---

Building Kids´ Citizenship Through Community Engagement offers a compelling, empirically-based argument for giving young people opportunities to grow through productive involvement with their local community.

---

Building Kids´ Citizenship Through Community Engagement offers a compelling, empirically-based argument for giving young people opportunities to grow through productive involvement with their local community. Drawing on John Dewey´s pragmatic frame of experience and concepts of bildung that inform educational practice in Europe, the book speaks directly to teachers and parents who are looking for a way to support young people in their efforts to become confident, self-directed citizens. Throughout, the book offers a paradigm for growth that counters the limits of narrow visions of schooling and equally thin out-of-school learning opportunities which serve to limit young people´s potential.

In framing the argument, veteran educator Bob Coulter draws on more than 30 years of experience that includes extensive work with youth as a classroom teacher and in a variety of other community-based efforts, as well as 18 years of work as a mentor to teachers and parents. Key themes running through Building Kids´ Citizenship Through Community Engagement include a cogent argument in support of young people assuming an active, age-appropriate role as citizens, as well as a modern updating of Dewey´s concept of experience that is suitable for a technological age. These theoretical ideas are made tangible through specific recommendations for productive uses of digital technology and a critical review of several frameworks that have proven useful for designing and evaluating the quality of kids´ community-based learning experiences.

---

Acknowledgments - Introduction - Wings That Work - Experience and Action - Living a Digital Childhood - Taking an Active Stance in the World.

---

"In his new book Building Kids´ Citizenship Through Community Engagement , Bob Coulter combines a profound understanding of kids with equally profound scholarship. Drawing on insights from theory and research without getting bogged down in inessential details, Bob shows us how we can help kids-both in and out of school-become effective democratic citizens. This is a book to read and to use." -Leonard J. Waks, President, John Dewey Society

---