Civic Mindedness
(Excerpt from: Brabant, Margaret and Donald Braid. 2009. "The
Devil is in the Details: Defining Civic Engagement." With Margaret
Brabant. Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, 13,
59-87.)
The insights that emerged from our ethnographic study had a
profound effect both on how we understood our role as a university
seeking to develop civic-engagement initiatives and on how we
design service-learning outreach programs so that students might
more fully witness and participate in the process of citizenship at
a neighborhood level. Our findings may be summarized by saying
citizenship matters. Yet it must be remembered that the performance
of one's civic responsibilities occurs within a pluralistic society
that ideally adheres to democratic governing principles and that
the practice of citizenship is conflict-riddled because it involves
a constant negotiation of wills and worldviews. As Lippard
notes:
A peopled place is not always a
community, but regardless of the bonds formed with it, or not, a
common history is being lived out…Community doesn't mean
understanding everything about everybody and resolving all the
differences; it means knowing how to work within the differences as
they change and evolve. (1997, 24)
We have come to view citizenship in terms of the idea of civic
mindedness-a reflective disposition that informs action. As we use
the term, civic mindedness involves a developed awareness of others
that engages our moral imaginations and enhances our sense of
efficacy and empathy as human beings who dwell in civil society.
From our perspective, civic mindedness is an essential attribute of
the identity of individuals who see themselves as citizens and
choose to participate in the cooperative process at the heart of
civic community. Citizenship, if understood as a mindset, can be a
practice individuals use to "work within the differences" that make
up the complexity of places like Butler-Tarkington. This notion of
citizenship also aligns with Rhoda Halperin's description of
community as "not just a place…but a series of day-to-day, ongoing,
often invisible practices" (1998, 5).
