NCCRESt

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Civics

• "E Pluribus Unum": What Does it Mean? How Should We Respond?
  Charts the intellectual history of competing conceptions of national unity, diversity, and ethnic identity. Explicates three models: monolithic integration (monocultural assimilation of diversity), pluralistic preservation (diversity and unity as equal values), and pluralistic integration (stressing consensus about core civic values while acknowledging the compatibilities and tensions regarding unity and diversity).
• Citizenship Education and the Teaching of Literature: Lessons and Suggestions from the American Experience
  This essay shows how the construction of literature curricula and the study of literature can contribute to civic education. The paper describes the anti-civic forces now at work in literature programs in U.S.
• Community Service in a Multicultural Nation
  Examines human qualities that undergird citizens' commitment to the common good in diverse societies, suggesting that community service fosters such qualities. Planned interactions across social barriers are necessary to develop qualities of citizenship for pluralistic nations.
• Cultural Reflections: Work, Politics, and Daily Life in Germany, Social Studies. Grades 9-12. Update 1997/1998
  This packet contains three lessons designed for the high school classroom. Lessons include: (1) "The German Worker"; (2) "Government in Germany"; and (3) "Culture and Daily Life in Germany." Student activities focus on comparative economic systems, worker training and apprenticeship programs, structure of government with case studies of the health care system and the federal budget, the role of the press in Germany, and leisure activities.
• Democracy and Difference
  Argues that, with the increasing diversity of the U.S. population, education needs to respond by figuring out a meaningful way to embrace values of civic unity and cultural diversity at the same time.
• Expanding Conceptions of Community and Civic Competence for a Multicultural Society
  Connects the concept of diversity to the symbiotic relationship between individuality and community in the United States. Maintains that cultural awareness is a valid and realistic response to global interdependence and changing demographics.
• Leaders of Color as Catalysts for Community Building in a Multicultural Society
  Presents a vision of multicultural education as a validating and inclusive process for non-European ways of knowing. Classifies multicultural education as inclusionary, emancipatory, liberatory, critical, and transformative.
• Service Learning for a Diverse Society: Research on Children, Youth, and Prejudice
  Reviews psychological and educational research on prejudice and intergroup relations to produce suggestions and guidelines for improving the combined educational goals of service learning and multicultural education. Recommends starting early, emphasizing critical thinking, connecting activities to appropriate stages of cognitive development, and employing role playing and cooperative learning.