Connecting Classrooms to Congress: New Social Studies Curriculum Aims to Boost Civic Education in a Polarized Nation
By Holly Ober
Faculty from the Graduate School of Education and the School of Public Policy at UC Riverside were awarded a highly competitive, $2 million grant from the Institute of Education Sciences, or IES. The project is a new collaboration between education and policy faculty, who will develop and test a social studies curriculum module that will give high school seniors an opportunity to meet with their member of Congress and then to reflect on that event through analytical writing. The project enables students to study a pressing issue - one that policymakers at the national level are grappling with - and then discuss that issue with their sitting member of Congress through an online deliberative town hall.
“We live in a time when there’s a lot of concern about the health of our democracy, and how to educate kids to participate in democracy,” said project co-leader Joseph Kahne, the Ted and Jo Dutton Presidential Professor of Education Policy and Politics and co-director of UC Riverside’s Civic Engagement Research Group. “The Connecting Classrooms to Congress initiative aims, in a tangible way, to create direct and informed dialog among the nation’s youth and between youth and their representatives.”