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Civic Engagement

In today's interconnected world, it's essential that we expand our notions of the who, what, and where of civic engagement. From early ages, young people have important ideas about how their schools, communities, and the larger world might be changed for the better. How do we support children, teens, and emerging adults to be effective and reflective agents of positive social change? What unique opportunities and challenges for civic and political participation are presented by digital and social media? Civic education needs to prepare youth not just for the voting booth but for deep engagement in their communities, with critical problems facing our world, offline and online, and from young ages.

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Education and Equality

A resource from Humanities & Liberal Arts Assessment (HULA)

Education and Equality

A resource from Humanities & Liberal Arts Assessment (HULA)

American education as we know it today—guaranteed by the state to serve every child in the country—is still less than a hundred years old. It’s no wonder we haven’t agreed yet as to exactly what role education should play in our society. In these Tanner Lectures, Danielle Allen brings us much closer, examining the ideological impasse between vocational and humanistic approaches that has plagued educational discourse, offering a compelling proposal to finally resolve the dispute.

Humanities & Liberal Arts Assessment White Paper

A resource from Humanities & Liberal Arts Assessment (HULA)

Humanities & Liberal Arts Assessment White Paper

A resource from Humanities & Liberal Arts Assessment (HULA)

Discussions of the humanities in popular media frequently identify the humanities as “under attack.”1 While humanists have made theoretical arguments about the value of the humanities, relatively little empirical research has focused on understanding the contribution of the humanities to human development. Rigorous tools for assessing the benefits of humanities programs are even less common and those that exist have been borrowed from other fields rather than being built to assess programs in the humanities specifically. The Humanities and Liberal Arts Assessment project (HULA) is an effort to build a base of empirical evidence concerning the value of the humanities and to build tools for assessing humanities programs that are based on the craft practices of humanists. Our goals are both to provide humanists with a better and more explicit understanding of how their own practices “work” as drivers of human development and to provide empirical data about the value of the humanities in the cultivation of human development, preparation of a workforce, and maintenance of a democratic society. This paper describes HULA’s methodology for analyzing humanist craft practices and developing assessment tools. The first section of the paper outlines a theoretical argument for our approach to studying and building tools for assessment in the humanities. The second section of the paper will describe the methodology that HULA has developed to study the craft logic of humanistic practices in order to build assessments from this understanding. Finally, we offer some brief conclusions about the value of the theoretical frameworks and methodologies described here.

Use the resource links on the right to download the full paper.

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Article

Children Are Citizens: The Everyday and the Razzle-Dazzle

A resource from Children Are Citizens

Children Are Citizens: The Everyday and the Razzle-Dazzle

A resource from Children Are Citizens

How do children get to know their city and the city get to know its children? How often are children asked their opinions about their city? The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) established that in addition to children’s human rights to protection from harm and provision of an adequate standard of living, children also possess civil rights to participate in the cultural and civic activities of their communities. We, the authors of this article, maintain that children are indeed citizens from birth with the right to participate in the civic life of their cities. Cities belong to the adults and children who live there—even young children, who are capable of generating compelling insights about their communities.

The recognition of children as citizens is an essential pillar of the Reggio schools. Sustaining the strong bond between children’s and adults’ destinies has characterized 50 years of dialogue and cultural and political collaboration between the city of Reggio and its municipal preschools and infant-toddler centers. Loris Malaguzzi, founder of the Reggio Emilia educational philosophy, believed that schools are a critical context for fostering the relationship between children and the city. Once Malaguzzi said:

Our children go outside of the school as often as they can. They go to discover what is there or not in the city and to reflect and maybe conquer, with the help of the adults, what could be there . . . [They go] to strengthen relationships with cultural and sports institutions, to run in the fields, to meet the farmers . . . [They go] to discover people’s most beautiful trades, where and how their fathers and mothers work, to make friends with the elderly in their nursing home— images that are missing from their eyes and minds but that are essential to launch themselves into life, into the future. They invite to school the farmer and the factory worker, to hear their stories, their problems, the conditions of the work, and to understand the meaning of life, to feel they are part of a wider community. (see also Cagliari et al., 2016)

How might we help children imagine their futures as active members of their communities? Schools are an ideal setting for fostering a dialogue between children and the city. Like the ancient Greek agora, classrooms can serve as laboratories for life in a democratic community—places where knowledge and culture are both created and transmitted. When children encounter other perspectives—when they discuss, argue, and compare ideas—they are building understanding and making public that which had been private. Cities also provide a construct that three-, four-, and fiveyear- olds can understand—places they can experience and to which they can respond.

This article is written for those who wish to foster a relationship between children and their cities. We start with two examples of children’s contributions to their communities, one from Reggio Emilia—a city with a long and rich history of connecting children to their community, and one from Washington, DC—a city that has more recently built child-community connections. We close by identifying three lessons learned about engaging children in their communities.

From Innovations in Early Education: The International Reggio Emilia Exchange, v. 23, n. 4, published by NAREA (North American Reggio Emilia Alliance)

Download the PDF (under Resource Links) to continue reading this article.

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Article

Accessing the Humanities

A resource from Humanities & Liberal Arts Assessment (HULA)

Accessing the Humanities

A resource from Humanities & Liberal Arts Assessment (HULA)

Assessment in the fields of the humanities and humanistic social sciences has been a durably challenging enterprise, regardless of whether the target of assessment is student learning, teacher or faculty performance, or the experience of public humanities audiences. Over the course of the last four years, our research team on Humanities and Liberal Arts Assessment (HULA) has developed a novel methodology for tackling this task. Our purposes in revisiting the question of whether it is possible to design assessment instruments that are appropriate to work in the humanities have been twofold. First, we have sought to equip humanistic practitioners—whether on campus or in public humanities settings—with tools to translate the impact of their work into the vocabulary of policy-makers and funders. Second, we have sought to equip these practitioners with tools that can provide meaningful insights into their work and support continuous improvement.

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