Polarization in political culture and the decline of public education for civic engagement have become serious challenges to a healthy constitutional federal republic in the United States. Communication as a field of study in American universities is well-poised to address these challenges and contribute meaningfully to improving the civic…

The marketization of U.S. schools has increasingly complicated and even undermined the democratic aims of education, causing many to argue that democratic and market ideologies are fundamentally opposed. This meta-ethnographic study uses conceptual tools from democratic theory and the research on civic education to investigate how leaders in one…

The purpose of this study was to examine professional learning practices of school districts that have included choice and differentiation in their approaches to professional learning, and to examine the impact educational leaders' knowledge of andragogy, or adult learning theory, may have had on program development. Andragogy is often ill-defined…

Home to the nation's largest Latinx (15 million), Asian American NHPI (almost 7 million) and the 5th largest Black (2.8 million) populations, California is the nation's most diverse and populous state. This diversity is one of the state's greatest assets, yet, representation of racially minoritized leaders in California's colleges and universities…

This article analyzes how guns emerged as both urgent topics of dialogue and common features of everyday life for 228 students and their teachers in six communities across the United States who participated in the Digital Democratic Dialogue (3D) Project, a year long social design-based experiment aimed at foregrounding youth voice and fostering…

Home to the nation's largest Latinx (15 million), Asian American NHPI (almost 7 million) and the 5th largest Black (2.8 million) populations, California is our nation's most diverse and populous state. This diversity is one of the state's greatest assets, yet, representation of racially minoritized leaders in California's colleges and universities…

This article shares lessons from committed and inspirational educators from across the country with whom the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) worked in 2020. Their experiences reinforce that nonpartisan teaching about democracy is possible (i.e., not teaching who to vote for, but rather how the system…

This research was originally presented as a chapter in the doctoral dissertation "On Becoming a People's College: An Appreciative Inquiry." Appreciative Inquiry (Ai) is a participatory approach to organizational change focused on an affirmative topic choice. The topic choice of the dissertation was equity, democracy, and justice at the…

Education has until recently promoted social mobility, broad economic growth, and democracy. However, modern universities direct policy and resources toward criteria that exacerbate income inequality and reduce social mobility. Online education can make education more socially, geographically, temporally, and financially accessible, impacting the…

This chapter describes the individual and institutional factors leading to greater civic outcomes among students at four The Democracy Commitment (TDC) colleges in California.

In this essay, Nicole Mirra and Antero Garcia explore how young people from six demographically distinct communities across the United States understand the social and political issues affecting their lives, engage in storytelling and dialogue across differences, and collaboratively imagine humanizing and hopeful civic futures. Drawing from…

Community colleges play a significant role in the higher education landscape. Open access missions and diverse student bodies are often used to indicate that community colleges are democratizing higher education. This study begins broad questions about what it means to do the work of democracy at a community college. De Anza College in Cupertino,…

Research shows that not only does higher education not see the public; when the public, in turn, looks at higher education, it sees mostly malaise, inefficiencies, expense, and unfulfilled promises. Yet, the contributors to this issue of the "Higher Education Exchange" tell of bright spots in higher education where experiments in working…

The purpose of this paper is to take a closer look at the states that have designed strong history standards and note what has made them exceptional so other states might do the same. They include Alabama, California, Indiana, Massachusetts, New York, and South Carolina. The report draws on interviews with individuals from each state who sat on…

This study explored the civic engagement of current two- and four-year students to explore whether differences exist between the groups and what may explain the differences. Using binary logistic regression and Ordinary Least Squares regression it was found that community-based engagement was lower for two- than four-year students, though…