In this essay, Nicole Mirra and Antero Garcia explore how young people from six demographically distinct communities across the United States understand the social and political issues affecting their lives, engage in storytelling and dialogue across differences, and collaboratively imagine humanizing and hopeful civic futures. Drawing from…

This two-year quantitative study analyzes students' experiences during migration experiential learning study-abroad programs in 2017 and 2018 in Munich, Germany. U.S. students worked with German refugee organizations to gain a more comprehensive understanding about the political, social, and cultural complexity of Europe's current migration…

This essay provides an overview of the goals and activities of the Children's Defense Fund (CDF), an advocacy group headquartered in Washington, D.C. that works to improve the well-being of American children through systemic change and whose goal is to make it unacceptable for any child in the United States to grow up homeless, hungry, sick,…

Innovative Social Studies: Urban Elementary Schools, known as ISSUES, is a social studies program actively pursuing the profound social problems of our times by daily student involvement with solutions as part of the curriculum. Upper elementary and junior high students increase their understanding in active participation in community problem…

Last May the Office of Education organized a list of pamphlet material under the title "Public Affairs Pamphlets." While this tabulation was prepared primarily to meet the needs of the 10 public forum demonstrations then organizing programs of public discussion, it was widely used by libraries, forums of all kinds, social science teachers and…

Adults cannot be induced to go "back" to school but they can be assisted in continuing their education. The school, the university, forums, discussion groups, libraries, newspapers, magazines, the radio, and the motion pictures all have roles to play in making education a continuing process for adults. The public forum demonstrations,…

This bulletin has been prepared in response to many hundreds of requests for information about public affairs forums. It is impossible in such limited space to give a comprehensive description of the forum method of adult civic education or its application in various parts of the country. However, the authors have tried to include in the bulletin…

Plans and programs come in response to need. Citizens of our democracy have need of greater opportunities for truth-seeking under competent guidance. The people are hungry for increased understanding of the problems which beset them and their communities. They have a right to expect their institutions of education to give them help in their study…