The ongoing crisis and promise of civic education

The responsibilities of civic education are more significant and urgent now than in recent history. Global crises around media disinformation, resurgent populism and authoritarianism, widespread reckonings with histories of racism, slavery, and colonialism, and countless cases of white supremacist violence and terror have led commentators, scholars, and politicians alike to look to schools for a remedy and for someone to blame. This divisive public debate has led to a growing contestation on the purposes of civic education and its potential (in)ability to safeguard democracy. Writing in The Atlantic, Packer (2021) recently called civics “the most bitterly contested subject in America today” and posed the question: “Can civics save America?” Meanwhile, Giroux (2021) recently diagnosed the problem as “a dark cloud of civic illiteracy” which he argued is a crisis of civic and public imagination (p. 2).

The urgency of this crisis has been amplified by recent events across Turtle Island/North America. In the United States, the January 6th, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol Building and ongoing controversies over the teaching of the 1619 Project and Critical Race Theory have placed a new spotlight on civic and history education. Meanwhile in Canada, multiple horrific discoveries of hundreds of remains of Indigenous children at former residential school sites and the ongoing debates over racist and colonial statues have reignited conversations on how history is taught in Canadian schools. Specifically, Indigenous educators, scholars, and activists have called out Canadian schools for their longstanding failure to teach the history of residential schools and settler colonialism (Carter, 2021; Forester, 2020). This deliberate miseducation of Canadian history is also a historic failure of civic education more generally, which has resulted in widespread ignorance and denial among non-Indigenous settlers of Canada’s genocidal policies towards Indigenous peoples (Carleton, 2021). This is evident in a recent survey showing that two thirds of Canadians report knowing little or nothing about the residential schools (McKinley, 2021).

Political demands on civic education to remedy this crisis have already begun. In the US, the Biden Administration and the Educating for American Democracy initiative have laid out ambitious and well-funded plans to transform the teaching of civics and history, while declaring that democracy is “in grave danger” (Educating for American Democracy, 2021, p. 8). Simultaneously, at the time of writing, legislators in 21 US states have started a process to ban the teaching of the 1619 Project, Critical Race Theory, and other so-called “divisive concepts” (Wong, 2021). In Canada, spurred on by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (2015) Calls to Action and widespread activism, ministries of education have begun to introduce new curriculum that includes expectations that Indigenous histories and historical injustices, including the residential schools, will be taught in most Canadian schools (Miles, 2021). The Canadian federal government has also just fast-tracked a bill to amend the citizenship oath to have new citizens swear observance to treaties with Indigenous peoples. While at the same time, Alberta’s government seems focussed on reinforcing traditional Western values and civilization with their new proposed curriculum, which Sears (2021) declared was designed for “a 19^th century European gentleman” (para. 8). Meanwhile in Australia, as Mati Keynes demonstrates in their article in this issue, changes to history curriculum are also aiming to confront histories of colonial injustice, though using approaches that do not fundamentally challenge the settler state or Western approaches to time.

These events and their political responses make clear that civic education continues to be a contested space with important consequences and responsibilities for curriculum scholars. While these debates carry on, critical curriculum scholars must continue to step forward to share their expertise. I use the term “expertise” here with intention. As Jen Gilbert argues in this issue of Curriculum Inquiry, while claims of expertise are often uncomfortable for educational researchers trained to problematize “outcomes” and “objectivity,” at times such as these, the knowledge and social impact of critical education scholars have become only more essential. However, claims to expertise always bring with them important political and ethical responsibilities. As public and political attention on civic education grows and funding increases, so too does the responsibility of curriculum scholars to reimagine and support young peoples’ civic engagement and agency in ways that work towards ethical and equitable ends. Furthermore, this responsibility will only become more pronounced as politicians clash over their competing visions of civic education and roll out new laws and policies to shore up their positions.

As new civic education reforms and initiatives unfold, curriculum scholars must study, scrutinize, and publicly engage them. This engagement should not just be to offer critiques but also to promote the reforms, initiatives, and resources that support projects of equity and justice or take anti-colonial, anti-racist, and abolitionist approaches. Critical curriculum scholars must continue to call out the normative and exclusionary aspects of much civic education that has long promoted and entrenched white supremacy, settler colonialism, and anti-Black discourses. Important work by scholars such as Vickery (2017), Woodson (2016), Duncan (2020), Clay and Rubin (2020), and Sabzalian (2019) have already taken up this challenge, and this work must continue to be extended. In this space of contestation, we must also remember that young peoples’ civic agency and voice are powerful forces for change. As Ito et al. (2015) outlined in this journal six years ago, young people’s interests, cultural practices, and identities are essential for shaping their civic engagement in a new era of participatory politics. Curriculum scholars must also support young peoples’ civic agency through our critical engagement with the media platforms, ideologies, and politics that shape the contexts within which young people are acting.

In this issue of Curriculum Inquiry, the authors all take up critical work around the promises and failures of civic education broadly understood. In their respective examinations of civic media literacy, disciplinary approaches to history curriculum, the politics of sex education reforms, and the power of counter-narratives in social studies, the authors question the limits of what civic education can be or what it should entail. The four articles also consider the pressing civic roles and responsibilities that currently face curriculum researchers, teachers, and students. Authors T. Phillip Nichols and Robert Jean LeBlanc question commonly accepted approaches to media literacy education by offering us the concept of “civic media ecology,” which aims to draw attention to the various geopolitical, infrastructural, and ecological layers always present in our engagement with media. Mati Keynes questions the civic promises of disciplinary approaches to the past, in particular historical thinking’s ability to respond to the challenges of transitional justice in Australia. In the third article, Tommy Ender looks to his own experiences and challenges of teaching histories outside of the mandated curriculum, positioning counter-narratives as a systematic tool for critical changes to the social studies and history curricula. Finally, Jen Gilbert examines their experience as an expert witness in a human rights tribunal in a case where a grade six trans girl took the civic action of suing the Ontario government for cancelling a progressive sex education curriculum. All four of these articles ask us to think about the problems with the current state of civic engagement in schools as well as new possibilities for reimagining and rethinking young peoples’ civic agency.

In their article “Media Education and the Limits of ‘Literacy’: Ecological Orientations to Performative Platforms,” Nichols and LeBlanc question the ability of media literacy education to adequately respond to the ongoing concerns of post-truth politics and fake news. They provocatively suggest that “literacy” as a guiding idiom for helping learners understand the contemporary media context is ultimately inadequate as it primarily focuses on representational concerns or “how media messages are created, interpreted, mobilized, or critiqued” (p. 391). What is left out, according to Nichols and LeBlanc, are the structural and performative facets of the media ecosystem including the material, economic, aesthetic, algorithmic, and economics activities that underpin all of today’s media platforms.

Nichols and LeBlanc trace the lineage of media literacy education over time finding origins in the Frankfurt School, British Cultural Studies, and the work of Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman. They suggest that the curricular adoption of media literacy as a framework came to dominate K–12 education by the 1990s. More recently, they note, it has been expanded to focus on what some scholars call “civic online reasoning” (Wineburg & McGrew, 2019), which has largely been developed as a response to disinformation and fake news. Nichols and LeBlanc argue that these new approaches are valuable and offer concrete resources, but they ultimately continue to bring a representational lens to media literacy, which they believe is only part of the problem. They contend that these approaches “elides the performative relations that condition those texts, their networks, and the ways readers encounter both” (p. 395). Or in other words, they ignore the material hardware being used by learners, the algorithms that determine what learners see online, the aesthetics of the interfaces that connect students to the internet, and the human and natural resources required to create and sustain all these aspects of our engagement with online media.

While Nichols and LeBlanc’s critique of recent media literacy education like “civic online reasoning” is effective, they don’t see their suggestions as replacing these approaches but rather augmenting them. They suggest that media educators should think about the media landscape through the lens of ecology rather than literacy and representational practices. In an ecological approach, analyzing media is more than accessing, interpreting, and assessing media messages but instead requires attending to the wider relations of human and non-human activities that condition these practices in any given environment. Drawing from theories of scalar assemblage, posthuman performativity, and platform studies, Nichols and LeBlanc examine design theorist Bratton’s (2015) concept of “The Stack” as an example to show how technologies and users interlock to form global media ecologies. The Stack provides a way of seeing how human and non-human actors, systems, and processes overlap to shape our experiences with media. Nichols and LeBlanc suggest that making The Stack visible to learners also makes visible the geopolitical, infrastructural, and ecological layers that are always at play in the media ecology. They offer the helpful example of a high school student in a US classroom being asked to analyze a questionable article on a Chromebook about perhaps the immigration crisis or climate change. In this instance, the student is also immediately connected to the Google interface and the school district’s broadband connection, feeding data and information to Google’s Cloud platform, which in turn is tailoring preferences back to the user through machine learning algorithms, while simultaneously drawing energy from perhaps a nearby nuclear power station. All of this is important to consider in media education, in addition to the natural resources and waste issues that are tied to our media experiences, including mineral extraction and digital refuse. Nichols and LeBlanc make clear that “the scale of these issues is dizzying and even, at times, debilitating” (p. 406), yet they argue they cannot be ignored and that there are hopeful possibilities for not only helping students better understand the media ecosystem but also to change it.

While their article does not aim to outline a practical resource for teachers to apply, Nichols and LeBlanc put forward an alternative orientation for attending to the performative politics of media, which they call a civic media ecology. This orientation acknowledges the generative contributions of work done around media literacy while expanding its focus to consider how students and teachers might engage with the wider relations that underpin the media ecosystem. Nichols and LeBlanc are ultimately hopeful, arguing that because the contours of the media ecosystem are not fixed, they are also open to new configurations, including those that are more equitable and just. For Nichols and LeBlanc, the goal of media education is in part analyzing and critiquing misinformation but also includes challenging and perhaps radically altering the environmental, economic, social, and technical relations in which our media ecosystems are embedded. Nichols and LeBlanc’s article reminds us that civic education’s response to disinformation and fake news must go beyond fact checking and aim to challenge the underlying and often unseen inequitable structures and ecologies that shape media.

In their conceptual article titled “Engaging Transitional Justice in Australian History Curriculum: Times, Temporalities and Historical Thinking,” Mati Keynes argues that questions of transitional justice in Australia challenge a disciplinary approach to history education. In particular, Keynes explores questions and uses of historical time and historicity in the history curriculum. Keynes interrogates what they call the “liberal teleology of transitional justice” (p. 416) in settler states such as Canada and Australia and troubles the settler states’ adoption of a transitional justice framework. This framework is essential to understand as it has placed direct expectations on history education to right history’s wrongs. In addition to this discussion, Keynes offers a thorough overview of how state jurisdictions in Australia have adopted a disciplinary historical thinking model as a pragmatic “middle way” between dominant single narrative approaches and deconstructionist approaches at the poles. However, Keynes points out that a transitional justice agenda creates important problems for the adoption of a disciplinary approach as it returns the contemporary and the political to history education, disrupting both sense-making and the civic promises of historical thinking.

Keynes advances several important arguments that present clear challenges for historical thinking and history education in settler states. First, Keynes contends that a historical thinking approach construes historical time as a homogenous, empty container in which past events can be placed, and importantly, kept in the distant past. In other words, it encourages students to see the past as absent and distant in order to enable a form of scientific objectivity. However, following a number of historical theorists, Keynes explains that transitional justice agendas challenge this form of historicity by continually returning the past to the present, denying historical distance and the possibility of objectivity, with important political and ethical consequences. Keynes further argues that by taking such an approach to historical time, historical thinking can have the effect of legitimizing settler colonial nation building by ensuring historical injustices are clearly demarcated and kept in the past, which obscures how they continue to haunt the present.

Keynes concludes that the current disciplinary approach in Australia ultimately falls short of challenging settler ways of knowing and being but that there are crucial interventions that might be made. Keynes suggests that teachers should explicitly open up questions of time and historicity in the classroom to “denaturalis[e] Western conceptions of time and chronology” (p. 428). This approach would allow students to see the contingency of different conceptions of time “to explore how events have been actively arranged, and placed in time, by history makers for different purposes, at different junctures” (p. 427). Ultimately Keynes’ work speaks to the importance of having teachers and students thinking about who they are by virtue of their past. In settler colonial contexts this requires settler subjects encountering historical and contemporary injustices and “a reckoning with settler-occupier knowing and being” (p. 429). Keynes’ challenge to rethink settler subjectivity in history education speaks to the greater question of how we might reimagine the purposes of civic education in spaces where the very notions of citizenship and belonging are highly contested.

In his article titled “Using Counter-Narratives to Expand from the Margins” Tommy Ender explores his own experiences learning and teaching the history of the Young Lords Party (YLP). Ender positions the history of the YLP as a counter-narrative that can be used to confront the whiteness of social studies curriculum and the silences contained within it. Taking an autoethnographic approach, Ender first reflects on his own experiences learning about the YLP first from an upstairs neighbour and then through researching the movement on his own. Ender discusses the history of the YLP and the lessons this history provides to question why the YLP story was absent in both his high school history classes and his university education while becoming a social studies teacher.

To un-silence the YLP, Ender brings this counter-narrative into his classroom as a new teacher. As a result, Ender experiences both an increase in student engagement and attendance but also resistance from colleagues and eventually the school administration, leading to threats of being fired if he didn’t stop teaching the unit. Ender’s article demonstrates the benefits and risks of teaching counter-narratives as a critical tool for student empowerment but also their potential to threaten colleagues who are invested in maintaining the status quo and the dominant narratives that support it. If civic education is to respond to the challenges I articulated at this editorial’s outset, it might look to Ender’s conception of expanding from the margins as one powerful approach.

Ender’s article calls on the field of social studies to do more, and he critiques the field for continuing to privilege dominant histories that racialized and marginalized students find irrelevant to their lived experiences. By offering a counter-narrative approach to challenge the whiteness of the curriculum, Ender positions the local stories of Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities as a systematic tool for critical change in social studies education. Ender cautions educators though that they must first understand and deconstruct the complexities of race in their own lives and the lives of their students before taking such an approach, as without this reflection “developing counter-narratives will be counter-productive and disrespectful” (p. 450). Ender’s article helpfully reminds us of the potential resistance facing critical social studies educators but also does not forget the hopeful possibilities such an approach can bring to the lives of students. At a time of mass crisis and outrage over the uses of Critical Race Theory, Ender’s article provides an important meditation on the power of counter-narratives to challenge white supremacy.

Jen Gilbert’s article “Getting Dirty and Coming Clean: Sex Education and the Problem of Expertise” explores the author’s experience serving as an expert witness at a human rights tribunal. The tribunal took place in Ontario, Canada, where a grade six trans girl, known only as AB, sued the provincial government for cancelling a new sex education curriculum that included gender and sexual identity issues. Gilbert grapples with the tensions of being a sex education researcher suspicious of claims to expertise while responding to legal contentions that the official curriculum is the lived curriculum. These tensions shaped Gilbert’s desire to influence policy using the uncomfortable language of outcomes, evidence, health, and well-being. Gilbert’s article sheds important light on how educational researchers may have to make concessions or adopt uncomfortable language to ensure that their research is legible and has the desired impact. For scholars taking up the challenges of civic education in crisis, Gilbert’s challenge to think about how we might orient our research to maintain a critical reflexivity while having the social and policy impact we desire is an important one.

Using the work of Janice Irvine, Gilbert explains how sexuality scholars “do academic dirty work,” in the sense that they produce valuable research yet constantly feel their careers and expertise are vulnerable to the stigmas attached to sexuality (p. 461). Gilbert addresses how sex education scholars continuously must “clean up” their research to remove the stigma of sex and sexuality that is often attached to their work. For example, progressive sex education advocates often sanitize or sterilize their work through the discourses of health and well-being in response to the moralistic and often religious messages coming from conservatives. Gilbert argues that while this move is understandable, something is lost in the process. Gilbert reflects on how this pressure to clean up the work emerged during the Tribunal, where Gilbert was seen as an expert but also “dodgy because I have devoted my academic career to studying sexuality and youth” (p. 461).

Gilbert’s discussion of the Tribunal demonstrates the enormous power invested in sex education curriculum for shaping behaviours, preventing disease, imparting knowledge, affirming identities, promoting belonging, and protecting against discrimination and harassment. Gilbert makes clear that this is a lot to ask of any curriculum and that curriculum scholars must not forget the differences between Aoki’s (2004) notion of the curriculum as plan vs. the curriculum as lived. Gilbert concludes by reflecting on the result of the Tribunal, while also discussing their academic commitments to understanding teaching and learning about sexuality as ultimately marked by uncertainty. Gilbert’s powerful article concludes by asking researchers that if they are to make “common cause with the worlds we care about, we need to risk not knowing, being uncertain, and recognizing how our own histories of love and loss bear upon the present. How can we be experts in this vulnerable place?” (p. 468)

Across these four articles in this issue, the authors make a strong case for the role of curriculum scholars as experts in redefining the civic promise of schools, while being careful to identify the limitations and failures of any school-based approach to engaging young peoples’ civic agency and voice. Nichols and LeBlanc’s contribution speaks to the importance of seeing the bigger picture when thinking about young people’s engagement with media ecosystems; Gilbert points to the influence education scholars can have in political, legal, and policy debates but also the impact one student’s civic agency can have in challenging governmental policy; Keynes reminds us that liberal compromises in curriculum reform often maintain the status quo and if we are to truly challenge the colonial underpinnings of civics and history education we must rethink even the most taken for granted topics including time; finally, Ender’s call for counter-narratives and “expanding from the margins” reinforces the importance of seeking out stories, like that of the Young Lords Party, that provide us with transformative examples of what civic action can look like.

The issues facing civic education are many and stark: the continued problem of disinformation; climatic and ecological crisis; systemic racism, white supremacy, and colonialism; and increasing political and ideological divisiveness, to name a few. These problems are not new but this moment has provided a clear opportunity, underscoring the responsibility for education scholars to act. I am not the first to make the call for a more critical, anti-colonial, and anti-racist approach to civics learning (Clay & Rubin, 2020; Duncan, 2020; Sabzalian et al., 2021); nor do I claim it as my own, however, it does bear repeating and often. The authors in this issue provide insightful analysis and important implications about the civic promise and failure of schools for us to consider as we go about this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.