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Kettering Foundation - Christy Buchanan

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This report is a follow-up to Harriger and McMillan's Speaking of Politics: Preparing College Students for Democratic Citizenship through Deliberative Dialogue (Kettering Foundation Press, 2007). That book described a four-year study at Wake Forest University in which students, called Democracy Fellows, were exposed to the process of deliberative dialogue both inside and outside of the classroom. The focus of this report is an alumni study of the Democracy Fellows 10 years after their graduation. For purposes of comparison, they are matched with a class cohort that did not participate in the Democracy Fellows study. The authors describe differences in the ways that the Democracy Fellows and their classmates understand citizenship. They found that the Democracy Fellows have a more "complex and nuanced understanding of citizenship and its responsibilities." Ten years on, they are more likely to be politically active and express more eagerness "to engage with people who hold different beliefs." Their classmates' concepts of citizenship are "more legalistic and less complex than those of the Democracy Fellows." The authors of this follow-up study bring together research insights from the literature on political socialization, political participation, and deliberative democracy, with a particular focus on whether and how interventions during the college experience might shape subsequent civic engagement. Their work demonstrates the enduring impact of learning to deliberate.

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Sociologie, société et politique

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Publié par	Kettering Foundation
Date de parution	01 février 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781945577185
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

THE LONG-TERM
IMPACT
OF LEARNING TO
DELIBERATE
A Follow-up Study of Democracy Fellows and a Class Cohort
Katy Harriger, Jill McMillan, Christy Buchanan, and Stephanie Gusler
Wake Forest University
©2016 by the Kettering Foundation
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
The Long-Term Impact of Learning to Deliberate 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 directors, 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, 2016
Manufactured in the United States of America
ISBN: 978-1-945577-05-5
CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
MILLENNIALS, POLITICS, AND DELIBERATION
MEASURING THE IMPACT OF DELIBERATION
THE DEMOCRACY FELLOWS: RECOLLECTIONS AND CONNECTIONS
CITIZENSHIP DEFINED
THE EFFECTS OF DELIBERATIVE DIALOGUE ON COGNITIVE COMPLEXITY
CITIZENSHIP PRACTICED
POLITICS REASSESSED
EDUCATING FOR CITIZENSHIP
ANALYSIS OF THE SURVEY DATA
IMPLICATIONS FOR HIGHER EDUCATION
REFERENCES
APPENDIX A: METHODOLOGY
APPENDIX B: THE INTERVIEW INSTRUMENT
APPENDIX C: THE SURVEY INSTRUMENT

INTRODUCTION

T his project had its genesis in the year 2000, with a question and a potential answer. The question was, what might institutions of higher education do to address young people’s apparent disenchantment and disengagement with the political process? The potential answer was that if students learned to talk about politics in a different way, one less politically polarizing and more focused on finding solutions to the difficult policy problems that face us, they might be more willing to be engaged in the political process. We asked, if students learn to engage in deliberative dialogue, would they be able to imagine a different politics, one that they would want to be part of? At the end of the first stage of this project (2001-2005), we found that learning to deliberate did have a marked impact on students’ attitudes about citizenship and their willingness to be engaged in the political process (Harriger and McMillan 2007). In this follow-up alumni study conducted in 2014-2015, we found that the impact of learning to deliberate was long-lasting. This monograph reports these findings.
A Different Way of Talking about Politics
The deliberation method used and evaluated in this study meets Gastil’s (2008) definition of group dialogue, in which participants “carefully examine a problem and arrive at a well-reasoned solution after a period of inclusive, respectful consideration of diverse points of view.” Our students at Wake Forest University were taught the method of deliberation used in the National Issues Forums (NIF), which includes considering multiple perspectives, surfacing and articulating competing values, identifying tensions and trade-offs, and looking for common ground for action (Mathews and McAfee 2003). Participants engage with a common text, called an issue guide, which offers three or more different perspectives on a policy issue. They talk with each other in a moderated dialogue that gives each perspective serious consideration and ends with a discussion that focuses on where participants find common ground that might lead to actionable ideas for change.
The first phase of the study involved a four-year program called Democracy Fellows. Thirty students were selected from the entering class to participate in the program. The selection process involved an application that included questions about their high school activities, as well as their attitudes toward citizenship and its responsibilities and the political process. We chose a group that reflected both the demographic diversity of the entering class and a diverse set of attitudes and experiences. When compared to a randomly selected group of students in the entering class, they were very much alike.
For the next four years, the Democracy Fellows (DFs) were exposed to the process of deliberative dialogue both inside and outside of the classroom. They started with a first-year seminar entitled “Democracy and Deliberation,” in which they learned both the theory and practice of deliberation. They read political and communication theory and they engaged in three deliberative dialogues around public issues, each moderated by the professors. At the end of the semester, they identified a campus issue they felt needed attention and began the process of framing the issue for deliberation. During the second semester of their first year, they completed an issue guide, which focused on building community at Wake Forest. In their sophomore year, students were trained to moderate a deliberation and they organized and conducted the deliberation on campus. During their junior year, participants followed a similar process, but this time with a deliberation planned and conducted for the larger community of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. They first held a “listening session” with community leaders on challenges facing the community, and then adapted an NIF issue guide on urban sprawl, making the facts specific to Winston-Salem. They organized and moderated the deliberation on this issue off campus, with members of the community as participants. In their senior year, the students were given opportunities to moderate dialogues sponsored by other organizations on campus and in the community. After each deliberative intervention, we conducted focus groups with the Democracy Fellows and a representative class cohort (our control group whose members will be referred to in this report as CCs) to assess the impact of the intervention.
This report focuses on an alumni study of the Democracy Fellows 10 years after their graduation. They were again matched with a class cohort for the purposes of comparison, and all participants were interviewed and completed an online survey concerning their attitudes about, and involvement in, civic engagement. After a preview of our key findings, the report details the justification, methods, and results of the follow-up study. It concludes with a discussion of the implications of our findings for higher education institutions that seek to prepare citizens for engagement in their democracy.
A Summary of Findings
This study compares two very similarly situated groups (with the same undergraduate institution and a nearly identical distribution of majors, gender, and race/ethnicity). One group had the additional experience of having spent four years in the intensive study and practice of deliberative dialogue. The similarity of the two groups allows us to draw conclusions about the impact of that exposure to deliberation and to make some broader generalizations about the group as a whole. Here, we summarize our findings about how the groups were alike and how they were different.
Similarities of the Two Study Groups
Despite their different college experiences with deliberation, there were a number of ways the two groups show no significant difference as young adults. They are all voters, for example. They share a dislike for the nation’s polarized political climate and the influence of money in politics. Their references to polarization were frequent; they present polarization as pervasive, and say that it inhibits their willingness, and sometimes ability, to engage in political discourse. We were struck by the way that, for both of these groups, the highly polarized environment seems to have made the workplace an arena in which political discussion is particularly to be avoided, either because there are formal rules against it or an implicit understanding that disagreements of this type could have negative consequences for their ability to do their jobs.
They all value service to their community and they give their university credit for encouraging them to serve. They recognize that their academic experiences prepared them well and they share a belief in their ability to use their voices to be heard about matters they care about. Although Democracy Fellows are more willing than the class cohort to engage with people who have different points of view, all of the alumni prefer political conversations with people whom they trust.
These alumni have a shared perception of their ability to effect change in their communities, in their workplaces, and in the political arena. They feel most competent in the community setting, especially if they work with others, and least efficacious in making change in national politics. The workplace is a mixed bag, with their sense of efficacy depending on their position in the organization, its size, and whether it is a political job. Not surprisingly, those with jobs in the political and policy realm feel more politically efficacious than those who work elsewhere.
Neither group has had much opportunity to engage in structured dialogue, but for those who have, their primary motivation for engaging in these activities is their desire to know more about an issue that they care about.
Finally, after almost a decade in the “real world,” these young adults have both positive and negative things to say about how their post-college experiences compare to their college life. On the one hand, they believe that having more experience and knowledge, and being more “settled” in a community, makes them more powerful and more engaged than they were when they were encased in the “bubble” of campus life. On the other hand, they have become less idealistic about the possibility of change.
Distinctive Differences of Democracy Fellows
The Democracy Fellows’ reflections on their experience with deliberation are almost uniformly positive. Even those few who had some less than glowing comments nonetheless recognized that they had gained skills from the program th