Moving Urban Students Beyond Online Public Voices to Digital Participatory Politics
The authors explore a teacher's 10-year journey to foster his urban middle school students' public voice and then their ability to engage in participatory politics. The authors first provide a conceptual and experiential context for how the teacher came to question whether cultivating 8th grade students' online public voice in a U.S. history was enough. Second, they discuss how two teachers created online interschool deliberations about contemporary issues and how a third teacher used low and high tech to enable her students to take civic action. Third, they discuss the essential elements of an online participatory learning space. Fourth, they address the challenges of integrating digital deliberations about contemporary public issues and online civic action into a U.S. history curriculum. Finally, they present how they adapted a site devoted to deliberations about just war in the context of U.S. history to a focus on just action in a contemporary setting.