Reviving Civic Education through Conversation

I’ve been helping community college students reflect on the meaning of America’s founding principles and documents since 2007, and over these years I’ve developed an optimistic perspective of American undergraduates, and consequently of our nation. Some on the political right and left increasingly waver when speaking about the future of our republic as grounded in its unfolding ideals. But the more deeply my students come to know those ideals, the more likely they are to connect their own moral perspectives with them. That’s hopeful news, because community college classrooms are the most American spaces in higher education today. There, you’ll find students that differ from one another not just in terms of race and ethnicity, but also in terms of class, parental status, military service, carceral experience, age and legal status. Many of these students work to support themselves and family members, making considerable sacrifices to pursue a college education.

While some reports indicate legitimate reasons to be concerned about elite higher education, there is a larger story to be told, and one which looks more optimistic as the perspective widens to include the 41% of American undergraduates who attend community colleges. If some scenes at elite institutions augur a future led by the highly-sensitive and coddled, my community college classrooms point to one led by the resilient and resourceful. Like many undergraduates, my students also express serious concerns about our political and social health, some “yearning to breathe free” daily overcome the fear of the agents of a nation that fails to live up to the noble ideals inscribed on its most recognizable symbol, yet most also remain hopeful in their pursuit of happiness and a good life. 

It’s important to pay attention to what’s happening at community colleges. About half of students who complete a BA degree will begin their higher education at a community college. In Texas, where I teach, 75% of students who complete BA degrees at public institutions will apply at least some coursework they have completed at community colleges towards their 4-year degrees. For most, this course work will be in general education courses that meet core curriculum requirements for nearly all college majors. Most students, for example, must complete courses in American history and politics. In many cases, about 20% of general education requirements at community college must be completed in social sciences. Given the absence of meaningful civic education in elementary and secondary schools for so many students in our country today, history and government educators at community colleges have an important responsibility for the future of our nation. They are among the best positioned to help the most students understand the nature of republican government and the responsibility of citizens therein and to help students develop their own political understanding and agency.

Classes in these areas should include meaningful opportunities for discussion. Discussion-based classrooms mirror how citizens work together in a healthy democratic society. The ability to engage in productive and collegial conversations and disagreements about matters that arise in the study of these subjects is an essential skill for citizens of a pluralistic republic like our own, and one which is underdeveloped in our time. The diversity of the community college classroom makes it an ideal place for students to practice these skills, and given the number of students who are enrolled in community colleges, it’s the best place to encourage and develop the pedagogical skills faculty need to help them do it well. 

Unfortunately, too many courses in the social sciences like history and political science at community colleges are lecture and textbook focused, presenting students with a continuation of the style of education many of them received in high school, focused on rote memorization and examinations, and one which AI is also supremely well equipped to deliver. Consequently, many students are missing out on essential opportunities to engage directly with the texts and ideas that form the basis of and continue to shape our political and social lives. In our era of declining civic knowledge and increased, and increasingly acrimonious, social and political polarization, the task of grappling seriously with American politics and history is especially vital. 

There are several meaningful efforts underway to help make that happen. While many of the campuses in the Teagle Foundation’s Cornerstone Initiative are four-year institutions, they are making a great effort to include community colleges in this work. Over a dozen two-year institutions are working on institutional efforts to center the discussion-based study of transformative texts and ideas in general education courses as a part of Cornerstone. My own organization, The Great Questions Foundation, in partnership with Teagle and the Jack Miller Center, runs national curriculum redesign institutes to help community college faculty explore discussion-based approaches to studying significant works in American political and social thought. Through those, over 30 faculty members from nearly 20 two-year institutions have worked on discussion-based course redesigns of general education offerings in the social sciences. Online efforts like Unify America are helping students anywhere connect across meaningful differences. 

Whatever we do to help general education in the classroom needs to include an equally robust effort to shape learning online. Over half of students at postsecondary institutions are enrolled in distance education courses. Last spring, I found teaching my online courses demoralizing. While I could not prove anything definitively, almost two decades of reading student writing made me convinced that the work I was reading in my online discussion boards was not written by students. AI was completing my course, and it was pretty good at it — and certainly good enough to get an A in this introductory American government course. I felt like a fraud. I had been traveling the country, preaching the importance of discussion-based learning in general education courses, yet most of the courses I was teaching that spring were online sections in which I was almost certainly interacting with robots.

This summer, I’m trying something new, and I think it’s working. I’ve gotten rid of written online discussion boards. All students must record and submit video responses to discussion questions and peer responses. The emphasis is on authenticity. The most important part of each week in the short summer course is the weekly wrap-up, where students need to look at the camera, press record and 

1. Read a short quotation from one of the texts assigned for that week that they found interesting, explain the context of that quotation, what it means and why they connected with it. 
2. Share one thing someone else in the course posted that week that they connected with and why. 
3. Discuss how what they learned this week helped them see something differently about our political or social lives.

The only wrong answer is anything from a script. I want to see thinking happening in the moment. I want to see mistakes and for students to get comfortable with the cringe. I want them to speak authentically with all the “ums” and “likes” that pepper everyday language. That’s the only way I’ll know it’s really them. Most of it seems to be so far. I’m seeing students responding to each other, and I’m surprised by how natural it all seems. My summer courses are almost entirely made up of rising high school juniors and seniors. Posting recorded videos of themselves is probably even more natural for them than sharing their thoughts in a physical space. 

It’s time consuming on my end. I’ve been watching and grading these discussion videos continually for the past five weeks, and new sections just opened. It’s difficult work, though it’s a lot more meaningful than what I had been doing online before. A few weeks ago, my online students were learning about the Declaration of Independence. I had them read the following quotation from Fredrick Douglass’ “What is the Slave to the Fourth of July?” speech and discuss the accompanying question: 

I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the ring-bolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.

What does Frederick Douglass mean when he says that the principles of The Declaration of Independence are “saving principles”? What and how do these principles “save”?

I opened the discussion forums and found about 100 recorded reflections. Recordings were made in bedrooms, at kitchen tables, outside under trees with summer birds singing in the background, and other places in and around their homes. Some were recorded while traveling. One student was on the balcony of a hotel, where her friends could be heard nearby, one was on an airplane, and another was on a train. All of them were speaking to the camera on their own, but they were speaking from the spaces in which they are nested with others. When I see my students in the classroom, I don’t often realize that my instruction also has the capacity to connect with their families, friends, and loved ones. When a student’s sibling or child flies by the screen or I hear the commotion of a full home behind their reflection on the meaning of the Declaration, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that what they are learning with me impacts the lives of those around them. There is a big difference between writing that the saving principles of the Declaration can help us confront our contemporary challenges if we are courageously faithful to them and saying something like that out loud where others in your home, your friends or seatmates on an airplane can hear. I believe it more when I hear and see them say it than when I just read it. 

Redirect, remind, get us back-on-track, stay true, hold-us together – most students said things like these in explaining how the principles of the Declaration can be saving for us. Their responses to this prompt evidenced the truth of what they said. I saw them engaging with the principles of the Declaration as saving principles, applying them to the challenges we face today, which reminded some of them of the stated reasons why the colonists dared to declare independence from their distant, disdainful king nearly 250 years ago, whom they found “unfit to be the ruler of a free people.” They were claiming for themselves the moral principles of the Declaration, “as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh, of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.” It was moving to see in my students what Lincoln observed of his compatriots on the 4th of July over 160 years ago. 

Even though this online teaching experience has been the most meaningful yet, it’s not a supplement for the small, discussion-based classroom. A discussion circle with a faculty member who doggedly insists that every single member of the class actively participates is a character forming experience that transcends mastery of the course content and is more formatively important for undergraduates. In my classrooms, students sit in a circle without desks or devices between them. It’s productively uncomfortable for many of them who are used to speaking through a digital vail. There, we’ll read and discuss works from antiquity by authors like Plato and Sophocles, Enlightenment texts from writers like Locke and Montesquieu, and the American political thought that springs from it by authors like Publius, Tocqueville, Du Bois, and Anna Julia Cooper who wrote in 1903 that “where there is no vision, the people perish. A nation cannot survive the shattering of its own ideals. Its doom is already sounded when it begins to write one law on its walls and lives another in its halls.” 

Together we consider what laws are written on our walls today that should be more faithfully lived in our halls. Everyone participates — no exceptions. I had a student a few semesters ago who told me that most of his interactions with others were mediated through some digital device, and that outside of our seminar he rarely spoke face-to-face with other people; we met twice a week for an hour and twenty minutes. Recognition of our saving first principles is not sufficient for a healthy civic life that requires connection, collaboration and an understanding that compromise is necessary for achieving common goals. These civic skills need to be practiced, and students today, perhaps more than ever before, need the uniquely effective practice spaces of in-person, discussion-based courses.