Allison Rank

During the 2016 election season, the authors-a collection of staff, faculty, and students at a rural, four-year comprehensive college-piloted a new format for a student-driven, campuswide, nonpartisan voter mobilization campaign anchored in a political science course and supported by a credit-bearing internship and advanced graphic design course. We argue that this project offers a model for how collaboration between student affairs and academic affairs can transform the nonpartisan voter mobilization campaign into a site for interdisciplinary, cross-campus service-learning projects that benefit the student participants and the campus community. This article outlines the advantages and challenges of the project and concludes with recommendations for those interested in implementing a similar program.

College campuses have taken on increased responsibility for mobilizing young voters. Despite the discipline's commitment to civic engagement, political science departments play a minimal role in this programming. This article outlines a course structure – including learning objectives, course outline, and assessments-that treats a campus-wide voter mobilization drive as the basis of an applied political science course. Transforming a campus voter mobilization program into a political science practicum offers advanced skill-building for students seeking political careers and links learning objectives to real world activities. Participants report gains in both knowledge of campaigns and grassroots campaign skills. We argue this type of course particularly benefits students attending colleges and universities in geographic areas that receive little attention from political campaigns as well as those students for whom the traditional route of gaining political experience – an unpaid, off-campus internship – is impractical or even impossible.

During the 2016 election season, the authors—a collection of staff, faculty, and students at a rural, four-year comprehensive college—piloted a new format for a student-driven, campuswide, nonpartisan voter mobilization campaign anchored in a political science course and supported by a credit-bearing internship and advanced graphic design course. We argue that this project offers a model for how collaboration between student affairs and academic affairs can transform the nonpartisan voter mobilization campaign into a site for interdisciplinary, cross-campus service-learning projects that benefit the student participants and the campus community. This article outlines the advantages and challenges of the project and concludes with recommendations for those interested in implementing a similar program.

ABSTRACTAlthough most instructors care deeply about student writing, they often give little attention to the part of the writing process over which they maintain complete control: the assignment itself. Yet, the written prompt that we distribute is often where student confusion (and confused writing) begins. Using Bloom’s taxonomy as inspiration, we offer instructors a typology directly linked to course objectives, which we believe can be readily understood by student writers.

This paper outlines our response to fundamental challenges confronting undergraduate political science education. While enrollments in the political science major have declined at many institutions, including our own, we believe a structured APD approach offers an opportunity to capitalize on the wave of youth activism as well as the turbulent moment in contemporary politics by framing our major as the place where students can go to learn more about how we reached this particular political moment, think about what it takes and means to make change in a thoughtful, meaningful way, and equip themselves with the tools to interpret both the rhetorical and institutional contexts in which they hope to make this change while also overcoming some of the hurdles posed by the distribution model that remains the prevalent structure of many political science undergraduate programs.

How can civic education keep pace with changing political identifications and practices of new generations of citizens? This paper examines research on school-based civic education in different post-industrial democracies with the aim of deriving a set of core learning categories that offer a starting point for thinking about how to address changing citizen identity styles and learning opportunities in various online and offline environments. The preponderance of school-based civic education programs reflects traditional paradigms of dutiful citizenship (DC) oriented to government through parties and voting, with citizens forming attentive publics who follow events in the news. The authors expand upon these conventional learning categories by identifying additional civic learning opportunities that reflect more self-actualizing (AC) styles of civic participation common among recent generations of youth who have been termed digital natives. Their AC learning styles favor interactive,...

Questions of how to support students in conversation across and about different perspectives regularly appear in discussions about civic engagement. Students with clear political positions and a desire to engage with political institutions, however, are themselves a rarified group on many campuses. The gulf between students who seek to engage their peers in civic action and those who see establishment politics as irrelevant, alienating, or hopeless may be more significant than any partisan divides. Thus, a liberal arts program committed to voter mobilization should help engaged, active students think carefully about the audience for their efforts and how best to communicate with those whose perspective of political participation varies significantly from their own. This article argues that personas, a tool common in design, can be incorporated into civic engagement programs to help students with a strong civic identity understand how to bridge this divide. This article discusses the...

A comparative reading of two recent crime dramas, The Fall and The Bletchley Circle, demonstrates the limits of law and potential of care to address violence against women. The Fall, a Nordic noir, moves beyond a gender-blind account of crime yet relies on a liberal, state-centric response that blunts its political critique. The Bletchley Circle, a hybrid cozy-period-detective genre piece set in post-World War II London, offers a new perspective on violence against women in crime dramas. First, juxtaposing men's and women's postwar experiences, The Bletchley Circle frames violence against women as an ongoing war in which women remain comrades-in-arms. Second, it suggests that while the state has a necessary role to play as a coordinator of spaces, skills, and citizens, state action alone cannot end violence against women. Rather, citizen engagement through an ethic of care may offer a new way to address such harms.