Understanding Service-Learning and Community Engagement by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: IAP - Information Age Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2012-12-20T16:00:00+00:00

DISCUSSION

This study explored cultural differences in how youth conceptualize and enact civic engagement. The results indicate that the views of civic engagement expressed by young people are shaped by their cultural standpoint and that youth in Germany and the United States have different standpoints and, thus, unique perspectives about engagement. Furthermore, the results suggest that even within larger national cultural groups, cocultures may inhabit different standpoints related to civic engagement. This was most evident in the focus groups conducted with American youth. In this section, the major findings revealed through our analysis will be discussed, with particular emphasis on their implications for internationalizing civic engagement.

Cultural standpoint is a powerful force, shaping an individual’s understanding of what it means to be an engaged citizen. On the one hand, the American and German youth define civic engagement in a similar manner: a common thread in all of the definitions of civic engagement presented by the young people is that it involves working to meet community needs. However, closer analysis reveals that German and American young people approach the construct of civic engagement from very different conceptual standpoints. To the American youth, working to meet community needs means tangibly solving problems (i.e., working at food pantries, tutoring, helping clean up after a disaster), but to the German youth, working to meet community needs means taking the political actions necessary to ensure that the government meets its obligations to the people. For example, German youth are more likely to engage in protests against poverty or for policies that ensure fee-free access to education for all than they are to participate in projects that provide direct material aid to people in need. This represents a fundamental difference in the conceptualization of civic engagement, a difference that is not inconsistent with existing research on civic involvement within these two countries. A study of political activity and volunteerism conducted as part of the American Democracy Project’s Political Engagement Project discovered that young people in the United States are more likely to engage in apolitical community service than in political activities (Colby, 2008). This stands in stark contrast to the emphasis placed on political activism as civic engagement reported by the German youth in the current study.

This difference has obvious implications for designing civic engagement initiatives that involve individuals from these two cultures. The success of civic engagement programs relies on convergence between young people’s conceptualizations of what it means to be an engaged citizen and the engagement opportunities they are provided. Either the engagement activities must be tailored to fit within the existing conceptualizations of the student, or the student’s concept of what it means to be engaged must be altered to foster such convergence. This latter alternative is evident in the Political Engagement Project’s goal to promote the inclusion of explicitly political activities within the conceptualization of civic engagement at American universities (American Association of State Colleges and Universities, 2011).

A second key finding supported by our data is that the conceptualization and enactment of civic engagement

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