Supporting Advocacy, Deliberation, and Civic Learning in the Classroom

We live, teach and learn in complicated times. As faculty in higher education, we have the opportunity to help uphold the civic purpose of higher education. We are accustomed to helping students navigate academic information, and to equipping them for more standard academic tasks. Through thoughtful course design, we can also help our students become better consumers and evaluators of less traditionally academic information: from critically interpreting what they read and see in the news media, to engaging the arguments of their friends, peers and family members. Further, we can challenge our students to use these evaluative skills to engage in debate and advocacy activities around critical issues of the day