Teaching Civic Literacy in Schools by Civic engagement comes in many forms but at its essence, it's the act of working to make a difference in the civic life of one's community. This may look different to each individual and take place at the local, state, federal, and international levels.
The types of civic engagement, as written by the student civic engagement division of the US Government, Youth.gov, include:
-Excerpted from Civic Responsibility and Higher Education, edited by Thomas Ehrlich, published by Oryx Press, 2000, Preface, page vi.
This guide will help to serve Brazosport College's community to learn about and engage in civic life at the local, county, state, and federal levels. It is a platform of linked information useful to programs, initiatives, institutions, and local, county, state, and federal resources dedicated to the advancement of understanding of the functions and processes of the governments of Texas and the United States.
Careful vetting of the listed resources occurred to eliminate bias. Links to external content may change along with their content, so please be advised to perform your own diligence when performing research and formulating opinions about political issues.
Education for Democracy by
This book presents a vision of education for democracy built around promoting equity and social justice. In doing so, Camicia and Knowles challenge many of the common perspectives of democratic education, deliberation, and the common good. The authors have published widely on the topic of education for democracy. This book builds upon their work to assist practicing teachers, teacher educators, graduate students, and educational researchers in understanding the background of education for democracy, as well as new directions for the field. While one of the primary goals of public schools is to teach students how to build better communities, this goal is increasingly difficult given the degree of political polarization within societies. Recent events provide no shortage of challenges to democracy in the United States and beyond. Utilizing theory and research, Camicia and Knowles promote instructional methods that are responsive to changing cultural and political contexts. There is an increasing need to rethink democratic principles and how these principles might be supported in classrooms in order to teach for social justice. This requires a move away from often stated idealistic notions of deliberative democracy, toward a perspective of education for democracy that incorporates aspects of identity, interests, and inequitable power relations within society.
Teaching for Citizenship in Urban Schools by
As the civic engagement gap widens across lines of race, class, and ethnicity, educators in today's urban schools must reconsider what it means to teach for citizenship; however, few resources exist that speak to their unique contexts. Teaching for Citizenship in Urban Schools offers lessons and strategies that combines the power of inquiry-driven teaching with a funds of knowledge approach to capitalize on the lived civic experiences of urban youth and children. Teaching for Citizenship in Urban Schools presents six strategies for making civic and social studies education relevant and engaging: using photovoice for social change, conducting culturally responsive investigations of community, defining American Black founders, enacting hip-hop pedagogy, employing equity literacy to explore immigrant enclaves, and drawing on young adult fiction to teach about police violence. Written by some of the leading scholars in the field, each chapter includes an overview of the strategy and lessons for both elementary and secondary students. As a whole, these lessons draw on neighborhood resources, facilitate cultural exchanges among students and teachers, create community networks, and bridge schools and communities in a shared mission of building a just and inclusive democracy. This book is for anyone who values student-centered, inquiry-driven, and culturally-sustaining pedagogies that foster a deeper understanding of citizenship within a diverse democracy.
Democracy's Discontent and Civic Learning by
Around the globe, democracy is under assault. For a dozen years, global freedom has followed a downward slope, according to Freedom House. Once viewed as the world's model of freedom, the United States has slipped in world ratings of democracy. For a rising portion of the world's population, faith in democracy is flagging. At the same time, a wave of nationalism and xenophobia is rising in the West, questioning democracy's ability to meet the needs of its citizens. The contributors to this volume examine democracy's discontent from a variety of perspectives. What forces have produced the extreme partisanship and polarization roiling America's civic life and politics? How has today's populist movement challenged democratic norms and institutions? What role has social media played in democracy's discontent and its defense? How do we overcome persistent racism in the face of emboldened White supremacist and anti-immigrant agitation? Across the pages of this book, teachers, teacher educators, and education policy makers will recognize a common theme in responding to democracy's discontent - the need to rebuild the nation's civic infrastructure. Research on best practices in civic learning and engagement serve as a guide to transforming how we prepare citizens for democratic deliberation and civic action. Creative and effective teaching materials and approaches await only the will to invest the needed time and support. Repairing our civic infrastructure will help to restore confidence in our civic capabilities and trust in our ability to work together for the public good. Without a serious recommitment to the civic mission of schools, the nation will be ill prepared to defend against those within and beyond our borders who are intent on undermining democracy.
Civic Education and the Future of American Citizenship by
The Founders of this nation believed that the government they were creating required a civically educated populace. Such an education aimed to cultivate enlightened, informed, and vigilant citizens who could perpetuate and improve the nation. Unfortunately, America's contemporary youth seem to lack adequate opportunities, if not also the ability or will, to critically examine the foundations of this nation. An even larger problem is an increasing ambivalence toward education in general. Stepping into this void is a diverse group of educators, intellectuals, and businesspeople, brought together in Civic Education and the Future of American Citizenship to grapple with the issue of civic illiteracy and its consequences. The essays, edited by Elizabeth Kaufer Busch and Jonathan W. White, force us to not only reexamine the goals of civic education in America but also those of liberal education more broadly.
