Reflections on service-learning in european higher education

Over the last two decades, there has been a growing emphasis on the transformation of higher education within Europe. The promotion of active and democratic citizenship through formal higher education is a primary concern. Service-learning (SL) has proven to be a powerful didactic methodology for achieving these ideals. The objective of this paper is to highlight some reflections that permeate SL european experiences, published in the European Observatory of Service-Learning in Higher Education, between January 2020 and September 2021. The counting and percentages of the valued attitudes of SL experiences were collected to explore the guiding philosophy, historical roots, purposes, and underpinning features of SL, contextual factors affecting the practice of SL in the partner institutions and countries, and future challenges and opportunities. Conclusions focus on SL growth and mainstreaming; SL as a core strategic pillar for developing deeper community-higher education partnerships and for strengthening civic engagement across higher education; the need to develop future research to explore these connections and the potential that SL can play in terms of increased civic, work-life and theoretical understandings and skills.

Measuring competences for democratic culture: teaching human rights through religious education

This paper aims to present research on measuring competences for democratic culture. It describes the development of a multiple-item scale that measures competences in teaching democratic citizenship and human rights through religious education. A principal component analysis based on the 135 items of the Council of Europe’s Reference framework of competences for democratic culture was carried out in two phases, in order to construct and refine the scale. The result was a 52-item scale divided into six components. This was tested for its reliability, factor structure and validity; firstly on a sample of 123, and secondly on a sample of 403 secondary RE teachers (2018-19). The research scrutinises the concept of democratic competences as being the ability to mobilise and deploy relevant values, attitudes, skills, knowledge and/or understanding. It concludes that these competences are more complex structures than has been assumed.

Using a Headshot Assignment to Incorporate Critical Theory Into Photojournalism Classrooms

This case study uses a diversity and critical thinking exercise in a photojournalism class to show how journalism educators can incorporate race and gender conversations about ethics and judgment into traditionally skills-oriented courses. It is crucial that journalism students learn how to apply their skills properly in an era of social unrest, inequality, and dwindling media trust. Democratic citizenship and journalism are intertwined, but often the bigger ethical conversations are left out of skills-oriented courses. This can lead to a disconnect between the skills themselves and the responsibility of practicing the skills, especially when it comes to matters of power and representation. The field of photojournalism remains predominately White and male, which makes it all the more crucial for students to interrogate their own biases to ensure ethical coverage of their communities. The assignment asks students to make 36 portraits of strangers, and the subsequent classroom exercise has them confront their inherent biases by looking at the demographics of the people they photographed compared to the general population. Data for this case study consist of observations of the classroom conversations and a reflexive journalism exercise the students completed afterward. Findings indicate this exercise is a successful way to introduce racial and gender considerations as part of photojournalistic ethics and judgment. Students initially neglected to think about representation and diversity in their selection of people to photograph but afterward said they could effectively incorporate reflexivity into their work in an effort to provide more representative imagery and confront their own biases.

A Comic Road to Interiors, or the Pedagogical Matter of Gen Z Humor

Generation Z (Gen Z) represents something of a quintessence for the broken promises that now seem to make up the promise of higher education. But if despair indicates the dark side of generational malaise around things like civic engagement, community, and student learning, the dark humor that has emerged out of these generations points to modes of democratic citizenship that are more about reconciliation than resignation. This essay offers a critical reflection on Gen Z humor, its place in college and university classrooms, and its usefulness as a resource for reconsidering how teaching and learning might be tied to a comically examined life. It proceeds with a fresh look at pedagogies of hope as developed by Paulo Freire, Martha C. Nussbaum, bell hooks, Henry A. Giroux, and others. This examination allows for the conceptualization of a comic poësis for understanding how instructional practices that meet students on uncommon ground contribute to the production, creation, and care for personhood as well as public culture. Ultimately, this essay balances theories of a comic teaching praxis with actual activities from the classroom to meditate on a pedagogy of reconciling curricula with who and where students are, beginning and ending with feedback loops.

Practicing Resistance and the Struggle over Power as Democratic Citizenship

Teaching democratic citizenship has never been more vital, particularly given the dismissive attitude and direct attempts to undermine democratic institutions exemplified by the Trump administration. In addition, traditional approaches to teaching citizenship foreground the underlying values of self-governance, knowledge of the different branches of government, and the skills for behaving within this system (i.e., voting) but lack a broader intellectual framework to guide those actions (Parker, Teaching democracy: Unity and diversity in public life, 2003). Parker, a critical multicultural educator, argued that this approach has rendered participatory citizenship superfluous and ignores more central concerns, namely, how people can live together justly while honoring their multiple individual and group identities (i.e., gender, race, class, religion, etc.). This essay focuses on the task of living together justly and offers one example of how this might be promoted through the communication studies curriculum.

The Impact of Social Media on Civic Engagement in China: The Moderating Role of Citizenship Norms in the Citizen Communication Mediation Model

This study incorporates the examination of citizenship norms in testing the Citizen Communication Mediation Model (CCMM) in China, exploring to what extent online political expression mediates the impact of informational use of social media on offline civic engagement and how beliefs in citizenship norms moderate the CCMM. Results based on a two-wave panel survey among a national sample of 1,199 Chinese adults provide strong support for the CCMM in the Chinese context. In addition, embracing the democratic citizenship norm significantly enhances the CCMM effect, whereas embracing the pro-government citizenship norm that encourages pro-government speech does not show the same effect.

Voting Intersections: Race, Class, and Participation in Presidential Elections in the United States 2008–2016

Intersectional analyses are increasingly common in sociology; however, analyses of voting tend to focus on only race, class, or gender, using the others as control variables. We assess whether and how race, class, and gender intersect to produce distinct patterns of voter engagement in presidential elections 2008–2016. Per existing research, we find income strongly predicts White voting. However, the class gap in voting is not statistically significant among Black voters. In contrast to common characterizations of Black people as politically disengaged, lower income Black citizens are more likely to vote than their White counterparts. Moreover, the lowest earning Black women vote at dramatically higher rates than any other race-gender combination in this income group. These findings call into question the perceived universality of the income gap in voting and widespread claims that more resources directly facilitate voting. They also have implications for our understanding of political participation, social inequality, and democratic citizenship.