Practicing Resistance and the Struggle over Power as Democratic Citizenship

Teaching democratic citizenship has never been more vital, particularly given the dismissive attitude and direct attempts to undermine democratic institutions exemplified by the Trump administration. In addition, traditional approaches to teaching citizenship foreground the underlying values of self-governance, knowledge of the different branches of government, and the skills for behaving within this system (i.e., voting) but lack a broader intellectual framework to guide those actions (Parker, Teaching democracy: Unity and diversity in public life, 2003). Parker, a critical multicultural educator, argued that this approach has rendered participatory citizenship superfluous and ignores more central concerns, namely, how people can live together justly while honoring their multiple individual and group identities (i.e., gender, race, class, religion, etc.). This essay focuses on the task of living together justly and offers one example of how this might be promoted through the communication studies curriculum.