Civic and social engagement
Marcella Milana
University of Verona

There is no shared, unambiguous definition of the concept of civic and social engagement; rather, it is semantically framed in different ways according to the point of view and disciplinary perspective of the person employing it. To complicate things, in the English literature the concepts of civic or social engagement are more often used separately than as an aggregated concept.
Nevertheless, the concept of civic and social engagement was originally used in political science to indicate citizens’ participation in voting and has been expanding its meaning over time. Scholars largely agree that it was partly thanks to the work of Robert Putman (2000) on social capital (and its ‘decline’ in North American society) that the concept of civic commitment was expanded beyond political participation (e.g. voting) to include all those connections that people have with the life of the communities they belong to, both formal (e.g. serving on a local committee) and informal (e.g. visiting friends).
According to this perspective, the concept of civic-social engagement refers to citizens’ participation in both political life (e.g. voting in political and local elections) and social life (e.g. serving and volunteering in support of the community), thus encompassing “a wide range of practices and attitudes of involvement in social and political life that converge to increase the health of a democratic society” (Banyan, Civic engagement, 1 para, t.d.a.).
Even understood in this way, the aggregate concept continues to be employed and conceptualized in different ways depending on what type of activities the researcher in question takes as the main expression of civic and social commitment. Adler and Goggin (2005), for example, distinguish among three possible expressions versions:

• community service: participating in service activities and/or volunteering in the person’s specific community, acting either alone or with others;
• collective action: participating in community activities in order to produce broader social change;
• political involvement: participating in activities launched by a collective with the aim of solving problems through the political process, which also involves institutions.

From the educational point of view, civic and social engagement underpins processes of citizenship education aimed at enabling citizens of all ages to acquire forms of knowledge that on one hand raise their awareness of the consequences of government actions and public policies (e.g. civic education) and, on the other hand, foster a sense of responsibility towards local, national and international communities (e.g. global citizenship education). However, since projects of citizenship education are formulated on the basis of the implicit concept of citizen underlying them and these conceptualizations in turn differ according to the given philosophical-political perspective (Janoski, 1998), definitions of citizenship education necessarily vary.
In the RE-SERVES project, we adopt the aggregate concept of civic and social engagement outlined in Banyan’s broad definition with the intention of investigating the role that educational activities in formal and non-formal contexts play in promoting children, young people and adults’ practices and attitudes of involvement in social and political life. At the same time, we do not take an a priori stance on either the concept of citizen or the type of engagement (or participation) in political and social life that educational activities in formal and non-formal contexts are expected to promote. Rather, our various lines of research address both the concept of citizen and that of participation through deductive or inductive investigative processes.

Selected references

Adler, R. P., Goggin, J. (2005). What Do We Mean By “Civic Engagement”? Journal of Transformative Education, Vol. 3, No. 3, 236-253.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1541344605276792

Banyan, M. E. (2013). Civic engagement. In Encyclopædia Britannica.

Janoski, T. (1998). Citizenship and Civil Society: a framework of rights and obligations in liberal, traditional, and social democratic regimes. Cambridge University Press.

Putnam, R. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. Simon & Schuster.