“Disrupt, Transgress, and Invent Possibilities” Feminists' Interpretations of Educating for Democratic Citizenship

Abstract

This paper explores the possibilities created by feminist and other alternative interpretations of citizenship in democratic societies — particularly as these concepts relate to secondary social studies education. The study involved five women — four secondary social studies teachers and one university-based researcher — in a series of focus group discussions. Each of the study's participants identified individual goals she hoped to obtain through her participation. As the university-based researcher, my goal was to create stories, grounded in our discussions, which would encourage readers to “disrupt, transgress, and invent possibilities” (Fine, 1992, p. xii) about the meaning of citizenship in a postmodern world. In addition, I wanted to explore “how we perform the magical feat of transforming the contents of our consciousness into a public form that others can understand” (Eisner, 1997, p. 4).