With news sources changing rapidly and fragmenting along ideological lines, understanding how to use news and information media (“information literacy”) is an important civic skill. A new fact sheet by CIRCLE deputy director Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg explores the extent to which information literacy is taught in high school civics classes and how its teaching varies.
Using the data from CIRCLE’s National Civics Teacher Survey, which asked teachers about the courses they taught in Fall 2012, this analysis found that overall:
Civics teachers believe that information literacy is critical and that students must be able to identify and gather credible information
Less than half of teachers are very confident about teaching information literacy. A majority are interested in receiving more training and resources.
Teachers commonly use news articles as sources, and 80% discuss election-related issues at least weekly
AP and honors courses are more likely to incorporate information literacy than courses that are required for graduation.
Teachers who perceive more support are more likely to teach information literacy.
We wanted to share an interesting post from out friends at the National Issues Forums Institute that showed that, even amid the recent political turmoil that has gripped Thailand over the last few months, there have been encouraging steps taken toward fostering deliberation about the country’s future. You can read more about the project below, or find the original post (with more pictures) by clicking here.
King Prajadhipok’s Institute (KPI) has organized Public Deliberative Forums on Thailand Future in many provinces all over Thailand since 2011. The objectives are to help strengthening the public participation in being consulted on the ways out from Thailand political conflicts and establishing an atmosphere of hearing from others who think differently, in understanding and peace.
Before organizing the forums, Issues book, facilitators’ guide book and manual on deliberative democracy are prepared. There are 2 groups of participants; the first group consists of 80 people who are the eligible voters (over 18 years old). Their names are from probability systematic sampling form the vote list. The second group (20 people) is from representatives from the specific groups such as the youths, civil societies, NGOs, local government politicians, political support groups (extreme activists), religion leaders, and people with disability. All of them are invited and informed of the activities at least 1 month before the meetings.
The deliberative forums take one and a half days, starting from introduction on the deliberative democracy and public deliberation process, ground rules, and then continuing with the consensus building and relationship establishment. The deliberative forums are conducted afterwards. The common ground on Thailand future is what they would like to see and how to achieve it as well as who has to do it. In addition, they also mention what they have to do to help the country in moving forward to what they have imagined. Moreover, the pre and post questionnaires are distributed to check the people’s opinion on the deliberative process and the concept of Thailand future.
KPI also introduces this deliberative democracy concept and techniques for organizing deliberative forums to the Thai government and various policy makers as well as the parliamentarians so that they understand the new ways of public participation and conflict management.
More deliberative forums on Thailand Future will be organized in many provinces in the near future.
We know that there many talented and accomplished facilitators in the NCDD network, so we wanted to make sure to share that the International Association of Facilitators has launched its 2014 Facilitation Impact Awards. These awards are intended to honor “excellence in facilitation and its positive, measurable impact on businesses, governments and not-for-profit organisations around the world”, and we know that many of our facilitators’ work has exactly that kind of impact, so we want to encourage you to apply for consideration for the award.
The Facilitation Impact Awards program is open to facilitators living in North, South, and Latin America and are not a typical competition:
Non-competitive Awards
In keeping with the spirit of the International Association of Facilitators, the Facilitation Impact Awards is a non-competitive, inclusive awards program. All submissions meeting a given threshold of points will receive an award.
There is no application fee for applications submitted by IAF members. The fee for non-IAF members is $200/application and includes a single, one-year membership in the IAF. For each successful application, an organisation and its facilitator (or facilitation team) will be recognized. There are three award levels and the potential for multiple award recipients across a number of categories.
We think that these awards represent a great opportunity, and we encourage you to learn more about them at www.iaf-fia.org. You can find the submission form here, the rules for the program are here, and you can find the award criteria here.
The deadline to submit your application is February 17, 2014, so make sure to get started soon! Award recipients will be notified by March 10th, and the awards ceremony will take place at the IAF North American Conference in Orlando, Florida this April 9, 2014. To find out more about the conference, visit www.iafna-conference.org.
Good luck to all the applicants, and keep up the great work!
I always find it refreshing when people decide to investigate the commons from new angles and in transdisciplinary ways. So it is a treat to learn about the web journal Lo Squaderno devoting its entire December 2013 issue (#30) to “Commons – Practices, Boundaries and Thresholds.” The entire issue is available as a pdf file under a Creative Commons BY-ND-SA license.
Lo Squaderno is “a free web journal devoted to exploring and advancing research movements…. [that] collects original short features by people committed to research in various fields. Each issue is structured around a thematic focus around the topics of space, power, and society.” This commons issue, edited by Giacomo DAlisa and Cristina Mattiuci, along with guest artist Andrea Sarti, consists of nine essays in English and three in Italian.
Below, provocative excerpts from three of the essays. In “Show Me the Action, and I Will Show You the Commons!” Helene Finiori, building on Silke Helfrich's observations, points out that the conventional ways of identifying common goods, based on their “rivalry” and “excludability,” is unreliable:
Types of goods are traditionally distinguished based on their degree of rivalry (the extent to which the use of a good by one diminishes the availability for others) and excludability (the extent to which access to a good can be denied or limited). This perspective ignores for a large part the contextual and variable nature of goods in time and under the ‘stress’ of repeated activity. It does not take into account the fact that rivalry can be a matter of perception (a good may be categorized non rival because perceived as abundantly available irrespective of whether self-renewable or not, such as water in ‘wet’ places), of congestion (a good may be non rival up to a point of saturation, such as roads before they get jammed) or of yield point (a good may be non rival up to the limit beyond which there is no more resilience under stress and therefore no more self-regeneration, such as a savannah before desertification). It does not acknowledge that low rivalry goods can also be depleted and made unavailable as a result of toxic outputs of activity (externalities). Neither does it consider the fact that property and access, in other words excludability, create artificial boundaries that businesses for example are constantly seeking to expand by inventing new property rights or business models, as part of their ‘natural’ quest to extend the perimeter in which they can generate and capture value. The examples of patented seeds and attempts to patent the human genome are the most striking.
Published today, Civic Studies: Approaches to the Emerging Field is a volume co-edited by me and Karol Edward Soltan and published by Bringing Theory to Practice and the American Association of Colleges and Universities as the third in theirCivic Series. It is available for free download (pdf) or for purchase at $10 for the volume. Contents:
As many of you know, AmericaSpeaks has closed down its operations. Participedia asked Susanna Haas Lyons, a former AmericaSpeaks employee and public engagement consultant, to reflect on the work of the organization and its legacy.
Popular political words like “liberalism” and “conservatism” often name disparate ideas and movements. No one controls their definitions, and therefore no one can complain if they are used for incompatible phenomena. For instance, “liberalism” can mean government interventionism or pro-market critiques of the state; and “conservatism” may be equally ambiguous. Yet we ought to be able to say something about the central tendencies of conservative thought. A helpful generalization should have three features:
1) It should be trans-historical and global, not limited to current US terminology.
In the US today, conservatives often present themselves as being critical of the nation-state and bureaucracy. But that has not been true of, for example, Christian Democrats in Europe.
2) It should be reasonably encompassing of the movements that have actually called themselves “conservative.”
For instance, if one defines conservatism as libertarianism, that omits traditionalist and communitarian conservative movements. If one defines conservatives as people who want to return to the past, that omits Newt Gingrich types who are utopians about technology and markets.
3) It should be charitable.
You should define a political idea in a way that a proponent would accept before you debate his or her views. For instance, although I have not read Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind, I am highly skeptical of Robin’s definition of “conservatism” as “animus against the agency of the subordinate classes.” According to Robin, “conservatism “provides the most consistent and profound argument as to why the lower orders should not be allowed to exercise their independent will, why they should not be allowed to govern themselves or the polity. Submission is their first duty, agency, the prerogative of the elite.” But what conservative would accept this characterization?
I would propose that the heart of conservative thought is resistance to intellectual arrogance. A conservative is highly conscious of the limitations of human cognition and virtue. From a conservative perspective, human arrogance may take several forms:
the ambition to plan a society from the center;
the willingness to scrap inherited norms and values in favor of ideas that have been conceived by theorists;
the preference for any given social outcome over the aggregate choices of free individuals;
the assertion that one may take property or rights away from another to serve any ideal; and/or
the elevation of human reasoning over God’s.
Now, these are separable claims. You can be an atheist conservative who has no objection to elevating human reason but deep concerns about state-planning. That is why conservatism is a field of debate, not a uniform movement. But it’s also possible to build coalitions, since, for example, Christian conservatives and market fundamentalists can unite against secular bureaucracies. Their reasons differ, but it is not only their practical objective that unites them. They also share a critique of the bureaucracy as arrogant.
If this is a fair description of conservatism, it should roughly describe the main tendencies of thinkers who have called themselves “conservative” over a broad sweep of time. I think it does. And some aspects of this definition are still visible in today’s Tea Party Republican Party. But our whole ideological spectrum is confused and atypical. If my definition of conservatism generally fails to describe the Republican Party, that may be because the GOP is not conservative in a deep sense. Meanwhile, as I argued in “Edmund Burke would vote Democratic,” it is sometimes the left in the US that seems most appreciative of local norms and traditions, most concerned about “sustainability” and fearful of human arrogance, and most resistant to planning and social control.
Our friends at the Interactivity Foundation recently published reflections from Dennis Boyer on his experience convening a conversation on poverty as part of the National Dialogue Network - one of the winners of the 2012 NCDD Catalyst Awards. We thought it was a great look inside the NDN process and wanted to share it with you. You can read the full article below or find the original on the IF blog by clicking here.
The National Dialogue Network (NDN) spent over a year planning and organizing the initial phases of a national dialogue on a topic of public concern, relying on practitioners within the public participatory sphere to assist and comment. Cooperating practitioners assisted in selecting and framing the concern of the first NDN dialogue project: poverty.
I first heard of the effort at the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation(NCDD) conference in Seattle, Washington in the Fall of 2012. It was my intent from the outset to personally facilitate a small group discussion for the project. I had advocated for a national discussion of either climate impacts or the role of money in political campaigns, but was satisfied that the chosen concern of poverty would provide a useful experiential basis for national dialogue.
By late Summer of 2013 the NDN was actively soliciting practitioner participation in facilitating “Phase 3” of the project: local discussion of the materials developed on questions surrounding poverty and wealth. I facilitated one such discussion in Iowa County, Wisconsin, a rural area about an hour’s drive west of Madison. Three of my participants had prior experience in public discussions sponsored by the Interactivity Foundation (IF) and one of those had participated previously in public discussion of material produced by Kettering Foundation/National Issues Forum (KF/NIF).
The NDN discussion materials are very different than IF discussion reports or KF/NIF discussion guides. IF reports usually pose six to eight contrasting conceptual policy possibilities and KF/NIF guides usually focus on three somewhat more developed policy approaches that often reflect some alternatives and some middle ground. When asked how to outline how IF’s approach differs from KF/NIF, I usually explain IF’s possibilities as discussion starters close to the origin point of the deliberative continuum, with KF/NIF materials representing more concrete ideas somewhat further out that continuum. NDN materials, on the other hand, may represent a location even closer to the deliberative origin point, calling upon discussants to explore some very basic thinking that shapes public impressions of the topic of concern.
I retain a spirit of openness toward the usefulness of all three approaches in their respective roles and harbor a belief that robust democratic governance discussion might harness all three in turn—and follow with approaches further out the continuum.
NDN poverty materials encourage some very basic personal introspection and group interaction that more developed policy materials might not. It is often the case that public conversation neglects the feelings and values that go into our impressions of a policy concern. Many deliberative practitioners seek to restore civility to public conversation, but in doing so may make participants more circumspect. NDN materials represent a move away from detachment and passionless pondering.
In that sense they reminded me of IF President Dr. Jack Byrd’s developmental materials on “Fairness” and “Freedom and Responsibility”. My own facilitative experience with Dr. Byrd’s materials have allowed me to see how participant exploration of the personal and experiential side of basic ideas that underlie social and political relationships opens many participants up to deeper understanding of their own positions, the positions of others, and the opportunities for common ground. My NDN discussion experience also exhibited these positive benefits.
The Iowa County NDN discussion group was not very representative of national demographics. We were very white (with one American Indian participant), somewhat older, more likely to be married (all were), and somewhat more clustered in lower-middle income brackets. By the same token, there were some indicators of diversity: a good mix of partisans and independents, backgrounds in different faith communities and secular outlooks, and broad life experiences (foreign travel, volunteer service, etc). Half claimed to have experienced economic deprivation at some point in their lives. All had family members or friends who had resorted to food stamps or public assistance at some point.
NDN materials definitely helped these participants tap their empathetic reserves concerning poverty. In the course of the discussion there was increased recognition of how hard it is for those who have not experienced poverty to understand how debilitating it can be. At the same time they were also made more aware of just how different rural poverty is from urban poverty. Until fairly recently the civil society side of dealing with rural poverty had been relatively strong, with extended families, churches, and fraternal groups playing major roles. Many stories were told about personally benefitting from these informal, non-governmental networks. And there was much speculation about what had made rural poverty harsher over the years: industrialization of agriculture, decline of subsistence living skills, declining population and out-migration, and disappearance of manufacturing jobs in nearby urban areas.
One major discussion thread that occurred independent of the materials was the extent to which informal mechanisms to deal with poverty are still workable. Some thought that certain aspects of the subsistence economy could be revived in rural areas. Others thought the complexity and skill needs of an information economy made it very difficult for the rural poor to overcome their disadvantages.
The arguments over these cleavages were not, of course, resolved. But through the exploration of values, experiences, and goals there was a sense that we as a society could do a better job in dealing with poverty. Where I saw the common ground emerge was around the notion of “good outcomes” that most, if not all, participants could share. This seemed to represent a pulling back from political positions and a refocus on a widely held vision of “what could be.”
Public opinion generally isn’t static. As people engage on complex issues and weigh trade-offs, their views tend to evolve. We study this evolution through a process we call Learning Curve Research, which uses a variety of methodologies. (We call it Learning Curve Research because it's based on our founder'sLearning Curve theory of public opinion.)
For "Curbing Health Care Costs," we convened 3 extended deliberative focus groups plus 1 pilot focus group, with a total of 44 Americans.
Each participant had at least some recent contact with the health care system as patients. Participants were 40 to 64 years old. We expected that this age group – as patients and potential caretakers of children or elderly parents – would have the broadest perspective on the health care system. This is also a politically significant group that tends to vote at high rates.
Participants were also recruited to represent a broad cross-section of the public in terms of gender, socioeconomic status, race/ethnicity and health insurance status. Focus groups took place in professional focus group facilities and all participants were compensated for their time.
First, participants engaged in three-hour focus groups divided into three main parts:
1. Participants had a general conversation about the health care system, the quality of care they receive and their experiences with costs.
2. Facilitators presented participants with information about the nation’s healthcare costs, including cost and quality comparisons over time, across countries and across different areas in the United States. Participants responded to the information, asked questions and discussed it as a group. This information is available for download here.
3. After a short break, participants deliberated over three approaches to addressing the nation’s health care cost problem using a Choicework discussion guide developed by Public Agenda, which you can read here. The policy approaches were based on a review of reforms and changes to the health care system that leaders and experts have proposed, are experimenting with or have already implemented.
The choices are not meant to be exhaustive or comprehensive, but to provide a basis for deliberation and reflection. The discussion guide laid out a set of concrete practices and policies that could help address the health care cost problem, including the advantages and trade-offs of each approach.
The choices, in brief, were:
Approach A. Give people more responsibility for their health and health care.
Participants discussed measures that were geared toward ensuring that people have more “skin in the game” through taxes on unhealthy lifestyle choices, high-deductible insurance plans and copays, as well as more choice among insurance plans and health care providers.
Approach B. Make sure doctors and hospitals work in smart, cost-effective ways.
Participants discussed the issues surrounding payment reform, including pay-for-performance and charging flat fees per patient or episode of care, as well as incentivizing providers to work in teams, coordinate care and share electronic health records.
Approach C. Contain health care costs by regulating prices.
In this approach, participants discussed the pros and cons of capping health care prices, regulating insurance markets, bringing generic drugs to market sooner and expanding access to Medicare.
Before and after the group sessions, participants completed surveys that assessed their awareness of and opinions about health care costs, their issue knowledge and their sense of efficacy to effectively deliberate with fellow citizens.
Click to enlarge
Finally, we conducted follow-up telephone interviews with all participants, within a week after the focus groups. The interviews explored what participants took away from the conversations and how they were thinking about the various approaches to reducing spending after they had the time to “sleep on” the issues and perhaps discuss them with others.
These interviews also gave participants opportunities to reflect on the deliberative research process and to express views they may not have shared in the groups.
The deliberative focus groups were conducted in Secaucus, New Jersey; Montgomery, Alabama; and Cincinnati, Ohio. A pilot was conducted in Stamford, Connecticut, allowing us to test the Choicework guide, graphs and charts on health care costs, the moderators guide and the surveys.
We found a great post from Gillian M. Mehers’s blog “You Learn Something New Every Day” via her Twitter handle that we knew would be a great help for many of our NCDD members who are facilitators. We encourage you to learn more about her workshop report method below or find the original post here.
And it is true that when you use very interactive workshop methodologies, the meeting room after your workshop can look like this:
With walls covered with flipcharts, cards and post-its people usually say “what can I do with all this?”
Typing them up is the first thought, and that can take a very long time and often be challenging to organize (this of course is also part of the learning process from the workshop – identifying what is useful input and important for the next steps in the project or process and what is not.) In my experience, you will rarely get a volunteer willing to do this! I also find that typed flipcharts, when they come back to you in Word format, can lose a lot of the context, feeling and creativity that went into the workshop brainstorming and discussions that produced them.
Another option is a Photo Report, and this has been done for a while. I remember when we took photos with our digital cameras, then downloaded them off the data card, pasted them into PPT and then inserted the photo slides into Word documents, fighting formatting and creating mega-heavy documents that in the end we had to distribute by USB stick as they wouldn’t pass as attachments. (I will fully admit that even then this was probably not the most effective way to do this). Things have gotten a easier with smart phone and compressed files etc.
However, EVEN easier now is the winning combination of an iPad, writing stylus and a nifty app called Penultimate.
Penultimate was recently acquired by Evernote, which I also love, although even before this partnership I was a Penultimate fan.
To use Penultimate for a quick and easy Photo report, you just need to start a new Notebook in the app:
Start a new Penultimate Notebook
Once you are in, you can take photos of your flipcharts, your cards work, your exercises using the photo icon on the page of your notebook. Once you have the photo there on your page, you can resize it, change direction, copy it to multiple pages, and best yet, you can write on or around it (as above!)
I use my notebook to create a living memory of my workshops, from both the content point of view, and the process. For example…
I capture notes and maybe an important slide from a presentation that I want to remember: I capture a workshop exercise in action with some of the highlights of the discussion (and you can write more neatly than I did here!):
I record the results of a card activity theme by theme: I can remember how I set the exercise up and how it ran: And more!
The number of functions is pretty rich for the purpose of creating a Photo Report from a workshop.
As you can see you can select from a range of 10 pen colours (including white and yellow for writing on dark photos as on some of the photos above). There is also a selection of three line thicknesses, so you can make titles stand out or put emphasis on particular words or images. If you make a mistake you can undo it, or change your mind and re-do it. If you like lined paper, plain paper or graph paper, you can change it at any time. As you can see, I use the photo function most heavily. Once I take the photo I always change the size of the photo, move it around, and sometimes put multiple photos on a page (see an example of this in the photos above). If you really need to read the text however, then 1 per page, expanded will work best.
You don’t even have to worry about taking your photos in order. I walk around and snap images of key flipcharts or processes with my iPad when I have a free moment during my workshop, and then I reorder them afterwards with the drag and drop feature – which is very much like you would use to change slide order in PowerPoint in the slide sorter view. If you forget your iPad, you can also use your iPhone for the photos, but then you have to upload them to your iPad photo archive by email afterwards and then insert them one by one into your Penultimate Photo Report. It takes more steps, thus more time, but is relatively straight forward – it also means that other people can send you photos to incorporate.
Once you are happy with your Photo report, you can send it as a pdf by email (if it is not too too big – it can actually quickly get too big for this in my experience), or you can open it in Dropbox and then share the folder, other options include Skitch (also an Evernote product) and Day One (a journaling app). Because I am also an Evernote user, I have it sync to Evernote and then I can just share the URL for that Evernote file by email with my workshop participants. This step will take some fiddling around. I open it in Evernote on my iPad, then open Evernote on my ipad where I then see my Photo Report. Then I sync my computer Evernote until I see it there too. At the end of all this it is easy to use the “Share” button to get a URL that you can paste into an email. It sounds more complicated then it is!
Overall, if you are pretty quick with your photos, and then any notes you want to make on them, you can do it all in about 15 minutes – an immediate and super quick memory of a workshop. If you want to make it very pretty and take it on like a scrapbooking exercise, then of course it can take longer, but it feels creative and fun! Gone are the hours and hours of typing up flipcharts into massive, boring Word document Workshop Reports – of course, you could still let someone else do that after you send your Penultimate report. They will thank you for making it more manageable than struggling with a huge roll of unruly flipchart sheets and a teetering stack of facilitation cards!
