Researchers Urge Colleges Promote Political Participation and Suggest Ways to Do It

Wednesday, November 14, 2007
from Chronicle of Higher Education

Researchers Urge College to Promote Political Participation and Suggest Neutral Ways of Doing So
By SARA LIPKA

Community service attracts record numbers of college students, but not so politics. Researchers at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching have been exploring how to change that.

"Young people are strikingly and troublingly ignorant about politics and political decision making," Thomas Ehrlich, a senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation, said at a news conference on Tuesday. The conference marked the release of the book Educating for Democracy: Preparing Undergraduates for Responsible Political Engagement (Jossey-Bass, 2007), which presents the findings of the foundation's three-year Political Engagement Project and reads as a how-to manual for colleges to promote political learning.

Just a third of students think it is important to keep up with political issues and events, and colleges are largely responsible for that, said Mr. Ehrlich, who is one of the book's authors. "Many campuses across the country make individual volunteer work such as tutoring kids or cleaning up a park an institutional priority," he said. "We could not find a single campus that made political engagement a priority."

The Political Engagement Project did find, however, 21 courses and programs at a wide array of institutions designed to improve students' knowledge of political and public-policy issues. The project studied those models and interviewed students before and after they participated.

The students' experiences increased their political interest and understanding but did not influence their stances, the researchers found.

"Students' political-party affiliation and their political ideology did not change," said Anne Colby, who is also a senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation and a co-author of the book.

The researchers adamantly denied the claim, popular among some culture warriors, that colleges' political-learning programs are inevitably doctrinaire. "Education for political learning has to be unbiased, and it has to be really deeply committed to political open-mindedness," said Ms. Colby, who called such neutrality "perfectly possible."


The book examines five educational strategies that expand students' political interest, understanding, and participation, drawing on examples from the model programs. The techniques are not just for political-science courses, the authors insist, but have been used in agriculture, engineering, and English. Those strategies are:


1*Discussion and deliberation. Promote face-to-face, Web-based discussions, simulations like the Model United Nations, and writing assignments in which students can argue opinions grounded in evidence.


2*Political research and action projects.


3*Encourage students to join a group like Young Democrats or Young Republicans or to conduct research on or for a political organization or community group.



4*Speakers and mentors. Connect students to people with substantial knowledge of and passion for a certain issue, setting expectations with both parties for the interaction.




5*Placements, internships, and service learning experiences.


*Structured reflection. Assign students reflective essays or journals to allow them to integrate their learning.

Despite common perceptions, today's college students are not apathetic, Mr. Ehrlich said, citing their involvement in Teach for America and AmeriCorps. "The notion that this is the 'me generation' is just not true. They really want to participate."

But many students veer toward projects with more visible impact because they do not believe they can influence broader systems, he said, and they need to be shown otherwise.

In long reflections on civics and democracy, the book urges colleges to commit to educating students for political participation.

"If you want to think about higher education as preparing students to understand the world and their place in it, certainly understanding the system that they live under ... has got to be part of what we mean," Ms. Colby said. "This is a responsibility and an opportunity for higher education."

Highlights from the book and information on how to order it are available on the foundation's Web site.