Preparing a Generation to do Public Work

Over the last twenty years, I have been an active participant in Campus Compact in New York and Vermont. I am excited to join the Ohio Campus Compact community. Like many academics of my generation, I owe part of my career to Campus Compact. When I arrived at Colgate University in the early 1990s, it was difficult to get a service learning class approved by the faculty. It was the leadership of Campus Compact that paved the way.

As I scan the higher education landscape, I feel heartened by the civic education efforts that are underway. In many respects, higher education has re-found its civic roots. Still, I worry that our impact is not what it needs to be, that John Saltmarsh was right when he wrote, "While the movement [to date] has created some change, it has also plateaued."

What do we need to do? For the last eight years, I have had a great adventure in civic education with World Learning, one of the largest global civic education and engagement organizations with about 10,000 people participating in its programs each year. Doing this work, I became struck by a tension between the possible and the likely. The possible is huge. We have the knowledge, methods, processes and physical tools, and the locally rooted assets to address climate change, human rights abuses, water shortages, lack of jobs, conflict and other critical global issues. What we lack is the capacity to come together as human beings and organize ourselves to use our social technology and assets to address the problems.

This is the central challenge of preparing a new generation to see civic opportunity and to engage in public work. Public work is the ability to move beyond seeing civic opportunity to actually working with others to create things of lasting social value, the essence of a free and democratic society. I would argue that public work is the defining outcome we are aiming for when we talk about civic education and community-engagement efforts.

Our students have the desire and ambitions, but lack the capacity to do public work. It is a creative generation that has great ideas for making change happen. It is a generation filled with citizens, social innovators and community activists. But too many aspiring young people lack the skills and habits to act on these passions.  For example: to be an effective citizen, one needs to be able to effectively work with people you don't like. Modern institutions prepare our students to do the opposite. We use technology to interact with those who already agree with us. Our daily lives are shaped by social institutions that demonize those who hold different views. Higher education is going to have to fill that void.

How do we do so? I think about five things:

Capacity Development: First, we need to focus on helping our students develop the capacity to do public work. Too often, we send students out into communities with very little training. Once they are in the community, we fail to provide the on-going coaching they need and deserve to be successful. People learn the arts of public work by doing public work. It is an experiential process, one that requires coaching and training. The future will be shaped by people who can thrive in diverse environments, embrace change as a daily reality, think creatively across categories to see old problems in new ways, and possess the persistence, humility, conflict resolution and communication skills needed to align people across long periods of time. Our students should know how to do the mundane stuff. They should be well versed in the arts of the tougher stuff: how to listen and hear somebody who sees the world differently from yourself, how to persevere through repeated failure until you succeed, and how to understand how the local, regional and global fit together. There is a range of skills that good community organizers and managers know that allow them to organize diverse people to get things done over sustained periods of time. These attributes need to be taught.

Looking For Lost Opportunities: Second, there are plentiful places where students are engaging in activities that could and should be sites for civic learning, but often are not. These are the lost moments in higher education. We need to capture them.

For example, we need to connect deeper and broader with our colloquies in study abroad/international programs. But now students rarely, if ever, get off the tourist path to see and learn from the communities they have traveled far to experience. Another place where we are losing the educational moment is residence halls. Let me be blunt: I believe residence halls are the best places on our campuses to teach the arts of public work, and I believe that almost nobody in the civic engagement community is paying attention to them.

Students come to our residence halls with an incredible array of needs, likes, dislikes, passions and goals. As goals clash, we can coach them as they learn to come together and work effectively to create things of lasting social value. Instead, we often avoid conflict and professionalize problem solving. Before students have a chance to learn to work through difference, we ask our professional staff to step in and mediate conflict, move roommates or enforce rules.

Finally, we need to re-imagine student organizations, our local associations. Imagine using the language of civic opportunity and public work to get student organizations to take themselves more seriously as community-based organizations. Most of our institutions have devoted significant resources to diversity. But we are not taking advantage of that diversity. Too often, students involved in campus organizations are learning poor organizing skills. And too often campus organizations break us into groups rather than bringing us together across groups.  Difference scares us because we fear the unknown and worry that we may say or do something stupid. We need to help students learn that they will make mistakes, but on the road to learning they will come to understand the joy and opportunities that diverse groups of people and difference provide. To do this, we need to challenge student leaders to use organizations to make the campus alive and vibrant, filled with dialogue and public work.

This means giving students more authority, and being willing to live with more campus conflict. Our campuses are filled with processes and offices that seek to avoid conflict. I am very interested in taking a different approach that sees conflict as positive.

Capturing the Jobs Debate: The third opportunity is around career development. Across the world, we have a generation that craves jobs that matter. They are starting small scale NGOs and seeking out firms that work for the social good.  Undersecretary of Education Martha Kanter had it right when she said that we need to “prepare young people for citizenship that extends across family, community and work."

The American Commonwealth Partnership has explored models to help students think about and prepare for jobs that deepen citizenship, “turning jobs into public work.”  I find this deeply exciting. At the most basic level, we are talking about preparing students to work in ways that transform the professions from work that disempowers to work that empowers; or stated differently, to shift the professional from somebody who acts on us to somebody who acts with us. Imagine doctors, lawyers, financial investors, and others who approached their jobs as citizens. It's one thing to prepare students to seek jobs with a positive social impact. It's even more exciting to nurture a generation to transform jobs into jobs that have a social impact.

This requires rethinking the career development process. It starts with orientation before students even begin college. It needs to connect classes to ethical development, to development of liberal arts frameworks and skills, and to real conversations about careers, jobs and professions. It needs to include our alumni who can speak to the current generation of jobs and about the wide range of ways people blend jobs and public work. Higher education is being questioned for its return on investment, and in a historical moment when students are fixated on jobs and security, we have a moment to capture an important debate in ways that transform the future.

Campuses in communities: As David Mathews and others have noted, there is tremendous energy coming "from faculty members who want to integrate their scholarly interests with their public lives. " There are students, staff and administrators clamoring to do more. To get this right, we have to rethink our relationship to local communities." Students need to work on projects that are sustained across a period of time, moving beyond volunteerism to public work. It is also about the depth of the culture interaction. I have often wondered why we don't have students doing home-stays in the local community as they get oriented. The homestay is one of the most powerful educational tools we have and yet it is one we rarely use. We need to become co-learners who work with, not on, local communities.

From Classrooms to Community:   The classroom is the last frontier. The skills and values of civic engagement are the liberal arts. I worry most about the retreat from the liberal arts to narrow and specialized education. We need to push back hard on this tendency. Why train students narrowly for jobs that will change before they even pay back their loans, when we could provide them with the broad-based education that prepares them for the myriad of challenges that lay ahead? The kind of learning that works best is also the kind that will prepare our students to do public work. The liberal arts provide this kind of learning.

The historian William Cronon put it well when he called for a liberal arts education that fosters certain abilities: students who can listen and hear; read and understand; talk with anyone; write clearly and persuasively and movingly; solve a wide variety of puzzles and problems; respect rigor as a way of seeking truth; practice humility, tolerance, and self-criticism; understand how to get things done in the world; nurture and empower the people around them; and see connections that allow one to make sense of the world and act within it in creative ways. http://www.williamcronon.net/writing/Cronon_Only_Connect.pdf

We need to make sure the pedagogy works, which for me is the strongest reason for embracing active learning techniques like service-learning, community-based research, and other academic work that Campus Compact has championed.

Conclusion: Denison has a long and proud tradition of civic engagement. Generations of our alumni have gone on to be active citizens and social change agents. We take our mission statement seriously, to produce autonomous thinkers, discerning moral agents, and active citizens of a democratic society. Denison is fortunate to have amazing resources through our endowed Alford Center for Service Learning, an umbrella for our student-led community work, our signature Orientation and America Reads tutoring programs, and service learning classes.