Our Future Environment

The dutiful citizen model favors participation in government centered and sanctioned activities. This model includes the following beliefs and activities: obligation to participate in government centered activities; voting is a core democratic act; one becomes informed about issues and government by following mass media, and one joins civil society organizations and/or expresses interests through parties that typically employ one-way conventional communication to mobilize supporters.
The actualizing citizen model favors loosely networked activism that addresses issues relevant to personal values. This model includes the following beliefs and activities: a diminished sense of government obligation and a higher sense of individual purpose; voting is less meaningful than other, more personally defined acts such as consumerism, community volunteering, or transnational activism; mistrust of media and politicians is reinforced by negative mass media environment; and loose networks of community action are often established or sustained through friendships and peer relations and thin social ties maintained by interactive information technologies.
Bennett argues that a large factor contributing to a disengaged, private conception of engagement is a lack of civic education, and I would add a creative active version, in schools today. In a survey conducted by the International Education Association of 90,000 fourteen year olds in twenty-eight nations, findings suggested that civic education, when it is even offered, is largely textbook based and does not also encourage or teach how to conceive of participation. I would argue that educators should capitalize on the productive and participatory nature of online engagement when discussing civic engagement in the classroom. Bennett, as well as I, argue that bridging these two models, dutiful and actualizing, is possible and worth a try in public school civic education.
Now, considering these two models and the different ways we can define civic engagement we will consider where these different forms of engagement occur. We will look at how youth are incorporating online environments into their everyday lives because the focus of this paper is how to bring a discussion of what American political culture and identity is and can be into a spatial combination of online and public school civic course environments.

Filed under: fostering identity on May 28th, 2008