Using Creative Assignments to Help Students Integrate Their Learning in a Campaigns and Elections Class

The ability to integrate learning—to make connections across classes or even within a single class—is integral to students becoming better learners, and to growing their capacity to perform as civic actors. We discuss an upper-level Campaigns and Elections class in which the course structure and assignments were set up to encourage students to integrate their learning. As part of the class, students played the role of state party committees during the 2016 presidential election, at first making arguments to devote more national party resources to their state campaign and then reporting back to the national party on how the election went in their state, and what the party must do to maximize its future success. Through coding of student final exam essay questions, we explore the degree to which students were able to achieve the integrative learning goals we had set for them, and examine factors that might help predict which students achieved these learning goals. We conclude by generalizing from our experience to discuss best practices for achieving integrative learning in our courses.     

The MISSING LINK: Exploring the Relationship Between Higher Education and Political Engagement

Empirical political behavior research has consistently observed a robust and positive relationship between education and political engagement, but has failed to adequately explain why education is so important. Using data from the Baccalaureate and Beyond (B&B) Longitudinal Study, I test three competing hypotheses explaining the enduring link between higher education and political behavior. I find that a verbal SAT scores and a social science curriculum are related to future political engagement, suggesting that the content of higher education, especially a curriculum that develops language and civic skills, is influential in shaping participation in American democracy. Analysis for this article relied on restricted-use data from the National Center for Education Statistics. Application procedures for obtaining an NCES restricted data license to access theBaccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study are available at http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/b&b/. Replication code and supplemental variables (including school quality) are available onthe authors website.     

“八荣八耻”：公民道德建设的切入点

“八荣八耻”是对社会主义国家公民应当遵循的道德规范的高度概括,同公民道德建设的内容是基本一致的,“八荣八耻”提高了开展公民道德建设的可操作性,并从法律、道德和信念三个层面对公民的日常行为进行了规范。它的适时提出,是我国公民道德建设的迫切需要,为公民道德建设提供了一个很好的切入点。     

Cosmopolitanism and National Tradition: The Case of Slovenia

This paper discusses the contradictions of maintaining national identity in the age of globalization. It investigates the central relevance of the concept of citizenship in light of the encroaching forces of economic and cultural globalization, on the one hand; and ethnic, nationalistic, and religious fundamentalism, on the other. The paper argues for the need to recognize not only the meaning of national identity, derived mainly from works of art and literature in a given tradition, but also its potential to head off forms of reductionism, be they economic or ethnic. In this regard, the paper calls for a theoretically subtle approach to the contemporary dilemmas of small nations, caught between the fundamentalist temptation (nationalism) and global corporate homogeneity. The case of Slovenia is used here to spell out the necessity to develop a cosmopolitan attitude, characterized as it is by both local cultural tradition and international codes of expression. Such an attitude may best be developed in a civic sphere that provides the mediating ground between the solipsistic pursuit of individual happiness and governmental political regimentation.     

Squaring the circle: domestic welfare,migrants rights,and human rights

Domestic welfare reform and the management of international migration in Britain have been described by David Cameron as ‘two sides of the same coin’. Heightened conditions and sanctions for the benefit-dependent domestic population, both in and out of work, are being harnessed as a means of promoting labour market change and reducing demand for low-skilled migrants – often EU workers, whose own access to benefit is being curtailed. Arguments about the post-national expansion of rights and associated cosmopolitan debate implicitly measure migrants rights against a normative model of citizenship as the yardstick of full social inclusion, but with little attention to how far citizenship itself falls short of this promise. Taking Britain as a case study, this paper considers how the concept of civic stratification can further advance analysis of the link between domestic welfare, migration and human rights in a context of intensifying controls for both migrants and citizens.     

“We Need to Have a Meeting”: Public Housing Demolition and Collective Agency in Atlanta,Georgia

The last two decades have witnessed widespread demolition of public housing and a large-scale relocation of public housing residents. Much of the current literature has examined the impact of demolition on relocated residents, focusing primarily on individual outcomes such as employment, housing quality, and health. This article examines the potential collective consequences of relocation by using data from 40 in-depth interviews conducted with relocated public housing residents in Atlanta, Georgia, to examine experiences of civic engagement and tenant activism before and after relocation. Participants describe frequent experiences of civic engagement and tenant activism in their public housing communities prior to demolition and also discuss how these collective actions often translated into meaningful gains for their communities. Participants also describe challenges associated with reestablishing these sources of collective agency in their new, post demolition, private-market rental communities where opportunities for civic engagement and tenant activism were perceived to be limited, where stigma was a barrier to social interaction, and where they experienced significant residential instability.     

Deconstructing invisibility: race and politics of visual culture in Brazil

Abstract

This paper aims to discuss race relations and power-building in Brazil. It is well known that the Iberian colonizers developed special ways of imposing their supremacy, dissimulating the skin color standards to provoke some type of beliefs about shade stratification among African descendents, indigenous and mixed-race people. For the first time in South America there are deconstructive projects of that colonial paradigm still alive and strongly embedded in the media landscape. However, new identity politics and attitudes have been emerging amidst this old social cognition. This paper will discuss some speculative thoughts and power-building scenarios on new representations and struggles derived from these lived forms that are emerging in the new racial formations in Latin America. The question is: what will nation-building in the midst of this changing imagery be like? This paper proposes that a civic pedagogy is the only answer to rendering this phenomenon visible.     

Political context,policy networks and policy change: the complexity of transition in Hong Kong

Abstract

Central to the debates on the transition of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty is how this process has affected change in the policy process and policy outputs. Many see policy change as a result of the evolving political environment in Hong Kong following the political transition. This article, however, adopts the notion of policy networks and argues that the analysis of policy change cannot be reduced to a simple contextual stimulus – the policy alteration model. A case study – ‘the development of civic education’ – demonstrates the importance of policy networks, as a particular structure of government and group relations in decision making, in explaining the course of policy change. It is apparent that the relationship between regime change and political liberalization, on the one hand, and established networks, on the other, tends to be complex and dialectical in Hong Kong. Despite the importance of sovereignty transition and political restructuring, the effect of contextual factors on public policy greatly depends on the nature of the network involved.     

Teaching for Social Justice and Social Action

Social justice education involves promoting critical awareness of social inequalities and developing skills that work against these inequalities. This article describes a general theoretical framework for social justice education, describes general strategies for facilitating students' social justice awareness and engagement, identifies challenges to social education, and highlights articles in the special issue that address these themes.     

The Trials of Henry Kissinger,written, directed,and produced by Alex Gibney and Eugene Jarecki, 2002. Running time: 80 minutes. Available from Jigsaw Productions. Web site: www.thetrialsofhenrykissinger.com.

Using data from the 2008 and 2009 Current Population Survey (CPS) conducted by the United States Census Bureau, this article assesses the year-over-year change in the civic engagement of citizens in America's largest metropolitan areas. Of special interest are Denver and Seattle, where the Rocky Mountain News and Seattle Post-Intelligencer closed during the intervening year. The data from the CPS indicate that civic engagement in Seattle and Denver dropped significantly from 2008 to 2009—a decline that is not consistently replicated over the same time period in other major American cities that did not lose a newspaper. The analysis suggests that this decline may plausibly be attributed to the newspaper closures in Seattle and Denver. This short-term negative effect is concerning, and whether it lasts warrants future attention.