Teaching Students to be Political in a Nonpartisan Way: Reflections from Action Civics Education Across Red and Blue States

ABSTRACT

Using a student-centered approach, Generation Citizen’s (GC) action civics model helps students gain civic knowledge and skills as they work together to take action on a local issue in their community. This paper draws upon reflections from GC’s decade-plus of teaching action civics at scale in middle and high schools across the United States, highlighting drivers for nonpartisan civics education efforts in Texas, Oklahoma, California, Alabama, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New York. Reflections on GC’s work also point to the opportunities and challenges that GC encountered as it scaled We suggest future directions for research and practice for nonpartisan action civics work into the next decade.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sarah Andes

Sarah Andes is a Research and Impact Fellow at the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) at Tufts University and the former Senior Director of Programming at Generation Citizen. Her work is centered around building K-12 classrooms, schools, and districts with civic learning at the center.

Jason C. Fitzgerald

Jason C. Fitzgerald, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Social Studies Education at Monmouth University. His research focuses on empirical and philosophical questions of historical and civic thinking. A former social studies teacher, his work includes studies of action civics programming, instruction, and learning.

Alison K. Cohen

Alison K. Cohen, PhD, MPH, is an assistant professor of epidemiology & biostatistics at the University of California San Francisco and an affiliated researcher with the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) at Tufts University. An epidemiologist by training, she has experience studying action civics education and youth civic engagement inequities and is a co-editor of this special issue.

Scott Warren

Scott Warren is the former chief executive officer of Generation Citizen and a SNF Agora Visiting Fellow at Johns Hopkins University. He co-founded Generation Citizen in 2008 and has led Generation Citizen to become one of the pre-eminent civics education organizations in the country in the years since. He is the author of Generation Citizen: The Power of Youth in Politics (2019).