Claiming Our Turf: Students' Civic Negotiation of the Public Space of School

Abstract

In the ongoing effort to conceptualize meaningful civics curriculum, the author looks beyond the intended curriculum to consider the civics lessons embedded in spatial interaction and engagement. She examines how young people negotiate school, a space she contends can be conceived of as a public space. Their negotiations rely upon tactics of avoidance, dissent, and incivility as civic actions that reshape space. These tactics—all forms of resistance—suggest that civic efficacy and possibility are bound in how young people create and then continuously respond to the spaces they re-create through civic processes.