Regional and Time Trends in Youth Civic Action From Action Civics Classrooms Across the United States

• In Event: Youth Development and Civic Education

Abstract

Civic engagement is essential to democracy, and schools can prepare students for civic life. We conducted community-engaged research in collaboration with organizational stakeholders to document the civic action projects (n=1651) of public school students in multiple U.S. metropolitan areas from 2012-2017 who have participated in school-based programming supported by Generation Citizen, an action civics program, and investigated differences in topics by region and time. We find that youth are paying attention to and are often closely grounded in issues that are local and urgent to their communities, and foresee important policy debates. These findings suggest youth have important insights and should have a place at the table in important policy conversations.

Authors

• Alison Klebanoff Cohen, University of California - San Francisco

• Elena G. Leomi, University of California - Berkeley

• Sarah Andes, Generation Citizen