Friends, it is with great pleasure that we invite you to join educators, politicians, students, and community leaders from across Florida and beyond at the upcoming 2018 Urban Education Leadership Summit here at UCF on April 12th, 2018. The featured keynote, Dr. Pedro Noguera, was recently featured on MSNBC, discussing the teacher walkouts in West Virginia and Oklahoma, as well as the recent events around Florida schools. Check out his TED talk from 2012 to get a sense of our wonderful keynote.
Panels and discussions will focus on ways in which we as educators can drive school and student improvement in urban schools. I have no doubt that it will be an engaging, exciting, and lively series of conversations!
The Florida Joint Center for Citizenship at the Lou Frey Institute has spent more than a year working on the current iteration of Civics360. While less than ten benchmarks still need a video resource, we have completed and shared on Civics360 more than 60 videos across the other benchmarks (with many having multiple videos to ensure that the content is not overwhelming). Looking at the statistics today on TeacherTube (our upload platform for the videos), these videos, most of which have been up for barely a year 9 and in many cases far less than that) have hit more than a half a million views!
We are grateful for the teachers, students, and parents that have found these videos and Civics360 itself useful as a tool for learning, and we look forward to improving on what is available over the next year. We expect to have the remaining videos done in the coming months, and will then work on uploading scripts, cleaning up resources, and redoing portions of 360 and the videos based on your valuable feedback!
You may have noticed a new logo, similiar to what is above this post, appearing on the FJCC homepage. That is a sign of some exciting news! The Florida Joint Center for Citizenship is excited to announce that our parent organization, the Lou Frey Institute, was recently welcomed as a member of the Civics Renewal Network!
The Civics Renewal Network is a resource-sharing network made up of civics education organizations from across the country. The Florida Joint Center for Citizenship at the Lou Frey Institute is currently in the process of curating some of our quality resources to share on the CRN website, and we look forward to sharing and posting the resources of other civics education folks across all of our platforms! We are excited to be a member of this consortium, and look forward to sharing with you some of the quality work being done across the country!
What does it mean to be involved? How can we make a difference in the lives of those who depend on us, and in the lives of those who seek only to have a voice? Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American woman elected to Congress, asked these questions. In addition to being the first African-American woman elected to Congress, she also ran for the Democratic nomination for President in 1972.
Her ‘Unbought and Unbossed’ campaign, while unsuccessful stands as a challenge to those who would sacrifice ideals for power, and stands even now as an example for those women and African-Americans who would follow in her footsteps.
The Florida Council for the Social Studies, a Gold Star Council, is pleased to announce that proposals are now requested for the 61st annual conference, to be held at the Florida Hotel and Conference Center, October 19-21, 2018. The theme of this years conference centers around the importance of diversity and inclusion within the social studies at all levels of teaching and learning. We are looking for exciting and engaging sessions that will provide teachers with something they will be able to reflect on and use in their classrooms, and we know you have a great session that you are dying to share!
We believe we have a fantastic keynote lined up that we will be able to announce soon, and look forward to providing our teachers with some excellent and exciting sessions!
Today, around the country, students from Kindergarten through higher education are engaged in protests concerning gun violence. However one feels about the issues being debated, students assuming the rights and responsibilities of democratic citizenship in their communities is something to celebrate. What students are doing today is consistent with our nation’s recent and not so recent history of young people becoming engaged in their communities and learning the skills of citizenship and civic life. Let’s consider just a few examples.
Being engaged in the issues, aware of the rules and requirements for office, and taking action to pursue change are not inherently conservative or liberal civic virtues. These young people are engaged in civic action in their state because they saw a need and decided to try and fill it.
Birmingham Children’s March
The Birmingham Children’s March involved more than 1000 kids skipping classes all across Birmingham and marching in favor of civil rights, despite threats and violence perpetrated by people far older than them. And they swore to continue doing it until change was on the horizon. They modeled for their fellow citizens the better angels of our nature and stood strong in the face of adult persecution and violation of their civil liberties.
Tinker v. Des Moines (1969)
‘Students do not shed their rights at the schoolhouse door.’ A legendary decision, arising as a result of 13 year olds protesting a war they saw as unjust. Indeed, the Tinker decision, and the actions of those students involved in that case, have in some ways inspired the movement today., with the Parkland students citing the Tinker case as something they learned about that helped show what can happen when students become civically engaged.
The Pro-Life/Pro-Choice Movements, Gun Rights, Student Busing, Black Lives Matter, and the ERA
Ongoing debates about controversial civic, political, and societal issues have always involved students, on both sides. Whether arguing and protesting over abortion, pointing out that there are is not uniformity among young people in the gun debate, wading knee deep into the disputes about busing students across northern cities like Boston to integrate schools, marching in the streets in defense of black lives and liberties, or taking sides for or against the Equal Rights Amendment, student civic activism is something that has always been an important pathway into civic life for young people. It is their first taste of the possibilities of civic life and fervor, and encouraging young people to engage with those possibilities can only strengthen the core of American democracy.
Elizabeth McCullough Johnson is an important figure in Florida civics, government, and history. She was the second woman elected to the Florida House, and the first women ever elected to the Florida State Senate. For those of us who live and work in the central Florida area, she is also an incredibly important figure because she is in many ways the mother of our University of Central Florida, the largest (at last count, by population) public university in the country.
We here at the Florida Joint Center for Citizenship are strong advocates of the C3 Framework. The emphasis on inquiry, and actually doing something with that inquiry, is civic learning at it finest, and we believe that the C3 Framework would be an excellent model to build standards and curriculum around. It seems that Florida is now making some moves towards providing teachers with an opportunity to embrace the C3.
Over the past few years, the social studies community has established a repository of Inquiry oriented lessons from various states at C3 Teachers.
This website is an excellent resource with a variety of K-12 inquiry lessons that can be modified to fit Florida standards and benchmarks. But, you may ask, where is Florida? Well, for a variety of reasons, Florida has fallen behind others states in using elements of the C3 Framework (though some districts like Pasco and Brevard have begun using the language of C3 in curriculum development and pacing).
Happily, this may be about to change. Dr. Jane Lo of Florida State University and Mr. Michael DiPierro, the social studies consultant of the State Department of Education, have announced a new project and opportunity that will create a C3 Hub for Florida! From their recent call:
WHO: We are seeking K-12 Florida social studies
teachers to be involved in an exciting lesson
creation project funded through Title IV-Part A and
managed by the Florida Department of Education
and Florida State University. Florida K-12 teachers
of all social studies content areas may apply
WHAT: This project is seeking teachers with experience
writing and implementing inquiry based lessons in the social
studies classroom. Selected lesson writers will participate in
a series of virtual professional development activities and
one face-to-face professional development session on the
C3 Inquiry Design Model with experts in the field. The
professional development is intended to help writers create
two lesson plans using the Inquiry Design Model. Lesson
plans will be shared with fellow teachers on the National
Council for the Social Studies C3 hub site. Lesson writers will
be compensated for their travel, professional learning, and
approved lessons. In-service points will be available to
submit for district consideration. More information will be
provided to selected writers.
WHEN: A virtual logistics meeting will occur in May 2018. A
face-to-face PD session will be conducted in summer 2018.
The lesson writing process will take place during Fall 2018,
with continued virtual professional development and
support (approximately one check-in per month). The
expected completion date of the lessons is January 2019.
The lessons will then undergo a review process, during
which time, writers may be asked to provide revisions. The
goal is to have lessons to share with the broader social
studies teaching community by Fall 2019.
WHY: This is a great professional development opportunity
that allows teachers to work with experts to hone their
inquiry lesson writing skills as well as inquiry pedagogy. This
process will also allow us to create a Florida C3 Hub so that
Florida social studies teachers can have a reliable resource
for rigorous inquiry plans.
HOW: To apply for a writer position, please fill out this form
online by March 23rd, 2018. Contact Dr. Jane Lo, Assistant
Professor, Social Studies Education, jlo@fsu.edu and copy Michael.DiPierro@fldoe.org, FLDOE Social Studies Education
Specialist, with any questions or concerns.
This is a great opportunity to help develop an incredible resource for Florida teachers, and we here at FJCC would love to see what you come up with for civics!
Friends, one of the most requested things that districts have asked of us when it comes to Civics360 is the ability to integrate it into Single Sign On within a district level LMS. In order for us to test this capability, we must see how the ‘live’ site works. While we do NOT expect there to be any problems at all, or expect any interruption in service with the Civics360 platform, please be aware that there MAY be periods of unavoidable downtime as we test and troubleshoot integration with Classlink. We will strive to ensure that this downtime is as limited as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
Many of the folks that read this blog and work in secondary civic and social studies education have considered ways in which they might incorporate the C3 Framework into the work that they do. This is no doubt just as true for elementary social studies educators (they, like Santa, DO exist you know!), and English Language Learners (ELLs) could benefit from the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) approach to inquiry and learning. Recently, our own Florida Joint Center for Citizenship director Dr. Steve Masyada coauthored, with ELL education expert Dr. Katherine Barko-Alva of William and Mary, a chapter in Optimizing Elementary Education for English Language Learners. In this chapter, they walk teachers through an extended second grade lesson around civic life, modified for ELL students and integrating all 4 Dimensions of the C3 Framework. It might be of interest to folks thinking about ways in which we can get the C3 Framework into elementary classrooms and help our ELL students, and really, all students, in embracing civic life. Check out Dimensions of Success if you are so inclined!
