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"Alongside activists - and sometimes as activists, and more about that particular problem below - more and more Americans also are practicing citizen journalism, posting, sharing and uploading photos, videos and stories as they happen. And that can be a problem: Unlike career reporters, students and new citizen journalists may or may not know how to identify themselves in public, what to say if confronted by law enforcement, how to handle volatile crowd situations and whom to turn to for help."

"It didn't take long for civic journalism to move from election experiments to deep enterprise work on major issues plaguing communities - race, drugs, education, the economy. Techniques involved listening to how the communities framed their problems and convening conversations about how they might be addressed. Yet major differences emerged between civic journalism and traditional investigative journalism. Unlike traditional investigative journalism, civic journalism's enterprise projects, "didn't have bad guys attached to them," Friedland said. Rather they mined the muddy swamps of tough issues enveloping communities. These projects focused less on measuring the nature of the engagement and instead focused on outcomes. The most systematic and deepest research into civic journalism was undertaken in 2002 by Friedland and PhD student Sandy Nichols. The Pew Center opened its files on 651 civic journalism projects that had applied for funding or for recognition in the Knight-Batten Awards for Excellence in Civic Journalism between 1994 and 2001. For months, Nichols read every project and coded them by engagement strategies, outcomes and story frames. You can read the final report or the executive summary. Among its highlights: At least one fifth of all U.S. daily newspapers - 322 of the nation's 1,500 dailies practiced civic journalism during that time. They hailed from 220 cities in all but three states. But, the authors said, the real number, if you included projects that didn't cross the Pew Center's transom, was much higher Newspaper editors asserted that their civic journalism increased public deliberation, civic problem solving, volunteerism and changed public policy.a  96 percent of the civic journalism projects used an "explanatory" story frame to cover public issues instead of a more traditional "conflict" frame, which often reports two opposing viewpoints. "The clear shift to explanatory frames is perhaps one of civ

"Public schools are failing at what the nation's founders saw as education's most basic purpose: preparing young people to be reflective citizens who would value liberty and democracy and resist the appeals of demagogues. In that sense, the Trump phenomenon should be a Sputnik moment for civics education. Just as Soviet technological advances triggered investment in science education in the 1950s, the 2016 election should spur renewed emphasis on the need for schools to instill in children an appreciation for civic values and not just a skill set for private employment. As we outline in a new report for The Century Foundation, entitled "Putting Democracy Back into Public Education," the Founders were deeply concerned with finding ways to ensure that their new democracy, which through the franchise provided ultimate sovereignty to the collective views of average citizens, not fall prey to demagogues. The problem of the demagogue, the Founders believed, was endemic to democracy, and they saw education as the safeguard of America's system of self-governance."

"Close Up's High School Program curriculum is designed to inform, inspire, and empower students to become more active citizens. For over forty years, we have been dedicated to this mission. This mission and inspiration comes from a commitment and understanding of the importance that civic education plays in the health of our democracy and in the lives of each student. A National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement study in 2012, found that students who participate in civic learning opportunities are more likely to "persist in college and complete their degrees, obtain skills prized by employers and develop habits of social responsibility and civic participation." The study goes on to say, "Today's education for democracy needs to be informed by deep engagement with the values of liberty, equality…and the willingness to collaborate with people of differing views and backgrounds towards common solutions for the public good.""

"A year ago I made an informal study of the mission statements of the 100 largest school systems in the United States. I was curious to see whether the public purpose of public education - preparing children for citizenship and self-government - is top of mind when those who run those systems ask themselves, "What exactly is our purpose here?" Unsurprisingly, it's not. About 60 percent of those big districts, collectively responsible for more than 11 million children, made no mention whatsoever of civics or citizenship. But it got a lot worse: The words "America" and "American" appeared zero times in the 100 school mission statements. Neither did "patriotic" or "patriotism." However, "global" appears in the statements of 28 districts - usually in phrases like "global society," "global economy" or "global citizens." What are we to make of that? The public mission of education in America's schools (as distinct from the private and personal ends of college and career readiness) seems suddenly relevant. Writing in The Atlantic, Rick Kahlenberg asks whether the election of Donald Trump represents a "Sputnik moment" for civic education, forcing us to confront how badly we have failed "at what the nation's founders saw as education's most basic purpose," namely preparing our children for reflective and capable self-government. "Just as Soviet technological advances triggered investment in science education in the 1950s," Kahlenberg writes, "the 2016 election should spur renewed emphasis on the need for schools to instill in children an appreciation for civic values and not just a skill set for private employment.""

"The New Deal, a series of experimental projects and programs implemented during President Franklin Roosevelt's presidency in the 1930s, was designed to help the country recover from the Great Depression. For African-Americans, those initiatives offered social and economic programs that helped many people stake a greater claim on full citizenship for the first time. The exhibition, "Claiming Citizenship: African Americans and New Deal Photography," now at New York's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, shows African-Americans taking advantage of opportunities that hadn't been available to them previously. "You can see how during the New Deal the government was experimenting with the possibility that all citizens deserved education, deserved medical care, deserved food security," said exhibition curator Rickie Solinger. The photos are drawn from the Library of Congress and the National Archives."

"How can a "normal citizen" affect change? Our nation cannot maintain greatness without first admitting to these moments, reflecting about them, and committing to produce the next generation of thinkers to bring us forward. Boards like this are my attempt to create those thinkers. I'd look forward to any similarly-minded history lovers adding to these, commenting, or sharing some boards of their own in the comments below."

Read highlighted parts of sections Background, Local Context, and Religious Context for Wednesday.

Use the treatment of citizens of Japanese and German ancestry during World War II--looking specifically at media portrayals of these groups and internment camps--as historical examples of ethnic conflict during times of trial; explore the problems inherent in assigning blame to populations or nations of people. Students will also look at contemporary examples of ethnic conflict, discrimination, and stereotyping at home and abroad.

The American government incarcerated Kim Ima's father when he was 4 years old, despite the fact that he was an American citizen who had not committed any crime. Kenji Ima was one of 120,000 Japanese Americans locked away in America's concentration camps during World War II simply because of his ancestry. "Imagine what it would be like," Kim Ima says as she introduces the play she is about to perform to a history class at the Bronx High School for Writing and the Creative Arts. Black, Hispanic and Arab American students, jammed in a semi-circle of chairs in a worn classroom, nod and furrow their brows as they are quickly transported back to 1940s America. Kim Ima is one of several actors working for Living Voices, a Seattle theater company that puts performers in classrooms and corporate offices, inviting audiences to view history from the perspective of a character who experienced significant historical events.

"Here's the one big lesson we've learned: Agency begins with being able to ask your own questions and continues with the ability to participate in decisions that affect you wherever and whenever they are made. That's the one big lesson from nearly three decades of work and it has implications from the micro level of our daily lives to the highest levels of decision-making in our democracy. For it's possible to imagine a dictatorship that discourages citizens from asking questions, but we should not accept a democracy in which questions cannot be asked. A strong sense of agency, and self-efficacy on a fundamental level is actually a precursor, a foundation for more effective action on any level of our democracy. It's the beginning of the journey towards democratic action, not its completion. Skip over it however, and you get pretty much the status quo we've got today. If you're happy with that, don't bother to read on. How do we translate this one big idea, one big lesson into action? We've been working on trying to answer just one question in the simplest way possible: How can we democratize access to the deceptively simple yet very sophisticated skills of question formulation and effective participation in decisions? Let's focus here on just the first skill; question formulation. It is no small matter to teach the skill; it's often developed only through high levels of professional education and with years of experience. Indeed, access to them can be difficult and costly. In 2002, The New York Times asked college presidents what should students learn in four years of college. There was a consensus that students could not come out of college knowing all there is to know so college should, according to Leon Botstein of Bard College, "engender a lifelong habit of curiosity, as opposed to becoming more convinced that you are an authority." He went on to say students should learn "analytical skills of interpretation and inquiry. In other word

""To the extent we want kids to be good citizens, we want them to be able to think critically about whatever information they're getting," he said. "Teachers in the classroom have a responsibility to helping teach those skills." Following are summaries of the two new research studies."

"It's become alarmingly clear that we've neglected an education that underpins civic engagement. Civics is dropping out of the curriculum across the country in favor of training for jobs. Students don't know how our government works, let alone why we want it to work that way. And the heart of civics education is literacy. Today, in the 21st century, when so much of our information comes in visual form, and information systems are created on a base of algorithms using big data that is collected via media, literacy is synonymous with media literacy."