Educating for Democracy: Preparing Undergraduates for Responsible Political Engagement (Jossey-Bass 2007). Anne Colby, Elizabeth Beaumont, Thomas Ehrlich, Josh Corngold. Copyright © The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

As one would expect from a book sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation, this is a thoughtful, high-level examination of the potential for political education within the undergraduate curriculum and co-curriculum. The authors, two of whom are co-directors of a Carnegie program called the Political Engagement Project (PEP), base many of their conclusions on the documented outcomes of 21 courses and programs nationwide that focus on political learning to enhance students’ political understanding, motivation, skills, and involvement. PEP itself is a documentation of outcomes from its 21 selected programs, rather than a designed approach to undergraduate education. As such, the project is open to the charge of being structured to deliver its desirable results. A closer look largely dispels these doubts, however; the selected programs reflect a great diversity of institutions, students, pedagogical approaches, and purposes.

PEP’s conclusions are that educating for political understanding, skills, and motivation produces meaningful gains not only in these political dimensions, but appears to support development of many of the core undergraduate skills of critical thinking, communication, teamwork, leadership, and reflective judgment. The authors are able to cite gains in the political dimensions based on interviews with PEP faculty and pre- and post-program surveys of the students. To measure gains in the broader undergraduate goals of critical thinking, leadership, and judgment, the authors suggest use of instruments such as the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), a widely used measure of intellectual growth in undergraduate education. They do not apply such an instrument to the PEP participants, however, and this leaves the connection to the larger goals unsubstantiated. (It also leaves the issue open to further investigation by the authors or by other researchers.)

Educating for Democracy promotes political education and involvement as an ideal vehicle for achieving meaningful intellectual growth, and contrasts it to merely civic engagement that is often expressed in the forms of service learning or volunteering. In the authors’ view, the goal of political education is to foster a broader and more active version of democratic participation than just voting, including involvement in local politics, grassroots campaigns, and policy-related work.

In developing their recommendations, the authors address the charge from conservative commentators that colleges and universities operate from a pronounced liberal bias that gives little scope to divergent viewpoints. Rather than debate the general political orientation of the universities, the authors focus on the prospects for an open and balanced political education. The prospects are good, they maintain, that political education—conducted in the right way—will support the values of intellectual pluralism and respect for diverse perspectives that are at the heart of the higher education mission. The right way of educating is to create the conditions for a “reasoned discourse” that maintains civility and respect for divergent opinions while subjecting all views to searching analysis and examination. An important part of this approach, one that is reflected in many of the PEP projects, is to model civility and reasoned discourse for students. In addition, one of the project’s findings is that political education does not change party affiliation or ideological orientation.

Five of the book’s thirteen chapters are devoted to pedagogical strategies for effective political education. The strategies draw on the examples provided in the PEP projects and reach conclusions from analysis of the projects’ outcomes. The authors point to gains in democratic participation skills, such as the ability to influence, and to increased levels of motivation and commitment, as well as a sense of political efficacy. Effective pedagogical methods include reading and discussion, research, action projects, use of speakers and mentors, and learning through placements in community organizations, internships, and structured service learning assignments. An important element in these diverse experiences is to set up mechanisms for reflection, in which an experience is viewed as a case in point of a larger process or pattern.
In a concluding chapter, the authors point to an institution’s overall responsibility in leveraging the benefits of political education strategies. These include working across the curriculum to connect multiple disciplines, courses, projects, and experiences. To help students achieve cumulative, integrated learning, the authors maintain, the institution should use its curriculum, co-curriculum, and campus culture to provide a deeper, broader, richer, and more lasting educational experience for its students.

The idea that campus culture can and should be part of the enriched learning environment prompts the authors to observe that, in this way at least, campus-based education is superior to distance learning. And while this may be a reasonable conclusion regarding the traditional first-time, full-time student, it does not help shape the educational choices of the growing numbers of working adult learners who study part time and take courses online to balance educational goals with family and work responsibilities. While some of the PEP projects include a residence hall component, for example, none are distance-learning based nor incorporate online learning in a significant way. The selection of the PEP projects, and the strategies proposed by this text, would have both been enhanced by consideration of learning formats used in online education, and the strengths and limitations of this increasingly significant educational mode.

These qualifiers aside, administrators and faculty will find Educating for Democracy inspiring, thought-provoking, and challenging in many general and specific ways. They will find the appendix providing detailed summaries of all 21 PEP programs useful in a practical way. They will then be left with the design challenge posed by the authors, one that each institution must address in its own way: designing the curriculum and co-curriculum and shaping the institutional culture to help students achieve the broadest and deepest possible learning for their own intellectual growth, for their careers, and for their participation in a democratic society.

By:
Dr. Maris Roze, formerly Director of DeVry University Press