Monthly Archives: February 2015

civic education and deeper learning

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Today, Jobs for the Future (JFF) a national nonprofit that advocates for all youth to gain the skills they need to succeed in the economy, releases a paper entitled “Civic Education and Deeper Learning” by me and CIRCLE Deputy Director Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg. This paper was funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation as part of its Deeper Learning Initiative. It was discussed at a Harvard Graduate School of Education event: “More than College Readiness: Engaging Students in Work and Civic Life.”

The Hewlett Deeper Learning initiative envisions k-12 students “using their knowledge and skills in a way that prepares them for real life.” When deeper lear`ning occurs, students “are mastering core academic content, like reading, writing, math, and science, while learning how to think critically, collaborate, communicate effectively, direct their own learning, and believe in themselves (known as an ‘academic mindset’).” Deeper Learning should occur in all disciplines and should encourage interdisciplinary learning.

In “Civic Education and Deeper Learning,” we argue that k-12 civic education must be strengthened to meet these goals. The best civic education exemplifies deeper learning, but many students receive more superficial and less interactive forms of civics. For its part, the deeper learning agenda must encompass civic education, because among the topics that students must learn to think critically about, discuss, and collaborate on are social and political issues.

We argue that aligning civic education with deeper learning points the way to pedagogical, curricular, and policy innovations that will be overlooked if we think of civic education as merely the acquisition of basic facts about the political system—the view that seems to drive such policies as requiring students to pass multiple-choice civics tests.

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Join us for our Feb 19th Confab on Newcomers, Latecomers, and Disrupters

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Join us on Thursday, February 19th from 12-1:30pm Eastern (9-10:30am Pacific) for NCDD’s next “Confab Call.” Register today to secure your spot!

On this Confab, we will be tackling the issue of working with newcomers, latecomers, and disrupters:  strategies for sustainable and productive engagement.Confab bubble image

Practitioners managing public engagement processes that run over months or years are often challenged by newcomers, late-comers, and disruptors:

  • The newly elected official who wants to have her say.
  • The neighborhood resident who finally gets involved when the bulldozers arrive on his block.
  • The activists who’ve been carefully biding their time and now hope to derail proceedings because “they were not consulted.”

How can you plan for their arrival?

This Confab will be led by NCDD members Sarah Read and Christoph Berendes. For more than 25 years, Sarah has designed collaborative processes to resolve regulatory issues, facilitated community dialogues, and led visioning and strategic planning efforts for a variety of organizations.  Chris was a project manager for online public engagement efforts for the Office of the Vice President and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the early days of the Web and has advised the Kettering Foundation, AmericaSpeaks, and the Democracy Fund on the use of social media to foster public engagement.

Using scenarios to illustrate the possibilities, Sarah and Chris will describe structures they’ve used for these kinds of challenges– on-ramps, off-ramps, and connectors — and the process elements that affect success – managing expectations, building and sharing knowledge (process and substance), setting boundaries, incorporating new information and ideas, evaluation and “flexibility,” and “harvesting as you go along.” They will also demonstrate simple web tools that can help, such as blog tags, maps, project timelines, charts, and trackers.

Participants will be able to share questions and examples of these challenges in advance and during the Confab.

NCDD’s “Confab Calls” are opportunities for members [and potential members] of NCDD to talk with and hear from innovators in our field about the work they’re doing, and to connect with each fellow members around shared interests. Membership in NCDD is encouraged but not required for participation. Register today if you’d like to join us.

Register Here

Gender and Grammar

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I generally feel rather strongly about using correct grammar. I suppose I ought to as a communications professional. But there are a few rules which I continue to break no many how many times I’ve been corrected.

I almost wish I’d kept a running tally, for example, of the number of times I’ve been marked down for noun/pronoun disagreement. That is, for writing sentences such as:

Did your child get their vaccine?

That’s incorrect, you see, because the child is singular while “their” is plural. You could ask about children getting their vaccine, but if your talking to a person with one child, that is not an optimal solution.

Traditionally, the proper approach was to always use “he” when a singular gender was unknown.

But, as others have noted this approach is generally considered “outdated and sexist.” An unknown person isn’t always male, after all.

So then came the so-called gender-neutral solutions:

Did your child get his or her vaccine?

Or, if you’d like to be a little more edgy, you can replace the default “he” to a default “she”:

From each, according to her abilities.

Those were the grammatical suggestions I received growing up, but neither ever seemed quite satisfactory.

“He or she” is just clunky. If you don’t know the gender of the person you are talking about, nobody cares enough for you to spend that much time on it.

Using a default “she” is delightfully subversive, but I personally find it rather stale. It seems to typically be used by men who are trying too hard to prove they’re feminists. That use may have its place, but is generally unhelpful to me.

And, of course, there’s a bigger problem to these solutions: both reinforce a gender binary. Are “his” and “hers” the only gender options?

English doesn’t offer much in the way of genderless nouns, as you might guess from the fact that they would more properly be called “neuter” nouns.

Did your child get its vaccine?

Well, okay, I might say that, but only because I am cold-hearted and childless.

From each, according to its abilities.

Better get ready for the Marxist robot take over.

Some have advocated for the use of newer pronouns, such as ze and xe. Call me old fashion, but I just prefer the simple they.

And better yet, there’s a now a term for this. I haven’t been suffering from noun/pronoun disagreement after all – I’ve just been using the singular they.

This may seem all neither here nor there, but words matter. Words are important.

So I was delighted to see the New York Times recently profile students at the University of Vermont – where the university allows students “to select their own identity — a new first name, regardless of whether they’ve legally changed it, as well as a chosen pronoun — and records these details in the campuswide information system so that professors have the correct terminology at their fingertips.”

Of course, this doesn’t stop the times from trotting out tired tropes of gender norms – saying one student “was born female, has a gentle disposition, and certainly appears feminine.”

But, I suppose, change happens bit by bit. It changes through big movements and upheaval, but it also changes through words and grammar. And so I stand by my grammatical standard:

Regardless of a person’s gender, they can go by any pronoun they want.

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recent research on state laws and youth voting

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In 2013, we used our own survey data, public data, and a literature review to assemble evidence on the effects of state voting laws on youth. I would say the highlights were:

  • For young people without college experience, the existence of a photo ID law in their state predicted lower turnout in 2012, even after we included many other potential explanations in our statistical models. Photo ID requirements may also disenfranchise some eligible college students, but the law did not lower the college student turnout rate appreciably. The overall turnout effects of new photo ID rules were modest in 2o12, but these laws were met with active opposition that year, so their effects may worsen in the future.
  • Allowing people to register to vote on the same day that they vote had a positive effect on youth turnout in 2012, and that finding is consistent with previous research on other elections.

We have had another election since 2013 and also seen a lot of new research using historical voting data. I would note these findings:

  • Allowing early voting is often thought to increase turnout only among people who are likely to vote anyway, but Ashok, Feder, McGrath, and Hersh find some evidence that young voters who were likely to be targeted by political campaigns in the weeks before the 2012 election (because they lived in high-profile swing states), had higher turnout if they could vote early. The argument here is that young people vote when mobilized, and early voting helps mobilization efforts.
  • Citrin, Green, and Levy find that informing minority voters about photo ID requirements raises their turnout (by informing these voters about the process or by making them angry about the potential barrier to their participation). It does not discourage them from voting. This is an argument for getting the word out, as long as photo ID laws are on the books. It is also a warning that photo ID laws may have worse suppressive power once the salience of these now-controversial laws declines.
  • Another policy option is to allow 16- or 17-year-olds to preregister, so that they are automatically registered on their 18th birthday. That reform has the advantage of allowing outreach to occur in schools and gets youth on the rolls at the earliest possible opportunity. The sooner a young person is registered, the sooner she can be canvassed and mobilized by parties. Holbein and Hillygus find that preregistration boosts youth turnout, and they find that the youth electorate diversifies, so that Republicans do better than they would if turnout were lower.
  • Keith Gunnar Bentele and Erin O’Brien argue that states are more likely to impose restrictive voting measures if they have higher minority populations, higher and/or rising minority turnout, and if the state is both competitive and has a Republican legislative majority. This is circumstantial empirical evidence in favor of the view that these restrictions have partisan motivations.

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Join Everyday Democracy’s Orientation Webinar on Feb. 12

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If you’re not already familiar with the work of Everyday Democracy, one of our founding NCDD organizational members, we highly encourage you to register for their upcoming orientation webinar on Thursday, February 12th at 2pm Eastern.

EvDem LogoEvDem has been honing its dialogue-to-change model for years in a huge variety of communities and has developed a wide ranging suite of tools to support the communities they work with, and this webinar is a great opportunity to get an overview of what resources they have to offer and how you can engage with their great work.

Here’s how the folks at EvDem describe the webinar:

Are you new to Everyday Democracy? Do you want to hear about success stories of communities that have used dialogue to create positive change? Join us for a webinar on Thursday, February 12 at 2pm ET for an orientation of our approach to change…

During this webinar, we will explore Everyday Democracy’s approach to change through dialogue and action. We will give an overview to how the process works, what kinds of results we’ve seen from using our approach, and  share a few stories of some of the communities we have worked with.

Not familiar with Everyday Democracy’s work? Here’s a bit of how they describe what they do:

We help communities build their own capacity for inclusive dialogue and positive change. Our ultimate aim is to create a national civic infrastructure that supports and values everyone’s voice and participation.

Because structural racism and other structural inequities affect communities everywhere, we help community groups use an “equity lens” in every phase of dialogue and change – coalition building, messaging, recruitment, issue framing, facilitation, and linking the results of their dialogues to action and change. We provide advice, training and flexible how-to resources on a wide range of issues – including poverty, racial equity, education, building strong neighborhoods, community-police relations, violence, early childhood, and community planning.

This webinar will be a great chance to learn about the work and resources of one of the leading D&D organizations in the field, so we hope you will consider attending. You can learn more about the webinar on EvDem’s website by clicking here, and you can register for it by visiting https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/5362336164849502721.

We hope to “see” you online next Thursday!

 

Langston Hughes

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This past weekend was Langston Hughes’ 113th Birthday, a fact which was commemorated in a Google doodle.

A prolific and powerful writer, Hughes wrote in many forms – poetry, plays, fiction and non-fiction.

All his work is remarkable, but I’ve always been particularly taken with his short poems – his ability to express so much with so little. Take, for example, Winter Moon:

How thin and sharp is the moon tonight!
How thin and sharp and ghostly white
Is the slim curved crook of the moon tonight!

But, of course, the real heart of his work was around social and racial justice. Hughes has plenty of works which tackle these issues outright – the 1947 ballad Freedom Train, for example.

And yet, there are few works I found as powerful, as poignant, as Lanston Hughes’ simple note, For Selma:

In places like
Selma, Alabama,
Kids say,
    In places like
    Chicago and New York…
In places like
Chicago and New York
Kids say,
    In places like
    London and Paris…
In places like
London and Paris
Kids say,
    In places like
    Chicago and New York…

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a new youth political poll

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The first youth poll of the 2016 election is out, and it appears to be solid methodologically, with a phone sample and 1,000 respondents (up to age 34). It’s from Fusion. I am not interested in the young adults’ preference among the presidential candidates, because now is way too early to be forecasting the election. (For the record, young adults prefer Hillary right now.) But I am interested in these nuggets:

Party and ideology: The biggest group is composed of Independents (46%), but when you ask which way people “lean,” the results are 43% Democrats and 31% Republicans. (Most political science research finds that Independent leaners behave exactly like party members.) Fifty-seven percent say government is “helpful,” much higher than the national rate and a sign of a persistent Democratic tilt. About two thirds say they belong to the same party as their parents. It looks as if the remaining third has mostly shifted left of their older relatives.

Knowledge: Only 23% of respondents can name one of their US Senators. The rates are 20% for women, 18% for 18- to 24-year-olds, 16% for Latinos, and 10 percent for African-Americans. This is a form of political knowledge that I would really like to be higher. If you don’t know who represents you, you are not able to hold your representatives accountable. Note that this is a distinct problem from the scores on civics exams, because standardized tests never ask about current facts like the names of one’s elected officials. If we were guided by standardized test scores, we would spend less time on current events, not more time.

Issues: The top issue is the usual–“jobs and the economy”–at 19%. Health care follows at 10%, and education, at 7%. Police brutality is the top issue for 1%, as is racial harmony. Climate change is also at 1%. The most striking finding here is the wide dispersal of top issues. As I often note, young adults are not an interest group. They do not have one or a few defining issues. They face all the issues that confront us as human beings, from taxes (1%) to immigration (4%).

Age of candidates: We are often asked whether young voters prefer younger candidates. That question will come up again if Hilary Clinton is the Democratic nominee. For what it’s worth, this survey asked whether respondents would be more likely to vote “if there were more young candidates.” Seventy percent thought it would make no difference. Twenty-six percent saw it as a positive change, and 6% thought they would be less likely to vote if there were more young candidates.

Comedy: And if comedians ran for president, the leading candidate among young adults would be Colbert, followed pretty closely by Stewart and Fay.

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Democracy’s Education: Stirrings of Change

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It seems fitting that yesterday was the 113th birthday of the poet Langston Hughes and also the publication date for the collection which I have edited, Democracy's Education: Citizenship, Public Work, and the Future of Colleges and Universities (Vanderbilt University Press). Both Hughes and the contributions to the book collection by a world-class group of policy-makers, presidents, tenured and adjunct faculty, staff, students, community and labor organizers, and public intellectuals hold in tension the challenges of the world as it is and the possibilities of the world as it should be.

Hughes regularly brought together seeming opposites in ways that simultaneously asserted their connection and transgressed conventional relations of power. In 1924 at the age of 22, as a transplanted North Carolinian freshman at Columbia, he penned "Theme for English B" in response to his teacher's assignment to write "a page tonight... out of you... it will be true."

"I wonder if it's that simple?" Hughes muses. Then he speaks a youthful truth to power:

"So will my page be colored while I write?
Being me, it will not be white.
As I learn from you,
I guess you learn from me --
although you are older -- and white --
and somewhat more free.
This is my page for English B."

No contradiction was more vivid in Hughes' poetry than that between the reality of America, the "world as it is" from the vantage of the black experience, and "the world as it should be," ideals of freedom, equality, and democracy. In "Let America Be America Again," Hughes conveys the irony by juxtaposing the creed and the reality: "Equality is in the air we breathe. (There's never been equality for me, Nor freedom in this 'homeland of the free.')" Hughes also defines the essence of the country as the struggle for democratic ideals. In "Freedom's Plow," expressing themes from the Harlem Renaissance and the popular movements of the Great Depression, he gives ownership to all who "made America":

"The plan and the pattern is here,
Woven from the beginning/
Into the warp and woof of America:
ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL.
NO MAN IS GOOD ENOUGH
TO GOVERN ANOTHER MAN
WITHOUT HIS CONSENT...
Who said those things? Americans!
Who owns those words? America!
Who is America? You, me!
We are America!"

In today's dominant intellectual fashion, conjoining "democracy" and "higher education" seems both uninteresting and far-fetched. Mark Lilla, writing in The New Republic last summer on "why the dogma of democracy doesn't always make the world better," sees "democracy" as simply a set of aphorisms about elections, rights, and free markets, part of a wider intellectual exhaustion. "Never since the end of World War II, and perhaps since the Russian Revolution, has political thinking in the West been so shallow and clueless," Lilla argues. "We all sense that ominous changes are taking place in our societies, and in other societies whose destinies will very much shape our own. Yet we lack adequate concepts or even a vocabulary for describing the world we find ourselves in."

Meanwhile, alarm about higher education appears across the political spectrum, from Republicans like Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, who may well use his lack of a college degree as a credential in his presidential bid, to liberals like William Deresiewicz, whose New Republic essay, "The Nation's Top Colleges Are Turning Our Kids into Zombies," was the most widely read article in the magazine's history.

For many, science itself is at least partly to blame for higher education's travails, to the extent that it has become higher education's leading edge. As the historian Andrew Jewett details in a brilliant recasting of the political and cultural history of science, Science, Democracy, and the American University, since the 1960s the main trends in humanities and humanistic social sciences have come to "validate the narrow, value-neutral conception of science" crafted by positivists. "In part because of that interpretive shift, science and democracy came to seem opposed, rather than mutually reinforcing (p. 367)."

Yet Jewett's book itself (Cambridge University Press, 2012) shows that times are a-changing, to recall Bob Dylan. John Dewey, the pragmatic philosopher who tirelessly promoted the linkage between democracy and education, graces the book's cover. In great detail, Jewett shows that Dewey was not an anomalous figure but part of a vast and diverse movement of "scientific democrats" beginning after the Civil War, becoming the dominant force among scientists until World War II. Scientific democrats drew on many traditions, from American pragmatism and Jane Addams' Hull House settlement in Chicago, to the movement of adult education, whose leader, Edward Lineman, was inspired by Danish folk schools which sought to make education "student-centered," beginning with their unique lives and experiences.

For the movement of scientific democrats, science was anything but "value-free" and politically detached. Scientists were citizens, promoters of practices and values which they saw as constitutive of democratic society such as cooperation, free inquiry, the experimental spirit, and insistence that any proposition meet rigorous tests of real world practice. For all their differences, they shared a populist faith in public deliberation by everyday citizens. This animated the Federation of American Scientists, formed just after World War II to educate and involve the people in the issues raised by the atom bomb. Albert Einstein argued that the fate of the world rested on "decisions made in the village square (p. 309)."

Democracy's Education shares with Science, Democracy and the American University the aim of countering dangerous anti-democratic tendencies by recalling a democratic narrative of higher education vastly different than Ivory Tower detachment and individualist meritocracy. Equally important, it is rich with case studies and concepts - curricular and co-curricular reforms which revitalize an educational model akin to the folk schools, beginning with the lives and interests of students, engaged scholarship, "anchor institution" collaborations with communities, institutional democratization.

In sum, they show that a narrative of democracy is again stirring in and around our colleges and universities.