Bennett - Civic Engagement: Environments that Help Young People Go Public
12.4.06 | Promoting youth civic engagement is complicated by how we define citizenship. Should young citizens be like the generations before and have an ingrained sense of duty to participate in conventional activities such as voting? What if young people have grown up under conditions that simply do not produce and reinforce a sense of obligation to participate in such conventional ways? These children of the new millennium may well come to politics, but through different routes than their parents and grandparents did. Their brands of civic engagement may seem unfamiliar. Above all, their sense of how to reform creaky political processes may not yet be imagined.
What may be most important for politicians, educators, and young people, themselves, is to learn how to use digital media technologies to build civic and political communities that enable young people to create and explore their own political futures. The lessons involved here are likely to strain, and ultimately, expand political comprehension within and across generations.
Perhaps the most important element of civic education in the future is to teach basic digital literacy and media production skills. In addition, educators, parents, and policy-makers must facilitate democratic experiences, and provide young people with public media spaces in which to represent the communities and the world in which they live. Unless their experience of public life is credible in communication terms, young citizens may undervalue politics and government as places to invest their time and emotion.
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Michael Chui
12/5/06
6:38am
I would recommend that kids be taught more about their local and state governments. Speaking as a college senior, I actually find myself very ignorant on the subject, and while I remember filing into the gym in fifth grade to pretend to go to the polls, I recall no teaching about the local government except that there was a mayor, nor the state government, except that I was supposed to tell my parents to vote no on a proposition.
People often discount the importance of local-level governance for the more sweeping national-level. But if we have a stronger awareness locally, this can bubble up to a stronger awareness nationally; people tend to want their backyards clean before they dust out the neighbors’ place.
Geoff McGovern (Binghamton University)
12/9/06
6:44pm
I’m very positive on the possibility of digital media to form political communities, but there seems to be a lack of discussion about how politicial communities form, generally. The first step, it seems to me, is to get a grounding in interest-group formation, and then see how it translates to digital media. What is it about new media that will allow groups to overcome collective action problems faster than before? Is it merely a matter of cost?
Mechelle De Craene (James Buchanan Middle School)
12/10/06
3:53pm
Hi Professor Bennett,
I wanted to share a link with you about global citizenship. I think it is so important for teachers to talk about global citizenship.
http://www.mirandanet.ac.uk/worldecitizens/
Kind Regards,
Mechelle : )
Carol Minton Morris (National Science Digital Library)
12/19/06
7:32pm
Does Internet engagement in learning spaces have the power to model civic engagement paradigms such as those advocated by The Coalition of Essential Schools, for example? Among the coalitions’s common principles are two related to civic engagement: [schools should have] democratic and equitable school policies and practice, and [schools should foster] close community partnerships.[1]
CES founder Ted Sizer’s philosophy rests on the belief that all students deserve practice in the habits of mind characterizing a democratic citizenry, many argue that schools should structure themselves to provide those skills. If students are to reason things out on their own, we must ask them to come up with the questions, not just the answers [1]. Where do online schools and new kinds of scholarship fit in?
Online communities have found that democracy and equitable partnerships inspire contribution and participation. People like seeing their ideas reflected back to them online just as they do in person.[2]
The opposite is also true. “I see a huge up tick in rules and regulations on use of the Internet at school, and it worries me. Someone needs to show how these rules are handcuffing the technology,” said Julie Evans, CEO of NetDay/Project Tomorrow at NSDL’s Annual Meeting in October, 2006. [3]
Democratic and equitable educational opportunities combined with appropriate technology have the power to model civic engagement by creating systems that respond to many kinds of user feedback in approriate ways—the more you contribute, the more you learn, the more you see your ideas in service to others, the more the system gives you what you want, and the more you feel personal responsibility for maintaining the civic life of a community you are engaged with. One possible Internet political future might be that online learning communities evolve primarily as forums for the lively exchange of ideas, dreams, principles and ideals around issues of critical importance to everyone.
[1] “About the Coalition of Essential Schools,” CES NationalWeb. http://www.essentialschools.org/pub/ces_docs/about/about.html.
[2] Kushman, K. “Empowering Students: Essential Schools—Missing Link” Horace, Vol. 11 #1, Sept. 1994. http://www.essentialschools.org/cs/resources/view/ces_res/86.
[3] Edmondson, B., Minton Morris, C. “Snapshots of the National Science Digital Library Annual Meeting,” D-Lib Magazine. December 2006. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december06/morris/12morris.html.