Civic Voices brings student voices from around the world into your classroom, gives your students a voice in global civic conversations and provides you with teaching tools to explore the intersection of culture and citizenship. This new comparative civic education resource is available free.
How it Works
Students who visit the site have the opportunity to participate in a unique survey that explores students’ perceptions of civic responsibility on a global scale. Students will get a printout of their results that educators can use to compare student opinions both within the class and across the globe.
Teachers can take student analysis further by assigning an essay that asks students what specific actions are important for civic engagement. The essay assignment can also be a class-wide competition. Teachers can submit the best essay from their class to Civic Voices for possible publication on the Web site.
Selected essays will be turned into classroom handouts that can be used to study how young citizens around the world think about their role in society. The essays join others collected from students across the globe during the 2007 International Project Citizen Showcase in Washington, D.C. Together, these essays provide insight about what students today expect from government, and what they feel their government should expect in return
Learning from the Data
Civic Voices also offers reading materials and classroom handouts to help teachers explore the concepts of culture, identity and citizenship with their students. We hope that you will find this resource helpful for engaging your students. We encourage you to try it and pass the link along to other colleagues. We would like to reach as many teachers as possible so that we can develop a diverse body of opinions from youth and contribute to the scholarly discourse on evolving citizenship norms.