Civics and Citizenship

For most of my time as a middle school teacher, I’ve taught at 7th grade history class that spans the time from the founding to the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation.  I know the period well and I like to study and teach it.  I’ve used the point at which the Constitution is adopted to insert some Civics into the mix but the focus has been more on early American history.

Last fall, as my colleagues and I were thinking about revisions of our curriculum, I knew that a change I wanted to make was to insert more civics education into the experiences of my middle schoolers.  We decided that we could revise 8th grade history to take on this challenge.

So I will be teaching a new course come the fall, a class to be called Civics and Citizenship.  We’ll explore American history from the vantage o=point of the meaning of the Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution.  The course is driven by the meaning of those amendments and the ways in which the ending of slavery and the requirement of equal protection of the law seeks to both fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence and makes our Constitution a meaningful and important document.

Since I first conceived of the idea behind the course, I’ve been reading and thinking about it.  This summer, as I’m on the runway to the launch of the class,  I am organizing lessons, reading assignments, and pulling together the documents that will be the foundation of the course.  As I do that, I’m thinking about what Civics and Citizenship mean and for the next year, as the course is launched, I will record my thoughts here.

I’m excited to create and teach this course and even more excited to do it now, when thinking about our history and what it means to be American is as important a task as it ever was.