Verified: Discerning Truth in the Disinformation Age
In the News
Coalition Member Spotlight
New Members
Every Voice Counts During Civic Learning Week
I often tell people, I’m sure your job is great, but mine is better—and I mean it. Each day, I get to work with some subset of over 325 organizations that are members of the CivXNow Coalition, learning what they do and why they do it. It’s inspiring and humbling. That is why I’m so excited about the second-ever National Civic Learning Week (CLW). The week provides an opportunity for our field and the amazing humans that drive it to take a curtain call, celebrate the importance of our work, and broaden and deepen our powerful movement.
Because I have a bird’s-eye view of what many partners are doing, organizational friends asked me for ideas on how they should celebrate the week. I’m heartened by the fact that a movement as diverse as ours—one that includes in- and out-of-school actors, museums and cultural institutions, people with different viewpoints and life experiences, etc.—provides many onramps for engagement. Our movement’s diversity is our strength.
With this knowledge, I encourage our partners and now you to showcase what you do and do what you’re good at throughout CLW. There’s not one way to celebrate; there are many. And, what’s more, you don’t have to do this alone or start from scratch. We have many resources that can help you.
If you’re an:
Educator, think about spotlighting your lessons or student work. Check out the Educator Toolkit your peers from small and large districts across the country created, including classroom-ready activities, messages, and other useful tools.
Elected official, take this moment to focus your colleagues on this important issue.
Organization, this one-pager lays out the goals our coalition members articulated for CLW. It includes links to ideas that can take you as little as 10 minutes to execute.
We ask that all partners use our marketing kit, which includes graphics, sample posts, and action ideas that your organization can easily deploy. You may also wish to attend one of the many thoughtful events our partners are leading.
As I think about CLW, my mind goes to one of the favorite books I read my daughter when she was younger. In Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who, the mayor of this tiny town, Whoville, that exists on a speck, calls out to this one young person who isn’t effectively using their voice with an impassioned plea. In Dr. Seuss’s words, “This is the time for all Whos who have blood that is red to come to the aid of their country!" he said. "We've GOT to make noises in greater amounts! So, open your mouth, lad! For every voice counts!”
The line always reminds me that all our voices don’t have to be the same or leveraged the same way, but together they contribute to a beautiful chorus that can make an enormous difference. So, whether you’re an organization or an individual, I encourage you to leverage your creativity and voice and celebrate with us in March. It will make an enormous difference for a field whose time has come.
See you at Civic Learning Week!
Ace Parsi Director of Coalition Engagement, iCivics
Verified: Discerning Truth in the Disinformation Age
Contemporary political campaigns and debates take place online, making information literacy skills essential for effective engagement in our constitutional democracy. However, skills developed in an analog age aren’t directly transferable to digital domains.
Enter Mike Caulfield and Sam Wineburg. In their essential new book, Verified, they offer actionable steps to assess the veracity of infinite digital information streams alongside our still limited attention spans.
Caulfield suggests SIFTing:
Stop: What do you know about the argument and its source?
Investigate: Is the source trustworthy?
Find: What do other credible sources say?
Trace: What’s the original context of the claim?
Wineburg offers “civic online reasoning,” which advises:
Lateral reading: instead of spending time on a given site assessing its information vertically, leave the site quickly to see what reputable sources say about its subject matter expertise.
Click restraint: yes, use search engines like Google, but scan the results and be judicious before clicking as the best sources may not be atop the list.
Wikipedia is our friend: Wikipedia’s crowdsourcing model produces increasingly accurate, well-sourced entries. Mine and, if appropriate, cite these sources.
Caulfield and Wineburg’s postscript concerns Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT.
While SIFT and civic online reasoning principles still apply, LLMs make lateral reading easier and more essential.
LLMs “...are so uncannily human that it’s easy to forget they don’t know the subject, they just know the things other people say about the subject, whether they’re true or not.”
Finally, LLMs further separate information from its source, complicating matters for those using ChatGPT to complete writing assignments.
In the News
Some stories worth reading, especially if you’re interested in local updates:
The U.S. Department of Education released a Toolkit for the Promotion of Voter Participation for Students to provide resources for educational institutions to help assist eligible students with voter registration and voting, according to the US Daily Ledger.
The Honolulu Civil Beat reports that bills on civic education are meeting resistance and dying in Hawaii, despite many of them never being heard by the legislature.
This report from Indiana takes an in-the-classroom look at how several initiatives are reshaping civic education in the Hoosier State.
One of the key values of CivXNow is finding ways to elevate authentic youth voice. We believe young people and their insights are the best short- and long-term hope for our constitutional democracy—it’s why we do what we do. We share this value with one of our great coalition partners, the public media team at KQED.
When our coalition established our goals for National Civic Learning Week, one of the areas of focus was elevating student-created media. KQED immediately stepped up to share its resources and expertise. Each year, KQED leads a Youth Media Challenge, an opportunity for youth across viewpoints, geography, and issue interests to share how they see the world and their future through audio, video, and images. Check out KQED’s resources for students and teachers and the helpful 2-minute video they created for partner engagement during Civic Learning Week. Then, start creating!
New Members
CivXNow continues to grow, now officially standing at 325+ member organizations! The latest additions are:
We remain deeply appreciative of member efforts and all that we accomplish together. Our goal is to aggregate and activate large networks of support to expand and re-imagine civic education as a force for civic strength. To our members, thank you for your partnership.
If your organization is interested in joining CivXNow or in learning more, please contact us atCivXNow@icivics.org.
Our Mission
CivXNow is a coalition of partners from diverse viewpoints working to create a culture shift that elevates civic education and engagement as a national priority in order to protect and strengthen America’s constitutional democracy. This includes building a shared commitment to ensure that all young people are prepared to assume their rights and responsibilities to participate in civic life and address the issues facing students, their families, and communities in our increasingly dynamic, polarized, and digital society.
To achieve this goal, CivXNow advocates for bipartisan federal and state legislation that supports implementation of state and local policies that reimagine and deliver relevant, inclusive, and engaging K–12 civic learning, both in- and out-of-school.
A Team Effort
The CivXNow team produces this newsletter each month.
We are grateful for the energy, time, and guidance of the CivXNow Advisory Council and to many, many others who support individual projects.
