Recommendations for Better Civic Learning: Building and Rebuilding Democracy

Abstract

This is the concluding essay for a special report from The Hastings Center entitled Democracy in Crisis: Civic Learning and the Reconstruction of Common Purpose, which grew out of a project supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. This essay provides an integrative discussion of various theoretical and practical reform perspectives offered by other essays in the report. It also offers a number of recommendations. It notes that the aim of the special report is not to propose specific reform measures but, rather, to consider larger, more theoretic concerns related to political and economic questions, which are personal and structural—psychological, cultural, and institutional—at the same time. In response, this essay argues that the best relationship between the citizenry and government in a democracy is not one of deference, nor one of contestation, but one that is critically constructive, which in turn is linked to practices of civic learning. To be constructive, citizens need scientific literacy, an understanding of how government and other institutions work, critical thinking abilities, and many open and diverse forums for civic learning to offset the increasingly isolating media “bubbles” that are the only source of information for many. The essay then formulates five recommendations designed to facilitate critically constructive citizenship and civic learning. These are creating a basis for civic participation, acquiring information, talking to each other, designing institutional change, and achieving deliberation.

Supporting Preservice Teachers’ Civic Competence as a Strategy for Internationalisation in the Digital Era

“…These strengths reflect basic principles of effective instructional design within teacher education (Alsaleh, 2020;Hoogveld et al, 2005;Koukounaras Liagkis et al, 2022), along with the need to integrate web-facilitated and blended models of curriculum delivery in modern classrooms (Paskevicius, & Bortolin, 2016). Studies show that when discussion and collaborative dialogue (Ali et al, 2018;Ceballos López et al, 2016;Han et al, 2013;Lee et al, 2009) as well as inquiry-based strategies are used within internationalisation at home programmes, civic learning and online engagement are promoted (Jennings et al, 2021;Sardoć, 2021;Sun et al, 2022). Practices of this kind resonate with the social constructivist nature of civic learning (Setiani & MacKinnon, 2015) and are congruent with calls for internationalising teacher education curricula, pedagogy and assessment (Ashby & Exter, 2019).…”

Protecting the Public's Health in Pandemics: Reflections on Policy Deliberation and the Role of Civil Society in Democracy

“…First-person perspectives of leadership as demonstrated by a statewide bar association in New York yield insights about the important role of civil society ( 28 ) in fostering policy deliberations through processes of debate and consensus-building, culminating in final recommendations for certain public health legal and ethics reforms in New York. These recommendations emerged from a broad consensus that the pandemic has exposed and heightened structural racism in the United States, described by some scholars as the racism pandemic ( 2 ), and pre-existing inequities and intersectional health disparities by race, ethnicity and age ( 22 , 29 ).…”

Is deliberative democracy possible during a pandemic? Reflections of a bioethicist.

“…The second is a more capacious conception of democracy in which citizens elect government officials to represent them during the election cycle but also have an ongoing role in informing the values and goals that lay behind laws and their implementation. Beyond the granularity of governance, this broader conception of deliberative democracy strives to articulate and influence larger conceptions that affect the commonweal such as justice, equity, and the common good (Jennings et al, 2021).…”