Exploring the Factors that Empower Students to Become Active in Civic Engagement

• In Event: Protest, Democracy and Education

Proposal

Enabling citizens to express their voices on public issues is a primary goal of civic education among democratic countries (European Commission, 1998; European Council, 2000; National Center for Education Statistics, 2011). However, compared with voting, which is private and individual, people are less likely to take other non-traditional, public-facing, and collective political engagement (Oser, 2016). While educators assumed that public schooling enhances students’ knowledge and attitude toward civic engagement, it is inconclusive how civic knowledge and attitude can be translated into civic behaviors (Campbell, 2019). Combining the framework of civic education and typology of civic engagement behaviors, this paper utilized the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) 2016 student questionnaire and civic knowledge test data to examine what factors in students’ learning experience invigorate their tendency on collective, public actions of civic engagement.
Social science researchers and educators hoped that, through the acquisition of civic knowledge, students can cultivate positive attitude and tendency toward democratic participation (Hoskins, 2006; Hoskins, D’Hombres, & Campbell, 2008; Campbell, 2019). However, the mechanism that extends students’ civic attitude to their civic behavioral outcomes is disputable. While the model from Hoskins (2006) and Hoskins et al. (2008) showed that civic behaviors was positively associated with years of education, the framework of Verba, Schlozman, & Brady (1995) suggested that students’ civic capacity and actions were enhanced by their social network. Similarly, Torney-Purta & Amadeo (2003) argued that civic knowledge and required volunteer work in K-12 education was not adequate to cultivate active citizenship since a democratic school culture and pedagogy also complemented students’ future civic engagement. Further, political discussion in classroom (Hess & McAvoy, 2015), instructional techniques (Gainous & Martens, 2012), and school culture (Seider, 2012) may influence students’ civic behaviors.
Among the literature analyzing how education promotes civic engagement, it is common that voting was treated as the sole, measurable outcome. However, other types of engagement are indispensable since they were utilized by the younger generation. Further, as U.S.-based research reported that the younger generation are less involved with politics (Keeter, Zukin, Andolina, & Jenkins, 2002), it is crucial to identify what factors promote the breadth and depth of civic engagement. Based on the nature of the actions and the characteristics of the participants, researchers categorized democratic participation into conventional engagement (voting), collective engagement for political awareness (protest, petition), direct initiative (community engagement), digital participation, and consumer activism (van Deth, 2016; Ohme, de Vreese, & Albæk, 2018). Specifically, Steenvoorden (2018) and Oser (2016) utilized logistic regression to analyze the demographical and educational factors that drew the boundaries between different types of engagement and with disengagement. As other studies suggested a continuum typology of civic engagement (Adler & Goggin, 2005) and analyzed youth’s tendency of being cynical (Amnå & Ekman, 2014), this study aimed to offer hope by examining factors that empower students to become more active in civic engagement. Thus, we asked what educational experiences and interventions in K-12 education encourage students to emerge as active citizens, specifically from political indifference to individual, private participation (voting), and to public, collective activism (protest).
Data from ICCS 2016 was used in this research, as its civic knowledge test offered records of students’ cognitive level of civics, and its student-level questionnaire probed high-school students’ learning experiences and tendency on civic engagement. The selected sample included 85,629 high-school students with an average age of 14.38 from 23 countries across three continents. The independent variables included students’ civic knowledge test score, immigration status, parental education status, students’ interests in politics, classroom activities and curriculum that promote civic learning, experience of democratic participation in schools, membership in voluntary organizations, and their understanding of gender and ethnic equity. The dependent variables were four-point Likert scale questions measuring students’ civic behaviors, including voting and protest. These were transformed into a three-level categorical variable, with level 1 representing political disengagement (N=5,875, 7%), level 2 referring to voting only (N=35,036, 41%), and level 3 indicating the participation in both voting and protest (N=44,728, 52%).
Ordered Logistic Regression was used to examine the splits across the three levels of civic engagement. The analysis was separated by students’ nationality as national curriculum and pedagogy can impact the development of civic identity.
The findings showed that, among most countries, an increase in students’ civic knowledge test score was positively correlated with their probability of voting in the future. Yet, civic knowledge failed to increase and, in some countries, reduced students’ possibility of participating in protest. This finding aligned with the theory that voting and protest should be categorized as different types of civic engagement (Oser, 2016; Steenvoorden, 2018) and are cultivated via different conditions and interventions. Not surprisingly, students’ interest in politics and experiences of democratic participation in school setting was positively associated with an increased probability of both voting and protest. However, students’ positive perception on the effectiveness of on-campus civic engagement was exclusively correlated with higher possibility of choosing to protest in the future, in addition to using voting as their choice of civic engagement. Further, civic curriculum and the usage of open discussion as class activities did not attribute to a higher tendency of voting and protest. This implied that enhancing students’ extra-curricular activities of civic engagement is more effective than classroom learning alone; and, enhancing students’ agency of civic participation empowers their future engagement. The findings also showed that students’ immigrant status was not necessarily a determinant on the probability of future voting and protest, which contradicted with U.S.-based research (Stepick & Stepick, 2002; Torres, Sosa, Flores Toussaint, Jolie, & Bustos, 2022). This implied that the larger societal conditions in a nation attribute to students’ choices of engagement. Students’ membership in voluntary organizations was positively associated with their higher odds of protest, on top of traditional political engagement. This finding supported that social capital is a crucial element of cultivating active citizenship (Verba et al., 1995).

Authors

• Jeff Ching-Fan Lai, University of Iowa

• Sabrina Ahmed, The University of Iowa

• man phan, University of Iowa