Inaugurated in Spring 2024 at a meeting sponsored by Stanford University and the Hoover Institution, the Alliance for Civics in the Academy is a nonpartisan network of instructors in higher education involved in teaching courses and developing academic programs aimed at civic education.
We understand civic education capaciously, as encompassing the knowledge, skills, dispositions, and experiences appropriate to the education of effective citizens and aspiring citizens in a constitutional democracy. While civic education is a broad field that includes K-12 and life-long learning, we believe that colleges and universities have a special and important role to play. Moreover, while leaders of educational institutions (college and university presidents, CEO’s of NGO’s, etc.) are essential to the success of civic education in the academy, we believe that they are well served by existing organizations. Finally, while we recognize that experiential learning is an essential part of civic education, there are also well-established existing organizations that promoting engagement. What has been lacking is an organization by and for those engaged directly in civics instruction. That is the gap that the ACA seeks to close.
Our membership represents a wide range of political, social, and cultural viewpoints. We suppose that the great diversity among American civics initiatives is a source of strength. The ACA brings together instructors at all career stages, liberal, conservative, and progressive, from red and blue states, teaching at public and private institutions, large and small. They work within different kinds of academic organizations (in departments, programs, centers, and schools). The curricula they teach feature different texts and their institutions offer students different practical experiences and opportunities for civic engagement. We suppose that each of us will become a better instructor through sharing what we have learned across those lines of difference.
The network is intended as a community of practice: Instructors are the community; the domain with which we are concerned is what citizens should learn if they are to preserve and make “more perfect” the practice of democracy, as collective self-government, under law, by citizens, in the context of a constitutional republic that is a commonly held public good. The ACA community of practice aims at sharing and aggregating what is known by those engaged in civic pedagogy in colleges and universities. The primary emphasis of the ACA is on coursework: Teaching students the knowledge and skills, and helping to develop the dispositions, that will enable them to participate actively and effectively in their communities and their nation. We suppose that the universe of courses relevant to civic education encompasses (at least) the humanities and social sciences, and that it involves both the exploration of normative issues and the use of evidence for testing factual claims.
We believe that a community of practice is especially valuable because some of the knowledge essential to effective civics teaching is tacit -civic education instructors depend on know-how, as well as mastery of an array of disciplinary knowledge as they guide students through a civics curriculum and help them to develop the necessary skills and cultivate the appropriate dispositions. The ACA is meant to foster instructor-to-instructor learning, and to facilitate sharing of resources that will enable each of us to be a better teacher of citizens and citizenship.
While highly diverse in our value commitments and pedagogic materials and methods, the members of the ACA broadly agree with the following statement of principles, which was written by the charter ACA members present at the inaugural meeting at Stanford University in April 2024:
Preparing students with civic skills, knowledge, and experience relevant to understanding and exercising the rights and duties of citizenship in a self-governing republic is a basic responsibility of American colleges and universities. Faculty must intentionally engage with historically significant competing arguments on contested questions of civic life, oppose indoctrination, and model the democratic values of open inquiry and freedom of expression. Civic education should be a shared intellectual activity, grounded in texts, aimed at building a practical capacity for listening to and acting together with others, including those of differing beliefs.
