Civic Education in the Digital Age

by Margaret Rundle

How, where, and what did you learn about civic life?

This was the opening question of a workshop titled Redesigning Civic Education for the Digital Age conducted at the Fall 2014 Project Zero Conference in San Francisco. The lively discussion that followed surfaced themes related to participants’ civic education: teacher-led lessons and in person conversations, whether at school, with family, or with religious groups, on the topics of facts about the government and voting were most common. After documenting these themes, attendees discussed the following questions:

1. Do you think your education prepared you to engage civically in today’s digital world?
2. What about the civic education received by students today?

A resounding NO was the consensus.

The workshop members then viewed examples of contemporary youth civic engagement, ranging from the Change.org petition calling for President Obama to address gun violence, to the Twitter hashtag campaign #Bringbackourgirls raising awareness of the Nigerian school girls who were kidnapped by the militant group Boko Haram, to the Harry Potter Alliance call to action Odds in our Favor addressing economic inequality. Attendees brainstormed the features of the opportunities afforded by digital media for civic action: these actions are youth-led, and can involve anyone, anytime, anywhere, on any issue, in a multitude of ways.

The stark contrast between the civic education themes and digital civic opportunities illuminates the challenges facing educators who work with young people and support their civic development.

The workshop described above was a joint effort between our Good Participation (GP) Team at Project Zero and the Educating for Democracy in a Digital Age (EDDA) Team at Mills College. Both teams are part of the Educating for Participatory Politics (EPP) initiative, which explores how digital media are transforming civic and political life and the implications for educators preparing youth for democratic life. As part of the EPP initiative, the Good Participation team has collaborated with Facing History and Ourselves (FHAO), an international educational and professional development organization, on developing curricular materials designed to support youth to develop the knowledge, skills, motivation, and reflective disposition to participate positively in civic life today. We created activities and lessons with a digital orientation that complement FHAO resources centered on the Holocaust and Human Behavior.

In pilot work with these materials, students reflected on their current digital footprint and how they are presenting themselves online. Furthermore, they used online discussion boards to share their ideas on how digital media is being used currently in local, national, and global events (such as in Baltimore and in the Middle East), and they imagined how digital media might have been used in the past (for example, how might social media have been used by different factions in WWII?). Students also planned how to take action on an issue they cared about, leveraging the opportunities afforded by new media. For instance, one group of students decided to tackle the lack of trauma centers in their city neighborhood.

The Good Participation and FHAO teams are planning workshops to introduce these resources to educators. We will be conducting our first mini-course at the Project Zero Classroom summer institute in July 2015. If you are interested in learning more about these resources and upcoming workshops and mini-courses, stay tuned for updates on the Good Project website, Facing History and Ourselves website, and the Educating for Participatory Politics website.

Conversation with Mary Katherine Waibel Duncan of Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania

By Danny Mucinskas

Dr. Mary Katherine Waibel Duncan is a Professor of Psychology at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania. Over the past several years, Duncan and her colleagues Jennifer Johnson and Joan Miller have spearheaded the Good Work Initiative at Bloomsburg University, integrating ideas and frameworks from the Good Work Project into freshmen orientation sessions and classes throughout the university. In February 2015, Duncan was named the Joan and Fred Miller Distinguished Professor of Good Work, the first Good Work-related professorship of which we are aware. We recently caught up with her to talk about how Bloomsburg’s Good Work initiative is evolving and continuing to influence students.

Q: How has the Good Work Initiative at Bloomsburg University developed in the past year?

Mary Katherine: First of all, I am excited and honored that I have been named as the first Distinguished Professor of Good Work at Bloomsburg University thanks to the generosity of Joan and Fred Miller, who created the position with an endowed gift. It was such an unexpected and welcome surprise. I hope to use this occasion and the funds available to me to give Bloomsburg University students opportunities for pivotal, transformative experiences. For example, we would really love to bring students to future Good Project or Project Zero conferences to expose them to the ideas that have come out of these endeavors and inspire them to think about what Good Work means in their own experiences. Students can then translate what they have learned into presentations or projects that benefit BU and the surrounding community.

Also, somewhat unexpectedly, we have been given the chance yet again to facilitate Bloomsburg’s summer assignment for incoming freshmen, and we have of course chosen a Good Work-themed assignment based on the 3 Es (Excellence, Ethics, and Engagement). This is our fourth year organizing the assignment, meaning that all students at Bloomsburg in 2015-2016 will have been exposed to Good Work. My colleagues and I reach about 2000 incoming students each year, and we refer all of these students to the Good Work Initiative website we have created, which is a great source of material. We have not looked into how many students have visited the site, but we hope that they continue to return to this site to learn about campus-based resources that have been designed to support their pursuit of Good Work. Through the Good Work Initiative, we want students to reflect upon and to better understand the challenges and opportunities they have to do Good Work as undergraduates and beyond.

Q: What are the biggest challenges to doing Good Work for students, faculty members, and administrators at Bloomsburg?

Mary Katherine: Although we have seen progress in how our students conceptualize Good Work, there is still more we can do to foster deeper connections. We recently surveyed sophomores and seniors in the Department of Psychology at Bloomsburg about their pursuit of Good Work, and we found that while respondents mentioned values/beliefs as motivators, a sense of purpose was not discussed, and little thought was given to horizontal support from peers. We also noted that students face obstacles to doing Good Work, mostly in the form of impediments to short-term goals, including time constraints, the stress of heavy course loads, and social distractions. We are thinking about how we can help students overcome these challenges.

We’re also encouraged by the number of faculty who have integrated Good Work into their courses. Faculty have led the workshops during our Welcome Weekend (freshmen orientation) sessions. When professors tell students that they also struggle to make sense of what is “right” in particular situations, it makes them more personable and less intimidating. We want students to feel like professors are approachable resources for help and information.

Q: How will Bloomsburg’s Good Work Initiative be expanding in the coming months and years?

Mary Katherine: We have been thinking about ways to continue the influence of Good Work at Bloomsburg beyond the Summer Assignment and Welcome Weekend workshop by injecting it into existing programs and courses, which will allow us to continue to have an impact on students throughout their college experience. In the past, we have hung Good Work posters in dorms and campus buildings as daily reminders of our shared goals and ideals. Some professors have placed references to Good Work in their syllabi after coming to talks that Jennifer Johnson or I have done on the topic. We also have students who have approached us, particularly in the psychology department, to ask about how they can do Good Work in certain tricky or ethically “grey” situations. Furthermore, we have a few students every year who do research and presentations on Good Work as a part of senior capstone projects. Eventually, it would be interesting to follow up with alumnae about how the program has had an effect on their personal and professional lives after graduation.

I am happy to say that we are in the process of tying Good Work to the meaning of our school motto “Unleash Your Inner Husky” (the husky is Bloomsburg’s mascot). When someone asks, “What does it mean to be a Husky at Bloomsburg?”, we want the answer to be tied to the definition of Good Work: Excellence, Ethics, and Engagement. We are planning on making videos of outstanding students who embody Good Work and playing these on the monitors throughout campus as exemplars for other students. There are many other avenues we can pursue to further integrate Good Work into the Bloomsburg experience as well. In the meantime, I will continue to embed the message of Good Work into my on- and off-campus speaking engagements.

Q&A with Dinu Raheja, Program Director at tGELF

by Danny Mucinskas

The Global Education & Leadership Foundation (tGELF) is a not-for-profit organization that seeks to foster young leaders from around the world with strong ethical and altruistic values to face the challenges of tomorrow in a network of schools in India and 13 other countries. Over the past several years, the Good Project and tGELF have partnered in an effort to incorporate Good Work ideas and practices into schools and teacher development.

In April 2015, we spoke with Dinu Raheja, Program Director, about recent events at tGELF, including how Good Work continues to be present in school communities, the rationale behind a new prize for teachers, and how tGELF is fostering the next generation of trailblazers.

Q: What motivated tGELF to create The Education Prize 2015 (an award for teachers who have made an innovative contribution to improve practice and inspire students)?

Dinu: We believe that the best way to impact student learning on a daily basis is to honor how teachers teach. Our goal with the instatement of The Education Prize is to recognize an educator who excites learning and a hunger for knowledge in his or her students. We want to find the next Socrates: someone who is able to connect with students and who uses innovative techniques to create new methodologies that can improve the educational landscape.

Q: Were there any connections to Good Work themes in the development of the prize?

Dinu: There may not have been overt connections, but unconsciously or subconsciously, there are definitely connections to the Good Project. tGELF has exposed students and teachers to ideas from the Good Project, and in the back of our minds, in whatever projects we undertake, our philosophy is to forge a better world by taking steps in a positive direction. We want to reward the Good Work that happens in our world, and in doing so, we are trying to do Good Work ourselves.

Q: What are the biggest challenges facing teachers who would like to do Good Work?

Dinu: In a sense, there are no substantial challenges if you are focused as a teacher in your vision of doing Good Work and imparting that ideal to students by ensuring that they do the best that they can. It is important to constantly encourage students to do better over time. A teacher can become accustomed to thinking about education in this way.

On the other hand, if an educator is constantly raising the bar, that is a challenge in itself. By raising the bar too high, it may end up demotivating the teacher and/or the students. There is a risk in always striving for improvement because you can forget how to have a more tolerant understanding of expectations and therefore not achieve all that you hope. Yet another challenge can occur when the difficulties posed by teaching and Good Work cause an educator to become depressed and capitulate.

Therefore, whereas there may not be challenges for particular teachers, there may be several challenges in place for others attempting to do Good Work. A lot depends on the attitude with which a teacher comes to the task at hand, asking “Am I willing to accept challenges and not regard them as challenges, or am I going to get bogged down by them and end by giving up?”

Q: How or in what ways is Good Work integrated into the tGELF school network?

Dinu: When we talk about leadership at our schools in our leadership curricula, we discuss the Good Work Project’s 3 Es: Excellence, Ethics, and Engagement. Leadership means excellence in what you do, and in tGELF’s own philosophy, we try to foster value-based, ethical leadership. Furthermore, there can never be leadership in isolation, so by extension, being a leader necessarily involves teamwork and engagement with others. I think our two organizations interconnect on a lot of frameworks, including that of the meaning of leadership.

Q: What changes or observations have you noted in schools using Good Work?

Dinu: We have seen a positive change in how teachers work in schools and in the attitudes of students towards their work. We believe there has  been an attitudinal shift due to the introduction of Good Work ideas in our school communities.

Q: You mentioned that you are working on a leadership program that will integrate the 3 Es of Good Work (Excellence, Ethics, and Engagement) into a curriculum for students. Where are you in this process?

Dinu: We are currently holding training sessions with teachers to prepare them to use the leadership curriculum in their classrooms. Depending on the number of participants, this is either a 1 or 2 day training process in which teachers are completely familiarized with the philosophy, objectives, and learning outcomes of our leadership curriculum. The teachers then deliver the modules directly to their students. We have found that teachers really look forward to and enjoy the training workshops, and we hope that they then convey this enthusiasm to the students.

The curriculum is age-appropriate and is used from grades 6-12, consisting of activity-based 35-40 minute lessons. We are also considering eventually bringing the modules to the primary level. We view the program on leadership as intertwined with the academic curriculum in these schools; it is not something that we consider separate.

Q: Are there any other updates from tGELF that you would like to share?

Dinu: Right now, tGELF is getting ready for “Harmony,” our annual youth festival. This is an international school-level series of events in which we bring students and teachers together on a common platform in a series of competitions.

For example, we facilitate a six-month youth leader competition that recognizes and initiates volunteerism. Students in this competition design specific service projects in their communities in order to tackle a problem or concern. Once a project design is accepted by our judges, students implement their plan and put their leadership training into practice, reporting back to us with the results. (One recent outstanding student project involved the construction of over 70 toilets in a rural area of India without regular public bathroom access.) Finalists are invited to make presentations about their projects at the “Harmony” National Final Event in November. The Final includes Leaders Club members and winners drawn from a spate of other competitions that are held at the regional level throughout our network. Last year, we hosted about 500 children from three countries, allowing attendees to make connections with one another and further develop their leadership skills.

Finally, in August every year, we organize a residential conference called LIFE (Leadership Initiative For Excellence) for our Leaders Forum members. Leaders Forum members are undergraduates, graduate students, or young professionals selected through a rigorous admissions process based on our four pillars of Leadership, Ethics, Altruism, and Action. The purpose of the program is to mentor and guide young people to make ethical choices in their chosen career paths. In a typical year, tGELF welcomes about 300 people from all over the world to the LIFE conference. This year, we will also be holding a LIFE-USA conference in September in New York City.

More information about tGELF’s programs is available on our website at www.tgelf.org.

Finding Purpose through Meaningful Experiences

a guest post by Maya Shaughnessy

Maya is a freshman at Brookline High School who recently participated in a panel discussion sponsored by her school’s 21st Century Fund on “Taking care of yourself, your community, and the broader world in the digital age.” This forum brought together local thinkers in a provocative discussion moderated by reporter Carey Goldberg of WBUR. In this guest blog drawn from her remarks that evening, Maya reflects on the impact of personally meaningful experiences and explains how her outlook about her academics, life, and future has been positively altered.

Last May I had the opportunity to travel with my family to a remote village in Honduras as part of a medical and dental team. I worked in a “makeshift” pharmacy, handing out vitamins and medications to patients treated at the clinic we were operating.

Almost immediately, I started getting frequent visits by a group of children from the village. I suspect that they were motivated, in part, by the stickers that I had with me. After a few days of these visits, Diadi, a seven-year-old boy, and his siblings took me by the hand and brought me down a dirt path to their home. There, I was greeted by their mother, two older sisters, and baby brother. They took me outside to their backyard where two small mango trees stood. I looked on as Diadi picked several mangos, sat on the ground and began cutting them on a large leaf. The other children appeared with a handful of salt and sprinkled it all over the mangos. They told me, “Es para ti es una merienda,” meaning the mangoes were a snack just for me to enjoy.

I was taken by both their hospitality and generosity but quickly realized that I was empty-handed and had nothing to give in return. So, I returned to the clinic, grabbed a stack of paper, and quickly ran back to Diadi’s house. Completely out of breath, I started folding the paper as all of the children stood by watching. To their amazement, I made an airplane for each one of them. We began flying the airplanes around the house, and I was smiling as they shrieked with laughter.

As the sun began to set, I realized my family was probably wondering where I was. I knew that it was time to go back to my team. Just as I was about to leave, Diadi’s mother brought me into her kitchen and sat me down at a small wooden table, insisting that I eat some lychee. She proudly shared that this fruit was a delicacy. I knew very well that she had probably traveled hours by foot to a town called Mancala to acquire this precious fruit.

This exchange made a lasting impact on me. At that moment, I felt an incredible sense of connection and mutual respect. It didn’t matter that we came from two different countries, different cultures, and spoke a different language; there we were, celebrating our common humanity.

Fast-forward five months to the start of my first year of high school. I, like many freshmen, was obsessed with getting good grades and finding my place among my peers. I had officially joined the race to get into a “good” college. I focused on what I needed to know for tests: becoming familiar with the caste system in social studies, whether to use the preterite or imperfect tense in Spanish, and memorizing “SOH-CAH-TOA” in math. By winter, I felt like I was just going through the motions. I was overwhelmed and unhappy, and the weather certainly wasn’t cooperating. I thought to myself, “I’m only a freshman, and I already feel burned out.” My fond memories of Honduras, the excitement I felt about the work we were doing there, the connection I made with the people I met, and the sense of purpose and meaning… felt worlds away.

It was around this time that a teacher said to me, “Look at the big picture, Maya; find your passion, and the grades will follow.” I thought about his comment and was reminded again of my experience in Honduras. A few weeks later I went with a group of Brookline students to the UN for a day-long conference looking at maternal health issues in developing countries. After the conference, I started to feel more engaged and more present in my day-to-day learning. I saw how several organizations, like the UN Populations Fund and the HeForShe Campaign, were using social media to raise awareness about human rights and gender equality.  I began to connect to topics that were important to me and experienced a strong desire to learn more about those issues. I saw how social media could be utilized to exchange ideas and collaborate with others globally, becoming a tool to accomplish good in the world. The following week I went on a visit to Lesley University, where my classmates and I worked with students from other schools to explore and find potential solutions to a range of complex problems facing a number of developing countries all over the world.

These pivotal experiences have led to a shift in the way I now think about my education. I’m beginning to see that education is not solely about personal achievement, such as acceptance to a college of my choice. Rather, I’ve come to realize that education is really about figuring out who I am and what my place is in the larger world, a process that requires exposure to meaningful experiences both in and out of the classroom. Learning opportunities like the work in Honduras and my participation in the conference at the UN have helped me grow while providing me with the inspiration for further learning and the desire to make a meaningful contribution to society in my life. These experiences have required me to take a risk and to step out of my comfort zone—a process that has helped me to define what learning and personal achievement really mean.

Doing Good Research on Good Research in Academics

A guest post by Wout Scholten MSc., Junior researcher at Tilburg University and Rathenau Institute

The Good Project has partnered in The Netherlands with the Good Work Hub (Goed Werk Hub), an extension of the Professional Honor Foundation, which seeks to promote Good Work ideas and reflective practices in Dutch professional life. In the first of two blogs, Wout Scholten describes the motivations behind and challenges associated with a currently ongoing research project investigating how professionals achieve Good Work in academia, a topic that is explored through targeted focus groups with workers in higher education. This post discusses the project from the researcher’s perspective. A second forthcoming blog will present key findings uncovered from the project.

For a long time in The Netherlands, the fields of research and higher education seemed to be perfectly functioning systems. In the last few years, this has changed due to a growing resentment for imposed rules, limitations on professional autonomy, and growing worries about the quality of academic work. Hence, we have embarked on a new research project on Good Work in The Netherlands asking two questions: How do academic professionals think about good work in their own discipline, and what are the main obstacles that academics encounter to achieving good work?

As researchers, we have also encountered our own reflective questions: what does it mean for us to do good work when carrying out this research, and what are the main challenges we face to living up to our own standards of good work? Thus far, we have encountered three challenges that, in our view, are specific to the fields of research and higher education: 1) a constantly changing social reality that affects participants; 2) the congested schedules of academic professionals; and 3) the critical attitude of the participants.

Constant flux

The field of research and higher education is in flux in The Netherlands. Expressions of discontent and protest against national policies, the current academic culture, and efficiency-oriented university management have increased tremendously in the last few years. This discontent has evolved into a fundamental and widespread cry from an increasingly large group of students and academics. Concepts like ‘the commodification of science’ and ‘publish or perish’ attitudes have recently been recognized nationally as important matters of debate. In February 2015, a group of student activists even occupied a building at the University of Amsterdam in protests that have lasted for over a month.

Policy makers have taken note of the unrest. Reactions from leadership include a revision of the Standard Evaluation Protocol that governs assessment of the research conducted at Dutch universities (productivity is no longer a separate evaluation criterion). The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) was also signed by the Association of Universities in the Netherlands, which lays out recommendations for improvement of “the ways in which the output of scientific research is evaluated.”

These calls for change and resultant actions have reached their climax in the middle of our research, and during conversations with participants, we notice them taking time to reflect on recent events. We hope to make sense of the fundamental flux in Dutch higher education helping others think about what it means to do good work.

The overactive academic

Via our focus groups, we also want to get a picture of the daily experiences of academic professionals. Unfortunately, we have noticed that it is very challenging to gather a group of senior academics from the same discipline on the same day around the same table. Despite recognition of the importance of our study, the congested agendas of the senior academic professionals prove to be a large hurdle to overcome. Most academics have so many competing responsibilities that they cannot substantially contribute to something they recognize as significant.

A typical decline to our invitation is a response such as, “I think this is an extraordinarily good initiative because the academic notion of good work is increasingly measured by management by successes in the struggle for funding, which eventually leads to a decline in good work because of high pressure. However, because of timing, I won’t be able to attend a focus group.”

A real challenge is therefore how we can involve academics in our research in a substantial way in light of time constrictions. This also means that there is a possible bias in the participants that eventually attend a focus meeting: participants are either so concerned about the quality of their work that they made an effort to contribute to our research, or they simply have enough time to participate. We believe that these two potential biases will cancel each other out.

Constant peer review

Academic professionals are used to judging the work of others, and, as one would expect in an academic environment, our focus group participants have been critical towards our study and our methods.

The criticism we encounter from participants is met with mixed emotions. On the one hand, feedback from participants amounts to a continuous peer review of our research, which has improved our methods. It has been inspiring to see the permanence of academic willfulness and the continual striving for good work. For example, during one session with a group of philosophers, the first 30 minutes of the focus session were spent on an analysis of our methods. This resulted in a rich discussion about what counts as good work in the discipline of philosophy and how one should approach the topic. On the other hand, the moderator of the focus group discussions has generally had a difficult time staying on track, even though our protocol is already loosely formulated. We felt we encountered another serious challenge to studying senior academic professionals: how do we overcome participants’ critical attitudes toward procedures and methods and facilitate an in-depth discussion on good work in academia?

Working toward good conclusions

Our research is still in progress. We continue to try to show participants that reflecting on good work is important, especially in the changing landscape of higher education, and that we as researchers also reflect on good work. We want participants to feel that the focus groups are valuable and that they can tell their story, and we hope that our data will give us a better understanding of the three challenges we have mentioned.

Please look forward to a forthcoming contribution to the Good Blog in which we share the outcomes of our research and elaborate on the notion of good work and the main obstacles to its achievement.