I teach civic engagement the way a CTE (career and technical education) teacher might teach cooking: with hands-on learning. Students need to learn the skills, but they also need to practice using them. That approach also allows students to think critically, problem-solve, and collaborate with their peers and community.

At a time when students feel immense pressure to perform academically, we know that civic engagement must compete for their attention. Moreover, in the age of AI, it’s too easy for students to google their way to an answer. Answers obtained easily this way are not a measure of academic abilities.  Students ask: when will I use this in the real world and how will this show my skills and abilities? That question motivates me as an educator, and it’s the basis for all the work we do together in the classroom. 

My AP Government students sometimes struggle with the amount of content, terms, and concepts they need to ingest and grasp. So I try to embed those concepts within civic engagement to help them stick. Learning the process by which a bill becomes a law might seem like a fairly easy thing to memorize. But my students really connected with it when we talked about an issue that impacted them directly: education funding. A couple years ago, voters were considering California Prop 15, which would impact how property taxes were calculated—which would, in turn, impact the tax dollars available to schools. We learned how hard it is for a bill to become law, and analyzed the proposition and discussed why citizens might want to bypass the legislature to implement this law. The students decided they wanted to support Prop 15 and, even though they couldn’t vote, they gathered signatures to get it on the ballot.

This approach is not limited to AP students. I’ve used the same model with my class of English language learners. Public speaking is a key skill connected to language proficiency. After I introduced how a bill becomes a law, I asked the students: how might you tell your local representative that you want them to address a community issue by creating or supporting a certain piece of legislation? First, we practiced together. Then we invited local leaders to join them in a town hall. Crafting an argument and presenting it to an audience connected idea to action in a way that was transformative to the students, both in terms of skill and confidence. This is civic engagement as language acquisition and oratory, and it points back directly to our core learning goals for these English language learners.

The joy of hands-on and real life application project-based learning is that it can expand to meet both the interests and ambitions of the students. As part of a lesson about inalienable rights, I guided a group of my middle schoolers who created an anonymous reporting system for bullying. A high school class I taught wanted to explore food deserts; they ended up connecting with community members to bring the unused fruit in senior residents’ gardens to families in need. That student-led initiative was a natural pairing with our in-class conversations about economics, labor, and nutrition. 

Of course, project-based learning can also be difficult to plan for. It’s naturally cyclical—when students realize they need to change course to achieve their goals, the teacher needs to as well. That pivot takes time, agility, creativity, and patience. It can also take a lot of energy teaching young people how to work together and collaborate. And because this approach is highly responsive, a lot of the planning must happen in real time. I find I must constantly be on the lookout for opportunities to plant the seeds of these core principles into work that’s capturing my students’ imaginations. That can make experiential learning a hard sell to colleagues who already have too much on their plates. But when teachers see their students discover how civic knowledge helps them act in the world, the payoff is hard to ignore.