Teaching Civics: An Overview of Instructional Strategies Using Primary Sources, Role-Play and Simulations, and Academic Service Learning for Teaching Civic Knowledge, Skills, and Dispositions

Abstract

Civic education is essential to the perpetuation of American self-government. Despite this important role, civic education in the United States has been neglected for several decades and is only recently seeing a resurgence in the classroom and as a focus of research. Conceptions of what constitutes effective civic education vary widely, creating a great multiplicity in what is measured and how, and obfuscating which pedagogical practices are most effective. This paper provides an overview of civic education and the outcomes—including civic knowledge, civic skills, and civic dispositions—that are the goals of such education. We then examine three pedagogies—instruction through primary-source analysis, simulation-based learning, and academic service learning—and review examples of the civic outcomes of these pedagogies. We seek to answer several questions: How are these instructional practices defined? What debates and challenges surround their implementation? What evidence is there that such techniques result in civic outcomes? Finally, what implications are there for the social studies classroom? We demonstrate that these three pedagogies have the potential to improve civic learning, and that a mixture of engaging and effective pedagogies is ideal. We encourage further research on the civic outcomes resulting from the implementation of various pedagogies.