Alumni of the Summer Institute of Civic Studies have designed a series of discussions at Frontiers of Democracy about mass incarceration, juries, and citizenship. The discussants include Andrew Nurkin (Executive Director of Princeton AlumniCorps, Princeton), Peter Pihos (doctoral candidate, University of Pennsylvania) and Joshua Miller (Philosophy professor at Morgan State)–all of whom teach in prisons. I will try to write more about their impressive and troubling thoughts after the conference ends. Meanwhile, we were treated to a virtual discussion among three of my friends on the topic of the jury. The discussants are Josh Miller, Albert Dzur (Bowling Green), and John Gastil (Penn State). The whole thing is worth watching, but if you are pressed for time, listen to and think about the questions they pose at the very end (minute 20).
This Saturday, community members in Sacramento and Albuquerque are coming together to discuss mental health topics and identify priorities. Not in CA or NM? Follow @MentalHealthCCS or join the online dialogue at www.theciviccommons.com/mentalhealth.
A bit about the project…
An important component of the National Dialogue for Mental Health, “Creating Community Solutions” is a series of events around the country that will allow people to engage in dialogue and action on mental health issues.
Creating Community Solutions will engage thousands of Americans, in a range of settings: small-group discussions, large forums, online conversations, and large-scale deliberative events at ten lead sites. Supported by an array of local officials, nonprofit organizations, professional associations, foundations, and health care providers, these Creating Community Solutions activities will use proven public engagement principles to help people make progress on one of the most critical and misunderstood public issues we face.
This effort is being led by a set of deliberative democracy organizations, including the National Institute for Civil Discourse, AmericaSpeaks, Everyday Democracy, Deliberative Democracy Consortium, The National Issues Forums and the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation, working in concert with the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) of the Department of Health and Human Services.
The U.K.-based Democratic Society produced a white paper in association with Public-i Ltd., on how democratic engagement can help local government save money in a time of cuts.
Executive summary:
This is a time of fiscal pressure and service cuts. Councils are restructuring services and looking to cut back on non-essential areas of spending. Is democratic engagement one of those areas?
Aside from the moral argument for democratic engagement, there is evidence that investment in strong democratic participation is important if reformed local government approaches are to result in more efficient spending and better-targeted services.
The evidence of self-directed support and personalised budgets shows that involving citizens and users in service provision can produce better-tailored services that operate at lower overall cost.
Where councils need to cut expenditure, high-quality democratic engagement in the budget setting process can provide them with better information, while increasing participants’ opinion of the council.
In countries with a tradition of more participatory democracy, higher levels of participatory democracy correlate with more efficient services and greater willingness to pay tax.
Creating a single architecture for public consultation and engagement can also reduce the cost of duplication in consultation exercises.
If they can create an attractive offer on democratic engagement, councils should be able to realise benefits, because there is a large untapped market of people who want to get engaged in their local area, as well as broader reach and range for online democratic engagement tools.
How do you know when a teacher is doing a good job? Are schools doing enough to insure that we have effective teachers and that we're supporting them? These questions are on the table in school districts nationwide as debates over teacher evaluation policies heat up. Most Americans say they have confidence in public school teachers, but most also think teacher preparation programs need more rigorous entrance requirements, and about half want student test scores counted as part of a teacher's job evaluation.
In fact, studies of parents, teachers, principals, students and the broader public -- research conducted by my organization, Public Agenda, and the Kettering Foundation, Ed Sector and other independent groups -- suggest it's time for a more inclusive and nuanced conversation about what good teaching is and how we judge, nurture and support it.
Nearly everyone has had at least one or two spectacular teachers along the way. Most of us can also think of a teacher or two who was monotonous and uninspiring, maybe even callous and cold-hearted. But the crux of the teacher quality debate today is whether we have a teaching corps that successfully helps students develop the skills and habits of mind to become educated, competent adults -- adults who can build careers and fulfilling lives, adults who will be good neighbors and citizens.
So, what really counts in teaching? What are the best practices? What kind of training and support will actually produce the teaching corps our kids deserve?
Unfortunately, the research isn't as clear as you might think. Harvard Graduate School of Education professor Jal Mehta suggests that we don't actually have a well-developed understanding of how to train, evaluate and support effective teaching. He believes the field lacks a "widely agreed-upon knowledge base." Moreover, he points out that " training is brief" compared to other professions, and "the criteria for passing licensing exams are much lower than in other fields."
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation must have reached much the same conclusion when it launched a multi-year project videotaping thousands of classroom teachers in action to "better understand what great teaching looks like, and the types of measures that can provide a fair assessment of teaching aimed at helping every teacher be their best."
Sometimes the political debate seems to center almost exclusively on the idea of judging teachers based on student test scores. Teacher surveys show that most see a place for standardized testing in education, but most also consider student engagement in class a better measure of their own performance. An analysis by Public Agenda and the Kettering Foundation suggests that most parents see low test scores as a red flag that something is wrong, but many also question whether good test scores by themselves actually show that children are learning and thriving.
What other kinds of questions should we include in teacher effectiveness discussions? Here are some nominees:
Is "good teaching" really the same for all students? Or, are some teachers more effective with some students than others? Suppose, for example, that one teacher excels in helping students who struggle, while another stands out working with more advanced students? Parents sometimes say that a particular teacher is just "right" for their child―that there's a special chemistry between them that helps the child blossom. If this is the case, how do we account for it in our schools?
Should teachers play a much larger role in defining and evaluating good teaching? Most teachers say that in their building, the teachers could pretty much agree on who the great teachers are. Nearly half also say they know a teacher who is "clearly ineffective and shouldn't be in the classroom," so teachers definitely make distinctions. A new book from Public Agenda and the American Institutes for Research encourages school districts to bring teachers to the table in this discussion and offers guidance for administrators and teachers on how to do it. Based on our research, teachers generally have useful, practical advice on the kinds of assessments that will fairly and effectively promote their growth as professionals.
Does it matter what students think? One thought-provoking insight from the Gates research on teacher effectiveness is the degree to which students themselves can be astute judges of good teaching. Some education experts have shown that students generally like classes that spark their curiosity and generally dislike those featuring repetitive exercises that are easy to do. In Public Agenda surveys, most students report that they have had at least one teacher who succeeded in getting them to enjoy a subject they hadn't liked before. To my mind, that's great teaching. How do we identify and encourage this type of impact?
What should we look for beyond the ability to teach academics? When adults talk about their favorite teacher, they don't necessary stress the teacher's prowess in teaching skills. Instead, they may talk about a teacher's sense of humor or a teacher's kindness. They may talk about what their teacher taught them about persistence or honesty or courage. What about teachers who help students battle shyness or those who reach out to help if there's trouble at home?
So much of today's teacher quality discussion centers on finding reliable ways to measure how effective a teacher is in teaching skills and how to apply those measures to teachers across the board. Given our limited understanding of the art and science of teaching, this is work that needs to be done.
But in our drive to delineate what we mean by "effective" teaching and to hold schools and teachers accountable, we shouldn't overlook the human dimensions of the job. They may not be as easy to measure, but that doesn't mean they don't matter to kids and schools.
Here’s a snapshot from today’s NCDD meetup at Tufts University in Medford, MA. We had a great time together before the Frontiers of Democracy conference began, with over 30 NCDD members joining us for at least part of the meetup.
During an initial round of introductions, everyone shared one strength or gift they brought to the table that other NCDD members could potentially tap into. Later, we broke up into small groups to dig into four topics attendees were feeling challenged by at the moment:
the continuing need to institutionalize or embed dialogue and deliberation work into the way we do business (i.e. building civic infrastructure)
the national dialogue on mental health project (both online and offline aspects of it)
reaching out to underrepresented groups
standardization of the terminology, procedures and metrics we use
sustaining ourselves as practitioners; handling overload and retaining optimism
It was an energizing afternoon, and most of us are staying on for the Frontiers of Democracy conference at Tufts and continuing to enjoy each other’s company!
I received an inquiry today from Montique Clark on LinkedIn. I had posted about the fact that I've just sent an article to a journal that is very proud of its incredibly high rejection rate. The good thing about this particular publication is that they answer you quite promptly, in general. The reason is that the journal has committed to either answer you very quickly or to give you feedback on your submission. Giving feedback takes time, so that motivates them to say no very quickly to more than 93 percent of submissions. From the author's standpoint, that means it's unlikely to land one's piece there, but why not try? After all, you'll know quickly whether they're not interested. It doesn't hurt them, furthermore, since they're proud of a high rejection rate. If you know that the first great place isn't interested, you can then move on to the next possible outlet, feeling confident that at least you tried.
Montique explained that she's interested in writing and would like some suggestions for getting started. Here are a few thoughts for anyone who is thinking about starting out as a writer. I'm no famous writer, but I've been studying the publishing industry and process and have plans in motion for a career of writing, ideally for wide audiences in time.
For scholars who are looking to land their first publications, the typical advice is excellent: Start with a book review. An incredible number of books are published every year, even though we're told the print industry is on its way out. Given the volume of books released, publishers struggle for attention. One way they get it is by sending free books to outlets that review them. For scholars, that generally means scholarly journals. If you're not too interested in more technical or academic readership, then consider looking to the many publications, often magazines -- which today are becoming "e-zines." Many of them review books that are sent to them and welcome volunteers to read the books and send in carefully written, short reviews. Reviewing books provides a service to the public, that can now choose book purchases with a bit more information in advance. It also gets you a free copy of the book. In addition, it gives you a chance to thinking about your own writing while you review someone else's. Finally, it gives you a very beneficial chance to be published and to start building your track record.
Among scholarly outlets, the journals in one's field are the ones to look to, checking whether they publish reviews and who is the review editor. For general audience or non-academic audience authors, look to the relevant trade magazines related to your interests. Find the stuff you like to read and see whether it includes opportunities to write reviews. If you're having a hard time finding an outlet, go to your library to find the year's Writer's Market book (released by Writer's Digest Books), or spring for it yourself, if your library's copy is old. The book's got a few informative essays, but it's amazing value is that it is like a phone book of writing opportunities. You'll find info about countless outlets for publishing your work, some of which are paid and some of which are not.
This leads me to an important point. If getting paid for your writing is important to you, know that it will take time to get there. I've been paid a little bit for some of my writings, but the vast majority of them have not come with financial compensation. Writing certainly can be a paying occupation. Syndicated authors can make millions of dollars, even if that's mainly the rock-stars of writing. Nevertheless, if you're getting your start as a writer, you need to invest considerable time on the front end, to build your skills, network, and audience, and to hone your voice as a writer. I've heard that a big deal author in my town had to invest in his own writing, self-publishing his first book, which was no real success until his second book was turned into a movie. Be patient, and start writing because you love to do it. If you don't love to write, it's probably best to stop thinking about a career in it (whether "career" refers to lifetime or source of income). I'll come back to ways of getting paid for writing in a moment. For now, though, know that it will take some time to invest in one's writing career.
Another route to getting started as a writer is through letters to the editor. If you start with your local paper, not the New York Times, landing a letter to the editor is pretty easy. They're often quite short too, so that means you can get one done quickly. The nice thing about short pieces like letters to the editor or op-eds is that you can have a first draft done quickly. The challenging and exciting part about writing them, though, is that given how short they are, it doesn't take so much time to go over them 20 or 40 or 50 times. Yes, that many times. Comb over every word. Decide whether you're being as economical as you can be (a practice I'm not exercising in this blog post, to be sure). Write with pith, power, relevance, and sincerity. Pitch a letter to the editor, land a few, and suddenly the editor at a regional newspaper knows your name. Letters to the editor are a great first step comparable to book reviews, though shorter.
Once an editor knows your name, consider that many local or regional newspapers post the contact info for their editors on their Web sites. Give him or her a call. Talk over your interest in writing a piece for the paper, and pitch -- briefly -- four or five ideas that you might write about. This is vital, since you could otherwise end up spending a lot of time on a piece that a newspaper editor wouldn't find particularly newsworthy. Always think about the gatekeepers and their interests. Consider their interests while you speak to an audience and you'll be on the right track. When an editor gives you no positive feedback, it's time to approach another outlet. Give it time too, and then come back to the first paper with new ideas. If the editor nibbles, he or she will generally look at a draft of your submission on the piece of interest. Know too that it's invigorating to write about a subject that a news editor thinks is interesting and worth reviewing. You'll already have surmounted one of the big challenges.
Once you've got permission to send the editor a piece, comb over your draft 50 times. Yes, 50 times. It's only about 500 words anyway. If you go over it 5 times an hour, you can send it to him in 3 or 4 days, even if you're writing in your spare time. When you've combed through a piece that many times, you'll find your words are carefully chiseled, and ideally they reveal just what you mean on a topic that is both interesting and important to you and to your target audience. Send it in. If it is accepted for publication, make sure to buy a copy or two and to scan it into the computer. Make a digital scrapbook of these pieces, and soon you'll have a track record of writings. A lot of these points pertain to magazine writing also, though some magazines just want to see your submission first. Then again, magazines will often publish book reviews, so look into that first.
Once you've got a relationship with one or more newspapers, think about making your contributions regularly. What kind of themed column could you put together, contributing once a month or eveyr two weeks in a way that is valued among the people in your audience. Publishers all the time buy syndicated material because they don't have enough local material, or because they need a balance of subject matter. In any case, if you put together a column and publish it regularly, you might find that other papers are interested in publishing the same column. Boom. You've just become a self-syndicated columnist. You're reaching a wide audience and doing so regularly. Now guess who's interested in you. People who like your ability to reach an audience, namely literary agents. They'll help you (and be highly necessary in most cases) to land your book proposal with a major publisher. The publisher, like Random House, Vintage, etc., is interested both in quality work AND in the author's ability to reach an audience. After all, doing so means you can let your loyal audience know about your forthcoming book. They need to know about it and be interested in you in order to be motivated to buy your book.
When you get to that point, you might start making some real money, maybe. It depends on the audience for your book. If people are so interested in it that they invite you to come speak about it, you could earn some money for such efforts. Also, along the way, your newspaper columns might earn you some money, a lot if your pieces start to come out in hundreds of newspapers or more. At the same time, though, if you've made a great impression with a magazine or newspaper, you might find that a salaried position as a writer is even better, more stable, etc. More power to you. There are many ways to get involved and to make writing a career. For a lot of people like me, though, there are ways to align one's work or free-time enjoyment with our passion for writing. In such cases, money's not the object, and the goal is really to participate in our democratic conversation about things that matter to us and to others.
To my mind, that is the big reason to be a writer. It's to contribute to the public discourse. If you don't speak up, others will. You might not like what you hear. So, either speak up, or your complaints will only be heard by your Facebook friends. There are many ways to become a writer. Going to grad school isn't a typically good one for becoming a widely read author. After all, at one time I heard that the average academic journal article is read by 7 people. The point there is not the same as writing for general audiences, of course, but it is writing nonetheless, and can be joyful. If you want to learn more about writing, check out some of the following books. I will warn you that, sadly, one or two of the books that are valuable for learning about writing careers are themselves poorly written. As strange as that may sound, it is still true that they contain valuable information about what it takes to be a professional writer.
I am sure that this is much more than what Montique was looking for. Don't worry. I won't mind if people skim this. In a sense, here's another value of writing, such as on blogs like this one: it's often helpful to organize one's ideas just for oneself. To get clear on what we're doing, how, and why is an invaluable benefit of writing. So thank you, Montique, for the opportunity to reflect on getting one's start as a writer. I hope that some of this proves helpful for you and for others. It certainly has gotten me thinking again about strategy and the big picture for my career as a writer.
Eric Thomas Weber, Ph.D. is associate professor of public policy leadership at the University of Mississippi, representing only his own views in this article. His third book, Democracy and Leadership, will be published in December of 2013. If you enjoy this article, visit my Web site: EricThomasWeber.org and connect with me on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Academia.edu.
I received an inquiry today from Montique Clark on LinkedIn. I had posted about the fact that I've just sent an article to a journal that is very proud of its incredibly high rejection rate. The good thing about this particular publication is that they answer you quite promptly, in general. The reason is that the journal has committed to either answer you very quickly or to give you feedback on your submission. Giving feedback takes time, so that motivates them to say no very quickly to more than 93 percent of submissions. From the author's standpoint, that means it's unlikely to land one's piece there, but why not try? After all, you'll know quickly whether they're not interested. It doesn't hurt them, furthermore, since they're proud of a high rejection rate. If you know that the first great place isn't interested, you can then move on to the next possible outlet, feeling confident that at least you tried.
Montique explained that she's interested in writing and would like some suggestions for getting started. Here are a few thoughts for anyone who is thinking about starting out as a writer. I'm no famous writer, but I've been studying the publishing industry and process and have plans in motion for a career of writing, ideally for wide audiences in time.
For scholars who are looking to land their first publications, the typical advice is excellent: Start with a book review. An incredible number of books are published every year, even though we're told the print industry is on its way out. Given the volume of books released, publishers struggle for attention. One way they get it is by sending free books to outlets that review them. For scholars, that generally means scholarly journals. If you're not too interested in more technical or academic readership, then consider looking to the many publications, often magazines -- which today are becoming "e-zines." Many of them review books that are sent to them and welcome volunteers to read the books and send in carefully written, short reviews. Reviewing books provides a service to the public, that can now choose book purchases with a bit more information in advance. It also gets you a free copy of the book. In addition, it gives you a chance to thinking about your own writing while you review someone else's. Finally, it gives you a very beneficial chance to be published and to start building your track record.
Among scholarly outlets, the journals in one's field are the ones to look to, checking whether they publish reviews and who is the review editor. For general audience or non-academic audience authors, look to the relevant trade magazines related to your interests. Find the stuff you like to read and see whether it includes opportunities to write reviews. If you're having a hard time finding an outlet, go to your library to find the year's Writer's Market book (released by Writer's Digest Books), or spring for it yourself, if your library's copy is old. The book's got a few informative essays, but it's amazing value is that it is like a phone book of writing opportunities. You'll find info about countless outlets for publishing your work, some of which are paid and some of which are not.
This leads me to an important point. If getting paid for your writing is important to you, know that it will take time to get there. I've been paid a little bit for some of my writings, but the vast majority of them have not come with financial compensation. Writing certainly can be a paying occupation. Syndicated authors can make millions of dollars, even if that's mainly the rock-stars of writing. Nevertheless, if you're getting your start as a writer, you need to invest considerable time on the front end, to build your skills, network, and audience, and to hone your voice as a writer. I've heard that a big deal author in my town had to invest in his own writing, self-publishing his first book, which was no real success until his second book was turned into a movie. Be patient, and start writing because you love to do it. If you don't love to write, it's probably best to stop thinking about a career in it (whether "career" refers to lifetime or source of income). I'll come back to ways of getting paid for writing in a moment. For now, though, know that it will take some time to invest in one's writing career.
Another route to getting started as a writer is through letters to the editor. If you start with your local paper, not the New York Times, landing a letter to the editor is pretty easy. They're often quite short too, so that means you can get one done quickly. The nice thing about short pieces like letters to the editor or op-eds is that you can have a first draft done quickly. The challenging and exciting part about writing them, though, is that given how short they are, it doesn't take so much time to go over them 20 or 40 or 50 times. Yes, that many times. Comb over every word. Decide whether you're being as economical as you can be (a practice I'm not exercising in this blog post, to be sure). Write with pith, power, relevance, and sincerity. Pitch a letter to the editor, land a few, and suddenly the editor at a regional newspaper knows your name. Letters to the editor are a great first step comparable to book reviews, though shorter.
Once an editor knows your name, consider that many local or regional newspapers post the contact info for their editors on their Web sites. Give him or her a call. Talk over your interest in writing a piece for the paper, and pitch -- briefly -- four or five ideas that you might write about. This is vital, since you could otherwise end up spending a lot of time on a piece that a newspaper editor wouldn't find particularly newsworthy. Always think about the gatekeepers and their interests. Consider their interests while you speak to an audience and you'll be on the right track. When an editor gives you no positive feedback, it's time to approach another outlet. Give it time too, and then come back to the first paper with new ideas. If the editor nibbles, he or she will generally look at a draft of your submission on the piece of interest. Know too that it's invigorating to write about a subject that a news editor thinks is interesting and worth reviewing. You'll already have surmounted one of the big challenges.
Once you've got permission to send the editor a piece, comb over your draft 50 times. Yes, 50 times. It's only about 500 words anyway. If you go over it 5 times an hour, you can send it to him in 3 or 4 days, even if you're writing in your spare time. When you've combed through a piece that many times, you'll find your words are carefully chiseled, and ideally they reveal just what you mean on a topic that is both interesting and important to you and to your target audience. Send it in. If it is accepted for publication, make sure to buy a copy or two and to scan it into the computer. Make a digital scrapbook of these pieces, and soon you'll have a track record of writings. A lot of these points pertain to magazine writing also, though some magazines just want to see your submission first. Then again, magazines will often publish book reviews, so look into that first.
Once you've got a relationship with one or more newspapers, think about making your contributions regularly. What kind of themed column could you put together, contributing once a month or eveyr two weeks in a way that is valued among the people in your audience. Publishers all the time buy syndicated material because they don't have enough local material, or because they need a balance of subject matter. In any case, if you put together a column and publish it regularly, you might find that other papers are interested in publishing the same column. Boom. You've just become a self-syndicated columnist. You're reaching a wide audience and doing so regularly. Now guess who's interested in you. People who like your ability to reach an audience, namely literary agents. They'll help you (and be highly necessary in most cases) to land your book proposal with a major publisher. The publisher, like Random House, Vintage, etc., is interested both in quality work AND in the author's ability to reach an audience. After all, doing so means you can let your loyal audience know about your forthcoming book. They need to know about it and be interested in you in order to be motivated to buy your book.
When you get to that point, you might start making some real money, maybe. It depends on the audience for your book. If people are so interested in it that they invite you to come speak about it, you could earn some money for such efforts. Also, along the way, your newspaper columns might earn you some money, a lot if your pieces start to come out in hundreds of newspapers or more. At the same time, though, if you've made a great impression with a magazine or newspaper, you might find that a salaried position as a writer is even better, more stable, etc. More power to you. There are many ways to get involved and to make writing a career. For a lot of people like me, though, there are ways to align one's work or free-time enjoyment with our passion for writing. In such cases, money's not the object, and the goal is really to participate in our democratic conversation about things that matter to us and to others.
To my mind, that is the big reason to be a writer. It's to contribute to the public discourse. If you don't speak up, others will. You might not like what you hear. So, either speak up, or your complaints will only be heard by your Facebook friends. There are many ways to become a writer. Going to grad school isn't a typically good one for becoming a widely read author. After all, at one time I heard that the average academic journal article is read by 7 people. The point there is not the same as writing for general audiences, of course, but it is writing nonetheless, and can be joyful. If you want to learn more about writing, check out some of the following books. I will warn you that, sadly, one or two of the books that are valuable for learning about writing careers are themselves poorly written. As strange as that may sound, it is still true that they contain valuable information about what it takes to be a professional writer.
I am sure that this is much more than what Montique was looking for. Don't worry. I won't mind if people skim this. In a sense, here's another value of writing, such as on blogs like this one: it's often helpful to organize one's ideas just for oneself. To get clear on what we're doing, how, and why is an invaluable benefit of writing. So thank you, Montique, for the opportunity to reflect on getting one's start as a writer. I hope that some of this proves helpful for you and for others. It certainly has gotten me thinking again about strategy and the big picture for my career as a writer.
Eric Thomas Weber, Ph.D. is associate professor of public policy leadership at the University of Mississippi, representing only his own views in this article. His third book, Democracy and Leadership, will be published in December of 2013. If you enjoy this article, visit my Web site: EricThomasWeber.org and connect with me on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Academia.edu.
In my introductory remarks (below the fold), I will explain how the conference draws together separate streams of discussion and organizing, and I will propose a conceptual framework for our common work.
As organizers of this conference, we generally try to avoid doing a lot of talking, but my colleagues have prevailed on me—or indulged me—to make some introductory remarks about who has gathered here this weekend and for what purpose.
I’d ask you to consider the conference as a tree. That’s not the most original metaphor, but it will work.
Its deepest roots are the individual stories of the 150 participants, every one different, but each one planted in its own rich soil of community, of personal and collective history and memory, and of civic practice and experience.
For instance, people have been meeting to talk about their common problems and aspirations for thousands of years in every inhabited continent. Since the 1960s, there has been something of a boom of explicit, organized, deliberative processes and experiments—deliberation that you can see and name; deliberation at a human scale. In 2002, many of the groups that had been helping to organize these citizen deliberations, both in the US and overseas, came together at Airlie House in Virginia and launched the Deliberative Democracy Consortium to promote research and learning, networking, and advocacy. Matt Leighninger directs the DDC today.
People have also been teaching the next generation to be good citizens for thousands of years, and universities have been operating in our societies for more than a millennium. But since the 1980s, there has been something of a renaissance of explicit efforts to strengthen the civic role of higher education. In 2006 and 2007, a group of highly experienced academics and civic leaders from outside academia met to share their work and discuss the potential of higher education to enhance American democracy as a whole. They launched a consortium called The Democracy Imperative, or TDI for short, to connect practitioners to academics and convene people who approach “educating for democracy” in diverse ways: intergroup dialogue, interdisciplinary problem-based learning, social justice, Sustained Dialogue, conflict resolution, community organizing, community-based participatory research, and so on. TDI was formed to bring these (and others) together so that they would not feel alone on their campuses. Today, Nancy Thomas directs that effort.
In 2012, Nancy came to CIRCLE and Tisch College at Tufts. CIRCLE, which I direct, studies the civic learning and engagement of young Americans and tries to focus on those not in college or on a path to college. The forms of practice that we tend to study include civic education in middle schools and high schools and in community-based organizations that serve working-class young people.
Meanwhile, Tisch College aims to prepare all Tufts students be lifelong active citizens and creates an enduring culture of active citizenship on this campus. CIRCLE and Tisch College are your hosts today, and Tisch College supports this conference generously. Kathy O’Connor and Charlotte Ringle, who work for Tisch, are the dedicated and talented logistical leaders of the conference.
In 2008, DDC and TDI teamed up to organize a conference called “No Better Time” at the University of New Hampshire. I was just a participant, so I can say it was a great success—perhaps in part because the political moment was optimistic and propitious in 2008, but No Better Time also drew a great group of people for an engaging format.
Just months before “No Better Time,” seven scholars from a variety of disciplines had met at the University of Maryland. They all shared the view that mainstream scholarship is not useful to citizens—people who want to improve or even co-create their worlds. It’s not only that theory is disconnected from practice, but the prevailing theories themselves are misguided. Mainstream scholarship ignores human agency and creativity. It separates fact from value in harmful ways. It can tell you, for example, that the odds of starting a social movement are low—but not what you should do if you want to start a good one.
The scholars who gathered at Maryland included the late Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, Jane Mansbridge, the current president of the American Political Science Association, and our friend Harry Boyte, who is following this conference from South Africa. The whole group wrote a manifesto entitled The New Civic Politics: Civic Theory and Practice for the Future.
This manifesto led to a concrete experiment. Since 2008, Karol Soltan from the University of Maryland and I—both co-authors of the original statement—have been trying to practice the new civic politics by co-teaching an annual Summer Institute of Civic Studies at Tufts. It is an intense, theoretically rich academic exercise that has now involved about 100 people who have come from Bhutan, Singapore, China, Mexico, South Africa, and numerous other countries and backgrounds to debate civic renewal. Many are here today, and some have organized the “track” on Civic Theory, which has a focus on prisons and crime.
In 2008, the Summer Institute culminated in a public panel that C-SPAN covered on cable. The next year, we decided to join forces with DDC and TDI to repeat the “No Better Time” conference but at Tisch College instead of UNH. And we have held some version of a public conference each year. It has gradually turned into Frontiers.
Meanwhile, The Center for Engaged Democracy has been holding summer institutes for four years. Based at Merrimack College, the Center acts as a hub for people who run or want to start certificates, minors, and majors focused on civic and community engagement, broadly defined. The Center’s 2013 annual meeting has been taking place here, and many participants are sticking around for Frontiers. Dan Butin leads the Center.
The National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation is an association of more than 2,000 members who practice and promote deliberative democracy. Sandy Heierbacher leads that effort. One of their signature methods is to hold meet-ups or regional gatherings, one of which has been happening here, as part of Frontiers 2013, so NCDD is another root of our tree.
Earlier this year federal program, the United States Institute on Civic Engagement, selected The Center for Civic Engagement at Miami University Hamilton to host student leaders from the countries of Botswana, Kenya, Uganda, and Zambia. They are here today and represent yet another root.
These roots have come together to support a pretty impressive trunk. But we could certainly ask what else should be included.
We could also ask about strategies and forms of work that may be missing. Civic education, broadly defined; deliberative democracy and dialogue; and civic scholarship are all well represented here. If you think those are all the most important and relevant forms of civic work, you can be satisfied. I personally believe that a many other forms are also important—and some are also represented here even though I haven’t named them yet.
For example, many people collaborate to manage and strengthen public resources: watersheds and forests, public libraries, cyberspace. They may talk and deliberate, but that isn’t really the heart of their work, which is more about management and co-production.
Many people are building alternative economic institutions—land trusts, community development corporations and social enterprises—that are more governable and accountable than transnational firms.
Many people struggle for political reforms and rights, not only in Egypt and the Palestinian Territories but also right here in the US.
Many people are involved in strengthening the civic health or capacity of communities by organizing citizens into effective groups and networks. These may not be primarily spaces for discussion. Service, belonging, and advocacy may be more central to their work.
Many people are trying to improve the media environment and serve what the Knight Foundation calls “the information needs of communities.” They are creating innovative software, formats, and organizations, some of them for-profit. Again, those people may deliberate and may educate, but the heart of their work is elsewhere.
I have begun to offer a list, and I could go on. Any list requires some kind of conceptual framework. You should be able to explain what deep principles define your list and encourage you to include some things and omit others. I do not expect my own conceptual framework to be shared by everyone who has gathered here today. On the contrary, debate about our frameworks is essential and exciting. One of the reasons that we need theory as well as practice is that we must be able to define what we are for. I’ll tell you my own framework in about one minute, not to settle the matter, but to provoke discussion.
I think that good citizens deliberate. By talking and listening to people who are different from themselves, they enlarge their understanding, make themselves accountable to their fellow citizens, and build a degree of consensus.
But deliberation is not enough. People who merely listen and talk lack sufficient knowledge and experience to add much insight to their conversations; and talk alone rarely improves the world. Deliberation is most valuable when it is connected to work—when citizens bring their experience of making things into their discussions, and when they take ideas and values from deliberation back into their work. Work is especially valuable when it is collaborative, when people make things of public value together. They are typically motivated to do so because they seek civic relationships with their fellow citizens, relationships marked by a degree of loyalty, trust, and hope. In turn, working and talking with fellow citizens builds and strengthens civic relationships, which are scarce but renewable sources of energy and power.
A combination of deliberation, collaboration, and civic relationships is the core of citizenship—in my personal view. If we had much more of this kind of civic engagement, we could address our most serious problems. Indeed, more and better civic engagement is a necessary condition of success; none of the available ideologies or bodies of expertise offers satisfactory solutions, which must emerge instead from a continuous cycle of talking, working, and building relationships.
Unfortunately, genuine civic engagement is in decline in the US and in many other countries, neglected or deliberately suppressed by major institutions and ideologies and by the prevailing culture. Our motivation to engage has not weakened, but we have lost institutionalized structures that recruit, educate, and permit us to engage effectively.
In fact, we face serious obstacles or deficits:
Our political system is organized to favor professionally-led, well-funded interests instead of creative, deliberating communities and grassroots movements.
Our major social policies are hostile to active civic participation. (For example, education is driven by standardized tests that experts write; public health depends on insurance companies and state bureaucracies rather than co-ops and community-based organizations.)
Our voluntary associations no longer have the means to recruit millions of Americans and develop the skills and motivations to participate as active citizens.
Our companies, because of their ability to withdraw investment, are virtually ungovernable by local authorities and communities.
Our culture lacks positive and plausible descriptions of collective agency, although it provides many depictions of lone heroes and of apolitical groups of friends.
Our news media generally overlook examples of deliberation and public work but relentlessly cover competition among professional politicians.
Despite their commitments to political rights and their heritage of experiments with participatory democracy, liberals and progressives are enamored of expertise, command-and-control regulation, and redistributive politics to the exclusion of active citizenship.
Despite their resistance to technocratic elites and their heritage of experiments with decentralization, conservatives are enamored of markets and negative liberties to the exclusion of active citizenship.
Our schools and colleges offer inadequate civic education, distributed unjustly to favor the most advantaged students, with an emphasis on factual knowledge instead of civic skills.
Our scholars in the social sciences and humanities produce an inadequate supply of knowledge relevant to active citizens (people who make moral and strategic judgments about how to improve the world directly).
Our funders—in both the state and philanthropic sectors—provide negligible streams of money for participatory processes, as compared to the funds available for concrete services.
On the other hand (sooner or later, there had to be another hand), we live in period of civic innovation, when, against the odds, people are at work on demanding, sophisticated, and locally effective forms of civic engagement. I estimate that 1 million Americans are involved in such work each year. Certainly they have many kindred spirits in other countries. These people see the need for citizenship and are building impressive practices and models. Their work remains scattered and local because it is contrary to the mainstream of national policy. Civic engagement cannot achieve sufficient scale and power without reforms in our most powerful institutions. The way to achieve such reforms is to organize the most active citizens into a self-conscious movement for civic renewal.
We are not 1 million Americans. We are about 150 international people out of the 7 billion human beings on earth. But we are deeply rooted in networks and communities that reach many more. That is why our gathering is so important. Of course, neither the root nor the trunk of a tree reflects its whole value. Its value is manifest in what it produces, its branches, leaves, and fruits. So, having come together, we must now branch out and produce a new harvest of civic theory and civic practice.
Philip Pettit and some others have been reviving the classical theory of republicanism as a theory that treats “domination” as the basic evil to be avoided. Domination often takes the form of arbitrary commands (“Do it because I say so”). Republican institutions, such as elections, legislatures, and judicial review, look attractive because they minimize domination, which is not the same as maximizing individual liberty.
I see the appeal, but it seems to me that non-domination is a virtue in a whole range of settings, some of which are not, and cannot really be, republics. Families and workplaces are two important examples. The remarkable American management theorist Mary Parker Follett (1868 – 1933) offers insights about how workplaces can reduce “arbitrary command” without becoming–or pretending to be–republics. For instance, in The Illusion of Final Authority (1926?), she writes that “Arbitrary command, the exaction of blind obedience, breaks initiative, discourages self-reliance, [and even the] lover’s self-respect.”
I think the solution is … to depersonalise the matter, to unite those concerned in a study of the situation, to see what the situation demands, to discover the law of the situation and obey that. That is, it should not be a case of one person giving commands to another person. Whenever it is obvious that the order arises from the situation, the question of someone commanding and someone obeying does not come up. Both accept what the situation demands. Our chief problem then is not how to get people to obey orders, but how to devise methods by which we can best discover what the order shall be. When that is found the employee could issue direction to the employer as well as employer to employee. This often happens quite easy and naturally: my stenographer or my cook points out the law of the situation to me, and I, if I recognise it as such, accept it even although it may reverse some previous direction I have given.
An order then should always be given not as a personal matter, not because the man giving it wants the thing done, but because it is the demand of the situation. … But while people should not be asked to follow directions blindly, at the same time a subordinate should not have the attitude of carping, of finding fault, of thinking things from above wrong. The attitude most desirable for receiving orders is intelligent scrutiny, willingness to suggest changes, courtesy in the manner of suggesting, and at the same time no prejudice in regard to what is prescribed, but the assumption that the way prescribed is probably the best unless one can show some convincing reason to the contrary.
For what it’s worth, that would also be my philosophy of parenting. Parents should strive to create a climate and set of situations in which neither the giving of orders nor carping and whining are common; instead, the family will generally do what the situation demands. Note that this has little to do with democracy (equal political power), nor does it always require explicit reason-giving and deliberation; but it is non-domination.
We live in exciting, challenging and, in many ways, unprecedented times for governance in the U.S. With massive public budget cuts, political polarization, and historically low levels trust in government intersecting with high unemployment, shifting demographics, and looming climate challenges, substantively involving the public in governance has rarely ever been more difficult or more necessary.
But recent developments in California have sparked conversation here at NCDD about how the convergence of these circumstances may be creating a perfect storm in which the use of dialogue, deliberation, and pubic engagement can be catapulted to levels of reach and effectiveness that we have yet to see. So we want to invite you to reflect with us on the significance that this moment might have for our work, and the opportunities it presents to reshape how citizens and government interact.
Our reflection began with a recent article penned by our friend, Republican Pete Peterson, head of the Davenport Institute (an NCDD organizational member), who contends that the problem with government is not whether it is too big or too small, as is the common framing in political debate. Instead, he suggests that the issue is actually that, for many very good reasons, citizens no longer feel they can trust the government to do the right thing.
This lack of trust complicates other social and political realities, and feeds a downward spiral of relations between publics and their governments. But Peterson believes that this situation hides a golden opportunity to begin boldly experimenting with new ways that public officials can put governance and decision-making power back into the hands of the public at large — that if everyday citizens can’t trust the government to address public problems in effective ways, maybe they can trust themselves and their communities.
As practitioners and scholars of our field know, some of the most creative and effective solutions to public problems come from the utilization of the tools of public engagement. But we also know that one of the greatest barriers to expanding those tools is the inertia of the status quo in public engagement, and that in many ways, we need a breakthrough that would elevate and normalize the kinds of citizen participation that we know works.
No one knows what that breakthrough will look like, but as Fox & Hounds writer Joe Mathews recently wrote, it might look like an experienced public engagement professional being elected to public office and using the position to expand the government’s official adoption and expansion of quality public engagement processes. And with the recent announcement that Pete Peterson will be running for California’s Secretary of State in the next election, just such a breakthrough for public engagement may be more within reach than ever. (We announced it here on the blog on April 23rd.)
Mathews points out that “the Secretary of State’s office [is] the natural headquarters for remaking governance in California around models of legitimate civic engagement.” And in the wake of the drastic budget cuts that have seen California government shrink in past years, the state is in a unique position to experiment with innovative forms of public engagement and participatory governance. If those experiments go well — if Californians are empowered to have more say so in their own communities and rebuild some of their eroded faith in government — it could prompt local and state governments all over the country to begin running their own experiments in public engagement, which could eventually lead to a long-term shift in the way that governments engage with publics in the US.
This is what we mean by “a perfect storm” for the expansion of our field. If just one influential state in the country could start demonstrating that government can be made more accountable, transparent, effective, and efficient by scaling up deliberative and participatory public engagement models, today’s political, economic, and social climate could prove to be fertile ground for that up-scaling to spread like wildfire. We won’t speculate as to exactly what that would look like or what kind of results it would have, but we think that everyday people becoming empowered to play a bigger role in defining their communities’ priorities and decision-making can hardly be a bad thing.
An upsurge in robust public engagement could also have an impact on the left-right polarization our country is experiencing. Peterson is running as a Republican, and as his article highlights, there is a great deal that conservatives should ostensibly be able to identify with and get behind when it comes to real public engagement, and he calls for conservatives to rally behind the cause. It will be telling to watch how Peterson’s candidacy is received by a state and a field that has more than its fair share of progressives.
Still, we have to remember that Peterson’s run for Secretary of State is in no way a sure thing or a quick fix for the ills of the state or the country. Indeed there are risks involved in his candidacy — the public and civic engagement movement could actually be damaged if Peterson, if elected makes mistakes or fails to implement the kinds of changes he sets out to make, and there is no telling whether California’s current situation will truly be improved by more participatory avenues for governance. But Peterson’s announcement statement suggests that his campaign is about real engagement and transforming how the state is governed, and it seems like a serious. So while there are no guarantees, we note that the potential for a significant shift is there, and that means we’ll be keeping an eye on next year’s elections in California.
But recent developments in California have sparked conversation here at NCDD about how the convergence of these circumstances may be creating a perfect storm in which the use of dialogue, deliberation, and pubic engagement can be catapulted to levels of reach and effectiveness that we have yet to see. So we want to invite you to reflect with us on the significance that this moment might have for our work, and the opportunities it presents to reshape how citizens and government interact.