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Beyond Politics As Usual

Paths for Engaging College Students in Politics

Ileana Marin Ray Minor

9781945577024
252 pages
Kettering Foundation Press
Overview

Beyond Politics as Usual: Paths for Engaging College Students in Politics sheds light on the political learning, thinking, and acting of college students today. The book, edited by Kettering program officers Ileana Marin and Ray Minor, endeavors to reveal the current practices and approaches that faculty and staff at institutions of higher learning and other nonprofits employ to instill democratic concepts, values, and skills in students. Chapters in this volume include:

• Introduction, Ileana Marin and Ray C. Minor

• Political Learning Opportunities in College: What Is the Research Evidence?, Constance Flanagan

• Deliberation as Communicative Politics: Building Civic Engagement in College Students, Elizabeth Hudson

• (Striving for) Democracy in Small Groups: Engaging Politics in a Communication Studies Course, Timothy J. Shaffer

• Practicing Deliberative Democracy at Gulf Coast State College, Elizabeth Trentanelli

• Political Participation Exercises as a Means of Teaching Civic and Networking Skills, Lindsey Lupo and Rebecca Brandy Griffin

• The Potential of Living-Learning Communities as Civic Engagement Incubators, Mark Small

• Civic Outcomes of Student Engagement in Sustained Dialogue, Rhonda Fitzgerald, Jo Constanz, and Darby Lacey

• Campus Network: Galvanizing a New Generation to Participate in Making Public Policy, Joelle Gamble with Lydia Bowers, Taylor Jo Isenberg, and Madeleine McNally

• Reengaging Students in Our Democracy: Lessons from the CSU Center for Public Deliberation and Its Student Associate Program, Martín Carcasson

• Lessons Learned from College Student Moderators, Lisa-Marie Napoli

• Learning to Deliberate: Implications for Political Participation after College, Katy Harriger, Jill McMillan, Christy Buchanan, and Stephanie Gusler

• Afterthoughts: Democracy and Higher Education, David Mathews


About the Kettering Foundation

The Kettering Foundation is a nonpartisan, nonprofit operating foundation rooted in the American tradition of cooperative research. Kettering’s primary research question is: What does it take to make democracy work as it should? Kettering’s research is distinctive because it is conducted from the perspective of citizens and focuses on what people can do collectively to address problems affecting their lives, their communities, and their nation. For more information about Kettering research and publications, see the Kettering Foundation’s website at www.kettering.org.

Author Bio
Ray C. Minor is a program officer at the Kettering Foundation. He joined the Kettering Foundation as a visiting scholar in March 2012 and became a program officer in February 2013. He has years of senior level executive and management experience in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. His primary focus areas include public policy, public administration, community politics, student politics, and business and democracy.

Minor’s research interests include citizen participation and engagement, democracy, public authorities and institutions, and nongovernmental organizations.

Minor served in the Governor’s cabinet in Alabama and held cabinet posts at United Methodist Homes of New Jersey, Wiley College, and Miles College.

Minor holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Alabama and a PhD in public policy and administration from Walden University. His dissertation topic is Citizen Participation: A Case Study of New Jersey’s 2008 Toll Policy Initiative.Ileana Marin is a program officer at the Kettering Foundation. She has been affiliated with the foundation since 1997, after having participated in international workshops held by Kettering between 1994 and 1996. Her contributions to the foundation’s work are of a research, programmatic, and managerial nature, and are conducted nationally and internationally on matters related to civil society, democracy, dialogue and deliberation, community building and civic engagement, and collective decision making. Her current work spreads over a number of the foundation’s more specific areas of research and inquiry, such as community politics, multinational research, public-academy, and civic organizations and philanthropy. She is the ongoing liaison with contributors to research exchanges with the Antonio Núñez Jiménez Foundation for Nature and Humanity in Cuba and the Arab Network for the Study of Democracy.

She is editor and translator of the Romanian edition of David Mathews’ Politics for People (Politica pentru fiecare, Edimpress-CAMRO, 2003), editor of Collective Decision Making around the World: Essays on Historical Deliberative Practices (Kettering Foundation Press, 2006), coeditor of Initiatives in Active Citizenship (Kettering Foundation Press, 2015), and coeditor of Beyond Politics as Usual: Paths for Engaging College Students in Politics (Kettering Foundation Press, 2017). In addition, she contributes to the foundation’s annual periodical, Connections.

Marin holds an MA in Romanian and Hungarian linguistics and cultures from Bucharest University, Romania, and Janus Pannonius University, Pécs, Hungary; completed studies toward an MA in ethnic and minority studies from the School of Sociology, Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Budapest, Hungary; and holds an MA in human and organizational development from Fielding Graduate University, California, where she also completed studies toward a PhD.