A Public Voice for Youth: The Audience Problem in Digital Media and Civic Education

Part of the Volume on Civic Life Online: Learning How Digital Media Can Engage Youth.Students should have opportunities to create digital media in schools. This is a promising way to enhance their "civic engagement," which comprises political activism, deliberation, problem-solving, and participation in shaping a culture. All these forms of civic engagement require the effective use of a "public voice," which should be taught as part of digital media education. To provide digital media courses that teach civic engagement will mean overcoming several challenges, including a lack of time, funding, and training. An additional problem is especially relevant to the question of public voice. Students must find appropriate audiences for their work in a crowded media environment dominated by commercial products. The chapter concludes with strategies for building audiences, the most difficult but promising of which is to turn adolescents' offline communities -- especially high schools -- into more genuine communities

Civic Identities, Online Technologies: From Designing Civics Curriculum to Supporting Civic Experiences

Part of the Volume on Civic Life Online: Learning How Digital Media Can Engage Youth.Youth today are often criticized for their lack of civic participation and involvement in political life. Technology has been blamed, amongst many other causes, for fostering social isolation and youth's retreat into a private world disconnected from their communities. However, current research is beginning to indicate that these might be inaccurate perceptions. The Internet has provided new opportunities to create communities that extend beyond geographic boundaries, to engage in civic and volunteering activities across local and national frontiers, to learn about political life, and to experience the challenges of democratic participation. How do we leverage youth's interest in new technologies by developing technology-based educational programs to promote civic engagement? This chapter explores this question by proposing socio-technical design elements to be considered when developing technology-rich experiences. It presents a typology to guide the design of Internet-based interventions, taking into account both the affordances of the technology and the educational approach to the use of the technology. It also presents a pilot experience in a northeastern university that offered a pre-orientation program in which incoming freshman designed a three-dimensional virtual campus of the future and developed new policies and programs to strengthen the relationship between college campus and neighbor communities

Examining the role of ideological and political education on university students' civic perceptions and civic participation in Mainland China: Some hints from contemporary citizenship theory

A long existing compulsive curriculum of ideological and political education is employed by the Chinese government to promote citizenship education among Chinese university students. This article builds on the findings of a mixed-methods research that examined the role of ideological and political education on university students’ civic perceptions and civic participation. The results showed little evidence of this curriculum having a clear effect on students’ political participation such as voting, as well as their idealized broad civic participation, but did reveal relatively positive effects on students’ civic intention and civic expression. In addition, it also identified its significant role in organizing students towards attending party-related activities. It shows that ideological and political education is insufficient to achieve specified aims of citizenship education among Chinese university students. We then argue that it results from a mechanistic understanding of citizenship and participation in educational policies and structural barriers to young people’s formal participation. Hence, this article argues that the forms and contents of citizenship education in China need to be reconsidered beyond the limits of the current ideological and political education and that the analyses contributed to an argument for a broader approach to citizenship education to be developed and adopted

A Time for Action: A New Vision of Participatory Democracy

For over eighty years, the League of Women Voters has been a voice for women and men of all backgrounds, rising above partisan disputes to help citizens fully and intelligently exercise their rights -- and their responsibilities -- as participants in the American experiment. The League has earned a reputation for integrity and fairness, and generations have relied upon League resources to help them make the kind of informed decisions that keep policymakers responsive and truly give weight and meaning to the hallowed phrase "consent of the governed."The League has cultivated expertise on electoral behavior and public policy at national, state, and local levels, and has been a leader in identifying and researching political trends. In recent years, one of the most distressing trends has been the ongoing decline of civic participation, in the voting booth and beyond. If one measure of the health of democracy is the rate at which citizens participate in elections, the fitness of the American body politic has been spiraling downward ever since voter turnout peaked in 1960.Recognizing the need for new insights and strategies to attack this problem, the Chicago chapter of the League convened a Task Force of recognized experts and leaders from the community to spearhead an examination of the factors at play. Concerned organizations of many stripes have studied the situation over the years, but there has been no authoritative summary of what we know and what we yet need to learn that can be turned into real steps toward a solution. Why are people dropping out of the political process....and what can be done to draw them back? What creative strategies hold the most promise for capturing Americans' attention, raising their awareness, and inspiring them to participate?The Task Force's findings are often disturbing, yet they also give cause for optimism. Americans may be keeping to themselves in growing numbers, but they do not do so solely from apathy or indifference; and want only to be invited to share their views, to be assured that government will pay attention, to be shown how and why they can make a difference. Young people especially have felt shut out of the process, despite knowing as well as anyone what matters to them and their communities. It's time they were invited back in. In this deeply polarized political moment, it is vitally important that we remind all Americans that civic engagement isn't merely about the often arcane and alienating world of politics -- it's a way to share in something bigger than ourselves, to express our devotion to our country and our community, to assure that (in Abraham Lincoln's timeless phrase) "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."Here in the state that was home to the author of those words, in the city where he was nominated for the presidency, we can take the first steps toward reinvigorating the vision he expressed. It is the hope of the League and the Task Force that this report will point the way toward those steps

Local, National and Global Citizenship

Original article can be found at: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t725445575~db=all Copyright Informa / Taylor and Francis Group. DOI: 10.1080/03004270385200361This paper puts local, national and global citizenship into context post 11.9.01 and pre Johannesburg Earth Summit 2002. It contextulises the strands of the Crick report (1998) and how these integrate with the national curriculum. It argues for a school ethos of citizenship which permeates the whole curriculum rather than a taught citizenship curriculum. The whole notion of citizenship is related to Agenda 21 and Local Agenda 21 and strong bonds are made with Education for Sustainability and Environmental Education.Peer reviewe

IEA International Civic and Citizenship Education Study 2022: Assessment Framework

The International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) investigates the preparation of young people to undertake their roles as citizens. It gathers and analyzes data from representative national samples on students’ conceptual knowledge and understanding of civics and citizenship, as well as their attitudes to, and engagement with, aspects of civics and citizenship. ICCS builds on a succession of IEA studies in this field dating back to 1971, and especially since 2009. The 2022 study has been developed to build on previous perspectives on, and monitor changes in, such enduring issues as: levels of civic knowledge and understanding; patterns of and dispositions toward civic engagement; attitudes to citizenship and equal rights; and schools as spaces for learning about citizenship. In addition, ICCS 2022 encompasses new developments such as increased globalization and migration; the implications of increasing social diversity; the roles of digital technologies in civic engagement and exchanging information; changing attitudes to traditional political systems; and the disruption to schooling associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. The assessment framework provides a conceptual underpinning for the international instrumentation for ICCS 2022. It needs to identify and define those aspects of cognitive and affective-behavioral content that should be considered important learning outcomes of civic and citizenship education, as well as contextual factors that are setting the context for students’ civic learning. It should be noted that within the context of this framework, the term “learning outcomes” is used in a broad way and that it is not intended to confine civic and citizenship education to school learning or any specific theoretical perspective. The way students develop civic knowledge and understanding, as well as affective-behavioral dispositions towards civic and citizenship issues, potentially depends on many factors, including those beyond the learning environment at schools

IEA International Civic and Citizenship Education Study 2016 Assessment Framework

The purpose of the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) is to investigate the ways in which young people are prepared to undertake their roles as citizens in a range of countries in the second decade of the 21th century. ICCS 2016 is a continuation of this study, which was initiated in 2009. The development of a framework for ICCS 2016 needed to take account of recent developments and ongoing challenges. The international project team identified areas related to civics and citizenship education, which had either gained more attention in recent years or were regarded as relevant, but which were not addressed in great detail in the previous ICCS survey. The following three areas were identified for inclusion to broaden the scope of ICCS 2016: environmental sustainability in civic and citizenship education; social interaction in school; and the use of new social media for civic engagement. In addition, two further areas were identified that had been included in previous IEA surveys as deserving more explicit acknowledgement in the ICCS 2016 assessment framework: economic awareness as an aspect of citizenship; and the role of morality in civic and citizenship education. This report is divided into three major sections starting with background and an overview of the current study; followed by the civic and citizenship framework covering definitions and content domains; and finally the contextual framework which looks at the contexts for civic and citizenship education

An Examination of Students\u27 Perceptions of Civic Issues: A Comparison of 1957 and 2011

Illuminated by a historical review of trends in educating for citizenship in American social studies classroom, the purpose of this study was to investiagte students\u27 perceptions of civic principles across three domains- democratic values, economic principles, and constitutional rights and responsibilities. To this end, a purposive, nonrandom sample of two hundred 12th grade students from eight high schools in a suburban school district in a Sour=theastern state was drawn and subsequently surveyed using an instrument originally developed during the 1950\u27s by Purdue University researchers. To determine whether there were generational differences in perceptions, the responses of the contemporary sample of 12th grade students were statistically compared to the norms obtained for a national sample of 12th graders surveyed over 50 years ago. In keeping with the emphasis on diversity in today\u27s social studies classrooms, also conducted were analyses of responses by gender, ethnicity, overall grade point average, level of class discussion, political orientation, and confidence in current administration\u27s policies to determine whether such factors influenced current student perceptions with regard to one or more of the issues investigated.Employing the one-way or goodness of fit chi-square test, statistical analyses of contemporary responses versus historical norms indicated generational differences across all five items within the domain of democratic values, all three items within the domain of economic principles, and five of the 10 items in the domain of constitutional rights and resonsibilities. Especially robust differences were observed with respect to items referencing affirmative action laws (c^2 (2, N = 200)= 41.37, p \u3c .001, w= 0.70), universal voting rights (c^2 (3, N = 200) = 93.72, p\u3c .001, w = 0.68, and the legal roght to face one\u27s accuser (c^2 (3, N = 200) = 112.52, p \u3c .001, w = 0.75).. However, when the two-way or test of independence chi-square was employed to identify differences in item responses by student characteristics, statistically signicant results were much less commonly observed and only systematically emerged with respect to the issue of limiting and controlling immigration. When levels of agreement and disagreement to this item were compared, differences among students in the contemporary sample were observed by ethnicity (c^2 (2, N =200)= 17.19, p \u3c .001, V = 0.29), political orientation (c^2 (2, N =195) = 14.85, p \u3c .001, V = 0.28), and confidence in the current U.S. administration\u27s policies (c^2 (2, N = 200) = 3.96, p \u3c .05, V = 0.14). To help clarify the generational findings, reference to the historical record is made, while more current events are evoked to help make the subgroup differences in contemporary student responses more interpretable

Beyond lecture capture: Student-generated podcasts in teacher education.

Podcasting in higher education most often takes the form of lecture capture or "coursecasting" as instructors record and disseminate lectures (King & Gura, 2007, p. 181). Studies published within the past five years continue to prioritise podcasting of lectures for the student audience, and to test the effectiveness of such podcasts via traditional pencil and paper assessments covering the material delivered via podcast (Hodges, Stackpole-Hodges, & Cox, 2008). A premise of this article is that in order to enhance learning outcomes via podcasting, it is necessary to move beyond coursecasting, toward podcasting with and by students, and to value key competencies and dispositions as learning outcomes. This article reports on a pilot study undertaken with teacher education students in an online ICT class, where students investigated podcasting and created reflective podcasts. The pilot study aimed to engage students actively in generating podcasts, incorporating a wider view of assessment and learning outcomes. Student-generated podcasts were self-assessed, and shared online in order to invite formative feedback from peers. A range of positive outcomes are reported, whereby students learned about and through podcasting, engaging in reflection, problem solving and interactive formative assessment