Colonial Blindness in Civics Education: Recognizing Colonization, Self-Determination, and Sovereignty as Essential Knowledge

• In Event: 56.075 - Affirming Diversity in the Social Studies

Abstract

This theoretical paper draws on the work of Mexican/Tigua scholar Dolores Calderón to interrogate the settler colonial context in which citizenship education takes place. In thinking through citizenship education and Indigenous studies literature, we consider how the rights and responsibilities of citizenship education might be reconfigured to recognize and challenge the settler colonial context of the United States and what possibilities emerge if citizenship education attended not only to civil rights, but to treaty rights as well as central to citizen identities.

Authors

• Sarah B. Shear, The Pennsylvania State University - Altoona

• Leilani Sabzalian, University of Oregon