From Representation to Agency: A Framework for Student-Centered Civic Pedagogy

• In Event: Pathways to Motivated Student Agency through Intentional Civic Pedagogy

Abstract

The inclusion of diverse voices and perspectives in civic education curricula is critical to the healthy development of students and society. A wealth of data supports the common-sense idea that when students see their teachers and fellow students treating people who seem “like them” as important thinkers and actors, they are more likely to think of themselves as important thinkers and actors. Such students tend to engage more deeply in learning and develop greater confidence to pursue both personal ambitions and publicly meaningful action than those less represented in curricula. There is also compelling data to support the less straightforward notion that curricula rich in socially and culturally diverse content are also more effective for learners used to seeing people “like them” presented as important. These students tend to develop greater intellectual curiosity, sharper critical thinking, and larger capacity to work across differences and outside comfort zones than peers who are not exposed to diversity and ambiguity. Given these cognitive and civic benefits, the education sector’s focus on racially and culturally diverse representation in curricular content over the past several decades is understandable and laudable.

It is also not enough. Indeed, the focus on representation can become too much—at least when it becomes an obsession that conflates content with pedagogy. Relying too heavily on inclusive content to support students’ academic and civic learning poses several problems. First, it is impossible to include everybody in any reading list (or equivalent tool), and presumptuous to determine, a priori, with whom one’s students will identify. Students must have opportunity to contribute directly rather than simply vicariously to the collective enterprise of learning. Second, too much emphasis on content—or rather, too little emphasis on the contingency and incompleteness of any given course’s content—can create the impression that the instructor is endorsing a canon. For students, that impression reinforces passive learning, by suggesting that there is one set of texts or perspectives that exhausts reasonable inquiry into a topic, and the teacher has discovered it. Meanwhile, for many parents, policymakers, and other interested observers—as well as some students—any whiff of canonism smells like indoctrination. Finally, exposing students to a curated (and implicitly sanctioned) diversity of perspectives without forcing them to wrestle with the uncurated diversity of their own peers’ perspectives diverts them from two essential tasks of intellectual and civic formation: learning to imagine and support novel answers to complex questions, and learning to be wrong.

With these virtues and challenges of representation in mind, I propose a theoretical, student-centered framework for social education that capitalizes on the former and meets or evades the latter. This framework is theoretical in that it responds to fundamental questions regarding the purposes and possibilities of social education, but has only begun to be tested and assessed. It is student-centered in that its historical origins, intellectual claims, practical program, and ultimate goals all stem from a concern with student agency: the belief that the best way to support students' development as responsible, creative, collaborative, productive citizens is to treat them that way, putting them at the center of the knowledge-creation process just as citizens of a self-governing polity are central to the creation of its culture.

My goal in this paper is to elaborate this framework and discuss its applications and challenges. I begin by describing the framework’s origins and theoretical assumptions. I then discuss its early testing and outcomes in a grant-funded initiative called “Third Way Civics” (3WC), which has been piloted at dozens of higher-education institutions in multiple states, including Florida, Indiana, Minnesota, and Missouri. Finally, I offer a provisional strategy for scaling, spreading, and sustaining the 3WC approach.

Author

• Trygve Throntveit, Wilson Center