| This study investigates what counts as civic education in the United States Virgin Islands. This question is fraught with conflict because: 1) Civic education is often centered on the nation-state, and 2) as a multicultural non-self-governing territory of the United States, Virgin Islanders have diverse and multiple political allegiances, some of which are directly in tension with the nation-state. Civic education in the United States Virgin Islands highlights the tensions of offering a traditional nation-centered conception within a politically and culturally marginalized and excluded community. In this year-long ethnographic study in two schools in St Croix, the largest of the U.S. Virgin Islands, four teachers and the students in six high school social studies classes were observed and interviewed and the curriculum and artifacts were analyzed. The overarching questions guiding the study were: What does civic education look like in the Virgin Islands? What counts as civic education? While the curriculum varied from class to class, and the teachers mediated the curriculum differently, some similarities and themes emerged. The resulting data demonstrates the teachers' and students' rejection of a nation-state centered civic education and the emergence of a Decentered Civic Education which includes the following components: 1) the understanding that students enter a classroom with political interests and identities and should be respected and nurtured with love and care, 2) the promotion of dialogue that does not merely disseminate dominant national myths, but seeks to expose historical and current power structures and promote social justice, 3) a commitment to helping students cultivate their conceptions of justice and civic identities, and 4) a focus on preparing students for action. Educators who wish to provide a more humanizing and emancipatory civic education should consider ways in which they may incorporate the components of Decentered Civic Education into their social studies classes. |
