Civic Reasoning Research Articles

Focusing on the Non-cognitive: Developing Civic Reasoning Through Emotions of Race and Power

Focusing on the Non-cognitive: Developing Civic Reasoning Through Emotions of Race and Power

Civic reasoning depends on transcendent thinking: Implications of adolescent brain development for SEL

Accumulating evidence from developmental social-affective neuroscience and educational research reveals striking affordances for adolescents’ academic, psychosocial and neural development of transcendent thinking—the disposition to integrate concrete, context-specific thinking and emotions into deliberations on the abstract, systems-level, ethical and personal implications of information, ideas, and skills. Here, we highlight the coordinated psychological and neural processes by which adolescents leverage transcendent thinking for civic reasoning. From qualitative field data, we argue that civic reasoning in the context of academic learning supports the coordination of conceptual understanding with intellectual agency, identity and communal orientation, leading youth toward process-oriented, rather than outcome-oriented, approaches to learning. From longitudinal interview and neuroimaging data, we argue that civic reasoning drives developmental coordination among brain networks involved in agency, self-awareness, and consciousness; internal reflection, abstraction and narrative; emotional feelings; memory; executive functioning and attention. These brain changes longitudinally predict resilience, identity development, and wellbeing (Gotlieb et al., 2024b). This transdisciplinary research underscores the power of civic reasoning for adolescents’ healthy development into young adulthood, and the benefits of schooling designed to center civic reasoning and personal reflection. In today’s globalized society, civic reasoning may be among the most important core social-emotional dispositions for youth and community thriving. Impact statementCivic reasoning is among the most important capacities youth must develop to sustain a functioning and equitable democratic society, and hence should be among the central aims of education. New research is demonstrating that adolescents’ dispositions toward civic reasoning, and the emotionally motivated transcendent thinking that undergirds it, are associated with a cascade of beneficial brain and psychosocial developmental effects that extend into young adulthood. Organizing adolescent education around civic reasoning and reflection could provide a powerful opportunity to support youths’ deep scholarly learning and psychosocial development in a coordinated way.

Should Government Agencies Be Trusted? Developing Students’ Civic Narrative Competence Through Social Science Education

Democratic school systems are expected to equip students with the knowledge, abilities, and attitudes needed for life as citizens, particularly through social science education. Disciplinary knowledge, derived from the academic counterparts to school subjects, is essential in developing these skills. However, research has also emphasized the importance of life-world perspectives, where students’ experiences are included and taken seriously in teaching. This study suggests that the theory of (civic) narrative competence can function as a bridge between the disciplinary domain and the life-world domain in its focus on how students’ civic reasoning can be developed through teaching. The article uses narrative theory to explore how the students’ civic narratives changed and became more nuanced after a teaching segment focusing on social and political trust. In the article, we demonstrate how the students’ personal experiences colored their interpretations and orientations before the teaching segment and how their civic narratives were developed through the implemented teaching, which provided them with concepts, a theoretical model, and empirical examples. We found that the students did not discard previous perceptions after the teaching segment, but integrated them into their new knowledge and orientations, thus integrating the life-world and disciplinary domains.

Towards a reform of religious teaching in the Chilean school system

This essay proposes to change the current manner by which religion is taught within the Chilean school system. Currently, all schools are legally compelled to offer a particular religious teaching in a confessional fashion, although exemptions are offered on an individual basis; whilst state-owned or private secular schools must choose a religion from a list of alternatives (usually Catholicism), private faith schools only teach about the religious belief that defines their educational project. As it stands, this scheme generates problems of exclusivism (students only learn about one faith), confessionalism (they are directed to believe in said faith), and religious illiteracy (in cases where they are allowed to opt-out from the religion class). After characterising religious learning as an educational good for anthropological, cultural, existential, and civic reasons, we propose a move towards a scheme of universal (all faiths), mandatory (no exemptions), and non-confessional (non-directive) religious teaching for state schooling (UMNC). Finally, we propose extending UMNC to faith schools, for reasons related to the epistemic and axiological place of the religion class within the curriculum, and a shift from concerns about parental rights to a child-centred approach.

Supporting Civic Reasoning, Discourse, and Problem Solving That Is Political Without Being Partisan

This chapter focuses on effective preparation for civic reasoning, discourse, and problem solving. It reviews literatures, including major synthetic reviews and studies from the science of learning and development (SoLD), civics education, and mathematics education. Based on these reviews, the authors make the case for a more comprehensive form of civic education in which reasoning, discourse, and problem solving permeate the curriculum across grades and subject matter. As an example, the authors illustrate how mathematical tools and techniques inform powerful fact-based civic reasoning and discourse and how SoLD informs both. This approach to learning engages students in politically relevant issues in a nonpartisan way as they prepare to become democratic decision-makers and problem solvers of the future.

Teaching Honesty and Improving Democracy in the Post‐Truth Era

AbstractIn this paper, Sarah Stitzlein considers the consequences of honesty on our democracy, especially for citizens' ability to engage in civic inquiry together as they face shared problems. Honesty is a key component of a well‐functioning democracy; it develops trust and fosters the sorts of relationships among citizens that enable civic dialogue and reasoning. Post‐truth attitudes and truth decay pose serious obstacles to good civic reasoning as citizens struggle to draw clear distinctions between fact and opinion, weigh personal beliefs and emotions over facts, and increasingly distrust traditionally respected sources of information. Stitzlein employs a Deweyan pragmatist account of truth and a distinctly social account of democracy to build a case for foregrounding honesty in the development of citizens. She describes how schools can employ communities of inquiry to cultivate habits of honesty within citizenship education. She explains how a better democracy — one grounded in a wider understanding of social life and relationships — might head off the temptation to be dishonest for self‐serving reasons, focusing on how dishonesty jeopardizes our relationships to each other as citizens and our ability to engage in civic reasoning together to fulfill shared goals.

Case Studies of Effective Learning Climates for Civic Reasoning and Discussion

While the national media continues to highlight the tensions of cultural politics in education, there is a need for young people and educators to be equipped for the daunting local, national, and global challenges that mark their everyday lives. Many educators and young people alike are interested in engaging youth in civic reasoning and discourse that prepares them to meet those many challenges. This article highlights applications of civic reasoning and discourse in three contexts: a traditional high school social studies classroom, a hybrid school-community action project, and an out-of-school Youth Participatory Action Research program. We argue that these case studies show a path forward for developing students’ civic reasoning and discourse skills because the students turn toward and lean into what we define as moments of critical dissonance: in each case, the students and educators work together to engage, rather than avoid, complex sociopolitical realities, even while holding a variety of racial, ethnic, political, and cultural identities.

What the Sciences of Human Learning and Development Tell Us about Civic Reasoning and Discourse

There is perhaps no more important skill to cultivate in today’s students than civic reasoning: the ability to think about social issues in complex ways. Civic reasoning involves the integration of knowledge, epistemological orientations, and ethics, and this integration is influenced by individuals’ perceptions of themselves and others, and by the problems they seek to address in the civic domain. We synthesize research from psychology, learning science, human development, and brain development to identify conditions that maximize opportunities for children, adolescents, and adults to learn to engage in civic reasoning. We argue that a commitment to democratic principles, and the development of the reasoning skills and ethical dispositions that undergird them, results in a more engaged populace that is willing and able to understand multiple perspectives and to make sound decisions for the collective good.

Policy for Civic Reasoning

Preparing young people for citizenship requires significant change in our public schools, including a commitment to preparation of the education workforce for today’s diverse learners and paying more attention to culture and identity in what is taught. Schools should be designed and organized in ways that help students understand the obligations that members of a society owe one another. Policy can be an important lever in promoting changes that foster civic reasoning and engagement: curriculum policies can support civic reasoning and discourse within and across subject areas, assessments can support civic reasoning through competency-based approaches, and well-designed graduation requirements can reinforce attention to civic learning. This article describes various frameworks to guide policy development, each with the potential to prepare young people more fully for citizenship.

More than Civil Engineering and Civic Reasoning: World-Building in Middle School STEM

This narrative essay describes a project in an urban sixth grade science class that began as an effort to link civic engagement with disciplinary learning in chemistry. The ways in which students took up this project prompted the authors to see urban infrastructures as engineered sites of learning with world-making possibilities. By interrogating the ways in which science and engineering practices are imbued with values and happen in places, teachers can engage young learners in critical examinations of their built worlds. The authors argue that there is an opportunity in K-8 engineering education to avoid reproducing some of the pathologies of (post)secondary STEM education by making the ethical and political dimensions of the STEM enterprise explicit. In fact, elementary school teachers’ ability to prioritize the whole child over disciplinary norms may allow them to engage students in realistic assessments of the built world while also imagining hopeful present-futures.

From Classroom Community to Building Citizens: English Language Arts and Math Teachers Collaborate on a Guide to Help Integrate Civic Reasoning into Classrooms

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Reimagining American education: Possible futures: A curriculum that promotes civic ends and meets developmental needs

If schools are to prepare students to participate more productively in civic life, schools will need to ensure that they have opportunities to practice the skills of civic reasoning, argues Carol Lee. Yet schools are challenged by the limits in the curriculum and the difficulty of addressing the different types of prior knowledge that students bring to the classroom. Lee suggests that when schools build their content and pedagogy on current understandings of human learning, they will be better able to enable students from all backgrounds to practice building the understandings they need, now and in the future.

Stress Test for American Democracy: Teaching Civic Reasoning and Engagement in a Time of Division

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Civic reasoning through paranoid and reparative reading: Addressing conspiracy theories within racialized and queer publics

ABSTRACT When classrooms fail to provide racially marginalized students with frameworks that explain their daily experiences, sometimes students turn to conspiracy theories, however inaccurate. This article links marginalized students’ critiques of society and paranoid readings of the world with civic reasoning. Through queer and critical race theory, this article offers practices within civics classrooms to address marginalized students’ turns to conspiracy theories, rethinking civic reasoning from students’ paranoid positionalities as targets of systemic oppression. These practices stem from my teaching a twelfth-grade civics course which centered conspiracy theories, and students’ distrust of the government and media. Recommendations for practice include providing terminology and documentation of marginalization; defining the line between conspiracy and conspiracy theory, science and pseudoscience; embracing fallibility as analytic virtue; and repairing students’ relationships to science and sources.

The Role of Public Schooling in Preparing Youth for Civic Reasoning and Engagement

Abstract This article explores the role of public schooling in preparing youth to engage in civic reasoning and civic action. The current challenges in the public arena—a pandemic, economic depression, civil unrest over continued systemic racism—illustrate the complexity of sense-making required to address these conundrums. At the same time, these challenges highlight inequities that have persisted over the course of U.S. history. The article further explores the mix of challenges and opportunities that the structure of the U.S. government poses to citizens hoping to grapple with these complexities, arguing that the knowledge base required to meet these civic challenges and opportunities are not just cognitive but epistemological and ethical. The article concludes that the development of such a complex knowledge base must be distributed across the K–12 public education sector: not limited to civics classes, but distributed across all the disciplines taught in schools.

Critical Reading in a Screen Paradigm

Abstract An important step in teaching critical reading for online civic reasoning is building teachers’ own acceptance of and comfort with screen literacies, understanding them not as alternative to gold-standard book literacies but as normative. To do so, teachers must better understand how web-based texts, and the reading of them, differ from the “classical” critical reading most teachers are used to. This article examines the “quantum” nature of web-based texts—their fundamental instability, their reader constructedness, and their nature as processes rather than objects—and relates these features to hyper-reading and other reading strategies that research shows allow engaged readers to screen-read critically.

William E. Barnes, Forgotten Booster: Documenting Why Archaeology Came to the University of Arizona

William E. Barnes, Forgotten Booster:Documenting Why Archaeology Came to the University of Arizona David R. Wilcox (bio) It is now well known that the new president of the University of Arizona (UA) as of January 1915, Rufus Bernhard von KleinSmid [1875–1964] (figure 1; see Bio Sketch 11), soon after indirectly hearing in mid-March 1915 from Byron Cummings [1860–1954] (figure 2) that he was interested in a position in archaeology at the UA, hired him in late June 1915 to be the founding professor of a Department of Archaeology and director of the Arizona State Museum (ASM) (Thompson 2005, 2015a, 2018a,b; Wilcox 2005, 2016a,b; Bostwick 2006; Ferg 2014, 2017). New research, however, shows that a movement in the direction of establishing these two institutions on an archaeological footing began with a public appeal by a businessman, W. [William] E. Barnes2 [1869–1916], the traveling freight and passenger agent of the Southern Pacific Railway Company headquartered in Tucson. Barnes in the fall of 1913 BC (Before Cummings) began to lobby the Arizona governor and the Arizona legislature to found a School and Chair of Archaeology at the UA and also an ASM there dedicated to archaeological studies. This was done without his apparently knowing that ASM as a natural history museum already had been authorized at the UA in 1893 via a bill introduced by then legislator (and later seven-time governor of Arizona, 1912–1917, 1923–1929, 1931–1932) George Wiley Paul Hunt [1859–1934] (figure 3) (Thompson 2005, 2018b; Wilcox 2005; Ferg 2014, 2017). To explain why Barnes succeeded so well—but not as well as he hoped—requires first a deeper examination of earlier efforts that built up public support that Barnes was able to capitalize upon. The forces in play included antiquarian interest in Arizona's prehistoric remains, which were at first regarded as curiosities or "curios" and "relics" of a mysterious race that attracted an audience locally but also nationally [End Page 143] and internationally. Gradually, concerned citizens of Arizona Territory began to realize that they were "losing" these resources to outside exploiters, and there then was a growing recognition that action was needed to find ways to keep these "resources" in the territory for the benefit of Arizona's citizens. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Rufus Bernhard von KleinSmid. (UA Biographical File, KleinSmid, Rufus B. von, Special Collections Library, University of Arizona) [End Page 144] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Byron Cummings. (UA Biographical File, Cummings, Byron, Special Collections Library, University of Arizona) [End Page 145] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 3. Governor George Wiley Paul Hunt in his office, March 1915. (AZ SW Photographic Collection, People, folder 60, HUG–HZ, Special Collections Library, University of Arizona) Following the building of the railroads through Arizona to California, and the housing boom in California in the 1880s, the economics of tourism became increasingly important in Arizona and the West (Pomeroy 1965, 1990 [1957]; Rothman 1998). By the 1890s, efforts to draw tourists' attention to some of Arizona's prehistoric "attractions" had begun in earnest by the Arizona Antiquarian Association. With the formation of women's clubs, however, highly valued civic reasons for the preservation of Arizona's ruins were formulated involving the importance of education, heritage preservation, and access for local benefit. By the early twentieth century, even more ambitious efforts along these lines were happening in adjacent western states or territories that also influenced public opinion in Arizona. By the time W. E. Barnes came to Tucson in August 1911, his employer, the Southern Pacific Railroad Company, was increasingly interested in promoting local growth, increasing traffic on their routes, and publicizing the attractions and educational opportunities to be seen nearby. In the middle 1910s the [End Page 146] automobile also had become a vitally important factor, and the Good Roads Movement was promoting many interests parallel to those of the railroads (Devine 1997). It was fertile ground for a talented booster and publicist like Barnes to bring "sunshine" to the communities along the Southern Pacific's Sunset Line, one result of which was the creation of a...

The Role of Public Schooling in Preparing Youth for Civic Reasoning and Engagement

Abstract This article explores the role of public schooling in preparing youth to engage in civic reasoning and civic action. The current challenges in the public arena—a pandemic, economic depression, civil unrest over continued systemic racism—illustrate the complexity of sense-making required to address these conundrums. At the same time, these challenges highlight inequities that have persisted over the course of U.S. history. The article further explores the mix of challenges and opportunities that the structure of the U.S. government poses to citizens hoping to grapple with these complexities, arguing that the knowledge base required to meet these civic challenges and opportunities are not just cognitive but epistemological and ethical. The article concludes that the development of such a complex knowledge base must be distributed across the K–12 public education sector: not limited to civics classes, but distributed across all the disciplines taught in schools.

Dimensions of Adolescent Civic Reasoning: An Examination of Individual Differences

The current study examined sociodemographic characteristics and political discussion as correlates of adolescents’ qualitative understanding of three civic behaviors. Participants were 743 adolescents ( Mage = 15.87, range = 13-20; 55.6% female; 89.9% White) from a midsized city and a small rural town in an Appalachian state. Open-ended responses to three civic behavior scenarios, asking participants why should people protest, vote, and volunteer were content coded (28 codes total). Anecdotal statements are provided to illustrate the variety of themes that emerged among adolescents’ written responses. Adolescents applied domain-specific reasons (moral, conventional, and personal) for specific types of civic behavior. Structural justifications were provided for all three civic behaviors, suggesting that many adolescents reason about the broader, structural impact of civic behaviors. In probit regression models, coding categories were differentially associated with adolescent demographic characteristics and political discussion. Findings offer insight into youth’s divergent understanding of different forms of civic responsibility and shed light on individual differences in youth’s developing civic beliefs.

The First Modern University: the University of Birmingham

ABSTRACTThe University of Birmingham was planned, advanced and established with both national and German models of a University in mind. Civic reasons for the planning of the University need to be viewed within a broader motivational context. Even with a strong sense of civic place, the University was conceived as a modern University with multiple founding visions. The set-up goals shifted as the size and complexity of the University increased and early ideas of social mission were either restricted or largely absent in practice. The paper examines the nature of the original institutional commitment to the ‘civic’ dimension of the University between 1900 and 1914 and highlights the many tensions that emerged between the growing academic standing of the University and its continued enthusiasm for the City and regional links.