To enact democracy, which is to live in communication with difference, requires a formative process that involves an education of the whole person for and through civic life. Drawing on Charles Mills's theory of "Herrenvolk" ethics and Jonathan Lear's analysis of psychosocial lapses that ail us, Sheron Fraser-Burgess and Chris Higgins…

A survey of the nation's civic health reveals troubling trends, with historic lows in trust among individuals and key institutions such as government, media, and the courts. Political polarization has significantly increased among Americans in the last 40 years, surpassing eight other democratic nations and challenging the idea that it is merely a…

A growing body of literature focuses on practice as a central aspect of teacher education. Whereas this approach emerged mainly from teacher preparation programs in specific content areas such as math, science, and literacy studies, socially related educational fields have served as a peripheral player alone. Recently, however, scholars have…

How can we imagine the ideal of "civic friendship" in the current contentious atmosphere? This article recasts the original concept of civic friendship through a tangle construct known as "weak ties." It introduces the initial interactions between Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Jane Addams as a useful model for forging weak ties…

In this paper, my aim is to reintroduce and reclaim the concept of civility for the ongoing debates on democratic education within the Arendt-inspired philosophy of education. I juxtapose a prominent interpretation related to theories of radical democracy and radical democratic education, referring to Gert Biesta's work, which amends Arendt's…

In this article, the central question is how the relationship between democracy and education can be understood in terms of civic literacy. By taking as a point of departure John Dewey's basic understanding of democracy in terms of communication and experience, which also forms the basis for the pragmatist knowledge concept of "transactional…

Contemporary literature reveals that many educators, especially those in elementary schools and in conflict-effected societies, are reluctant to engage in the teaching of current public issues, even more so social controversies. However, this qualitative study examined the successful experience and the perspectives of educators from two elementary…

The paper argues that the racist underpinnings of the dominant narrative of American exceptionalism require radical exposure as a first step in turning around this discourse to serve democratic ends. As a key pedagogical element in this vision of renewal, insights from ignorance studies are employed to illustrate how teachers might integrate…

Contemporary liberal democracies face complex and disruptive challenges, such as toxic populism, culture wars, political polarization, religious fundamentalism, the climate emergency, global conflicts, and the influence of powerful social media platforms. This is the disconcerting world that young people are growing up in and need support in…

Recent calls by legislators to exclude "divisive concepts" and histories from our curricula pose a challenge to the development of students' epistemic responsibility and agency in classrooms. In this paper, Martha Perez-Mugg examines the classroom as a space for the development of epistemic responsibility, ultimately suggesting that…

In this article, the authors review higher education's evolving role in this nation's democracy. They then describe a new collaboration, the Civic Learning and Democracy Engagement (CLDE) Coalition, which responds educationally to the challenges facing our democracy. The CLDE Coalition aims to (1) reclaim and revitalize higher education's public…

Purpose: Investigate first- to third-graders' understandings of the police. Design/methodology/approach: Phenomenography is used to analyze elementary students' understandings of the police as a social institution Findings: The results indicate three qualitatively different ways of understanding the police. The police as: attributes, activities…

The Institute for Citizens & Scholars brings together diverse people, across traditional divides, to build a constitutional democracy that works for all. In 2019, Citizens & Scholars released the whitepaper "From Civic Education to a Civic Learning Ecosystem: A Landscape Analysis and Case for Collaboration," which noted a…

Primary and secondary schools across the world are expected to contribute to the citizenship development of their pupils. Most citizenship curricula focus on the acquisition of knowledge and the cultivation of skills and attitudes. Citizenship-related self-efficacy beliefs are often neglected in the literature on citizenship education, although…

This article, understanding populism as an essentially undemocratic ideology, argues that the pro-social theatre education approach of ensemble pedagogy can offer a model of educational practice which counters these anti-democratic rhetorics by creating a shared space for the enactment of empathetic discourse. Via an ethnography of the UK…