“We Are All in This Struggle Together”: Toward an Active Communal Construct of Citizenship

Citizenship as a Fundamental Construct in the Social Studies

Citizenship in a democracy entails multiple nuances and manifestations that have changed over the course of U.S. history depending on social, political, and economic forces. While the notion of citizenship and its qualifications have changed over the course of American history to include more people, it continues to be most commonly recognized as a signifier of a legal status that ties an individual to a particular country (Abowitz & Harnish, 2006; Marshall, 1950/1998) and involves three distinct categories: membership, rights and duties in reciprocity, and participation (Hall & Held, 1990). In the United States, those granted American citizenship are entitled to certain rights, privileges, and freedoms that the government must protect. Numerous legislative battles and social movements have been waged by marginalized groups to achieve full citizenship status and its associated rights (e.g., women, African Americans, Latinas/os, Native Americans, Asian Americans, LGBT, etc.). Despite such changes, the foundation of the modern U.S. democratic state continues to be premised on Enlightenment ideas and western political philosophy (such as the reciprocal relationship of rights and responsibilities between the individual and the nation-state, the idea that a political body governs on behalf of the individual, and loyalty to the nation-state as an essential duty of each citizen).

Social studies scholars argue the importance of citizenship education as being a priority of the field with the social studies classroom representing an important space where students learn what it means to be a citizen of the United States (Abowitz & Harnish, 2006; Parker, 1996, 2006). Citizenship education in schools continues to inundate students with an uncomplicated understanding of citizenship that reduces it to a legal status and membership to the nation-state (Abowitz & Harnish, 2006), citizens developing a patriotic identity (Hahn, 2008), participation (voting, deliberation, jury duty, etc.; Parker, 1996, 2006), and civic republican literacy (Abowitz & Harnish, 2006; Parker, 1996, 2006).

Researcher Positionality

I must admit that Devine is my home community. I attended Devine schools from kindergarten until I graduated high school. To revisit Devine schools more than a decade later to conduct this study has given me the opportunity to witness a predominately African American community taking charge of the education of its future citizens and providing them with 21st century skills and community knowledge. As a qualitative researcher, the purpose of my research is to work in collaboration with communities to engage in social transformation and community uplift. It is critical that I engage in the practice of reflexivity as a way to understand how my experiences and intersecting identities could influence my research and relationship with participants and research sites. Banks (1998) argued that the journeys of researchers greatly influence their values, research questions, and the knowledge they build. I am a biracial (African American/White) woman of color and a former middle school social studies teacher. The multiple intersections of my identities have, at times, enabled me to experience both privilege and oppression at different times and multiple spaces throughout my lifetime.

Flores (2001) argued that as educators, we cannot separate ourselves as social beings from our own beliefs since knowledge construction occurs within varying sociocultural contexts. We derive meaning from situations based on our own histories, experiences, and beliefs. Therefore, I root my research in a theoretical tradition that “privileges women’s issues, voices, and lived experiences” (Hesse-Biber, 2014, p. 3). Black feminist research emphasizes the collaboration between the researcher and the participants in bringing the experiences of Black women to the forefront in hopes of inspiring praxis and the empowerment of both Black women and their communities (Mullings, 2000). With that said, my gendered and mixed-race socialization in an African American and White household intersected in complex ways that positioned me as an “outsider-within” (Banks, 1998; Collins, 2009) in the ways that I experience and interpret reality. To protect the validity of my research and findings, I spent an extended period of time in the Devine community and at DHS becoming reacquainted with my home community. I hung out in the school cafeteria, teacher’s lounge, and the school office, taking note of the climate and happenings at the school. I attended pep rallies and school assemblies. I asked a lot of questions to students, faculty, visitors, and staff. But most importantly, I listened to my participant and asked clarifying questions to make certain I fully understood her statements and perspectives. This allowed Ms. Harper the opportunity to define her own reality and speak “truth to power.” ⁴

Data Collection and Analysis

Three primary sources of data were collected and analyzed as part of this study: semistructured teacher interviews, classroom observations, and classroom artifacts. I conducted multiple classroom and school observations, and spent 4 days a week at DHS for a month. While at the school, I took detailed field notes documenting the activities and interactions between Ms. Harper and her students as well as the school culture and climate. At the end of the school day, I took notes in my electronic journal about what I had observed that day and how it related to the participant’s construction of citizenship.

In feminist research, interviews serve the purpose of “uncovering the subjugated knowledge of the diversity of women’s realities that often lie hidden and unarticulated” (Hesse-Biber, 2014, p. 184). Interviews seek to understand the lived experiences of an individual and the knowledge they bring to a specific situation. I conducted five semistructured interviews with the participant. The first interview was informal and occurred prior to classroom observations. In that initial interview, I asked Ms. Harper basic questions about her background, what subjects she taught, about her students, and a little about her curriculum. The remaining interviews occurred about once a week throughout the data-collection process. In those subsequent interviews, we discussed Ms. Harper’s family, how she came to teaching, students, current events, and how she defined and taught citizenship. The interviews were audiotaped, transcribed, and given back to the participant for member checking.

In addition to interview data and classroom observations, I gathered multiple artifacts from her classroom such as student work, teacher lesson plans, email correspondence, and pictures of classroom posters and realia. After the interviews and classroom observations, I manually coded the interview transcripts and analyzed them as Miles, Huberman, and Saldaña (2013) suggest by noting patterns and themes, arriving at comparisons and contrasts, and determining conceptual explanations of the case study. I used codes such as “teacher background,” “teacher knowledge,” “identity,” “citizenship,” “community,” and “citizenship education”; I have also member checked and conducted follow-up interviews with my participant as Merriam (2009) suggested, confirming the emerging themes. I utilized Yin’s (2003) guidelines for high-quality case study analysis: I analyzed and coded each piece of evidence collected before themes were assigned, I considered multiple explanations for the findings, and my own knowledge and experiences were used in the analysis of the data. The patterns, themes, and comparisons of the data led to the findings included in this article.

The Social Construction/Disjuncture of Citizenship

Turner (1993) examined the construct of citizenship from a sociological standpoint in his attempt to account for the changing construct and oppressive conditions of citizenship. He defined citizenship as “a set of practices (judicial, political, economic, and cultural) which define a person as a competent member of society, and which as a consequence shapes the flow of resources to persons and social groups” (p. 2). According to this line of thought, a “set of practices” suggests that citizenship should be understood as a social construction that changes because of political events and discourses. From this definition of citizenship, one could infer that the meaning of the term would differ based on the social location, knowledge, and experiences of individuals—in particular, those who come from historically marginalized communities. Ms. Harper displayed an awareness of the dominant perspective and definition of citizenship that was to be transmitted to students but at the same time recognized that because of her position as an African American woman and the knowledge that comes from that standpoint, there was a disjuncture, a dissonance, between the two sets of knowledge.

Ms. Harper initially defined the concept of U.S. citizenship as “being born here” (Harper interview, 05/23/14), acknowledging that citizenship is considered a legal status granted to individuals who are born inside the jurisdiction of the United States. She then tried to make sense of the dissonance between the traditional and legal definition of citizenship with her own interpretation of history and experiential knowledge when she stated, “For me, citizenship. . . . I think that we all have this different view of what it looks like because of our experiences” (Harper interview, 05/23/14). While she recognized the societal understanding of citizenship as a legal status, in her eyes, she viewed citizenship as an entity that is socially constructed and understood, and experienced differently from person to person.

She followed the previous statement by tracing the changing nature of U.S. citizenship as both a legal status to the nation-state and/or performance.

In the beginning [the founding of the United States], I think citizenship started out as this very thing that was defined by whether you’re a man, whether you were White. . . . I feel like citizenship—for people of color and for women, we didn’t always have this citizenship right. They used to say to people, “Well, you’re not a citizen, because you’re not from here: You came here, you immigrated here.” Which is stupid because we all immigrated here because we weren’t here to begin with. There were people here before we got here, and we just pushed them out of the way and killed them. . . . But I think over time citizenship has expanded to more people. It’s not just White and male anymore. (Harper interview, 05/23/14)

She first began by detailing the historic qualifications for citizenship rights and status, as well as how it has changed over time based on political or social discourses. Ms. Harper considered citizenship as a historical and social construct that has been shaped by political struggles in an effort to bar certain bodies from gaining access to citizenship status and rights. She noted that while citizenship was initially granted to “White men,” immigrants from different countries were excluded based on their immigration status and country of origin. She identified the contradiction in the argument to exclude people based on immigration status because “we all immigrated here to begin with,” hinting that there was another reason for the denial of citizenship status. Ms. Harper recognized that White men intentionally created the construct of citizenship as a way to purposely subjugate populations and to elevate the societal position of White men.

Ms. Harper mentioned that Native Americans were denied citizenship status and forcibly removed from their land and subjected to unspeakable violence because of their otherness and refusal to assimilate and adopt American cultural values and norms. Retelling this history demonstrated to Ms. Harper the length to which the U.S. government would go to in order to defend the sanctity of [White] U.S. citizenship and perceived right to property (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014; Grande, 2004). When Europeans first colonized North America, they created the construct of citizenship and set the conditions that would lead to the supremacy of White men and the violent subjugation of non-Whites and women. This helped create the formation of Whiteness as a social construct and precondition for attaining “American citizenship” (Ladson-Billings, 2004; Roediger, 2010; Urrieta, 2004). Even though Ms. Harper noted that, over time, more groups have been granted legal citizenship status and rights, Whiteness continued to endure as the primary and desired qualification for citizenship.

After outlining this history, I wanted to know what citizenship meant to her as an African American woman. In her above statement, Ms. Harper briefly noted that, historically, you had to be a “man and White” to be a citizen, thus barring everyone outside this “mythical norm” (Lorde, 2012). In thinking about how she experienced citizenship, she stated that as an African American woman she was not typically seen as a citizen because she was neither White nor male:

I think people tend to question my citizenship more . . . I think part of citizenship is this idea of patriotism—now, especially. So I feel like they’re more likely to question, “Well, is she a true patriot? Is she true to this country?” . . . I think the majority population thinks automatically if you’re the majority group, you’re White, then you are considered a citizen: There’s no question about your patriotism and your citizenship. We’ve all had different experiences so citizenship looks different. (Harper interview, 05/23/14)

Ms. Harper felt that her non-White/nonmale body disallowed her from public recognition as citizen. Normalizing Whiteness and maleness as attributes of citizens suggests that those who do not meet those qualifications are not considered legitimate citizens. Therefore, the burden of proof falls upon them to prove their status by engaging in the performance of patriotism.

Mrs. Harper provided additional examples of what she considered the exclusivity of citizenship being a raced and gendered construct that prevented certain bodies from participating or being seen as legitimate citizens in public political spaces:

I think that when you’re not White and sometimes even female, they will exclude you. Because I see how sometimes they treat Hillary Clinton, and it upsets me. . . . And so I think that’s why there’s this struggle, because we have the White male idea of citizenship, and you’re trying to assimilate all these different groups into what that looks like and we all look different. (Harper interview, 05/23/14)

In this statement, Ms. Harper was directly referring to the racial and gendered ascriptive qualifications of citizenship that prevents racial minorities and women from participating as citizens. She used the example of former Secretary of State and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton to illustrate the inability of women to fully participate in public political spaces. According to Ms. Harper, ascriptive notions of citizenship are still used as barriers to obstruct particular groups from recognition as citizens and participating as legitimate representatives of the U.S. body politic. The second half of Ms. Harper’s statement alludes to the assimilation requirement of citizenship for non-White and nonmale bodies to legitimately participate in public political spaces. However, while individuals can be forced to adopt White male middle-class values, beliefs, and mannerisms, they still are unable to shed their raced and gendered bodies and thus remain in a constant state of otherness and civic estrangement (Tillet, 2012). Because of her personal familiarity with this exclusion from citizenship because of race and gender, Ms. Harper concluded that this was the reason why citizenship differs based on one’s social location and experiences.

Taking the historical body of knowledge of African Americans’ relationship with citizenship coupled with her own experiences, I asked if the construct of citizenship is important to her as both an African American woman and teacher; she replied, “I never thought about it. I’ve never just thought about citizenship . . . because I really don’t care.” She followed this assertion by unapologetically declaring,

And that’s how I see citizenship . . . because we aren’t part of that traditional idea of citizenship. And I kind of want to say to the people in charge, “What did you think?! Like, you excluded us from this for so long as being citizens, so now, you want us to be patriotic?” They need to understand it looks different to us because of what we’ve been through compared to what you’ve been through! (Harper interview, 05/23/14)

African Americans existing in a constant state of “citizen”/“non-citizen” led Ms. Harper to reject the traditional understanding of citizenship, as membership and allegiance to the nation-state, and constructing a different meaning based on her experiences as an African American woman.

It Is All About the Community

Since Ms. Harper taught in a predominately African American school, it was only fitting that she would reject the traditional definition of citizenship and gravitate toward a more inclusive definition that better aligns with the Devine community. The second theme showed that Ms. Harper valued community-centered notions of citizenship that emphasized belonging and the relational aspect of being part of a community, and the importance of citizens actively working to uplift their community. When asked how she would describe her ideal definition of citizenship that supported her experiences and those of their students, she described citizenship that involved people experiencing a sense of belonging to a particular community.

When I look at the dictionary definition of citizenship, I don’t really define it that way myself . . . I don’t really think about that definition too much, and it’s not that big of a deal to me. It’s just like what all that matters to me is what’s happening with the people I’m around. Because to me, I worry about my community and that’s pretty much it. I do get concerned especially because we’re so focused on things at the individual level too much instead of community? (Harper interview, 05/23/14)

Ms. Harper rejected the dominant individualistic notion of citizenship to the nation-state that is privileged in society and taught in schools. This aligned with Spinner’s (1984) argument that traditional liberal citizenship has mostly failed African Americans because it is based on individual rights and actions and does not take into account cultural group membership or historical oppression. For that reason, Ms. Harper preferred to define citizenship at the communal level—because she valued her community. Ms. Harper criticized the notion of citizenship and dominant societal values because it encourages people to adopt individualistic attitudes and dispositions where citizens are ignorant of how individual and structural decisions, actions, and policies affect the community.

From my observations and analysis, it was clear that Ms. Harper’s family and the Devine community played a critical role in how she conceptualized citizenship. She credited her parents for instilling in her the values that she used to guide her perspective of citizenship.

I think it comes a lot from how I was raised by my parents. My dad, for instance, when one of my brother’s closest friend’s mom was a single mom and he had no dad figure in his life, and so my dad took him under his wing. Like, we still helped coach him, helped him get through high school, and college. My dad was that person who always volunteered and coached all of our sports teams too. . . . I think, too, it’s as part of my parents’ profession, and that’s why they’re in the health care industry, is because they really believe in taking care of other people. . . . And also, I’m lucky enough where I know my parents’ neighbors and I know my neighbors, because we kind of look out for each other. It’s just what we do. (Harper interview, 05/19/14)

This sentiment carried over and influenced her belief on citizenship—specifically, the communal notion of citizenship. She mirrored Avoseh’s (2001) framework about citizenship in African societies being premised on a communal view of life and the individual contributing to others in the community. Ms. Harper believed that individualistic notions of citizenship did not align with her experiences or how she interacted with the world and that she preferred to center citizenship in the community and on the citizens’ role to take care of one another.

The kinship relationship between Ms. Harper’s family and her brother’s friend also inspired Ms. Harper’s view on collective child rearing being part of how she conceptualized a communal notion of citizenship. She stated, “Like to me, I’m very into like the collective idea where my kids are your kids” (Harper interview, 05/19/14). While collective child rearing could also be seen as a form of othermothering (Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2005; Dixson & Dingus, 2008), Foster (1993) argued that Black women teachers adopting familial terms in how they viewed their relationships with students is a longstanding practice in African American communities (Collins, 2009). This shared practice of child rearing not only represented a personal relationship but also was deeply political in its intent and practice. Collins (2009) wrote,

By seeing the larger community as responsible for children and by giving othermothers and other nonparents “rights” in child rearing, African Americans challenge prevailing property relations. It is in this sense that traditional bloodmother/othermother relationships in women-centered networks are “revolutionary.” (Collins, 2009, p. 123)

Collective child rearing dispels the mythical norm of a heteronormative family structure and instead recognizes alternative-kin family networks. More importantly, collective child rearing shifts the task of child rearing future citizens away from individuals and instead places this important task to everyone in the community. hooks (1999) claimed that communal parenting is revolutionary in nature because it relies on trusting those in the community and challenges the idea that children are the private property of their parents:

This form of parenting is revolutionary in this society because it takes place in opposition to the ideas that parents, especially mothers, should be the only child rearers. . . . This kind of shared responsibility for childcare can happen in small community settings where people know and trust one another. It cannot happen in those settings if parents regard children as their property. (p. 144)

What is key in hooks’s characterization of this practice is that shared parenting can only take place in a community setting where people know and trust one another. In an increasingly competitive society that promotes rugged individualism guided by the capitalistic structure, these types of shared practices are often devalued or criticized because of the prevailing belief that children are the private property of their parents.

Ms. Harper connected the practice of collective child rearing to her role not only as an educator but more importantly as a citizen of the community. She noted that although Devine had issues like any other school or community, she felt that a majority of the parents, teachers, and administrators embraced this tradition of collective child rearing.

And here . . . I feel like they [the administrators] do try to create this sense of the school that you need to take care of each other. I’ve also noticed that most of the teachers here try to take care of each other, too. . . . I do feel like a lot of the parents are like “that kid is also my kid.” So, I really do like when I talk to parents, I have a sense that they really want all of the kids to do well, and I know a lot of parents that know somebody else’s son or they know me and my brother because we both went to Devine High School. (Harper interview, 05/19/14)

Ms. Harper believed that the practice of collective child rearing was present in the school and surrounding community in the way the teachers, administrators, and parents took care of the students. Thus, collective child rearing became an enactment of communal citizenship and relationships a fundamental component of citizenship. Ms. Harper elaborated and described what collective child rearing and citizenship looked like in her community:

So like for me, an active member of my community doesn’t mean I just vote locally, but actually I go out and I like go to soccer games or I talk to people, you know, not just at my school but I know what’s going on in the community . . . It also means that you know the people in the community . . . and I can communicate with them. (Harper interview, 05/19/14)

Ms. Harper’s understanding of citizenship included being active and participating in the community in addition to building and sustaining relationships with individuals in the community.

In the classroom, mentoring became a primary way for Ms. Harper to build relationships, enact, and model an active and communal notion of citizenship. Several times throughout my observations and encounters with Ms. Harper, I witnessed several informal mentoring moments with students. Students (current, former, and even students who were not in her class) were constantly visiting her classroom, turning in work, asking questions, or seeking advice. When I asked about her mentoring and relationship with students, she simply stated, “I just feel like I’m responsible . . . like if my kids go out in the community and act crazy, I’m responsible for that” (Harper interview, 05/15/14). Not only was she embodying an othermother (Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2005; Collins, 2009; Dixson & Dingus, 2008) but an active citizen and community advocate (Collins, 2009; Gordon, 1985).

Active Community-Centered Citizenship in the Economics Classroom

Collins (2009) wrote that Black women educators oftentimes used their classrooms as spaces to promote African American community development. These educators viewed their roles as uplifters (Harley, 1982) and believed in the importance of teaching the critical knowledge that would unsure their collective survival (Thompson, 1998).

While Collins was discussing the education Black women provided in the context of post-emancipation in the late nineteenth century, I argue that the same can be said of Black women educators in the present day. The final theme indicated that Ms. Harper used her economics class as a space to teach students about the realities of living in a racially stratified society and the importance of deliberately working to uplift their community as active citizens.

The introduction to this article was representative of a discussion I observed in Ms. Harper’s classroom about the reality of being a person of color at a predominantly White university. Ms. Harper later reflected on that conversation and stated the importance of discussing these issues with her students:

So I want to try to teach them that when they step in the classroom you know, I can’t teach you everything. But at least you could say, “well, at least somebody said something to me about this before.” So even if we do watch a video on affirmative action or something and even if you do go to an HBCU, you should still care about the experiences of minorities in these predominately White spaces. (Harper interview, 05/29/14)

As part of her view on communal notions of citizenship (Avoseh, 2001; Knight & Watson, 2014), Ms. Harper hoped to introduce these issues to her students to consider what it means to be a citizen of color in a society. Teaching students about the sociocultural realities of existing as a person of color in predominantly White spaces could be a culture shock for students, and she viewed her decision to have these conversations as a necessary part of their education at DHS. Thompson (1998) argued that African American students need to be taught adult African American knowledge that is true to their everyday realities—not only as an act of caring but also as an act of necessity—for survival. Because Devine was a majority African American community, she felt that her students had been shielded from the reality of racism that occurs in more diverse and predominately White spaces.

And so, I tried to show them that and we have discussions about things like that because I want them to realize that this is not necessarily how’s it going to look in the real world. This is not how the real world looks; that your school isn’t how the real world looks. And so you have to prepare yourself for this. I mean when you go off to school, unless you’re going to an HBCU, your school is not going to look the way Devine looks. And so, I try to have that discussion with them. Some of them get it, some of them don’t, but you know, you try. So, that’s the best I can do is just try to inform them that, hey, this is just a small step in your whole life, and that life doesn’t look necessarily like high school looks. So that’s what I try to do as much as possible. (Harper interview, 05/15/14)

Bartolome (1994) used Freire’s (1987) notion of “political clarity” to refer to the process by which individuals achieve an awareness of the sociopolitical and economic realities that shapes their everyday lives, as well as an understanding of the connections between sociocultural structures and schooling. Ms. Harper understood that once her students were in those racially diverse spaces, they could face the harsh realities of racism and suffer the consequences of lacking the habitus necessary to gain acceptance and succeed in the foreign milieu (Bourdieu, 1994). For those reasons, she made a deliberate effort to engage in these critical discussions with students.

As part of her role as an economics teacher, community advocate (Collins, 2009; Gordon, 1985), and othermother (Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2005; Collins, 2009; Dixson & Dingus, 2008), Ms. Harper taught not only the required economic curriculum needed to graduate high school but how to challenge the racist structure through the acquisition of financial knowledge that would give students and their community access to the culture of power (Delpit, 2006). Brown and De Lissovoy (2011) used economies of racism as a framework to understand the systemic underpinnings of “the embeddedness of race and racism in the material processes of production and exploitation that characterize capitalism” (p. 596). This is helpful to understand how the structure of racism is an ever-present force in society that continues to exploit Black bodies to fuel the capitalistic economic structure. This can be seen in terms of the unequal distribution of wealth in society, lack of financial knowledge and access to loans, and higher interest and mortgage rates given to African Americans.

On some level, Ms. Harper recognized the existence of the economics of racism (Brown & De Lissovoy, 2011) and the lack of access to financial knowledge for minorities:

I teach the importance of investing early on and stuff now because my parents came to investing late. But also there is a big stereotype that African Americans and Latinos don’t invest, which actually is not a stereotype. It’s true and it’s because people don’t have the knowledge themselves or talk to their kids about investing and saving and stuff like that. So, that’s what I try to tell them. I really want them to start thinking about investing at a young age because that’s how you build wealth. Because I always tell them there’s a difference between being rich and being wealthy. Being wealthy means that you have assets that continue to make money and being rich means you just have a bunch of money. I really want them to start investing because there was that stereotype of Black and people of color in general and also like there’s a stereotype that we all poor so we live on social programs. A lot of people of color don’t live on social programs. (Harper interview, 05/19/14)

While Ms. Harper suggested that the American financial structure withholds financial knowledge from minorities and the negative representation of minorities as being financially illiterate, she sought to teach the economic capital needed to be successful and contribute to the community.

And to me, like I know we’re discussing citizenship, but what I want them to understand is that as a responsible citizen, I want them to be able to go out and make a life for themselves and help the community and not have to rely on government assistance, even though there is nothing wrong with that. And here, I just want them to be good people more than anything else . . . But I just want them to understand you can be and do whatever you want, but you have to make sure you take care this side of everything in order to be successful. And that’s kind of how I approach economics and citizenship. (Harper interview, 05/15/14)

Ms. Harper linked acquiring financial knowledge to citizenship in the sense that by having this knowledge, students would be free to live their lives as free citizens and human beings. By possessing this withheld financial and economic knowledge, students would be free from the cycle of poverty that positions the poor and minorities as noncitizens and dependent upon government assistance. Moreover, she believed that having this knowledge would also uplift communities because citizens would be free to contribute to and actively participate in communities.

An example of this deliberate teaching of withheld knowledge demonstrates how she merged economic knowledge and personal experience with a critique of the economic structure for minorities. In her lesson on investing and credit cards, she shared with her students why it was important for them not only to learn about investing but also to share their knowledge with their families:

Ms. Harper had the attention of every student in the classroom when she gave that speech. At the end of class, Lucia asked Ms. Harper if she could email the presentation slides to her so that she could talk to her mother about investing, and Ms. Harper happily obliged. She believed it was important for her students to acquire this crucial knowledge because of societal stereotypes of minorities possessing a lack of financial knowledge.

Ms. Harper also designed a project where students would apply financial knowledge in real-life scenarios. At the beginning of the project, the students were provided with a packet that contained the following information outlining the objectives and instructions for the project:

You are now entering into a finance reality check! The objective is for you to see what it would take to survive in the “real world” in terms of personal finance. Each couple or single will have an assignment card that will indicate your occupations and monthly income (after taxes and insurance). For simplification, everyone has health insurance, lives in a house, and no one has children (yet). You will be required to keep up with your bank balance. Each day you will be presented with decisions to make, and after making these financial choices you will have to input the numbers and track your balance. You also have bills due at specific times during the week. You’ll need to keep up with this and make sure your bills are paid on time . . . Here are some decisions you will have to make: Where do you live? Do you own or rent? If you rent you will need to deduct $100 from your monthly income because your taxes will be higher as you won’t have the income tax advantage of owning . . . . (Harper classroom artifact, 05/15/14)

This unit represented the culminating activity for her senior economics class and was their opportunity to make sense of the knowledge they had learned this semester and apply it to real-life situations. Every day in class, students and their partners choose a “scenario” card that detailed the situation or financial decisions they needed to make that day. Ms. Harper stated that she wanted to write scenarios that represented real-life issues and situations that they needed to learn how to handle. During one class, a group was disappointed with their scenario and credit card statement they had received and the bleak picture this project was painting of the real world:

From the students’ responses and reactions to the scenarios, it was clear that the students had an unrealistic vision of the economic reality adults’ deal within their everyday lives. Ms. Harper hoped to teach students the economic reality of adulthood as a way to prepare them to be able to take care of themselves and their community. While this adult knowledge (Thompson, 1998) of the real world upset quite a few students, she felt it was crucial to prepare students to thrive as citizens in the existing capitalistic structure.

During the student presentations of their project, it was clear that they had taken Ms. Harper’s lessons about economic stability and financial knowledge to heart. At the end of each presentation, Ms. Harper asked students to reflect on what they had learned after completing this project.

Another group echoed a similar sentiment about the importance of saving money and budgeting:

It was clear that Ms. Harper was successful in teaching students the importance of budgeting and personal finance. She believed it was important for students to acquire this critical knowledge because of the inequality minorities face within the capitalist structure. Students also learn that the knowledge learned inside her class is applicable in the outside world.

Although Ms. Harper’s lessons and conversations with students may appear as though she was reinforcing and reproducing the traditional capitalist structure and individualistic notions of personal responsibility and citizenship (Westheimer & Kahne, 2004) and not teaching students to challenge or critique the structure, she was instead doing something far more significant. Ms. Harper was teaching her students the “culture of power” (Delpit, 2006)—how to live in a White-dominant society that had been denied to their community as a result of residential resegregation and discrimination. She not only taught her students the economic knowledge needed to “build wealth” but also spoke about acquiring wealth in conjunction with family members and the community. She encouraged her students to share the knowledge with their families and others not just as a way to build personal wealth, but also as a means to build collective wealth. It could be debated as to whether the actual content of Ms. Harper’s lessons would truly teach students the tools needed to build “wealth” and not just middle-class financial knowledge, but it was obvious that she did use her own economic cultural knowledge, coupled with her experiences, to teach students what she perceived to be knowledge that would allow them to live financially secure lives. Moreover, she continued to reiterate to students the necessity of sharing this financial knowledge with others and the importance of uplifting others to financial security.

Furthermore, Ms. Harper acknowledged the reality of inequities in access to economic capital, wealth, and structural residential segregation by stating that in the wealthy suburbs, “you don’t see many of us [minorities] walking around.” Ms. Harper made students aware of the existence of racial inequities and that racism could take the form of unequal access to economic capital and knowledge to communities of color. She explicitly discussed with students what it meant to be a citizen in a racialized and classed society. Ms. Harper included how the lack of access to economic capital and financial literacy affected their lives and taught students the knowledge to disrupt that cycle in the hopes of uplifting their families and community. Ms. Harper framed her economics lessons through a communal lens and used her personal (and familial) economic cultural knowledge and experiences too as valid sources of knowledge to teach students about the connections between economics, finance, and citizenship.