Creating a Sense of Worldliness and Natality at the Community College

• In Event: Teaching Toward Transformative Citizenship on the College Campus: Democratic Education and Civic Praxis With Young Adults

Abstract

The purpose of our paper is to show how an instructor’s understanding of two Arendtian conditions about human life, worldliness and natality, may strengthen community college civic education courses. Accordingly, the first objective of our paper is to describe and explain these two Arendtian conditions as developed in her 1958 work, The Human Condition. Our second objective is to show how community college faculty might acknowledge and build upon these conditions in civic education courses. Because the norms and institutions of American democracy are deteriorating and the nation’s political culture is tilting towards autocracy, now is the time to revisit the philosophical foundations of civic education at the American community college.

Authors

• Clifford P. Harbour, University of North Texas

• Jonathon Sanders, The University of North Texas