Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning Sustained Dialogue and Civic Life: Post-College Impacts

This study examined the civic outcomes of the Sustained Dialogue model. Qualitative interviews investi-gated the perceived impacts of dialogue experience on post-graduate civic life, generating an inventory of 29 dialogue civic outcomes across five domains: 1) cognitions, 2) behaviors, 3) attitudes 4) skills, and 5) hopes and plans for the future. Results extend past research by finding that perceived dialogue impacts lasted into the post-college years and affected future hopes and plans. Additional impacts were identi-fied: (1) across various civic arenas of society, and (2) a transformative "restringing " effect, in which participants reported they were changed or transformed in subtle, complex, and pervasive ways. Many educators have sought experiences to help young people become part of an engaged local and global citizenry, both prepared for and motivated to participate in a democratic society. In Democracy and Education, Dewey (1916) wrote: Democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience…It is the name of a way of life of free and enriching communion in which free social inquiry is wedded to the art of full and moving communication. (p. 81) The current research study reinforces the bridge between two movements in higher education — civic engagement and intergroup dialogue. The study draws on two concepts embedded in the above quote: first, the notion of living in association with others, the essence of what we term a broad “civic life; ” and second, the idea of a shared communication or dia-logue with others. These two ideas — that a civic life is a broader way of living in association with others and dialogue is a unique process fostering individual community engagement — undergird this study. Other researchers have made this connection as well. Educational policy makers and university administrators want college graduates to be compe-tent in the “arts of democracy, ” i.e., capable of and effective at engaging in a participatory democrac