Teacher Education for Democracy and Social Justice

David Keiser Lee, Nicholas M. Michelli, David Lee Keiser

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781136756498
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Examines just how the important goals of educating for democracy can be achieved from the perspective of those working in teacher education and in P-12 schools.

SECTION 1

Contextual Grounding

CHAPTER 1

Education for Democracy:
What Can It Be?

NICHOLAS M. MICHELLI

There is a democratic education problem in the United States. The young are not learning properly to care for the body politic and the body politic is not adequately caring for the young.¹

The title for this chapter has a number of embedded meanings. In one sense, we must approach education for democracy in the context of what it can mean, and we find that there are many possible meanings. In another sense, the title suggests what education for democracy can become. In this chapter, we explore both of these attributes of education for democracy. However, the position we put forth is that we are at great risk if we do not attend carefully to preparing the young for life in a democracy and for its concomitant characteristic, a society built on social justice.

Meanings and Possibilities

We make an assertion in our Introduction that one of the primary purposes of public education in the United States of America is to prepare students to be participating citizens in our social and political democracy. What was your reaction to the assertion? For many educators it passes unnoticed. They have seen it before, whether in school mission statements, in textbooks on education, as part of conceptual frameworks for accreditation, perhaps in something they have read by John Dewey or John Goodlad. It is an assumption that many take for granted, and do nothing about. In this chapter we explore the assumption, and the consequences of doing nothing about it. In fact, our focus is on what it would mean to do something to put into practice our expectations for the role of education in supporting and extending democracy.

First, we should recognize that education for democracy does have many different meanings. For some it means carrying out our civic responsibilities as citizens, that is, to register and vote in elections, perhaps to sit on juries when called, and whatever else one might imagine a citizen, narrowly defined, would be expected to do. It should be noted that while students may be citizens in their schools, and in their classrooms, they may not be United States citizens. This is particularly true in urban colleges and universities, including the author's home university, The City University of New York (CUNY), where a good many students in teacher education programs are not citizens in the technical and legal sense, and that is true as well for students in the P–12 schools we serve. It was only recently that the New York State Board of Regents dropped the requirement for citizenship or being in the process of gaining citizenship to be eligible for initial certification as an educator. New York education regulations now permit individuals with permanent residence status through the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services to qualify for a certificate to teach.²

A narrow definition of citizenship is inadequate to cover what teaching for democratic life might be. That isn't to say that the civic responsibilities and civic engagement we have mentioned are unimportant, or shouldn't be included in the curriculum; indeed, they are most often seen as the purview of social studies teachers. The fact that students may not be “citizens” in the legal sense can create some difficulties for the pursuit of democratic education in that students, and their teachers, misunderstand the broader meaning of democracy. At one City University of New York college where an overall revision of the general education program has led to specifically including teaching for democracy as a goal, students were very concerned when they read that preparing to be citizens in a democracy was explicit in the new requirements. Some said, “Do you mean that I now have to be a citizen of the United States to attend this college?” My discussions with Provost Marcia Keizs, charged with leading the revision of general education, made clear the sensitivity of the issue. One alternative that emerged was that since we are talking about a broader definition of education for democracy, the general education goal might be preparing students for critical participation in democratic life. Some, including James Banks, continue to argue that citizenship is the right word because of its broader meaning within an institution or community. Our view is that if citizenship as a legal concept is problematic for students, then both a discussion of the meaning of citizenship beyond the legal term and the use of alternative language is important and appropriate. We will discuss the role of general education, and overall undergraduate education for democracy, in the context of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities' American Democracy Project later in this chapter. Of course, we do believe that the ultimate goal of citizenship in the nation for those students who seek that status should be encouraged, and some universities, including CUNY, actively support progress of students toward citizenship, but it is not the only or perhaps even the most important purpose of education for democracy.

One of the broader ways to think about education for democracy is to consider the “civil” responsibilities of individuals.³ What does it mean to be civil as a participant in a democratic society? How does one deal with disagreements and resolve them? How might we treat other persons we encounter, especially when their beliefs and views are different from our own? What are the implications for flexibility and empathy in dealing with other perspectives? How do we examine and engender respect for others in the way we deal with differing positions? If these are qualities of a democratic life, and we would contend that they are, then the responsibility goes beyond the social studies teacher, and becomes the responsibility of all teachers. Learning to be respectful does not mean accepting all positions put forth as equally valid; we deal with this distinction in the context of our discussion of learning to argue well.

A third way of thinking about preparation for democracy is by thinking of the meaning of civil rights and liberties in our society. Some of these rights were expressed in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution, some aspects of freedom are expressed as civil rights and liberties, either memorialized in the Constitution or not.⁴ Examining the evolution of civil rights in our society, including the abolition of slavery, the right of women to vote, and the end of legally enforced segregation are civil rights that are now explicit in the Constitution or on the interpretations of the Constitution. Emerging civil rights, such as the rights of gay, lesbian, and transgendered individuals, are embedded in some state laws, and such individuals are considered “protected classes” in some venues for affirmative action/equal opportunity purposes, but they are not universally recognized and not yet in the Constitution or subsequent federal legislation. Similarly the issue of education as a “civil right” has emerged in the court cases that have supported equal funding for urban education in a number of states, including New Jersey and New York.⁵ Future teachers must understand that democracy is an evolving concept, and nowhere is that clearer than in the continued legal definition of the civil liberties of members of a democratic society. Of course, any consideration of civil rights moves into the territory of social justice as well, and into the issue of beliefs and dispositions that candidates to become teachers have or will develop.

Fourth, and closely related to our discussion of civil rights, is the centrality of liberty to democracy, which is often overlooked in our effort to focus on the mechanics of democracy. One of the early observers of American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: “It cannot be repeated too often that nothing is more fertile in prodigies than the art of being free; but there is nothing more arduous than the apprenticeship of liberty.”⁶ Learning to be free may be as difficult, or perhaps harder than gaining freedom. Tocqueville did not suggest the role of public education in the apprenticeship of liberty, but we do. Future teachers need to be able to explain the fundamental rights embedded in our society to their students. How do we do that for future teachers, or for our students in P–12 public schools? The issue of privacy, for example, has seldom been more at the forefront than at the beginning of the Twenty-First Century, especially in the context of concerns about terrorism. A consideration of personal liberty is and should be a basis for the development of confidence and self-concept for students. This is an area where social studies education can take the lead, but all teachers again need to understand their obligations and to know the personal rights inherent in democracy. We think teaching about rights explores one of the essential meanings of teaching for democracy.

Next, no consideration of the relationship between education and democracy is complete without examining the importance of the arts in a democratic society. Freedom of speech has one of its most important expressions in the production of art. Imagination is central to solving complex problems involved in democratic living and the arts play a central role in its development. Maxine Greene, one of our leading philosophers of education, has observed that

We are interested in education here, not in schooling. We are interested in openings, in unexplored possibilities, not in the predictable or the quantifiable, not in what is thought of as social control. For us, education signifies an initiation into new ways of seeing, hearing, feeling, moving. It signifies the nature of a special kind of reflectiveness and expressiveness, a reaching out for meanings, a learning to learn….We do not regard aesthetic education as in any sense a fringe undertaking, a species of “frill.” We see it as integral to the development of persons—to the cognitive, perceptual, emotional, and imaginative development. We see it as part of the human effort (so often forgotten today) to seek a greater coherence in the world. We see it as an effort to move individuals (working together, searching together) to seek a grounding for themselves, so that they may break through the “cotton wool” of dailyness and passivity and boredom and come awake to the colored sounding, problematic world.⁷

In the sense that Greene sees aesthetic education as “integral to the development of persons—to their cognitive, perceptual, emotional, and imaginative development,” we argue that aesthetic education is essential for the full development of participants in a democracy. Participants, through aesthetic education, avoid “passivity and boredom and come awake to the colored, sounding, problematic world.” Preparing students for democracy means preparing them to see the problematic and to act on it. We need them to be active, not passive; engaged, not bored, and aesthetic education is one of the key vehicles to achieving these ends. Of course, we are in a time when learning to be aesthetically literate is often minimized in our approaches to education, especially as the focus is increasingly on outcomes measured by high-stakes standardized tests. In many instances we find future teachers have themselves been denied exposure to aesthetic education in their own P–12 studies as a result either of cost-cutting strategies or a focus on those subjects measured by standardized tests. Ignoring aesthetic education is another way to minimize our hopes for fully functioning democratic citizens. How does one overcome such deficits, or enhance aesthetic understandings, when students often come with little experience in aesthetic education because of periodic cycles of cutting the arts in public schools, especially urban and rural schools? The City University of New York is fortunate to be located in one of the great cultural centers of the world.

We approach this obligation to prepare future teachers for aesthetic education in two ways. First, and most fully developed, we work with the Lincoln Center Institute for Arts Education, a relationship explored further in Madeleine Holzer's chapter in this book. Second, we have developed “cultural passports” for future teachers that allow them to have access to dozens of museums across the city as well as access to opera and drama. These programs are always connected to academic learning and to thinking about how future teachers can use the arts and aesthetic education in the context of providing a fuller education for their future students. And, this is essential not for teachers of art, but for all future teachers.

Another aspect of learning to live in a democracy we will consider is in the art of arguing well for one's beliefs, and learning to be flexible when better arguments emerge. This is, we would suggest, an intellectual attribute of living in a democracy that certainly permeates the other meanings we have explored, but also stands by itself. One prominent pedagogical example that focuses on this area is critical thinking, especially as advanced by philosophers like Dewey and Matthew Lipman.⁸ This approach specifically engages students in making good judgments and exploring their validity with others. We will explore critical thinking and its connection to democracy later in this chapter and more fully in David Martin's chapter in this volume. We conceive of learning to make good judgments in the context of thinking critically as an important aspect of what teaching for democracy can be. We want students to be engaged civically and act civilly, but we want them to do so in the contex...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Full title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword by John I. Goodlad
• Introduction: Teacher Education for Democracy and Social Justice
• Section 1 Contextual Grounding
• Section 2 Programmatic Examples
• Section 3 Strategies for Implementation
• Section 4 Moving Forward