Let Them Lead: Toward a Critical Civics Education in K–12 Schools

Drawing on conceptualizations of justice-centered praxis and portraiture methodology, this article illuminates and contextualizes the praxis of a high school civics teacher engaging in a community-responsive and asset-based approach, which creates space(s) for his students to read and rewrite their worlds critically. Field observations and interviews with the teacher and his students, colleagues, and community members were collected across roughly six months. Thematic analyses conducted on these sources, combined with archival research on the school and community site are threaded together to present three portraits: a historical portrait visualizing the community-driven activism that led to the opening of the high school, a portrait of the teacher illuminating the roots of his pedagogical praxis, and a portrait of the teacher’s pedagogical moves and the impact on his students. The narratives highlight the teacher’s pedagogical, curricular, and spatial moves that countered traditional notions of civics education, instead situating civics as a context for justice-centered teaching and learning that utilized students’ civic ideals and actions in connection with the local community for inquiry and action. Analyses of the collected data are presented through a framework that the author terms critical civics education, composed of four interrelated areas: community-rooted and responsive, student-led and teacher-supported, inclusive, and reflective. The article concludes with implications that offer civics educators and those supporting them pragmatic guidance to actualize justice in K–12 civics classrooms.