Making Civics Real: Patriotism and Foreign Policy
The students in this program are seniors at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, a public magnet school in Washington, DC.
In this lesson, U.S. government teacher Alice Chandler has her students create a Museum of Patriotism and Foreign Policy. The lesson alternates between whole-class discussion and small-group committee work as students create a gallery for the museum using their respective arts concentration as the medium.
The lesson concludes with students presenting their gallery contributions in dance, music, theatrical performances, and visual presentations, along with rationales for their selections. This lesson highlights small-group work as a constructivist methodology.
Making Civics Real: Civic Engagement
This program shows a group of eleventh and twelfth grade students at Anoka High School in Minnesota engaging in service learning - a requirement for graduation.
In this human geography class taught by Bill Mittlefehldt, students work in teams to define a project, choose and meet with a community partner who can help educate them about the issue and its current status, conduct further research, and present the problem and a proposed solution first to their peers, and then to a special session of the Anoka City Council.
The primary methodology presented in this lesson is service learning.
Making Civics Real: Controversial Public Policy Issues
In this twelfth grade law class at Champlin Park High School in Minnesota, JoEllen Ambrose engages students in a structured discussion of a highly controversial issue - racial profiling - and connects student learning both to their study of due process in constitutional law and police procedure in criminal law.
Students begin by completing an opinion poll, which they discuss as a group. Students are then put into pairs in which they conduct research on the topic. Next, students participate in a debate in which each partnership argues both sides of the issue.
A debriefing discussion completes the lesson. The methodologies highlighted in this lesson include role playing and structured academic controversy.
Making Civics Real: Rights and Responsibilities of Students
Students in Matt Johnson’s 12th-grade law course at Benjamin Banneker Senior High School in Washington, DC, engage in a culminating activity to help them review and apply what they have learned. Students write and distribute one-page briefs of Supreme Court cases they have studied. Next, students are assigned to small groups and given hypothetical cases related to student rights cases from the Supreme Court’s 2001-2002 term. Students prepare their cases and present them to the Justices. Justices deliberate and present majority and dissenting opinions, after which the class discusses both the process and the disposition of the cases. This lesson highlights the use of case studies for synthesis and analysis.
Primary Sources: Workshops in American History - The Virginia Company: America's Corporate Beginnings
This workshop tells the story of America's corporate beginnings and explores Jamestown as a business operation. Using primary source documents, you can examine the Virginia Company's settlement in Jamestown as a case study in colonial economics and social dynamics, and debate why it failed and whether failure was avoidable.
Primary Sources: Workshops in American History - Common Sense and the American Revolution: The Power of the Printed Word
This workshop explores the power and importance of America's first "bestseller," Thomas Paine's Common Sense. Using the language of ordinary folk, Paine called for revolution and challenged many commonly held assumptions about government and the colonies' relationship to England. By looking at Common Sense, comparing it with the local declarations of independence, and then comparing it with the Declaration of Independence, you can explore the growing support for American independence in the 1770s.
Primary Sources: Workshops in American History - The Lowell System: Women in a New Industrial Society
In the earliest days of American industry, the Boston Manufacturing Company created an innovative, single-location manufacturing enterprise at Lowell, Massachusetts, that depended on the recruitment of women millworkers. Using primary source documents, you can examine the changing face of gender, class, and labor in the 1830s and 1840s through the lens of the Lowell System and determine if Lowell was a real opportunity for working women or a dead end.
Primary Sources: Workshops in American History - Concerning Emancipation: Who Freed the Slaves?
This workshop examines the complex issues surrounding the end of slavery in the United States. It addresses President Lincoln's attitudes and actions before and during the Civil War and the role of the enslaved in attaining their own emancipation. Using primary source documents, you can deepen your understanding of the influences on Lincoln and the different forces at work that contributed to the end of slavery.
Primary Sources: Workshops in American History - Cans, Coal, and Corporations: The 1893 World's Columbian Exposition
This workshop investigates the new American vision that resulted from the explosion of interstate transportation and industrial technology in the second half of the Nineteenth century. Drawing on essays written to celebrate the Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, you can reflect on this new perspective, both cosmopolitan and expansionist, and its implications for the future.
Primary Sources: Workshops in American History - The Census: Who We Think We Are
Beginning in 1790 and every ten years since, American citizens have gotten a new view of who they are through the census that is mandated by the U.S. Constitution. Reformulated racial and ethnic categories reflect both policy priorities and changes in how we think about ourselves and how the government allocates resources. In this workshop, you can explore your identity through historic census forms and analyze recent data to formulate spending priorities for a sample community.