From Civic Commitments to Instructional Planning: Elementary Pre-Service Teachers and Justice-Oriented Democratic Citizenship

Amid increasing social diversity and political polarization, preparing teachers to support justice-oriented democratic citizenship is an urgent challenge for teacher education. This qualitative study examines how elementary pre-service teachers (PSTs) conceptualize democratic citizenship and represent those commitments in instructional planning within a justice-oriented social studies methods course in the United States. Grounded in an expanded framework based on Westheimer and Kahne’s (2004) citizenship typology and informed by decolonial perspectives, the study analyzes course assignments, discussions, reflections, and interviews from 17 PSTs. Findings show that all participants articulated justice-oriented civic commitments, emphasizing collective action, systemic critique, and multiple perspectives, yet these commitments were unevenly represented in instructional planning. While most planning artifacts referenced social movements, fewer positioned students as civic actors, engaged structural analysis, or planned for dialogic engagement across difference. Participatory civic knowledge and skills appeared infrequently in planning, and personally responsible citizenship was absent. Pedagogical knowledge and skills, course structure, teaching philosophy, and participants’ identities and backgrounds emerged as key factors shaping how civic commitments were translated into planned instruction. These influences operated within broader constraints, including political climate, limited instructional time, and the scarcity of field-based exemplars for justice-oriented civic teaching. By foregrounding instructional planning as a critical intermediary site of teacher learning, this study extends scholarship on democratic citizenship education and introduces a practice-oriented framework to support both research and teacher preparation. Although situated in the United States, the findings offer insights relevant to international efforts to prepare teachers for justice-oriented civic education under conditions of constraint and uncertainty.