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Informing or Engaging: What Is the Role of Higher Education in Strengthening Public Life? (Connections 2015)

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The five-page article, Informing or Engaging: What Is the Role of Higher Education in Strengthening Public Life?, by Derek W. M. Barker was published Fall 2015 in Kettering Foundation‘s annual newsletter, “Connections 2015 – Our History: Journeys in KF Research”. Barker discusses how Kettering’s work over the last 20 years has explored the role of higher education and democratic citizenry. Kettering recognized the need for improved democratic processes to address the public’s deep frustration toward politics in this country and created a network of colleges to experiment deliberative practices within higher education. Below is an excerpt from the article. Connections 2015 is available for free PDF download on Kettering’s site here.

From the article…

KF_Connections 2015Higher education is a key institution in our democracy, charged with shaping the next generation of our citizenry. From Kettering’s perspective, future citizens need more than information if they are to be effective actors in public life. They need to be able to come together with other citizens—across partisan divides—and make a difference in their communities. However, a key challenge underlying Kettering’s research is how higher education views its civic role. That is, as these institutions have evolved, rather than an engaged citizenry, they have in most cases narrowed their role to developing an informed citizenry. To address this challenge, over time Kettering has developed a small network of college campuses that are experimenting with deliberative approaches to civic education and public forms of scholarship that integrate the civic aspirations of academics into their professional work.

Kettering’s research on higher education, of course, was part of the foundation’s shift from technical innovation to democracy and citizenship. At the beginning of this shift, the foundation faced a critical puzzle. The dominant narrative was that the public was apathetic and uninterested in politics. Low rates of voter turnout and opinion data on attitudes toward government reinforced this view. There seemed to be no demand for the type of democracy that Kettering saw as increasingly necessary to address our nation’s problems. A key insight helped shape Kettering’s research agenda for the next 20 years: perhaps what appeared as apathy and disinterest was in fact a deep sense of frustration and alienation. While the public may be disgusted with politics-as-usual, perhaps citizens could be reenergized by a different kind of politics worthy of their time and attention. Indeed, researchers in Kettering’s network found evidence for this hypothesis in a series of focus group reports of public attitudes toward politics. Following the landmark Citizens and Politics: A View from Main Street America study of the public-at-large published in 1991, the Harwood Institute found this phenomenon to be especially true of students in the 1993 study, College Students Talk Politics. While frustrated with politics-as-usual, college students were enthusiastic about working together in their communities and engaging in public discourse across partisan divides. As David Mathews wrote in his foreword to College Students Talk Politics, “This study found that students have retained a remarkable ‘instinct’ for democratic practice; there is a buried civic consciousness in students.”

Sparked by the idea that people had a latent potential for civic awakening, Kettering began thinking about the possibilities for higher education to provide the sorts of experiences that students seemed to want. The foundation became aware of the larger possibilities for higher education’s civic role by looking historically at the major movements in higher education, from the liberal arts colleges of the founding era, to land-grant and minority serving institutions founded after the Civil War, and community colleges in the 1950s. In “The Public and Its Colleges,” an article that appeared in the 1998 issue of the Higher Education Exchange, Claire Snyder-Hall observed that, in each case, the colleges evolved in the context of larger civic movements. They were responding to particular groups, each demanding not only technical knowledge or vocational training but also education as full participants in our democracy. Although it seems strange to speak in this way now, at the most transformative moments in its history, higher education has been itself a civic movement.

Stirrings within the Academy
While Kettering was just beginning to focus its attention on higher education in the 1990s, within the academy interest in civic engagement was also beginning to take shape. A consensus emerged that universities seemed to have narrowed their vision and lost their way. Based on interviews with faculty at the University of Minnesota, Harry Boyte observed a widespread disenchantment among academics with their disconnection from public life—even among academics who joined the profession with hopes of their ideas contributing to social change. Academics began talking once again about civic education and their democratic role. In 1999, a “civic movement” was formally declared with a document now known as the Wingspread Declaration, in which a group of college presidents committed to an expansive vision of an informed and engaged citizenry. By the turn of the millennium, nearly every campus had courses and offices devoted to civic engagement.

Although something was stirring in higher education, from Kettering’s point of view, what it actually meant for democracy had yet to be determined. Would this civic movement aim to educate students in their civic capacities, to participate in politics and public life, to negotiate conflict and work together across their differences? Or would it teach students to make a difference by using their knowledge as individuals through direct service? Arguably, both goals represent coherent and complementary visions for higher education and its civic mission. Indeed, during the formation of the civic movement in higher education, both visions were part of the conversation. However, Kettering realized the civic engagement movement had become more focused on the application of expert knowledge rather than the relational norms and habits needed to revamp our politics; in the categories of the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, it had prioritized instrumental reason over communicative rationality.

The civic education of college students, while much improved, has mostly emphasized individual community-service experiences. As Rick Battistoni, himself a proponent and practitioner of service learning, has argued in the 2014 issue of the Higher Education Exchange, such efforts are “a mile wide and an inch deep.” By emphasizing such programs, higher education sends students the signal that individual service is a more satisfying and direct way of making a difference than working through politics and public life. Students are taught to see communities as recipients of their expertise rather than ecosystems rich with their own civic assets. More than ever before, represent coherent and complementary visions for higher education and its civic mission. Indeed, during the formation of the civic movement in higher education, both visions were part of the conversation. However, Kettering realized the civic engagement movement had become more focused on the application of expert knowledge rather than the relational norms and habits needed to revamp our politics; in the categories of the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, it had prioritized instrumental reason over communicative rationality. The civic education of college students, while much improved, has mostly emphasized individual community-service experiences. As Rick Battistoni, himself a proponent and practitioner of service learning, has argued in the 2014 issue of the Higher Education Exchange, such efforts are “a mile wide and an inch deep.” By emphasizing such programs, higher education sends students the signal that individual service is a more satisfying and direct way of making a difference than working through politics and public life. Students are taught to see communities as recipients of their expertise rather than ecosystems rich with their own civic assets. More than ever before, students have opportunities to apply their knowledge in community contexts, but higher education seems to have reached its limit when it comes to educating their civic skills and capacities.

Similarly, academics in outreach and extension fields are talking about civic engagement more than ever before. However, what they mean by civic engagement remains unclear. Again, the dissemination of expert knowledge brings academics into communities and constitutes an important part of their civic mission. But might they also see a role for themselves in strengthening the civic capacities of communities? Reflecting on a series of research exchanges with cooperative extension and outreach professionals, David Mathews’ Ships Passing in the Night? posited a fundamental disconnect between the role of the university in disseminating technical knowledge and communities’ needs to come together to solve their own problems. Similarly, a recent study by Ted Alter, based on interviews at Penn State University, found that most faculty saw their civic role in terms of disseminating and applying their expert knowledge, while only a few saw themselves as strengthening civic life or addressing controversial issues…

If our goal is for the citizenry to be not merely informed, but also active and deliberative, what is the role of higher education? Reflecting upon 20 years of research on higher education, this is the question to which we have come.

About Kettering Foundation and Connections
KF_LogoThe Kettering Foundation is a nonprofit operating foundation rooted in the American tradition of cooperative research. Kettering’s primary research question is, what does it take to make democracy work as it should? Kettering’s research is distinctive because it is conducted from the perspective of citizens and focuses on what people can do collectively to address problems affecting their lives, their communities, and their nation.

Each issue of this annual newsletter focuses on a particular area of Kettering’s research. The 2015 issue, edited by Kettering program officer Melinda Gilmore and director of communications David Holwerk, focuses on our yearlong review of Kettering’s research over time.

Follow on Twitter: @KetteringFdn

Resource Link: www.kettering.org/sites/default/files/periodical-article/Barker_2015.pdf

Can Democracy Reduce Inequality? – A Research Agenda

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We encourage our members to give some thought to the piece below written by NCDD Supporting Member Matt Leighninger for Public Agenda. In it, Matt reflects on evidence that is beginning to show that democratic innovation can actually decrease social inequality and have many other positive effects, and he proposes a series of critical questions for future research into how we can amplify those benefits. Read Matt’s piece below or find the original here.

To reduce economic inequality, do we need better democracy?

PublicAgenda-logoWhen people have a say in the decisions that affect their lives, they will be better off economically as well as politically.

This idea has intrigued community development experts, foundation executives, public officials and academic researchers for many years. It has also animated some of the work people and governments are undertaking to address inequality, both in the United States and (especially) in the Global South.

But can a participatory democracy lead to greater economic opportunity? We are just beginning to amass evidence that this idea is true, understand how and why it works, and figure out how to make it happen better and faster.

Over the last two decades we have witnessed a quiet revolution in how governments and other institutions engage the public. Public officials, technologists, engagement practitioners, community organizers and other leaders have developed hundreds of projects, processes, tools and apps that boost engagement.

While they differ in many ways, these strategies and resources have one common thread: they treat citizens like adults rather than the clients (or children) of the state. They give people chances to connect, learn, deliberate, make recommendations, vote on budget or policy decisions, take action to solve public problems or all of the above. The principles behind these practices embody and enable greater political equality.

This wave of experimentation has produced inspiring outcomes in cities all over the world, but it has been particularly productive in Brazil and other parts of the Global South, where engagement has been built into the way that many cities operate. In these places, it is increasingly clear that when people have a legitimate voice in the institutions that govern their communities, and when they have support through various kinds of social and political networks, their economic fortunes improve.

The best-documented cases come from cities in Brazil, where Participatory Budgeting and other forms of engagement have been built into a much more robust “civic infrastructure” than we have in most American cities. In other words, people in these places have a wider variety of ways to participate on a broader range of issues and decisions. Their chances for engagement include online opportunities as well as face-to-face meetings. Many are social events as much as political ones: people participate because they get to see their neighbors and feel like they are part of a community, in addition to being able to weigh in on a public decision.

In these cities, the gap between rich and poor has narrowed, much more so than in similar cities without vibrant local democracies. In addition, governments are more likely to complete planned projects; public finances are better managed and less prone to corruption; people exhibit increased trust in public institutions and are more likely to pay their taxes; public expenditures are more likely to benefit low-income people; public health outcomes, such as the rate of infant mortality, have improved; and poverty has been reduced.

The connection between democratic innovation and greater economic equity raises many questions ripe for research:

Does short-term engagement yield long-term impacts?

Most of the engagement work in the United States and other countries of the Global North have come in the form of temporary efforts to address a public issue or policy decision. They have produced outcomes of their own, but due to their short-term nature, they seem unlikely to have shifted long-term challenges like inequality. But this is a hypothesis rather than a well-supported conclusion. We might shed light on this question by assessing the long-term impacts of such processes – for example, projects like Horizons, in which thousands of people in hundreds of small towns in the Pacific Northwest worked together to address rural poverty.

Do stronger networks from sustained engagement boost economic opportunity?

Sustained engagement seems to strengthen community networks, so that people may be more likely to find jobs or find supports that help them work, such as child care or transportation. How much does this “social capital” effect explain the effects of participation on inequality?

What is the role of data and transparency in reducing inequality?

Tiago Peixoto of the World Bank argues that annual participatory budgeting processes make a greater impact on inequality when the data on local inequality are made public, and when local officials and participatory budgeting organizers emphasize those numbers as a key goal of the process. In other words, when people focus regularly on equality data, they are better able to ensure that the process reduces inequality. While participatory budgeting has been proliferating across the United States, the role of inequality data is not as strong in the American processes.

Does engagement in the private sector boost local economies or public-sector engagement?

Workplaces have also used engagement tools and processes to help people learn, connect with colleagues, make decisions and improve how they work. In fact, it may be true that in some cases, private institutions are more responsive and participatory than public ones. In some cases, high levels of engagement in the workplace seem to have spilled over into the community, creating “more robust forms of community engagement.” Some business leaders clearly feel that workplace engagement enhances the productivity of their firms – does it also enhance the state of the local economy? Should we be considering engagement in the private sector as we explore ways to advance it in the public sector?

Is it important to explicitly acknowledge racial and cultural differences in engagement efforts?

Many engagement processes, especially in the United States, have focused on the role of race in public life, especially in areas like policing and immigration. The knowledge gained through engaging citizens around issues of cultural difference helped inform how practitioners organize engagement on other issues. To what extent have engagement efforts in other countries addressed race, and how important is it to explicitly address cultural difference in any attempt to promote participation and reduce inequality?

What can public institutions do to integrate engagement internally and support sustained engagement externally?

How can public institutions, including local governments and K-12 school systems and state and federal institutions such as Congress, incorporate more productive engagement practices and principles in the way they operate? How can these entities work with foundations, universities, businesses, nonprofit organizations and other groups to support more sustained, efficient and powerful opportunities of public participation?

These are ambitious questions. But if we are serious about reducing inequality, at home and abroad, practitioners and researchers should be taking a broader view of what we are learning about democracy and what we might do to improve it.

You can find the original version of this Public Agenda blog post at www.publicagenda.org/blogs/to-reduce-economic-inequality-do-we-need-better-democracy#sthash.RPWmYRS7.dpuf.

N. Am. PB Research Board Seeks Input on 2016 Agenda

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In case you missed it, the North American Participatory Budgeting Research Board recently announced that it’s seeking input on what topics folks in the field think PB researchers should prioritize next year. The Board was originally launched by two NCDD member organizations – Public Agenda and the Participatory Budgeting Project – and we encourage the rest of our members to weigh in. You can learn more in the Public Agenda post below or find the original here.

What do you want to see PB research address in 2016?

PublicAgenda-logoAs part of their work coordinating research on participatory budgeting processes in the U.S. and Canada, our research and public engagement teams have asked for input on potential tasks for the North American PB Research Board to tackle in the coming year (2015-16).

Below are five suggestions. What would you add or amend? Comment or tweet your suggestions to @PublicAgenda with #PBResearch.

  1. Building capacity for data gathering. This group would focus on the challenges facing local evaluators, such as: the lack of staff and volunteering time; lack of capacity to administer, collect, and enter data from surveys; translation of instruments; increasing survey response rates, and so on.
  2. Making PB data more usable, visible, and powerful. This work would work on ways to improve, facilitate, and institutionalize the collection, storage, and sharing of metrics data from all North American PB sites. There are a number of technological, ethical, logistical, and research challenges to making this happen. The final product would a rich, open data source for local PB evaluators and implementers, other PB researchers, and experts to draw on and share.
  3. Building a better infrastructure to support PB. Around the world, many cities have started doing PB without figuring out what kinds of supports they might need to make PB successful. At the same time, other engagement structures and processes that may already be in place may be far less effective from PB. This group would consider ways to use our research and evaluation efforts to help cities learn about PB, and learn from PB, in order to create a stronger engagement infrastructure.
  4. Organizing the evaluation and research track for the PB Conference in May 2016. This group would develop some interesting and thoughtful ways to present PB evaluations and evaluation data at the May 2016 conference in Boston. The overall goal would be to highlight the efforts, experiences, and insights gained through on-the-ground evaluation.
  5. Designing and supporting a larger research project to estimate the impact of PB in North American communities. This group would review the list of research projects that last year’s board members discussed during the development of the key evaluation metrics as important for further understanding PB in North America but beyond the scope and interest of individual, annual evaluation efforts. This group would focus on one of these project areas, design the study and develop a proposal for funding.

You can find the original version of this Public Agenda blog post at www.publicagenda.org/blogs/what-do-you-want-to-see-pb-research-address-in-2016#sthash.qDecnO6t.dpuf.

Nomination Process Open for 2016 Brown Democracy Medal

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As we look toward 2016, we want to encourage our members to consider submitting a nomination for the 2016 Brown Democracy Medal for Innovations in Democratic Practice.  The Medal and a $5,000 award are awarded annually by the McCourtney Institute for Democracy – one of our NCDD organizational members.

The award is Mccourtney Institute Logodesigned to bring attention to work that is “important to democracy but under-appreciated” – something that we know describes a lot of people in D&D. In fact, the 2014 Medal was awarded to NCDD member organization the Participatory Budgeting Project, so we have high hopes for 2016!

The nomination process is open now, and all initial inquiries are due by February 1, 2016. We encourage you to nominate people, projects, or organizations that you think are innovating in the way we do democracy. Here are some of the guidelines for nominations:

Review Criteria

The democratic innovation selected will score highest on these features:

  1. Novelty. The innovation is precisely that – a genuinely new way of thinking about democracy or practicing it. The award is thus intended to recognize recent accomplishments, which have occurred during the previous five years. The innovation will likely build on or draw on past ideas and practices, but its novelty must be obvious.
  2. Systemic change. The idea, theory, or practical reform should represent significant change in how we think about and practice democracy. Ideas should be of the highest clarity and quality, empirical studies should be rigorous and grounded in evidence, and practical reforms must have proof of their effectiveness. The change the innovation brings about should be able to alter the larger functioning of a democratic system over a long time frame.
  3. Potential for Diffusion. The idea or reform should have general applicability across many different scales and cultural contexts. In other words, it should be relevant to people who aspire to democracy in many parts of the world and/or in many different social or political settings.
  4. Democratic Quality. In practical terms, while the nominees themselves may well be partisan, the spirit of this innovation must be nonpartisan and advance the most essential qualities of democracy, such as broad social inclusion, deliberativeness, political equality, and effective self-governance.

When choosing among otherwise equally qualified submissions, the review panel will also consider two practical questions. Who would give the lecture on campus and meet with the PSU community? Who would write the essay about the innovation? Neither needs to be the nominee, nor the nominator.

Initial nomination inquiries should be sent in the form a one-to-two page letter that describes how the nominee’s work meets the criteria for this award and what distinguishes it from other work on democracy. Both self-nominations and nominations of others are welcomed. In either case, email, phone, and postal contact information for the nominee must be included.

For more information on the nomination process, please visit http://democracyinstitute.la.psu.edu/awards/seeking-nominations-for-the-2016-penn-state-democracy-medal.

Good luck to all the nominees!

4th Int’l Conference on PB in N. America Opens Call for Proposals

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Before you check out for the holiday this week, we encourage our members to consider responding to the call for proposals for the 4th International Conference on Participatory Budgeting in North America, which will be hosted in Boston, MA from May 20th – 22nd, 2016 by the Participatory Budgeting Project, one of our great NCDD member organizations.

The deadline to submit for the conference is December 18th, 2015, so don’t wait too long! You can read the full call for proposals here.

This year’s conference will coincide with the voting phase of the Boston’s youth participatory budgeting process, which adds an exciting focus on young people’s participation in deliberative processes to the gathering. Here is how PBP describes the conference:

The 4th International Conference on Participatory Budgeting in North America, organized by the Participatory Budgeting Project (PBP), will take place in Boston, Massachusetts, USA during the voting phase of their award-winning, city-wide, youth PB process.

The conference is a space for participants and organizers of PB processes to share and reflect on their experiences so far, alongside interested activists, practitioners, scholars, elected officials, and civic designers.

The PB Conference will be organized around three themes this year:

2016 Conference Themes

  • Youth power through PB: PB in schools, youth-only processes, and nearly every other PB process in North America uniquely gives real power to young people – as young as 11! What can we do to encourage even more youth leadership with PB?
  • PB in practice: What is working well? What has been less successful? What improvements can be made in the way the process is implemented? How can we do better and be more effective with existing PB processes and how can we put more processes in place across North America and around the world.
  • Measuring impact: How do we define a good PB process? What are the best ways to define success in this context? What are innovative, effective tools and methods we can use to assess the impact of processes that are currently underway as well as to shape new PB processes.

Any proposals for workshops, presentations, panel discussions or other creative formats focused on one of these three themes will be welcomed for consideration, and you can send in proposals via the submission form at www.pbconference.org/submit. For more information, email PBP at conference@participatorybudgeting.org.

Again, the deadline for submissions is December 18th, so send in your proposals soon! Registration for the conference is slated to open in January, and early registration will end in April. We can’t wait to see how this great gathering turns out!

For more information on the 2016 PB Conference, you can visit www.pbconference.org.