Engaging Young People in Civic Life

Contributors

279 Contributors Ellen Claes is a Ph.D. candidate at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. Her research focuses on civic education in Western Europe. Elizabeth Cleaver is an Academic Practice Consultant at the University of Birmingham, UK. Prior to this appointment, she spent five years leading the government-funded Citizenship Education Longitudinal Study at the National Foundation for Educational Research, UK. James G. Gimpel is Professor of Government at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research interests lie in the areas of political socialization, political behavior, and geographic variation in political attitudes and opinions. He was the principal investigator in a path-breaking study of variations in civic knowledge and engagement across local districts between Baltimore, MD, and Washington, DC, as described in Cultivating Democracy: Civic Environments and Political Socialization in America (Brookings Institution Press). Daniel Hart is Professor of Psychology and Childhood Studies at Rutgers University, Camden. He has done extensive research on personality and civic development in adolescents, particularly those living in low-wealth urban environments. He has looked especially at the demographic makeup of neighborhoods and found a negative correlation between “child saturation” and civic knowledge. Diana Hess is Associate Director of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Since 1998, she has studied what young people learn from deliberation of highly controversial political and legal issues in the classroom. She is currently the lead investigator of a five-year study that seeks to understand relationships between various approaches to democratic education in schools and political engagement among young people after they leave school. 280 EngagingYoung People in Civic Life Marc Hooghe is Professor of Political Science at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. He has published widely on aspects of political socialization, social capital, and political culture and is currently working on a comparative study of youth civic engagement in Western Europe and Canada. Joseph Kahne is Abbie Valley Professor of Education, Dean of the School of Education, and Director of the Civic Engagement Research Group at Mills College, Oakland, CA. He is currently conducting a longitudinal study of the impact of schools and digital media on civic and political development. His recent work dealing with digital media and civic opportunity gaps is available at www.civicsurvey.org. David Kerr is Principal Research Officer at the National Foundation for Educational Research, UK, and Visiting Professor of Citizenship at Birbeck College, University of London. He directs the Citizenship Education Longitudinal Study and is Associate Director of the IEA International Civic and Citizenship Education Study. Ben Kirshner is Assistant Professor of Educational Psychology and Adolescent Development at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His research examines how young people learn and grow through participation in civic activism, action research, and community-related after-school programs. Peter Levine is Research Director of the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service and Director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) at Tufts University. He is the former Chair of the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools and author of The Future of Democracy: Developing the Next Generation of American Citizens (Tufts University Press). Ellen Middaugh is Senior Research Associate at Mills College and a doctoral candidate in Human Development in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. She studies civic education in cultural and social contexts and is coauthor of the paper Democracy for Some: The Civic Opportunity Gap (CIRCLE). Henry Milner is Visiting Professor at Umea University in Sweden, Research Fellow at the Université de Montréal and the Institute for Research in Public Policy, and co-publisher of Inroads, the Canadian journal of opinion and policy. He is the author of eight books on politics and society. Contributors 281 Shanna Pearson-Merkowitz is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Government at the University of Maryland, College Park. She studies and has published in the areas of political behavior, elections, political socialization, and ethnic minority politics. Diana Marginean Schor is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Social Policy with focus on youth civic engagement at Brandeis University. She brings to her studies a background in work for grassroots-level nonprofit organizations in Romania and the United States and has worked as a social development scientist for the World Bank. Daniel M. Shea is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for Political Participation at Allegheny...