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The participants in the Civic Engagement II track focused our attention on what we termed “the trifecta of civic engagement,” namely engaging students, contributing to the community, and changing institutional commitments of the university. One of our responsibilities as educators of the next generation of engaged citizens must be to examine how students think and learn about politics. Responding to the limitations of info-centric and formulaic courses in building the citizenship skills of individuals, we focused attention on expanding our notions of what it means to be an informed citizen capable of meaningful participation in the political system. Our expanded definition of what should be taught in order to increase civic engagement included greater emphasis on current events essential to the education of modern global citizens and more attention to promoting sophisticated organizing and processing of political information among students. In focusing on civic engagement in the community, our group explored a variety of approaches including case studies, community-based learning, and service-learning models designed to encourage and increase citizen efficacy by linking institutions of higher learning to their surrounding communities. These projects have the potential to provide authentic, hands-on, theoretically driven learning experiences that bring students into contact with the community. Though not always successful in the narrow sense of the term, failure and frustration are useful learning experiences for students, their professors, the academy, and the community. In exploring linkages between the academy, the community, and student civic engagement the working group identified three elements that are critical to using these approaches to promote civic engagement. First, listening to the needs of community partners rather than dictating solutions as “experts” is critical to the success of community-based or service-learning efforts. Second, efforts need to be made to create long-term and sustainable relationships between the school the community. The specific actors may change but the mechanisms of interaction need to remain intact. Finally projects in courses that address local community needs can be especially meaningful for students and can help them apply their skills as political scientists, thus cementing course learning by providing avenues of practice, building social capital, and (ultimately) encouraging civic engagement. In the end meaningfully linking politics to the classroom to foster student civic engagement requires a commitment of both faculty and academic institutions to themselves be genuinely civically engaged. Out of this discussion of community-based learning, a third issue emerged that track members felt was crucial to the success and development of civic engagement programs—the institutional role of the college or university in encouraging and rewarding such activities. In general track members viewed civic engagement not merely an important goal for our students and potentially helpful to the community, but also as fulfilling the institutional responsibility of the college or university as an agent of society. Many participants expressed the desire to move beyond the ivory tower idea of the college as a separate entity from its surroundings, and instead think about the responsibility of the institution to promote and even model what it means to be civically engaged. Yet all of these efforts at promoting civic engagement are extremely labor intensive and so a significant challenge to building civic engagement elements into what our colleges and universities do is the lack of institutional incentives and rewards for doing so. Despite all of the benefits of these efforts, there are rarely institutional incentives or rewards—especially in regard to tenure review—for putting in the effort that such initiatives require. Track members discussed the importance of institutional support for the incorporation of civic engagement projects in the form of course releases, financial resources, and consideration in tenure review, among others. In general, our track found that the ideal form of civic engagement activities: (1) serve the community; (2) serve the students by developing critical thinking skills, civic knowledge, and participation; and (3) reflect the institutional commitment of the university to promoting civic engagement. With the proper institutional rewards and incentives, the members of the discipline can create course activities and larger programs that foster civic engagement in these three ways. Beyond that we also have the potential to identify and leverage the natural linkages across these three domains, and thus integrate the ways in which we enhance civic engagement in our students, our communities, and our institutions. |
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