By Danika Brown, CCL Staff
This summer, the Center for Civic Leadership has launched a new voter engagement and election awareness initiative this summer and fall. As part of our strategic efforts to highlight and support civic engagement in all its many forms across the Rice campus, we are: hosting a faculty roundtable and a 2-hour workshop;, developing a Canvas resource page; , and offering funds and curricular support to faculty who would like their courses so that funding courses canto to participate in this year’s Texas Tribune Festival.
The CCL invites faculty and instructors from all disciplines to collaborate with us to integrate voter education into your courses in order to help students see disciplinary connections to policy and governance decisions and to take action through the election. Integrating voter education into your courses can be as simple as including important dates related to voting on your syllabi and connecting students to the campus’ voter registration resource, TurboVote. But the buzz of an important election, tied to a campus-wide series of events around voting rights, issue education and advocacy, and election research, offers a unique opportunity for you to engage with your students and help them make connections between what they are learning in your courses and broader civic concerns.
In collaboration with the Center for Teaching Excellence, we are pleased to host Civic Rice: Voter Awareness in Your Curriculum, a two-part series in which faculty will share their strategies for tying their courses to issue education and democratic processes. In Part 1, the“Civic Rice Roundtable”, faculty from diverse disciplines will share how they integrate issue education, policy consideration, and current political context into their curriculum. Please join Molly Morgan, Dan Wallach, Scott Solomon, and Ozge Gurcanli for a lively discussion to inspire your thinking about engaging students, Friday, August 7th, 11:30-12:30.
In Part 2, the staff of the CCL and the CTE will host a workshop that includes concrete examples, resources, assignment design ideas, and strategies for you to work with and introduces you to the Civic Rice Curricular Resources Canvas page. We will also share details about several voter engagement events that the CCL is planning with campus partners (such as the soon to be announced Right to Vote Series) and provide resources designed specifically for integrating these events into your courses. Please join us for the workshop on August 14, 10a-12p. Registration for the series (you may choose to attend one or both) is available at: https://bit.ly/32Vhohk
For those of you already thinking about ways to leverage the robust policy conversations and analyses going on right now, the CCL invites you to consider integrating this year’s Texas Tribune Festival into your course. TribFest is a yearly event that brings diverse speakers and groups from across the country to participate in panels on a range of timely topics and issues. The panels are expertly moderated by Tribune staff and represent multiple positions on the issues engaged. This year’s TribFest has been turned into a month-long series of virtual events. The CCL has taken students to Austin to attend TribFest every year, and they find so much value in getting to hear from the speakers interacting with each other on issues they feel a sense of urgency about. The CCL is able to support the registration for 3 courses at up to 25 students each (if your course has a higher enrollment, we can work with you to help identify other sources of potential funding). To apply for this funding, please send a one-page proposal that explains the learning objectives and TribFest activities you propose to integrate into your curriculum. Application details are provided on the application form: https://forms.gle/bgQeHJHdaDF9iBtRA. The deadline to apply is August 15th.
We are excited to work with the Rice community to highlight civic engagement and to share resources for enhancing courses with civic content. We will soon launch our Canvas site, Civic Rice Curricular Resource for Civic Engagement, which will include a compendium of assignments, readings, activities, and other resources that you can adapt to your courses. We would love to include resources and activities you are already using in your courses and highlight your work on the Canvas site as well. Please contact us to submit and if you have any questions about our upcoming events and initiative.