It is imperative that schools and communities give students opportunities to participate in active citizenship and prepare them with the important skills and dispositions needed to become informed citizens. Action civics is a promising practice that puts students at the heart of civics learning by providing them with the opportunity to learn about…

Walter Parker responds to Hanson and Howe's article, extending their argument to everyday classroom practice. He focuses on a popular learning activity called Structured Academic Controversy (SAC). SAC is pertinent not only to civic learning objectives but also to traditional academic-content objectives. SAC is at once a discourse structure, a…

Forest fires, as all natural disasters, have the potential to seriously affect both the environment and the social structure of a local community. Unlike some of the natural disasters, such as hurricanes, tornados and tsunamis which are unpredictable, the phenomenon of forest fires could be easily predicted and controlled, since the causes are…

This chapter presents an analysis on civic values in the Mexican and German youth population (high school education students), considering the set of capabilities and civic dispositions that mobilize young people of both countries, and which together reflect the calls "civic virtues", with the purpose of knowing what characterizes the…

Adult education programs should turn to the deliberative democracy movement in order to help their communities better address the "wicked problems" they face. The authors contend that due to the "wicked" nature of problems in the diverse democracies, communities must develop and sustain their capacity for deliberative democracy and collaborative…

We describe a non-statistics, data-based activity developed by the author for an interdisciplinary course on mathematics and politics that uses actual ballot data from the City of San Francisco, California. The assignment is appropriate for a general education audience and develops students' ability to work with data, improves their understanding…

Citizenship education is widely acknowledged as a necessary part of the school curriculum for various reasons. For young people, it is assumed that citizenship can best be learnt through the school curriculum. This means that teachers need to thoroughly understand what citizenship means and how to pass this knowledge on to students. This paper…

In this article sixth grade English/language arts and science teacher at Oldfield Middle School (Greenlawn, New York) Monica Zenyuh describes how she established a program called "Adopt-a-School" in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. Schools that wished to provide assistance would be matched with a grade, school, or district in devastated…

"To Obey or Disobey" should be a life question for all free people, but for the Israelis, who are in intractable war with their neighbors while facing constant rifts among themselves, it is a concrete problem they have to face every day. Therefore, the research question posed by this article is: How is obedience of laws or military…

The issue of language, specifically access to English, has emerged as a key concern for both U.S. policy-makers and immigrant communities alike. Many of these debates are framed by neoliberal and human capital perspectives, which view English as a set of skills and linguistic capital that are inextricably tied to employment opportunities and…

This article argues that in divided societies, civic education fails to fulfill one of its most important social role: creating a more inclusive society that allows a democratic dialogue to flow across different ideological, religious, and cultural communities. This failure is grounded in two main reasons. First, civics teachers are socially and…

We present findings from the first wave of a longitudinal study of civic and political engagement among undergraduate students at a mid-sized university in the Midwestern United States. We find that high school experiences of civic learning are a significant predictor of three of our four measures of civic and political engagement, namely, the…

When taught in an engaging manner, civic education can help stimulate and motivate students to excel in other academic areas, while simultaneously preparing them to be active citizens in the democracy. As an initial attempt to more systematically analyze civic education practice, this article presents four case studies of projects in one action…

The purpose of this study was to use the US naturalization test as a springboard to gauge the citizenship knowledge and notions of young adolescent students in Ohio and Georgia. The participants' citizenship knowledge was partially measured by administering questions from the US naturalization test in two case studies. Students from a range of…

This chapter explores elements that should be included in a service learning style internship program in urban community colleges. It provides theoretical background and descriptions of best practices for forming community partnerships, collaboratively developing learning outcomes, and aligning program design with institutional general education…