CIVICS EDUCATION/SERVICE LEARNING

Civics Education Background

Civics education is vital to our nation’s future, since as scholars have noted, “as the twig is bent, so grows the tree” and youth who learn civic attitudes, skills and knowledge, reinforced by family and schools are far more likely to be civicly active all their lives. Civics education too often evokes images of musty courses asking students to memorize the number of representatives in the House of Representatives or how a bill becomes a law. Many organizations and individuals are realizing now that effective civics education is not just about memorizing knowledge, but also learning attitudes and skills. And various individuals are experimenting with curricula that makes civic education a lot more relevant and hands-on: for example, an inner-city school class learning about civics by trying to getting night lights for a local basketball court through testifying, writing letters, meeting with representatives, etc. Civics classes, when effective, teach civic knowledge together with actionable civic skills (like organizing a meeting, making a public speech or writing letters to the Editor, persuading others) and civic attitudes and habits that lead youth throughout their lives to use these skills and attitudes by being more engaged in their communities. Various groups have been active in trying to resuscitate civics education, for example:

a) The American Political Science Association has had a Task Force on Education to recommend how to revitalize the teaching of civics education;
b) The Bush Administration is actively exploring how to revive civics education and a description of these efforts and the form it might take was found in a Washington Post article by Dana Milbank on 5/12/2002 called “Revival in Civics Education Is Explored”

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Interesting research on civics education:
Nathaniel Leland Schwartz did a thesis called “Civic Disengagement: The Demise of the High School Civics Class” (senior Harvard thesis, 2002) describing a shift in civics education that occurred between 1960 and 1980, where “American Government” courses started being offered in place of “Civics” and “Problems of Democracy” courses. American Government classes where much more about learning facts like “How a Bill Becomes Law” and were originally viewed as a useful supplement to the more skills-based “Civics” or “Problems of Democracy” classes. His thesis suggests that simply requiring more schools to offer the type of civics education they are currently offering will be insufficient, unless the content changes to focus equally on developing the skills of civic engagement. Nathaniel Schwartz is planning on developing a shorter summary of his thesis for a magazine. David Campbell’s research shows interesting evidence of the staying powerful of the school climate on long-term civic involvement, as the students become adults. [See: http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/inequality/Summer/Summer00/papers/Campbell.PDF

Some further description of civics education can be found in Campbell’s paper at:
http://www.educationnext.org/unabridged/20013/campbell.html

Actor Richard Dreyfus has taken up the cause of civic education. Read The education of Richard Dreyfuss (Boston Globe, 2/2/07) and Actor Wants to Bring Back Civics (ABC News, Dec. 3, 2006). Drefus has also spoken on ABC's Real Time with Bill Maher and lectured on civics at Oxford University in England. Other interesting papers on this or related topics can be found in the following books/articles:

William Galston, “Political Knowledge, Political Engagement, and Civic Education,” (unpub. ms., in Political Science: The State of the Discipline, Ira Katznelson and Helen Milner, eds. [2002])

James Youniss, Jeffrey A. McLellan, and Miranda Yates, “What We Know about Engendering Civic Identity,” American Behavioral Scientist (March/April 1997): 620-631.

Ted Halstead, "A Politics for Gen-X," Atlantic Monthly (August 1999), [part 1 and part 2].

Wendy M. Rahn and John Transue, “Social Trust and Value Change: The Decline of Social Capital in American Youth, 1976-1995” Political Psychology, vol. 19 (September 1998): 545-565.

"E-Planning with Youth: Creating Spaces of/for Engagement" by Dr. Laxmi Ramasubramanian and Asma Ali (2004) describes the Chicago Placeworx project that aims to involve low-income youth in community planning, in cooperation with faculty and graduate students at the Univ. of Illinois at Chicago and staff/ students from the Yollocalli Youth Museum, a youth initiative of the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Pilsen.

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Links to useful organizations

CIRCLE (The Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement) at University of Maryland has a lot of useful information on civics education and other topics relating to youth civic engagement.

CIRCLE and the Carnegie Corporation also collaborated on an interesting and useful publication called The Civic Mission of Schools. There is relevant information at:
http://www.civicyouth.org/research/areas/civic_know.htm
http://www.civicyouth.org/research/areas/youth_attit.htm
http://www.civicyouth.org/research/areas/hs_civic.htm
http://www.civicyouth.org/research/areas/serv_learn.htm There is also some relevant research at:
http://www.civicyouth.org/research/products/survey_articles.htm The American Political Science Association’s Standing Committee on Civic Education and Engagement has useful information.


CURRICULA

And some sites like the Center for Civics Education offer “civics education” curricula.

Harvard University's Institute of Politics also has a CIVICS program (where college students teach civic engagement).

Learning to Give has lesson plans for classes K-12 on philanthropy, civil society and social capital, and these lesson plans are tied to state educational standards.

PBS has some good resources on civic engagement entitled Access, Analyze, Act: A Blueprint for 21st Century Civic Engagement..

Social Capital Currciulum/Curricula:

We suspect that individuals trained in the importance of social capital and in how to build social capital will be more personally effective throughout their lives and their communities will similarly prosper. Some evidence suggesting that 'social capitalists' are trained rather than born as social capitalists comes from Teaching Executives to See Social Capital: Results From a Field Experiment (Ron Burt and Don Ronchi, March 2006) that showed that business executives taught about social capital in an executive education class were more effective long-term than similar executives not taught about this.

Here are some thoughts about teaching social capital in K-12 schools and curricula from Tom Sander (v.1.1).

Jonathan Milner (Winston-Salem, NC) teaches social capital at the high school level over a week long period. Here is a list of questions and exercises he uses and a mini-unit on social capital and Bowling Alone.

The University of South Florida Collaborative for Children, Families and Communities at their 2006 annual meeting enlisted high school students to make recommendations about how better to build social capital. Read the story here and their PowerPoint presentation here. [Jonathan Porat and Ricardo Pena collaborated on a publication titled Building Communities in the Classroom: A Handbook on the Integration of Social Capital into FCAT Preparation]

Sofi Frankowski, a teacher at Fremont High School (Sunnyvale, CA) and Southeast Raleigh High School (Raleigh, NC) in conjunction with Dan Cotton, Ina Sakaguchi and Bob Grover (Fremont H.S.) developed the MOSAIC program (Making Our School An Inclusive Community) in 1997 and Sofi taught it from 1998-2003. The course was built on the premise that all students can become leaders and that by raising the awareness of the importance of strong social connections and helping students navigate those connections, they could become more successful. In Saguaro's jargon, the program worked on creating both bridging social capital and fostering civic leadership and engagement. Here is a MOSAIC Project Overview, a list of the Leadership traits they hoped to instill, some sample lesson plans, their final exam, and a list of questions to consider in developing a project.

The Melton Foundation uses a Desert Survival Game to teach the wisdom of collective knowledge. Members of the group read the problem; then each individual has to rank the items in terms of their importance to survival. Following that, the group discusses their choices and then comes to a collective decision about how to rank the items. Invariably, a much higher percentage of group members survive with the group's prioritization than the individuals'. A variant on this in the context of Lunar Survival can be found here.

For students to better understand the importance of trust, it may be useful to do some exercises where trust and collaboration play an important role in performance. Some of these trust exercises can be found here. A Melton Foundation Trust exercise is interesting.

[ e-mail us other interesting curricula you've seen on social capital or related topics for elementary to high school students or college students.]

Related curricula:

- Project 540 (started by the Pew Charitable Trust. The Project 540 site to effect teen voice is not still around but there is this summary of the project. The project has now been passed off to the National Association of Secondary School Principals.
- YouthOnBoard has been working with Boston Public Schools on teen voice and has a grant from the Surdna Foundation to write up their experience for others.
- A Cry For Character (by Dary Matera) describes one high school's efforts to restore its civic culture. At Mundelein High School in Illinois in 1995, the administration had proven ineffective at stanching a break of pranks and rowdyism. A group of students, aided by a French teacher (Royer), enlisted students in a successful effort to restore civility through cross-grade small discussion groups, led by student-trained leaders. The students and Royer, following an approach tried at neighboring Deerfield High, convinced the administration to develop a curriculum on moral character and civic values that blossomed among the younger students. Administrators agreed "to be more tolerant of minor misbehavior and more flexible in their response to situations requiring disciplinary action" with the result of a changed school culture and spirit.

College curicula:
The Lasting Impact of College on Young Adults’ Civic and Political Engagement (2005) (by Kim Misa, Jodi Anderson, and Erica Yamamura, Higher Education Research Institute, University of California, Los Angeles) describes how colleges can foster students' civic and political engagement through experiences like community diverse, diverse peer networks, etc.

Here are some sample college syllabi:
Francis Fukuyama, Social Capital and Development (2004) and this related page
Lily Tsai, Civil Society, Social Capital, and the State in Comparative Perspective (2004), MIT and course description
Zeynep Aksehirli, Social Capital (2005), Tuck School of Business
Stanley Katz, Civil Society in the United States and Other Places (2002), Princeton
Neil Carlson, Civil Society, Social Capital and Voluntary Association (2003), Duke
Civil Society and Community Building, (2003) Princeton Online Syllabus
Daniel Rubenson, Social Capital in Comparative Perspective (2005), Ryerson (Canada)
Ivan Light, Social Capital, (2006) UCLA
Benjamin Read, Associations, Networks, and Trust in the Realm of Politics (2006), U. Iowa
David Garson, Social Capital Theory (2006)

Service Learning:

The Learning In Deed Commission has put out an interesting report and has links to useful research on the importance of “service learning” (community service that is tied to classroom learning).

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