Civility and Shared Fate: Social Studies Teaching as Teaching for Belonging

Martha J Ritter

doi:10.46303/jcsr.02.01.1

Abstract

In response to the violence of our era and the vast movement of people around the globe, the author argues that effective social studies education should include an understanding ourselves within communities of shared fate collectively building strategies of civility. Through conceptual analysis, the paper supports arguments that citizenship education should be grounded in communities of fate, rather than a sense of shared identity as a member of a particular country. Shared fate is the idea that our lives are intertwined with others in ways we perceive and ways we cannot. Civility is elaborated as concrete strategies that support or make possible broad participation in the demos. Looking at citizenship through the lens of communities of shared fate changes how we think about belonging and our responsibilities to one another in our shared world. The author provides examples of early career educators’ moral commitment to teaching from a perspective of shared fate and as well as their concerns to link the conceptual work to concrete practices within elementary school classrooms.

Highlights

There is something new and soul destroying about this last and current century
In response to the violence of our era and the vast movement of people around the globe, the author argues that effective social studies education should include understanding ourselves within communities of shared fate, collectively building strategies of civility
I draw on Balibar’s (2001, 2016) conception of civility to frame my argument that effective social studies education should include understanding ourselves within communities of shared fate, collectively building what Balibar calls practices of civility

Summary

INTRODUCTION

There is something new and soul destroying about this last and current century. At no other period have we witnessed such a myriad of aggression aimed against people as “not us.” as you have seen over the last two years, the central political question was, Who or what is an American? Toni Morrison (2019, p. 20), Home. Morrison (2019) writes: Excluding the height of the slave trade in the nineteenth century, the mass movement of peoples in the latter half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first is greater than it has ever been It involves the distribution of workers, intellectuals, refugees, traders, immigrants, and armies all crossing oceans and continents, through custom offices and hidden routes, with multiple narratives spoken in multiple languages of commerce, of military intervention, political persecution, exile, violence, poverty, death, and shame. I draw on Balibar’s (2001, 2016) conception of civility to frame my argument that effective social studies education should include understanding ourselves within communities of shared fate, collectively building what Balibar calls practices of civility. I provide examples of early career educators’ moral commitment to teaching about refugees or people fleeing from danger from a perspective of shared fate to link the conceptual work to concrete practices within elementary school classrooms

CIVILITY AS PARTICIPATION

COMMUNITIES OF SHARED FATE

WORKING TOWARD A COMMON GOOD

CITIZENSHIP EDUCATION FOR SHARED FATE

MORAL COMMITTMENTS OF EDUCATORS

CONCLUSION