Civic Studies, Civic Practices Conference

Please join Tisch College and CIRCLE for this two-day gathering of educators and activists to explore the theory and practice of citizenship. Through interactive sessions, we will focus on “citizenship” as creativity, agency, and collaboration–not as a form of membership that separates those who are in from those who are out.

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

We invite proposals for 90-minute “learning exchanges,” which may include short panel presentations with plenty of time for conversation, moderated discussions, workshops, readings, planning sessions, or other types of events. A list of potential topics is below, but we welcome all proposals that fit broadly and creatively within the key theme of the conference, Civic Studies, Civic Practices.

Please use this this form to submit your learning exchange concept. Once you’ve submitted your proposal, we will be in touch to discuss your proposal, answer any questions you might have, or help you flesh out your concept. Proposals should be submitted by a group of at least two people. Teams of scholars and practitioners are preferred.

TOPICS

Citizens and Citizenship – What sort of citizens do we want? What knowledge, actions, and beliefs are important for strong citizens? What actions have citizens taken to actively engage in democratic practices? What institutional structures promote meaningful and engaged citizens? What knowledge, skills, and attitudes could transfer to global citizenship? Which may not? How does in-group and out-group status both define and limit citizenship?

Scale – How can strong/successful civic practices be scaled up and out? Is this a useful focus for civic work?

Civic Studies – Is this a useful field? What are its characteristics, boundaries, and limits? What is its potential theoretically and practically?

Political Reform – What changes in laws and policies are needed to strengthen active citizenship? What should we do to achieve those changes?

Civic Practices – Sessions on particular practices or methods, which may involve – for example – community organizing, media production, deliberation, reflection, or service.

Civic Education – How can we begin to address civic education in an era of education spending reduction, No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top?

PARTICIPANTS

Scholars, students, activists, educators and others interested in this topic are welcome to use this form to register or to submit a presentation proposal.

TIMING

July 23, 10 am through July 24, 4 pm

LODGING

Participants are responsible for their own lodging. Tufts dormitory rooms can be rented by the night in the summer. Please use this link to reserve a room

ABOUT THE CONFERENCE

The Civic Studies, Civic Practices Conference concludes the second annual Summer Institute of Civic Studies at Tisch College. This intensive, two-week interdisciplinary seminar brings together advanced graduate students, faculty and practitioners from diverse fields of study for challenging discussions about the role of civics in society.

an extra’s perspective

Last Thursday night, I boarded a flight from LA to Baltimore. I was coming from Seattle, where I had been meeting with veteran civil rights activists and community organizers, mostly young African American and Latino leaders from big cities. I was on my way to the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, where I would have conversations with William Kristol and Charles Murray, among others. The LAX-to-BWI flight was my chance for a little sleep between meetings.

Two young people recognized each other as they walked down the jetway to the plane. They had attended the same high school in Baltimore around the same time. The woman asked someone to switch seats so they could sit next to each other. That was bad news for me, because she ended up eight inches behind my head. But it was good news for them. They had so much in common–as I learned during the next five-and-a-half hours. Apartments not far apart, in the general vicinity of Culver City. Jobs in the media industry. Recent breakups. Jewish ancestry. Several drinks later, they were sharing their deepest hopes and dreams. As dawn broke over the east coast, they left the airplane holding hands.

It makes you think about how neat and happy stories feel to the people on the margins, those who are meant only to swell a progress, start a scene or two. The Fatted Calf was not so happy to learn of the return of the Prodigal Son. For every tearful reunion at the top of the Empire State Building, there are dozens of people in the elevator who are just trying to get on with their day. I didn’t begrudge this new couple my night–it was more important to them than to me. But I wished their romantic comedy could have begun elsewhere than in seats 16C and D.

using technology to cut the costs of college

Anya Kamenetz has a good article in The American Prospect about the need for colleges and universities to cut costs. The problem isn’t just predatory lenders or cheap state legislatures; the real costs of college are rising far too fast and imposing unjust burdens on young people and their families. A major cause is probably the failure of higher education to achieve efficiencies that have cut costs in manufacturing and service industries. If everything else gets more efficient, but your activity doesn’t, you become more expensive. That’s the situation with both medical care and higher education.

Kamenetz is excited about initiatives like MIT’s Open Courseware, which is an impressive repository of materials created at MIT that can be used free anywhere else. The materials include notes, syllabuses, readings, illustrations, problem sets, and assignments. It is generous and helpful for MIT to contribute in the way (sometimes at a cost of $15,000 or more for each course, as Kamenetz notes). But the benefits will be substantial only if (a) the expense of developing course materials is normally a significant component of tuition, and (b) “courseware” can be used effectively by faculty who didn’t develop it in the first place. Both premises are possible, but I’m not overly optimistic.

I see two opportunities that might be more important.

First, I’m obsessed by the sheer number of people who are employed per student at particularly expensive colleges and universities. For instance, Harvard employs 2,163 faculty, 5,102 administrators and professional staff, and 4,800 clerical and technical workers for its 19,500 students. Only 18 percent of the total work force are professors. There are three students for every five workers. (I’m counting graduate students as students, even though most also teach, so the ratio is even higher.) Thus I wonder whether there could be significant efficiencies in administration. On the other hand, it may be that most of the administrative and professional staff are involved in externally funded research or clinical medicine, in which case shrinking their numbers doesn’t cut the cost of education.

Second, I do see prospects for new types of course that would be based on computers, would be cheap per student, and would complement the rest of the curriculum. Imagine that we continued to offer a college education that was broadly similar to what we provide today, with seminars, lectures, labs, and office hours. But students were expected to take one course that was a large-scale simulation of a complex phenomenon. They might, for example, be asked to play various roles (appropriate to their majors) in a fictional town that faced a health emergency. Students would have to conduct research, plan, and communicate as part of playing this game. Developing it would be extremely expensive (if it was any good), but it could be offered nationally at a marginal price of just a few dollars per student. Small local teams of faculty could customize the game for their own campus.

I wouldn’t want the computer to do the grading, but it could dramatically cut the costs of assessment by tracking the completion of assignments and scoring multiple-choice tests, leaving only writing to be hand-graded. If ten percent of students’ credits were earned in such courses, the saving would be almost ten percent of tuition. And if these courses were offered in residential universities along with traditional seminars, lectures, and labs, there would be little loss of face-to-face learning and community.

a long journey

Tonight, I fly to Seattle, Washington, for a meeting at the Gates Foundation. It will be a politically progressive gathering; entitled “The Color of Change,” it is devoted to community organizing by young people from ethnic minorities. After somewhat less than 24 hours on the West Coast, I will take the red-eye flight to the other Washington, our Nation’s Capital, for a meeting at one of the big-three conservative think tanks, the American Enterprise Institute. The topic, again, will be citizenship, albeit from a different perspective (with a focus on formal knowledge, military service, and the incorporation of immigrants) .

I have many thousands of miles and quite a bit of ideological spectrum to traverse between now and Friday evening (when I’ll be back in Boston), so I’m not going to try to blog for the rest of this week.

Syracuse is taking over

I am a native of Syracuse, NY, born and raised. I think my accent is “downstate” thanks to my parents. Our family was part of the Great Brooklyn Diaspora. But I grew up extremely familiar with what I considered a “Syracuse accent,” characterized by distinctive vowels. Given the generally friendly culture of the place, the accent is best illustrated with phrases like, “Heeave a nice day!” Or “Keean you believe it, Sairacuse is in the Cheeampionship!”

As an adult, I have made Midwestern friends with similar accents, especially people from northern Illinois and urban Wisconsin. It turns out that something called the “northern cities vowel shift” began in the vicinity of Syracuse and has been spreading west, like acid rain but in the opposite direction.

On our western frontier, Nordic Minnesotans with their elongated o’s. To our southeast, impregnable New Yuwalk City with all those extra w’s. Canadians to the North, flinty New Englanders to the east (stingy with their “r’s”), and Apallachia not so far southward across Pennsylvania and Ohio. But if nobody minds, we vowel-shifters will be heeyapy to keep on spreadin’ out.

Prof. William Labov is the expert on the vowel shift, and he thinks it may have begun during the construction of the Erie Canal. I personally find the Chicago version just a little different, although I lack the technical training to know how to represent the distinction. Many European-Americans from Cleveland, Madison (that’s Meeadison”), and Michigan sound to me strikingly like their counterparts from Syracuse. It’s not only the vowels: if you grew up in Syracuse, there is something ineffably familiar about a row of double-decker wooden houses on a wintry side street in Madison. Maybe it all comes from living on drumlins or shoveling snow in May.