Abstract Living in a time of democratic decline compels practitioners in the field of education to study innovative methods of teaching and learning. This article explores the philosophical roots of an outdoor, place-based microsociety created in the woods of a New Hampshire public middle school. This kind of place-based learning facilitates the types of authentic experiences where wonder grows and dialogue flourishes. Here, this article outlines a special community of inquiry where democracy flourishes for students through codetermination and mutual respect. Writing from the perspective of the teacher of this class, this article delves into the pedagogy and practice of place-based learning and its potential to unite the world of the early adolescent learner with the intentional practice of being a member of a self-governing community. By honoring young learners as the demos (citizens), we, as educators, can co-construct a community of learners rooted in the natural world that empowers the rising generation to take on the challenges humanity faces today. To do so, this article explores how practicing democracy as a way of life in middle school through outdoor learning holds great promise in planting the seeds of democratic renewal among early adolescents today.
Abstract In August 1963, a teenage Harry C. Boyte, accompanying his father, Harry Boyte Sr., a field organizer for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, arrived in Washington, D.C., where they prepared for the March on Washington. The younger Boyte later recalled listening as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. rehearsed what became the “I Have a Dream” speech. That moment, etched in memory, foreshadowed a life devoted to democratic practice and civic renewal (Boyte, 2012, 2016). That special moment in a D.C. hotel in 1963 offers a fitting metaphor for democracy: to sustain it, it must be practiced peacefully, persistently, and together.
Abstract For democracy to thrive in a pluralistic society, there must be meaningful and sustained intergroup and interracial dialogues that support citizens of all backgrounds in understanding their shared humanity so that they may work together to address societal challenges. This article begins by using critical race theory (CRT) as an analytical framework to explore instructional approaches that preservice and in-service teachers might use to dissect related information for cultural competency. Thompson and Cuseo’s (2020) four-stage model (awareness, acknowledgment, acceptance, and action) for overcoming biases and appreciating diversity is then presented as an effective pedagogical approach for constructive dialogues. The author then outlines examples of organizations employing dialogic frameworks that reflect Thompson and Cuseo’s (2020) four-stage model, which are relevant for overcoming biases and appreciating diversity, and may be utilized by preservice teachers, as well as those working outside of the classroom.
Abstract Drawing on conceptualizations of justice-centered praxis and portraiture methodology, this article illuminates and contextualizes the praxis of a high school civics teacher engaging in a community-responsive and asset-based approach, which creates space(s) for his students to read and rewrite their worlds critically. Field observations and interviews with the teacher and his students, colleagues, and community members were collected across roughly six months. Thematic analyses conducted on these sources, combined with archival research on the school and community site are threaded together to present three portraits: a historical portrait visualizing the community-driven activism that led to the opening of the high school, a portrait of the teacher illuminating the roots of his pedagogical praxis, and a portrait of the teacher’s pedagogical moves and the impact on his students. The narratives highlight the teacher’s pedagogical, curricular, and spatial moves that countered traditional notions of civics education, instead situating civics as a context for justice-centered teaching and learning that utilized students’ civic ideals and actions in connection with the local community for inquiry and action. Analyses of the collected data are presented through a framework that the author terms critical civics education, composed of four interrelated areas: community-rooted and responsive, student-led and teacher-supported, inclusive, and reflective. The article concludes with implications that offer civics educators and those supporting them pragmatic guidance to actualize justice in K–12 civics classrooms.
Abstract In 2022, a group of 32 high school students in a metropolitan region of the Southeast conducted a local history research project that focused on how the documentation of diverse experiences of community members during the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to their demonstration of historical empathy. Interestingly, we observed that the students exhibited deep affective connections to how their historical research impacted their beliefs about citizenship and definitions of community. This article examines whether high school students’ local history research about community members’ experiences during the pandemic could impact their demonstration of enriched critical citizenship education (ECCE). Major findings indicate that students can display ECCE through analysis of how their local history research about the pandemic impacted their (1) knowledge construction of contexts, (2) development of skills when discerning multiple perspectives, (3) identifying values of a community, and (4) raising dispositional awareness to take informed action on civic matters.
Abstract Social democracy recognizes that individual development is always in relation to others within a social context and guarantees dignity and freedom for the widest swathe of individuals through inclusiveness and participation. Jane Addams’s perspective on education and its relevance to realizing a social democracy offers an alternative construction of education’s role in helping students learn about the interconnectedness of individuals in a democratic society by emphasizing the moral considerations of cooperation, respect, and mutual commitments to the common good. Schools are an ideal site for this. To this end, Addams’s work can serve as a philosophical framework for teaching a social studies curriculum that confronts the increasing emphasis on teacher accountability and standardization, which limits the development of community relations within the modern educational system and thus limits the building of social democracy. While many states subscribe to these democratizing ideals found in Addams’s theory, states fail to implement curricula and pedagogies capable of realizing them. To this end, we consider the objectives of the Alabama Social Studies Course of Study, as its aspirations do align with Addams’s goals, but it ultimately falls short in achieving them.
A new and better modernity (a second modernity) is possible. It will require a deep cultural and institutional transformation. It will require a reframing of the way we think about human ideals and about the creative aspect of human nature. To support this we can expect a reorganization of intellectual disciplines, including perhaps the addition of a “new civics,” a “civic studies,” and a new science of ideals. A new modernity will require also new forms of practical theory and a reorganization of the political spectrum. As a contribution, this article proposes a transformative moderation, an alternative to the radicalisms we inherit from the first modernity. This transformative moderation is inspired by Mohandas Gandhi and the various forms of twentieth-century politics that we can call Gandhian: Martin Luther King Jr., Poland’s Solidarity (1980–1981), the multiple nonviolent “color revolutions.” But it is also open to a deep reworking of this Gandhian project. This article outlines core ideas of transformative moderation, including the idea of the project of human development through projects. And it outlines some institutional and cultural details of the project of second modernity.
This article explores Aristotelian virtue ethics, which it asserts is an effective moderating tool when applied in parallel with our more popular political ideologies as a mitigating strategy against political divisiveness. Using political polarization in the United States as an example, the following key points are developed. For practical reasons, political discourse outside of academia is motivated by rough-hewn ideologies, not comprehensive moral doctrines. Despite their social value, overly dogmatic application of our most popular political ideologies leads to morally troubling recommendations evidencing their limited range of ethical applicability and fueling tribal divisiveness. A proposed mitigating strategy is offered: embracing virtue ethics as a moderating ideology to work in parallel with other, more popular, ideologies rather than replacing them; encouraging treatment of ideologies as useful pluralistic heuristic tools rather than comprehensive moral doctrines mandating singular commitment; and acknowledging limitations of virtue ethics and providing strategies to guide its application.
Street art during Nigeria’s #EndSARS protests constituted a set of ephemeral interventions that disrupted dominant narratives of state power and reshaped the politics of urban visibility. This article foregrounds critical perspectives from spatial theory and performativity to develop a framework for understanding how protest murals and graffiti operated as contingent practices of spatial production. This article discusses the urban conditions that enabled these inscriptions to emerge, their tactical reconfiguration of public space, and the ways in which their erasure and transience mirrored the unstable terrain of protest itself. This article argues that theorizing these visual acts through Lefebvre’s conception of socially produced space (1991), de Certeau’s tactics of the everyday (1984), and Butler’s performativity illuminates their capacity to unsettle sedimented orders of authority (2015) while choreographing fleeting relations of solidarity and dissent. Rather than memorializing resistance, these interventions generated momentary fissures within established regimes of meaning and belonging, opening temporary sites for renegotiating visibility, memory, and power. This theoretical framing contributes to debates on the aesthetics of resistance by repositioning protest street art as a practice of spatial dissensus embedded in the uneven temporality of urban struggle.
This article outlines the notions of aspirational memory and nodal memory, then uses the combined concept of aspirational memory node to illustrate how the Nebraska capitol’s architecture and aesthetics draw upon the past to inspire Nebraskans to enact a moral vision of “noble living.” The capitol imagines this future good society by gathering a collection of public memories and molding them into (1) a political vision of democratic and just government as a sacred obligation and (2) a social vision of caring, harmonious living.
This article discusses incorporating a community focus into the Pre K-12 curriculum. Teaching about community furthers two fundamental goals of The Good Society. One is to help define and support civic engagement. The other is to determine and provide the education needed to thrive in society. Communities are the bedrock of civil society, and learning about the challenges they address, the services they provide, and the institutions they include prepares us to be knowledgeable and engaged citizens. Simply put, education must promote engagement, and learning about communities must be an integral part of that education.
Abstract As political polarization increasingly shapes public discourse and even students’ choice of college, higher education must equip students with the skills to engage across difference. This article explores a pedagogical model developed in “Religion in Public Life,” an undergraduate course at the University of Virginia, designed to counter the binary thinking that fuels polarization. Specifically, the course integrates four key components: diagnosing partisan tribalism as a lack of moral vision, introducing Aristotelian virtue ethics as an alternative framework, challenging reductive binaries through case studies of religion in public life, and cultivating deliberative democratic skills to engage complex social issues. By fostering critical thinking, moral reflection, and inclusive dialogue, this model offers a way to strengthen civic identity in higher education. To illustrate the model, this article draws from both theory and practical classroom examples. Ultimately, the article argues this approach can be adapted across disciplines to prepare students for engaged, ethical participation in a pluralistic society.
The survival of a democratic society requires an educated populace skilled in understanding and building consensus with individuals of different backgrounds, experiences, and ideas. With the classroom being a key place where children learn discourse skills, this article examines how future teachers learn these skills in an education foundations course context. Focusing on the redesign of a history of education course, this article explores how incorporating discourse-oriented activities is experienced by and influences preservice teachers’ views and expected future use of such pedagogical methods. Findings suggest that many preservice teachers enter preparation with limited experience interacting with others in discussions about social issues. However, incorporating these methods into college coursework appears to be a promising way to introduce and positively impact preservice teachers’ views about such forms of instruction.
The following article argues that the idea, values, and practices of cultivating and sustaining the commonwealth from America’s higher education and democratic history provide multiple resources for addressing today’s challenges of polarization, fragmentation, authoritarianism, and degradation of the public world. It analyzes the declining public support for higher education and other public commons, including government, as the result of a widespread process of marketization across society. Exploring several different meanings in American history, including wide use in higher education, the article proposes that new developments, including the transdisciplinary field of Civic Studies and examples of practice, provide substantial resources for revitalizing a robust sense of the commonwealth that can push back against hopelessness.
Abstract The purpose of higher education has shifted from the public purpose of nurturing democratic citizens to a focus on economic advancement and workforce preparedness. The resulting preference for technical and scientific expertise and the concomitant devaluing of reflective and humanistic inquiry have shortchanged all students’ preparation. Nonetheless, addressing the critical and complex problems facing our society requires reconnecting higher education with the public sphere, leading to a need for robust methods for assessing students’ civic development. The Civic-Minded Graduate (CMG) scale measures students’ knowledge of community issues and ability to act on said issues. Given that past work is limited to mainly service-learning pedagogy, this article expands on past research by examining the CMG scale’s psychometric properties in a farm-situated place-based experiential learning (PBEL) context. A total of N = 496 students from a midsized, private, Midwestern university completed the CMG across four years in ten PBEL courses. Psychometric analyses resulted in a 21-item, five-factor structure. Drawing from relational ethics and interdependent self-construal theory, we align the CMG with how students conduct their disciplinary inquiries in caring and just ways that are sensitive to the diversity of values present in civically rich educational experiences.
Civic Studies is both a nascent international intellectual movement and the name of an undergraduate major at Tufts University that offers a demanding academic curriculum. While other disciplines focus on explaining institutions and social patterns, analyzing and recommending governmental policies, or exploring ethics and theories of justice, Civic Studies poses the question “What should we do?” in an academically rigorous way. This essay discusses the origins and evolution of Civic Studies at Tufts.
This article aims to examine the issues and direction of citizenship education, which nurtures democratic citizens from new initiatives, in Japanese universities. It is divided into three sections: First, Kodama explores the historical background of citizenship education and clarifies the conditions of political citizenship education in Japan’s public education. Second, Ninomiya-Lim and Horimoto discuss the philosophy and curriculum of Tokai University’s approach to public achievement-style education based on Boyte’s theory, as well as its challenges. Finally, Fujieda discusses the theoretical background and practice based on political citizenship education of Rikkyo University’s service-learning method. These two practical cases present a new direction for political citizenship education in Japan’s higher education.
