The Time is Now, The Time is Always

Abstract

The time could not be more urgent, and university faculty and leaders must act and reclaim their responsibility for civic preparation. In the face of enrollment decline, an emphasis on student credit hours, and a history of siloed tunnel vision, action seems impossible in a system that opposes the core mission of higher education. In this article, authors—faculty from two teacher preparation departments—share their journey that started as state-mandated program revision to a campus-wide civic agenda. They argue for the integration of civics teaching in disciplinary courses and share classroom teaching ideas that cultivate civic identity and virtues. Feeling empowered, they widened the scope of their work to include a campus-wide learning community and civic survey audits to target professional learning opportunities. Through collected data and lessons learned, they demonstrate the moves needed to reclaim higher education’s core democratic purpose.

We are in a time of crisis. The causes are complex. Healing the wounds will be challenging, but without a doubt, the democratic ideals and values that are meant to bind us together are fraying at the seams. Citizens are losing faith in government and elected leaders (Citron & Stoker, 2018; Rainie et al., 2019), and polarization jeopardizes compromise in both political and personal spheres. Average Americans are increasingly divided on social issues (Abramowitz, 2010; Pew Research Center, 2020), and people are unwilling to befriend others whom they perceive as sharing differing political views. Alarmingly, this level of affective polarization (Iyenger & Westwood, 2015) begins in pre-adolescent children (Hutchins, 2024).

Despite the state of divisiveness, Americans on both sides of the aisle agree on one thing: our democracy is in peril (Malloy, 2022). While troubling, this point of consensus offers some solace. If we all agree that we are in crisis, then we can all agree that we must act.

While the shadow of January 6 and the looming 2024 election creates a state of urgency, we can never forget that democratic living is never a finished product. It is ongoing work, which Parker (2003) adds, requires “builders, caretakers, and change agents” (pg. xvii). There is no democracy without an engaged citizenry, yet a civic education deficit has been decades in the making as resources have shifted to meet the demands of standards, high-stakes tests, and STEM (Educating for American Democracy [EAD], 2021; Hoyer & Sparks, 2017; Levine & Kawashima-Ginsberg, 2017). In addition, there are inequities in civic opportunities (Levinson, 2014), and working-class communities–like the ones where many of the authors’ students grew up–have been dubbed civic deserts (Atwell et al., 2017). Moreover, novice educators graduating from our universities’ teacher preparation programs are entering ill-equipped with the civic readiness to implement empowering democratic pedagogies (EAD, 2021). Carrese (2024) bluntly states that our nation has been slowly committing “civic suicide” (pg. 3).

There is no time to cast blame, but we in higher education must pause to reflect on our actions, organizational structures, and competing goals that have contributed to the current crisis and moving forward. In What Universities Owe Democracy, the president of Johns Hopkins (Daniels, 2021) argues that institutions of higher learning have lost sight of their responsibility to democracy. In addition, despite being labeled as communities of scholars, universities continue to suffer from “silo syndrome” (James Jacobs, 2015, p. 2), and contemporary barriers to interdisciplinary collaborations often include the allocation of student credit hours, an overemphasis on student outcomes, and a prioritizing of publications over pedagogy (Polczynski et al., 2019). This siloed approach fails to instill the integrated capacities required for 21st- century citizens (Burrell Storms et al., 2020; National Academy of Sciences, 2018).

Four years ago, we—social studies methods faculty members representing two departments (Teacher Education, History and Philosophy) at a public Midwestern university— committed to Lazarre’s (2011) assertion that the “dirty job” of democratic remediation begins in the university classrooms (p. 215) and embarked on a journey that asked, what can our university do to better prepare our students for civic engagement? This article highlights how we leveraged state-level teacher education mandates to foster interdisciplinary collaborations and weave civic themes in a series of disciplinary courses that are part of our new elementary education program. From there, our democratic project grew, and we will share insights from student reflections, findings from our campus-wide civic surveys, and ideas for creating a civically-focused learning community. We argue that fostering civic development through disciplinary goals is an actionable, individual first step. We draw on our own lessons learned and argue that campus-wide institutional audits and ongoing faculty professional learning should also be part of broad structures that promote students’ civic development. In our discussion, we will also share actionable classroom and community-building activities that could be implemented at the individual and small-group levels. Given this pivotal time, the need for universities to reclaim their public purpose and engage in interdisciplinary collaboration could not be greater.

The Institutional Context

Our public university in Michigan is known for its teacher preparation programs and diverse, working-class student population. Like many similar institutions, our enrollment has declined in recent years, and we currently serve approximately 11,000 undergraduates and 2,500 graduate students. Over 90% of our students receive financial aid, and 43% receive Pell Grants (National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 2023). In 2019-2020, the university awarded 245 teaching degrees at the baccalaureate level, which was nearly 12% of new teachers entering classrooms in our state. While the university’s population is more racially diverse than the national statistics (NCES, 2023), as teacher educators, we note that the diversity of our teacher preparation program reflects the racial and ethnic disparities of the national educational landscape. Equity and access are also areas to not lose sight of in campus conversations regarding higher education’s democratic responsibilities (Daniels, 2021).

Transforming Problems into Promise

In 2018, Michigan (Michigan Department of Education, [MDE], 2018) announced plans to revise the teacher certification system from a two-tiered certification approach consisting of four grade-level bands (PK–3, 3–6, 5–9, 7–12). One year later, the state also adopted new K–12 social studies standards (MDE, 2019). The state also encouraged programs to limit required credit hours in teacher education programs in a move to decrease the time teacher candidates took to earn certifications, so we and other program coordinators across Michigan had to grapple with how to teach a more comprehensive social studies curriculum in fewer course offerings.

In addition, social studies educators across the nation were—and continue to be—mired in the politicization of curriculum (McVicar, 2018), but despite our divisive times and the demands of reducing credit hours, there is tremendous promise in Michigan’s social studies standards. The theory and pedagogical approaches that ground them are deep and focus on the skills required for informed democratic engagement. Auspiciously, Michigan (MDE, 2019) joined the national trend, and like 17 other states (Grant et al., 2023), it also embraced the tenets of the National Council for the Social Studies’ (NCSS) The College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework (2013) by fully adopting or largely incorporating its standards. In addition to those 18 states, over 20 states have cited or incorporated elements of the C3 into the K-12 social studies standards (Grant et al., 2023). In 2021, 300 researchers and practitioners released The Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy (EAD)–another robust set of educational resources that prepare K-12 students for civic life using an inquiry approach to disciplinary and civic learning.

Preparing Teachers to be the Caretakers of Democracy

As Parker (2003) noted, democracy requires “caretakers,” and he also added that educators are the “primary stewards” (pg. xvii). This is a lot to ask of a teacher, which is why the C3 Framework is popular. Framework provides the tools to social studies teachers with the goal of educating students who “are aware of their changing cultural and physical environments; know the past; read, write, and think deeply; and act in ways that promote the common good” (NCSS, 2013, pg. 6). With a focus on this charge, the Framework is structured around four dimensions and reflects an arc of inquiry that culminates in public civic action: 1) Developing questions and planning inquiries; 2) Applying disciplinary concepts and tools; 3) Evaluating sources and using evidence; and 4) Communicating conclusions and taking informed action. A benefit of centering questions in curriculum design is student engagement—this is true for both young learners (Brophy and Alleman, 2008) and university students (Reynolds & Kearns, 2016). In addition, inquiry that problematizes disciplinary topics also increases students’ interest (Agarwal & Sengupta-Irving, 2018).

However, inquiry is more meaningful than just a tool for engaging students, and while the inquiry process in history and related disciplines seems overly scientific, the model cultivates critical thinking (Barton & Levstik, 2004). A critical thinking, inquisitive mind is a necessary element of civic preparedness (Colby et al., 2007; hooks, 2010; Nussbaum, 1998), and instruction that centers disciplinary inquiry invites rich classroom discussions that develop democratic deliberative practices in learners (Lo, 2022). An inquiry model, according to Weber and Hagan (2024), also has the potential to increase civic agency—a person’s understanding that they can take action. Improving civic education in our PK-12 schools by empowering classroom teachers will not solve our nation’s problems, but by teaching young people to become comfortable questioning, diverse points of view, and the messiness of the political sphere, they will be more prepared for the civic life and taking action in it.

Building a Commitment to Citizenship from the Ground Up

In academia, there is a history of retreating in defense of our disciplinary silos, but avoiding the habitual reactions to the state mandates, we–as the social studies coordinators– developed a working team across the university to support our new social studies strand of our elementary teacher preparation offerings. Rather than throwing our hands up in despair, we approached the mandates as a chance to reflect, collaborate, and build anew. The core planning team, which included other faculty from the traditional social studies disciplines, shared similar ethos and commitment to civic education, but our understandings of citizenship varied. Rather than an obstacle, our disciplinary differences brought innovation and clarity. As unifying civic themes emerged, we used them to construct a civically focused series of disciplinary and teacher education courses (Beaubien, et al., 2021). As our collaboration progressed, we also recognized that our work—if we seized it—was the work of democracy and deeply rooted in the common good. We did seize it, and as we became more empowered, we expanded the civic pedagogies in our classrooms to campus-wide learning communities and thoughtfully targeted professional development.

Integrating Disciplinary and Civic Learning in the Classroom

University courses are already overstuffed with content and long lists of objectives, and the new disciplinary courses in our elementary teacher education social strand were no different. Due to the state mandates to reduce credit hours, we were forced to merge and integrate. The history course covers Michigan in the development of United States history, and another new course integrated economics and political science standards. It would be easy to spend our class time lecturing on the content, but citizenship development is core to PK-12 social studies standards (National Council for the Social Studies, [NCSS], 2013).

Taking Stock

In 2019, when we began our program overhaul, we asked elementary education students enrolled in the original program to write about their feelings and experiences taking social studies courses. Their responses were difficult for us to read, but our understanding of the student experiences in their civic development was essential. One student wrote that they believed “social studies involved facts and information crammed down your throat at an incomprehensible rate”, and another reflected, “I thought I would have to rely mostly on a textbook and teach my students facts that they would ‘need to know’ for whatever reason.” The words “boring” and “dread” appeared in nearly every response, and alarmingly, students lacked any personal connection to the disciplines or—as one student wrote, “connected social studies with critical thinking, citizenship, ethical reasoning, or social action.” The list of what they wished they had learned included: what politicians specifically do, the history of politics, what taxes do, issues of economic equity, how the Constitution impacts me, gender bias, global and local poverty, the health care system, our roles in the community, social problem solving, and more honest stories about the past. In sum, our elementary education students wanted to learn the knowledge that would help them engage as citizens and how to teach these things to their future young learners. In many ways, we failed them, but we also found hope and optimism in their hunger to grow their civic knowledge.

Teaching Civics Across the Disciplines

Sustainable civic education, according to Bernstein et al. (2011), cannot be an add-on to already content-heavy courses; rather, it must be the vehicle to achieve the objectives. If content is taught with citizenship, students will acquire civic dispositions that connect them to disciplinary knowledge and ways of thinking. The authors add that there is no script to civics teaching and learning and that each discipline contributes to elements of citizenship development, and in a previous edited volume (Smith et al., 2010), they showcase a range of models–several unlikely areas– that demonstrate that citizenship across the curriculum is attainable. Our experiences affirm their assertion, and by explicitly weaving civic aims and the language of citizenship identity into our courses, students have come to make connections between the disciplines and their readiness for and ability to teach civic knowledge, skills, and virtues. However, it is not enough to impose democracy. If we want to change teachers’ practices, we must clarify the democratic purposes that guide those practices. Like Barton (2019), we believe that “pre-service teachers have to see democracy, talk democracy, live and breathe democracy until they want it so badly that they can no longer imagine a classroom that doesn’t promote democracy” (pg. 182).

Michigan in the Development of the United States. Maher teaches the Michigan-United States history course for elementary education students and frames her social science and content objectives under the lens of becoming a citizen historian. Rather than the consumption and regurgitation of historical facts, students develop historical thinking skills that position civic learning at the forefront–to teach and learn history to be better prepared citizens. While following the disciplinary emphasis of the C3 Framework (NCSS, 20133), Maher also joins Barton and Levstik (2004) in the belief that “history can help citizens in collaboration for the common good” (pg. x). Her reimagined course also provides the opportunity to connect students to the local stories where they will one day teach, wrestle with social issues, and find joy in funds of local knowledge. A culminating experience includes going into elementary schools, where the university students teach the young learners about their local history through learning to read primary sources like photographs, maps, and newspapers. When done intentionally, the doing of local history is the doing of democracy (Smith & Sobel, 2010), and in a dramatic change from the reflections in our planning phase, one student wrote, “I now know that everyone can be a historian. I can use history to be an advocate, “and another reflected, “I care about being a teacher that knows about the place where I will teach and how that area developed and the lasting effects of things past events on the community.” Emerging from the citizen historian orientation and community learning empowers civic identity development and a sense of stewardship.

Politics and Economics for Civic Life. Beaubien teaches another new course in the elementary education series that integrates economics and political science. Again, not daunted by the amount of content, the course employs a liberal arts approach to the teaching of civic understanding and virtues: the pursuit of knowledge and truth, informed academic debate, and Constitutional democracy (Carrese, 2024, pg. 6). She uses a range of Socratic discussions and Structured Academic Controversies (see Schmidt & Pinkney, 1997) to engage with material, including historical and contemporary Supreme Court cases that shape our political, social, and economic thinking. Well-aligned to the EAD (2021), the students–future elementary teachers–are well-equipped with working notions of civil disagreement and can use “reasonable speech and writing when criticizing views or policies” in times of disagreement (pg. 26).

Inquiry (Colby et al., 2007) is another essential civic disposition, so in this course, students also learn content by engaging in the development of a C3 inquiry arc (NCSS, 2013). For the summative project, each poses a compelling civic question, gathers sources, and shares their arguments. Most impressively, they present their framework in a way that could be used to teach elementary students. They have included a range of topics: why we pay taxes, the Bill of Rights, the Electoral College, and compound interest. Beaubien invites faculty, administration, other students, and classroom teachers to a student showcase on the final day of class. By going public with student work, this event not only models the potential of authentic pedagogy (Newman, et al., 1996) it also acts as an informal–yet effective–invitation for others to join our work and expands the democratic culture of our campus community.

University faculty and lecturers are overworked and stretched thin. It is difficult to imagine that we have the time or ability to make meaningful civic change at the individual level. Still, if each instructor commits to civic teaching and learning in a way that aligns and integrates with their discipline, powerful change is possible.

Harnessing the Power of Learning Communities

During our program planning, the initial small team from across four disciplines worked closely to develop the new courses, shared teaching strategies, and discussed assessment methods. Still, perhaps most importantly, we developed a sense of camaraderie and collective resilience. While not a formal learning community, in retrospect, that is how we operated (Cox, 2001; 2024). The two authors were empowered by our accomplishments in our classrooms and saw the potential of learning communities to make wider institutional change. In the 2022-23 academic year, ten faculty and lecturers from across seven departments answered our call. As a learning community, we discussed relevant readings and civic data, invited guest speakers from other universities engaging in civic projects, and hosted three larger events that included more faculty and university administrators, members of the community, and PK-12 teachers. Over the year, our learning community of ten engaged nearly 100 other campus community members and partners in civic planning and shared ideas for teaching and learning.

Embrace the Unique Civic Lived Experiences

In addition to our disciplinary differences, we all come to civic work with differing experiences and journeys of civic identity development, so for our first learning community gathering, we planned a reflective exercise that asked participants to track their conscious and unconscious understanding of citizenship. We adapted the activity from Ehrenworth et al.’s (2021) The Civically Engaged Classroom, and while written for an upper elementary classroom and a different topic, the activity has produced rich discussions about how members began to identify as citizens from the family dinner table to media representations to learning experiences to the access to community opportunities. We have used this activity several times in other settings. While participants have a range of lived experiences, it has been a deeply unifying and informative exercise on the development of civic identity and issues of access. We encourage learning groups—formal and informal–to spend 20-30 minutes writing down their conscious and unconscious civic experiences and sharing them with one another. This has also been a powerful exercise to do with students as it provides a qualitative snapshot of student perspectives, experiences, dispositions, and civic skills.

Ditch the Definitions and Work Towards a Mission

Like other civically focused learning communities (Bernstein, et al., 2011) and civic researchers (Campbell et al., 2012), we agreed that coming to one definition of “civic education” is a challenge. Each discipline contributes different skills and excels at different disposition development, and consensus, we feared, would be a time-consuming endeavor. Rather, we used meeting time to identify areas of civic learning that would serve the development of our students: discussion techniques that promote civil, controversial conversations, methods for cultivating belonging, and strategies for fostering democratic culture across our university. We planned professional learning around the first two items and went to work on crafting a mission statement that could serve our wider aims. We implemented Rogers’ (2021) visioning framework and identified the good things that were already happening on campus around civic education and the institutional barriers that created obstacles. We also listed the things that we felt made it difficult for our students to engage in civic engagement and learning. In our case, student time constraints are a major barrier since many of our students live off campus, work, and/or care for family. The group also felt that our students—and many faculty—struggled to engage in controversial conversations. We identified avoidance as another theme. By categorizing our generated lists and sharing more of our thinking and experiences, we clarified our collective institutional understanding of civic learning and specific actions we can take in our classrooms and across our campus.

At the conclusion of our formal, year-long learning community in 2023, we committed to our mission: A community of educators who will push for the realization of a truly democratic university through organizing, professional development, outreach, and infrastructure building. It may seem like a simple statement, but the benefits of our community were countless. Most importantly, it is the social networking that makes civic work more sustainable, and across our university and in our communities, there is a growing action-oriented group of individuals who know who to call for brainstorming, celebrating, venting, and inspiration and continue to collaborate on a range of civic-focused curricular and research projects. As EAD’s (2021) nonpartisan scholars urge PK-12 schools to undertake as a mission at the university level, we are renewing our institution’s ecosystem of civic education (pg. 16).

Using Civic Audits to Inform Professional Learning

Schools at all levels do more than teach reading and writing. Schooling also shapes our view of the world and our place in it. Probably without even realizing it, a person comes to define and identify a good citizen inside the classroom, but what defines “good” varies (Westheimer, 2015). We also know that notions of citizenship change over time (Dalton, 2007), and as Parker (2003) argues for K-12 schools, we also contend that it is essential for university leaders to get inside their institutions as sites of citizenship development. Engaging in ongoing evaluation of student civic skills, knowledge, behaviors, and experiences is imperative for creating and assessing curricular, programmatic, and structural changes (The National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement, 2012; Illinois Civics Hub, 2021). As previously captured, our course reflections have been invaluable for selecting relevant topics, targeting specific skills, and assessing growth. Trying to get inside our institution even more deeply, in the 2022-23 academic year, we created and administered a civic survey to both undergraduate students (N=365) and teaching faculty and instructors (N=86) to gauge student experiences in the classroom, track civic engagement behaviors, and evaluate their civic skills. We adapted sections of Colby et al.’s (2007) tool that measures civic experiences, knowledge, skills, and efficacy (see also Bernstein, 2011) and added items from Eristi and Erdem’s (2017) media literacy tool. We also added sections that asked respondents to rank order democratic dispositions and skills. While the findings have been useful on multiple fronts and inform a future research project, we immediately used the data to inform professional development and student learning.

Prioritizing Critical Thinking

One section of both the student (see Appendix A) and instructor survey (see Appendix B) probed respondents to rank order the top three civic virtues and dispositions that they felt were most important for a democracy. Recognizing that new patterns of citizenship are constantly evolving (Dalton, 2007), we compared the values and priorities of the older generation of faculty with the ideals of our largely younger students. Critical thinking emerged as a dominant point of commonality. Twenty-five percent of students picked as their first choice, and 52.6% selected in their top three. For faculty, 32.5% were selected as first choice and 65.1% had selected in their top three. No other dispositions were ranked in the top three, and other rankings varied dramatically between students and instructions.

A critical-thinking citizenry is considered by many to be essential for sustaining democracy (Colby et al., 2007; hooks, 2010; Nussbaum, 1998). While this finding was not surprising, in our experiences, we have found that critical thinking has become a parroted and often a poorly articulated concept. When we ask our teacher education students what it means to think critically, they are rarely able to define or articulate how to assess it. Like citizenship education, it is also understood and enacted differently by different disciplines. Given that the idea of critical thinking is a highly valued yet a fuzzy concept to many, we prioritized it in our professional development planning. In the fall of 2023, we hosted a critical thinking workshop and invited both instructors and students. The session activities modeled critical thinking teaching strategies as a vehicle for deep diving into what it means. We used a rank order activity where participants rank-ordered five elements of thinking, and we held a mini-Structured Academic Controversy where we grappled with the question, should teachers share their political opinions and perspectives with students? Approximately 20 undergraduate students and 20 faculty/lecturers attended and worked in mixed groups, and while only 2.5 hours, the workshop was impactful. For several weeks, multiple instructors reported using the strategies or making changes to assignments and lessons to make critical thinking clearer. Students have repeatedly asked to host more workshops where they can work, talk, and think with instructors rather than being told what good thinking is supposed to look like.

Targeting Media Literacy Skills

For more than a decade, media literacy has been included in the battery of necessary civic skills (De Abreu & Mihailidis, 2013), and recently, UNESCO (2023) has added media literacy to its list of civic priorities. Given its importance in today’s civic sphere, we included media literacy in the list of civic skills that we asked participants to rank as most important. Given all the public and academic concerns about fake news, we were surprised that media literacy was not included in the top five rankings by faculty and was second to last by students. Since presenting our findings to small groups across campus, other stakeholders were also surprised that media literacy was not ranked higher, but we have come to see that many view critical literacy as something that encompasses media literacy.

We also asked students (see Appendix A) to report how often they engage in the domains of media literacy (Eristi & Erdem, 2017) in their courses. In the companion faculty survey (see Appendix B), we asked respondents to evaluate students in these domains—access, evaluate, analyze, and communicate. Faculty respondents evaluated students high in their ability to access media (My students can use various media tools to access information, audio, images, and other data). Still, alarmingly, respondents ranked students low on the evaluation of the media domain (My students can identify the credibility, trustworthiness, and relevance of information from media sources). This was the lowest-ranked area out of the entire section, but not out of line with other research findings (McGrew, et al., 2019). We conclude that media literacy continues to be haphazardly understood and taught (Rackaway, 2013) and question if our students’ critical thinking skills are translating to media sources. Our findings will assist instructors and programs in our targeting teaching and professional learning. We are sharing our data with the university’s general education information and literacy subcommittee to support their planning, and given the upcoming election, we are also supporting fall workshops with students and faculty around political media literacy.

Next Steps

Our two civic audits have been essential tools in supporting our civic work across campus. They provided us with a snapshot of our campus’s civic climate and gaps in civic areas that we have been able to address through learning communities. There were also limitations to our survey design and implementation. We emailed the student audit to a subset of undergraduate students, and the response rate was less than 10%. Still, the surveys serve as a pilot for a longitudinal study that we are creating to evaluate the incoming civic skills, knowledge, and efficacy of our elementary education students, the impact of our program, and post-graduation civic teaching behaviors. Longitudinal studies connecting higher education to democratic practices—especially beyond voting—are missing in the body of civic scholarship (Hulbert & Harkins, 2024). In the sphere of PK-12 classrooms, research also highlights that even when teachers learn impactful civic-centered pedagogies, they avoid topics that they deem controversial or political (Stanford, 2022). Given these gaps and issues, assessing the inputs, outputs, and long-term effects is an essential next step for our teacher education program and a step we argue should also be undertaken at the campus level.

Conclusion

Dewey (1916) said it best when he penned, “democracy needs to be born anew every generation, and education is the midwife” (pg. 122). In the 21st century, universities play an essential role in its ongoing renewal, but this responsibility has waned under current conditions. Those who work in higher education are inundated with discussions of declining enrolments, rising fees, student credit hours, and job market demands, and many of us feel overwhelmed even before we begin considering the current internal and global threats to democracy. It is hard not to feel despair, but there are many small actions we can take in our classrooms and grow across our campuses. By weaving civic teaching into courses and recognizing the power of an informal learning community, we were inspired to move our work from the programmatic level to a formal campus-wide community. Through mission-making and community outreach, our work is slowly but surely building sustainable foundations for ongoing civic action. We also found student and faculty audits serve a purpose beyond the traditional research agenda, and our findings—directed internally—have informed campus discussions and our ongoing professional learning. The university campus should act as a “participatory showcase of democracy” (McGowan, 2016, pg. 587), which is what we will continue to do long after any election or mandate.

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Appendix A

Referenced Items of Student Civic Audit Tool

Here are a list of skills and areas of knowledge. Identify and rank order the top 3 that you believe are the most important for sustaining a strong democracy.

( ) Having a global perspective

( ) Critical media literacy skills

( ) Skills of civil dialogue and moral deliberation

( ) Knowledge of local concerns, issues, and assets

( ) An understanding of democratic theories

( ) A sense of personal responsibility

( ) Leadership dispositions and skills

( ) Critical thinking skills

( ) Habits of self-reflection

( ) Skills for collective decision making

( ) An understanding of their chosen discipline connection to their participation as a citizen

( ) An understanding of how American government is structured

( ) An understanding of the common good

The following statements refer to your experiences in your courses and how you feel as a member of the university and wider community. Indicate the frequency of each activity.

	Never	Very Rarely	Rarely	Occasionally	Frequently	Very Frequently
My professors and instructors plan cooperative, group projects that teach skills of collaboration.
In my courses, I learn how my major connects to citizenship and/or community engagement.
My professors and instructors plan cooperative, group projects that teach skills of collaboration.
In my courses, I learn leadership and organizing skills.
In my courses, I learn to locate credible sources of information.*
In my time at my university, I have gone to see speakers who discuss social issues, political topics, and/or the community.
In my courses, I learn to critically read media sources.*
In my courses, I learn about perspectives different from my own in ways that cause me to think.
My professors and instructors effectively facilitate controversial discussions and dialogue.
In my courses, I research and present about public policies, social issues, current events, and/or topics that are considered political.
In my courses, I have opportunities to engage with the community through outside of class placements and experiences.
My professors and instructors provide opportunities for students to reflect on our assumptions, points of view, and/or identities in connection to learning about political and social topics.
At my university, I participate in student organizations, clubs, and/or other affiliated groups that give me opportunities to engage with the wider community.
In my courses, professors and instructors avoid political discussions or debates.

Note: Items were adapted from Colby et al. (2007). The two items with stars were adapted from Eristi and Erdem’s (2017).

Appendix B

Referenced Sections of Instructor Civic Audit Tool