The Right Question Project Civic Engagement Initiative
Improving Civic Participation and Skills for Self-Sufficiency and Better Academic Outcomes
Challenges for adult learners in the classroom, in their lives and in civic participation: Adult learners face a range of challenges. In the classroom, they are often playing "catch up", trying to develop learning skills they have not acquired along their educational journey. In their own lives, they struggle to secure decent housing, income, transportation, job training, and health care for themselves and their families. Overwhelmed by the challenges inside and outside of the classroom, they rarely participate in traditional forms of civic action, including neighborhood improvement, community organizations or even in the occasional act of voting.
The Right Question Project (RQP) offers a non-partisan civic and voter education strategy that invests in the ability of adult learners to think and act on their own behalf in several realms. It builds skills that can help adult learners acquire valuable learning skills and prepares them to be more self-sufficient when addressing problems outside of the classroom. And, at the same time the RQP strategy also increases the motivation of traditional non-voters to vote for the very first time.
Core Content: RQP accomplishes this through simple teaching materials, learning activities and a workshop that can be used in various formats to teach fundamental, but often overlooked skills for formulating questions and for focusing effectively on decisions.
Outcomes of Implementing The Right Question Project Strategy:
Improves Learning and Critical Thinking Skills: Adult learners who participate in RQP describe how they learn to produce their own questions, improve those questions and strategize on how to use them. They see how they can use the skill of question formulation in their classroom work. Adult educators report significant changes in adult learners who have learned how to formulate their own questions. The adult learners are transformed into active learners and ask more questions in class.
Increases Self-Sufficiency Skills: Adult learners who learn RQP's skills for focusing on decisions and formulating questions are more effective in their regular encounters with a range of agencies and services, including their childrenÕs schools, health care services, the welfare system and job training programs.
Increases Civic Participation and Motivation to Vote: Adult learners name for themselves how, as a result of participating in RQP, they now see the value of participating as citizens in their own communities and they make a new connection between decisions elected officials make and their lives. They feel a new sense of urgency to have a voice in their communities and to participate in a range of public decision-making processes, including voting.
In 2004, RQP piloted a civic and voter engagement strategy as part of work with the state adult education programs in Arizona and New Hampshire. Teacher and adult learner responses were overwhelmingly positive about the training experience, the educational content and the results in the classroom and beyond. A graduate student at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University reviewed evaluation data of the initial pilot and found clear examples of Òstrong successÉparticularly in strengthening critical thinking skills.Ó A pre and post-assessment of one group of adult learners in Arizona also found that learning skills for focusing on decisions and asking their own questions led 93% of them to feel Òmore preparedÓ to vote and 87% to confirm they are much more likely to vote than if they had not learned the skills.
RQP Services: To help adult educators achieve these outcomes, The Right Question Project will offer on-site training, technical assistance, resource materials and guides for adult educators, materials for adult learners, and access to online resources.
Evaluation: Yale University Professor Donald Green is considered the nation's preminent expert on evaluation of voter mobilizations efforts (see Get Out the Vote, 2nd, ed. Brookings Institution, 2008). Dr. Green and his colleague at Yale, Dr. Shang Ha, will be evaluating the effectiveness of the RQP strategy. Professor Green will work with RQP staff in selecting two states that best meet evaluation criteria. For more information on that, see document on evaluation. To see an example of an evaluation of RQPÕs impact in another field, see the paper on a NIMH-funded study in Medical Care, March 2008.
Cost: Two states will be selected to participate in the national evaluation and will receive all of the above RQP services for free. RQP can make the training available to a few states that are not selected to participate in the evaluation. The cost of that training is $10,000.
State Partners: The states that are selected to receive the training will have responsibility for recruiting teachers and coordinating the on-site training.
Leadership: The Right Question Project is a unique organization that develops simple, but powerful methods that help all people, no matter their literacy or educational level, learn how to advocate for themselves, navigate complex systems and participate in decision-making processes that affect them. RQP has received funding from major foundations for work in various areas - the Packard Foundation (health care), the Wallace Funds (parent involvement in education), the Boston Foundation (active citizenship), JaneÕs Trust (adult literacy), and The Rockefeller Brothers Fund for efforts to document and introduce to a wider public a new idea about Microdemocracy and its implications for improving democratic practices. Co-Director Luz Santana is a former welfare recipient who earned a MasterÕs Degree, and was named an M.I.T. Community Fellow. Co-Director Dan Rothstein is an experienced designer of informal educational programs, a Fulbright Scholar and National Academy of Education Spencer fellow who received his doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
The RQP National Advisory Board includes: Robert Coles, Writer and Editor of DoubleTake Magazine; Craig Kennedy, President of the German Marshall Fund; Bill Kovach, Chair, Committee of Concerned Journalists; Wendy Puriefoy, President of The Public Education Network; and Professors Archon Fung, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University; Martha Minow, Harvard Law School; and Kay L. Schlozman, Boston College.
For more information, contact: Luz Santana, luz@rightquestion.org, The Right Question Project, 2464 Massachusetts Ave., Ste. 314 - Cambridge, MA 02140 luz@rightquestion.org – 617.492.1900
