Beyond Politics As Usual

Description

Beyond Politics as Usual: Paths for Engaging College Students in Politics sheds light on the political learning, thinking, and acting of college students today. The book, edited by Kettering program officers Ileana Marin and Ray Minor, endeavors to reveal the current practices and approaches that faculty and staff at institutions of higher learning and other nonprofits employ to instill democratic concepts, values, and skills in students. Chapters in this volume include: * Introduction, Ileana Marin and Ray C. Minor * Political Learning Opportunities in College: What Is the Research Evidence?, Constance Flanagan * Deliberation as Communicative Politics: Building Civic Engagement in College Students, Elizabeth Hudson * (Striving for) Democracy in Small Groups: Engaging Politics in a Communication Studies Course, Timothy J. Shaffer * Practicing Deliberative Democracy at Gulf Coast State College, Elizabeth Trentanelli * Political Participation Exercises as a Means of Teaching Civic and Networking Skills, Lindsey Lupo and Rebecca Brandy Griffin * The Potential of Living-Learning Communities as Civic Engagement Incubators, Mark Small * Civic Outcomes of Student Engagement in Sustained Dialogue, Rhonda Fitzgerald, Jo Constanz, and Darby Lacey * Campus Network: Galvanizing a New Generation to Participate in Making Public Policy, Joelle Gamble with Lydia Bowers, Taylor Jo Isenberg, and Madeleine McNally * Reengaging Students in Our Democracy: Lessons from the CSU Center for Public Deliberation and Its Student Associate Program, Martin Carcasson * Lessons Learned from College Student Moderators, Lisa-Marie Napoli * Learning to Deliberate: Implications for Political Participation after College, Katy Harriger, Jill McMillan, Christy Buchanan, and Stephanie Gusler * Afterthoughts: Democracy and Higher Education, David Mathews

Informations

• Publié par: Kettering Foundation
• Date de parution: 22 février 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781945577031
• Langue: English

Extrait

BEYOND
POLITICS
AS USUAL

Paths for Engaging College Students in Politics

Edited by Ileana Marin and Ray C. Minor
Managing Editor: Copy Editors: Design and Production: Ilse Tebbetts Laura Carlson, Lisa Boone-Berry Long’s Graphic Design, Inc.
© 2017 by the Charles F. Kettering Foundation
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Beyond Politics as Usual: Paths for Engaging College Students in Politics is published by Kettering Foundation Press. The interpretations and conclusions contained in this book represent the views of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, its directors, or its officers.
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to:
Permissions Kettering Foundation Press 200 Commons Road Dayton, Ohio 45459
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
First edition, 2017
Manufactured in the United States of America
ISBN 978-1-945577-13-0 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016955359
Acknowledgments
The editors would like to thank all of the authors included in this book for their contributions. Truly, without their devotion and hard work this collection of essays would not be as comprehensive or as rich as it is. We also thank Ilse Tebbetts, our in-house editor, for her meticulous editing, and Laura Carlson for editorial suggestions for the manuscript. Thanks go also to Maxine Thomas for doing a final read of the manuscript. We are grateful to David Mathews for his vision and his charge to produce such a book. Finally, we would like to thank all of our colleagues at the Kettering Foundation who comprise the Public-Academy Workgroup.
Contents

Introduction
By Ileana Marin and Ray C. Minor
Political Learning Opportunities in College: What Is the Research Evidence?
By Constance Flanagan
Deliberation as Communicative Politics: Building Civic Engagement in College Students
By Elizabeth Hudson
(Striving for) Democracy in Small Groups: Engaging Politics in a Communication Studies Course
By Timothy J. Shaffer
Practicing Deliberative Democracy at Gulf Coast State College
By Elizabeth Trentanelli
Political Participation Exercises as a Means of Teaching Civic and Networking Skills
By Lindsey Lupo and Rebecca Brandy Griffin
The Potential of Living-Learning Communities as Civic Engagement Incubators
By Mark Small
Civic Outcomes of Student Engagement in Sustained Dialogue
By Rhonda Fitzgerald, Jo Constanz, and Darby Lacey
Campus Network: Galvanizing a New Generation to Participate in Making Public Policy
By Joelle Gamble with Lydia Bowers, Taylor Jo Isenberg, and Madeleine McNally
Reengaging Students in Our Democracy: Lessons from the CSU Center for Public Deliberation and Its Student Associate Program
By Martin Carcasson
Lessons Learned from College Student Moderators
By Lisa-Marie Napoli
Learning to Deliberate: Implications for Political Participation after College
By Katy Harriger, Jill McMillan, Christy Buchanan, and Stephanie Gusler
Afterthoughts: Democracy and Higher Education
By David Mathews
The Authors
Beyond Politics as Usual: Paths for Engaging College Students in Politics
Introduction
Ileana Marin & Ray C. Minor Kettering Foundation

THE AIM OF THIS BOOK is to shed light on the political learning, thinking, and acting of college students today. In addition, the book sets out to reveal current practices and approaches faculty and staff at institutions of higher learning and other nonprofits employ to instill democratic concepts, values, and skills in students under their tutelage.
It is a subject that has occupied a considerable portion of the Kettering Foundation’s research agenda for more than 20 years. In 1993, the foundation published a national study conducted by the Harwood Institute, College Students Talk Politics . This study, based on findings coming out of focus groups on 10 American campuses, revealed that students considered politics “irrelevant” to their lives and saw little purpose to be served by active participation in the political system. It was not a particularly surprising result. Other observers, many of them in the nation’s colleges and universities, had seen the signs. And some were making efforts to reverse the trend.
Campus Compact, for example, began in 1985 with four founding members—the presidents of Brown, Stanford, and Georgetown Universities and the Education Commission of the States. Its goal: challenging institutions of higher learning across the country to make the education of students for responsible citizenship an institutional priority. Now a national coalition of some 1,100 colleges and universities, it has gradually shifted from a focus on community service to promoting a broader view of civic engagement.
Faculty members in some colleges embraced the idea. Among them were Katy Harriger and Jill McMillan at Wake Forest University, who devised an experimental four-year program for a small group of students to learn and practice public deliberation to determine whether this “useful and practical way of ‘speaking politics’” might counteract the alienation from public life that had overtaken so many young Americans. Findings from their 2007 study, Speaking of Politics: Preparing College Students for Democratic Citizenship through Deliberative Dialogue , published by Kettering Foundation Press, indicated that, upon graduation, this group of students “had the skills and the interests needed to become more involved, responsible, analytical, efficacious, and community-minded citizens” than did their fellow students in a control group and in the larger community.
Almost 15 years after the Harwood study, in 2007, Kettering Foundation collaborated with the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) to publish a report titled Millennials Talk Politics: A Study of College Student Political Engagement . The main goal of this research was to find out whether, and in what ways, college students’ views and actions around civic engagement had changed as a result of the work carried out by colleges and universities throughout the country and of the political events surrounding it. The study was based on conversations with undergraduate students in focus groups held on 12 four-year college and university campuses across the United States. Findings revealed that the millennials (born after 1985) were more engaged than their predecessors in generation X; they were involved at the local level, but were ambivalent about formal politics; they disliked polarized debates and sought authentic opportunities for discussing public issues; and across the landscape of higher education, opportunities for civic participation and learning remained spotty.
It is not news that many college students today lack confidence in the political system; they are turned off by conventional politics, and seek new ways to engage politically. Gridlock in Congress, partisan politics and polarization, voter disenfranchisement schemes, political corruption, and unethical behavior have motivated them to seek alternative ways, including utilizing the Internet and social media, to address public problems and make a difference in public life.
Today’s students live in a virtual global community. Mountains of information about persons, places, and events are at their fingertips through social media and search engine sources. The cell phone in every student’s pocket can be used to record voice or motion, create text, and take photos. And it can transmit any of these products to a person in the next room or on the other side of the world in real time. It can be used—and has been—to record a classroom lecture or to foment a national revolution.
Altogether, today’s young people have access to more current or historical information than any generation of young people before them. These college students have the opportunity to become the most informed generation in human history. All of this means, in part, that today’s college students have the capacity to become more prepared politically to grapple with the issues and problems confronting them than ever before.
How, and whether, they choose to do so, is the question.
In the fall of 2012, Kettering Foundation initiated a three-year series of research meetings with college and university faculty and others engaged in determining how their college experiences could best be designed to encourage today’s young people to find their way into the political life of their communities and their nation. The essays in this book emerged from these meetings. They are written by an array of scholars and practitioners who teach, direct, or coordinate civic-learning opportunities for college students. The authors’ firsthand observations of students in classrooms, special learning programs, dialogue and deliberative activities, and community forums—and their research on what effects these pedagogical and practical experiences have on students—gives them the ideal platform for identifying and evaluating the distinctions between, and tensions among, different approaches to engaging students in politics.
In the first essay, Constance Flanagan lays out a conceptual framework of the different political practices and attitudes of today’s college students. She reviews a wide variety of studies of college and university offerings designed to broaden students’ public engagement—public deliberation, classroom instruction, student organizations, community service, political campaigning, and community organizations. A consistent finding is that readings on the topic and volunteer service in the community are not enough. Follow-up reflection on these experiences that involve dialogue or deliberation with heterogeneous groups is key to enabling students to crystallize their own views. What is less clear, the author notes, is whether the changes involved in gaining informed opinions translate into political action.
The nex