Institutions of higher education strive to create a diverse, inclusive, and civically engaged student body. Encouraging students to critically engage in social justice enhances the ability of universities to achieve these desired outcomes and empirical studies link activism to greater gains in civic engagement and democratic ideas later in life…

There is a growing societal need for civic-minded leaders, and undergraduate students are poised to become the future leaders and decision makers for a global society. This dissertation explores the demographics and experiences of undergraduate students and their perceived civic-mindedness at a predominantly White, urban, Jesuit-Catholic, liberal…

A democratic life is a form of associated living that requires people to participate in a pluralistic dialogue in different spheres of the civic society: government, community, and work. Higher education classes have a leading role in preparing students for participation in a democratic society; however, more could be done, in particular focusing…

This mixed-method analysis presents a model of college students' civic commitments and capacities for community action. Quantitative findings indicate that after controlling for background characteristics, campus contexts, and college experiences, students' acquisitions of commitments to and skills for contributing to the larger community are…

International education expands a student's perspectives, encourages interest in cultural variations, promotes critical analysis, and strengthens observational and interpersonal skills. Yet, even more research is seemingly needed to confirm the value of study abroad, not only for the individual students involved, but for communities and society at…

While nature center's missions often point to connecting people to nature in various ways, their potential to provide a broader array of services to their communities remains largely unexplored. To better understand the values local community members hold for nature centers, we conducted survey research around 16 centers in the United States.…

The "new student activism," as it is often called, is a hot topic in higher education as well as in the popular press and social media. As a college student in the late '60s and early '70s, a long-time student affairs professional, a scholar and practitioner of service-learning, and an academic teaching a course on social change, the…

This study tests, and finds support, for the hypotheses that a student who majors in political science will have stronger feelings of political competence and will be more willing to engage in hypothetical political actions than two peer groups: (a) those who major in other fields and (b) those who show an interest in politics but have not studied…

The Civics Education Initiative is a project of the Joe Foss Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to shaping "young Americans for civic engagement as voters and informed members of their community." The three-year initiative, which launched in September 2015 and concludes in September 2017, has three goals: (1) To ensure students graduate…

The Bard College Clemente Course in the Humanities (Clemente) has little in common with the market-driven ideology that undergirds most adult learning today. Instead, it is built on the belief that liberal education can offer adult students the possibility of personal change by fostering critical reflection. Across 31 courses in the US and Puerto…

This groundbreaking book describes theory, research, and practice that can be used in civic education courses and programs to help students from marginalized and minoritized groups in nations around the world attain a sense of structural integration and political efficacy within their nation-states, develop civic participation skills, and…

This study presents a unique educational partnership combining the Children's Defense Fund (CDF) Freedom Schools Program with a concentrated iteration of civic education via iEngage Action Civics in order to provide an opportunity for a localized curriculum that featured specificity to the urban community demographic. Participants were asked to…

Traditional service-learning pedagogy assumes that learning occurs when contact between relatively advantaged students and a relatively disadvantaged service population reduces prejudice. However, little is known about how students whose backgrounds are similar to the populations they serve process this learning experience. This study explores the…

This research incorporates theories of intersectional identities, place identity, and critical geography to synthesize a conceptual framework for "double consciousness" in students from a racialized city attending an engaged college in that city. Through 21 phenomenological interviews with resident-students, two themes about the city…

Historically there has been a relative dearth of social science research into civic education--even in political science, a discipline that had civic education as one of its founding objectives. This is partly due to the mistaken impression that civics instruction has no effect on civic and political participation, a conclusion that was once…