Higher education institutions are continuously called upon by society to prepare students to be engaged citizens. Leadership is a core component to an individual being an actively engaged citizen. How do college students learn and develop leadership skills? How do college students learn and become civically engaged during their collegiate years? The purpose of this study was to identify campus environmental factors perceived to influence student leadership development and civic engagement that resulted in students’ perceived capacity to create positive social change. The study was conducted at a public four-year comprehensive higher education institution regionally located in the south central region of the United States. This qualitative study examined undergraduate students’ perceptions of personal leadership, influences on personal leadership development, and experiences with leadership and civic engagement. Following a naturalistic qualitative research method, interviews were conducted with ten undergraduate participants. Hoy and Miskel (2001) higher education organizations social system model and A Social Change Model of Leadership Development by the Higher Education Research Institute (1996) was used as conceptual frameworks for the study. The researcher determined from participant responses that peer and mentor relationships, community identity, personal identity, and democratic experiences were key environmental factors influencing student leadership development and civic engagement. Collegiate relationships with peers and faculty/staff mentors were a primary influential factor to participants’ university experiences resulting in their perceived knowledge of leadership and value for civic engagement. Identity as a campus community member and local community member was an environmental factor influencing participants’ commitment to civic engagement. Participants who were engaged in their personal cultural heritage articulated a deeper understanding of leadership and had a greater commitment to engaging with ethnically diverse populations. Participants who experienced the tenants of Democratic values in their academic and co-curricular experiences had a deeper sense of empowerment to create positive social change. The conclusions drawn from the researcher’s findings indicate the depth to which campus environmental factors influence student leadership development and civic engagement result in the level students’ build their leadership knowledge and capacity. The intent of the study was to gain an understanding of a campus environment through the constructed reality of individuals within the environment in order to determine factors that can be enhanced to improve leadership development and civic engagement.

This study examined the relationship between service-learning and civic engagement in the 2- year college and also investigated specific differences between service experiences to determine whether those differences moderated the relationship between service participation and civic engagement outcomes. The study yielded 110 matching pre- and post-Student Civic Engagement surveys from service-learners in five different course subject areas at a large southeastern community college. The findings of the paired-samples t tests suggest that students experienced significant gains in four of the seven dimensions of civic engagement after participating in service. Students in comparable courses in subject matter but without service-components were also surveyed, yielding 117 matching pre- and post-surveys. A comparison of the mean differences between pre- and post-responses of the non-service-learners and service-learners suggests that the service-learners had a higher tendency than the non-service-learners to participate in the majority of assessed civic engagement activities. The data were sorted by subject area to allow for an analysis of the service-learners and the non-service-learners in comparable courses. Those results, however, were inconclusive, and no clear trends emerged. ANOVAs and independent-samples t tests were used to determine the relationship between gains in civic outcomes and select variables. The findings suggest that the type of service-learning activity, the duration of the service experience, the participant-perceived quality of the service experience, the amount of required student reflection, and the teacher’s frequency of use of active and passive instructional strategies significantly moderate the relationship between service participation and a number of measures of civic engagement.

Civic life in its healthiest state is a dynamic, open, and reflective system that serves the needs of the public and improves the quality of life for all its members. A vibrant civic sphere helps citizens become less vulnerable to exploitation, hardship, harm, and allows everyday voices access to the powers that influence their lives.Yet most citizens today feel that the political arena has become too hostile, irrational, and polarized to expend their energy trying to affect it. Texas in particular is experiencing some of the lowest levels of civic engagement in the nation. The framework of this report holds on to both the notion that a healthy civic sphere is vital to the social fabric of our nation and to idea that citizens have legitimate reasons why they do not currently engage more in the process. These new dynamics in the landscape of political life warrant a moment of reflection which this retrospective seeks to offer. This paper uses Current Population Survey data from the U.S. Census Bureau to explore whether we are we asking the right questions, if we have enough information, and outlines what the data we do have is telling us about civic life in Texas. / text

The ways that young people learn to engage in democratic and other mechanisms for community involvement is a product of how they are socialized into the institutions they inhabit and how they incorporate this socialization into their ongoing construction of identity. In order to become active and agentive members of their society, young people must learn to view themselves as able to productively engage in social practices and social change. Conventional schools are structured in ways that limit opportunities for marginalized students to develop agentive and active social identities. This study suggests that students may construct more agentive identities if they have opportunities to frame their life circumstances and actions in political and historical terms.This project has studied how high school students may construct expanded subject positions as a result of participating in a culturally relevant and explicitly political youth development program. The Project for Conscious Education and Activism (PCEA) incorporates critical and culturally relevant pedagogy with participatory action research. Embedded in a required senior year social studies course, the PCEA provides students a chance to perceive their roles as sociohistorical actors. This two-year ethnographic case study examined shifts in students' academic identities and social agency. Increasing identification with school subject matter fostered intellectual empowerment that often extends beyond the context of school to effect broader social identities. Findings detail the ways that participants can come to see their actions as socially and historically grounded, eventually coming to think of themselves as social actors.Conventional typologies of civic engagement tend to leave out ways that youth of color and those from poor communities resist and address debilitative social disinvestment. But neither do young people tend to think of their actions as constituting social or civic action. Many shifts in subjectivity were apparent as PCEA participants began to frame their actions as intentional intervention in social injustice, becoming "civic" attempts to improve conditions in their communities. As young people learn to see their actions in relation to political and institutional patterns, they may both expand their social agency and increasingly frame their actions as contributing to social justice.

abstract: The Arizona Interfaith Alliance for Worker Justice (AIAWJ) was a mediating structure for those who wanted to be civically engaged in the labor movement and other coalitions in Phoenix, Arizona. It not only served its constituents, but it integrated, educated, and empowered them. Due to lack of funding the AIAWJ closed in the summer of 2016. Many community members from marginalized neighborhoods, other concerned citizens, students, myself, and others participated in their first and only civic engagement opportunities through this organization and were subsequently left with no connections, a barrier to being civically engaged. Through interviews and secondary data research, the relationship between people, mediating structures, and civic engagement activity are examined. The key findings support existing research that emphasizes the importance of mediating structures when it comes to civic engagement. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Interdisciplinary Studies 2016

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / The U.S. is now experiencing an unprecedented growth in its older population. In order to reduce the adverse effects of population aging, older adults’ civic engagement has been a recent focus in the field of aging. A considerable body of literature has documented the significance, current status, positive outcomes, and influencing factors of American elders’ civic engagement. However, there are very few studies, if any, that adopt an organizational competency perspective to explore the promotion of older adults’ participation in civic activities. To fill the current research gap, the dissertation aims to help formal organizations identify and develop necessary competencies to better engage American elders through two inquiries. The first inquiry is a mixed methods systematic literature review which included 19 quantitative studies, two qualitative studies, and one mixed methods study. Through meta-summary, six themes and 28 factors related to American elders’ civic engagement were generated. These themes encompassed socio-demographic factors (eight factors), health status (four factors), program characteristics (four factors), engagement opportunities (three factors), engagement outcomes (five factors), and social capital (four factors). Formal organizations are advised to develop relevant competencies to capture the beneficial influences of facilitating factors and minimize the adverse impact of obstructive factors. The second inquiry aims to develop and validate an Organizational Competency Scale (OCS) for elder civic engagement programs. 32 formal organizations and pertinent programs in the State of Texas participated in the pilot study. Factor analyses of the data collected from these organizations revealed a seven-factor solution for the OCS. These factors included client discovery with support, client-centered planning and management, client assessment and training, integration of diverse groups, promotion of adaptation between groups, integration of resources to address the structural constraints, and promotion of social recognition and social justice. As a reliable and valid scale, the OCS can serve as both an assessment tool and practice guidelines for formal organizations to evaluate and develop their competencies to increase American elders’ civic engagement. / 2 years

Service-learning is a hybrid curriculum that puts students in direct contact with the needs of a community around them. Taking an experiential approach to learning, service-learning provides an outlet for students to take their education from within the classroom and apply it to a real-world setting. When developed successfully, service-learning challenges students to use the knowledge and skills they gained as a tool in tackling real world civic and social issues. To be successful, these programs must have a component that requires students to actively participate in community partnerships. Effective service-learning acts as a bridge between university and community—giving students an opportunity to grow and develop in their civic positionalities, and offering communities external support and resources they can use to move themselves forward. This relationship sounds picturesque, but the practice is far from perfect. Research demonstrates that certain examples of service-learning curriculum ignore the community perspective or lack the opportunity for students to become actively involved. These issues often result in negligible impact, passive participation, and stunted civic development. To combat these deficiencies, then, universities should adhere to an accountability framework. One way to do this is by conducting comparative analyses of existing pedagogy. By conducting a critical comparative analysis of existing service-learning research and localized service-learning pedagogies/student experience, this thesis asks what happens when you put the student experience into conversation with the pedagogical research. What can this kind of dialogue reveal about the pedagogies that the research advocates for? How do these different pedagogies spark the potential for students and community partners to thrive in a service-learning environment? How do they limit them? Asking these questions will demonstrate how to maintain that service-learning practices, regardless of university differences, follow examples of effective service-learning that's established by existing literature.

A commitment to advancing civic engagement has been evident throughout the history of the U.S. higher education system. Civic engagement is a part of the mission of fraternity and sorority organizations. Because of this commitment to civic engagement, the purpose of this study is to understand what is happening in the development of civic engagement of fraternity and sorority alumni, specifically the role fraternity and sorority life plays in this development. The research questions that guide this study include: 1) How do fraternity and sorority alumni exercise civic engagement upon graduating from their undergraduate college experiences?; 2) How do fraternity and sorority alumni make meaning of the impact past Greek participation play in their current commitment to civic engagement?; 3) What impact do environments along the academic pathway (e.g., high school, college, postcollege) have on the longitudinal process of meaning making around commitments to civic engagement for fraternity and sorority alumni? Levering key perspectives from Astin’s (1984) Person-Environmental Theory, Baxter Magolda’s Self-Authorship Theory (1999), and Musil’s Spiral Model (2009), the literature review synthesizes research on civic engagement inputs and outcomes into a new conceptual model for understanding the complex process of longitudinal civic engagement commitments via iterative precollege, college, and postcollege experiences. The design of this study comes a from a constructive-development pedagogy lens, that used focus groups to collect data from the narratives of 25 alumni members of fraternity and sorority organizations from a single institution site broken down by Council membership of the National Panhellenic Council, National Pan-Hellenic Council, and the Inter-Fraternity Council. The themes from the results included that most participants took part in a variety of civic engagement experiences prior to college; their commitment to civic engagement grew due to the influence of other chapter members and other student organizations during college; membership commitment due to the foundational leverage of internal commitment to civic engagement; and current environments and previous lived experiences had an impact on participants’ current civic engagement commitment and identity. Additional research should be conducted to determine if this research could be replicated at other higher education institutions and fraternity and sorority communities to better understand the long-term impact of these experiences on alumni’s civic engagement identity.

Contemporary United States has witnessed a gradual shift of political responsibilities to local communities. This shift creates opportunities for a greater sense of democracy among individuals in local communities. This dissertation explores how elements of social capital and civic engagement support participatory democratic processes, and ultimately improve the quality of democracy for individuals. The central premise of this research is that democracy satisfaction includes the ability to influence decisions for individual and community benefits. Thus individuals who possess social capital and actively participate in civic life are likely to experience democracy satisfaction. Trust is specified as a primary social capital measure. Thus, the extent to which ?generalized trust? and ?particularized trust? account for differences in the levels of individual satisfaction with democracy is examined. A parsimonious typology is developed in which four categories of trusters (total trusters, general trusters, particular trusters, and skeptics) are delineated and empirically tested. Three categories of civic engagement; local political, representative and altruistic civic engagement are also differentiated and tested for their explanatory value for democracy satisfaction. To achieve this, data from the 2000 American National Election Study were used in logistics regression models. The study confirms the notion that while trust is important when it comes to democracy satisfaction, it is generalized trust (total and general trusters), rather than particularized trust (particular trusters, and skeptics) that is more important in predicting democracy satisfaction. The results also show that not all forms of civic engagement predict democracy satisfaction. While representative civic engagement and giving to charity have positive effects on democracy satisfaction, local political civic engagement and volunteering time do not significantly predict satisfaction with democracy. With reference to altruistic civic engagement, results show that giving to charity has a positive effect on democracy satisfaction, but not volunteering time. It is concluded that participatory democracy is impeded in communities with strong particularized trust and limited generalized trust. The study points to futures research opportunities to ascertain the extent to which types of trust and civic engagement are pertinent factors in explaining development efforts in local communities that are deficient in civic culture and participatory democracy.

As universities enhance their civic engagement and build connections between campus and communities across the state, the county extension office and local staff have an opportunity to broker resources between the two entities. The question is not ‘if’ this needs to happen, but specifically what role Extension should play. County Extension Coordinators in Alabama have differing opinions about the role of their office and the value of specific engagement activities to the community. These differing opinions may make it difficult to achieve uniformity in what faculty can expect of a county extension office. Three different opinion groups were identified in this study. One group of County Extension Coordinators felt that engagement activities should focus on issues affecting local economic impact. Another group chose activities that would avoid potential problems due to interagency conflict and local politics. The third group saw the civic engagement of their land-grant university as an opportunity to make Extension look good in their county. Group membership could be explained by tenure of the County Extension Coordinator and their subject matter expertise. Given the results of this study and engagement scholarship, strategic areas for Extension to explore include (1) the activities of the county extension office as influenced by local advisory groups, opinions of the County Extension Coordinator, and needs of the Land-Grant University; (2) the role of the County Extension Coordinator in facilitating university-wide outreach; and (3) the need for County Extension Coordinators to have extensive networks and networking skills in order to embrace the breadth of opportunities to facilitate the civic engagement of a Land-Grant University.