Agency to Action: Integrated Action Civics Insights

The "Double Bubble" shows the interconnection between study of history and student action

Welcome to the first newsletter from the
Integrated Action Civics Project!

We will use this space to:

Share new developments and strategies.
Highlight teacher-submitted lessons and insights from the classroom.
Offer recommendations on using IAC strategies to explore content.
Show examples of student civic action projects using this framework.

Calling for IAC examples from the classroom:

Do you have a lesson and student work samples that elevate unique perspectives on course content?
Did you make modifications or add scaffolds to facilitate student learning?
Can you share stories about how this framework shifts conversations and student engagement?

--> Send them to us and receive a $50 gift certificate if yours is chosen to be highlighted here. Be sure to redact student names and images.

Interested in IACP? Join our online summer institute! June 22-26, Register Now!

Our 5-day institute shows how to use IACP strategies to deep exploration of course content and empower students as change-makers. Learn more here.

Today's theme - Centering justice in your classroom

Identity, Justice, and Worldview"

How do we encourage student self-reflection on the meaning of justice in our society?

We use the term 'justice' to refer to the overarching concepts of right and wrong that form the moral underpinnings of 'rights', 'liberty' and 'freedom'. Teachers are often hesitant to teach about justice, concerned about inappropriately influencing students with their own personal beliefs.

In developing the IAC analytical strategies to examine root causes, action goals, power, stakeholders and strategies of change, we realized that we, as teachers, also need to help students explore the values and beliefs - their sense of justice - that they would use to guide their analysis and eventual civic actions.

Envisioning Justice: "In a just society ..."

“Now is the time to think like poets, to envision and make visible a new society, a peaceful, cooperative, loving world without poverty and oppression, limited only by our imaginations.” ¹

Before students can think about social change, both large and small, they need to develop a sense of alternatives. Too often, though, they are trapped by the belief that the world they see is fixed. They can only imagine small, incremental changes.

This activity is designed to help students generate and reflect upon expansive, unlimited visioning of a world in which they would want to live. We want to encourage them to think beyond the limits of political or legal systems and imagine potential in all of what society encompasses: economic structures, social relations, environmental issues, and more.

A sentence starter helps students begin their freedom-dreaming: “In a Just Society …”. In groups, they create sets of 'sticky notes', each with an attribute of what they would want to see "in a just society...". They then prioritize their ideas, followed by an evaluation of the extent to which these various attributes currently exist, exist in name only, or aren't a part of what our society values.

We encourage you to try this activity with your students. It helps them think about and discuss the world in which they would want to live and can help center conversations about justice in your classroom.

1. Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (2002)

Inspiration from the Classroom:
Adapting "Envisioning Justice"

Kaedan Peters, a teacher in the SF Bay Area, used "Envisioning a Just Society" for students to explore the central inquiry of their Modern World History course: How do we get into 'right relationship' with the planet and each other?

Kaedan created two sentence starters to explore this theme: "In a world in right relationship with the planet ...", and "In a world in right relationship with each other...." . Each student group worked with one of the phrases and added, sorted and evaluated the ideas their groups came up with. Through a gallery walk, students used stickers to 'up vote' ideas on the groups' posters who worked with the other sentence starter.

They found that this activity helped ground the students and elevate key concepts and vocabulary throughout the year.

"We don't want to just study history for history's sake. We want it to be meaningful moving into the future and understanding our own lives. [This strategy helps] frame everything throughout the year- We come back to it either at the end of a unit or at the beginning of starting a unit, or just sometimes randomly"

And it was important to adapt the activity to elevate the particular words that were central to the course.

I'll use the same strategy, but based on what the essential question is for the year, I'll change the language a little bit. So in my world history classes, I usually describe it as 'What would right relationship look like with the planet? What would it look like with each other?' It's talking about justice. It's still getting at the same concept... And when I've done it with my Gov, Econ or Gender Studies classes, I use the word justice more explicitly."

Key Takeaways:

Change the sentence starter to elevate key concepts of the course.
Reference the questions and ideas students raised throughout the course.
Encourage students to interact and explore other groups' ideas.