Teaching for Democracy in an Age of Economic Disparity

Teaching for Democracy in an Age of Economic Disparity (Introduction and Summary)

Cory Wright-Maley & Trent Davis Editors St. Mary’s University Calgary, AB, Canada

For full text, visit: https://www.routledge.com/Teaching-for-Democracy-in-an-Age-of- Economic-Disparity/Wright-Maley-Davis/p/book/9781138933422

Introduction to the Edited Volume

Note: This is an unedited, pre-published version of the introduction, included with summaries from each of the chapters. Do not cite without permission

Preparing students to participate in democracy is one of the central charges of today’s schools. In the same vein Thomas Jefferson (1784/1954) argued that education was “essentially necessary” to help ensure that the people were prepared to participate in government, and to guard against the corruptions of wealth, privilege, and the degeneracies of human weakness inherent in all human constructs. He believed that the “people themselves” were the republic’s “only safe depositories” (para. 1). This word republic is an important one to keep in mind as you read this collection. Thomas Paine (1789/2011) explained at great length that the term literally means “the public thing” or “the public good” (p.). We have positioned this text as one that aligns fundamentally with the ideals and principles of this “public good” within our liberal democracy, albeit one that is, as Giroux points out in his chapter here, “under assault.” It is important to note that we don’t believe there was a halcyon period to which we must return. On the contrary, the participatory ideal to which democracy strives, as Derrida (2006) noted, is ever in process and in various stages of imperfection. This is true, too, of how we prepare our students to be engaged citizens. Currently, much of what constitutes democratic education takes place in civics classes, where students learn about the functions of government and their potential roles as democratic citizens. Throughout the social studies curriculum, students are pressed to think critically, to learn the tools and dispositions of social discourse, as well as ways to involve themselves in the mainstream political process. Although such preparation constitutes an important component of civic education, it is embedded within a political landscape that has shifted in recent years to one informed by a neoliberal ideology with an overriding emphasis on enhancing the power of corporations and wealthy individuals—or as Jefferson called them, the pseudo aristoi or “artificial aristocracy” (as cited in Hartman, 2010, p.). Obviously, Jefferson’s recognition that the intensification of economic disparity undermines democratic life is not newly revelatory. While we personally have been especially concerned about this trend in the wake of the most recent financial crisis, a plethora of political thinkers from across the political spectrum, from Rousseau to Rawls, have been troubled by it for centuries. At the dawn of the modern period Rousseau’s work may be emblematic in this respect since he effectively demonstrated that as France’s overall wealth grew the inequality between its citizens proceeded apace. In our own time Rawls tried in his influential “two principles of justice” to admit inequalities in his ideal polity only if they could be demonstrated to benefit the least advantaged. The work of Carl Schmitt provides a more detailed and revealing example of the debilitating effects that economic disparity can produce. He argued that democracy’s tendency to move into realms having nothing to do with the political purposes of the state (which for him were primarily restricted to the protection of its citizens) would undermine its neutrality as an arbiter of this protective function. Further, once its neutrality was breached it would be impossible to keep economic interests from co-opting the armature of political power (Schmitt, 1938/1996). When this occurs, he argued, democracy itself becomes “only a poor façade concealing the dominance of parties and economic interests” (1923/1992, p. 20). This arrangement is a terrible deception, because moneyed interests are given access to power and all of its benefits without suffering the risks that come with political power (1938/1996), in effect exercise influence even as they evade “political responsibility and visibility” (1932/1996, p. 77). Two prominent contemporary philosophers, Michael J. Sandel and Sheldon S. Wolin, both offered diagnoses of the current health of this corporatist context within the United States. In What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, Sandel (2012) pointed out that “the reach of markets, and market-oriented thinking, into aspects of life traditionally governed by nonmarket norms is one of the most significant developments of our time” (p. 7). He then offered two connected reasons why we should be alarmed by this development. First, over the past several decades there has been a growing disparity in terms of a widening gap between rich and poor that compromises if not outright betrays any commitment to equal opportunity for all. Second, when increasingly everything is for sale and fewer and fewer things are protected from the pressure of market forces there is a corresponding increase in the “corrosive tendency of markets” to “express and promote certain attitudes toward the goods being exchanged” (p. 9). To illustrate this point, Sandel provides the example of paying children to read in school, which reveals how this one act can alienate students from their desire to read, with potential consequences on student’s long term attitudes towards reading. In Democracy Inc.: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, Wolin (2008) points out that within the liberal democracies life has become “managed” through collusion between corporate and political actors. The really bad news, however, as the rest of his title suggests, is that as this collusion gets tighter and tighter the “specter” or grave threat of nothing less than “inverted totalitarianism” grows ever more likely. As Wolin explains, this is a peculiar variation of totalitarianism suited to the complex reality of neoliberalism where more and more power is continuously being concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people through the deliberate manipulation of the levers of media, politics, and finance. Tellingly neither Sandel nor Wolin believe that there is an easy remedy in sight, and while they both offer some measured hope that democratic life can be rejuvenated, neither has anything novel to recommend, except the old procedural insights that democracy depends upon the quality of public discussion and a wider participatory culture for support. Sandel (2012) even points to “two daunting obstacles” that interfere with a public debate on the proper role of markets ever becoming a reality, namely “the persisting power and prestige of market thinking,” and “the rancor and emptiness of our public discourse” (p.11). For his part, Wolin (2008) writes, “if democracy is about participating in self-government, its first requirement is a supportive culture, a complex of beliefs, values, and practices that nurture equality, cooperation, and freedom” (pp. 260-261). But like Sandel, Wolin is not naïve to the enormous difficulties that reanimating such a “culture” would involve. Incredibly politicians from across the political spectrum are echoing these concerns. Republican Vance McAllister, former House representative from Louisiana, outlined the ways in which the contributions of wealthy individuals are treated as a quid pro quo in the decision making of elected representatives (MacNeil, 2014). Bernie Sanders’ (2015) political platform explicitly states: In the year 2015, with a political campaign finance system that is corrupt and increasingly controlled by billionaires and special interests, I fear very much that, in fact, government of the people, by the people, and for the people is beginning to perish in the United States of America (para. 2). And even Rand Paul, on the libertarian right, has made the argument that one of the problems with ceding power to government is that corporations just end up seizing it from the American people, who ultimately have minimal control over how that power is wielded. Even economists have joined in the chorus of those pointing out the disparities in the capitalist system and its corrosive impacts on democracy. In Capital in the Twenty-First Century Thomas Piketty (2014) effectively exposed the ideological lie that in the twentieth century unfettered capitalism benefitted everyone equitably. He reveals for us two key conclusions. First, the market has “no natural, spontaneous process to prevent destabilizing, inegalitarian forces from prevailing permanently” (p. 21), which means “top earners can quickly separate themselves from the rest by a wide margin” (p. 23). Second, Picketty argues that “the history of inequality is shaped by the way economic, social, and political actors view what is just and what is not, as well as by the relative power of those actors and the collective choices of that result” (p. 20). In other words the absence of strict economic determinism means that human-driven political policies matter, and the ways in which we frame economic and democratic justice and equity determine the degree to which economic disparity exists in our society. The collective choices we have made have led to our present condition. More importantly, if we should choose to, the decisions we make from here can potentially ameliorate or even reverse this condition (see also Kotler, 2015; Stiglitz, 2013, 2015). This book personally motivated us to really consider how our traditional civic curriculum, which primarily provides an introduction to the proper functions of the institutions of government, fails to address the ways in which corporatism undermines democracy and the public good in America. Sadly, Picketty’s findings are not aberrant. On the contrary a whole body of evidence has emerged over the past decade that supports his historical and contemporary analyses. Today, economic disparity in the United States is much worse than most Americans believe (Fitz, 2015). The most recent data available show that the top 1% of Americans possess 38.4% of all wealth in the country, while the top 10% possess 74.6% (Credit Suisse, 2014). In fact, The Economist reported that income wealth of the top 0.01 percent of income earners in the United States is higher than even during the Gilded Age, noted for its infamous robber barons like Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, J.D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, who built their fortunes on the backs of exploited workers and strong-arm business tactics (“True Progressivism,” 2012). Such economic disparity has manifold and interwoven consequences for Americans. In the richest country on the planet, more than 43 million people live below the poverty line, and perhaps as many as half of all Americans are but one paycheck away from falling below it (Kotler, 2015), roughly 3.5 million people are homeless (Caliendo, 2015) or cannot afford access to housing safe neighborhoods in which to live near available work, even while they would like to find both (Kotler, 2015). This leads to circumstances in which individuals must live in unsafe neighborhoods, often far from work, that put them in perpetual danger of victimization and stress. Such conditions contribute to an America in which it is “literally dangerous to be poor” (Taibbi, 2015, p. 343). Worse still, it is clear that being born into poverty makes it very unlikely that an individual will escape it. Mitnik and Grusky (2015) explained the scope of their findings in the following way: “although no one would be surprised that children from higher-income families enjoy some advantages, this report reveals them to be dramatic” (p. 9). Among their results they found that: The expected income of children raised in well-off families (90th percentile) is about 200 percent larger than the expected income of children raised in poor families (10th percentile) and about 75 percent larger than that of children raised in middle-class families (50th percentile) (p. 5). In part, this is because the educational opportunities, and thus, education performance between rich and poor students is dramatic and has increased by as much as 40% over the last quarter century (“True Progressivism,” 2012). This conclusion bodes ill for the financial stability and wellbeing of Americans today, but also paints a grim picture for the future. We believe that the ways in which we prepare students to influence their government and contribute civically are outmoded. Today, individual citizens have less access to, and influence over, the political process; ideology in the service of an ever-increasing economic disparity has contributed to a political milieu that has undermined the traditional message that each of our students’ voices and votes matter within the political process. It is not our goal to frame this volume pessimistically or cynically. Rather, we want to call educators to action in how we address a new and troubling context in which the traditional means of preparing students for civic life no longer provide them with the tools to engage effectively in our democracy. Just as the nature of democracy is ever evolving, democratic education must be seen as fluid, a sphere of practices that are constantly renegotiated based on the needs of the people they are meant to serve, appropriate to the circumstances in which they find themselves (Torres, 1998). We are immensely grateful to the many scholars who submitted proposals for this collection in response to our invitation. Smart and engaged scholars produced high quality pieces here that we believe are both timely and provocative in the way they stimulate discussion about the role of democratic education today. We divided the essays into four sections. The first, “Setting the Context,” aims to describe in broad yet arresting terms how democratic education is currently struggling under the economic imperatives of neoliberalism, the history of civic education, and how teachers are currently trying to address economic disparity in their teaching. This leads into the second section, “Confronting Economic Disparity,” which looks more specifically at how we might teach students about money and finance and the role of the law. In “Activating Student Voice” the key theme attends to how teachers can best be prepared to engage students at all levels: primary, secondary, and pre-service teacher education, in learning to stimulate student civic participation. In the final section, “Fostering Emergent Spaces for Democracy,” the pieces examine more specific avenues of engagement in our democracy, which address both civic and economic equity. These chapters explore topics such as the relationship between economic and gender disparity, the use of social media as a tool for civic engagement, an approach to radical humanities and social justice in adult education, and what we might learn about racism and subaltern civic arts practices illustrated by the Mike Brown tragedy. We were left with two central questions we did not believe we had the wisdom to answer alone: In an age of economic disparity, how can we use democratic education to meaningfully promote effective citizen engagement that in turn substantively impacts the ways the nation is governed? And, more importantly, how do we prepare students to counter the fundamental imbalances generated by economic inequality that corrupt and weaken the democratic ethos of the American people and the institutions of democracy under which we operate? Fortunately, we have collected a series of works from scholars across disciplines that together provide us with a powerful set of ideas from which we can further this vitally necessary conversation. It is our hope that this volume will play a role in the effort to begin to take steps to confront what is perhaps the greatest challenge of our time to democracy and democratic education.

References Barton, K. C., & Levstik, L. S. (2004). Teaching history for the common good. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Credit Suisse (2014). Global wealth data book 2014. Accessed from http://economics.uwo.ca/people/davies_docs/global-wealth-databook-2014-v2.pdf Fitz, N. (2015, March 31). Economic inequality: It’s much worse than you think. Scientific American. Retrieved from http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/economic- inequality-it-s-far-worse-than-you-think/ Giroux, H. A. (2009). Teacher education and democratic schooling. In A. Darder, M. P. Baltodano, & R. D. Torres (Eds.), The critical pedagogy reader (2nd ed., pp. 438-459). New York, NY: Routledge. Jefferson, T. (1954). Notes on the State of Virginia. In The Founders Constitution (vol. 1, ch. 18, doc. 16). Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture. Retrieved from http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders /documents/v1ch18s16.html Mitnik, P. A., & Grusky, D. B. (2015). Economic mobility in the United States [Report]. Pew Charitable Trust and the Russell Sage Foundation. Retrieved from http://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/assets/2015/07/fsm-irs-report_artfinal.pdf?la=en Obama, B. (2013). Remarks by the President on economic mobility. Washington, DC: The White House. Retrieved from https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press- office/2013/12/04/remarks-president-economic-mobility Paine, T. (2011). Rights of Man. Buffalo, NY: Broadview Press. Parker, W. (2008). Knowing and doing in democratic citizenship education. In L.S. Levstik & C. A. Tyson (Eds.), Handbook of research in social studies education. New York, NY: Routledge. Picketty, T. (2014). Capital in the twenty-first century (Trans. A. Goldhammer). Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press. Sandel, M. J. (2012). What money can’t buy: The moral limits of markets. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sanders, B. (2016). Getting big money out of politics and restoring democracy. Retrieved from https://berniesanders.com/issues/money-in-politics/ Schmitt, C. (1923).The crisis of parliamentary democracy. (E. Kennedy, Trans.) Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Schmitt, C. (1932). The concept of the political. (G. Schwab, Trans.) Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Schmitt, C. (1938). The Leviathan in state theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and failure of a political symbol. (G. Schwab, & E. Hilfstein, Trans.) Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Soder, R. (Ed.). (1996). Democracy, education, and the schools [Abstract]. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Retrieved from http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED390156 Torres, C. T. (1998). Democracy, education, and multiculturalism: Dilemmas of citizenship in a global world. Comparative Education Review, 42(4), 421-447 “True Progressivism,” (2012, October 13). The Economist. Retrieved from http://www.economist.com/node/21564556 Warren, E. (2014). A Fighting Chance. New York: NY: Metropolitan Books. Westheimer, J., & Kahne, J. (2004) What kind of citizen? The politics of educating for democracy. American Educational research Journal, 41(2), 237-269 Wolin,S. S. (2008). Democracy inc.: Managed democracy and the specter of inverted totalitarianism. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. CHAPTER SUMMARIES SECTION I Setting the Context

1. Democratic Education under Siege in a Neoliberal Society Henry Giroux, Visiting Distinguished Professor, Ryerson University

This volume begins with a discussion of the neoliberal context in North America, which was adapted from one of Giroux’s earlier articles. The chapter was updated and revised so as to be current in relation to the events and challenges in the political environment, and to speak directly to the challenge facing democratic education today..

2. The Economic Citizen: Civic Education and its Discontents Joseph Nichols, Assistant Professor, Saint Louis University

The policymaking process is complicated. Although policy solutions are implemented and interpreted by a number of players in varying institutional contexts, policy paradigms drive which solutions are appropriated in practice. The policy solutions taken up in educational policy and, thus, practiced in schools are constrained by how school problems have been defined on the broad sociopolitical landscape. A Nation at Risk focused the purpose of schooling on economics and reframed the problems of schooling on the school itself, excluding contextual circumstances. As such, educational success is tied to the success or perceived success of our economy. The neoliberal perspective that schooling should and does play an exclusively economic role in our society has metastasized into its civic purpose. Schools should function in collaborative community settings and civic education should define the good life. Schools in these settings operate as political and social spaces through which we can confront and answer deeply political questions about how our society is organized. However, the neoliberal obsession with economic well-being divorces schooling from its political and social domains, and promotes a citizen as worker model. From this perspective, good citizenship is expressed by personal responsibility through markets—schools are effective and citizens are good if they are able to contribute to the capital forces driving our economic progress. One of the reasons the personally responsible model easily evidences itself in schools is because personal responsibility fits the problem definition of schooling. This chapter discusses how neoliberalism corrupts civic education and the civic purposes of schooling. Specifically, this chapter focuses on the neoliberal citizenship model in contrast with other established models of citizenship and how schools can respond to the prevailing ideology of the economic citizen.

3. Emancipatory and Pluralist Perspectives on Democracy and Economic Inequality in Social Studies and Citizenship Education Marcus Edward Johnson, Assistant Professor, University of Georgia This chapter will provide a history of the discourse on democracy in Theory and Research in Social Education (TRSE), highlighting the two dominant approaches to this concept: emancipatory and pluralist. The analysis of this binary provides a foundation for discursive matrix for scholarship on transformation and education, including concerns with economic and social equity/equality. Emancipatory theorists resist social reproduction and promote transformation toward social and economic equality. Pluralists likewise have a generally negative assessment of reproduction, but due to their commitment to respecting diverse perspectives, are less likely to promote economic equality as the goal of social studies education. Situating the discussion of these two approaches in their historical and philosophical contexts, this chapter will help to answer questions around how democratic citizenship education may have been shaped by this binary and how these two approaches might help us to attend more fruitfully to the problem of economic disparity. The pluralist tendency to discuss inequity, develop critical thinking skills, and provide access to information will be contrasted with the emancipatory focus on reconstructing the social order by directing attention to the problem, seeing inequality as a moral issue (and rejecting moral relativism), and promoting civic/political action that attends to the economic, political, and social structure of society. To do so, the analysis of these approaches will draw from salient examples from the last four decades to highlight the potentialities of addressing economic disparity in democratic education.

SECTION II Confronting Economic Disparity 4. Talking About Inequality: How Teachers Address Economic Inequality in the High School Classroom John Rogers, Professor, University California, Los Angeles Joel Westheimer, Professor, University of Ottawa

This chapter reports on the first in-depth empirical examination of what schools do to develop young people’s understanding of economic inequality. The research reported here takes as its point of departure the insight that young people are not only objects of economic and social forces; they also are potential civic agents. As adults, they will be called on to make social policy choices about taxation and the distribution of public resources, and to weigh in on a host of issues that shape and are shaped by economic inequality. Their understanding is essential for informed civic engagement—including participation in public debates, electoral politics, policy formation, and community mobilization. Using a mixed-methods study, the research we write about here aims to illuminate how and in what ways economic inequality is addressed in high schools, and how this varies across different kinds of schools. The chapter addresses three central questions: (1) What do public high schools in the United States teach young people about economic inequality, its causes and consequences? (2) To what extent do curricular content and pedagogy in these schools reflect what scholars across various disciplines deem important for students (and citizens more broadly) to know about economic inequality? (3) How do lessons about economic inequality reflect prevalent cultural and political conceptions of citizenship and the “good” society? How do these conceptions, in turn, deepen our theoretical and conceptual understandings of how inequality is framed, how attention to inequality is enabled or constrained, and how these issues relate to a broader education reform agenda? Based on an analysis of both quantitative (teacher surveys) and qualitative (teacher interviews and case study observations), this chapter explores the degree to which schools address these issues in both the formal or informal curriculum and programs.

5. Teaching about Economics and Moneyed Interests in 21st Century Democracy Tamara Sober, Doctoral Fellow, Virginia Commonwealth University

As a high school social studies teacher I often found that students entering my 11th and 12th grade Government and Economics courses were unable to differentiate between political and economic systems. They saw democracy and capitalism as one in the same. However, they were not naïve when it came to understanding the power of money in politics. What they lacked was 1) exposure to how moneyed interests operate behind the scenes of a democracy, 2) content knowledge that demystifies economic policies, and 3) real-world examples of how the power of organized people has and can continue to rival organized money. The textbooks and curricula I was provided were silent on these topics. My goal was for students to recognize that economic policies--contrary to the invisible hand zeitgeist—are made by people and can be made to disproportionately benefit one group at the expense of another, and lead to economic inequality that can threaten our social mobility, efforts toward equality, and ultimately our democracy. Finding a dearth of classroom resources written from this perspective spurred me to author Teaching Economics As If People Mattered. I will apply a practitioner approach and draw on lesson plans from Teaching Economics and from my experiences integrating the lessons into a civics course in a public high school. Practical suggestions will be provided for teaching students to consider the human implications of various economic policies in order to create the dialogue essential to our future as a self-governing, democratic society. Examples will be drawn from lessons that examine institutional asset builders and asset blockers, the difference between income and wealth, income viewed through the lenses of gender and race, and who pays taxes in America. By providing structure, experiences and material with which students can engage and create meaning, the lessons encourage students to be co-creators in their process of learning.

6. Addressing the Elephant in Democracy’s Room: An Interactive Approach to Teaching about Campaign Finance Wayne Journell, Assistant Professor, University of North Carolina at Greensboro Brett Levy, Assistant Professor, State University of New York at Albany James Hartwick, Professor, University of Wisconsin at Whitewater

Over the past two decades, the amount of money spent on political campaigns in the United States has more than doubled, tremendously increasing the role of campaign finance in US elections and democracy. This recent surge is related to the confluence of growing political action committees and recent Supreme Court decisions that have liberalized campaign spending laws, and the result has been an increasing barrage of negative campaign ads every election season. Young people are regularly exposed to these ads but often have little understanding of their source, the mechanisms that create this hostile political climate, or how that climate might be changed. In this chapter, we will (1) explain campaign finance regulations and how they permit large expenditures, (2) describe five schools of thought on campaign finance in the US, and (3) illustrate how teachers can prepare young people to consider these perspectives and take action based on their own preferences. In the first section, we will detail Congressional and state laws on campaign finance and how those laws have been affected by recent Supreme Court decisions, such as Citizens United and McCutcheon. The second section will describe the following five different schools of thought for approaching our current state of affairs: (1) the status quo, (2) amending the Constitution, (3) judicial action, (4) legislative action, and (5) corporate governance. We will describe the advantages and disadvantages of each of these approaches, including their feasibility. Then in our third (and most extensive) section, we will describe teaching strategies that can be used to educate middle and high school students about these issues. Ultimately, the goal of these experiences is to foster civic engagement and knowledge among young people. We will provide details on how teachers can frame the problem, support balanced discussions, have students declare and defend their positions, and finally guide students to take action and reflect on that action.

SECTION III Building Spaces to Nurture Student Action

7. Toward Gender Equity: Imagining New Spaces for Empowerment through Feminist Pedagogy in Democratic Classrooms Kathryn Engebretson, Assistant Professor, Indiana University

It is clear that women in the U.S. have made strides in working toward gender equity in the past century, though gender inequity persists. Economically, women still face a 23% wage gap compared to men and hidden discrimination present in hiring and firing practices endures. This disparity fails to achieve the vision of the U.S. as a place that serves the needs of those living in a pluralistic and democratic society. The only way to change this reality is to work for what we want our society to become. For educators, this happens in our classrooms with a particular responsibility placed on our social studies teachers because of their charge to educate the future citizenry. Social studies classrooms as sites for learning about and practicing democracy must attend to gender inequity as it exists in the present day. How to attend to that is a persistent question to which here I pose a pedagogical solution. Through the combination of feminist pedagogy and a democratic classroom environment, classrooms can be an active site of resisting oppression where a new status quo for all genders to be valued equally is created. The addition of social justice issues into the explicit curriculum is critical for a democratic classroom. Feminist pedagogy stems from gender injustice but allows the inclusion of multiple forms of injustice to become open topics in the classroom. This coupling of feminist pedagogy and democratic classrooms provides students with the resources necessary for community building, personal growth, societal responsibility, and eventual social change. Guiding student learning to issues of oppression, injustice, privilege, and power is where feminist pedagogy is essential to the democratic classroom actualizing its full potential.

8. Literacy Methods Instruction as a Tool for Vibrant Civic Voice Jennifer Dolan, Doctoral Candidate, University of Connecticut Douglas Kaufman, Associate Professor, University of Connecticut

This chapter proposes that public schools should be places that promote ideals of civic participation, provide students opportunities to deeply examine social and economic issues near and far, and share their diverse perspectives on personal and public concerns. However, the prevalence of culturally biased “teach to the test” pedagogies that negatively and disproportionately impact marginalized and impoverished students undermines their ability to attest to and arrest the socio-economic injustices they face by depriving them of the tools that a robust and critical course of literacy studies can provide. We contend that if literacy education coursework occurs in spaces where preservice teachers can openly deliberate over complex texts, negotiate positions of power and privilege, and engage in dialogic discourse with their peers, they may begin to understand the challenges that their students will face, not only as readers and writers, but also as marginalized citizens with innate capabilities to change the world in which they live. We believe that changing the paradigm in their coursework from one that emphasizes promoting good behavior and accepting standardized content, to one that emphasizes shared journeys of discovery; immersion in literacy experiences and dialogic discourse; and the recognition of risk, failure, and dissonance as integral to exemplary practice, preservice teachers may adopt more constructivist and socially conscious curricula. To illustrate these changes, we present vignettes of both preservice teachers and classroom students engaged in a dialogic construction of literacies that offers tools for civic engagement. We will introduce Bank’s Five Dimensions of Multicultural Education, among other theoretical models, as a guiding framework. These excerpts will exemplify the ways in which preservice teachers work collaboratively, solve problems, explore diverse ways of knowing, and struggle to move away from standardized curricula toward a liberating approach to literacy education that prepares students for lives of engaged and critical citizenship.

9. Empowering Praxis in Our Youngest Citizens—An Instructional Framework for Helping Elementary School Students Evaluate and Respond to Contemporary Socioeconomic Issues Ryan Colwell, Assistant Professor & Director of Childhood Education, Fairfield University

This chapter will emphasize Freire’s process of “conscientization,” in helping students to develop an awareness of their own social realities, and to tackle real-world problems through reflection and ongoing action. I will offer an instructional framework to guide elementary school teachers as they empower the young citizens in their classrooms to take action in regard to contemporary social issues. This framework includes five stages including: 1) identifying what students already know about a social issue, including any personal connections and potential pre- conceived notions/stereotypes; 2) moving beyond a surface level understanding of a social issue by digging into the complexities of the issue; 3) Recognizing that social issues can be experienced, examined, and understood from a variety of different perspectives, including the perspective of elementary-age children; 4) considering transformative actions student can take in regard to a social issue, and ultimately engage in praxis; and 5) reflecting on what they have learned about a social issue and consider their roles and responsibilities as active citizens and participants in a democratic society. In order to exemplify the instructional framework and bring it to life for pre-service and in-service elementary school educators, the author will incorporate teaching vignettes within each section of the instructional framework, which will describe how teachers and students in elementary school classrooms could address the issue of homelessness. Homelessness affects a tremendous number of children, often making its presence felt in school settings. Through the process of conscientization, students develop the tools to form nuanced understandings of complex social issues that result from economic disparities, which ultimately enable them to seek equally complex and nuanced solutions.

10. Participatory Citizenship: Preparing Students for the New Majority Brooke Blevins, Assistant Professor, Baylor University Karon LeCompte, Assistant Professor, Baylor University

Students who will come of voting age within the next decade—regardless of their socioeconomic status—have the potential to help ensure a vibrant and positive democratic republic. Previously underrepresented minority groups are cultivating what will continue to be the new majority. In order to foster students’ potential, it is imperative that schools and communities give students opportunities to participate in active citizenship and prepare students with the important skills and dispositions needed to become informed citizens. Action civics puts students at the heart of civics learning, by providing an opportunity to participate in authentic civic activities. Although action civics programs vary in scope, content, and duration, they do share key elements, including: Student voice, experience, and decision making; engagement in civic activities; student choice for work to make a difference; and students’ reflections upon their own actions, successes, and challenges throughout the project. Through our research, we worked with the principal and teachers at a middle school serving gifted students from low socio-economic backgrounds, to develop an action civics project called iEngage. In this project, the free online civics program, iCivics, served as a catalyst for students to investigate and advocate issues in local communities. In analyzing the data from 284 middle and elementary age students and 115 action civics projects, including student interviews, student reflections, and projects, findings indicate that (1) students developed meaningful and personal connections to the world outside their classroom, (2) students developed an increased sense of personal efficacy and recognized that they could make a difference in their own communities, and (3) students developed both deep knowledge and important communication and civic skills, including, researching, evaluating multiple perspectives, and weighing evidence about their topics.

11. Democracy is a Verb: An Exploration of Mikva Challenge’s Democracy in Action Program Emma Kornfeld, Graduate Student, University of Michigan Jill Bass, Director of the Center for Action Civics, Mikva Challenge Brett Levy, Assistant Professor, State University of New York at Albany Often young people are excluded from democratic processes that directly affect their lives. Mikva Challenge is a non-partisan non-profit organization in Chicago that seeks to develop the next generation of civic leaders through a variety of programs on electoral participation, policy-making and community activism. The organization’s programs are built on the central principle that young people learn civics best when they are actively engaged in democratic activities inside and outside the classroom. Additionally, Mikva programs contribute to an amelioration of the civic empowerment gap, which is now well documented, by especially engaging with low-income, minority students who often are not provided equal opportunities to develop themselves as civic actors. Mikva’s Democracy in Action (DIA) program is organized to allow students to explore their communities from an asset-based perspective, identify issues that are important to them and their community, research those issues, analyze power, and ultimately develop an action plan to create change. The 6-step curriculum for the program encourages students to identify government in their everyday lives, reflect on their sense of obligation to the communities in which they live, make their schooling experiences relevant to their lives, and grow as citizens in our democracy. Teachers and students collectively build a classroom space based on democratic ideals, and consequently aim to tackle long-standing problems that policy- makers have inadequately addressed, such as community violence, school funding, teen pregnancy, and unemployment. During its 12th year of programming, DIA engaged over 3,000 students and 76 teachers from 54 schools throughout the City of Chicago. The Democracy in Action program is an effective and meaningful vehicle for teaching for democracy and provides a comprehensive case study with its application in numerous Chicago Public Schools. We will provide details on (a) the Democracy in Action curriculum (b) how teachers implement the curriculum, and (c) students’ experiences and outcomes.

SECTION IV New Fronts in the Fight for Democracy

13. Democracy Unbound: Lessons from Ferguson, Missouri Lauren Arend, Assistant Professor, Saint Louis University Alex Cuenca, Assistant Professor, Saint Louis University

Today there is a thin form of civic education in schools that focuses on developing rational individuals able to act as free and independent agents. This education echoes the individualistic nature of economic pursuit that dominates the current discourse of schooling. However, because the aspirations of democracy are best articulated by the voices marginalized within a democracy, in this chapter we turn to the movement in Ferguson, Missouri led by young activists to help articulate lessons on the search for public justice. We will discuss three particularly poignant lessons for democracy that Ferguson provides, with examples from media, author-obtained narratives, and primary source documents. First, Ferguson has illustrated the multiple ways in which citizens can express a legitimate democratic self by helping legitimize a variety of democratic expressions such as art, language (e.g., hip-hop, social media, literature), and film. Second, Ferguson has demonstrated that to engender a dialogue, inquiry must move into protected spaces in our society. Finally, the movement in Ferguson has elucidated that democratic resistance must be local. Each of these lessons exemplifies the ways in which democracy has been unbound from the traditionally thin forms of civic education found in schools. Moreover, we believe that the actions within this community provide a powerful teachable moment for democracy in an age of economic disparity. These expressions provide evidence that a democracy undergirded by a search for justice is possible. However, in order for us to achieve this kind of democracy, the lessons must not just infiltrate our classrooms, but also fundamentally transform them in order to redefine the purpose of schooling as the pursuit of public justice.

14. Teaching from the Margins: Democracy Depends on the Humanities Tara Hyland-Russell, Associate Professor, St. Mary’s University Corinne Syrnyk, Assistant Professor, St. Mary’s University

Humanities 101 is an academic program designed to intervene in the narratives and social structures that push adults to the margins of society and to help these adults to step beyond the constraints of poverty and increase their capacity to engage in a life reflective of their gifts and abilities. The insights and experiences gleaned from a decade of involvement in this program shape a generative model that can be used across contexts to teach and learn about the interconnected elements that constrain and enable democratic participation. This chapter outlines the core aspects of the Radical Humanities program that catalyzes both individual and social transformation, fostering marginalized learners’ capacities, gifts and abilities, while addressing the systems that have disempowered them. The combination of content and praxis offers a powerful model that can be used across educational contexts and includes: a pedagogy based on Socrates’ maieutic dialogue or “midwifery of the mind”; a profoundly safe learning environment; access to the reflective possibilities of the humanities; encounter with the stories of others and varying experiences of oppression and alienation that activate the narrative imagination; critical recognition and analysis of interconnecting strands of power, privilege, oppression and marginalization; models and practices of change; and access to cultural, intellectual and social spaces. This chapter will provide examples of pedagogical practices used throughout the program to elucidate how participants become more aware of intersecting narratives and systems and learn ways to become more visible and heard as people. In the process, they provide a powerful lens through which people, institutions, and systems are called to examine their complicity in constraining democratic participation by pushing people to the margins of society.

15. Problems of Democracy: The Promise and Peril of Social Media in Education Daniel G. Krutka, Assistant Professor, Texas Women’s University Jeffrey P. Carpenter, Assistant Professor, Elon University

Many New Media Literacy (NML) scholars have argued that the social networking activities of young people might allow for informal learning in diverse and geographically dispersed communities that could cultivate more participatory democracy. Modernist notions of technological progress often result in the acceptance of new technologies, but our era is unique for the speed with which new technologies are introduced. People today have less time than previous generations to adjust to, push back against, and learn to take advantage of new technologies like social media. But since the pace of change has picked up, our responses must be more diligent than ever before, and since these social media technologies are still in their infancy, we can still affect how they are used. Educators are uniquely positioned to help young people take stock of numerous concerns regarding how social media might work to reproduce the status quo, transform it, or something in between. We will address the following questions as a means of gaining critical understandings of social media: (1) Are the autonomy and mobility afforded by online spaces compatible with deeply-rooted communal and civic engagement, or simply an atomized individualism where disengagement is easy and groupthink rampant? (2) How can we be sure that emerging participatory cultures will result in a vision of democracy that is inclusive and equitable? Who has social media access and does that access allow for equal opportunities for diverse racial and socioeconomic groups? (3) In an age of media consolidation and neoliberal hegemony, what are the risks associated with the capitalist imperatives of social media corporations? How concerned should social media users and educators be with the loss of privacy and the collection and use of personal data?