CIVIC ENGAGEMENT AS A CATALYST FOR CIVICS EDUCATION
Civic Engagement, service-learning and other community projects offer a means to engage diverse learners in authentic work that profoundly motivates because it matters in the larger world.
Massachusetts, as part of reform that builds civic education into the curriculum each year from Kindergarten through high school, passed a law in 2018 to require that each student be offered an opportunity to participate in a civic engagement project in middle school and/or in high school.
The MA Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) has published a Civics Project Guidebook: Guidance to Support Implementation of Chapter 296 of the Acts of 2018, an Act to promote and enhance civic engagement. Link to the law here. To learn more about the law and the coalition that supported its passage, click here.
Emerging America offers resources to teachers for developing Civics lessons, planning courses that pair content knowledge with inquiry skills and practices that are fundamental to citizenship, and shaping community engagement projects for maximum educational value. To see current and upcoming courses and workshops, click here.
Online Resources:
- EmergingAmerica.org library of Teaching Resources: for support in developing Civics lessons, use the check boxes and search window to select grade level, time period, subject, and key words for primary source sets and sample lesson plans.
- Click here for K-12 Social Studies and Civics resources developed by Emerging America for
the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), and now maintained by the Tisch Center for Civic Life at Tufts University. - Local History Projects are an opportunity to pursue civic engagement by finding information about issues of historic and contemporary interest to the students’ own community. Projects can allow students to try out, sharpen, and show off skills that include yet extend beyond conventional classroom skills. Learn from Emerging America’s decades of direct experience leading civic engagement projects in its Windows on History program.
- Library of Congress TPS consortium members focusing on civics education are linked on the website of Barat’s Citizen U, and listed below:
Citizen U is a multidisciplinary, inquiry-based civics curriculum using primary sources for elementary, middle, and high school students to foster civic knowledge, skills, and dispositions.
Case Maker features twenty pre-made civics challenges that teachers can share with their 6th-8th-grade students, or customize and annotate specifically for their needs.
DBQuest introduces students to major questions in civics and history using a Big Question as guiding light for deep examination of three selected primary sources from the Library.
Engaging Congress is a fun, interactive game that uses primary sources to explore the basic tenets of representative government and the challenges they face in contemporary society.
Kid Citizen features episodes in which children interactively explore Congress and civic engagement through historical primary sources, connecting what they find with their daily lives.
Eagle Eye Citizen is a digital resource that helps middle and high school students think critically about Congress, civic participation, and American history using primary sources from the Library.