New York State Seal of Civic Readiness and the Civic Readiness Capstone Project
CRF Resources to Support the New York State Seal of Civic Readiness
and the Civic Readiness Capstone Project
As part of its commitment to “civic education that empowers all students to make informed decisions for the public good as members of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world,” the New York State Board of Regents is advancing the recommendations of its Civic Readiness Task Force. Students in the Empire State now have the opportunity to earn a Seal of Civic Readiness.
CRF is pleased to offer curriculum materials to assist educators across New York state in meeting the criteria for demonstrating civic knowledge and civic participation across the Civic Readiness Domains and through the Civic Readiness Capstone Project as outlined by the New York State Education Department and the Board of Regents.
Civic Readiness Domains
Civic Knowledge
Demonstrate a fundamental and functional knowledge of government, law, history, geography, culture, economics, and current events.
CRF has curated a collection of lessons that provides timely and focused opportunities for students to strengthen their civic knowledge. These balanced, interactive, and enriching lessons can supplement learning in U.S. history, world history, and U.S. government courses, as well as address current civic issues.
Civic Skills & Actions
Demonstrate a broad array of critical analytic, verbal, communication, media literacy and other skills and participate in a wide variety of actions.
CRF’s Challenge of Democracy series of lessons will also help students to build content knowledge as they consider fundamental questions about our democratic institutions and the challenges facing the United States today. What’s more, these lessons feature dynamic teaching methods that also give them the opportunity to practice civic skills and actions, including navigating opposing viewpoints and analyzing and evaluating news and other sources for accuracy, bias, reliability, and credibility.
Civic Mindsets
Demonstrate the mindset of a participant in a democratic society. A civic mindset is a commitment to democratic interpersonal and intrapersonal values, virtues, attitudes, and beliefs and informed actions that promote and facilitate meaningful participation in civic life. It is an understanding of self as part of and responsible to larger social groups.
Many CRF curriculum materials feature either the Civil Conversation strategy or Civic Scenarios and Simulations. Both methods are explicitly designed to help students build civic knowledge, practice civic skills and actions, cultivate civic mindsets, and provide important civic experiences. To see how both methods support Standard 5 of the New York State Learning Standards for Social Studies, as well as key Social Studies Practices and Unifying Themes of the New York State K-12 Social Studies Framework, click here.
Civic Experiences
Participate in developmentally appropriate civic experiences. Civic readiness should be developed in a variety of settings and ways—inside and outside of the classroom, across content areas, and for multiple purposes.
CRF’s Civil Conversation and Civic Scenario and Simulation approaches to academic discussion also set the stage for the crucial civic experiences of navigating controversy through civil discourse and of participating in a moot court or in other simulations of democratic processes.
Civic Readiness Capstone Project
Students choose to complete the Civic Readiness Capstone project to demonstrate their readiness to make a positive difference in the public life of their communities through the applied combination of civic knowledge, skills and actions, mindset, and experiences.
CRF’s Civic Action Project (CAP) is a free project-based, student-driven practicum for civics and government classes that amounts to a ready-to-implement Civic Readiness Capstone Project, with versions for implementation at the middle school or the high school level. CAP provides students with opportunities to deepen their civic knowledge, practice a wide range of civic skills and actions and is, of course, a transformative civic experience.
Note: While these links have been organized separately under each domain, very few CRF curriculum materials address only a single domain. The resources highlighted here provide meaningful overlap across domains, and educators can find still more lessons in our full Curriculum Library.
