Teaching Civic Engagement

Back in 2024, I asked political scientist and faculty developer Bethany Morrison on my podcast to share some strategies for teaching in U.S. presidential election year. She had so many resources to share that I then invited her to curate a collection of resources for the University of Virginia Teaching Hub on the topic of teaching for democratic engagement and civic learning. Once that collection was posted, a former Vanderbilt colleague and current English professor Scott Hicks reached out to suggest a new resource for the collection: a repository of openly licensed teaching materials from faculty participants (including Scott) in the Civic Engagement and Voting Rights Teacher Scholars Program hosted by Clemson University.

Bethany and I thought the repository was fantastic and were happy to add it to the collection. It's full of peer-reviewed teaching materials that instructors can borrow and adapt to their courses. In the repository you'll find syllabi and lesson plans and assignment descriptions from courses like "Citizen Science and Scientist Citizens" by Jenny Presgraves, "Democracy in Action" by Sonalini Sapra (who I think was in the teaching certificate program I helped coordinate at Vanderbilt long ago), "Agree to Disagree: Thorny Questions and Civil Discourse" by Brian MacHarg, and "Information Literacy and Civic Responsibility" by Troy Martin. All the teaching materials are peer-reviewed and open source.

I was curious about the program that created this repository, so I reached out to the program directors, Bridget Trogden, dean of undergraduate education and academic student services and professor of education at American University, and James Burns, professor of history at Clemson University, to invite them on the podcast. Bridget and James were happy to talk about this faculty development program, and they brought along two faculty participants: Megan VanGorder, assistant professor of history at Illinois State University and a member of the first cohort in the program, and Nafisa Nipun Tanjeem, associate professor of interdisciplinary studies at Worcester State University in Massachusetts and current cohort member.

We have a lively conversation about the importance of teaching civic engagement in the year 2026, the strategies that these faculty use to engage students in these challenging topics, and the value of a faculty development experience structured like this one. You can listen to our conversation here, or search for "Intentional Teaching" in your podcast app.

Curricular Responses to Generative AI

Most of my work with faculty helping them respond to the challenges and opportunities posed by generative AI has been at the individual course level. How should learning objectives and assessment strategies and assignment design change because of AI? That's great work, but I don't think it's sufficient to meet the moment. Students continue to take courses with wildly different approach to AI, not only during a given semester (where a student might have to deal with four or five very different course AI policies) but also across time as they work through a major or program of study.

I've said for a while that departments and programs need to develop coherent approaches to generative AI, and now I'm looking for examples of this work. Who is coordinating course AI policies across all the courses in a major? Who is updating their program-level learning outcomes to address the need to teach critical AI literacy or build AI competencies? I keep hearing about schools or departments that are just beginning to have conversations about curricular responses to AI. Do you know of any programs where this kind of work has already been done?

If you do, please hit reply to this email and let me know! I'm hoping to find a few programs that are ahead of the curve on this and maybe feature them on the podcast so other programs can learn from them.

April 17th at the University of Oklahoma

I need to do a better job in this newsletter of letting readers know when I'm on the road! To that end, I'll share that I'm giving a talk on teaching and learning in the age of AI at the University of Oklahoma next week. The OU Center for Faculty Excellence is hosting me, and I'll speak at the Oklahoma Memorial Union's Meacham Auditorium at 1pm next Friday.

This will be my second talk after submitting the manuscript for The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching, co-authored with Annette Vee and Marc Watkins, and the talk will incorporate some of what I learned researching and writing the book. I'm excited to share these ideas with the OU teaching community next week. If you're a part of that community, please connect with me! I'll be at a meet-and-greet reception at 10am that morning. See the OU CFE website for more details.

Thanks for reading!

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