Definition: A teaching strategy that combines community service with learning from classroom instruction. Students engage in community service activities and apply the experience to personal and academic development. The aim is to benefit both the community and the learner.
Teach Lessons 1–3 to get your students ready to choose their issue and complete their CAP Proposal planners.
Teach Lessons 4 and 5 to prepare students to take civic actions and complete their Thinking It Through and Civic Action planners.
Supplemental Lessons are optional and anticipate topics that could help students as they work on their projects.
Download Webinar Presentations
Webinar 1: Get CAP Up and Running in Your Classroom
Webinar 2: The Project: Getting Your Students to Take Civic Action
Webinar 3: Showcasing Your Students Work: Culminating Activities and Assessment
Teachers start by exploring a current issue that echoes a unit’s essential theme. Investigating the unit's content sheds light on the theme as students apply their analytical skills during their study.
Students then return to related current issues and apply what they've learned to form and express their conclusions in class, for example through Deliberative Discourse or Socratic Seminar, and/or out in their community or on social media.
Throughout this work, students develop their sense of self by exploring their identity, worldview and concepts of justice.
At the federal level, we spend approximately $50 per student per year on STEM fields and approximately $0.05 per student per year on civics. A lack of consensus about the substance of history and civics—what and how to teach—has been a major obstacle to maintaining excellence. The Educating for American Democracy (EAD) initiative provides tools to make civics and history a priority so that we as a country can rebuild our civic strength to meet the modern challenges we are facing.
The EAD initiative demonstrates that an ideologically, demographically, and professionally diverse group can agree about history and civics content, as well as pedagogy (Source).