From deliberation to counter-narration: Toward a critical pedagogy for democratic citizenship

ABSTRACT

Best practices in civic education emphasize deliberative pedagogies as one of the most powerful ways to educate enlightened democratic citizens. Yet deliberative pedagogies are rooted in a white normative ideal of discursive democracy that, in the service of “civility” and “reasoned discourse,” fails to account for the social and political inequalities—the logic of white supremacy—that structures our political context. Drawing on Critical Race Theory and Charles Mills’s notion of the racial contract, I propose a pedagogy of counternarration that privileges voices from the margins, imagines the world as it could be, and talks back to dominant narratives in order to cultivate justice-oriented citizens in the democratic classroom.

KEYWORDS:

• Civic education
• counternarratives
• critical race theory
• deliberative pedagogy
• democratic education

Notes

1. American Psychological Association guidelines stipulate that racial and ethnic groups are considered proper nouns and should be capitalized. However, many critical social studies scholars (e.g., Hawkman & Shear, 2020) capitalize Black but not white in order to challenge the supremacy of whiteness in social studies. In line with critical scholars, I will not be capitalizing white unless it begins a sentence or is within a direct quotation.

2. Watts is a neighborhood in Los Angeles, California.