Civic Learning

Background

In May 2014, the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education (BHE) adopted a state policy on civic learning for public colleges and universities and committed to work with the Commonwealth’s community colleges, state universities and University of Massachusetts campuses to incorporate civic learning as an "expected outcome" for undergraduate students beginning in the 2014-15 academic year.

The policy defined civic learning as the acquisition of the knowledge, the intellectual skills, and the applied competencies or practical skills that citizens need for informed and effective participation in civic and democratic life. It also means acquiring an understanding of the social values that underlie democratic structures and practices.

Read the full policy

The Board stated that the development of detailed outcomes within each of the four components contained in this definition (and the academic coursework, co-curricular activities and off-campus civic engagement to achieve them) should be left to the individual campuses.

Areas of Work: Four-Point Action Plan to Advance System-Wide Goals

National Coalition: Civic Learning and Democracy Engagement (CLDE)

The Massachusetts Department of Higher Education has joined with the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), Campus Compact, Complete College America, College Promise, and the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association to form Civic Learning and Democracy Engagement (CLDE), a new coalition of higher education and student success organizations committed to ensuring that civic learning is both expected and experienced equitably across postsecondary education in the United States.

The founding CLDE commitment is described in a statement titled “Our Shared Commitment: Democracy Learning is a Top Priority for Postsecondary Education.” Dozens of additional partner organizations have signed onto the statement, pledging to advance the civic mission of postsecondary education by engaging with policy leaders, showcasing examples, promoting alignment with P-12 reforms, and working to provide high-quality civic learning and make equitable participation a documented achievement.

Massachusetts was the first public higher education system in the nation to call in 2014 for civic learning to be an expected outcome for all undergraduates. The Commonwealth’s system-wide commitment to civic learning fits naturally with the Equity Agenda, which calls for equity and racial justice in all elements of the undergraduate experience. Through equitable access to civic learning, all students—including students of color who have previously experienced barriers to their success—will develop the knowledge and skills that they need for informed and effective participation in civic and democratic life. DHE brings to the coalition experience tying civic learning to a vision of equity.

Civic Learning and Engagement Linked to Racial Equity

In 2018 the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education adopted racial equity as its highest strategic priority, following that in 2021 with a new vision of undergraduate education grounded on racial equity and in 2022 with a Strategic Plan for Racial Equity providing many recommendations to both the institutions and the DHE for ways to realize that commitment to racial equity. Civic Learning and Engagement show up clearly in both these documents.

In 2021-2022, a cross-campus team of faculty and staff led by the Director of Civic Learning and Engagement developed a set of Principles for Anti-Racist Community Engagement designed as a tool for faculty and curriculum development; those principles formed the foundation for the national symposium on Anti-Racist Community Engagement (below). In 2022-2023, members of that team plus additional faculty, staff and students developed a Framework for Civic Learning Through a Lens of Racial Equity, also intended as a tool for faculty and curriculum development. The Framework served as a foundation for the second national symposium on Anti-Racist Community Engagement and also for a series of five two-day regional 2023 Summer Institutes across the Commonwealth.

Campus Resources

Many of our campuses were doing excellent work with Civic Learning before the Board named this as a goal of the Vision Project and created a policy to define and shape it; this initiative provides a way to make that campus-based work visible and to build on it throughout the system. As this website develops, we want to serve as a clearinghouse for Civic Learning resources developed on the campuses (faculty manuals and other tools, curricular and co-curricular models, research reports, etc.). If you have produced a resource for Civic Learning on your campus that you think could be useful to other campuses, please send the URL for that resource to Dr. John Reiff, Director of Civic Learning and Engagement, at jreiff@bhe.mass.edu, and we’ll provide the link for others.

Here is one example of Civic Engagement at one of our campuses, Holyoke Community College.  This video was produced just before COVID-19 struck, so you’ll see students, faculty, and community members interacting closely without masks. Since the pandemic started, our campuses have been working with their community partners to create new forms of civic engagement that bring equal benefits to students and community without adding to the risk of the disease spreading.

In addition to being important in its own right, campus work on Civic Learning—and in particular, work on Civic Engagement—fosters student development in ways that contribute directly to the Department’s strategic priority of Equity. Mounting evidence nationally and from within our own system demonstrates that student participation in well-designed Civic Engagement courses helps them develop knowledge, skills, and motivations that close achievement gaps and lead them to persist to graduation at higher rates. If that engagement is also designed to involve them in the learning and development of K-12 students from populations under-represented in higher education, it also helps those younger students develop a vision of the possibility of college and the capacity to get there. The HCC video linked above shows how both of these outcomes are possible.

Civic Learning Professional Development Events

Each year since the 2014-2015 academic year, the Department of Higher Education has held a statewide conference on civic learning for faculty and administrators of public colleges and universities, drawing between 100 and 150 people to the in-person events each year. During the pandemic years, the DHE tried both a virtual and a hybrid format with a national partner, Campus Compact, and drew 650-700 people to the 2021 and 2023 events. The Department of Higher Education also collaborates with local institutions and organizations on additional professional development opportunities.