Education Commons^™

An Analysis Of Citizenship Education In Maine Middle Schools, Tom Adams

Honors College

An essential responsibility of public schooling is to cultivate civic awareness in students and prepare them to participate in a democratic society. Schools have, however, broadly failed this task, a trend the Maine Department of Education has attempted to reverse through policy. The 2019 edition of the MDoE’s Maine Learning Results (“MLR”) standards mandates that middle school social studies teachers implement civic action and service-learning projects (a.k.a. “citizenship education”) to address community needs and foster students’ civic identity. Existing literature suggests that citizenship education improves students’ civic awareness, community engagement, and future voting behavior, but the effectiveness of this new …