Civic Renewal through Education for Agency, Tolerance, and Engagement

About The Program

CREATE is an innovative approach to instruction, student learning and professional development in civics, that integrates American history, geography, government, and media literacy.

CREATE builds on both cutting-edge approaches to civic learning, integrating, and adapting multiple evidence-based strategies and tracking and assessing the resultant outcomes to produce a scalable model for building the civic capacity of communities through their K12 schools.

What makes a good citizen? This is the question we sought to address when we designed the CREATE project.

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Our Mission and Vision

The CREATE project comes at a critical time in our nation’s history. The U.S. faces a civic crisis: its citizenry is divided, its politics gridlocked, and the major institutions through which a diverse people learn about and deliberate with one another—government, the media, and educational systems—are increasingly mistrusted. The is a critical need for quality civics education, content, curriculum.

Our goal is to increase students’ and teachers’ understanding of civics, American history, government, media, and geography.

The CREATE mission is to co-create a model for building the civic capacity of students in our community through our K-12 schools.

The CREATE project was designed to engage all teachers and administrators across the K-12 spectrum. We believe that everyone involved in education play a role in cultivating the skill and dispositions that prepare students for life in our society.

CREATE is directly focused on hands-on civic engagement activities for teachers and students.

CREATE’s vision is model that plants the seeds for a civic identity that is values-based and action-oriented without being polarizing. To cultivate teachers and students who are co-learners and co-directors of their classroom learning community.

The vision for this project is to enhance educators’ capacity to foster three types of civic learning in students: 

  1. Civic knowledge, or an understanding of American history and political development, governmental structures and processes, and relevant social studies knowledge and concepts; 
  2. Civic skills, or the capacities that enable students to participate in a democracy as free, responsible, deliberative, and productive citizens
  3. Civic dispositions, or the attitudes important in a democracy such as a sense of responsibility for one’s community and nation, an awareness of a shared fate with fellow citizens, curiosity about the challenges and opportunities of public life, and concern for the welfare of others.

Our aim is to equip schools to foster civic agency in their students: the capacity to work across differences for shared purposes, in line with their considered values yet in pursuit of a commonwealth reflecting as many divergent perspectives and lifeways as basic justice, general health, and universal dignity can accommodate.

The CREATE project has five main components
The Civic Learning Repository is an extensive set of resources pertaining to civics, American history, geography, government, and media literacy. The repository will include standards-based lesson plans, PD modules, videos, annotated primary sources, and civic learning activities for classroom and community or community-involved settings.
These are intended to enhance and multiply the resources and skills teachers bring to civics and civics-related courses.
This 14-day program will immerse at least teachers annually in a compressed version of the sort of civics and history curriculum we are asking them to deliver to their students. The Academy will also immerse at least 30 students annually in the same curriculum simultaneously with teachers, providing teachers an opportunity to see students co-direct their own civic learning and preparing students to model such agentic learning in their classrooms.
Our project includes funding, for teachers with innovative ideas, existing institutional resources, and identified opportunities for modeling constructive civic practices.
This symposium will present a unique opportunity to address gaps in teacher knowledge about civic agency and to model engaged citizenship for students. This annual symposium will involve national experts in civics and history as event speakers.
Our Team and Project Partners
Official logo of the US Department of Education against a navy blue backgroundThe CREATE project is supported through the U.S. Department of Education and aligned with the American History and Civics Education-National Activities program, which is funded by Congress as part of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Public Law 114–95.
Official logo of Muncie Community SchoolsIn cooperation with Muncie Community Schools (MCS), Ball State developed CREATE as an innovative approach to instruction, student learning, and professional development in civics that will integrate American history, geography, government, and media literacy.