COURSE STRUCTURE

In the Spring 2022 semester, 43 students at a large public university enrolled in the lower-level course titled, “Everyday Political Theory.”Footnote ² In addition to the semester-long group research project (60%), students were evaluated through intellectual journal entries (10%), two midterm exams (5% each), participation (5%), and a final exam (15%) (Schmitt, Mehlhaff, and Ommundsen Reference Schmitt, Mehlhaff and Ommundsen2023). This may seem formidable for a lower-level course; however, all assignments, readings, and assessments worked together to advance the semester-long group research project by separating tasks into manageable parts, cultivating student understanding of the fundamental course material, and devoting class meetings to the project.

The projects consisted of three parts. In the first part (January–late February), students learned five “perspectives” on politics that they were expected to apply in everyday life (hence, “Everyday Political Theory”): citizenship, collective action, deliberation, freedom, and equal opportunity. They then self-selected into teams, chose a shared topic, and wrote individual papers from each of their chosen perspectives on their shared topic (see the online appendix, supplement C). Students were required to choose a problem connected in some way to the campus or the town for which they had a real relationship to the issue. For example, one group chose to write about the campus food bank. Students in that group wrote individual papers on food insecurity and citizenship, the collective-action problem of running the food bank, and so on.Footnote ³ They received extensive comments on their papers as well as advice on how their group might progress collectively to the next phase of their project. Other projects ranged from mental health services for LGBTQ+ students to gentrification near campus to vaccination rates among Evangelical Christians in the county.

In the second part of the projects (late February–late March), the students wrote a group paper on their collectively chosen topic, bringing together their perspectives with feedback from a relevant member of the community and consultation with a graduate student (see the online appendix, supplement D). The two graduate-student consultants assisted the instructor in providing detailed feedback to each group throughout the semester, including advice on how to contact and correspond with relevant community members, synthesize the information they obtained from stakeholders, and structure their arguments. With nine unique projects, each of the two graduate students and the instructor devoted specific attention to three groups, which lightened the instructor’s workload. This aspect of the course design is not essential, but we found that it increased the amount of attention and feedback that each group received.

After meeting with a graduate-student consultant, the group that was interested in food insecurity connected with the food bank’s executive board to learn about their challenges, ask questions related to their perspectives, and receive feedback on its project. In this way, the students established initial connections with an organization on campus and in the community. In most cases, communication was limited to a single discussion, followed by an invitation to attend a public poster presentation. However, these initial contacts established a point of connection for future collaboration in CER, with either the same students in different courses or new students in the course. Crucially, these relationships did not require cultivation in advance to benefit both parties.

After speaking with a member of the relevant community group, team members drafted a group paper in an attempt to answer the question, “What should we do?,” regarding the agreed-on local problem (Levine Reference Levine2022a). Their research question was always practically grounded in the issue studied. For the food bank, students synthesized their independent research on food insecurity across perspectives and details of the local food bank to arrive at several interwoven responses, grounded in the facts of the case and constrained by the goals of their community partner. Rather than trying to “solve” the problem of food insecurity, their research goals were to gain the relevant knowledge, build relationships, and grow in their personal commitments to make improvements while also analyzing the institutional elements of the problem in need of reform. Students received extensive feedback on the group paper in an effort to refine their approach, outline tradeoffs or normative pitfalls, and streamline their thinking.

In the third part of the projects (late March–late April), students condensed their group paper into a poster presentation (see the online appendix, supplement E). Presentations were given at the end of the semester in a public forum where friends, faculty, and members of the community attended, asked questions, and offered feedback. These presentations enabled the students to make their research reciprocal, offer insights on improved governance, raise awareness, and develop partnerships in a manner that reflected the preliminary nature of these relationships (Udani and Dobbs Reference Udani and Dobbs2021; see also the online appendix, supplement F).

The group research project was highly demanding, both intellectually and practically. Students had to form a team, arrive at a topic, divide responsibilities, conduct independent research from different perspectives, meld those perspectives, and deliver a final research product accessible for community members. Crucially, this research experience mimics the iterative and constructive technique used in undergraduate research (Ayoub Reference Ayoub2022) while also developing an engaged research relationship with the community. Although they were guided by the instructor, students conducted self-directed CER that connected directly to a problem in their community and the course content. Whereas none of the students “solved” their problem, they learned a great deal about a local issue and considered potential improvements. In some cases, their projects were exceptionally insightful.

THE GROUP RESEARCH PROJECT AS CEL, RESEARCH EXPERIENCE, AND PARTNERSHIP BUILDING

Although most students will not advance to graduate work, all of them must ask the question, “What should we do?” This fundamentally civic question is appropriate for curricula because higher-education institutions aspire to train good citizens, necessitating the development of various civic skills.Footnote ⁴ For our course, this meant applying the five perspectives of citizenship, deliberation, collective action, equal opportunity, and freedom.

Similar to the framework used by Levine (Reference Levine2022a) and the Tufts University College of Civic Life (Levine Reference Levine2022b), these perspectives equip students to ask, “What should we do?,” about a given problem through different lenses. Looking through the lens of citizenship, for example, might lead to reflections on the rights and responsibilities of membership and the ways in which some individuals are denied citizenship status or full membership to see what “we” means. The deliberative lens focused on resolving conflicts related to values through mutual understanding and decision making, and the collective-action perspective provided insight on institutional design and the division of cooperation into multiple interrelated parts. The equal-opportunity perspective helped students to think about the value of opportunity and its relationship to social norms and structure. Discussing freedom led them to reflect on the enabling conditions for agency. In summary, membership, values (e.g., freedom), institutions, and their interrelated properties unified the course focus on the civic question.

Bringing these perspectives to bear on a local problem meant asking, “What should we do?,” given the values of students, the community members, and the interplay of normative and positive frameworks for shared life. That is, civic skills are exercised in a particular context with particular people. Therefore, the focus is on local knowledge and connections outside of the classroom, collective and incremental over unilateral and definitive action, and the recognition of complex social problems. Students had to wrestle with and ask initial questions, learn more, ask again, reframe the question, and so on.

In this way, a course designed on the assumption that most students will not attend graduate school nevertheless includes a significant research experience. The task of preparing students for graduate education and the knowledge economy through research does not preclude civic engagement—they go together. In addition to the course evaluations, the students’ final projects were evidence of their assimilation of this multi-perspectival approach to civic-skills acquisition and research (see the online appendix, supplement F).Footnote ⁵

The course design also serves to develop new relationships with campus and community partners for future research. Making connections with potential stakeholders in the community is an essential aspect of community organizing and civic action. Delivering ready-made connections to students presents an unrealistic expectation of civic action and creates a status-quo bias (i.e., working only with extant relationships), potentially undercutting student agency. The students’ diverse projects were driven by their experiences and interests in unpredictable ways, but they nevertheless established contact with community partners, received feedback, and invited them to attend their presentations. Although not full-fledged CER or CEL, the project enabled students and community members to connect, reason, and reflect.

STUDENT COURSE EVALUATIONS

To assess whether this approach achieved the desired learning outcomes, we used anonymous data from university-sanctioned and -implemented course evaluations that we conducted at the end of the semester, after all components of the group project had been completed. To tailor this evaluation to key learning outcomes from the course, we included a series of free-response items that captured the effects of the course on the students’ approach to community involvement, approach to leadership, knowledge of the university and surrounding community, optimism about their ability to make positive changes in their community, and approach to the study of political science. Of the 43 students in the course, 28 completed the evaluation—a response rate of 65%. Because participation in the group project was a compulsory component, our results naturally lacked a control group; therefore, we were unable to make comparisons using a content-only approach. Furthermore, as with any course evaluations, the results may be subject to selection effects and personal biases. Nevertheless, we view the student evaluations, along with project deliverables, as informative of the effectiveness of this course design and research project.

Overall, the results suggest that the course—and the research component in particular—had a strong impact on students’ community involvement and their perceptions of civic engagement. Of the total students, 96% expressed that the course led them to rethink their approach to community involvement. The outcomes mentioned most often were their intention to play a more active role in various community organizations with which they interacted, the realization that progress can be incremental and need not involve high-profile changes, and the recognition that community is a collective effort not controlled by any one person. This latter finding aligns with the students’ approach to leadership: 77% indicated positive changes in this area. Reflecting the idea that community participation requires a collective effort, they emphasized that they perceived leadership as multilateral organizing rather than unilateral problem solving, and they learned that non-leaders can still be actively involved in key organizational decisions.

All of the evaluations indicated an increased knowledge of the community and an especially heightened awareness of the inner workings of the organizations that the students studied. More important for their continued community engagement was their understanding that change often is slow but nevertheless they can have a positive impact on the university and surrounding community. One way this can be achieved is by separating seemingly entrenched problems into manageable parts. This was a central theme mentioned by 73% of the students, who stated that they were more optimistic about their ability to make changes in their community as a result of the course.

Finally, as Ishiyama et al. (Reference Ishiyama, Breuning, Thies, Van Vechten and Wallace2021) pointed out, demonstrating how political science advances the understanding and resolution of real-world problems is a crucial outcome in the reform of political science education. Combining this element with substantial research experience enabled students to see the potential impact of research in their community—doing good, engaged research can make a difference: 77% indicated that the course changed their approach to the study of political science. In their evaluations, almost all of the students wrote about the value of applying abstract concepts to concrete problems and political actions, especially in the political theory subfield. They expressed that they finally understood how institutions worked, despite initially learning about them in their introductory courses. Additionally, they indicated that the UCER project made political science accessible and practical, and it taught them how to assess political behaviors and institutions rather than merely learning facts about them.Footnote ⁶