Coming Soon: Weekly Civic Educator Spotlights

When writing the story of your life, don’t let anyone else hold your pen.

The 2017 NEA Leadership Summit closed with NEA Secretary Treasurer Princess Moss sharing this quote. She urged the attendees to pick up the pen and author their own stories instead of letting someone else tell the story of public education.

Last Sunday, we published our first civic educator spotlight and I told the story of how I implemented service learning and hosted a blood drive at my high school. It is my hope and plan that this will be a regular Sunday feature on a weekly or semi-weekly basis.

This video is the closing session of the 2017 NEA Leadership Summit in Orlando.

Princess’ message at the Leadership Summit was clear. Other people are trying to tell the story of education. Instead, we must author our own story.

This applies to us as civic educators as much as it applies to us as education advocates and union activists. There are people who want the story of civics education to be a test of facts. There are people who don’t see the value in reading the world, and just want to make sure kids can close read a passage. But there are great civic educators out there in New Jersey and around the country, and it’s time for us to tell our story.

If you’re one of those civic educators, than I humbly ask you to pick up that pen. It’s not about patting yourself on the back, it’s about staking a claim for civic education and showing people what we do. Head over to the submission guidelines, and fill out the form to tell me what you want to write about. I want to hear your story, and more importantly I want to share it with our readers.

There are a few things in the pipeline at the moment, but we’ll fit you in to the publishing schedule soon. For now, stay tuned. Because we’re about to get a visit from a very special guest in a week or two to tell you his story …

The image at the top of this post is courtesy of A. Birkan Caghan on Flickr.