Argues that geography educators need to give greater attention to the teaching of professional ethics as part of their contribution to the education of responsible citizens. Introduces an approach that couples the case method with a jurisprudential inquiry model, asking students to resolve professional ethical dilemmas through publicly defensible…

Explores the authoritarian model of education that has predominated historically and internationally, and argues that in recent years international political and educational developments have dramatically strengthened the position of democratic alternatives to such schooling. Concludes by discussing the correlation of educational effectiveness…

Explores relationships between the civic development of high school students and various factors, such as characteristics of the student and the environment. Features five dimensions of civic development: (1) political knowledge; (2) attention to politics; (3) political participation skills; (4) political efficacy; and (5) tolerance of diversity.…

Describes a project, Comparative Lessons for Democracy, to develop and publish lessons for high school students. Lessons compare institutions and processes of constitutional democracy in the United States and five post-communist countries involved in the Civitas international civic education programs: Latvia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary,…

Describes a ten-day curricular unit with three goals: motivating students to vote, helping students to understand the importance of political parties, and having students identify a variety of effective means for influencing the political process. Incorporates historical and experiential elements key to motivating students to get involved. (DSK)

The eight chapters of this theme issue report on analyses of civics education in 17 secondary schools in 6 countries. The analyses focused on national policies on civic education, the impact of these policies on the school curriculum, and the implementation of these policies in school practices. Overall, studies suggest that schools are…

Discusses the use of the National Issues Forum's (NIF's) town meetings in efforts to increase citizen participation in democratic processes. Describes the Catholic adaptation of the NIF approach, providing examples of its use at the high school, college, and community level. (MAB)

Studied teacher-student verbal interactions and questioning and students' curriculum-related performance for bilingual students in Norway in small and large mainstream civics classes. Findings for 77 fourth graders show that bilingual minority students in general, and bilingual minority girls in particular, benefit from civics lessons in small…

This article examines the image of the nation in the history textbooks of post-Soviet Ukraine. Ukraine is an interesting case as it is the second most populous Soviet successor state--48 million inhabitants according to the 2001 census--and harbors a population with a complicated ethnolinguistic structure. This demographic portrait differs from…

A long recommended central purpose of civic education has been preparation of students for responsible democratic life. The authors of this paper contend that teaching students the domain-specific process of historical thinking and the habits of mind that are incorporated into this discipline-specific act will contribute to students' ability to…

The war in Iraq and the aftermath are receiving media attention around the globe. A plethora of media reports from many other countries is now available online in English. This article recommends possible approaches to developing comparative media studies and provides URLs to specific sources. The NCSS standards addressed by these lessons include:…

This activity is designed to help teachers engage students in a critical examination of the challenges embedded in balancing economic, environmental, and immigration policy. Students take on the roles of environmental and elderly advocacy groups, both for and against increased immigration. By taking on the personalities and interests of these…

Students' ignorance of civics is often viewed with alarm, as in interpretations of the 1998 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP); yet adults' incomplete knowledge of government is considered by many to be reasonable and acceptable. We show that aggregate distributions of political knowledge are actually quite similar for students and…

There is a moment, when rifling through archives, when a subject, a substantive line of interpretation, gradually emerges. Sometimes returning over time, one recognizes the significance of an image or document that has been ignored heretofore. This was the case when looking through boxes of photographs, freely linked to schools, searching for …

In this reply to my critics, I begin by clearing away some misunderstandings: I do not reject autonomy and critical self-reflection as possible bases for political judgment and action; I do not dissent from the standard view that some civic education should be mandatory; and I claim neither that each citizen need possess civic virtue nor that…