Online Collaborative Civic Education Program

Eurasia Foundation’s Online Collaborative Civic Education Program worked with educators and youth to promote youth civic engagement in their classrooms and beyond.

EF’s civic education model blends critical thinking skills and an experiential learning pedagogy while examining civic values based on real-life examples of citizen interaction and behavior. Through a series of online courses—on critical thinking, media literacy, citizenship, conflict resolution, service learning, and learning through civic engagement—participants were asked to reflect on their own perspectives of citizenship and learn about participatory teaching methods. As part of their coursework, educators created lesson plans and activities to introduce and practice these concepts and skills with their students. Youth then conducted community engagement projects based on self-identified needs, including the environment, health, disability access, and quality education. As a result of EF’s pedagogical process, both educators and students became more aware of how their assumptions inform their behavior and their actions impact their communities.

The program provided a unique space for collaborative learning and engagement. Participants were encouraged to work with their peers to design interactive curricula, rethink their teaching methods, experiment with new teaching and learning approaches, encourage their students to engage in community projects, and share their experiences and observations. As a result, the program built an extensive repository of localized lesson plans and instructional guides on civic engagement for youth.