Notre Dame recently announced a partnership with the University of California, Riverside and Harvard University to study civic education in the United States. The research group will receive $600,000 in grant funding and will measure the effectiveness of civics education curricula used nationwide.
According to professor of American democracy David Campbell, the origins of the project align with another civics program, Educating for American Democracy. The goal of this initiative was to design a guide for civic education in K-12 schools, providing teachers with resources to use in the classroom. However, programs such as Educating for American Democracy lack a definitive way of measuring what young people are learning — a vital metric for evaluating the effectiveness of civic initiatives.
“This is where we come in,” Campbell said. “Our project will bring together a large number of scholars to figure out ways that we can measure what young people are learning beyond just top-of-the-head factual questions.”
He shared ways that students will be able to benefit from this type of education and enhance their critical thinking skills.
“Do they know how to make sense of information online? Do they have the skills that are necessary to be civically engaged? Not just the knowledge, but the skills. We want to develop yardsticks — ways that we can actually measure what young people are or are not learning," he stated.
Campbell, who also serves as director of the Notre Dame Democracy Initiative, works on a research team led by Joseph Kahne, the director of the Civic Engagement Research Group at the UC Riverside School of Education. Their work is a joint effort alongside David Kidd, the chief assessment scientist for Harvard’s Democratic Knowledge Project.
“The three of us who are involved come from different disciplines. I’m a political scientist, Joe Kahn at UC Riverside, he is an education scholar … and then David Kidd at Harvard is a psychologist,” Campbell said. “I think it will be one of the selling points of this project … that it wasn’t only political scientists or only sociologists or only psychologists — it was a group of people working together. Even as scholars, we have to learn to compromise with one another [as] each discipline comes at a question in a slightly different way.”
Civics receives significant attention from politicians on both sides of the aisle. Its importance is generally considered a non-partisan issue, yet, civics is often shunned in favor of other school subjects such as math and reading. This is, according to Campbell, the reason the literature on implementing civic education is limited in comparison to the other topics.
“When you get down to what gets funded and … where the priority is placed — Civics is often shunted aside,” Campbell said. “It’s hard to convince policymakers that [civics] should be a priority and because it has not received as much attention, everyone just sort of assumes this is something schools should be doing without actually evaluating it.”
According to Campbell, the best way to educate students and grapple with challenging topics is not passive forms of learning like lectures, but discussions with others and an open forum for dialogue.
The perspectives of Notre Dame students reflect this consensus. Senior Spencer Foote expressed that civic education in the United States requires a renewed focus. Foote emphasized that while an essential component of civics is an understanding of U.S. government and institutions, civics also means exploring current issues and providing space for debate and constructive dialogue.
“I think it’s important that we start having people get used to disagreeing with each other because we live in a polarized society and quite frankly, we don’t learn how to hash things out in high school,” he said. “We just learn to agree with whatever the teacher says in order to get an A, go to college and get a job.”
Foote also supported adding a civics class as a university requirement, describing it as a “no-brainer” given the school’s already-extensive core curriculum. Sophomore Felix Ruda agreed that Notre Dame has a responsibility to civic education but emphasized the importance of teaching the foundations of civics at the K-12 level.
“I think it’s definitely the University’s responsibility, particularly since Notre Dame is a private institution that can take more liberty in terms of educating students,” Ruda said. “I would say it’s the responsibility of K-12 education to lay the foundation for understanding government and civic society.“
Sophomore Enoch Griffith said his “formal civic education” at the K-12 level was limited. However, he noted that as a political science major, his experience with civics at Notre Dame was much more positive, citing his participation in courses and student groups on campus.
“My engagement with civics at Notre Dame has been much more robust and meaningful,” he said. “I’ve had a great experience with civics through my participation in student groups like ND Votes and via my political science curriculum.”
Reflecting on his work in the field and this research project, Campbell expressed his belief that the skills a proper civic education provides are essential to a democratic society. He emphasized that as an established and respected university, institutions like Notre Dame have an obligation to promote a renewed understanding of civics in America.
“An effective civic education ensures that a young person has the knowledge, the skills and the disposition to be an engaged, informed and tolerant citizen and how exactly we measure whether or not they have the right knowledge, whether they have the right skills, the right dispositions, that’s what this project is all about,” Campbell said.
He shared that as a university, the institution has a unique position to set the standard in the higher education space and look at expanding the civics curriculum.
“I think we are very fortunate at Notre Dame. We’re a financially healthy university, we have a very loyal alumni base [and] we have a national reputation. All of those things help us provide a platform so that higher education, broadly defined, can maybe rethink its civic commitments," Campbell said.
