Redefining Civic Engagement: Using Research to Transform Democracy in the Council of Youth Research

• In Event: Blending Youth Participatory Action Research and Youth Organizing: Analyzing the Council of Youth Research

Abstract

A growing consensus in the field of civic education is that civics should not be about teaching “techniques” or “routines” or delivering “programs” of civic knowledge, but should be considered a continuous practice through which citizens become co-creators of their own social and political environments (Cammarota & Fine, 2008; Morrell, 2004). In this paper, the students, teachers, and university researchers of the Council of Youth Research will examine how the Council is striving to generate grounded theory about civic learning that challenges the commonly held view that low-income and minority students are ‘deficient’ in civic skills and engagement (Levinson, 2007). We will show how citizenship is taught in the community through offering students opportunities to engage in meaningful and authentic processes in a critical community of practice.

The work of the Council is based on the idea that students learn civic knowledge, skills and dispositions best when they are embedded within practices that relate to their developing identities and daily lived experiences – an idea that emerges from established theories of learning. Vygotsky (1978) focuses on the role of culture and social interactions to the construction of knowledge, and Lave and Wenger (1991) argue that learning is socially constructed as students take peripheral and then more central roles in “communities of practice” that scaffold actions and behaviors. Each of these perspectives highlight the need for learning to be active, grounded in social interaction, and guided by practice. These criteria match up well with practice-oriented theories of citizenship, which stress that citizenship is continually negotiated in everyday social situations rather than a static body of knowledge or skills that can be simply acquired (Nasir & Kirshner, 2003; Lawy & Biesta, 2007). As Lawy & Biesta note, “young people learn to be citizens as a consequence of their participation in the actual practices that make up their lives” (p. 45).

This paper explores how youth within the Council of Youth Research reshape our understanding of democracy in multiple ways. Namely, the process of youth participation in a democratic public and the role of learning through written and oral presentations the students produce. This study finds that these efforts concretize the role of youth who become more legitimate democratic participants. Through a combination of standpoint theory and case study analysis, our analysis of the Council reveals pedagogical and curricular strategies that encourage citizenship-as-practice and can be broadly applied across contexts both in classrooms and in extracurricular spaces to empower urban youth to transformative civic agency.
Using a grounded theory approach to analyzing student interviews, presentations, videos and reflections, this paper offers an in-depth discussion of how the student work is reflective of the process of becoming part of the public. This study highlights the connection between this transformative process and larger democratic themes of equity, access, and participation. The results point toward ways that the Council of Youth Research strives to embody a Deweyan notion of the public which challenges the passive, adult-centered views of young people that characterizes many civic engagement efforts.

Authors

• Ebony Cheiree Cain, University of California - Los Angeles

• Arlene Ford, University of California - Los Angeles