Asian Students’ Preferred Forms of Future Civic Engagement: Beyond Conventional Participation

Abstract

The citizenship norms discussed in this book reflect students’ attitudes towards social movements and conventional citizenship. These foci have been a mainstream interest of political scientists and researchers concerned with civic engagement. Yet such an approach has tended to exclude norms that are more radical than conventional/social movement approaches, but still within the broad expectations of democratic citizenship. The exclusion of more radical forms of civic engagement as part of democratic citizenship is particularly problematic when it comes to Asian youth. Since 2014, Korea, Chinese Taipei, and Hong Kong have been sites of both legal and illegal protests, and many of these have involved young people. Thus, using data from IEA’s International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) 2016, the focus of this chapter is the identification of Asian students’ intentions for civic engagement, broadly conceived to include different forms of protest. Using mixture models, profiles were developed of the different ways young people see themselves being civically engaged in the future. These profiles were assessed against the conventional civic norms referred to earlier in order to better understand Asian students’ citizenship values and their proposed civic actions. Conclusions related to policy, theory, and practice are drawn, helping us to understand expanded notions of civic engagement in Asian contexts.