I’d welcome recommendations\u00a0of particularly promising\u00a0undergraduate courses or\u00a0programs\u00a0that are intended to boost students’ civic knowledge, skills, and engagement. I’m especially interested in\u00a0two approaches: 1) requiring a specific course with\u00a0a civic focus for\u00a0all students at a given institution, or\u00a02) offering a major, minor, or certificate program for especially interested students.<\/p>\n
Civic education at the college level may\u00a0address\u00a0contested concepts (justice, citizenship, democracy), skills (from facilitating meetings to reading regression tables), bodies of knowledge (how a bill becomes a law; the texture of the local geographical community; social determinants of health …), self-understandings and identities (“Who am I and what is my role in the community?”), and relationships among students or between students and others. The list of possible outcomes is so long that one reasonable\u00a0view is: A civic education is a liberal education–it’s the whole curriculum and co-curriculum. But it’s valuable to consider what to offer (or perhaps even require) in the finite span of one course or one major.<\/p>\n
Many colleges and universities\u00a0require first-year seminars. Students can typically choose a\u00a0course from a menu, but all the seminars\u00a0create a similar experience, <\/em>which is supposed to\u00a0build a community among the students. To the extent that first-year seminars address issues of civic importance, this is also a way of teaching ideas and skills relevant to citizenship. At Cal. State Chico, the guiding principle of the first year seminar program is “Public Sphere Pedagogy<\/a>.” Chico aims to shift\u00a0“from a typical classroom setting” to real public dialogues with “diverse campus and community members.”<\/p>\n Other institutions require a particular course or sequence of courses for all students. Columbia’s Core Curriculum is a distinguished example<\/a> that dates to the early 1900s. Since Columbia’s Core course on\u00a0“Literature Humanities” has included the\u00a0Iliad<\/em>, Oresteia, <\/em>and\u00a0Inferno <\/em>for all of its 75 years, every Columbia College student since WWII has read those books. “The communal learning–with all students encountering the same texts and issues at the same time–and the critical dialogue experienced in small seminars are the distinctive features of the Core.” One could focus mainly on formal, historical, or theological issues while reading texts like the Inferno<\/em>; but\u00a0among the topics emphasized\u00a0in the Core seminars are explicitly civic ones: “What does it mean, and what has it meant to be part of a community?” “By what rules should we be governed?”<\/p>\n