Civic Learning and Civic Action
Initiative on Civic Learning and Civic Action Research Grants
Please click on a grantee and scroll down to view details of the grant.
Amy J. Binder | Marginalized on Campus? A Study of Conservative Students on Two ‘Notoriously Liberal’ Universities
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?
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.
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.
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.