Our Curriculum
Generation Citizen's focus on taking action sets it apart from other civics programs.
Our curriculum is action-based, aligned to standards, and academically intensive.
Generation Citizen students don’t read about the political process in a textbook, they learn it by engaging in it directly—meeting with representatives, lobbying local legislators, organizing letter-writing campaigns, writing opinion pieces for newspapers, and making documentaries to raise awareness about community issues they care about. By uniting high school and college students in the program, Generation Citizen instills a sense of shared student agency in the political processes.
Generation Citizen is also committed to providing a path for sustained political action for participating students. Active citizenship is not a semester-long course, it is a life-time endeavor. Generation Citizen will be providing students with concrete mechanisms to stay involved after the semester is over, as well as developing a special "Student Leadership Team" structure, which allows exceptional students to continue to participate in the program.
Unit Breakdown
Generation Citizen’s curriculum has been created with the help of prominent educators, curriculum experts, and advocates. It emphasizes a multi-layered action-oriented approach, and has been standardized for replication in schools across the country. The curriculum fulfills district and states social studies standards, and is tailored to achieve our desired goals. Because the curriculum takes place during the day, it is academically intensive, ensuring that students learn and retain literacy and writing skills, in addition to civic skills.
Our curriculum takes place twice-weekly during the school day over the course of the semester, for a total of twenty classes. The curriculum outlines each class over the semester and provides exemplary lesson plans. It is separated into three distinct units:
Unit 1: What Do We Care About?
Students hold a dialogue on important issues they care about, discussing issues they would change if they were in charge of their school, city, state, and world. The students conduct research on these issues, learn about the governmental process, and, as part of an organic democratic process, select one issue on which to focus as a class.
Unit 2: How Can We Take Effective Action?
Through the lens of their selected issue, students learn the basics of grassroots advocacy. Students receive training on writing an effective opinion article, lobbying an elected official, mobilizing others, and crafting a message. Students use these techniques to formulate an action plan on their specific issue. This unit includes intensive research, reading opinion articles and position papers, and writing individual editorials.
Unit 3: Taking Action!
In the final unit of the curriculum, students use their civics knowledge and skills to actually take action on their selected issue. This can include producing documentaries, holding petition drives, publishing opinion articles, lobbying legislators, and much much more. The students themselves, with the help and support, of the mentors, enact their plans.
To culminate the semester, each class participates in a “Civics Fair”, in which they make presentations to all GC classes on the research and action they have taken over the course of the semester.
If you would like to see GC’s curriculum, please e-mail info@GenerationCitizen.org