The Educating for American Democracy (EAD) initiative works to improve k12 history and civic education. One of EAD’s contributions is a list of five “Design Challenges.” Each challenge names tensions between a pair of valid principles.

The tensions are not resolvable. Instead, we encourage teachers (and everyone else involved in civics and history education) to keep the five challenges in mind as they design and offer classes and other programs. We propose that materials, curricula, and pedagogy will be better if people always hold these tensions in mind.

At a meeting this weekend sponsored by the Alliance for Civics in the Academy, it occurred to me that a similar list might be useful for civic educators in higher education. But I don’t think the actual items would be the same. Here is a preliminary list of design challenges for college-level educators, just for consideration.

Realism and Inspiration

• How can we analyze and understand institutions’ tendency to limit or even suppress human agency while also inspiring students to participate?

Honesty and Appreciation

• How can we seriously study and discuss deep historical injustices without missing the value of excellent texts and other legacies from the past?

The Personal and the Institutional

• How can we explore the potential and the limitations of two sometimes competing ways of improving the world: strengthening our own character (broadly defined) and preserving or reforming institutions?

Text and Context

• How can we read and discuss common texts while also benefitting from the contextual knowledge that specialists offer about each specific work?
• How can we learn from both the arguments and testimony of exceptional people, such as great writers, and also from empirical patterns in large-scale human behavior?
• How can we learn from observations and analyses written long ago and from the latest social science?

Science and Values

• How can we learn by using techniques that minimize the influence of the observer’s values (science) while also rigorously investigating questions of value (normative inquiry)?

Citizens’ Roles and Career Pathways

• How can we educate students to play the generalist’s role of a citizen (in various contexts and communities) while also helping them to become professionals whose work can have civic benefits?

Pluralism and Shared Fate

• How can we seriously explore deep differences among human beings–as reflected in our topics of study and in our students’ and teachers’ backgrounds–while also teaching students to reason and work together at various scales, from the classroom though the nation to the globe?
• How can our assignments and discussions connect to students’ diverse cultural experiences and also stretch them to learn about ideas beyond their experience or contrary to their values?

Study and Experience

• How can students learn from being responsibly involved in communities despite not having extensive academic knowledge, and how can they study civic topics in the classroom without having extensive civic experience? (In other words, how can students do good in the world if they don’t already know a lot, and how can they grasp and assess texts and ideas about civic life if they have not already experienced much civic engagement?)

Choice and Commonality

• How can we encourage individuals to choose and display their diverse interests and agendas related to civics while also offering common experiences?
• How can we offer courses or other experiences for many or all students in a given institution without compromising quality?

Heritage and Innovation

• How can we introduce students to ideas, institutions, and practices inherited from the past while also helping them to learn to innovate beneficially in civic life?
• How can we develop both trustees and designers?

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(The fact that this list is longer than the EAD’s list of challenges should not imply that college-level education is more complicated or fraught than k12 education is. Quite the contrary. Instead, this list captures my own most recent thinking, and I would probably apply it to K12 as well.)

See also: The Educating for American Democracy Roadmap; Educating for American Democracy: the work continues