Abstract
Civil society has captured the imagination of many adult educators and has become a central focus of both local and international development work. Volunteerism has come to be seen as a source of democratic learning and this emphasis calls adult educators to deeply interrogate its contours. This paper reports on an American volunteerism program organized to recruit young people into participation in civil society and examines the relationship between learning about citizenship or democracy and understanding social inequality, or ‘social problems’.
Keywords
civil society, diversity, social inequality
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
Recommended Citation
Carpenter, S.
(2011).
Learning Democracy and ‘Difference’ in Civil Society.
Adult Education Research Conference.
https://newprairiepress.org/aerc/2011/papers/16
Learning Democracy and ‘Difference’ in Civil Society
Civil society has captured the imagination of many adult educators and has become a central focus of both local and international development work. Volunteerism has come to be seen as a source of democratic learning and this emphasis calls adult educators to deeply interrogate its contours. This paper reports on an American volunteerism program organized to recruit young people into participation in civil society and examines the relationship between learning about citizenship or democracy and understanding social inequality, or ‘social problems’.
