Summer Institute for Faculty

Be a Part of the Civics Initiative

If you are concerned about issues that are dividing our communities, our country and our world, we invite you to join a diverse community of teacher-scholars who are engaging these topics in the classrooms.

We are living in a remarkable time in the history of American democracy. More than any point in recent generations, we are witnessing extreme polarization, increasingly complex and highly segmented news, entertainment, and social media; and public instances of animosity, incivility, and violence in our communities and nation. This turbulence in public life has spawned a renewed debate about what it means to be part of our shared community and prompts urgent questions about the contours of the American social contract.

DePaul's Civics Initiative is designed to bring such questions to the center of our conversations in and out of the classroom.

• What are our obligations to others in times of economic and social upheaval?
• What does it mean to actively participate in a social contract that includes living with, by, and under rules, regulations and values that we may believe are wrong or misguided?
• How do we understand the role of power and the unequal distribution of it in this process?
• How do we seek justice within these power relations?

Faculty interested in exploring these questions both broadly and within their own disciplinary framework can receive training to offer a section of LSP 275: Lived Civics, the Social Contract & Public Life at the DePaul Civics Initiative Summer Institute.

LSP 275: Lived Civics, the Social Contract & Public Life is an interdisciplinary course that provides students with the framework for addressing the key issues facing us in the 21^st century in our local, state, national, and global communities. Faculty are provided training and support to teach the course, employing the social contract as frame for understanding the tensions inherent in our society and using their own disciplinary lens to explore specific issues. All sections of LSP 275 can be cross-listed with faculty members' home units.