Civic Innovation Featured in National Showcase
The Emory & Henry College Civic Innovation Department will be prominently featured in a case study on AAC&U’s website as an institution that successfully uses a civic lens to enhance the design of the major.
The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) announced today that Emory & Henry College is one of twenty-two departments from institutions across the country that are providing models for how to make civic learning and democratic engagement an expectation for all students who major in a given discipline.
The Emory & Henry College Civic Innovation Department will be prominently featured in a case study on AAC&U’s website as an institution that successfully uses a civic lens to enhance the design of the major.
“These civic-rich departmental designs seek to increase students’ comprehension of their discipline’s investigations, enhance voice and agency, offer hands-on practice in collaboratively addressing challenging public problems, and introduce students to moral, ethical, and civic responsibility issues that are likely to be part of their professional lives,” Caryn McTighe Musil, senior scholar and director of civic learning and democracy initiatives, and director of the Civic Learning in the Major by Design project said.
The interdisciplinary program in Civic Innovation provides students with the skills and knowledge to be innovative problem-solvers and leaders in the non-profit, government, and private sectors, addressing issues of social justice, equality, and sustainable community development.
“Civic Innovation students take seriously the dynamics of their places, and are grounded in the twin values that all persons have the potential to make creative contributions to the common good, and that all places have the potential to be safe and healthy places for all their people,” said Tal Stanley, director of the Appalachian Center for Civic Life.
The AAC&U efforts are supported by a grant from the Endeavor Foundation, which aims to limit the civic-free zones within departments by providing guidance to colleges and universities as they tackle one of their most resistant, yet fertile, areas of civic learning by bringing it squarely into where students invest most of their academic attention: their majors.
The grant will also support national dissemination of some of the exemplary models through a session at AAC&U’s 2018 Annual Meeting, to be held January 24–27 in Washington, DC; a webinar in March 2018 for departments wanting to learn more about how to craft civic departmental designs; and seed grants to support departments in their efforts to incorporate public questions, consequences, issues, and pedagogies into their major requirements.
Open gallery
“Civic Innovation students take seriously the dynamics of their places, and are grounded in the twin values that all persons have the potential to make creative contributions to the common good, and that all places have the potential to be safe and healthy places for all their people,” said Tal Stanley, director of the Appalachian Center for Civic Life.