Educating for Democracy: Preparing Undergraduates for Responsible Political Engagement
by Silvia Foti
Creating citizens engaged in maintaining democracy entails intentionally increasing the people’s knowledge of the democratic process, their skills, and their motivation. This falls under the purview of America’s colleges and universities, according to the authors ( Anne Colby, Elizabeth Beaumont, Thomas Ehrlich, Josh Corngold) of Educating for Democracy, yet for a variety of reasons, is a mission that is failing.
Written with a sense of urgency of how important it is for the academy to educate its students on democracy, the authors suggest that America is headed for troubling times and that if citizens are not more engaged in the democratic process, doom awaits. While civic education is on the rise on American campuses with 600 programs already established, “only 1 percent of service learning programs included a focus on specifically political concerns and solutions.”
The authors acknowledge several factors for the disconnect between civic education and political engagement, including the “sensitivities of many political issues and the concerns many educators have about being able to teach effectively topics that often engender strong reactions or disagreements,” as well as “the risk of political indoctrination.”
Their definition of good citizenship is this: “It is important for pluralist democracy and for citizens themselves that as many people as possible possess a set of capacities that are intrinsically valuable and also support responsible citizenship by helping them thoughtfully evaluate political choices and effectively contribute to political outcomes.”
The book offers several thought-provoking chapters with compelling arguments and data on the need for faculty to include more political projects in their curriculum that would educate students on the democratic process and get them involved in a political cause. For anyone who is unsure of whether or not to incorporate a political agenda into their curriculum, Educating for Democracy offers strong ammunition by way of interviews with faculty and students, as well as case studies on how political programs have been successfully integrated.
The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching assembled a group of faculty to design the Political Engagement Project (PEP) to address the lack of attention to education for political engagement. The goal of the authors was to share specific strategies for use in courses, in the curriculum, and in other campus activities. Senior scholar Anne Colby is a developmental psychologist who has devoted much of her career to the study of moral development across the lifespan and spent nearly twenty years as director of the Henry Murray Research Center at Radcliff College, Harvard University.
The group identified twenty-one interventions among faculty across the nation that they felt were successful, and from these they determined three developmental dimensions essential to political engagement: understanding or knowledge, skills, and motivation. They cited a recent study of American young people which revealed that 56 percent of youths did not know that only U.S. citizens can vote in federal elections. Political skills include registering to vote, lobbying elected officials, analyzing political advertising, writing press releases, working with a group, or running meetings. Political motivation could be strengthened by helping students develop constructive approaches to negative emotions such as cynicism.
The book is organized into four sections:
• The foundational theoretical and conceptual issues surrounding college-level education for political learning;
• Central goals in political development that higher education should address;
• Key pedagogical strategies of teaching for political learning; and
• Concluding thoughts and recommendations.
In my case, the book had me at “hello,” as my own commitment to engaging students in the political process is high, although I still felt at a loss as to how to go about and do it. My impatience with the promises of the book grew as chapter after chapter extolled the virtues of the need for engaging students in the political process, yet failed to delineate exactly how to go about and do this. I felt that this theoretical foundation, while valuable, was not what I needed as a new teacher. The chapters that promised strategies on how to incorporate such programs were somewhat lacking in the details. Perhaps my expectations were too high in hoping for detailed lessons that would outline from the beginning of the class to the end with examples of objectives, examples of worksheets, examples of what the teacher might say to introduce the subject, examples of how students might respond, and step-by-step instructions of how to build the lesson, along with detailed assessments with the answers. As an adjunct, this has always been my fantasy, but it often became deflated with books that promised proven strategies to incorporate into the classroom. I am back to interpreting, trying it out in my own class, figuring it out myself, and developing my own exams. Where is that silver platter?
One great idea, for example, is the National Model United Nations courses offered at Dutchess Community College and Vassar College. Students are assigned to represent a particular country, and they develop agendas, position papers, resolutions from the country’s perspective. By the end of the semester, the students simulate a United Nations General Assembly. This was nearly the extent of the entire description and explanation, and while fascinating, I am still at a loss of how to go about and implement this in my own classroom. It is back to the research table on the United Nations for me.
The book also promised the PEP Document Supplement, a set of documents from the twenty-one PEP courses and programs that would “make implementation easier as well as convey as concrete sense of how the recommended teaching strategies work in practice.” The documents supposedly are available by following the website address listed in the book, but once I tried to reach them, I could not find them, another disappointment.
For administrators or department curriculum designers, Educating for Democracy offers a solid theoretical underpinning to the benefits of offering more political learning opportunities for undergraduate students, but for new teachers, or adjuncts looking for concrete examples of lesson plans they can incorporate immediately, the book offers general ideas that lack specifics and will require interpretation, as well as extensive research and preparation.
