Civic Prompts: Making Civic Learning Routine Across the Disciplines

Posted by American Association of Colleges and Universities on September 21, 2015

This publication, Civic Prompts: Making Civic Learning Routine Across the Disciplines, seeks to embrace the 1947 recommendation from The President’s Commission on Higher Education uttered almost seventy years ago. Civic Prompts strives to translate this idealistic call into the everyday teaching world of faculty members who are responsible for constructing the many layered components of each course offered in their department. Designed for faculty members in particular, Civic Prompts offers in the fourth section of this publication a practical set of steps to use to infuse within majors, specialized studies, and interdisciplinary programs key civic and democratic concerns affecting the public good. It also takes to heart the Call to Action from a more recent publication, A Crucible Moment: College Learning and Democracy’s Future (2012), released at the White House, in which higher education was urged to “define within departments, programs, and disciplines the public purposes of their respective fields, the civic inquiries most urgent to explore, and the best way to infuse civic learning outcomes progressively across the major” (32).

http://www.aacu.org/sites/default/files/files/CLDE/CivicPrompts.pdf