Rebuilding Civic Education

Educating for American Democracy (EAD) is an unprecedented effort that convened a diverse group of scholars and educators to create a Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy. This required acquiring a deep, evidence-based understanding of key issues from many perspectives and creatively designing, developing, and evaluating new approaches. The roadmap provides guidance and an inquiry framework that states, local school districts, and educators can use to transform teaching of history and civics to meet the needs of a diverse 21st century K–12 student body. The work was supported by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the U.S. Department of Education.

The webinar speakers described how the initiative brought together hundreds of ideologically, philosophically, and demographically diverse historians, political scientists, and educators. The project required multiple task forces and working groups, each one grappling with a key design challenge. Together, the collaborators learned to approach disagreement and controversy as an opportunity for learning rather than as a problem to be overcome and, in doing so, they achieved much greater consensus than they had anticipated. The creative tension that resulted from conflicting priorities and perspectives was productively harnessed, leading to energetic debate, new perspectives, and alternative approaches that would not otherwise have been developed. The presenters shared their experience and thoughts about how the lessons they learned may be applied to HIBAR research challenges in other fields.