Strategic Initiatives

Initiative on Civic Learning and Civic Action

The Spencer Foundation announces a grants program to support research about how and why individuals and groups become committed to civic action. We call this program of work the Initiative on Civic Learning and Civic Action to highlight our keen interest in learning and action and in the relationships between them. We begin with the assumption that civic action matters for citizenship and for strong institutions and nations. It yields benefits for individuals and groups, who by their actions have their interests and those of their communities represented. But it also yields benefits for society, which stands to gain from the voices, commitments, insights, and participation of diverse communities of individuals.

What compels civic action? We know much more about how to teach civic knowledge and skills than we do about the connections between actions and learning. Teaching civic knowledge and skills may well be crucial for developing good civic actors, but learning about them is not the central concern of this program. In this initiative we focus on action, and on the capacities, circumstances, and contexts that trigger action.

Through the Initiative on Civic Learning and Civic Action we also signal our concern about troubling patterns of civic involvement. Although there are reports that certain forms of youth civic action are on the upswing, there also is evidence of a growing civic divide. Youth who lack opportunities and advantages in ways relevant to other educational outcomes also are vulnerable here. Marginalized youth who do not participate may not have their interests fully served by civic organizations and communities. Societies lose, too, when voices across communities are unrepresented in dialogue and debate. At the same time, we recognize that current definitions of civic action may not capture all forms of involvement or the efforts of those outside mainstream institutions. The initiative will take a comprehensive view of the forms of civic action and of communities of actors. Thus, although our interest in civic action is not limited to non-college-bound youth or to youth who are marginalized in various ways, we do make special note of our interest in these populations.

The Foundation is prepared to invest in research and other activities in this initiative for a significant period of time, if interim assessments of progress are promising. We anticipate typical research grants will range from less than $40,000 to $350,000, extending over periods of one to four years or more. We know that the challenges to moving forward in this area will require the commitment of researchers from many disciplines, and will involve a range of methods and techniques. Thus, we expect to build a portfolio of studies that includes researchers from multiple disciplines, sometimes working together, and methods that range from historical and case studies, to quasi-experimental designs, experiments, secondary analyses of existing datasets, and the like. We also see this as a fertile arena for comparative and international work. Complementary activities, including conferences, grantee meetings, working groups, and other methods to learn from one another and to push the agenda forward also are encouraged.

Through these efforts, we intend to build a knowledge base that will advance understanding, build theory, and contribute to the work of practitioners and policy-makers. In addition, we hope that attention to civic outcomes will become more central to the aims and goals of public institutions that traditionally have been charged with civic education, especially public schools. Although virtually all state constitutions describe their warrants as including civic goals, recent trends have favored other school subjects, especially those measured by high-stakes testing programs. Community organizations, political parties, and many other groups also have an interest in developing commitments among youth for civic action. The initiative aims to advance the work of all of these groups by producing the kinds of information that can lead to better-designed, more effective programs, practices, and policies.

What we mean by Civic Learning and Civic Action

When we talk about civic learning we are talking about learning and development that relate to the likelihood of action. This initiative’s focus on civic learning and civic action is distinguished from research supported by other funding organizations that asks how individuals and members of groups can learn civic knowledge and skills. By framing our interests in this way, we do not discount the importance of civic knowledge and civic skills. There is a good and growing body of work on that topic. Rather, the Spencer Foundation initiative emphasizes the learning experiences that bridge capacity, circumstances, and context with action. The civic learning that is central to our interests addresses questions about whether and how schools and other settings where learning occurs can encourage civic activity, in both the short- and long-term. Our focus is intended to encourage and support research that we view as critically important but is less well-funded.

Similarly, we broadly frame the issues and outcomes that we recognize as civic action: voting; working together to solve a school or neighborhood problem; participating in an organization aimed at a broader social goal; writing to a newspaper or on a blog about an issue; boycotting or buycotting; producing art with social themes, such as neighborhood murals, radio productions, or poetry readings; using the internet to rally people around various causes; choosing a career for its civic mission, or creating community gardens or green spaces. We seek to understand the developmental pathways to greater adult participation, but we are equally interested in how and why young people participate at different ages and in different contexts.

We are also deeply interested in issues of both quality and equality. We seek a more complex outcome than simply greater numbers of participants. All civic action is not equally valuable, some is not valuable at all, and how valuable particular instances of civic action are may be dependent on the context.

We are concerned with the aims of participation, the quality of deliberation and commitment, and what explains the emergence of better rather than worse forms of civic action. Similarly, we highlight issues of equality. Of special importance are improved understandings of the avenues for and impediments to civic learning and civic action among young people who do not attend college, who reside in marginalized communities, who are members of racial and ethnic groups, who are recent immigrants, or who are less economically privileged.

Research Priorities: Three Sets of Influences

We aim to address challenges that we believe are at the core of understanding civic learning and action. Our questions, while framed broadly enough to encompass a range of approaches and research questions, ultimately come down to understanding action and the factors that promote or encourage it, as well as those that constrain or discourage it. Our long-term goal is to support the accumulation of knowledge that will lead to concrete policies and practices that will support civic learning and action.

Working toward these goals, we aim to advance research that identifies

1. powerful motivations and psychological processes,
2. aspects of enabling learning experiences and environments, and
3. societal or group norms, political processes or events, historical and cultural trends, and other contextual influences on individual and group action.

These three sets of influences frame our perspectives for supporting studies that explore the learning and action connections. We are particularly interested in research that seeks to answer the following types of questions:

• Questions about the development and influence of civic motivations and other psychological processes, such as a sense of social responsibility, civic agency and identity, and the like. How and why do these develop and change? What role do they play in influencing civic action?
• Questions about the influence of learning experiences and environments. What kinds of environments and experiences within them are especially conducive to civic learning and to developing a commitment to civic action?
• Questions about the role of societal or group norms, political processes like elections, unique unifying events (like 9/11 or the Columbine shootings), national or local policies, and other potential historical or contextual factors. How are individuals and groups impacted by the times and contexts in which they live?

Here we elaborate how we see these three sets of influences fitting into the broader focus on civic action.

Motivation and Other Psychological Processes

Because the role of motivation in civic action may be critical for some participants yet is often neglected by current research, we are particularly interested in work that helps us to understand how the kinds of motivations that can inspire civic action develop and operate. We use the broad term motivation to encompass ideas that might range from having a strong sense of social responsibility to wanting to join friendship networks in common activities, to being angry at a proposed or actual change in one's environment, and so on. That is, we do not presuppose that motivations are necessarily beneficent, "civic," or long-lasting. We know from other research that many people's first experience with civic action occurs because someone asks them to participate or because they are required to do so in school, church, or elsewhere. We do wonder how these initial experiences with civic action motivate subsequent engagement or action, and so we are interested in values and motivations that incite initial action, how those values or motivations change or develop over time, and whether they influence subsequent behavior.

There are other psychological processes that might be implicated in civic action, and we will encourage research on those as well, but here we introduce two that we see as potentially important: identity and agency. We focus on these because they have been implicated in theories of action around civic engagement, but have not been extensively studied in this context. We highlight identity because we suspect it is key to understanding both the impetus towards action and the target of that action. We see two particularly salient dimensions to identity as it relates to civic action: with whom or what one identifies and the extent to which civic actor, in the sense of a generalized concern for the general welfare, is a firmly embedded aspect of self-identity.

The first dimension of the problem relates to the notion of citizenship: what is the strength of an individual's sense of belonging, loyalty, and commitment to groups (including ethnic groups, the nation, or the neighborhood)? What enters into the identity of citizen? Do multiple identities create complications for civic behavior or do they enrich it? What are the expectations for behavior of those identity groups? What groups do individuals see themselves belonging to and what responsibilities do they feel towards those groups? From the perspective of motivating action, how can individuals' senses of membership and responsibility, and commitment to public affairs be reinforced or cultivated? A second central aspect of identity relates to the sense of oneself as connected to a set of goals or missions. In what ways do people come to see themselves as the kind of person who participates in civic life? How do individuals internalize a sense of civic purpose and concern for the public good? What are obstacles to acting on those commitments?

Connected to issues of identity are issues of agency. We use the term civic agency to refer loosely to a set of ideas about one's ability to act in and on the world in ways that relate to civic purposes. That is, we use it here to capture the idea, sometimes called political or civic efficacy, that individually or as part of a group, individuals feel they have the ability to impact their environments and have a predisposition to see opportunities to make a contribution.

Enabling Learning Experiences and Environments

A second key theme concerns what we are calling enabling environments. This area draws attention to social and environmental factors that either facilitate or diminish learning opportunities around civic action. Among the factors included here are instructional practices, curriculum or access to information, norms, policies, rules and expectations, tools (the internet, for example), and the like, that are associated with families, schools and classrooms, religious organizations, neighborhood and friendship groups, and so on. We include here the formal structures and materials, but also organizational features such as the extent to which classrooms are organized to promote democratic deliberation, or the degree to which mechanisms exist for students to influence class decisions. We are also aware that structures and organization can sometimes convey messages that conflict with the formal curriculum of the school. For example, regulations and disciplinary policies around issues like adherence to pledge of allegiance policies, or rules about what messages and slogans are allowed on students' clothing may conflict with formal lessons about freedom of speech and the right to dissent.

Recent studies testify to schools’ potential to advance civic and political development.¹ For example, the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) Civic Engagement Study of 14-year-olds in 28 countries found that several curricular features are associated with civic outcomes that include interest in politics and a range of civic and political commitments or values. Keeter et al. (2002) and Verba et al. (1995) conducted large-scale surveys of high school students and find that students who report having particular experiences (e.g., debating issues in class, being taught civic skills, undertaking service learning) are more likely to also report being committed to and involved in various forms of civic and political action. Kahne and Sporte's (2008) more recent work finds that civic learning opportunities are strongly related to the development of high school students' civic commitments. We intend to build upon these studies and other strong work that investigates more deeply the relationships of curricular and instructional practices and the development of students' civic dispositions and actions. We are especially interested in two extensions of this work: (1) the mechanisms or processes linking the civic learning opportunities to the outcomes; and (2) the extent to which these influence the likelihood of longer-term or recurring civic action.

Some families, religious organizations, youth groups, classrooms, and other groups that young people formally or informally belong to offer more opportunities to develop and exercise skills, develop habits and motivations, and be actively involved than do others. Skocpol, Putnam, Verba, Scholzman, Brady, and others,² for example, have reported relationships between various forms of religious participation and civic action. We want to know more about the kinds of skills and dispositions that are developed in religious institutions as well as in other organizations in which youth are involved, how these opportunities are distributed, what environmental factors enable civic learning and action, and which inhibit these. Again, our interests include going beyond correlations to include both mechanisms and connections of such participation to longer-term or recurring civic action.

Contextual Influences on Individual or Group Actions

The third set of factors that we identify attends to contextual influences on individual and group actions. Here, we include a loose collection of societal or group norms; isolated or recurrent political, national, local, or other experiences (for example, elections and other cyclical political events, tragedies like 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina, as well as ongoing but historically-distinct events such as the Iraq war); and policies that might indirectly influence the likelihood of civic action (as the GI Bill did for those who benefited from it).³ We know that specific personal qualities may predispose some people to be more likely than others to take civic action. Others may be less disposed to take action. The factors that we include under this theme may serve as triggers for both groups. For example, the Obama candidacy is being heralded as a mobilizing moment for a new generation of voters, for young people, and for groups that have felt disenfranchised. The Obama campaign likely appeals to individuals who would be involved in the presidential election because of psychological factors or prior experiences anyway, at the same time that it involves those who are being mobilized specifically by the appeal of the Obama candidacy. Thus, we recognize that the path to civic action is not necessarily via the psychological processes introduced earlier (although values, motivations, skills, knowledge, and dispositions may change as a result of involvement and we want to know when this occurs, and how). Context matters, too.

Developing a research agenda: What are we Looking for?

Within the substantive framing described above, we have identified several other priorities that we seek to build into the funding strategy. These include:

• Appealing to a broad range of disciplinary scholars, including those who have done work in this area and those outside the field who might contribute to the developing initiative. We see a role for sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, historians, philosophers, political scientists, education scholars, and others.
• Encouraging teams that combine investigators conducting research from different disciplinary perspectives, researchers and practitioners, community organizers, youth, and other combinations of relevant actors and stakeholders.
• Supporting research that reflects a range of research designs, methodologies and theoretical perspectives.
• Because so much previous work has been descriptive or correlational, we are particularly interested in work that takes a developmental or longitudinal view as well as experimental and quasi-experimental studies.
• Developing and encouraging international and comparative work.
• Investing in infrastructure and field-building activities, such as the development and use of datasets that are nationally representative or longitudinal or the development of new tools and measures.
• Creating networking and mentoring opportunities for early-career scholars.
• Supporting research on the role and relevance of nonschool learning environments (such as neighborhoods, religious institutions, after-school programs, community organizations, family) in civic development.
• Building a portfolio that encompasses research on ages ranging from childhood through at least age 30 (reflecting the extension of adolescence and early adult transitions into later years).
• Paying attention to populations that have been neglected in much research in this area, including non-college-bound youth, less economically privileged youth, diverse racial and ethnic groups, immigrants, etc. We are aware that individuals are members of social groups, some privileged and some excluded. We are interested to learn how action is influenced by the group context (through differing group norms, access to different peers, etc.) or the extent to which individuals social ties bridge these groupings.
• Recognizing that civic participation may differ for people of different ages, for different groups of individuals, and in different historical moments, and explicitly seeking work that is sensitive to this.

Potential Contributions to Educational Improvement

The ultimate aim of the Initiative is to contribute to educational improvement. Here we provide a partial list of applications to education that might emerge as a result of knowledge built through the initiative.

• Guidance about the kinds of instructional practices and learning experiences that influence the civic participation of young people both now and in the future (including school and classroom instruction or activities, after-school and recreational involvements, and community-based learning experiences such as public-work experiences, community service or service learning that are specifically designed with civic participation and agency in mind).
• Suggestions for the kind and sequencing of college coursework that will increase the likelihood that students will participate actively in civic life.
• Instruction about the nature and organization of extracurricular activities at both the K-12 and higher education levels, if one goal of those experiences is to foster a set of personal qualities important for developing involved citizens.
• A better understanding of the kinds of opportunities that can be provided for non-college-bound youth, marginalized youth, and other populations without access to opportunities to learn and participate in civic action, to enable their full participation in civic life.
• Suggestions for how community, political, religious, and civic organizations can draw upon and further develop the diverse commitments and forms of participation of young people of all backgrounds.
• Guidance on ways in which new media, technology, online social networking, and the like, could be used to develop or provide opportunities for civic learning and engagement.
• Information about the role of national, state, or district policy on teacher preparation, curricula and other instructional materials, testing programs, and student outcomes over time.
• By focusing attention on the civic mission of schools and other educational and community institutions, increasing the priority of civic learning among relevant stakeholders.

Small Grants: Guidelines for submitting a proposal with a budget of $40,000 or less.

Major Grants: Guidelines for submitting a proposal with a budget of more than $40,000.