GBH has posted a video of the substantive portions of my opening remarks. My 7-minute talk may also serve as an overview of civic education in the academy as I see it today.
(The subtitles are a little inaccurate, but close enough …)
I wrote a review of a new PBS documentary about urban debate leagues for Education Next. It was published today, and it begins:
You may have seen a movie in which teenagers experience grave injustice and then enter a prestigious competition where they prove to the world that they are smart. The competition might be the AP math exam (Stand and Deliver, 1988), the National Spelling Bee (Akeelah and the Bee, 2006), robotics (Spare Parts, 2015), or chess (Queen of Katwe, 2016), to name just a few.
Typically, one charismatic adult believes in the kids, inspires them to confront their doubts and society’s stereotypes, and leads them—through setbacks—to an exciting victory that demonstrates their dignity and character as well as their skills.
On February 18, the Alliance for Civics in the Academy hosted a webinar on “What Counts as Success? Assessing the Impact of Civics in Higher Ed” with Trygve Throntveit, Rachel Wahl, Joseph Kahne, and me.
We discussed some of the advantages of developing reliable and consistent measurements of civic education, particularly the opportunity to learn from data and the need to be accountable. We also discussed some drawbacks and risks, including Campbell’s Law (a remark by Donald T. Campbell): “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”
We asked ourselves who should use assessments, and for what purposes. For example, it is a different matter for a college professor to get feedback from the students in a course or for a university to measure student outcomes. I thought the conversation was both intellectually serious and relevant to practice.
Panelists:
Rachel Wahl: Associate Professor in the Social Foundations Program, Department of Educational Leadership, Foundations, and Policy at the School of Education and Human Development at the University of Virginia
Joseph Kahne: Ted and Jo Dutton Presidential Professor for Education Policy and Politics and Director of the Civic Engagement Research Group at the University of California, Riverside.
Trygve Throntveit: PhD, Research Professor in Higher Education and Associate Director of the Center for Economic and Civic Learning (CECL) at Ball State University.
In a recorded interview with the Story Preservation Initiative, I discuss “landmark cases and civic turning points—including the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Brown v. Board of Education, the United Farm Workers boycott, and Watergate—to illustrate how people came together to reinforce core democratic principles of equality, justice, and the rule of law.”
This recording and related documents are meant as a resource for teachers and students, particularly in high schools.
I also discuss “the ‘nuts-and-bolts’ skills young people need to participate effectively in civic life—how communities organize, how coalitions form, and how citizens can work together to effect change.” And I mention “skills that support meaningful participation, including listening, debating, respecting opposing viewpoints, and learning from history.”
On December 10, the Alliance for Civics in the Academy hosted a webinar on “Comparative Civics: Beyond Western Civ” with Fordham professor Dongxian Jiang, University of Chicago professor Shadi Bartsch, Nanyang Technical University professor Simon Sihang Luo, and University of Chicago student Jessie Wang. I was the moderator.
The title of the event suggests our original plan, which was to think about the role of “non-Western” texts and ideas (whatever the word “Western” means) in civic education. As it turned out, our panel had the expertise and lived experience to focus on China. Clearly, we could have chosen many other foci, but I thought this one was useful–it made for a coherent conversation. We discussed what “civic education” has meant in China, what American students can learn from studying Chinese society and classical texts, how Confucian thinkers might assess American civic education, what you should know to teach Chinese texts well, and other topics that may also apply (mutatis mutandis) to other countries and regions of the world.