Students as Knowledge Brokers: Bringing Voter Engagement Back Home To Their Families
Recognizing students as knowledge brokers has implications beyond increasing voter engagement, potentially mobilizing disenfranchised communities to vote and counteracting voter suppression efforts.
This post is the third in a State of the Student Vote series about the research results from the projects supported by the first round of Student Vote Research Network subgrants. You can read the prior posts here.
Many colleges and universities, often in cooperation with external non-profit organizations, work to increase student voter registration and engagement. After conducting a study across multiple campuses, we found evidence that students are teaching their families and communities how to participate in politics even beyond the ballot box (Michelson et al. 2023).
Knowledge Sharing Dynamics
Specifically, our recent research suggests students of color and first-generation students take the information they learn on campus back to their families and communities. These students have access to knowledge that their families may not have access to and feel it is important to share this knowledge with their families and communities to enrich their understanding of politics and help them make informed decisions. We find that this experiential knowledge sharing works in three ways: parent to child (common in political science research), child to parent (novel discovery), and bi-directionally.
Through 11 virtual focus groups across eight U.S. universities and college campuses, including four Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) and two community colleges (one of which is also an HSI), we investigate how students act as knowledge brokers among their families and communities. Focus groups were conducted between December 2022 and March 2023 and lasted from 42 to 101 minutes. Facilitators were all women of color political scientists. Their identities as members of the historically marginalized communities with whom we conducted the focus groups matter because, as evidenced by student comments during the conversations, they often felt more comfortable as a result of the facilitators’ identities. This was due to small things, like pronouncing the student’s name correctly, but this allowed students to feel like they were speaking to someone who understood them.
Child to Parent Knowledge Brokering
In instances where child to parent knowledge brokering takes place, it is important to students that they facilitate political learning in their family because politics were not discussed in their household growing up. An example of this lies in the narratives of one first-generation student who participated in a focus group. Not only were politics not a part of the conversation in his family, but he mentioned not even knowing his parents’ political leanings. He recalled a time he attempted to share political information with his family. He stated:
“I texted both my parents like this huge paragraph talking about for them to go out and make sure they vote, and neither one of them responded to that paragraph. So, I'm not sure if they actually did go out and vote or not. And I know I was going to text my two brothers and tell them to make sure they go out and vote. But I knew neither one of them were registered. And so that was just a waste of a text. So, I tried my best. But, you know, we just sort of have these like boundary lines [in] my family that [they] sort of are not willing to cross yet.”
Bi-directional Knowledge Brokering
In instances where bi-directional knowledge brokering takes place, students feel it is important that sharing knowledge is a two-way street. Students share information with their families and communities, but they learn from them as well. Many students stated this type of knowledge brokering developed as they grew older and more informed. One first-generation student’s narrative captures the essence of this:
“Me and my mom talk about politics, probably even more than we did back in high school … with me being in college and like, that's what I'm actively learning. I feel like my mom understands that I'm more informed.”
Taken together, child to parent and bi-directional knowledge brokering is important. Students of color and first-generation students take the information they learn on campus and share it with their families and communities. They also leave the door open to receive information from those closest to them. It is important to note that being a knowledge broker is, at times, challenging for students due to language barriers, cultural differences, or resistance due to differing views.
The Upshot: Evaluating Impact on Communities
Organizations like colleges and universities, the Students Learn Students Vote (SLSV) coalition, and others that prioritize student engagement typically measure their impact by evaluating voter turnout among students. We present a way to gauge impact beyond turnout. By understanding the ways in which students use this information as political actors, organizations that focus on educating, registering, and mobilizing student voters can evaluate other outcomes due to their efforts. From this perspective, their efforts not only increase the political engagement of student voters, but it has the potential to increase political engagement among their families and communities as well. Tapping into their power can help increase voter turnout among groups with traditionally lower voter turnout.
Recognizing students as knowledge brokers has important implications for how we might be able to mobilize disenfranchised communities to vote. While we do not know the extent of this practice, we are continuing to investigate how and how often first-generation students and students of color act as brokers in their communities.
Students of color suggest that they are motivating their family members and their communities to vote. This has been an understudied method of getting out the vote. Crucially, as people of color and immigrant communities are targeted for voter suppression, students might help tip the scales to sustain democracy in what might otherwise be successful attempts at disenfranchisement.
This is a really important area to explore, especially the bidirectional interactions between families. Years ago, when the city of Malmo Sweden was trying to implement a major expansion of recycling programs they focused on kids teaching their parents to participate, and found this to be far more successful than just starting with the parents. The students in this study are obviously far more knowledgeable and have more agency, but the principle of families being able to pull each other into engagement still applies.