Preparing Citizen Professionals –

New Dimensions of Civic Education

in Higher Education
Dr. Harry C. Boyte, Augsburg University
University of Tokyo Symposium 3 September 2018

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 “Age of Subject”
The “age of the subject” holds promise
* Humans as self-determining agents

It also creates dangers

* Identity politics manipulated by elites
* War of all against all
* Loss of civic capacity to address challenges

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 Paradigm Shifts
Last Saturday at JERA I argued that overcoming
the dangers of the age of the subject
requires a paradigm shift in democracy

From state-centered democracy 

Citizen-centered democracy

My argument today: to realize this shift requires

a shift in civic education

From “civics” or “service” 

Civic education as political public work

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 Outline of Lecture
1) The new paradigm of democratic society and
civic education as political and productive
with aim of developing civic agency
2) The learning cultures, free spaces, needed for
such civic education
3) The educator as “citizen professional” who
creates and sustains free spaces

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 Paradigms of Civic Education
Civics Service Public work

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 What Is Democracy?
Civics Service Public Work
Elections Civic Way of life
responsibility

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 What Is the Citizen?
Civics Service Public Work
Voter Volunteer Co-creator

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 What Is Citizenship?
Civics Service Public Work
Informed Helping others Public Work
voting

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 What Is Politics?
Civics Service Public Work
Partisanship, Avoided Engagement
fight over who with others
gets what who are
different on
public tasks

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 What Is Power?
Civics Service Public Work
Power over Moral suasion Power to
Zero-sum Power-averse Relational and
generative

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 What Is Aim of Civic Education?
Civics Service Public Work
Knowledge Character Development
about formation and of civic agency:
government sense of capacity for
and skills of responsibility informed,
advocacy and ethical, and
lobbying effective public
action

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 How Are Outcomes Measured?
Civics Service Public Work
Evidence: Evidence: Evidence:
Civics tests and Numbers of Growth in
policy impact people helped political and
tests of moral civic capacities
development (habits of civic
agency)

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 Three Frameworks of Civic Education

Civics Service Public work

What is democracy? Free elections Civic responsibility Way of life

Where is it learned? In classes and interaction with Service projects Free spaces
government

What is the citizen? Voter Volunteer Co-creator

What is citizenship? Voting Helping others Public work*

What is educators’ role To instruct To facilitate moral development To open and sustain empowering free
spaces

How are outcomes Civics tests, election and policy Numbers helped, evidence of growth in civic Evidence of growth in habits of civic
measured? impact responsibility agency

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 An Example of Public Work
Public Achievement –
The story of children who built a playground with “coaching” from
teachers and college students
Key elements
• Learning a different kind of politics (practices like one on ones,
public narrative)
• A new sense of power/civic agency (practices like power mapping)
• Continuing reflection on what worked, what didn’t and core
concepts like democracy, politics, citizenship, public work, power,
and free spaces

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 Learning Cultures as Free Spaces
A cultural lens in civic education involves a shift

From individualized learning 

Learning cultures as empowering free
spaces where people develop civic
agency

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 Free Spaces
Definition:
Places where people develop civic agency
Why important
• “Civic desert” study by Kawashima-Ginsberg and
Sullivan shows loss of sites for engaging people of
different views contributed to the Trump victory
Positive examples
• Beauty parlors in civil rights movement
• Organizing training camps in Obama campaign 2008
• Cultural salons of 19th century Edo

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Free Spaces in Public Achievement
* Public Achievement requires finding or
creating free spaces
* This requires support from teachers and
administrators who become “citizen
professionals” in their public work

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 Public Work
– Work that is “ethical practice,”* infused with
values of equality, cooperation, and community-
building
– Work that is “political,” working with (often in
tension and conflict with) and also through
established structures in ways that empower
ordinary citizens and democratize governance

• The phrase “work as ethical practice” is from Tetsuo Najita, Ordinary Economies in Japan: A Historical Perspective,
1750-1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).

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 Public work – US
Productive work
in New Deal
• “Harlem is…a large-scale
laboratory experiment. Through
his artistic efforts the Negro is
smashing immemorial
stereotypes…impressing upon
the national mind the
conviction that…he is a creator
as well as a creature…helping to
form American civilization.”
James Weldon Johnson, 1930
•

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 Public work --
Hōtoko movement
of village
reconstruction
Ninomiya Sontoku
(1787-1856)
Japanese philosopher of
work as ethical practice,
or public work

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 Citizen Professionals
Professionals (work requiring craft knowledge)
who do public work

Example: Dr. Shigeyoshi Matsumae, a leading

telecommunications engineer and founder of
Tokai University

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 Citizen Professionals and Free Spaces
Public work-style civic education requires free
spaces.

The story of Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s

father, a druggist in Doland, South Dakota

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 Disappearance of Citizen Professionals

The story of Falcon Heights, Minnesota

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Higher Education and Citizen Professionals

What is higher education’s role in citizen

professionals’ disappearance?

Study by Professor Erin Cech, Rice University, on

the “hidden pillars” of engineering education

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 Hidden Pillars
Cech’s research question: “Why does student
concern for public welfare sharply decline over
the course of engineering education?”
1) Message that engineering is apolitical
2) Technical/social dualism that assumes
scientific knowledge is superior
3) Meritocratic models of success

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Higher Education and Citizen Professionals

Emerging international movement for public

purposes of higher education pushes back
• Talloires Network https://talloiresnetwork.tufts.edu/who-we-are/
• Campus Compact https://compact.org/
• Imagining America https://imaginingamerica.org/
• Kettering Foundation College Presidents
https://www.kettering.org/blog-
categories/college-presidents
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 A forgotten history
• “The first and most essential charge upon higher education is that . . . it
shall be the carrier of democratic values, ideals and processes.”
Truman Commission on Higher Education, 1947
•
• “In the kind of homes, farms, and industries which are the goals of
Extension service…it is not enough for people to have food, shelter, and
clothing— they aspire also to find appreciation, respect for individuality
and human dignity, affection, ideals, and opportunities…the satisfactions
that belong to democratic living.
Ruby Green Smith, Extension Leader, 1944

• Farmer Discussion Groups, 1935 – 1942 through land grant colleges, in

partnership with the US Department of Agriculture, involved more than
three million rural people in discussions about the future of rural America.

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Citizen Professionals as Next Stage
What is driving interest in preparing citizen
professionals?
• A way to reframe “vocation versus liberal arts”
• Preparing graduates who are leaders in civic
innovation through their careers
• Desire of young graduates for civic dimensions
of work, not only volunteerism

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Examples of Preparing Citizen Professionals

• Special Education preservice teachers as

citizen teachers, Augsburg University
• Citizen Nurses – Augsburg University
• Citizen Professional Center, University of
Minnesota
http://www.cehd.umn.edu/fsos/research/cpc/default.asp

• Student life professionals at Denison

University

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 Elements of Culture Change
• Retrieving democratic history of higher education
• Multiplying free spaces with relational and
empowering learning cultures
• Emphasis on “democratic excellence,” not simply
individual excellence
• Core habits and practices of civic agency
• Retrieving civic dimensions of disciplines
• Becoming “parts of” communities, not simply
“partners with” communities

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 Short Bibliography
Kathleen Knight Abowitz, Publics for Public Schools
Harry Boyte, Ed., Democracy’s Education
Lee Benson, Ira Harkavy, et. al., Knowledge for Social Change
Kim Berman, Finding Voice: A Visual Arts Approach to Social Change
Albert Dzur, Democracy Inside: Participatory Innovation in Unlikely Places
Jess Gilbert, Planning Democracy
Louise Knight, Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy
Meira Levinson, No Citizen Left Behind
Alain Locke, The New Negro
Deborah Meier, The Power of their Ideas
Bobby Milstein, Hygeia’s Constellation: Managing Health Futures in a
Dynamic and Democratic World
Scott Peters, Ted Alter, and Tim Shaffer, Jumping into Civic Life
M. Post, W., Ward, N. Longo, J. Saltmarsh Eds., Publicly Engaged Scholars

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