CRITICAL DEMOCRATIC
CITIZENSHIP:
WHAT COMPETENCIES DO
STUDENTS NEED TO ENGAGE
FOR JUSTICE IN A DIVERSE
AND INEQUITALBE
DEMOCRACY?
Cynthia Gordon
Har vard Graduate School of Education
Ed.D. Expected May 2013
Univer sity of California, Berkeley
American Cultures Engaged Scholarship Program
“ENVISION A … SOCIET Y THAT ADVANCES SOCIAL
PROGRESS … AND THAT SUPPORT S THE
WELFARE OF ALL. … TO ENACT THIS VISION,
EDUCATORS MUST EQUIP STUDENT S WITH THE
VALUES, SKILLS, AND KNOWLEDGE TO BECOME
COMPLEX THINKERS AND ETHICAL DECI SIONMAKERS IN A SOCIET Y CURRENTLY PLAGUED
WITH CONFLICT AND INEQUALIT Y”
(HURTADO, 2009, P. 1 ).
INTERACTIVE PRESENTATION OUTLINE
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Purpose
Conceptual framework
Proposed competencies
Group activity
Share-out & Wrap-Up
PURPOSE
 US Higher education institutions aim to graduate students
who are committed to civic -engagement for the public good
(AACU, 2008; Furco & Goss, 2001; Musil, 2011).
 What kind of citizenship (meaning civically -engaged people
and not documentation of af filiation with a nation) prepares
students to engage for justice in a diverse and inequitable
democracy?
CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
What assumptions am I making and what theories provide
background for answering this question?
…Engaging for justice in a diverse and inequitable democracy…
Democracy
Justice
Inequitable US context
Critical Theory
CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK:
DEMOCRACY
 Political theorists multiple forms of democracy:
 participatory, pluralistic, deliberative, economic, representative, liberal ,
etc …
 Lessons from critical theor y:
 Giroux: “Democracy cannot function without educated citizens capable of
being autonomous, making knowledgeable judgments, and bringing what
they learn to bear on understanding and shaping civic culture.”
 Freire: “…creating the conditions for people to govern rather than merely be
governed.”
 I will use the following definition:
( C o l by, B e a u m o n t , E h r l i c h , & C o r n g o ld )
 : “…democracy is fundamentally a practice of shared responsibility for a
common future. It is the always unfinished task of making social choices and
working toward public goals that shape our lives and the lives of others.”
 Consider questions of a greater or common good
 Democracy cannot be healthy without wide spread participation
 Democracy cannot be healthy when run by expert elites alone
CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK:
JUSTICE
 Moral, political, philosophical theorists multiple forms of
justice:
 Distributive Justice ( Rawls, Kohlberg, 1989, others…)
 Fairness, impartiality
 Resources (wealth, income, social position, etc…) fairly distributed
 Capabilities Approach ( Sen, Nussbaum)
 Human Capability: “the freedoms … to choose the lives that they have
reason to value” (Sen, 1992, p. 81)
 Functionings: healthy, being safe, being happy, having self-respect,
etc…
 Capabilities: freedom to achieve these functionings “…the real
opportunities (freedoms) that one has to achieve those functionings”
(Walker, 2010)
 Capabilities: set of 10 ( Nussbaum ) vs. left to public reasoning (Sen)
CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK:
JUSTICE & CRITICAL THEORY
 Process Justice (Young, 1990)
 Principles of justice should be applied not only to the distribution of
goods and resources in a society, but also to evaluate the fairness
and impacts of decision-making, division of labor, and culture (Young,
1990).
 “…where social group differences exist and some groups are
privileged while others are oppressed, social justice requires
explicitly acknowledging and attending to those group differences.”
(Young, 1990, p. 3)
 Need inclusive and “collective problem-solving by all those
significantly involved in or affected by a decision, and under
conditions of dialogue which allow diverse perspectives and opinions
to be voiced” (Young, 1990 cited in Walker, 2010) .
CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK:
CONTEXT MATTERS
“Critical theor y rejects as illusor y the effor t to construct a
universal normative system insulated from a par ticular society. …
[it] must begin from historically specific circumstances … Without
social theor y, normative reflection is abstract, empty, and unable
to guide criticism with a practical interest in emancipation”
(Young, p. 5).
 US socio-political context: a diverse, but inequitable democracy
 Inequities across social group demographics
 Focus race/ethnicity
 Distributive justice
 Wealth (net mean worth and financial assets) (Bobo, Kluegel, & Smith,
1996; Oliver & Shapiro, 2006)
 More reliable predictor of economic stability
CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK:
CONTEXT MATTERS
 US socio-political context: a diverse, but inequitable
democracy
 Capabilities approach to justice
 Health (Bloom & Cohen, 2011)
 Education (Diamond, 2008; Ferguson & Mehta, 2004; Gandara &
Maxwell-Jolly, 2000; Kozol, 2005; Orfield & Lee, 2005a)
CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK:
CONTEXT MATTERS
 US socio-political context: a diverse, but inequitable
democracy
 Process approach to justice
 Decision making
 112 th congress
Percent of US Population
Percent of Congress
African American 13.1%
8.1 %
Latino/Hispanic 16.7%
5.7%
Asian Pacific Islander 5.2%
3%
American Indian 1.2%
0.2%
White 63.4%
83%
ENGAGING FOR JUSTICE IN A DIVERSE
AND UNEQUAL DEMOCRACY
 Postsecondary student learning outcomes for civic -engagement
can include knowledge, skills, dispositions, attitudes,
commitments, motivations, and actions that prepare students for
engagement in a diverse democracy (Brammer et al., 2012;
Gurin, Dey, Hurtado, & Gurin, 2002; Stokamer, 2011).
 A recent literature review conducted by the Center for an Engaged
Democracy (Brammer et al., 2012), researchers found more than 50
(!) areas of civic knowledge, skills, practice, and inclinations
currently being measured by various civic postsecondary programs
and national organizations.
 Colleges and universities faced with challenge: determining
which of these many learning outcomes are most appropriate
given their context and missions .
 Choosing learning outcomes vary depending on context:
 Focus: establishing learning outcomes well-suited to prepare
students to engage for justice in a diverse and unequal democracy .
ENGAGING IN A DEMOCRACY
 Democracy:
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shared responsibility
working toward public goals for the common good
cannot function without wide spread participation
conditions for people to govern rather than be governed
 Participation
 A functioning democracy relies on citizens participating (Dewey,
1916).
 Participation can and should be broadly constructed (Haste, 2009;
Haste & Hogan, 2006; Mira, 2010)
 Involvement or actions in collective community -based efforts; in
local, state, and national issues; and for the general betterment of
one’s communities (Westheimer & Kahne, 2004).
DIVERSIT Y
 Openness to multiple perspectives
 Tendency of an individual to think from the perspective of another
individual (Gurin, Nagda, & Zuniga, 2011)
 Controversy with Civility (Komives & Wagner, 2009)
 In a diverse group inevitably differing viewpoints exist
 To work towards positive social change, people need to engage civilly
with conflict to develop new and creative solutions to social problems
JUSTICE
 Justice-oriented (Westheimer & Kahne, 2004)
 Analyzing the structural causes of inequality and collectively acting
on what is discovered
 “If participatory citizens are organizing the food drive and personally
responsible citizens are donating food, justice oriented citizens are
asking why people are hungry and acting on what they discover”
(Westheimer & Kahne, 2004).
 Dialogue (Isaacs, 1999)
 "...aims to engage us...in a collective present -tense truth telling,
where no one person's position or thought dominates, but where
larger questions and new frontiers are laid bare for exploration.”
 voicing, listening, respecting and suspending
ADDRESSING INEQUALIT Y
 Understanding the root causes of inequality
 Active thinking: a tendency and motivation for individuals to think
deeply and analyze the causes for individual actions/behaviors (Gurin
et al., 2011).
 Active thinking is (arguably) domain specific—the complexity of
causal attribution for an event/behavior is dependent on variables
such as interest, experience, and knowledge (Fletcher, Danilovics,
Fernandez, Peterson, & Reeder, 1986)
 To positively impact racial justice, need active thinking about the
causes and impacts of racial/ethnic inequality 
 Structural thinking about racial inequality
 Analysis of causes of racial inequality from a structural level
 For example…
 Racial inequality in test scores
SUMMARY
 To realize the ideal of a democratic nation in which race and
ethnicity cannot be used to predict life outcomes, we need
citizens actively fighting for racial justice ( Warren, 2010).
 Engage in a democracy
 Through participation
 That is diverse
 Through openness to multiple perspectives and controversy with civility
 And work towards justice
 With a justice-orientation and the skills to dialogue
 And righting inequality
 with active and structural thinking
 Critical Democratic Citizenship
 Now, what do you think?
YOUR TURN
 What knowledge, competencies, skills, or dispositions are
necessary for citizens to engage for justice in a diverse and
unequal democracy?