Michael McDevitt

Deliberative Learning: An Evaluative Approach to Interactive Civic Education

This study incorporates the perspective of deliberative democracy in proposing a framework for evaluating relationships between civic education and political development. Findings support a conception of deliberative learning as a process in which interactive curricula result in the diffusion of discursive inclinations to families and peer groups. These orientations, in turn, foster receptivity to future opportunities for learning through news attention and primary-group discussion. Data were derived from an evaluation of high school curricula taught in conjunction with the 2002 election. Participation in deliberative instruction predicted the following behaviors one year later: news attention, issue salience, political discussion with parents and friends, size of discussion network, willingness to disagree and to listen to opponents, and testing out opinions in conversation.

Agenda Setting in Civic Development: Effects of Curricula and Issue Importance on Youth Voter Turnout

This study examines the role of agenda setting in affecting voter turnout using panel data of adolescents in Arizona, Florida, and Colorado from 2002 and 2004. Specifically, a model is developed probing the multiple influences of interactive civic instruction, media attention, and discussion on the following sequence of outcomes: perceived issue importance, opinion strength, political ideology, and finally voter turnout. The results suggest that agenda setting serves as a critical intrinsic process in political socialization contributing to the crystallization of political predispositions, which lead to electoral participation. The implications of the findings are discussed.

The making and unmaking of civic journalists: Influences of professional socialization

This study explores the origins of civic journalism values as a function of professional socialization. Findings from a survey of college students and professional journalists reveal a progression of socialization that begins with students supporting civic journalism. However, the transition from the classroom to the newsroom is accompanied by the adoption of a professional identity in which autonomy tends to preclude purposeful attempts at community engagement. Results highlight the need for college instruction to encourage a broader conception of autonomy.

The Red and Blue of Adolescence Origins of the Compliant Voter and the Defiant Activist

An emergent culture of youth activism suggests the need to examine a fundamental question about political learning. Does formal education function primarily to engender compliance or does instruction foster differentiation, and perhaps defiance, in political identity construction? We draw on data from a 3-year panel study of high school students. Results support a theoretical model in which schools prompt discussion in families and peer groups. The flow of interpersonal influence in the two spheres share common steps but can be thought of as parallel staircases to divergent orientations, with families promoting compliant voting and peer groups fostering activism.

The Adolescent Unbound: Unintentional Influence of Curricula on Ideological Conflict Seeking

Conflict seeking is celebrated in advocacy of civil disobedience as a commitment of youth to transcendent principles that compel activism. Conflict avoidance, however, is far more prevalent as an explanatory theme in political socialization research. Nevertheless, it is possible to imagine undercurrents of defiance in the seemingly controlled and disciplinary environments of the home and the classroom. We propose that high schools and families—as overlapping spheres of interpersonal political communication—can engender ideological conflict seeking during election campaigns as activity conducive to moral-political identity development. Ideological conflict seeking was modeled as inclination to openly disagree, which fosters support for confrontational activism. Evidence was obtained from multiple interviews of student-parent dyads across two election cycles in Arizona, Colorado, and Florida. In validating a theoretical model confined to the ordinary political communication that occurs in classrooms and households, we highlight ideological conflict seeking as a focal concept deserving a more explicit role in the theory of civic identity development.

The Family in a Sequence of Political Activation: Why Civic Interventions Can Succeed

We invite theorists and architects of interventions to consider the stimulation of family political communication as a powerful strategy for the mobilization of civic involvement. Family-based interaction constitutes a valuable resource for activation efforts, but to appreciate this potential requires a conceptualization of political involvement as a micro-social process. The family constitutes a social system that tends to maintain homeostatic balance in various domains of social interaction, including civic competence. An intervention such as a school curriculum or a media campaign can heighten the political interest of the family member initially reached by the intervention, which creates tension if other family members perceive a need to increase their own civic competence. Strides toward citizenship occur when the family system adjusts to re-establish equilibrium in response to exogenous influences that create tension. This framework situates the family as a mediating institution in relationship to societal agents that periodically heighten the flow of political information. The family is responsive to increased political stimulation and generative of motivation that leads to voting and other forms of participation outside the home. Our functional model of family political communication contrasts with a tendency toward reductionist thinking in which campaign effects are evaluated in isolation to each other, and in the absence of social context. We conclude with an intervention strategy that incorporates family interaction to amplify the impact of political stimulation originating from media, schools, and elections.

Social drama in the academic-media nexus: Journalism’s strategic response to deviant ideas:

This article applies ‘social drama’ – adapted from the anthropology of Victor Turner – to portray a performance of media ritual in control of critical academic discourse. Insights from newspaper coverage of a controversy surrounding Ward Churchill allow us to trace theoretical connections between strategic ritual at the occupational level and media ritual in cultural practice. We observe a fractal-like structure, such that ritualistic punishment of deviant ideas as a cultural response is encoded in textual production. We discuss implications of social drama as media ritual for the prowess of US journalism in patrolling boundaries of acceptable ideas in the academic-media nexus.

How to Kill a Journalism School The Digital Sublime in the Discourse of Discontinuance

The authors argue that journalism’s uncertain identity in academia has made it vulnerable to unreflective instrumentalism in the digital era. They show how instrumentalism intertwined with the digital sublime constitutes a rhetorically resonate rationale for closing a journalism school. Evidence comes from documents and testimony associated with discontinuance of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Colorado. Vulnerability of the school became apparent in its own Advisory Board recommending closure. The authors warn against stakeholders in journalism education internalizing the fear and opportunism implicit in a discourse of the digital sublime, a discourse ultimately in service to discontinuance.

Populism, Journalism, and the Limits of Reflexivity

This study considers how punitive populism as a strain of anti-intellectualism is condoned in the ways that US journalists imagine audiences. A disregard for intellect is nevertheless antithetical to journalism’s understanding of its contribution to an informed electorate. This contradiction between the representation of public antipathy and reason-based reporting leads to an appraisal of how journalists critiqued their work in the rise of presidential candidate Donald J. Trump. To identify boundaries of reflexivity, we compare the near-instant commentaries of scholars to the interpretations of journalists following the startling election of 2016. Textual analysis of news and news commentary documents a form of reflexivity in which practice is not so much justified to the public as the public is imagined in ways that justify problematic practice. Scholars viewed the rise of Trump as predictable when considering long-established routines of the press and journalists’ misunderstanding of populism. We suggest that reform of campaign coverage is contingent on the recognition of journalists that their work is shaped by audiences they imagine.

Anti-intellectualism among US students in journalism and mass communication: A cultural perspective:

This study explores how support for journalistic anti-intellectualism is condoned in the views of emerging adults in the United States as they develop attitudes toward news, audiences, and authority. Anti-rationalism and anti-elitism as cultural expressions of anti-intellectualism correlate as expected with approval of corresponding news practices. Identification with professional roles generally fails to inoculate college students against the endorsement of journalistic anti-rationalism and anti-elitism. With the exception of the adversarial function, role identities appear to justify journalistic anti-intellectualism beyond the influence of cultural anti-intellectualism. While reflexivity is often viewed as conducive to critical thinking, affinity for transparency in news work associates with a populist suspicion of intellectuals and their ideas.