Before I started this experience with the EAD Taskforce, I thought it was a far-fetched notion to incorporate American democracy and civics education into the 6th grade Social Studies/World History curriculum, which is what I teach. Using the content and subject matter of the curriculum, the only option I ever saw to incorporate Civic standards in my teaching was to compare our government and civic responsibilities today to those of the ancient civilizations students are learning.

Our school, a charter in Surprise, Arizona, offers many electives to our middle school students.  There are Houses, and this class falls under the House of Civics; this class offers students a chance to find an issue or problem within their community.  Ultimately students chose to investigate their school community and determine if the school uses too much plastic.

How do you bring civics to life while making it accessible to young elementary students? Limited literacy skills can get in the way of studying important ideas about the privileges and obligations of being a citizen of our community, state, and nation. However, when you’re tasked with ensuring that students learn all standards, the desire to deliver on this promise pushes you to find a way. By combining the EAD inquiry framework with primary source documents, a team of us discovered one answer to this dilemma that has the potential to help you too!

The most meaningful EAD lesson I have done so far has been exploring the theme of Our Changing Landscape with 3rd-grade students across my district. The lesson was designed with inquiry and civics at heart. Having gone through the CPTL training on the EAD Roadmap this spring, I have a clear picture of not only how to begin implementing civics education into almost every lesson but also understand the importance of doing so. Using inquiry as an essential element of the lesson engages students to want to know more and personalizes civics learning for each student.

ASU’s Center for American Civics hosts workshops for educators to learn how to teach American civics in various contexts, class subjects, and grade levels with ready-made, engaging, and rich with interactive forms of learning. These workshops have been made possible by a generous donation to the Center from a private donor who cares about the quality of civic education in Arizona and wants to support our state’s excellent teachers. So, what can you expect if you attend one of these workshops?

The Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy (EAD) is composed of three interrelated supporting components: the seven themes, the five design challenges, and the six core pedagogical principles (CPPs). The CPPs are presented in the EAD Pedagogy Companion, alongside indicators and conditions for success. The EAD Pedagogy Companion supports educators in implementing the EAD Roadmap with findings and recommendations from the latest research in education, the learning sciences, and developmental science. 

The Educating for American Democracy (EAD) project offers many ideas, perspectives, and resources for teachers of American history, government, and civics. Teachers are going to face challenges as they change how they plan, present, and assess lessons, and work with students to help them learn about our history and civic life. None of this is easy, and EAD makes some unique demands of teachers, and near the end of the EAD development process, it was decided to address these challenges directly, accepting them as integral parts of the civics teaching, and not problems to be resolved.

Introduction

The Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy is organized around an inquiry-based content framework of seven themes. These themes integrate history and civic education through key concepts, broad driving questions, and specific guiding questions. Even though the interplay of history and civics are the crux of the roadmap, the seven themes draw upon the broader social studies to include other tenets like geography, economics, culture and society, and governance.

Education is based, in large part, on questions. We ask questions to learn things; we ask questions to determine what someone else knows, and we ask questions to infer what someone else understands. And yet, in most classrooms, most questions are generated by the teacher, and student-generated questions are unstructured, based on an individual student’s skill and knowledge, and often asked in pursuit of clarity of instructions or ideas. In short, students are most often cast in the role of answering questions about content rather than generating them.