Educating for full participation – what does civic learning and democratic engagement have to do with it?

By: Mary F. Price and Morgan L. Studer

• Where are we going as a nation, as an institution, as a community? 

• What shared commitments make us a “We”? 

• How can education help us we live into these commitments? 

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These questions aren’t new but why we are asking them is taking on new meaning. We see Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement (CLDE) as a springboard to both engage with and respond to these questions, to ensure that we are working to fulfill higher education’s promise to educate for full participation. On the surface, CLDE may sound like academic jargon.  But the reality is that ideas embedded in CLDE, like self-determination and self-governance, are central to who we imagine ourselves to be as members of communities guided by democratic principles.  CLDE also raises questions about the purposes of education. 

There are multiple frameworks that describe what CLDE is. One framework that we draw on to orient us to CLDE has been developed by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). A Crucible Moment: College Learning and Democracy’s Future introduces CLDE within the context of K-16 education’s role in supporting learners in developing their capacities to contribute to democratic societies as well as calls for educational institutions to live into their missions as civic institutions. AAC&U’s CLDE framework emphasizes the “civic significance of preparing students with knowledge and for action” (p. 3, emphasis added). While the report includes references to high impact practices, like service-learning, the authors conceive of CLDE beyond this single practice, going to the core of educating whole people.  CLDE invites us to think beyond traditional “civics” and into an understanding of the cultural and global contexts in which democracy can be both “deeply valued and deeply contested” (p. 3). With this in mind, we know that civic knowledge, skills, values, and collective action cannot be developed through textbook study alone. In theory, we hone civic competencies over the course of our lives through direct engagement with people, places and systems that form the basis of life based on the freedom to associate.

College campuses are part of a civic ecosystem (Longo, 2007), a network of institutions that include classrooms, Facebook groups, neighborhoods, professions, unions, coalitions, libraries, and playgrounds, among others that are drawn together by a set of common principles that inform what it means to be part of a democratic society – particularly, the everyday practices of working across differences (e.g. race, class, gender, faith, status, expertise) to solve public problems and work towards the ideal of a just world for all.  At these times of discord, suffering and division, examining the health of our civic ecosystem and the nature of our roles in matters even more. This blog is a space to capture stories, raise questions and offer insights into the promise, practices, and contradictions associated with CLDE at IUPUI, in the Indianapolis community, across the state and beyond. It is also a space to explore new possibilities for how we can learn, live, and thrive together as 21st century democratic communities in the context of seismic social, political, economic and environmental changes in which we are both willing and unwilling participants.

In this post, we share a bit of our own stories and understanding of what CLDE means to us, some ways we wrestle with its meaning, and particularly, what it means now, in this moment. We offer our reflections as a starting point and a call to action for others to build on, complement and counter. 

Morgan’s Story

Living into community: This is not work for us to do alone  

Civic learning and democratic engagement seem urgent and imperative now more than ever. Just recently, I found myself in conversation with a friend on justice and faith {specifically, the Christian faith}.  This brief, online discussion on a Tuesday morning packed a lot of thoughtful moments, but the key theme that emerged was prompted by a question regarding those for whom a personal relationship with the Gospel is the guiding tenet of their faith, rather than a faith that calls us into a life of actively working towards justice for others, for all, for the world.  What, then, she was asking, do we say to them about Christianity and justice?  And I found myself responding that for me, faith and justice are intrinsically linked. I cannot parse them apart. I cannot untangle them. Justice and community are at the heart of how I understand living out my faith in the world.    

I was engaging in this conversation as I was outlining this very piece–and I realized that what I was sharing with my friend was also showing up in my own answer to the guiding question: “What does CLDE mean to me? And why is it so important right now?” I told her this and she said to me, “Press on!” and so I did.  

And as I sat to reflect and write more, my heart and my mind settled on this:  Democratic values of inclusivity, full participation, responsibility to a larger good, and viewing every person equal in their wholeness and dignity are deeply intertwined with my way of being in the world just as my faith guides my way of being with these same values at the helm. They are the values that drive my approach to work, my approach to raising my children, my approach to civic participation.   

I vote and donate and sign petitions and call my representatives and write letters of advocacy with these values in mind. 

I have hard conversations and speak truth with a shaky voice and stumble over my words {because I’m not always sure they are the right ones} with these values in mind.  

I examine the spaces I occupy and the tables where I sit and critique those places with these values in mind.  

Daily, I fail to fully uphold these values. {Because, daily, my self-interest knocks. My desire for comfort knocks.} 

And daily, I must rise with an active, intentional, renewed commitment to upholding these democratic values because these values aren’t an aside; these values are part of a lived experience. 

So what does any of this have to do with CLDE? For me, I see these two {civic learning and democratic engagement} just as intertwined as the justice and faith conversation. To me, one without the other is only a piece of the puzzle. I see these two as conjoined twins, as life-giving to one another to create a wholeness through which to live into a more just world. Civic learning is the learning that gives us, gives me, the skills to have the conversations and do the work.  Democratic engagement calls me to think about HOW I do that work and WHY I have those conversations, even when they are hard. Even when they mean making difficult choices. Even when it feels risky (perhaps because it feels risky).  

I have been following the anti-racist educator and public scholar, Rachel Cargle, for some time now, and she reminds us, her followers, in a recent post: “I know in the age of social media it can seem like you need a ‘platform’ to do meaningful work.  Not true in the least. Your home is your platform, your extended family is your platform, your office is your platform, the little girl in your neighborhood is your platform, your classroom is your platform, your example of being a decent person who cares about humanity and demands justice. is. your. Platform.”  

She finishes with “Go, continue to #dothework.”  

In the words of my friend, I will continue to press on. In the words of Ms. Cargle, I will continue to do the work. CLDE says to me that we press on, that we practice and use our skills and our knowledge, that we do the work in all facets of our lives–not waiting for the just right platform to present itself. Not waiting for a specific “platform” at all. We are in community at all times. That is the platform. CLDE calls me into work with others who are called into the work, too. It takes engaging alongside others, being in community and conversation with others, to work towards transformation. This work is not work to be done alone. And it is work that is never fully done. Because it is a work of commitment, of daily responding and answering the call. In the words of artist Danielle Coke, “With every painful blow of injustice, the question should no longer be ‘what easy thing can I do now,’ but ‘what hard things must I do to help for a lifetime?’” 

Mary’s Story

Wrestling with the ideas of “We, the people” and “justice for all” in an urban, research university 

I thought writing a post about civic learning and democratic engagement would be relatively easy since my day job focuses on civic engagement in a university setting. The reality is the opposite. I have asked myself over the last few weeks, why it is worth spending time writing, much less reading a blog on CLDE during COVID-19.  With the chaos, injustice and discord around us, at a time when colleges and universities are struggling to stay open and fulfill their basic teaching and research functions, who has the intellectual, mental, or spiritual space for this conversation now? Is this anything more than navel gazing at a time when it is action that is needed? Perhaps it is.  Still, I believe that it is more critical than ever that we make room for this conversation.  For me the work of CLDE is rooted in reckoning with the “we” in “We, the people”  and the goal of “justice for all.”   This conversation both in the context of a blog and beyond. 

CLDE is part of our mandate as a public institution. I take this to mean that it is a central, cross-cutting, all be it contested, feature of our teaching and research functions as an institution of higher learning.  Within the civic ecosystem, CLDE anchors our individual and collective work as colleagues, educators, scholars, and as moral beings in a world that we co-inhabit as We, the people  and have a shared responsibility to co-steward toward justice for all.  Our campus re-commitment to dismantle racism and injustice on campus, to support full participation of all in academic and community life, is about social justice;  it is also intertwined with the work of CLDE, about who we understand ourselves to be, how we work together and make decisions as democratic communities and to what ends.  So, I ask:

• What responsibility, if any, do we have to the everyday work of democracy, as members of an urban research university in the mid-west?  
• And, how are we accountable to our whole selves and to each other for doing this shared work and bringing a better world to life?
• Who is the “we” in We, the people when applied to our work at IUPUI, and that of CLDE specifically?

I’ve always been interested in how university knowledge can be brought to bear on public and community issues although at the time, I didn’t have the language to name what this work entailed. Indeed, one of the aspects that attracted me to IUPUI fourteen years ago was our campus’ expressed commitment to civic engagement an integrated part of its core mission, not just for students but faculty and staff as well.  At IUPUI, I found a campus steeped in commitments to civic and community engagement, to public outreach and service that gave language to attach my formative beliefs about the nature of academic work. It fueled my view of university teaching as a calling and a way to socialize the next generation toward lives of purpose. It also shaped my understanding that university knowledge serves many public purposes and that the value and quality of university knowledge is amplified when research and creative activity are conducted on real world issues and in direct collaboration with those impacted.  

CLDE emphasizes learning working in and with communities, not only doing for them; this includes recognizing what each of us brings to a project and then creating collective leadership to work in solidarity, in light of our differences, strengths and weaknesses to name and address questions of public concern—this is part of the democratic engagement project, creating a “We, the people” out of “us” and “them” sharing decision-making authority and taking action together.  

Service and outreach are important to the work of universities but they are not sufficient; investment in systems and practices that support CLDE need to be a priority. One step we can all take is to reclaim space and time for the civic. This includes reclaiming the words democratic and democracy as part of what we do across the campus and in our daily lives.  By democratic, I do not mean the term in its partisan sense (I.e. republican, democrat); membership in a democratic society cannot be reduced to a party affiliation or birth in the U.S.A. We are not the only society guided by democratic ideals; the bonds that bind us together as democratic societies are not forged simply by birth; they are also imagined. We do not inherit our membership as much as each of us must claim, hone, and practice it, all the while making sure that we pass on to the next generation what we have learned.  

Reclaiming democracy in education focuses our attention not only on what students learn; it anchors us in an ethos, even if we contest its nature.  This ethos is larger than any individual discipline or profession and it resists reducing the value of higher education in terms of narrow understandings of career preparation and market accountability. The work to reclaim our relationship with democracy on and off campus involves acknowledging that membership in We, the people exacts both a cost and a cargo; at the same time, it also offers each of us an invitation. 

The cost of democracy is that we cannot stand on the sidelines as passive observers if we expect a democratic culture and institutions to flourish. Our burden emerges from our power to discern, to inquire and reckon with our biases, to make choices of consequence in light of evidence and through consensus.  Our burden is our endowment to self-determine and self-govern, both as individuals and as members of multiple publics (campus, neighborhoods, state, global, etc.). It lives in where and how we decide to practice civic-mindedness, to show-up, to listen and be fully present, and to stand up to injustice. It includes developing our individual and shared responses to 5 essential questions (Musil, 2009) about ourselves as We, the people:  

• Who am I? 
• Who are we? 
• What does it feel like to be them? 
• How do we talk to one another? 
• How do we work together to achieve our shared futures?  

These 5 questions reflect the work of democracy not only as a burden; they invite us to see this work as an invitation to hope, inspiration, healing and rebirth. The invitation to We, the people includes cultivating playfulness, joy, struggle, and creativity.  Responding to these 5 questions is one avenue to tap into what Henry Jenkins refers to as the civic imagination, that is our shared capacity “to imagine alternatives to current social and political conditions.” 

On campus, the work of civic imagining, as expressed through CLDE, is not just for those of us in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Nor is it reserved for those of us that teach general education courses or lead co-curricular programs. Rather, the civic imagination lays dormant, ready to be tapped, in any aspect of our work, including the work of STEM, university administrators and custodial staff. The civic imagination can be called upon whenever we claim our civic agency as members of publics, as We, the people.   

For all of the real challenges we are facing as a campus, for all of our shortcomings, the sparks of the civic imagination are alive at IUPUI. Here are a few places where I have seen these sparks at work recently: 

• year long commitments made by faculty and staff to read and discuss Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Anti-Racist as a first step toward building solidarity to dismantle racial injustice on and off campus;  
• the Community Engaged Research Group (CERG) and the Monon Collaborative, whose work claims space for democratic voice in engaged research and team science; 
• curricular and co-curricular programs, such as the Masarachia Scholars Program, the Social Justice Scholars and JAG Social Action Grants, that support students in cultivating their political voice and developing skills in deliberation and community organizing and advancing social action projects;
• campus efforts to reduce inequities in faculty hiring, merit and reward systems as well as efforts to expand participation in faculty governance to include contingent faculty.  

These are by no means the only sparks alight on campus or in our community.  Rather, these examples reaffirm what drew me to IUPUI fourteen years ago.  They beg the question of how we can make CLDE a more robust dimension of the learning we are about as an urban, research institution that advances just futures for all.  More generally, these examples invite each of us to ask we can do in our own work to strengthen democratic practice and decision-making as part of our work on campus generally.

Where do we go from here?  

For each of us, our paths to understanding and living into our visions of civic learning and democratic engagement may be different but at their core are questions of the dignity of all people.  Moving from individualism to a concern for our collective well-being and a shared humanity marks our reflections on our personal and professional roles in responding to questions of CLDE.   

We’ve launched this blog as a space to rekindle a conversation about the democratic purposes of higher education at IUPUI and for anyone interested.  The triple pandemic (i.e. Covid-19, the economic fallout, systemic racism and police brutality) has raised attention to longstanding biases and institutional inequities that begs us to ask hard questions of ourselves and who we are as a society [and a public university].  We invite you to join the conversation. 

• Who are “we” and what are we committed to?  
• What values show up for you in the context of civic learning and democratic engagement?  
• How are your wrestling with engaging these values in your work on campus and in your life? 
• What ways are you finding to engage the civic imagination?

 

Bloggers

Morgan L. Studer is the Director of Faculty and Community Resources in the Center for Service and Learning.   Morgan feels like her professional role gives her the opportunity to watch the imagination of campus and community come alive in the unique and varied ways that students, faculty, staff, and community partners work together to enact the values of democratic engagement.  It was her own undergraduate alma mater’s focus on finding your vocation that led her to explore the field of higher education and civic engagement after obtaining her graduate degree.  

Her current responsibilities include overseeing the Community Engagement Associates program, one-on-one and group consultations focused on community engaged learning course design, community engaged learning resource development, connecting community partners to curricular and co-curricular resources at IUPUI, and overseeing the planning of the annual Bringle and Hatcher Civic Engagement Poster Showcase, a part of the Institute for Engaged Learning’s Engaged Learning Showcase.  

Morgan holds a Master of Arts in Philanthropic Studies and has served as adjunct faculty for the undergraduate Philanthropic Studies program in the Lilly School of Philanthropy. Other professional committees include PRAC and the Division of Undergraduate Education Steering Committee. 

 

 

Mary F. Price is an anthropologist and Director of Faculty Development at the IUPUI Center for Service and Learning. In current role, Mary works with scholar-practitioners and learners as a thought partner and critical friend working to strengthen democratic practice, deepen learning and co-create of knowledge with communities that improves our shared futures. 

Mary continues to work as active practitioner-scholar in her role at CSL. Her current research and scholarship emphasize the influence of community-academic partnership relationships on student learning and community outcomes, building evaluation capacity for democratic community engagement; socialization and coaching of community-engaged faculty as part of campus equity, student success and civic agendas, and improving institutional climates for ethical and equitable community engagement locally and globally.   

She has over 20 years’ experience working in the design of high impact educational practices including: service-learning, study abroad, learning communities and faculty-mentored undergraduate research.  Her interest in learner-centered and collaborative teaching practices extends to the use of community-engaged teaching methods in graduate and professional curricula. She holds a masters in Latin American Studies from the University of Florida, Gainesville and a doctorate in anthropology from Binghamton University, SUNY.