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ABSTRACT
Critiques of traditional civic education as exclusionary toward individuals and groups that are linguistically, culturally, and age-diverse have led to critical civic education that foregrounds the experiences and assets of Communities of Color. Elementary-aged Children of Color face civic marginalization because of their multiple identities, including culture and age. We present a case study of one white fifth-grade teacher, Ms. Vine, and her two classes of culturally and linguistically diverse students who engaged in critical social studies content that created opportunities for students to use and learn about cultural citizenship. We highlight three cultural citizenship practices seen across students’ engagement with social studies content. First, students engaged in self-definition and identity work, laying the groundwork for further critical civic education. Second, the class interrogated issues of injustice and civic action through attention to counternarratives inclusive of Children and Communities of Color as civic actors. Finally, students grappled with historical agency in counternarratives and negotiated agency within the classroom. These cultural citizenship practices enabled Black and Brown children to draw on their civic assets, engage a conception of civicness reflective of people like themselves, and forwarded critical elementary social studies practices.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Melissa Gibson for her feedback on an earlier draft of this manuscript. We would also like to thank Esther Kim for her thoughts throughout this research project.
Notes
1. Drawing from the work of critical race legal scholar Neil Gotanda, we use the lower case white; as Gotanda wrote, white “is better left in lower case, rather than privileged with a capital letter. ‘Black,’ on the other hand, has deep political and social meaning as a liberating term, and, therefore, deserves capitalization” (Gotanda, Citation1991, p. 4)). Similarly, “Brown” has become a socio-political term used by People of Color to describe themselves and therefore also deserves capitalization.
2. All people and place names used in this article are pseudonyms.
3. We use the terms citizens, civic beings, and civic actors somewhat interchangeably. We begin with the premise that legal citizenship is not a necessary component of civic action. Instead, we draw on communal participatory perspectives (e.g., Knight & Watson, Citation2014), which emphasize civic beings acting with and for their communities (Adair et al., Citation2017). We recognize the various contested citizenships of participants in this study as immigrants, children of immigrants, Black people, and minors (Bhabha, Citation2004; Coady, Citation2008; Kymlicka, Citation1995; Ladson-Billings, Citation2004; Tillet, Citation2012). Finally, we use these terms in recognition of the many people who have enacted civic expertise with and without legal citizen status.
4. The numbers here represent the group of students who assented and whose guardians consented to participation.
5. Additionally, as former elementary teachers, we note that being in classrooms means we necessarily interact and work with groups of students as needed (directed either by Ms. Vine or by the students). For example, Katherina read one group’s “book club” selection so that she could work with a group of students as identified by Ms. Vine.
6. We would like to acknowledge the work of Shear, Knowles and Castro (2015), whose positionality recognition informed our own reflection on our role in conducting and reporting this research.
7. There was a give and take in the relationship between us as researchers, and Ms. Vine as a teacher. After observing the Civil Rights Movement project in the 2015–2016 school year, Katherina asked Ms. Vine if she had ever considered expanding the project to include other civil rights movements in the United States. She then suggested the Chicano Rights movement (El Movimiento) since she noticed a large Latinx population at UE. Ms. Vine took the suggestion and expanded it by including multiple events of El Movimiento, an in-depth class study of Corky Gonzales, and interview work with local Chicano activists.
8. We applaud the opportunities students had to explore narratives not traditionally taught in elementary social studies, such as the Black Panther Party and the L.A. walkouts. We also recognize the danger of characterizing all of these groups and movements as part of one Civil Rights Movement. When the cultural, regional, time, and ideological distinctiveness of different groups’ work is lost, students may miss the important opportunity to consider the reasons for a particular group’s existence, values, and the cultural roots of its civic tools—and their own.