Gender and Civic Education

This chapter discusses findings from research conducted in the United States on gender differences in civic learning and gender and the social studies curriculum. Additionally, I discuss implications of feminist theory and recent research for needed changes in classroom practice and social studies research. I have argued elsewhere that “despite the centrality of citizenship education to social studies and of gender to human experience, almost no research on gender and political learning has been reported in the social studies literature” (Hahn, 1996, p. 8). That situation has improved slightly in recent years. However, teachers, curriculum developers, and teacher educators still pay too little atten­ tion to the implications of the new scholarship for social studies practice. Fur­thermore, there remains much that we do not know, which requires future re­ searchers’ attention.