Well, the class I was teaching has wrapped up (except for grading final papers) - I found it to be quite exciting and hope that the students did as well! we will see when the evaluations roll in.

Time now to turn back to the work of preparing for the dissertation. Just received feedback on a draft of a portion of my comprehensive exam and got some great direction for transforming what was becoming a critique of one typology of citizenship (from Westheimer & Kahne, 2004) into a more appropriate structure for the comps, which will involve building a basic typology of my own - allowing for a smoother inclusion of a variety of thinkers on citizenship. The critique of W&K will still be there, but reformulated.

It is also time to begin a serious exploration of topics for the dissertation proposal. Was exploring the Kettering Foundation's site this morning and saw this article on what they term 'wetlands democracy' http://tinyurl.com/26tbbya - the idea here being that there is more to democracy than working through the formal institutions of government, but that exploring and understanding this organic democracy can be difficult. Echos here of Dewey and the idea of democracy as a way of life. I am interested in how these organic interactions both structure the citizen's ability/disposition to participate further in organic politics and in institutional politics. As I start to explore the dissertation proposal I want to explore the possibility of using qualitative methods to explore some of these questions through students' participation in schools and other forms of civic education.

Reading this brought me back to something I was reading yesterday: a new publication that I was exploring through google books - the Handbook of Research on Civic Engagement in Youth. Just starting to explore it and am very excited to get my hands on a complete version (but no libraries have it yet). This is going to be a great resource for setting up the proposal and moving forward with research that I hope can make a significant contribution to the field!