Civics Across Campus: Designing Effective Extracurricular Programming

This study focuses on examining the role that isolated extracurricular events can play in furthering students’ civic education; these one-time events require fewer resources to implement than courses and therefore provide valuable opportunities for faculty to engage new audiences on their campuses in the work of civic learning. In order to develop more effective civic learning in these isolated extracurricular activities, we follow a two-pronged approach. First, we use survey data to determine the audiences reached by extracurricular civic education events, as well as to assess event attendees’ levels of political knowledge, civic skills, democratic values, and feelings of efficacy. Second, we use insights drawn from this data to suggest strategies to design more effective programming, including identifying key audiences and targeting specific learning outcomes, and share the successful results we have had in implementing these strategies on our campus. In so doing, our work not only adds to the growing literature on civic learning, but also provides a model for how to practically organize successful, and manageable, one-time extracurricular civic education programs.