Citizenship normalizing and white preservice social studies teachers.

• Date: 22 March 2008
• Author: Urrieta, Jr., Luis,Reidel, Michelle
• Published date: 22 March 2008
• Author: Urrieta, Jr., Luis

Introduction

I just thought of something ... To be a citizen doesn't necessarily mean anything ... I mean, you really don't have to do anything ... all you have to do is live and survive in the United States (Interview with pre-service teacher, Lucy, February 2005). Define myself as a citizen? ... I don't know.... It's one of those things I just am (Interview with preservice teacher, Jason, September 2004). ACCORDING TO LUCY AND JASON, TWO PRESERVICE SOCIAL STUDIES TEACHERS, citizenship in some ways and to some people is meaningless. All you must do to be a citizen is to live and survive." For these two future U.S. social studies teachers, citizenship may be an empty, normal, and natural concept. In part, their responses may be explained by the general apathy that tends to characterize civic life in the U.S. Yet it is also explained by the fact that in a white supremacist society, citizenship is normalized to a white standard (Chock, 1994) that is part of an unacknowledged "property" (privilege) of whiteness. In the context of this article, we define the normalization of citizenship as the consistent, systemic, institutional, and individual practice of ascribing full citizenship status to a white, middle-class, male standard (O Jo, 2003). This process of normalization and what it means to be a full citizen range from physical appearance to cultural, social, and economic ways of being, along with sensibilities and dispositions.

As a white, middle-class man and a white, middle-class woman living in the U.S., Jason and Lucy benefit from the long-term equation of whiteness with citizenship and have the luxury of taking for granted and trivializing the fact that they "belong." Given the rapidly changing demographics of U.S. society, the same cannot be said for many of their future students in public schools (Frankenberg, 2006). The student-led pro-immigrant marches in spring 2006 exemplified the disconnect (1) between normalized notions of national citizenship and is an important issue to Latina/o youth, the largest minority group in the U.S. (Cano, 2006).

Thousands of young Latina/os citizens and their allies across U.S. cities took to the streets to represent and define their membership in this society. With large signs, U.S. and various Latin American flags, they proclaimed their civic and cultural identities, insisting that both be acknowledged. These protests suggest that for students of color in the U.S., citizenship is not--and never has been--natural or neutral. I have argued that Mexican-American students have traditionally and specifically been disconnected from full citizenship in U.S. schools, especially through the social studies curricula (Urrieta, 2004). Legal citizenship status can bring benefits of rhetorical inclusion for some members, but for many defined as "other" by dominant cultural groups, it can also be a painful and marginalizing type of second, third, or non-class citizenship. Various scholars have highlighted how cultural and/or racial minority groups often experience citizenship in alienating ways that convey a sense of being worth less than mainstream people (Rosaldo, 2003; Cary, 2001; Houser and Kuzmic, 2001).

Preparing children and young adults to be and act as citizens has been an important goal of social studies education since the early 20th century. Civic education typically focuses on the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and attributes students need to effectively participate in society. Often missing in civic education, however, is attention to the ways in which citizenship is inextricably tied to culture and racial identity. In this article, we consider how predominantly white preservice social studies teachers identified as citizens and understood their role as civic educators, or failed to do so. We present these data to suggest that cultural and civic identities intersect, affect citizenship education, and explain how the normalization of citizenship to a white standard by mainstream educators is consistent with the tenets of white supremacy. By white supremacy, we are referring to the official and unofficial practices, principles, morals, norms, values, history, and overall culture that privileges whites in U.S. society (Urrieta and Reidel, 2006). We also conclude that such normalization to a particular group must be actively acknowledged and confronted. The next section will explore three bodies of literature that theoretically inform this research before delineating the details of the study's design and methodology. These three bodies of literature include citizenship as a property of whiteness, white teachers as civic educators, and citizenship identity production.

Theoretical Framework

Citizenship as Whiteness

Historians Stuart Hall and David Held (1989) argue that the history of citizenship is one of successive attempts to limit citizenship to certain groups. In the U.S., this process of defining who belongs and who does not has always been closely linked to who is defined as white (Ladson-Billings, 2004). Ladson-Billings (2004) and Harris (1993) argue that since the 17th century, race, gender, and class have been the criteria for citizenship in what would become the U.S. The Three-Fifths Compromise reached between Southern and Northern states at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 constructed the "possession" of whiteness as the ultimate form of property. It extended the slave trade until 1808 and included a fugitive slave clause as foundational to the new nation-state. In a nation conceived and built on property rights, these compromises defined African Americans as subhuman (three-fifths of a human) and as property, while conferring aspects of citizenship to whites not available to others. For Harris (1993: 1731), the property functions of whiteness--rights of disposition, rights to use and enjoyment, reputation and status property, and the absolute right to exclude--make the dream of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" a more attainable reality for whites as citizens. This construction of whiteness as the criterion for citizenship also presupposes Anglo conformity (Appleton, 1983) as a condition of fuller (yet not full) citizenship for all those designated as nonwhite. In this manner, Anglo culture became historically and institutionally normalized as natural, and is imposed on all other forms of cultural capital as the standard to emulate (Ibid.).

Rosaldo (2003) explores how citizenship can be a coercive and oppressive notion, especially for those defined as marginal, insignificant, or other by dominant cultural groups. If the ethnic cultures and languages of a people must be denied as a condition of being identified as a citizen, he argues, alienation and marginalization often result (see also Banks, 2004). In the U.S., these problematic dynamics of citizenship have allowed an almost seamless melding of the cultural and the civic for the dominant group (Urrieta, 2004). As Ladson-Billings (2004:113) argues, because white supremacy historically has been a definitive characteristic of citizenship in the U.S., anyone defined as nonwhite has been and is "vulnerable to loss of full citizen rights." The equation of whiteness with citizenship reifies existing power dynamics and affords whites the luxury of substituting their cultural and racial identity for citizenship (Urrieta, 2004). Thus, it is inherently difficult for whites to recognize how their cultural and racial identities are often interchangeable with their citizenship identity and legal rights (Williams, 1991). White, middle-class, heterosexual males have the privilege of not being questioned about their citizenship status and consequently devote little thought to citizenship issues, especially as they relate to people of color and others outside the mainstream.

White Teacher as Civic Educator

In the last decade, the cultural disconnect between our nation's teachers and public school students has grown ever wider (Banks, 2001 a; Nieto, 1999; Johnson, 2002; Gay, 2002). Teachers in the U.S. are predominantly white, middle-class, female, and monolingual, while our nation's student population has become more ethnically, racially, and linguistically diverse (Frankenberg, 2006). Many educators and educational researchers argue that it is imperative for white teachers to acknowledge and confront their white racial identity if they hope to effectively teach all students (Cochran-Smith, 2004; Howard, 1999; Nieto, 1999; Sleeter, 1993). White teachers need to understand that they are white racial beings with a culture, and as such experience the world from a particular and privileged standpoint. We argue that in their role as civic educators it is particularly important for social studies teachers to explore how cultural and racial identity affects how they structure and teach about citizenship by the practices they use to teach. All teachers must understand how they implicitly teach about citizenship, civic engagement, and democracy in their everyday classroom practices.

Although civic education programs have changed in recent decades, most have not effectively integrated multicultural perspectives into citizenship education (Parker, 2003; Banks, 2004; Noddings, 2005). Banks (2004: 7) argues that citizenship and civic education must be reconceptualized to reflect "a delicate balance of cultural, national, and global identities." Since citizenship is a cultural construct and is intimately tied to racial, gender, class, religious, and sexual identities, Banks argues that these identities should not be minimized or negated. The construction of civic worth is often based on mainstream notions of identity characteristics; thus, as Banks point out, we must deconstruct the meaning of citizenship as a cultural construct in the U.S.

By understanding the deeper meanings implied by citizenship, U.S. educators can become more aware of their own conceptions of citizenship and how they teach about and model...