Monthly Archives: July 2006

democratic skills for professionals

What does an aspiring urban public school teacher need to know? Before she starts teaching, she should learn the material she is supposed to cover, something about pedagogy and assessment, some instructional techniques–and the ability to address fundamental problems in the system in which she will work. She cannot solve educational problems inside her own classroom, because senior managers and big bureaucratic structures create too many hurdles. She cannot take on managers and bureaucracies alone. In my experience, unions are unreliable. Thus she needs to work with other teachers, parents, kids, and community-members, often quite different from herself, to address common problems together.

Democratic skills (listening, deliberating, organizing, petitioning) are essential for teachers, as they are for many other professionals. For a good teacher, “civic engagement” is not a voluntary after-work activity, but the heart of her professional life. Therefore, it is exciting to watch Minneapolis Community College’s Urban Teacher Program embrace “advocacy and activism.” Specifically, their Associate’s Degree students lead urban students in Public Achievement projects. In Public Achievement, kids choose, define, and address community issues–a genuinely open-ended, non-ideological form of politics that will serve teachers well.

the press and civic engagement

Below the fold, I have pasted a longish draft essay on the evolution of the news media and its impact on democracy. (A revised version will go into a book on civic engagement that is due next month.) In essence, I argue that we had a particular model of the news business between 1900 and 2000 that became increasingly dysfunctional for citizens. It offered limited opportunities to write the news–that’s a well-known flaw. It also assumed an audience of people who were interested in public issues and who trusted professional reporters to be objective, balanced, reliable, and independent. That audience encompassed the most active citizens, as surveys show. But it shrank rapidly in the last quarter of the 1900s. Resurrecting the twentieth-century press now seems impossible, but the new digital media have promise.

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youth media and the audience problem (revisited)

I’m interviewing adults who help youth to make digital media (videos, podcasts, online newspapers)–and also some of the kids who actually do this work–to find out what kinds of audiences they want to reach and how satisfied they are with their impact. (Some background here.) Yesterday, I interviewed the leader of an important nonprofit that trains kids to make documentaries. She said that youth in her program are encouraged to think about their audience from the beginning of their projects. At first, they want to reach “everyone,” but then they “fine-tune” their goals to be more realistic and to enhance their impact on their communities. They are less concerned, she said, with the number of viewers than with “the kind of conversations” that they provoke.

The youth in this program are “very eager to get an audience” and to provoke “public discussions,” because showing their work makes it “real”; it provides “evidence to the kids themselves” that they have achieved something significant.

Left to their own devices, adult audiences usually ask unhelpful questions, such as: “Why did you choose this topic?” Or “Do you want to be a professional film-maker?” The youth have begun to circulate better questions in advance, such as: “What can we do about the problem that you have presented in your video?” Or, “What were the strongest and weakest parts of the documentary?” Adults like to be guided in this way.

Most of this discussion and feedback occurs in face-to-face settings. A good example was a public screening of a youth-made video about gentrification, attended by academic experts, activists, and some of the kids’ parents and friends. The discussion was very rich and rewarding for the young film-makers. Overall, my interviewee thought that youth were both satisfied and dissatisfied with their audience–glad for the feedback they receive, but not fully satisfied by their impact on their communities.

logical positivism and chivalry

Until yesterday, I did not know the following story about the major British philosopher A.J. Ayer, which wikipedia borrows from Ben Rogers’ life of Ayer. In 1987, “At a party … held by fashion designer Fernando Sanchez, Ayer, then 77, confronted Mike Tyson harassing Naomi Campbell. When Ayer demanded that Tyson stop, the boxer said: “Do you know who the **** I am? I’m the heavyweight champion of the world,” to which Ayer replied: ‘And I am the former Wykeham Professor of Logic. We are both pre-eminent in our field. I suggest that we talk about this like rational men.’ Ayer and Tyson then began to talk, while Naomi Campbell slipped out.”

newspapers and civic engagement

Almost two centuries ago, Tocqueville detected a close relationship between journalism and civic engagement. Newspapers were the main news organs of his day, and he wrote that “hardly any democratic association can do without” them. “There is a necessary connection between public associations and newspapers: newspapers make associations and associations make newspapers; and if it has been correctly advanced that associations will increase in number as the conditions of men become more equal, it is not less certain that the number of newspapers increases in proportion to that of associations. Thus it is in America that we find at the same time the greatest number of associations and of newspapers.”

I wanted to see whether the relationship that Tocqueville observed impressionistically remains true. Yesterday, using the 2000 American National Election Study, I found strong, statistically significant relationships between people’s frequency of reading a newspaper, on one hand, and their likelihood of volunteering, working on a community issue, attending a community meeting, contacting public officials, belonging to organizations, and belonging to organizations that influence the schools (but not protesting or belonging to an organization that influences the government). To illustrate these relationships with an example: 42.4 percent of daily newspaper readers belonged to at least one association, compared to 19.4 percent of people who read no issues of a newspaper in a typical week.

I did not control for other factors, such as education. Nevertheless, it appears that residents who engage in their communities also seek information from a high-quality source–and vice-versa. Having information about current events gives one relevant facts and motives to participate; and participation leads one to seek information.

Rates of newspaper reading have fallen sharply. I realize there is nothing sacrosanct about the printed daily newspaper; websites or radio and television broadcasts could, in theory, be just as good for civic engagement. But there is no evidence that the electronic media have yet compensated for the decline in newspaper consumption.