Civic Learning Partnerships and Past Projects
Partnerships
Bringing Theory to Practice
Bringing
Theory to Practice (BTtoP) encourages colleges and universities to
reassert their core purposes as educational institutions, not only to
advance learning and discovery, but to advance the potential and
well-being of each individual student, and to advance education as a
public good that sustains a civic society.
The Council of Europe
AAC&U collaborates with The Council of Europe in their mission
to highlight and advance the contributions of higher education to
democracy on college and university campuses, their local communities
and wider society.
The Democracy Commitment
The Democracy Commitment is a national initiative that will provide a national platform for the development and expansion of programs and projects aiming at engaging community college students in civic learning and democratic practice.
Film Your Issue
The Association of American Colleges and Universities is proud to continue its partnership with Film Your Issue (FYI), an ambitious outreach to young Americans to engage them in the public dialogue about pressing issues of importance to them.
The Democracy Imperative
The Democracy Imperative at the University of New Hampshire is
a new community of practice and national network of multidisciplinary
scholars, campus leaders and civic leaders in the fields of democracy
building, public deliberation, democratic dialogue, and social change.
Past Projects
Elon University Research Seminar on Engaged Undergraduate Learning
Elon University and AAC&U co-sponsored a national, two-year multidisciplinary seminar for college faculty and staff to facilitate the development of innovative research and pedagogy on issues central to engaged undergraduate learning. The inaugural seminar focused on teaching democratic thinking.
Elizabeth Minnich, senior scholar at AAC&U, served as the intellectual anchor for the seminar.
As a group, seminar participants explored the existing literature and conducted research on how students come to learn and to develop democratic thinking habits, how to teach for democratic thinking, and how best to assess and document democratic thinking processes. Seminar participants developed and conducted research projects at their home institutions to investigate how students learn to think democratically. More information for the 2009-2011 seminar may be accessed at http://org.elon.edu/ers/.
The Center for Liberal Education and Civic Engagement
Founded in 2003, the Center for Liberal Education and Civic Engagement aimed to deepen the understandings of the relationship between liberal education and civic engagement as the heart of a student's academic learning. To accomplish this goal, the Center partnered with projects and organizations such as the Council of Europe, The Democracy Imperative, and Film Your Issue. The Center was the result of a partnership between AAC&U, the nation's leading advocate and voice for liberal education, and Campus Compact, the nationally known organization promoting service learning.
In the Spring 2003, the Center released a call for proposals for a national dialogue project, Journey Towards Democracy: Power, Voice, and the Public Good. It invited colleges and universities to sponsor robust and candid dialogues about how to put student learning about democracy and the public good at the center of academic inquiry.
The dialogues offered a means through which campuses could a gain deeper institutional understanding about how to educate students for democracy, how liberal education could foster civic engagement, what stood in the way of these efforts, and what new directions institutions might take in making civic learning a core component of every student's education.
American Commitments: Diversity, Democracy, and Liberal Learning
American Commitments was a multi-project initiative that focused on the connections between societal diversity and democratic aspirations.The primary goal was to graduate students who were prepared and inspired to contribute to the success of a just and diverse democracy. Begun in 1993 and ending in 2001, the initiative provided resources to help colleges and universities address and increase diversity in their mission, campus community, and curriculum; linked a national network of colleges and universities seeking to collaborate on the goals and make diversity a positive educational resource; and supported faculty learning about cultural diversity in the United States.
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