Teaching Methods: Civic Engagement

Civic engagement is a model of teaching that combines civic responsibility with academic preparation. As part of their academic instruction, students engage in activities that teach them about citizenship in a democratic society. The ultimate goal of this approach is to create informed adults who will be active in and committed to the democratic practices of our society. The links below provide rationale and methodology for this approach to teaching, which will be useful to both administrators and faculty members.

Campus Compact.
A comprehensive site on the value of civic engagement and methods for implementing it. Links to many web resources plus bibliographies of books and articles.
Link: http://www.compact.org

Strategies for Creating an Engaged Campus (Campus Compact).
A toolkit for academic administrators who wish to increase their students' engagement with the local community.
Link: http://www.compact.org/advancedtoolkit/default.html

Civic Engagement (Association of American Colleges and Universities, AAC&U).
A comprehensive listing of AAC&U's current work on civic engagement. Contains links to articles, publications, programs, and other resources from AAC&U's initiative American Commitments: Diversity, Democracy, and Liberal Learning.
Link: http://www.aacu.org/issues/civicengagement/index.cfm

American Democracy Project (American Association of State Colleges and Universities, AASCU).
A site dedicated to encouraging schools to develop programs that increase student involvement in public life. Has links to presentations from their annual conference, assessment tools such as questionnaires, and examples of civic engagement audit materials from several college campuses.
Link: http://www.aascu.org/programs/adp/

"Civic Engagement," Thomas Ehrlich (Senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation).
This article presents an argument for civic engagement as part of higher education in order to prepare students for more active involvement in our democratic society than that of the present generation of young adults. Calls for a "sustained national dialogue about the public purposes of higher education" and describes campuses that have committed to increasing the civic responsibility of their students.
Link: http://measuringup.highereducation.org/2000/articles/ThomasEhrlich.cfm

Peer Review, (Association of American Colleges and Universities), Spring 2003, Vol. 5, No. 3. Theme is Educating for Citizenship.
Several articles are available online, including "Educating for Citizenship," which sketches out six different kinds of learning spurred by civic engagement.
Link: http://www.aacu.org/peerreview/pr-sp03/index.cfm

See also Service Learning on this website.