For over a decade, I’ve been teaching people about the political process and how to be engaged citizens. So I suppose it’s only right that I get involved myself. For the last few months, there have been a lot of conversations around town about who would run for Board of Education. A few people approached […]
Category: General
I just finished Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, by David Epstein, and it’s got me thinking about a lot of things. The book is about a lot of things. It deals with chess, athletes, musicians, artists, and scientists. The overarching premise – as you might discern from the title – is that […]
2020 has been a helluva year. It brought an end to the Trump presidency, so maybe civics education can get back to normal next year. But it also brought Covid – and along with it remote learning and lots of anxiety. Teaching remotely is tough, but going to work in a school building where Covid […]
When COVID-19 prompted schools to physically close last spring, one of your first thoughts was probably, “How am I going to teach remotely?” More specifically, “How am I going to teach civics remotely?” Virtual learning poses a lot of problems, and teachers around the country struggled to address those issues all spring. As the fall […]
Today is Constitution Day, so I thought it would be timely to share a book review of a quick read that you might enjoy – On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, by Timothy Snyder. In On Tyranny, Tim Snyder draws on the history of the 20th century to share some lessons for those […]
Rock the Vote is nothing new. They’ve been around since the 1990’s trying to get people out to vote and to exercise their voting rights. But in the last few years, they’ve tried something new. They created a program called “Democracy Class,” and they partnered with organizations across the country to teach lessons in schools […]
If you’re reading this blog, you probably agree that as a country we can do a better job of teaching civics education. So I don’t have to waste time explaining that. I’ll bet you’re much more interested in how we can do a better job. And that’s where these six research based methods for teaching […]
Paulo Freire was a Brazilian educator with some pretty radical ideas about education and its role in creating better societies. To Freire, education was a revolutionary act. His most famous work is the book Pedagogy of the Oppressed. He discussed his practice of literacy education in Brazil. Through his service as the director of adult […]
Once upon a time, you needed a phone line in your house. Then television got more complicated, and you needed cable. And then along came this thing called the Internet, and you had to pay for that, too. Have you thought lately about how much you’re paying the cable company for all these services? I […]
There was one thing in particular in last week’s civic education news round-up that caught my eye: the New Hampshire Legislative Youth Advisory Council and it’s youth forum. What exactly is this legislative youth advisory council, and are there more like it? I’ve heard of local youth advisory committees and youth mayors. A few weeks […]