This article describes the work of a civic education program in New York City schools called Youthbuilders, which existed from 1938 to 1948. Youthbuilders' aim was to engage youth in civic education projects and teach them about their place in a democracy and worked with them to support racial and social equality. Shortly after World War II, they…

Our study of the nationally representative data of adult populations from the 2012/2014/2017 Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) provides essential information on the roles of information processing skills (literacy skills) in the context of social, cultural, and political participation among Black women and men…

For the past several decades, public attitudes toward immigrants in the United States have centered on questions of legality and documentation, as well as economic and social impacts of immigration, whether real or imagined, such as employment and criminality. How immigrants, writ large, perceive of and contribute to these debates is…

This dissertation sought to explore the way preservice teachers grappled with race/ism and citizenship during a social studies methods class. Relying on the theoretical framework of racial civic literacy, this instrumental case study examines six white preservice teachers as they confront issues of race/ism in a young adult fiction novel and…

In this essay, we consider how reconstructing our ideas about the nature of democracy, and its relationship to education, can help us respond to contemporary challenges. We focus specifically on the ongoing fights about critical race theory (CRT), providing an overview of the CRT controversy--we argue that its cultivation for political reasons has…

Background: Tolerance is a prerequisite for deliberative democracies. Therefore, fostering tolerance is an important task for educational systems in democracies. In the present study, the concepts of social and political tolerance were disentangled and applied to the measurement approaches of the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study…

This dissertation examines the expansion of refugee student services in postwar France during three subsequent refugee crises involving students from Eastern Europe. More than just a product of Franco-Soviet Cold War relations, I show how French support for the students developed in the context of decolonization and contemporary migration politics…

Tolerance is a prerequisite for deliberative democracies. Therefore, fostering tolerance is an important task for educational systems in democracies. In the present study, the concepts of social and political tolerance were disentangled and applied to the measurement approaches of the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study 2016 (ICCS…

Our current political situation and the demographic realities of our country require Political Science educators to be more intentional about integrating Asian Pacific American (APA) histories and experiences in the Political Science curriculum. By including the multifaceted ways in which APAs have and continue to participate in American civil…

The 21st century has seen changes in migration patterns in Europe with implications for schooling and civic education: movement from eastern and central European Union member states to western Europe; increased movement between member states for study or work; and growth in the numbers of migrants and refugees seeking asylum in Europe as a result…

African American high school students' erudition of Black history, including the events and individuals who afforded them freedoms, enhances their informed decision making and impacts them as citizens. The purpose of this article is to detail how African American high school students engage in critical discourse regarding how historical events…

In this article I ask a seemingly simple question--How can a Muslim be a liberal citizen? In order to explore this question I define who and what was indexed by the term "Muslim" at various points in United States history. I argue that the figure of the Muslim has existed as an existential other upon which otherness, violence, and…

In this essay, the authors challenge the myth of political neutrality in teaching and emphasize the urgent need for teachers to imagine and enact liberatory pedagogical praxis that sensitively responds to the nation's divisive political climate. They point to U.S. political shifts and changing federal policies in education as catalysts for the…

This paper explores the issue of democracy and the role of the democratic classroom in the development of society in general, and the way in which educators understand and deal with diversity in particular. The first part of the paper explores different meanings of democracy and how they can be manifested in the classroom. We argue that the idea…

The contention of this article is that the biologically derived versions of the nation of "blood and soil" only tell a narrow and singular version of the story of nation states. The substantive historical and contemporary realities necessitate the telling of much broader stories which are inclusive of good citizenship values derived from diverse…