Lance Bennett: Investigating Youth Civic Learning and Engagement Online
Filed at 8:00 am on March 10, 2008 in Civic Engagement • 1 comments
How can informal online environments effectively engage the citizenship and learning styles of younger generations? University of Washington Professor Lance Bennett details his team’s work on the Center for Communication and Civic Engagement’s Digital Media and Civic Learning Project.
Many young citizens are interested in learning how to advocate for their own causes and to develop more effective public voices. At the same time, they often have uneven experiences with developing effective organization and public voice skills. More effective application of such digital voice and networking technologies requires scholars and practitioners to develop clearer standards about how various tools and online communities actually advance particular civic learning goals. We aim to create a set civic learning standards and tools to help teens raise their public voices and form sustainable advocacy networks. These civic learning standards will be useful for youth workers and other online community developers to review and align their practices.
This project involves three main areas:
- A review and synthesis of perspectives on youth identity, civic learning and engagement both online and offline. The outcome will be a set of standards for defining key civic learning goals and assessing differing approaches to civic learning online.
- These civic learning standards will be used to evaluate a broad sample of over 40 predominantly U.S. (also some Canadian and British) online youth engagement sites and programs. This evaluation will take into account differences in civic learning opportunities, the nature of community decision-making and governance, social networking applications, varieties of participatory media content creation, and what these elements suggest about the implicit citizen identity styles being engaged.
- An assessment and review of the Seattle digital youth commons, named Puget Sound Off by the teens designing it. PSO is a youth engagement web environment housing many issue and interest communities. Founded through a partnership between the City of Seattle, CCCE and the Seattle Metrocenter YMCA, PSO involves hands-on participation from a diverse spectrum of regional teens ages 13-18.
The model of civic learning and the supporting research findings will provide a basis for thinking about future directions in digital learning. The ongoing dialogue with MacArthur grantees from affiliated projects should help develop a set of shared concepts, questions, and next generation research that defines the field.
An executive summary of our current MacArthur-funded work is available here. Info on past MacArthur work can be found here. Also, please visit our ongoing practitioner blog featuring conversations, debates, news, and project documentation. Puget Sound Off, the Seattle youth media commons website, will launch in mid March. For more info on the site, click here.
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Comments (1)
1: Cliff Manning from Radiowaves/NUMU at 5:49 am on Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Hi, we are piloting an online youth citizenship project with the Ministry of Justice in the UK - http://www.radiowaves.co.uk/voiceit
The project is UK based at present but we are looking at how it could work effectively internationally.
Our work touches on many of the issues which you are exploring and it would like to get your thoughts on how the standards you are developing could be applied to our work
for more information please contact me or visit our blog http://www.synergy.tv or project website http://www.radiowaves.co.uk/voiceit
thanks
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