Previous research demonstrates two aspects of religion that affect civic activity—church participation and religious conservatism. Conservative religious beliefs and membership in conservative denominations are often associated with low levels of civic activity while church participation is said to increase civic activity. This article advances the discussion of the relationship between religio...

Forthcoming, Harvard University Press Chapter 2 The Catholic Puzzle: Parishes and Civic Life By Mary Jo Bane The National Conference of Catholic Bishops issues a statement opposing stem cell research. Catholic parishes mobilized by the Industrial Area Foundations lobby for affordable housing. Lay Catholics occupy important leadership positions in local and national Right-to-Life committees. Cat...

The Adolescents, Life Context, & School project was developed in a suburban, residential area of Padova, Italy, and involved three classes of 12-year-old children. Across three months, children observed, documented, and talked about their own life contexts in order to voice problems to decision makers. Both teachers and council members played key roles in supporting the project and the children...

This dissertation examines the issue of academic preparation of future professional instructional designers in the context of higher academic institutions. It is presented in nontraditional dissertation format as approved by the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, Iowa State University. The dissertation is comprised of three publishable journal articles that would represent Chapters 2, 3 ...

In the K-12 social studies classroom, the goal is to create the well-informed citizenry that is essential to a functioning democracy. Preparing students for a lifetime of active citizenship is a complex undertaking, one that demands that students be given opportunities to integrate classroom learning with experiential learning in the larger world where political debate and decision making occur...

In this empirical paper we attempt to measure the separate influence on civic engagement of educational attainment and cultural transmission of civic attitudes. Unlike most of the previous empirical works on this issue, we are able to approximate the cultural transmission of civic attitudes. We observe that civic returns to education are overstated when the transmission of civic attitudes is ig...

This paper introduces the theoretical lens of the everyday to intersect and extend the emerging bodies of research on contestational design and infrastructures of civic engagement. Our analysis of social theories of everyday life suggests a design space that distinguishes ‘privileged moments’ of civic engagement from a more holistic understanding of the everyday as ‘product-residue.’ We analyze...