Civic Engagement in Communities of Color

Situated at the intersection of race and civics, this volume discusses how communities of color interpret and enact civics both within and beyond the classroom. Chapters focus on historical and contemporary topics ranging from issues facing Asian immigrant communities to the Black Lives Matter at School curriculum. Civic Engagement in Communities of Color will help classroom teachers, teacher candidates, and teacher educators identify where whitewashed civics curricula fail students of color and begin to understand how marginalized communities conceive and enact civics without the deficit lens. It will also help education researchers understand the various frameworks that communities of color use to approach civics and civic education. Chapter authors include established and emerging civic education scholars, including Leilani Sabzalian, ArCasia D. James-Gallaway, Jesús Tirado, and Brittany Jones.

Book Features:

• Reimagines civics teaching and learning in communities of color, expanding current frameworks for what civic education is and can be.
• Disrupts the idea that civics is a singular notion that should only be viewed through one specific lens.
• Provides specific examples showing how racially marginalized people have created their own civic spaces.
• Includes chapters on Black, Indigenous, Arab, Immigrant, South Asian American, and Southeast Asian American communities.

Kristen E. Duncan is an assistant professor at Clemson University, a former middle school social studies teacher, and a former elementary school instructional coach. Kristen was awarded the Kipchoge Neftali Kirkland Social Justice Award in 2020 from the College and University Faculty Assembly of the National Council for the Social Studies.

“The authors in this volume do an outstanding job articulating why fear is really the only rational response to the current condition of our field…If you believe a more expansive democracy is necessary and possible through informed, empowering civic engagement of young people, this book should keep you up at night. Stay woke.”
—From the Foreword by Ashley N. Woodson, associate vice president of academic outreach, Albion College

“Civic education couldn’t be more important in the current state of public education in the United States. Our democracy depends on the ideas in this book. Each chapter holds the possibilities for our future.”
—Bettina L. Love, William F. Russell Professor, Teachers College, Columbia University

“Dr. Kristen Duncan offers us the book we all need to expand our understanding of the possibilities for civic education by centering civic knowledge, participation, and action in communities of color. Using critical, justice-oriented, culturally sustaining, and liberatory frameworks, the contributors to this book reconceptualize civics to include notions of embodied civics, Indigenous civics, anti-racist civics, and Latinx civic engagement, among others, to strive for a more inclusive and socially just democratic society. Challenging normative and traditional notions of civic education, this book is a must-read for social studies teachers, researchers, and graduate students looking to engage their students, administrators, curriculum, and/or scholarship in transformative ways.”
—Ashley Taylor Jaffee, assistant director of social studies and lecturer, Program in Teacher Preparation, Princeton University

Contents

Foreword by Ashley N. Woodson  vii

Introduction  xi

Part I: Current Realities of Civic Education: Perspectives from the Margins

1.  Emancipatory Civic Education for Black Students: An Action-Oriented Literature Review  3
Erica Kelley

2.  “Have We Been Civically Educated to Seize the Present Moment?”: Two Black Social Educators’ Sense-Making of Civic Education  17
Carla-Ann Brown, Rasheeda West, and Elizabeth Yeager Washington

3.  Civics and Latinidad: Letters to the Past With Hopes for the Future  31
Jesús Tirado, Gabriel Rodriguez, Timothy Monreal, and Tommy Ender

4.  “I Understand Both of Them. But Nobody Understands Me!”: Civic Dissonances Among Arab-Palestinian Students in Israel  41
Aline Muff and Aviv Cohen

Part II: Civics Embodied in Communities of Color

5.  It’s Been Here All Along: Integrating Local Stories of Struggle Into Civics Discourses  57
Asif Wilson, ArCasia D. James-Gallaway, and Sabryna Groves

6.  #FreeThemAll: Civic Action Through Southeast Asian Community Defense Digital Toolkits  71
Van Anh Tran

7.  More Than Talk: Youth Poets’ Civic Action and How Youth Spoken Word Prepares Minoritized Youths as Civic Actors  93
Camea Davis

Part III: Possibilities for Civic Education

8.  Black Feminist Pedagogy for Anti-Racist Civics  109
Tiffany Mitchell Patterson, Natasha C. Murray-Everett, and Crystal Simmons

9.  “Responsible, Capable, and Whole Human Beings”: The Value and Necessity of Indigenous Civics  125
Leilani Sabzalian and Michelle M. Jacob

10.  “It Didn’t Mean ‘Me’ When It Said ‘We’ ”: Counterstories as Pedagogy When Citizenship Is Not Guaranteed  141
Brittany Jones

11.  The Black Lives Matter at School Guiding Principles: Fostering Black Cultural Citizenship Through Critical Civic Empathy  153
Denisha Jones and Sarah A. Mathews

Endnotes  169

Index  171

About the Editor and Authors  181

2025 Society of Professors of Education (SPE) Outstanding Book Award