Civic participation of high school students: the effect of civic learning in school

Abstract

Building active and informed citizens is a major part of civics and citizenship education in order to enhance and sustain democracies. Civic learning and civic action opportunities within school contexts are commonly claimed to promote an active and informed citizenry. In the present research, we examine the meaning of formal civics education and the role of students’ participation in a range of curricular and extracurricular activities. Multilevel analyses yield quite stable results across two cohorts of Australian secondary students and reveal that schools account for a surprisingly small share in students’ willingness to participate in future civic and political action. Among the influences at the student level, formal civics learning, participation in student governance activities and in the community are the most significant predictors of intended future participation, but some effects vary conditional on whether more conventional or issue-related civic participation is the focus of active citizenship. Implications of these findings for democratic policy and practice are discussed.

Keywords:

• Australia
• citizenship
• civics
• civic education
• civic engagement
• political participation
• student participation

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a postdoctoral fellowship by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, a visiting fellowship at The University of Sydney, and an Australian Research Council grant [DP 120103057]. Parts of this research were conducted while the first author was affiliated with the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories in Bamberg, Germany. The data used in this publication are sourced from the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) and are available from ACARA in accordance with its Data Access Protocols. The authors would also like to thank three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.

Notes

1. We note that “active citizenship” is not conceptualized as a dichotomy. Although this analysis focuses only on behavior, we would like to emphasize that a comprehensive understanding of active citizenship comprises skills development, motivated behavior and attitudes and values (Hoskins and Mascherini 2009; Kennedy 2006). Dichotomies often fail to capture the whole picture, and this applies to active citizenship. Most prominently has this been argued by Amnå and Ekman (2014), who speak of “standby citizens”; and there is recent evidence on the inappropriateness of any binary thinking of active citizenship in the Australian context (Reichert 2016b, 2016c, 2017).

2. Because the mediator was an intermediate dependent variable in this scenario, it was used in its raw metric for mediation analyses to avoid model identification issues.