Posts Tagged ‘civic engagement’
By David Hubert, Professor of Political Science and ePortfolio Director, Salt Lake Community College
It’s the first day of AAC&U’s Annual Meeting and I’m already bleary-eyed. Yesterday afternoon I flew into Washington from Utah, registered for the conference, and crashed in my room. It wasn’t so much the travel that has caused me to be so tired this morning, but the “goodie” I received in my registration packet. I’m referring to A Crucible Moment: College Learning & Democracy’s Future, by the National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement. This call to action kept me up half the night reading and thinking about its message. And now that I just finished attending the opening plenary session, I want to get my thoughts down before they dissipate with the activities of the day ahead.
There is simply no better time than the present for a national call for elementary, secondary, and higher educators to work together to renew our commitment to democratic engagement. As Carol Geary Schneider, president of AAC&U, mentioned in her opening remarks, the scope and severity of the challenges the United States and the global community face are truly daunting. If I may elaborate just on the American situation: our over-leveraged economy seems incapable of returning to the levels of growth and employment we have come to expect in the post-World War II era; we appear to be running up against resource scarcities and environmental challenges at every turn; economic inequality has reached a level of toxicity not seen in the United States since before the Great Depression; our fellow Americans seem more enthused by their roles as consumers than their responsibilities as citizens; we have engaged in an extremely unilateral and militarized foreign policy that magnifies rather than diminishes national security problems; and our national institutions are held in varying degrees of disregard by the people they purport to serve. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m sure many of you are as transfixed as I am by the demonstrations in the Middle East and in Madison, Wisconsin. While spurred by very different circumstances and motivations, both are compelling instances of civic engagement and participatory democracy in formation and/or in action. They also both entail the supremely important public challenge of setting appropriate societal priorities in the midst of very challenging economic circumstances. Wisconsin’s governor has put his cards on the table in terms of where education fits into his own view of his state’s priorities. Access to meaningful educational and economic opportunity is also at the heart of democracy movements in the Middle East.
The demonstrations in the Middle East and in Wisconsin also, however, raise many questions about the role of education in advancing participatory democracy. These issues, too, are being debated throughout the higher education and policy communities. How many Wisconsin residents know their state’s history in terms of unions, collective bargaining rights, and educational opportunity? How many know how the salaries and benefits of public school teachers actually compare to those individuals working in the private sector with similar credentials and degrees? Readers of this blog will certainly know that AAC&U has called for all college students to have access to an engaged and practical liberal education—one that prepares them for informed and responsible citizenship as well as for work. College students need and deserve the knowledge, skills, and capacities that prepare them to debate these kinds of issues in productive ways.
The 2010 edition of the College Sustainability Report Card was released last week and provides additional evidence that colleges and universities are taking seriously the challenges of community, environment, social responsibility, and interdependence.
While it is worthwhile to recognize the schools that best match their rhetorical commitment to sustainability with campus practice, the sustainability categories that make up the grade remain incomplete. Institutions are graded in the following areas: administration; climate change and energy; food and recycling; green building; student involvement; transportation; endowment transparency; investment priorities; and shareholder engagement. What they are not yet judged on is the very heart of the higher education enterprise—teaching and learning. Read the rest of this entry »
In recent postings, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) raises the specter that civic literacy—defined as knowledge of the answers on the U.S. citizenship test—is lacking among today’s college students. The more important question is not whether students should know a few basic facts about the United States government and its history. (That answer, for me, is yes.) The question is whether retention of basic facts is the best mechanism by which to develop an informed and active citizenry. As John Bransford and colleagues note in How People Learn (1999):
Above all, information and knowledge are growing at a far more rapid rate than ever before in the history of humankind. …More than ever, the sheer magnitude of human knowledge renders its coverage by education an impossibility; rather, the goal of education is better conceived as helping students develop the intellectual tools and learning strategies needed to acquire the knowledge that allows people to think productively about history, science and technology, social phenomena, mathematics, and the arts (1999, p. 5). Read the rest of this entry »
As college students move from their first to final year, their belief that their campus should focus on contributing to a larger community is stable and strong, but their assessment of whether their institution actually is focusing on this goal becomes increasingly pessimistic. This is just one of the findings included in the new AAC&U publication, Civic Responsibility: What Is the Campus Climate for Learning?, which will be released this Wednesday, on the eve of the Network for Academic Renewal meeting, Educating for Personal and Social Responsibility: Deepening Student and Campus Commitments, taking place in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
The report, which features campus climate data gathered at twenty-three leadership campuses involved in the initiative, Core Commitments: Educating Students for Personal and Social Responsibility, includes responses from 24,000 students, evenly divided over all four years of college. The report notes that nearly 45 percent of first-year students strongly agreed that their campus actively promotes awareness of U.S. and global social, political, and economic issues, which is critical to take effective action in communities. However, only one-third of seniors felt as strongly that their campus actively promotes awareness of U.S. issues, and only one-fifth of seniors strongly agreed that their campus actively promotes global issues. Read the rest of this entry »
Last Wednesday, the Washington Post covered the release of a new report issued by the Corporation for National and Public Service, indicating that volunteer rates are on the rise, especially among young people, despite worsening economic times.
According to the Post article, “the number of 16- to 24-year-old volunteers rose 5 percent, from 7.8 million to 8.2 million. The number of applications to AmeriCorps, which puts people to work full time in nonprofit groups for a year, increased 217 percent over the past eight months.” Read the rest of this entry »
