Shape the future today
The Civic Learning Institute is led by Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University. The project is located at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
The Institute offers online courses to help educators at all levels, from kindergarten through college, deepen their understanding of critical concepts in US constitutional democracy and US history. Gain new insights and develop strategies to strengthen civic and history education in your classroom through group discussions with peers, feedback from educator coaches and the country’s leading scholars, and by designing learning activities. Merging history and civics topics, each of the Civic Learning Institute’s nine courses is aligned with the Educating for American Democracy (EAD) Roadmap, a source of content guidance and instructional and implementation strategies for educators developed by a cross-ideological group of educators, scholars, and practitioners, and uniquely integrates strategies designed to improve your content knowledge and pedagogical skills.
The EAD Roadmap is neither a set of standards nor a curriculum. It recommends approaches to learning that:
encourage civic engagement to sustain the republic;
give the complete narrative of America’s plural, yet shared story;
simultaneously celebrate and critique compromise;
cultivate civic honesty and reflective patriotism -- the notion that you can love and critique your nation simultaneously; and
help students understand the chronological timeline of events in history, core themes that can be found across those events, and key civic concepts related to the philosophical foundations of democracy.