Civic Learning and Civic Action
Initiative on Civic Learning and Civic Action (CLCA) Makes Five New Grants
The CLCA initiative has funded five new grants, bringing the total number of grants made under this initiative to twelve. The new grants are described below. These research studies contribute to a growing portfolio that addresses key CLCA priorities. Represented here are two projects that explore the outside-of-school contextual factors that influence civic behavior, including the role of organizations and local history (Cunningham, and Nie and Roy); as well as three studies of curricula focused explicitly on producing changes in civic learning and civic action (Freedman, Kirshner et al., and Seidman). Together, the five projects contribute to an Initiative portfolio that represents an array of interests, methodologies, and disciplinary perspectives.
Please click on a grantee and scroll down to view details of the grant.
David Cunningham
Truth and Reconciliation as Civic Learning: Racial Contention and Contemporary Civic Action in Mississippi, Brandeis University.
Sarah Warshauer Freedman
The Development of Ethical Civic Actors in the Face of Identity-Group Conflicts: Inside Secondary Schools in the United States, South Africa, and Northern Ireland, University of California, Berkeley.
Ben Kirshner, Shelley Zion, and Carlos Hipolito-Delgado
Civic Learning and Action among Non-College Bound Youth: A Design-Based Study, University of Colorado at Boulder, University of Colorado at Denver, California State University at Long Beach.
Norman Nie and Nandini Roy
Civic Networks and Collective Action at the Neighborhood Level, Stanford University.
Scott Seider
Investigating the Impact of Ethical Philosophy Upon the Civic Identity and Actions of Urban Adolescents, Boston University.
David Cunningham
Truth and Reconciliation as Civic Learning: Racial Contention and Contemporary Civic Action in Mississippi
Brandeis University
Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs) are group efforts in which participants confront historic and divisive group-related patterns of behavior or events with an aim towards overcoming differences and promoting mutual respect. As such, they can be occasions for civic learning and civic action. But little is known about the role that TRCs play in building civic capacity or inviting civic action. What kinds of people are attracted to participate? How do they get involved and what is the nature of their involvement? How do both individual factors and community history and context influence the TRC and the people who become active in it? Does the presence of a civil rights-centered curriculum influence young people’s engagement in the TRC?
Cunningham will address these questions by focusing on a new TRC initiative: The Mississippi Truth Project (MTP). The MTP is a state-wide commission formed to examine Mississippi’s history of systemic racial injustice. Cunningham will collect multiple forms of data, including observation at MTP meetings, interviews with meeting attendees, commission volunteers, and official statement-givers, interviews with students from public schools in counties that have recently adopted educational initiatives focused on civil rights history, as well as students from counties with no such initiatives, and data that identify the levels of past civil rights involvement and organized white vigilante activity in each county. Analyses will focus on how local county history and individual experience, in combination with MTP recruitment activities, regional MTP organization and meeting activities and, for youth, exposure to civil rights curricular materials, influence the involvement of individuals in the MTP.
Sarah Warshauer Freedman
The Development of Ethical Civic Actors in the Face of Identity-Group Conflicts: Inside Secondary Schools in the United States, South Africa, and Northern Ireland
University of California, Berkeley
Freedman and co-project director Karen Murphy of Facing History and Ourselves will explore the processes by which young people develop as civic actors when, over time, the young people study identity-group conflicts and then engage in civic action. Of particular interest are students' experiences with violence and conflict, and how those experiences affect their development as civic actors. The study is situated in high school social studies classes in three parts of the world where the Facing History and Ourselves curriculum is taught –the United States, South Africa, and Northern Ireland. As the program materials describe it, Facing History and Ourselves “is an international educational and professional development organization whose mission is to engage students of diverse backgrounds in an examination of racism, prejudice, and anti-Semitism in order to promote the development of a more humane and informed citizenry.” Freedman and Murphy see the Facing History curriculum as a particularly promising “tool” for developing students’ senses of civic responsibility and engaging them in civic actions. The curriculum is relatively constant across the three locales and so allows the research team to explore differences and similarities in how cultural and historical contexts relate to the development of civic responsibility for civic action.
This is a study in two parts. The central activity of the project is a qualitative investigation of a class of 20-30 diverse students in each locale. Students will be followed across two years of secondary schooling, with data to include classroom observations, student and teacher focus groups, teachers’ logs, and students’ work. The case studies will help answer two sets of research questions: (1) How does a class of students in Facing History classrooms in Northern Ireland, South Africa, and the United States, where different identity groups come together, develop their awareness and understandings of local, national, and global civic issues? (2) In each locale, what is the role of identity-group conflict in students' developing understandings and in their stance toward action? For the second part of the study and to complement the qualitative data, in each country survey data will be collected from a larger sample of Facing History teachers and their students to answer questions about classroom teaching and student learning as well as students’ movement toward action. The teachers' surveys will assess their perceptions of their knowledge and skills for promoting students’ civic learning. The students’ surveys will provide data on their understandings about civic responsibility, civic participation, and tolerance of others.
Ben Kirshner, Shelley Zion, and Carlos Hipolito-Delgado
Civic Learning and Action among Non-College Bound Youth: A Design-Based Study
University of Colorado at Boulder, University of Colorado at Denver, California State University at Long Beach
This study of critical civic inquiry (CCI) projects in three public high schools responds to the lack of information about how youth who are at risk for dropout or not on a college track might develop into powerful civic actors. Further, this study addresses the need for research examining the school conditions that support and encourage student engagement and voice. The study revolves around CCI projects, in which students, as part of a specialized course on civic inquiry, reflect on their school experiences, identify a problem, investigate it systematically, and, together with school personnel, devise strategies to solve it.
Through a combination of qualitative and quantitative data collected over three years, the study will assess individual and school-level change. Individual outcomes of interest include civic identity and efficacy, academic engagement and academic self-efficacy, ethnic identity, and the development of civic skills, such as public speaking and group decision-making. School-level conditions that will be assessed include beliefs about student voice held by school personnel and changes in formal opportunities for student participation, such as student government, peer mediation, student roles on hiring committees, or continued student action research.
Norman Nie and Nandini Roy
Civic Networks and Collective Action at the Neighborhood Level
Stanford University
Nie and Roy ask the intriguing question: Does the quality and structure of networks of neighborhood civic organizations influence the scope and character of local collective action? The PIs seek to better understand how the ties between organizations, not just the activities of the individual organizations themselves, structure the kind and degree of local civic action. Characteristics of networks have potential positive as well as negative effects. For example, neighborhoods with better communication and links between relevant civic institutions may be better able to mobilize around community issues, involving community members more efficiently and effectively, partly because the cross-cutting networks increase communal solidarity and reduce inter-group conflict. Or, to illustrate a potential negative consequence, networks with more organizations that rely on volunteers may be weaker, if the organizations are competing for limited volunteers to accomplish their individual goals. In addition to better understanding how characteristics of the networks might influence outcomes, Nie and Roy seek to understand why the networks are the way they are in the first place. Do factors like the age, size, goal, or sphere of operation of organizations influence their participation in networks with other civic groups?
Data for the project will be collected in San Francisco. San Francisco is a city with very distinct neighborhood areas, making it more likely that between-neighborhood variation in civic networks will be found. A directory of civic associations has been created by neighborhood, and each will receive a survey asking about key characteristics of the organization, as well as the organization’s relationships with other civic organizations in the neighborhood and city, now and five years ago. Data on neighborhood collective action will be collected from online newspaper archives. Social network analysis will be used to measure the structural characteristics of the networks, which can then be linked to aspects of neighborhood civic action.
Scott Seider
Investigating the Impact of Ethical Philosophy Upon the Civic Identity and Actions of Urban Adolescents
Boston University
Seider will study an urban charter school serving a primarily low-income student population that includes in its mission developing students who have a sense of civic identity and social responsibility. The school has a strong ethical philosophy curriculum that challenges students to reflect upon their roles and responsibilities, both to the school and to other citizens of their city. This study will probe whether and how the curriculum achieves its desired ends. Seider seeks to answer a very focused set of questions linked to very specific outcomes. This approach should provide more targeted information about the utility of a curriculum that focuses on the civic learning and civic action effects of coursework that includes ethical philosophy.
Data will include pre- and post-test surveys of 150 of the charter-school students and 150 control students not attending the charter school at the beginning and the end of the 2010 2011 school year. Interviews will be conducted with 30 charter-school students (10 each in seventh, eighth, and ninth grades) and 10 non-charter-school students. Both the surveys and the interviews will focus on students’ civic beliefs, values, and actions. Parents and advisory teachers will also be interviewed about students’ civic behaviors, and any changes they have noticed over the course of the year. Finally, classes will be observed, with particular attention to the topics of conversation, and the contributions of students to the discussions.
Click here for a complete list of all CLCA research grants.