Welcome

My name is Danielle Leek and I am an Associate Professor in the School of Communications at Grand Valley State University.

This blog is part of an assignment for a course being taught at Grand Valley State University in the Fall 2012 semester. Students taking my COM 495 "Issues in Communication" class have been tasked with talking about politics in public.

It's harder than it sounds.

Research shows that young adults struggle with what Anne Colby, senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, calls "political learning." Political learning is what happens when students are politically engaged, which Colby explains "includes community and civic involvement that has a systemic dimension and various forms of engagement with public policy issues, as well as electoral politics at all levels. A key criterion is that political activities are driven by systemic-level goals, a desire to affect the shared values, practices, and policies that shape collective life."

In practice, higher education in America has shied away from real political learning to invest in civic engagement that is detached from learning about institutional politics and policy. Colby and her colleagues surveyed and interviewed undergraduates who confirmed that service-learning and volunteer opportunities, while valuable in their own right, do not empower students with confidence in their knowledge or ability to participate in the American political system.

My own experience and research validates Colby's claims, especially in regards to what I call "political voice." Our political voice is what we use whenever we're involved in communicating about political issues. In terms of electoral politics, a robust political voice is motivated and inspired to converse, deliberate, and learn about candidates, policies, and campaigns through the process of communication.

Yet a variety of factors conspire to prevent students from gaining this experience: increasing resistance to talking about politics in the classroom, the conflation of civic and political learning, and declining support for speech activities, are only a few examples.

But as with all communication praxis, developing a political voice requires practice. And I mean real, boots-on-the-ground, out-loud-and-in-front-of-people, practice.

For the past few weeks, students in this course took the first step in this effort to engage with one another on a private class blog. This site opens space for students to take the next step in their practice. At the end of the course, we'll reflect on lessons learned about strategies for invoking a political voice in the contemporary American public sphere.

Please, join us in this conversation about the 2012 election.