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Kettering Foundation - J. Harriger Katy

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124 pages

English

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In this book, authors Katy J.. Harriger and Jill J.. McMillan follow the "Democracy Fellows," a group of 30 college students, during their 4 years at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to discover whether their experiences in learning and practicing deliberation might counteract the alienation from public life that has overtaken so many young Americans today.Their research design included classroom learning and practical experiences in organizing and conducting deliberative forums both on campus and in the Winston-Salem community. Observations gleaned from interviews, focus groups, and surveys of a comparison group and the larger student population indicate that, upon graduation, the Democracy Fellows had the skills and the interests needed to become more involved and responsible citizens than their fellow students.Harriger, professor of political science, and McMillan, professor emerita of communication, offer some prescriptions for how deliberative practices might be adopted at other institutions of higher education as at least one important antidote to political disaffection among young people.The book includes a foreword by David Mathews, president of the Kettering Foundation.

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Publié par	Kettering Foundation
Date de parution	01 janvier 2007
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781945577321
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0474€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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© 2007 by the Kettering Foundation
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Speaking of Politics: Preparing College Students for Democratic Citizenship through Deliberative Dialogue is published by Kettering Foundation Press. The interpretations and conclusions contained in this book represent the views of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, its trustees, or its officers.
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to:
Permissions
Kettering Foundation Press
200 Commons Road
Dayton, Ohio 45459
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
First edition 2007
Manufactured in the United States of America
ISBN 978-0-923993-22-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2007925891
SPEAKING OF
POLITICS
Preparing College Students for Democratic Citizenship through Deliberative Dialogue
Dedicated to the memory of our mothers
Jean K. Harriger (1921-2005) who liked to talk, but knew how to listen
and
Mary Elizabeth Hall Jordan (1914-1949) whose example as a young teacher of “expression” inspired me many years later to take up her cause with a new generation of young people
Acknowledgments
Without the 30 young people, the Democracy Fellows, who began this journey with us—and especially the 26 who completed it—there would be no book, and more important, no long-term look at how extensive exposure to deliberative democracy can affect college students. Because these students were promised anonymity from the start, we cannot list their names here, but we express to them our profound gratitude and readily acknowledge that in the pages of this book, what the reader will hear is in large part their story, not ours. Likewise, we thank the members of the cohort group who offered their time each year and their voices to provide us a counterbalance to the experiences and expressions of the Democracy Fellows, and the deliberation participants—those one-time deliberators from the fall of 2002—who taught us one of this study’s most profound lessons: that even a single experience with deliberation can indeed alter one’s political outlook and optimism.
In every project of this magnitude and length, there are individuals who step up to help in invaluable ways, and that was our experience as well: from the Wake Forest administration, Ross Griffith of the Office of Institutional Records regularly provided us with timely statistical information and advice and assistance about how to use it, and Ken Zick and Mary Gerardy, from our Division of Student Life, also lent feedback and encouragement. Undergraduate and graduate student assistants performed vital tasks: Nicole Kazee and Allison Crawford did critical background research; Rebecca Jerome and Terry Dumansky scheduled and managed the paper work on interviews and focus groups; Elizabeth Lundeen did virtually everything mentioned here, but her most notable and unique contributions were her exemplary copyediting and footnote/citation management; Terry Dumansky and Colleen Colaner helped with thematic analyses of certain data sets; and Leanne Quatrucci, Allison Spangler, and Connie Chesner assisted in the assembling of annual reports. Joanne Vansice served this project with transcription par excellance. Her skill, professionalism, and abiding good humor through garbled tapes and all manner of other human and technologically induced errors was remarkable.
Underpinning all of the on-site help was the continual presence and support of John Dedrick of the Kettering Foundation. Though keeping us grounded and realistic from the start was not an easy task, John managed to do that in his own kind and inimitable way. We also are grateful for the gentle presence and support of Debi Witte and, later in the project, Laura Grattan. Ilse Tebbetts proved to be an effective and accommodating editor as she assisted us in our attempt to give this story its best hearing.
Finally, we thank Bob Griffiths and Toney McMillan, our husbands and partners, and our respective families for their patience and support during this lengthy project.
Contents
Foreword by David Mathews
An Experiment of More Than Ordinary Significance
Chapter One
Why College Students? Why Deliberation?
Chapter Two
Citizenship Deferred
Chapter Three
Deliberation in the Classroom
Chapter Four
The Campus Experiment
Chapter Five
Deliberation “On the Road”
Chapter Six
The Senior Year Data
Chapter Seven
Overall Findings
Chapter Eight
The Role of Higher Education
References
Appendix A
Deliberative Democracy First-Year Seminar, Course Outline and Assignment Schedule
Appendix B
Issue Framing: A Teaching Outline
Foreword
An Experiment of More Than Ordinary Significance
S peaking of Politics is about a discovery and an invention—a breakthrough in combating the privatization that threatens to rob college students of their public lives. This is also a book about faculty members Katy Harriger and Jill McMillan, who went beyond charted waters to combat this threat. And it is a book that challenges colleges and universities to take more seriously their mission statements to prepare students to be citizens.
The argument that preparing students to be citizens requires the same self-conscious effort as preparing them to be historians, musicians, or accountants can be very unsettling. For instance, a faculty member at another institution reported that when he pressed for specifics on what his institution was doing to provide the civic education promised in the catalog, he was met with considerable resistance. The issue didn’t resonate well with most of his colleagues, and they quickly tired of his persistence in raising it. They found a solution: they took the reference to citizenship out of the catalog.
This incident is relevant here because Wake Forest hasn’t abandoned its responsibility for civic education. In fact, the two faculty members who wrote this book have given a new meaning to this type of education by giving a new meaning to democratic politics. That was the invention that led to a breakthrough. Students in the experiment discovered another dimension to democracy and a new role for themselves as citizens. The effect of what happened at Wake Forest was so profound that the Kettering Foundation has touted the Democracy Fellows project as one of the most significant innovations it has seen in 20 years. (Kettering’s relation to the experiment, I should explain, has been that of a research institution, which doesn’t make grants.) What happened at Wake Forest happened because two members of the faculty had compelling reasons to change how they went about their work as teachers and scholars.
The Wake Forest experiment is significant because it was informed by an acute sense of the troubles facing modern democracy. Professors Harriger and McMillan have been very aware of the contest now going on over the kind of democracy that will shape the twenty-first century and the role citizens will play in it. The democracy that characterized the second half of the twentieth century is in serious trouble. Look at the titles of several recent books: Demosclerosis , Democracy’s Discontent , Democracy at Risk , Downsizing Democracy . 1 All of these studies report that democracy is facing fundamental problems, which I have called “megachallenges.” Determining where higher education stands in all this ferment seems inescapable to me. And the Wake Forest experiment addresses one of the most serious of these challenges—the relegation of the supposedly sovereign citizenry to the sidelines of politics.
Americans sense that they have been marginalized, and in one of the books just cited, Matthew Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg show why. “For more than two centuries,” they write, “ordinary citizens were important actors,” but they argue that our political system has found ways to operate without a collective public. 2 People sense their marginalization and see evidence of it in gerrymandered districts that discount the votes of all but the core of electors needed to return most incumbents to office. And while citizens like to hear the government promise to be more responsive to them as customers, they know that they should own the store. In Kettering’s most recent research on how Americans feel about the country’s political system, one refrain stands out. People say over and over, “we can’t make a difference.” 3
Crenson and Ginsberg lay much of the blame for this situation on the advent of a “personal democracy” that encourages citizens to pursue their individual interests or assert their individual rights, much as consumers would. This encouragement reduces incentives for people to work together. The two scholars cite some of the community service programs now popular at schools and colleges across the country as examples of how personal democracy has changed civic education. Individuals volunteering to serve others is admirable, yet it is different from joint efforts to correct the conditions that require volunteering. Though not unsympathetic to service learning, Crenson and Ginsberg come to the same conclusion as Harriger and McMillan—it has become an alternative to politics and isn’t training for sovereignty.
For some time, college students have had the impression that their institutions aren’t concerned about citizens being sidelined. In 1993, a Kettering study found that undergraduates thought all academe had to offer was a curriculum in political science for those interested in the subject. 4 This arrangement fit comfortably with students’ perception that politics is for people who intend to serve as politicians or to work in government, careers that had limited appeal. Now, 14 years later, this book reports that many students still believe their institutions are better at preparing them for a career than for an active life in a democracy.
The idea that there is a political dimension to life doesn’t appear to have crossed the mind