Civic Education in West Virginia: Guidelines and State Standards in a Case Study

Civic teachers are members of their community and are responsible for preparing their students to be future citizens. West Virginia is one of nine states that requires students to pass a class whose title includes the word civic. All 12th grade students in the state must take a year long civic education course. The goal for the course is offered by the state in published documents. The documents lay out a course that is guided in part by the definition of civic education offered by the National Council for Social Studies (NCSS). West Virginia offers a much broader and deeper extrapolation of the goals through its Content Standards and Objectives for 12th grade civic education and the state documents are operationalized by a teacher in the state. This paper explores the definitions of and relationships between documents that govern and define civic education along with practice of a classroom teacher.;From working with a classroom teacher, it became increasingly clear that an additional issue in civic education is the cognitive level that the state and the teacher believe are critical to civic education. The state documents categorized its objectives along the Taxonomy of educational objectives: Handbook I, the cognitive domain (Bloom, et al., 1956). This Taxonomy is a widely recognized and used device by which educators can understand and plan the cognitive levels of lessons. This paper explores the practice of using Bloom\u27s Taxonomy in civic education, the appropriate use of the Taxonomy, and the use of the Taxonomy by a classroom teacher. The researcher concluded that the Taxonomy continues to be a relevant tool for planning and shapes the way that teachers and the state think about the goal of civic education