The Youth Civic Web: Charting the Learning Landscape

January 7th, 2009 at 07:08pm Deen Freelon Permalink

As an illustration of our ongoing MacArthur-funded research project mapping the youth civic web sphere, we have created a brief slideshow containing screenshots of all of the various types of civic content we encountered in our analysis. Our theoretical framework incorporates four learning opportunities (knowledge, expression, joining publics, and taking action) each of which can manifest in two citizenship styles (actualizing and dutiful), and we divided our 90-site sample into four categories: government/candidate, community organizations, interest groups, and online-only sites. This yields 32 possible combinations of learning opportunity, citizenship style, and site type, all but three of which we actually detected in our sample. The PDF slideshow linked below briefly describes the study’s theory and methods and displays one visual example of the actual site content that was judged to merit each distinct coding possibility.

Download the slideshow (PDF format)

Entry Filed under: civic learning goals, conceptions of citizenship