In this dissertation I argue for using John Dewey's scholarship in ethics, progressive education, and public discourse as a framework for teaching rhetoric for civic engagement. By "civic engagement" I mean working to discover, address, or confront issues of public importance through discourse. In the first part I establish Dewey as a point of reference for progressive revisions of curriculum in rhetoric at the undergraduate level. Using data gathered from a sample of undergraduate institutions, I argue for an increase in courses that reflect classical interests in performance of argument and critical analysis of text as essential skills for civic engagement. In the second part I describe what such revisions may look like as we consider teaching argument as a back and forth process, deliberation as a key component of rhetorical literacy, and critical analysis of literature as an aid to civic imagination. This dissertation contributes to the continuing interest in the way rhetorical education can help students develop transferable skills, attitudes, and interests that will make them effective and ethical agents in their professional and civic lives.

In an increasingly complex world, there is a need for youth to address scientific issues both locally and globally. While interest and proficiency in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) decline, diverse methods to successfully engage, educate, and empower youth based on informal, learner-centric approaches are being tested. The factors potentially contributing to the success of a technology-supported civic engagement program were documented for 20 after school programs using qualitative methods. Using content analysis, the data was coded and tabulated and key variables were constructed. Univariate regression analysis revealed that four out of seventeen potential predictor variables proved to have a significant relationship with program success. The final multivariate regression model for predicting program success included youth-drivenness and total events (R-squared =0.58, p-value=0.0006), suggesting that encouraging participant ownership of the learning process is important to community and environmental problem awareness and the pursuit of solutions through STEM skills.

Media is belittling millennials for the current overall decrease in civic engagement. They are criticized for their apparent lack of responsibility, political knowledge and reluctance to get involved in current affairs, and social media and the Internet have been regarded as contributing to this civic decline. Millennials choose more liquid forms of organizing, as they have uprooted from pre-established and stable collective identities. There is a change in generations and their activities, and millennials’ use of social media for both political and civic engagement is a growing research field now. Hence this thesis aims to determine how civic engagement has been redefined by new media and generational shifts. The Internet has been proven to entice citizens to thoroughly engage in politics, providing a framework for broad social participation, which is inherently democratic, becoming a potent tool for civic and political participation, a crucial motivation for the core constituency of movements. According to the theoretical and empirical material, with the emergence of new media, new concepts, such as online activism, have been materialized or old ones, such as simple protests, have simply shifted and adapted to current times. There is not a discontinuity but rather a redefinition of civic engagement. The findings of the current study are significant in this sense, as they support the theoretical concept of the reinvigoration of civic life through generational shifts and the rise of new media.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work / Robert K. Schaeffer / In deliberative democracy, attempts to reconcile questions of gender and civil society are deadlocked over fundamental assumptions concerning the role of deliberation and the possibility that exclusion and inequality are inherent in democracy. Normative theories of deliberation - encouraging free, equal and impartial participation by citizens are fueled by the power of reason. Reason giving is associated with dominant groups – namely white, middle-class men; passionate, emotive and particularized speech is associated with politically disadvantaged groups such as women, minorities and poor. Limited empirical findings indicate rational models of deliberation do not affirm theorized inequalities. In this case, female participants neither experience unequal access or treatment within deliberation. This dissertation seeks to provide a framework for resolving the debate posed by difference democrats over whether deliberative democracy remedies the problem of inequality by examining fourteen National Issues Forums public deliberations. One set of deliberations feature an equal mix of male and female participants, another set with more male than female and a third with more female than male participants. I examine the types of talk women and men use in deliberations and whether affective claims negatively affect deliberation. Ultimately, I find that inequality based on gender exists in most of the deliberative forums I surveyed. I argue that the type of inequality plaguing deliberative democracy exists a priori – before participants enter the forums – and then manifests itself inside the forum as well. The normative structure of deliberation that is supposed to screen or bracket out inequality and the strong influences of the economic and political elites just does not happen to the degree deliberative democracy needs in order to continue the claim that it is net beneficial over the status quo.

Thesis advisor: Marilynn Johnson / This study examines widespread efforts to manage the environmental impact of suburbanization in metropolitan America since 1970. Using the Washington, DC area as a site for analysis, I demonstrate how residents, public officials, and organized interests balanced suburban development and environmental protection. Featuring cases from the Virginia and Maryland suburbs, this project considers environmental conflicts resulting from housing, commercial, and highway projects as well as efforts to preserve rural land and farming from suburban encroachment. As metropolitan Washington decentralized, the environmental impact of suburbanization worsened, producing different approaches to managing development and protecting the environment. These responses reflected new social and spatial inequalities, as well as differences in political leadership and civic activism. While communities in Maryland benefited from more progressive public concern, local leadership and strong support from the state for growth management, their counterparts in Virginia struggled to overcome strong and pervasive protections for property rights. This project rewrites our understanding of suburbanization and environmental protection in two ways. First, it urges scholars to rethink a traditional emphasis on federal policies; even in the suburbs of the nation's capital, the active participation of the public at large, as well as officials at the local and state levels, was critical to the success or failure of environmental protection. The present study thus demonstrates how and why different approaches to growth management emerged across metropolitan areas. Second, this study differs from the existing social science literature by moving away from policy analysis to focus on the broader context of decision-making in planning suburban development. Drawing on correspondence, publicity materials, and public testimony from residents, environmental groups, local officials, business organizations, and federal agencies, this study offers a more complete picture of growth management, providing a historically informed and policy relevant argument about environmental protection in metropolitan America. Ultimately, it reveals that even with an unprecedented degree of expansion of state regulation and civic engagement, the legal and cultural regimes surrounding the use of property often continued to privilege private gain over environmental protection as localities competed for economic investment. In a few cases, however, we can see how residents and public officials pursued more holistic forms of growth management in metropolitan America, laying the groundwork for a model of more meaningful public participation to enhance environmental protection in the future. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2013. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

Thesis advisor: Ce Shen / Civic engagement, involving people in public processes to achieve common goals, has received increased attention in the past several decades. This renewed interest was triggered by the seeming decline in civic engagement, particularly in the context of Western societies including the U.S. In addition, its potentially positive effects, such as psychological well-being at the individual level, have recently received much attention. Low-income people in developing countries suffer from double discrimination: first, the lack of opportunities to participate in civic matters due to their low socio-economic status (SES) and second, the lack of civil society culture in developing countries. However, less attention has been paid to civic engagement in the context of developing countries and low-income people, in spite of the importance of civic engagement to them. Given the significance of civic engagement for low-income populations in developing countries, this dissertation intends to fill the gaps left by previous scholarship. The following are specific objectives for the study: 1) Paper 1 aims to investigate the construct validity of an instrument to measure civic engagement among low-income populations in developing countries; 2) Paper 2 aims to examine the associations between country-level political and economic determinants and civic engagement among low-income people in developing countries; and 3) Paper 3 aims to examine the effect of civic engagement on subjective well-being through the mediating effect of sense of agency. Using the cross-national data set, the World Values Survey Wave 6 (2010-2014), this study first found that civic engagement among low-income individuals in low- and middle-income countries is defined in three dimensions: electoral behaviors, membership in civic organizations, and cognitive engagement. This result contributes to measurement development of civic engagement, especially among the low-income individuals in the context of developing countries, who have been neglected in policy-making processes. In Paper 2, I found that civic engagement increases in economically disadvantaged environments (low GNI per capita and high Gini coefficient). This finding may reveal the strength that low-income populations have. Lastly, the results of Paper 3 showed that electoral engagement and membership in civic organizations were directly related to well-being, but cognitive engagement had an indirect effect on well-being through a sense of agency. Also, the result of a non-recursive model showed that engagement in electoral behaviors leads to a sense of well-being, not in the reverse direction. The results from Paper 3 may demonstrate the mechanism by which civic engagement is related to well-being. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Social Work. / Discipline: Social Work.

Thesis advisor: Janet E. Helms / Researchers have argued that whether Latina/o students and other students of Color resist their negative educational experiences with feelings of hopelessness or consider them challenges to overcome, depends on whether they have developed a Social Justice Orientation (SJO) (Cammarota, 2004; Diemer, 2009; Watts, Griffith, & Abdul-Adil, 1999). SJO is the motivation to promote justice and equality among all in society. The purpose of the present study was to develop and test a longitudinal model of predictors and outcomes of SJO among Latina/o youths, the SJOLY model. The constructs investigated were (a) environmental factors (i.e., school relational and language climates), (b) personal skills (English proficiency and Spanish language background) and characteristics (SJO and agency), and (c) social (i.e., community engagement) and academic outcomes (school behavioral disengagement, grades, and school dropout). The study was conducted with a subsample of Latinas/os taken from the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988. Participants were enrolled in eighth grade (N = 1,472), sampled from different schools and regions in the U.S., and followed through three waves of data collection until the 12th grade. The age range of the participants at Time 1 was 13 years to 16 years (M = 14.46, SD = .65), and 49.6% were girls. The SJOLY model was tested using structural equation modeling (SEM). Results indicated that school relational climate was a positive predictor of SJO, which in turn predicted more community and school engagement, higher grades, and decreased likelihood of dropping out of school via its impact on personal agency. In addition, school language climate and language skills predicted greater sense of personal agency, which in turn predicted higher grades and decreased likelihood of dropping out. Gender differences were observed, as more SJO was associated with higher levels of personal agency for girls, but not for boys. Higher levels of personal agency were associated with less likelihood of dropping out of schools for boys, but not for girls. Implications of the study results for education, counseling, and research are discussed. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2011. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Counseling, Developmental, and Educational Psychology.

Thesis advisor: Henry I. Braun / Addressing the call to provide hard evidence on undergraduate student outcomes and make comparisons across higher education institutions for accountability purposes, this study extends current efforts in measuring higher education outcomes and explores the differences in three value-added methodologies. Using the CIRP freshman and senior survey data from 2002 and 2006, this study examines noncognitive higher education outcomes with a focus on civic engagement. The three value-added methodologies examined are: an OLS-based cross-sectional method, an HLM-based cross-sectional method, and an HLM-based longitudinal method. Rather than seek to establish which methodology is superior, this study intends to provide empirical evidence concerning the similarities and differences in estimating institutional effectiveness with regard to civic engagement. First, several student-level and institution-level covariates were found to be associated with a measure of civic engagement in the senior year after adjusting for their level of civic engagement as freshmen. The model comparison further revealed some advantages in the HLM-based longitudinal method over the other two methods, such as providing a more accurate institutional value-added estimate and the ability to account for a relatively large percent of the total variance in the civic engagement measure when using the same covariates. Next, among all pairs of model comparisons, results from the two HLM-based methods agreed the most (r=.80). However, institutional rankings fluctuate dramatically, even when comparing institutions within small peer groups. Finally, the findings highlighted great divergences among different value-added methodologies in identifying institutions that perform significantly differently from the average for accountability purposes. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Educational Research, Measurement, and Evaluation.

No description available.

No description available.