Citizens by Design: A Learning Community–Based Strategy for Building Civic Engagement into General Education

Abstract

Abstract Between historic changes in American undergraduate student demography and increasing stresses on civil society, institutions of higher education face mounting pressure to help their students foster strong civic skills and practices. At Queens University of Charlotte, the authors leveraged a curriculum revision process to create a general education–civic engagement partnership that features a required academic civic engagement component for all undergraduates, including traditional, transfer, and post-traditional students. The authors embedded this experience by combining two high-impact practices as we locate it within a learning community framework featuring cross-disciplinary examinations of “wicked” problems. As a result of this approach, they have faculty working in civic engagement from a great diversity of disciplines. After reviewing successes and challenges from the first several years of this program, they found that their program used some consistent pedagogies that they have organized into four distinct but related civic engagement types: (a) bridging to the community, (b) problem-based, organizational engagement, (c) the constructs of community, and (d) deliberative skill development. This exploratory framework for civic engagement can assist programs seeking to support faculty at varying levels of civic engagement teaching experience and different disciplinary perspectives.