Madison-based Filament Games has been producing educational games on civics for more than a decade.
A news release announcing the first-ever national Civic Learning Week, underway this week in the nation’s capital and through virtual channels, included a pitch for coverage that caught my eye: “This is a story about real growth in the civic education movement — despite all of the negative stories happening around social studies and civics.”
The release went on to list several bullet points reflecting advancements in the field of civics education over the last five years, including increased federal funding for the teaching of civics and the formation of the CivXnow coalition, which pushes for bipartisan civic education policies at the state and federal level.
I was interested to hear this encouraging outlook because when I dug into the topic of civics education in 2019 for an Isthmus cover story, the news seemed generally more grim. Studies were showing how little Americans knew about how their government worked and news was emerging about how digital disinformation was being used to sway the electorate. I also learned that there was no required course for civics in Wisconsin, so what students learn about democracy and government is varied and somewhat random.
But even then the news wasn’t all bad. I observed an innovative civics program at Middleton High School called Legislative Semester, where students take on the roles of lawmakers to debate public policy issues and pass legislation, and watched spirited high school students from around the state test their knowledge in the inaugural Wisconsin Civics Games, hosted by the Wisconsin Newspaper Association Foundation.
I was curious if some of the people I spoke to in 2019 agreed with the contention that the field of civics education had made significant strides in the last few years. I started with David Olson, a former social studies chair at Memorial High who coached a team in that first civics game. He is now director of education for Retro Report, a nonprofit that produces documentaries and other materials on current events for classroom learning, and also a co-founder of the recently formed Wisconsin Civic Learning Coalition. He and Michael Blauw, an education consultant who is active in the coalition, hopped on a call last week.
“What is most noticeable to me is that the field of civic education is probably the most organized that it has been in my lifetime,” says Blauw, who is also a former social studies teacher. “There is a ton of energy and motivation in connecting the field and building a super strong network of folks that are interested in civics and advocating for civics in a really broad sense.”
Olson says students themselves have generated some of this momentum. School shootings, for instance, have generated interest among students in public policy and activism. “Students across the political spectrum have seen the power that their own voices can have and they’d like to know how to do that better,” he says. The political upheaval following the 2020 election and the events of Jan. 6, 2021, when pro-Trump forces stormed the nation’s capital, also left an impression on young people. “Watching adults…engage in democracy in some really weird ways has left students hungry to be more civically engaged and I think teachers sense that. So there is a desire for teachers to better equip themselves to teach about these things, including about being critical consumers of media.”
Blauw says one sign of real growth is that more than a dozen state-level coalitions have cropped up in the last five years, from Utah to New York to Wisconsin. “That is really very exciting,” he says.
One of the first things the Wisconsin Civic Learning Coalition did was to survey schools around the state to learn where civics was being taught and where it was not. They found that about 75% of the districts had a requirement in high school to take a civics or government course. Those courses varied widely and the coalition is now focused on how to advocate for and support the teaching of high-quality civics education.
The coalition has also created a toolkit with resources for teachers to teach about voting and elections, with a focus on the upcoming April 4 Supreme Court election. The release of the toolkit is included in the list of events for Civic Learning Week.
Jennifer Javornik of Madison-based Filament Games also participated in the national conference as part of a panel on “Gaming for Democracy.” Filament Games has long been creating civics-based video games for iCivics, a nonprofit which in turn makes these games and other educational materials available free to teachers.
Javornik says these are dynamic times in civics education, driven by recent events including the rise of disinformation. “Arming people with knowledge is one of the best ways to counter and fight disinformation,” she says. Using games to teach civics, she adds, is a “perfect marriage” because so much about civics is about “action,” in particular the action of government. “It’s all about doing and in video games you do.” I was particularly happy to hear about Filament’s NewsFeed Defenders, which teaches students how to discern if information is credible. “You have to use tools to research the source of the information and to essentially fact check it,” says Javornik.
Aidan Olson fits the description of a student “hungry to be civically engaged.” A 10th grader at West High School, he co-founded the Sifting and Winnowing Club at the school this fall. The club, which encourages youth participation in civic events, has brought elected officials to school to speak to students and is hosting debates during school hours on the upcoming Madison mayor’s race and school board race.
“I think it’s important to bring civics to kids at West,” says Olson. “West should be a place where students see civic interaction…. We’re a bunch of young, motivated kids who want to see the world be better than it is right now. All these issues — police brutality, systemic racism, climate change — need to be addressed and I think young people are really the people to do it.”
Olson would like to see Wisconsin require a civics course, but that’s just the floor. Clubs like Sifting and Winnowing, he says, “can help bring politics to high school students and make them real. When you see a representative on the stage answering questions from fellow students, that is powerful in the sense that it makes people feel like they have a voice. And at the end of the day that is the most important thing. Because everybody in this democracy has a voice, or at least they should.”
When I spoke to Diana Hess, UW-Madison School of Education dean and an expert on civics education, in 2019, she noted that Wisconsin was an outlier for not requiring a civics course in its public schools. A bill introduced in the state Legislature in 2021 would have required such a course, but Hess says she could not ultimately support the legislation because it would have prescribed a model curriculum. “You don’t want the Legislature determining what should be taught in specific courses,” she says. The bill did not pass.
But there is ample evidence state educators are focused on civics. The Department of Public Instruction is planning to release a recommended “scope and sequence” for civics and social studies education this summer, with implementation in the coming school year. And when the Wisconsin Council for the Social Studies convenes for its annual conference March 10-12 in Madison, Superintendent Jill Underly, who has made civics a priority of her administration at DPI, will give the keynote on the importance of civic education.
Hess, whose research focuses on how to teach people to talk about highly controversial issues, says the last few years of increased polarization has made teaching civics challenging, with more pushback from parents and school boards. Students, however, are not usually the ones objecting. Hess says that is why it is also necessary for teachers to speak with parents and to reassure them about the nature of civics education. “Students are being taught how to be citizens in a democracy,” says Hess. “They are not being taught that a particular perspective is the right one.”
[Editor's note: This article was corrected to note that the program taught in Middleton is Legislative Semester, not Seminar.]
