Civic Learning and Civic Action
Initiative on Civic Learning and Civic Action Research Grants
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2010 | 2009 | 2008
2010 Grantee List
David Cunningham | Truth and Reconciliation as Civic Learning: Racial Contention and Contemporary Civic Action in Mississippi.
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.
Ben Kirshner, Shelley Zion, and Carlos Hipolito-Delgado | Civic Learning and Action among Non-College Bound Youth: A Design-Based Study.
Scott Seider | Investigating the Impact of Ethical Philosophy Upon the Civic Identity and Actions of Urban Adolescents.
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
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
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.
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.
2009 Grantee List
Amy J. Binder | Marginalized on Campus? A Study of Conservative Students on Two ‘Notoriously Liberal’ Universities
William Damon | Civic Identity and Participation among Diverse Populations of American Youth
Kate Eichhorn | Felt change: The Affective Dimension of Civic Action
Sarah A. Elwood and Katharyne W. Mitchell | Mapping Youth Journeys: From Place-Based Learning to Active Citizenship
Carol Hahn | Engaging Transnational Citizens: A Comparative Study of Civic Teaching and Learning for Civic Action
Paul Lichterman and Nina Eliasoph | Paid Civic Engagement: Young Interns in the Age of the Nonprofit
Doug McAdam | Civic Engagement among Disadvantaged Youth: How Does School Context Matter?
Krista M. Perriera | Southern Immigrant Civic Adaptation Study
Robert D. Putnam and Bruce Western | Inequality and Youth Civic Participation
Amy J. Binder
Marginalized on Campus? A Study of Conservative Students on Two ‘Notoriously Liberal’ Universities
University of California, San Diego
Binder’s study will examine the identities and political practices of conservative students on two college campuses. The study responds in part to critics who accuse predominantly liberal college faculty of creating environments that are hostile to conservative students. In this project Binder will pose questions about conservative students on campus: Who are they? How do their identity and their political practices relate to their history and background, to their experiences on campus, and to their future career aspirations? How are they involved in formal and informal college groups? Do their college affiliations and activities translate into leadership roles and civic action after they leave their institutions? On the institutional side, how do universities reproduce particular kinds of conservative action from cohort to cohort, while making others less likely to emerge or take hold?
The investigation will be conducted on two college campuses that differ along several dimensions (including geographic region, public/private, selectivity, proximity to Washington DC), but are each held up as liberal leaning by conservative writers and politicians. In-depth interviews will form the core data of the study, which will be supplemented by internet and media sources and survey research on students’ political attitudes.
William Damon
Civic Identity and Participation among Diverse Populations of American Youth
Stanford University
Damon will conduct a pilot study aimed at understanding the interconnections between civic identity and civic participation among American youth. Of particular interest are marginalized populations of young people who feel that they may not have realistic prospects for full U.S. citizenship. This project will provide the foundation for a subsequent major study that will examine questions that derive from its focus on civic identity and purpose, including (1) Do young people who are politically engaged differ from those who are engaged in other community activities, and from those who are wholly unengaged? (2) How are such differences reflected within and across diverse populations of youth, especially with regard to disadvantaged youth and recent immigrants? (3) What role does knowledge of the American democratic tradition play in shaping civic identity and purpose among young people in the U.S.? (4) How do attitudes regarding American citizenship differ among populations of young people who may consider themselves marginalized – and, relatedly, what is the relationship between identity as a prospective American citizen and aspects of identity that derive from ethnicity, place of birth, religious affiliation, and socio-economic background? The pilot research phase will be devoted to assembling a methodology able to answer the questions the large-scale study will be designed to investigate, including choosing the specific populations for the major study sample and selecting and refining measures of youth civic identity, civic action, and understanding of the American democratic tradition.
Kate Eichhorn
Felt change: The Affective Dimension of Civic Action
The New School
Eichhorn’s project focuses on the affective dimensions of civic action. While positive affects, such as hope, are often recognized as factors promoting social change, this project is especially concerned with the depathologization of negative affects. Be it the public grief and outrage felt in the wake of Hurricane Katrina or the national shame felt in the face of the Abu Ghraib prison incident, it has become increasingly difficult to ignore how feelings, interpretation and social activism are inextricably linked.
This project will involve a team of undergraduate and graduate student researchers, each with a history of active civic engagement. The research will include focus groups and interviews with students currently engaged in activism as well as students who lack the motivation to become engaged. The student researchers will also be interviewed (and interview each other) as a form of self-assessment throughout the project. Integral to the project is the development of experimental research models. Working in collaboration with several artist-consultants and cultural activists, the research team will present part of their final research findings in the form of a performance or exhibit. Eichhorn will draw on all of these research phases to probe the core questions in this project, which have great relevance for better understanding how affect might be involved in prompting and sustaining social action both in and beyond the campus.
Sarah A. Elwood and Katharyne W. Mitchell
Mapping Youth Journeys: From Place-Based Learning to Active Citizenship
University of Washington
Elwood and Mitchell’s study focuses on out-of-school programs, particularly on an after-school program developed for YMCAs catering to students from low-income families. The action research project addresses questions central to the CLCA Initiative: What experiences and meaning-making lead young people to become civic agents? How does an understanding and analysis of community space and social interactions within it (and problems and inequalities) help young people commit to civic action, and to share their commitments and insights with others? In this study, young people travel around their own communities to map their spaces and their own and other peoples’ interactions with each other. By sharing analyses of those maps, they will identify local needs and processes, and from there design and participate in a civic activity.
The research plan captures these processes, examining them through the extended case method approach. Working sessions with youth will be observed, in which the young people use the mapping software to create their “journey-maps” and discuss the implications of their findings. Field journals will be kept, recording observations of the young people, how they interact with each other, and evidence of civic learning and civic action. Finally, the journey-maps themselves will provide insights into the young people’s interpretation of their space, and chronicle the development of their civic awareness.
Engaging Transnational Citizens: A Comparative Study of Civic Teaching and Learning for Civic Action Emory University
Hahn will conduct a comparative case study of civic education in secondary schools serving large refugee populations in Denmark, England, Germany, and the Netherlands. The study will address how different national contexts grant and think about citizenship, what rights and responsibilities are involved, and how civic education aligns with national goals for civic dispositions and civic actions. Given both the advent of the European Union and globalization more broadly, what does it mean to be a citizen in a country whose residents have diverse national backgrounds? How do the four countries cope with questions of diversity and inclusion? In what ways do curriculum and pedagogy reflect conceptions of the dispositions and behaviors expected of citizens? And finally, how do teachers and students conceive of themselves and others as citizens?
Hahn will choose five or six secondary schools in each country and create case studies from teacher interviews, classroom and school observations, student focus groups, and document analysis. The case studies will provide comparative data about citizenship education, and especially the practices being used in different contexts. In addition, because the study will include both immigrant and native-born students, Hahn will identify differences in the ways in which these two groups are treated, both within and between countries.
Paul Lichterman and Nina Eliasoph
Paid Civic Engagement: Young Interns in the Age of the Nonprofit
University of Southern California.
Lichterman and Eliasoph have identified an important, but rarely studied form of civic action, the paid internship in a hybrid organization funded primarily through grants. These organizations, and the paid interns employed by them, provide the kinds of community organizing that has traditionally been performed by volunteer civic associations – mobilizing others, organizing protests, etc. Yet the students and others involved are employees hired to perform a set of job-related activities. How, then, does this paid position influence their socialization into the world of civic action? Is their behavior different or similar to the kinds of volunteer activities that it resembles? How do they think about their relationship to the practices that they enact, particularly with respect to their identification of activities in the political, public, and private realms?
The PIs will conduct an ethnographic study of paid internships in two civic arenas, a citywide housing campaign and an environmental land trust association. Each of these cause organizations relies on paid interns, who tend to be 18 to 28 years old. These interns will be followed and observed as they interact with each other, the elders in their organization, and the community. In addition, interviews with 32 interns will focus on how social background and education influence the ways in which interns interact with and make sense of their civic involvements. The goal here is to identify the everyday practices in hybrid civic organizations that contribute to civic learning, and to better understand the form and content of that learning.
Doug McAdam
Civic Engagement among Disadvantaged Youth: How Does School Context Matter?
Stanford University
McAdam’s project focuses on the effects on civic learning and civic action of attending charter and voucher schools, with particular attention to the influence of these schools on the civic participation of youth from low-income families. McAdam’s focus is on process: What aspects of schools influence students’ senses of civic agency? What kinds of involvements are most productive of civic identity and civic action? In the first of two studies McAdam will analyze ten years of data from 1300 applicants now in grades six through ten who applied for a court-ordered random-assignment transfer from their school district serving lower-income children of color to a neighboring high-income, predominantly white district. Random assignment provides a unique opportunity to compare students who applied but were not able to attend with those who were accepted. Potential school mechanisms and non-school factors will be assessed through interviews and surveys.
The second project will be the development of four case studies of charter schools, each of which includes as part of its mission a civic component. Documentation about the institutional mission of each school, surveys aimed at assessing students’ civic attitudes and behaviors, and in-depth interviews with students, school administrators, and teachers will examine the organizational culture and processes, and how these influence students’ senses of agency, attitudes about civic participation, and civic action.
Krista M. Perriera
Southern Immigrant Civic Adaptation Study
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Perreira’s award supports a follow-up survey of 238 immigrant students originally contacted in 2006-07. In both 2006-07 (when the participants were 9th graders), and in 2007-08, these Latino young people provided a range of information about their academic experiences and adaptation in the U.S. In the second survey they were also asked about their civic engagements. In 2009-10 those students still in school entered 12th grade. The focus of interviews in the current study will be on academic experiences, civic engagement, and future plans. These data will be merged with academic transcript data, and data about the school and community (from the Department of Public Instruction and the Census). In addition, Perreira will conduct in-depth follow-up interviews with 18 first-generation Latino youth who also were interviewed initially in 2006-07.
These three waves of data will be used to address three aims: (1) to identify how the civic engagement of Latino youth in 10th grade varies by psychosocial factors (e.g., gender, immigrant generation, strength and centrality of ethnic identifications, family identification, school/college orientations, and work orientations) and assess the inter-relationship between academic and civic engagement, (2) to examine how psychosocial factors and daily acculturation experiences in 9th and 12th grades (e.g., daily family obligations, work obligations, and experiences of discrimination and social acceptance) shape the civic engagement of Latino immigrant youth in 12th grade and changes in civic engagement between 10th and 12th grades, and (3) to learn more about the types of community activities that Latino youth are involved in, what motivates them to (not) get involved and stay involved, and what they learn from their involvement. The research promises to contribute to our understanding of how individual-level factors interact and intersect with environments to influence the civic development and civic actions of high-school-age Latino immigrants.
Robert D. Putnam and Bruce Western
Inequality and Youth Civic Participation
Harvard University
Putnam and Western will analyze patterns of youth civic engagement over time and between subgroups of students, particularly those defined by socioeconomic status. By analyzing models using multiple datasets, the investigators hope to bring clarity to questions about how civic participation and socual engagement have changed over time for different groups, and to the extent possible examine why those changes have occurred. Preliminary analyses using the Monitoring the Future dataset suggest that overall trends showing rising youth civic engagement masks a pattern of civic and social disengagement among children of less educated white parents. If left unaddressed these patterns threaten to turn our nation into "two Americas."
The study will use nine nationally representative datasets to examine how participation, attitudes, and knowledge have changed over time for young people living in families that differ on key demographic variables. If a growing civic divide is found, the investigators will probe potential influences, including increases in income inequality and insecurity; variability in schooling quality and experiences that align with schools’ average family income; changes in family structure and fertility associated with income; and decreases in intergenerational mobility that solidify differences in access to social and community capital and opportunities for civic participation. To extend these analyses, Katherine Edin, also of Harvard University, will conduct a small-scale qualitative study of high school youth using both life-history and ethnographic observations.
2008 Grantee List
Roderick J. Watts | Learning Principles for Political and Civic Education for Young Activists
Roderick J. Watts
Learning Principles for Political and Civic Education for Young Activists
Georgia State University
Building on the work that argues that the roles young people take in civic and political work influence the persistence over time of knowledge, skill attainment and civic behaviors, Watts aims to examine the role of early experiences in the formation of commitments to social justice activism in young adults of color. Two sets of questions guide the project. The first explores broadly the early experiences of these activists: What are the patterns or themes in their experiences? What are the connections between life experiences and interests in civic action? What role did relationships with peers and adults play in the learning process and in the development of a commitment to civic or political action? In what settings (e.g., family, school, community) did these experiences occur? The second set of questions relates to the theory and practice of civic education: What was the mix of didactic and experiential elements? Does an “experience of agency” play a prominent role? How do the attributes of influential learning experiences as described by young activists compare with prevailing approaches to civic and political education in schools and elsewhere (e.g., service learning programs, youth volunteering, community service requirements in schools)? Data include interviews and the applications from 1986 to 2003 of those who graduated from the Movement Activist Apprenticeship Program (MAAP), a training program “for movement activists of color committed to learning the theory and practice of building social justice movements through community and labor organizing" established by The Center for Third World Organizing.