Dissertation Proposal Announcement Ed.D. Program: Michael Catelli “A Case Study of Multimodal Civics Education from Leadership to Classroom Practices at a New Jersey School District”
Modern civics education creates students who rarely learn how to engage as civic actors outside of schools (Gibson, 2020) and ignores the reality that students learn civics in all spaces outside of schools (Bauml et al., 2022; Biesta et al., 2009). While research has examined how educational leaders guide civics education (Journell, 2022), how classrooms implement controversial civic discussions (Campbell & Niemi, 2016; Kawashima-Ginsberg & Levine, 2015), and how educators are actively reconceptualizing citizenship skills in a digital democracy (Chapman, 2023), we lack research that examines all of these aspects together in the context of a school site.
The purpose of this study is to explore how school administration and classroom educators’ beliefs of civic education in a digital world influence classroom instruction. This multi-site case study will use multiple interviews with school administrators and classroom teachers, artifact analysis, meeting observations, and classroom observations to collect data from two school sites. Data from the study will be analyzed using the Lived Civics framework (Cohen et al., 2018) to interpret how school administrators and classroom educators conceptualize the objectives of civics education. Critical digital citizenship (Garcia et al., 2021) will also be applied as a second framework to examine how educators apply Lived Civics values in digital spaces. Together, these two frameworks will provide a lens to see how educators enact civics in a multimodal world across physical spaces and digital platforms.
Findings from this study will provide insights that school administrators can use to support civics instruction. This study will also provide educators and administrators examples of educators using instruction to validate the multimodal civic experiences students bring to schools. Finally, this research will also contribute to the knowledge base on civics education by exploring how exemplary school sites implement instruction focused on multimodal civic goals.
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