This will be a series of blog posts that I am writing to assist me in the work of developing my book. Basically, I want to engage in a critical analysis, as it pertains to my interest in civics and citizenship education, of some of the key scholars in a range of different fields. I will be aiming to describe their arguments, the relevance of those arguments to my work, and any differing points of view related to the work in question.
This section on W. Lance Bennet’s edited collection, will fit in with Chapter Two: Apathetic or activist? Young people, citizenship and the public sphere.
Bennett, W. L. (2008). Civic Life Online: Learning How Digital Media Can Engage Youth. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
There’s a strange sense of vertigo in reading some of the chapters in W. Lance Bennet’s Civic Life Online. Although it was published only 12 years ago (not that long before I started working on my PhD), some of the chapters make references to long forgotten relics of the digital age- MySpace, for example, or Second Life. While the points that the authors make are not necessarily wrong for that, it does add a disconcerting sense of looking back at the past from a great height.
Nevertheless, this edited collection is really useful for my work. While I will need to be mindful of the age, it raises many important questions that are still being discussed. In this passage, I’m going to focus mainly on the open chapter, by Bennett himself, but I will refer to other chapters as relevant.
Firstly, Bennett affirms the important role of civics and citizenship education (or, as it is more often described, civic engagement and civic education in the US sense) as being central to the development and sustenance of democracy. However, and in a way that I think shows accurate foresight, Bennett suggests that many democracies are ’showing signs of wear’, and there is a feeling that younger generations have disconnected from conventional politics and government. Certainly, having the benefit of examining this idea from 12 years in the future, and within an entirely different (i.e. Australian) context, I don’t see much to disagree with. Bennett also recognises the global nature of this disengagement, citing US, Germany, Sweden and the UK (but interestingly not Australia – wonder why?) and suggests that there are many pathways that have led to this disengagement, including a cynical press, negative adults, vitriolic campaigning and limited or no attention to those issues of relevance to younger voters.
While Bennett (and others in the volume) point out that such disaffection actually began before the internet and social media came to dominate our lives in the fashion they do now (and certainly do in 2020, compared to 2008), they do question whether it is going to hasten the decline. Not he other hand, they also acknowledge that while ‘conventional’ politics might appear to have lost its appeal, young people continue, and indeed, in many ways seem more engaged than ever in a range of different formats, including those online. Bennett and others cite increasing ciivc engagement in things like consumer activism, social causes, volunteer work and campaigning about economic injustice. Some of these activities take place in online spaces – the digital real:
“For example, Henry Jenkins, Cathy Davidson, Mimi Ito and Jochi Benkler argue that many forms of shared activity online (from blogging, to conflict and protest behaviour in gaming, fan and entertainment sites) represent forms of civic or media engagement.” (p. 2)
This is a representation of what Bennett describes as the two paradigms of youth engagement. Young people are (and I would suggest continue to be) either criticised for being relatively passive and disengaged, compared to previous generations, or they are considered to be active and involved. How can two such different paradigms be true? The answer lies in our understanding of what we mean by civic engagement. For the ‘Engaged Youth’ adherents, there is a recognition of the growing importance of peer networks and online communities. There is also a decline in the credibility of public institutions and discourses. This paradigm places more weight on the empowerment of young people, and recognises that they have the right to make their own creative choices about how, where, when and with whom they choose to engage civically.
Alternatively, the ‘Disengaged Youth’ Paradigm acknowledges the rise of more autonomous (as Stephen Coleman would describe it) forms of public expression, but emphasises the generational decline in connections to government and general civic inolvement as threats to the health of democracy itself.
Bennett takes this argument further; while he acknowledges that there are problems with youth civic engagement, especially along conventional or traditional lines, he argues that the fault in this lies with the institutions, not the young people themselves. He writes, “We must not only prepare citizens for politics but also improve politics for citizens” (p. 4).
One way to do this is to consider how we engage in Civics and Citizenship Education. Bennett comments that there appears to be little recognition that the new platforms that engaged youth are using to engage civically are often ignored in civic education programs – again, something that I think holds true in 2020 as much as it did in 2008. He writes:
“Such pathways to political engagement are often not accommodated in traditional civic education and or government sponsored e-citizen sites, leaving many young citizens at odds with brittle conception of proper citizenship imposed upon them by educators, public officials and other institutional authorities” (p. 5).
The challenge here, which Stephen Coleman points out in the final chapter, is navigating between managed conception of citizenship and autonomous conceptions of citizenship. Certainly, there are few governments who have an appetite to foment anti-government activism within the halls of their schools – and, as the Climate Change Strikes have demonstrated very recently, such approaches are every likely when calling on young people to be active citizens.