Civic Expertise

Posted on November 30, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

In response to my unhelpful guide on how to resist, my friend Joshua Miller responds with his own post, writing:

I think we – we scholars who tackle the civic arena – ought to be able to give advice, and not simply advocate a life of unspecified restless action. Too often we study the politics of governments but we need to practice a different politics: of relationships and of institutions. But I don’t yet know what advice to give. I am still a little bit heeding the instructions: don’t just do something, sit there.

This is a common complaint within the civic domain – ‘talk’ is useless if it doesn’t lead to action, our scholarly leadership is too ivory-tower if it doesn’t translate to practical advice. There’s something entirely unsatisfying if the outcome to all our civic work and scholarship is merely to “advocate a life of unspecified restless action.“

I subtitled my guide unhelpful, and Miller reasonably agrees that it is.

Yet, I find something meaningful in this vague, unhelpful result. We don’t know what advice to give because there are no easy answers and we, civic scholars and citizens alike, are in the process of figuring it out.

If we somehow did have answers and we simply doled them out to anyone who would listen, such expertise would interfere with everyone else’s education. Such a process would defeat the goal itself. We don’t have answers because the task before us is to figure it out together.

Miller by no means intended to suggest such a brash professionalism of civic scholarship – saying we should be able to give advice is a far cry from claiming everyone should look solely to us for instructions on what to do.

But while the intentions of those approaches are worlds apart, the practical line between them may be thinner then we’d hope.

I think of the great story from organizer and educator Myles Horton. A group of striking workers he’d been working with comes to him in desperation:

They said: “Well, you’ve got more experience than we have. You’ve got to tell us what to do. You’re the expert.” I said: “No, let’s talk about it a little bit more. In the first place, I don’t know what to do, and if I did know I wouldn’t tell you, because if I had to tell you today then I’d have to tell you tomorrow, and when I’m gone you’d have to get somebody else to tell you.”

One guy reached in his pocket and pulled out a pistol and says, “Godddamn you, if you don’t tell us I’m going to kill you.” I was tempted to become an instant expert, right on the spot! But I knew that if I did that, all would be lost and then all the rest of them would start asking me what to do.

While may feel like we’ve failed to live up to our scholarly and civic duty if our work does not result in practical advice, Horton would argue that the goal of our work should always be education and building the capacity of those around us.

We don’t have to know the answers, we have to create space for people to figure out the answers for themselves. Even when the stakes are high. Especially when the stakes are high.

It’s debatable whether Horton was right to take his commitment to such extreme measures, but there’s always a piece of me that thinks he might be right.

You can’t tell someone what to do when you’re just a person trying to figure out what to do.

And I don’t think accepting that means our scholarship has no value. Our research can help broaden the scope of conversation, shed light on what works in certain time and contexts, but we’ll never have the perfect answer for what we should do now.

Bent Flyvbjerg argued in favor of phronetic social sciences. “At the core of phronetic social science stands the Aristotelian maxim that social issues are best decided by means of the public sphere, not by science,” Flyvbjerg writes. “Though imperfect, no better device than public deliberation following the rules of constitutional democracy has been arrived at for settling social issues, so far as human history can show. Social science must therefore play into this device if it is to be useful.”

Flyvbjerg provides the following specific advice on how social scientists should do this:

Producing reflexive analyses of values and interests and of how values and interests affect different groups in society
Making sure that such analyses are fed into the process of public deliberation and decision making, in order to guarantee that legitimate parties to this process, i.e., citizens and stakeholders, receive due diligence in the process.

This is more specific than advocating for a life of unspecified restless action, but it falls short of offering actual advice. The role of the phronetic social scientist is to add value to the public conversation.

This may feel like too little in times when the questions are big and the stakes are dire. But it is, perhaps, enough…or even exactly what is needed.

Then again, I am certainly not above simply advocating for a life of unspecified restless action.

How to Resist: An Unhelpful Guide

Posted on November 28, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

Some days ago, a good friend suggested I write a ‘how to resist’ article to complement the “super-vague or just wrong” articles he had seen circulating in the wake of the recent presidential election.

I’d put off doing so, because I was wholly uncertain of what to say. How to resist? If there was an easy answer to this question there would be no further need of social movement research, there would be no future debate about what types of action are appropriate and effective. If we knew how to resist, there would only be one question left:

When should we resist?

Come to think of it, that’s a pretty good question.

I’ve been seeing a lot of articles recently talking about how we must act to save the Republic or warning why we should be concerned about an impending constitutional crisis. I’ve been reminded more times than I can count how good people stood by while fascism rose in pre-war Germany. The end, it seems, is neigh.

And it’s not that things don’t look and feel dire, but in an era where President Bush lead us into pre-emptive war and initiated a Muslim registry, where President Obama increased deportations and the use of drone strikes – it feels hard to tell what is divergently bad.

It feels, instead, like this is the new normal – or perhaps the old normal that our collective memory is too young to remember. One side wins and the other side loses its mind. Then we repeat this process every four to eight years. Each time it gets a little worse.

So, perhaps there is nothing to resist at all. Perhaps we’re just caught in a particularly brutal ebb of our side’s power and there’s nothing to do but ride it out as best we can. As a Trump supporter once told me: it is their turn.

But, of course, there are no turns, not really. Otherwise Jeb Bush would have been on the ballot and Bernie Sanders would be long forgotten. There are no turns.

More importantly, accepting such comfortable discomfort reminds me of the powerful words Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail:

I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

Calls not to resist, assurances the President-elect is just one more in a serious of imperfect leaders are surely the calls of the white moderate. And this call makes sense: even a legitimate challenge to the election results threatens to wound our democracy. Secretary Clinton conceded for the election for the good of our democracy; because the peaceful – if distasteful – transfer of power is essential.

But such calls also turn a blind eye to the many people who will suffer under a Trump presidency – who have already suffered under the vile hatred President-elect Trump’s rhetoric has unleashed.

Not everyone has the luxury of waiting for a more convenient season.

Earlier I asked, when should we resist? The answer that comes to me, fueled, perhaps by my upbringing in Oakland, CA, is: always.

Václav Havel argued that politics “cannot be enshrined in or guaranteed by any law, decree, or declaration. It cannot be hoped that any single, specific political act might bring it about and achieve it. Only the aim of an ideology can be achieved. The aim of this kind of politics, as I understand it, is never completely attainable because this politics is nothing more than a permanent challenge, a never-ending effort that can only in the best possible case leave behind it a certain trace of goodness.”

When John Dewey writes of democracy as a way a living, this is what I imagine: the constant battle to build the Good Society, the permanent challenge to work in solidarity for a more just and equitable tomorrow. This is the work of citizenship – the work of all who live in a place and consider themselves part of that place. To issue a permanent challenge to ourselves, our neighbors, and, of course, even our government.

Perhaps this is why I find the question of how to resist hard to answer. Resistance isn’t a postcard campaign or a call to an office. It isn’t showing up at a rally or donating to an important cause. All of those things are good, they each, in their own way have the capacity to fuel your energy play a part in making change.

But if you really want to know how to resist, the answer is more complicated than that. Resistance is a way of life, it’s a form a citizenship. It’s a commitment to speaking out and, importantly, creating space for others to speak out. It’s a bold declaration that all people are created equal and its an unequivocal call that we will not, cannot, rest until that equality is manifest is our society. Resistance comes in every word you say, every action you take.

Resistance means that this moment matters, that every moment matters. And with that commitment to noble action and equitable interaction, with that permanent challenge to fight for the Good, we’re collectively left with just one more question:

What should we do?

Dreams of Union, Days of Conflict

Posted on November 18, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

At last week’s National Communication Association (NCA) annual conference, Penn State’s Kirt Wilson gave a moving lecture on Dreams of Union, Days of Conflict: Communicating Social Justice and Civil Rights Memory in the Age of Obama.

Responding to the “civic calling” theme of this year’s conference, Wilson praised the urged to get involved, but cautioned that we must do so wisely – first understanding “the nature of the society we are called to,” and critically interrogating the civic actions we take on its behalf.

We all know that our society is not perfect – indeed, that is why we so acutely feel a civic calling; a need to engage in the hard work of democratic living. But even with the need for such a “process-model” utopia, as Erin McKenna calls it, the entrenched inequities of our society require more than a moderate amount of collective civic work.

Wilson pointed to the innovative activism of Black Lives Matter, which seeks not only to ameliorate an immediate problem, but to fundamentally disrupt the paradigm which has supported and normalized the perpetual murder of black people.

Wilson quoted Fredrick Douglass: “Slavery has been fruitful in giving itself names…and it will call itself by yet another name; and you and I and all of us had better wait and see what new form this old monster will assume, in what new skin this old snake will come forth next.”

Black slavery still exists today, Wilson argued, but we call it by other names. The school-to-prison pipeline; the new Jim Crow; police-community relations.

When we act, when we respond to the civic calling of our times, we must do so with a critical eye to the institutions which shape our society and the how our actions will affect them.

Black Lives Matter has come under fire for the disruptive nature of their protests; for breaking with the protest approach of their 1960s peers.

But Wilson made a compelling argument for that shift in strategy. The civil rights movement made tremendous advances, but it did not end the insidious remnants of slavery and oppression. Slavery only changed its name.

The only way to truly change this institutionalized oppression is to disrupt the system, to change the paradigm.

Wilson argued that the radicals of the 60s “marched because the only life affirming response to death and to slavery is to resist.” Today’s young activists organize out of a similar need.

“Black life matters,” Wilson said, “because people are dead and they didn’t have to die. And more are going to die tomorrow.”

That is why we resist.

On Calls for Unity and Disturbing Appointments

Posted on November 16, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

In his election night victory speech, Donald Trump took on a more moderate tone, proclaiming: “I pledge to every citizen of our land that I will be president for all Americans, and this is so important to me. For those who have chosen not to support me in the past, of which there were a few people. . ..I’m reaching out to you for your guidance and your help so that we can work together and unify our great country.”

The Democratic party also took the high road – conceding the election even though Clinton received at least a million more votes than Trump. There were calls for unity and respectful meetings between the president and the president-elect. While some chose to take to the street in “Not My President” protests, the resounding message from the Democratic establishment was clear: Democrats have a civic duty to give the president-elect the benefit of the doubt.

And perhaps we did, but as the work of his transition team gets underway Trump has made it clear what kind of President he will be.

Perhaps Representative Katherine Clark put it best when she wrote: “A ‘President for all Americans’ doesn’t appoint an anti-Semitic, racist, homophobic misogynist as senior advisor.”

I’ve heard from a lot of Trump supporters that his dramatic campaign rhetoric really was just rhetoric. They don’t really expect him to build a wall or undertake any of the more troubling policy proposals. Candidate Trump wasn’t as terrifying as liberals thought because his campaign commitments weren’t intended to be taken literally.

But even if this argument allays an impression of Trump as a bigot, the appointment of Stephen Bannon as chief White House strategist and senior counselor cannot be so easily explained away. As chairman of the alt-right Breitbart News, Bannon has given a voice and a platform to the neo-nazis and extremists of America.

His appointment is cause for grave concern.

There are many great articles detailing Bannon’s more serious flaws, but I’ll quote here from the National Review, a “conservative weekly journal of opinion”:

The Left, with its endless accusations of “racism” and “xenophobia” and the like, has blurred the line between genuine racists and the millions of Americans who voted for Donald Trump because of a desire for greater social solidarity and cultural consensus. It is not “racist” to want to strengthen the bonds uniting citizens to their country

But the alt-right is not a “fabrication” of the media. The alt-right is a hodgepodge of philosophies that, at their heart, reject the fundamental principle that “all men are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.” The alt-right embraces an ethno-nationalism that has its counterparts in the worst of the European far-right…

..The problem is not whether Bannon himself subscribes to a noxious strain of political nuttery; it’s that his de facto endorsement of it enables it to spread and to claim legitimacy, and that what is now a vicious fringe could, over time, become mainstream…No, Steve Bannon is not Josef Goebbels. But he has provided a forum for people who spend their days photoshopping pictures of conservatives into ovens.

This is why I find the appointment of Bannon so horrifying. When true conservatives agree that this is a disconcerting turn of events, it’s pretty clear that something is wrong. Our republic truly is in danger.

Now is indeed a time for unity; but not the unity of blindly supporting the President-Elect. It’s a time for liberals and conservatives alike to unite in denouncing hate in all its forms; of making it clear in no uncertain terms that equality and respect for all people are core American values on which our country will not compromise.

Civic Hospitality

Posted on November 15, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

I recently returned from three days at the annual conference of the National Communication Association. I attended a lot of great panels and enjoyed some enriching, thought-provoking conversations.

I was particularly struck by a comment from Debian Marty, who served as respondent for an engaging panel on “Using Dialogue and Deliberation Practice, Research, and Pedagogy to Shape Society and Social Issues.”

Marty argued that hospitality should be championed as a civic virtue.

This idea received some criticism from the room – most notably for the gendered connotation of the word “hospitality.”

To me, that word also implies a certain artificialness which I don’t think Marty was going for. Indeed, it was a little surreal staying at a Philadelphia hotel just days after the election. While nearly everyone I interacted with was generally gloomy and/or angry, the hotel staff – almost entirely people of color – were professionally upbeat and enthusiastic.

They were very hospitable, and their enthusiasm didn’t even feel forced – but their happy-presenting exteriors were a notable contrast to the general climate.

But, semantic details aside, Marty makes a strong argument. Hospitality – “the welcoming of the stranger as a guest,” as she described it – is a worth championing as a civic virtue.

In Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education, Danielle Allen advocates for a somewhat similar approach of “political friendship.” We don’t all have to agree in a democratic society. We don’t even have to all like each other. But we do need to respect each other, care for each other, and make personal sacrifices that support the common good.

It’s a fine line that Allen walks – we should pretend to like each other, but in a way that’s not entirely fake and disingenuous. We need to be hospitable.

Now, this sounds all well and good in a perfect world where we can all just put our differences aside and learn to work together across disagreement – but I worry that this line of reasoning does too little to acknowledge the real and persistent sacrifices that some groups of people have been forced to make for too long.

I want to be hospitable, and I want to champion hospitality, but there are some things – hate speech in particular – which I simply cannot abide or respond to warm smile. As a society, we cannot let such behavior stand.

Allen is well aware of this challenge – indeed, she starts her book with the inexcusably treatment of the Little Rock Nine. But the idea of “niceness” of not saying the things that need to be said out of a misplaced since of politeness, still plagues broader conceptions of “friendship” or “hospitality.”

But civic hospitality or political friendship is something much more subtle than this – something much more important. It is welcoming the stranger as a guest; it is listening intently and thoughtfully, and it standing up for what’s right: it necessarily entails calling out injustice and working against hate.

I don’t know the best phrase for this spirit; our language is so diversely burdened with subtle connotations, but I do know that whatever it is – civic hospitality, political friendship – we sure could use more of it. Fast.

The Day After Tomorrow

Posted on November 7, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

People keep asking me how I feel about tomorrow’s election.

I’m not quite sure how to answer that question.

I feel relieved that the endless cycle of repeating political ads will be finally be broken. I feel excited at the prospect that a woman may be elected president for the first time; 240 years after this country’s founding.

But mostly, I feel an impending sense of doom.

Not so much about the election itself, but about the day after the election – about how we move on after this nasty, divisive campaign season in an increasingly polarized country.

I don’t mean to glorify the past, here – politics has always been messy, scandalous, and far less ideal than we might hope or pretend. But with my limited life time of experience, it seems like things have gotten particularly bad.

In All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid, political journalist Matt Bai tracks the fall of Gary Hart. The dashing young Democrat who in was on the road to becoming his party’s Presidential nominee until a sex scandal took him down in 1987.

Today, that story seems unremarkable – what politician hasn’t been taken down by a sex scandal? But Hart’s story is remarkable because it was the first. As Bai argues, the Gary Hart affair marked a turning point in American political journalism, a moment when public life ceased to allow a private life.

And perhaps this is being over dramatic, but it feels like we are hitting another tide right now. A point where we’re all accustomed to being entrenched in our own point of view, where the line between fact and opinion has become irreparably blurred.

In the field of Civic Studies we don’t just complain about the many failings of civic society, but rather we ask “what should we do?”

As I ponder the future on this election-eve, my best answer to that question is to first get out and vote, but to then get out and talk – to your friends, to neighbors, and to strangers. Or perhaps, I should say: next, get out and listen.

No matter who wins this election, the hardest work – the work of reuniting folks across this great land and the work of finding space in our hearts to respect everyone in it – that work will fall to us.

Tomorrow, we perform a small civic duty and vote. The day after that the real work begins.

Facts, Bias, and Horse-Race Journalism

Posted on November 2, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

I’ve been thinking a lot this election season about an argument from Peter Levine’s We Are the One’s We’ve Been Waiting For.

What if, instead of horse-race journalism where pundits try to predict who will win, our media environment was governed by “public journalism” or “civic journalism” – with reporters asking who should win?

This question seems to fly in the face of common understandings of “good” journalism. Good journalism should be neutral, non-biased, and fact based. By tackling an inherently biased question such as “who should win,” a journalist cannot possibly meet appropriate ethical standards.

Yet, that’s not an entirely accurate take on the situation.

I love quoting Bent Flyvbjerg’s modified proverb: “power is knowledge” – that is, as Flyvbjerg argues, those with power define what counts as knowledge and fundamentally shape reality with their power.

In Rationality and Power, Flyvbjerg meticulously documents how power shapes knowledge throughout the planning process for a new transit hub in Aalborg. The initial list of proposed sites indicates one as most promising, numerous studies confirm the promise of that site and the problems with other sites. Yet – that “promising” site was, in fact, pre-selected by elites and all the research in which that option naturally rises to the top as the best choice is carefully, artfully curated to ensure that decision.

In Power and Powerlessness, John Gaventa similarly argues that power shapes reality – as people in power get to choose not only what issues are addressed, but also what issues are raised.

Both Flyvbjerg and Gaventa warn about the invisibility of this power – in the most insidious, entrenched power structures, this subtle shaping of what does and does not count as knowledge goes largely unnoticed. It’s just taken as a giving that the issues talked about, and the framing given to them, are the factual, non-biased ways to address them.

And this is what is so dangerous about horse-race politics. It’s presented as neutral, but in fact, it’s not neutral at all. Every decision about what does or does not become part of the conversation shapes the electoral atmosphere. There is no neutral coverage.

Levine provides an example of an alternative approach: in the early 1900s, the Charlotte Observer dispensed with “horse race campaign coverage, that is, stories about how the campaigns were trying to win the election. Instead, the Observer convened representative citizens to choose issues for reporters to investigate and to draft questions that the candidates were asked to answer on the pages of the newspaper.”

In this way, political coverage responds to the interests and priorities of “the people” writ large, without devolving into a mess where no knowledge is taken fact leaving only “mere opinion.”

They may be other, and possibility better, approaches as well.

All I know is that now – one week away from the end of the 2016 Presidential Election – after all the coverage, all the ads, all the sound and fury that has gone on for months…I find myself wishing we’d spent just a little more time not asking who will win, but really examining: who should win?

Epistemic Networks and Idea Exchange

Posted on October 21, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

Earlier this week, I gave a brief lightning talk as part of the fall welcome event for Northeastern’s Digital Scholarship Group and NULab for Texts, Maps, and Data. In my talk, I gave a high-level introduction to the motivation and concept behind a research project I’m in the early stages of formulating with my advisor Nick Beauchamp and my Tufts colleague Peter Levine.

I didn’t write out my remarks and my slides don’t contain much text, but I thought it would be helpful to try to recreate those remarks here:

I am interested broadly in the topic of political dialogue and deliberation. When I use the term “political” here, I’m not referring exclusively to debate between elected officials. Indeed, I am much more interested politics as associated living; I am interested in the conversations between every-day people just trying to figure out how we live in this world together. These conversations may be structured or unstructured.

With this group of participants in mind, the next question is to explore how ideas spread. There is a great model borrowed from epistemology that looks at spreading on networks. Considering social networks, for example, you can imagine tracking the spread of a meme across Facebook as people share it with their friends, who then share it with friend of friends, and so on.

This model is not ideal in the context of dialogue. Take the interaction between two people, for example. If my friend shares a meme, there’s some probability that I will see it in my feed and there is some probability that I won’t see it in my feed. But those are basically the only two options: either I see it or I don’t see it.

With dialogue, I may understand you, I may not understanding you, I may think I understand you…etc. Furthermore, dialogue is a back and forth process. And while a meme is either shared or not shared, in the back and forth of dialogue, there is no certainty that an idea is actually exchanged to that a comment had a predictable effect.

This raises the challenging question of how to model dialogue as a process at the local level. This initial work considers an individual’s epistemic network – a network of ideas and beliefs which models an given individual’s reasoning process. The act of dialogue then, is no longer an exchange between two (or more) individuals, it is an exchange between two (or more) epistemic networks.

There are, of course, a lot of methodological challenges and questions to this approach. Most fundamentally, how do you model a person’s epistemic network? There are multiple, divergent way to do this from which you can imagine getting very different – but equally valid results.

The first method – which has been piloted several times by Peter Levine – is a guided reflection process in which individuals respond to a series of prompts in order to self-identify the nodes and links of their epistemic network. The second method involves the automatic extraction of a semantic network from a written reflection or discussion transcript.

I am interested in exploring both of these methods – ideally with the same people, in order to compare both construction models. Additionally, once epistemic networks are constructed, through either approach, you can evaluate and compare their change over time.

There are a number of other research questions I am interested in exploring, such as what network topology is conducive to “good” dialogue and what interactions and conditions lead to opinion change.

SecEd King on Civic Education

Posted on October 20, 2016 by stevemasy

Yesterday, Secretary of Education King spoke for quite awhile on civic education and its importance in helping students become the kinds of citizens they should be.

For me, as someone with a passion for civic education and a firm belief in the importance of developing civic knowledge, skills, and dispositions, this was a positive speech. Some of the highlights:

We need to continue to be ever-vigilant to make sure that this right is not taken away. However, as I would tell my students when I was teaching, voting, as important as it is, is only one responsibility of citizenship. The strength of our democracy depends on all of us as Americans understanding our history and the Constitution and how the government works at every level. Becoming informed and thoughtful about local, state and national issues, getting involved in solving problems in our schools, communities, states and nationally. Recognizing that solutions to the complex issues our nation faces today all require compromise. Being willing to think beyond our own needs and wants and to embrace our obligations to the greater good.

Here at the FJCC, we cannot stress enough how important it is that we as citizens understand that we need to do MORE than just vote, no matter your position on issues. In order to be the best citizen that you can you be, you must become involved and engaged within your community. Organizationally, the FJCC has brought on board an Action Civics Coordinator to begin the process of working with students, teachers, schools, and districts in a civics program that moves beyond just civic knowledge and towards a refinement of the other civic competencies that Secretary King stresses here.

Today, all 50 states and the District of Columbia make some civics instruction a graduation requirement. Over the past couple of years, 14 states have also begun requiring students to pass a version of the citizenship exam to get a diploma. That could be a good start, but it is civics light. Knowing the first three words of the preamble to the Constitution, or being able to identify at least one branch of government, is worthwhile, but it’s not enough to equip people to carry out the duties of citizenship.

Without a doubt, this emphasizes again the importance of skills in dispositions as well as knowledge in creating a well-rounded and engaged citizen! It also reinforces the concerns that some have raised about the value of the naturalization test as a measure of civic education and preparedness.

And ask teachers and principals and superintendents to help your students learn to be problem solvers who can grapple with challenging issues such as how to improve their schools, homelessness, air and water pollution or the tensions between police and communities of color. It is also critical that these conversations not be partisan. Civic education and engagement is not a Democratic Party or a Republican Party issue. Solutions to problems can and should be rooted in different philosophies of government. We have to make sure classrooms welcome and celebrate these different perspectives.

I recognize that this could lead to uncomfortable conversations and that teachers will need support and training to foster these conversations in productive ways. Principals will need to be courageous and back their teachers up. Superintendents and school boards will need to make sure their communities understand what they are trying to accomplish.

This is so very important. Discussion of current events and controversial issues within a deliberative framework generally has a positive impact on student civic engagement and awareness of issues, as well as willingness to engage in problem solving. Recent work by Hess and McAvoy explore ways in which teachers and students in ideologically different communities approach this, and both the research and the suggestions can be quite beneficial as we contemplate how to safely approach difficult issues.

So what are the elements of a robust and relevant civic education? First, students need knowledge. They need to know the Constitution and the legislative process. They also need to understand history. Our students ought to be truly familiar with the primary sources that have shaped our nation’s history, with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, with Sojourner Truth’s, “Ain’t I a Woman” speech, and Dr. King’s letter from a Birmingham jail, to name a few.
But it’s not enough to be able to quote from these documents. They need to know why they remain relevant today. They need to be able to put themselves into other shoes and to appreciate the different perspectives that have shaped our nation’s history.

Well, there is the need for civic knowledge. But is there anything else kids need in order to become the citizens this nation needs them to be?

Beyond knowledge, students also need civic skills. They should be able to write persuasive letters to the editor, or to the mayor, or to a member of Congress, and learn to speak at public meetings. In addition, they should have opportunities to do democracy. When I was teaching, I had my seniors do research projects tackling local problems in the community. I can recall students who worked with a local nonprofit to end the dumping of garbage in their neighborhood, to support urban agriculture projects, and to advocate for more affordable housing.

Ah, there is is! Civic skills! They have to know what to DO with that knowledge! Is there anything else, Dr. King?

We also want our students to learn to look beyond their own interests to their enlightened self interest in the common good. I recently visited Flint, Michigan, and while I may never live in Flint, I recognized it’s in my interest to make sure that children and families in Flint and every other city in the country have safe water to drink and an opportunity to fulfill their potential. Service both helps students understand the challenges in the community, helps them understand themselves and also helps them understand the importance of the common good.

And THERE is is! We need to ensure that students develop those civic dispositions that help them make a difference for the common good! And remember, this is not a partisan issue. No matter the perspective, we want citizens to feel as though they CAN make a difference and that they have the ability to engage in the practice of citizenship!

But the biggest and most important outcome of all is that high quality civic education prepares students to help the nation solve difficult, challenging, complex issues and make it a better, more equitable place to live with genuine opportunity for all. Civic education must be an essential part of a well-rounded education. It must be at the foundation of the future, not only of our economy but of our democracy.

Our schools need to be about more than preparing kids for a job. They need to be about preparing them to be citizens. Another reason we should consider how the C3 Framework can shape our standards, our curriculum, and our instruction.

It was such a pleasure to hear and see strong advocacy for civic education that goes beyond simple rote learning. As this current election season suggests, there is such a great need for building those civic competencies and considering our schools as more than just the place where we send our kids to the spend the day.

You can take a look at the transcript of Dr. King’s remarks here.

Facts, Power, and the Bias of AI

Posted on October 17, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

I spent last Friday and Saturday at the 7th Annual Text as Data conference, which draws together scholars from many different universities and disciplines to discuss developments in text as data research. This year’s conference, hosted by Northeastern, featured a number of great papers and discussions.

I was particularly struck by a comment from Joanna J. Bryson as she presented her work with Aylin Caliskan-Islam, Arvind Narayanan on A Story of Discrimination and Unfairness: Using the Implicit Bias Task to Assess Cultural Bias Embedded in Language Models:

There is no neutral knowledge.

This argument becomes especially salient in the context of artificial intelligence: we tend to think of algorithms as neutral, fact-based processes which are free from the biases we experience as humans. But such a simplification is deeply faulty. As Bryson argued, AI won’t be neutral if it’s based on human culture; there is no neutral knowledge.

This argument resonates quite deeply with me, but I find it particularly interesting through the lens of an increasingly relativistic world: as facts increasingly become seen as matters of opinion.

To complicate matters, there is no clear normative judgment that can be applied to such relativism: on the one hand this allows for embracing diverse perspectives, which is necessary for a flourishing, pluralistic world. On the other hand, nearly a quarter of high school government teachers in the U.S. report that parents or others would object if they discussed politics in a government classroom.

Discussing “current events” in a neutral manner is becoming increasingly challenging if not impossible.

This comment also reminds me of the work of urban planner Bent Flyvbjerg who turns an old axiom on its head to argue that “power is knowledge.” Flyvbjerg’s concern doesn’t require a complete collapse into relativism, but rather argues that “power procures the knowledge which supports its purposes, while it ignores or suppresses that knowledge which does not serve it.” Power, thus, selects what defines knowledge and ultimately shapes our understanding of reality.

In his work with rural coal minors, John Gaventa further showed how such power dynamics can become deeply entrenched, so the “powerless” don’t even realize the extent to which their reality is dictated by the those with power.

It is these elements which make Bryson’s comments so critical; it is not just that there is no neutral knowledge, but that “knowledge” is fundamentally controlled and defined by those in power. Thus it is imperative that any algorithm take these biases into account – because they are not just the biases of culture, but rather the biases of power.

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