The Connecting Classrooms to Congress project will develop and test a social studies curriculum module that enables high school students to study a pressing issue - one that policymakers at the national level are grappling with - and then discuss that issue with their sitting member of Congress through an online deliberative town hall.
This initiative is enabled by a new web-based platform and aims to develop students’ civic knowledge, skills, and commitments while also furthering fundamental academic priorities such as persuasive writing skills and capacities for higher-order thinking and analysis. The initiative also aims, in a tangible way, to create direct, healthy, and informed dialog between the nation’s youth and their representatives. In so doing, participants experience what Neblo, Esterling, and Lazer (2018) term a “directly representative democracy” - one more aligned with our ideals.
Deliberative Town Halls have been shown in a decade of research to have highly desirable impacts on adults and this motivates the plan to bring this experience to youth. After engaging in their town hall, students will also have the opportunity to watch a recorded town hall where this issue was discussed with a member of Congress from a different political party than their own. They will also have the opportunity to talk with students from this different community about this issue. Students will then engage in a writing exercise that may take one of several forms: a policy memo, a persuasive essay, a collaborative writing exercise with other students, or an article or post of some sort that raises awareness amongst the broader public.
The research team will study this intervention in a diverse set of high schools by conducting a randomized controlled trial in California, Illinois, and Florida that adheres to best practices of transparency and reproducibility including making the study material public and publishing a pre-analysis plan. Once this approach is tested, we believe it has the potential to be implemented on a national scale.
Project Team
The research team includes leaders in the fields that comprise the core domains of their work - Civic Education, Democratic Deliberation and Political Science, Curriculum Design and Development, and Evaluation Research Methods.
University of California, Riverside
- Dr. Joseph Kahne, Dutton Presidential Professor of Policy and Politics and Co-Director of the Civic Engagement Research Group
- Dr. Erica Hodgin, Co-Director, Civic Engagement Research Group Center -- Civic Engagement Research Group
- Dr. Kevin Esterling, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy and Director, Laboratory for Technology, Communication and Democracy (TeCD-Lab)
- Dr. Mariam Salloum, Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering Center -- Laboratory for Technology, Communication and Democracy (TeCD-Lab)
Ohio State University
- Dr. Michael Neblo, Professor of Political Science and (by courtesy) Philosophy, Communication, and Public Policy & Director of the Institute for Democratic Engagement and Accountability (IDEA)
- Dr. William Minozzi, Associate Professor, Political Science
- Amy Lee, Associate Director of the Institute for Democratic Engagement and Accountability (IDEA) Center -- The Institute for Democratic Engagement and Accountability (IDEA)
Brown University
- Dr. Jonathan E. Collins, Assistant Professor of Education, Political Science (by courtesy), and International and Public Affairs
Advisory Committee
- Dr. Danielle Allen -- James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University, and Director of Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics
- Andy Blackadar -- Director of Curriculum Development, The Choices Program, Brown University
- Dr. David Campbell -- Packey J. Dee Professor of American Democracy at the University of Notre Dame and the chairperson of the political science department
- Dr. Barbara Cruz -- Professor of Social Science Education, College of Education, University of South Florida
- Dr. Elyse Eidman-Aadahl -- Executive Director of the National Writing Project
- Dr. Diana Hess -- Dean, School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison
- Dr. Jane Mansbridge -- Adams Professor of Political Leadership and Democratic Values, Emerita, Harvard University Curriculum Working Group
- Steven Masyada -- Interim Director, Lou Frey Institute at University of Central Florida
- Sonia Mathew & Mary Ellen Daneels -- Democracy Program, McCormick Foundation
- Carolyn Power -- History-Social Science Specialist, Riverside Unified School District
- Heather Van Benthuysen -- Director, Social Science and Civic Engagement Department, Chicago Public Schools