Mobile, Situated, and Affective: Reconceptualizing Civic Learning as Collective Practice

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 8
  In Roundtable Session: Place and Meaning-Making in Educational Contexts

Abstract

This paper theorizes and illustrates civic learning and engagement contextually embedded, networked and mobile, developed through relation and interaction among participants across multiple levels of a system. In an 18-month long social design collaboration, civic inquiries foregrounding community-based questions of opportunity and justice formed affectively rich interactive spaces, fostering cross-constituency communication within a public-school district. Rather than individually acquired by young people from adults by means of delimited curricular and pedagogical efforts, civic learning and engagement were mutually constructed within an ecosystem of collective practice, across networks thick with relation and meaning. This ecological reconceptualization of civic learning and engagement opens new ways of thinking about civic education: as a mobile and multidirectional experience impacting both youth and adults.

Author

• Beth C. Rubin, Rutgers University