-
7. Developing Citizens
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
7 Developing Citizens A socially cohesive and economically vibrant U.S. democracy and a viable, just global community require informed, engaged, open-minded, and socially responsible people committed to the common good and practiced in “doing” democracy. —National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement In review, the previous chapters have offered an in-depth study of the gap year experience for participants. They attempted to illustrate what was meaningful for volunteers—the reasons why they undertook the gap year experience and the ways they believed it had affected them. Regarding motivations, I found that, despite many industry appeals to altruism, volunteers tended to have largely egoistic motivations for undertaking their international volunteering gap year. However, as time progressed, their motivations to stay on and continue their work until the end of their placement tended to become more altruistic, rooted in a concern about the well-being of those in their care. Volunteers experienced a broad range of changes stemming from their gap years. I have grouped these changes around broad and interrelated themes: intrapersonal (i.e., their sense of self), interpersonal (i.e., their sense of self in relation to others), civic and religious (e.g., changes in ideas of community), and finally, intellectual practices and future plans (e.g., moving to a more relative understanding of the world). Together, these themes help to illustrate the significant ways in which volunteers experienced the gap year as having influenced them. I have also sought to situate these findings within educational theory. In order to accommodate the diversity of findings, I developed a theoretical framework based upon the activity of meaning-making. This framework bridges two kinds of theories—constructive developmental and transformational learning— which I detailed in chapter 6. In this chapter, I build on that foundation by exploring how the gap year, by offering novel challenges for the volunteers, served to catalyze changes both in the meanings volunteers made of the world (e.g., the role of religion) and in their capacities for more complex meaning-making 136 Understanding the Gap Year schemes (e.g., their ability to place their experiences in a relative light). As such, the gap year also served to promote development toward increasingly “self-authored” ways of making meaning and fostered civic meaning-making of the kind we considered in the previous chapter. The Gap Year and Changes in Meaning The gap year encouraged changes and development in volunteers by engaging them in different ways of living. As we saw in the narratives, volunteers often sought the experience because they were somehow unsatisfied with their current state. In the gap year, they had the opportunity to engage in cognitive dissonance and live a very different life, “trying on” other ways of understanding the world—of making meaning—through their daily experiences. Such opportunities to “try on” other ways of making sense of the world, living the life of another,are key to the process of reforming meaning-making schemes (Mezirow 2000; Zajonc 2010). As Parker Palmer (1980) wrote, regarding transformational learning: “We do not think our way into a new kind of living; rather, we live our way into a new kind of thinking.” The long-term nature of the gap year and the roles occupied by volunteers facilitated this process, by allowing them to work toward a life integrated with the local community. As one volunteer, who lived in a small aboriginal village in Guyana in his year, said: “I changed because I lived as a local . . . I lived as a villager so I was able to see the world from that perspective.” Renegotiating meaning-making schemes was an emotional process as well as a rational one. This provides general support for Elizabeth Tisdell’s (2001) and Richard Kiely’s (2004) arguments that emotional engagement is an important condition for remaking meaning and that pedagogy that integrates affective elements can be more effective at catalyzing changes. As the volunteers’ stories illustrated, the gap year experiences can stimulate very intense emotions, especially as volunteers build relationships with those around them. These relationships helped volunteers to learn more about the culture, put a “human face” on or “personalize the third world,” and see the world from another’s perspective— in the end, becoming more concerned about the well-being of others. This mirrors Noddings’ (1984, 14) argument that moral education involves building relationships through a deep exploration of otherness: “When we see the other’s reality as a possibility for us, we must act to...