Critical Civic Inquiry: Students Master Academic Content through Action Research Projects

When I was starting out as a youth worker in San Francisco’s Mission District in the 1990s, I saw powerful examples of multiracial youth organizing: young people, often working with young adults, investigate damaging or unjust education policies, develop promising solutions, and press for policy change in their schools and communities. These groups are not just spaces for policy change, however – they also offer transformative contexts for marginalized youth to learn and claim power. Organizing groups, such as Philly Student Union, offer learning environments where youth come together to share stories, identify injustices, and organize campaigns to influence policies that affect their lives.

Less common, however, are examples where our public schools nurture robust civic learning of this kind - where students have a voice in decision-making and explore topics relevant to their lives. Too often, a laser focus on academic testing overshadows the civic mission of public schools and, more broadly, school policies and practices can undermine young people’s sense of belonging and dignity. But hopes for a more equal and vibrant democracy depend on public schools. Young people and their families fight for high quality neighborhood schools because public schools and the teachers who staff them are guardians of the democratic promise of America.

Why not learn, then, from community-based youth organizing spaces to inform the design of rich democracy education inside of public schools? This is precisely what we did when developing Critical Civic Inquiry (CCI), a social justice approach to student learning, teacher development, and structural education change. CCI aims to leverage the insights and practices of teachers and community educators to strengthen opportunities for transformative student voice in public schools.