Why Should We Care? Teaching Emotional Competency to Support Engaged Citizenship

This paper introduces the notion of emotional competency as a key component of democratic citizenship and suggests a variety of ways to help students become emotionally competent citizens in undergraduate courses on American government. We offer several teaching strategies designed to foster students’ capacities to recognize their own processes of political socialization; to see politics as an extension of personal and collective values; to connect trends in political behavior to differential access to resources and varied identities and, thereby, to foster greater understanding and tolerance for difference; and to understand how, when, and why emotional cues shape and constrain political action.