ABSTRACT
This chapter considers one attempt to bring critical analyses of historical, political, economic, and social context into a design-based project that attempted to improve social studies learning. It describes how each aspect of “Teaching for Civic Learning in Diverse Social Studies Classrooms,” a design-based research (DBR) project, was shaped by and benefited from a critically theorized understanding of context. The critical theorizations of context are absent from much of mainstream DBR, including DBR in social studies. The research aspect of the DBR project took a qualitative approach rooted in interpretive, critical sociocultural perspectives. Civic action research, in this DBR project, facilitated the connection between the curriculum and students’ lives and also laid bare the complexities of making such connections. This DBR project dramatized how fundamentally civic identity development is embedded within particular historical, political, and economic contexts. Creating an intervention attentive to those dimensions of context both enabled and complicated meaningful civic learning.
