner et al. (2022) has recently typologized state policy discourses, finding that many states have turned towards either republican or mixed-republican-liberal discourses in framing policy. Yet in light of democratic education theory-building and these policy discourses espoused, little is known as to whether leaders will promote pedagogical content knowledge of promising practices that might stem democratic backsliding, or whether leaderships will follow newer Virginia guidelines and fact-based curriculum standards. Further, extant research documents that teachers often follow their existing cognitive schemas and purposes in enacting practice, serving as gatekeepers and screeners of influences, ideas, biases reaching the classroom. Decision-making often hinges on student needs, perceptions of student limitations, instructional goals as well as local contexts and epistemologies that are often unmediated by school leaders.

A main focus of this research is leadership sense-making (Weick, 1995) and on emerging leadership decisions regarding the teaching of social justice and equity for active student civic engagement / leadership. Virginia is a unique site as America's repository of patriotic foundation myths and resistance, in light of the essentially-contested and historically-fraught first- and second-class citizenships present. In contrast to states like Illinois and Massachusetts, which achieved bi-partisan support for progressive civic learning initiatives, Virginia and other divided states have been less studied, particularly at sub-state levels. Little is known about how leaders are sense-making current policy signals and curriculum swings from governors’ mansions, statehouses and boardrooms. More information is needed about how local leaderships are communicating metaphors, problems, solution narratives, and counter-defenses. Further, research is needed to understand whether these policy divides are sparking adaptive responses and cognitive reframing as supportive narratives or counter-narratives. The research seeks to determine whether "sense-giving" leaders foster multi-vocality of incommensurate values, requiring decisions as to accept deeper pluralization or to coerce or coopt a monist perspective and “fidelity.” Finally, more is needed to understand the dynamics of stability and change in schools, and how leaders sense-making might affect gradual “shifts” associated with displacement, drift, layering, fading and exhaustion of other practices, citizenships and democracies (Streeck & Thelen, 2005).

Data from this study will enable a better understanding of dynamics of dissent, protest, adaptation, hybridization, and the extinction of wholesale democratic identities and matrices (frames) that Americans tie to their beliefs to their thicker civic identities and purposes.

The research methodology is a mixed methods comparative case study of secondary schools in Virginia, purposefully selected to reflect a range of contexts and qualities of civic learning present in the Commonwealth. Qualitative interviews will be conducted, and information coded to reflect sets of effective leadership practices and conceptions of citizenship, from thin and thick, personally-responsible, participatory and justice-oriented (Westheimer & Kahne, 2004) based on the researchers' review of the literature. The paper will present findings in a broad comparative such as to draw comparisons across domestic and international contexts. In addition to inform enactment research, the paper will also speak to the threats to democracy that are taking shape from France and Italy to Israel and Hungary – and the United States.

By March 2024, this research will have completed the bulk of mixed methods research, examining extant curriculum and student performance data, along with qualitative interview of principals and History/Social Science chairs in Virginia secondary schools.

Author

• Jeff Coupe, The George Washington University