Educating for Social Justice: A Case for Teaching Civil Disobedience in Preparing Students to be Effective Activists. A Response to “Justice Citizens, Active Citizenship, and Critical Pedagogy: Reinvigorating Citizenship Education”

Heggert and Flowers (2019) offer important insights into how social media provides students with important opportunities to engage in meaningful civic engagement and political activism. They argue that students are more politically active than some recent studies would have us believe because they are utilizing social media platforms, methods not accounted for by traditional measures. They further argue that if students are to alter the foundational causes of injustice, educators should adopt a critical pedagogical framework in teaching students to use social media as a means of becoming activists. I agree with the authors’ main arguments but take issue with their suggestion that activism should be separated from notions of disobedience. On the contrary, I argue that activism that has as its fundamental goal to get at the roots of injustice must include civil disobedience. Educating for social justice, then, ought to include teaching students the history, theory, and techniques of civil disobedience