About
The NYCDOE Department of Social Studies & Civics is part of Curriculum and Instruction in the Division of Teaching and Learning. We produce resources, materials, and provide year-round professional learning for all things social studies and civics. You might have seen our flagship K–12 social studies curriculum: Passport to Social Studies, or its companion guides: the Hidden Voices collection, the K–12 Civics for All curriculum, or our comics collection produced under the Civics for All Comics Group imprint. You can access all of those resources and more on the Social Studies & Civics Hub.
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Social Studies
Our goal is to make sure that all students graduate from high school prepared for college, a career, and a future as a productive adult. Students use rich content, themes and big ideas to learn history, geography, economics, civics, citizenship and government. They also use important skills to “think like historians,” developing crucial critical literacy.
To support teachers and students, we've collaborated with NYC public school educators, historians, and other experts to produce Passport to Social Studies. The first NYC educator produced curriculum of any subject area available to every NYCDOE teacher K–12.
Civics for All
Civic education is an essential part of every student’s core academic program. The DOE believes that teaching the foundations of American government and the democratic process is necessary to build a more engaged, active future citizen and informed voter.
Civics for All, an initiative that launched in Spring 2018, provides resources, programming, and professional learning to all NYC schools. The initiative focuses on education models that are interactive, project-based, and relevant to students’ lives.
Civics & The Chancellor's Four Pillars
The work of the Department of Social Studies & Civics is key to realizing the Chancellor's Four Pillars for New York City Public Schools. The resources, programming, and support that exist across our department have begun the work of reimagining the student experience by cultivating deep literacy through disciplinary-specific practices like our "Historical Thinking Tools and Strategies" in Passport to Social Studies, harnessing the power of comics and graphic texts in our curricula, building capacity for virtual-learning across our schools with Passport Digital, and engaging students with a nationally-recognized civics curriculum and innovative democratic and civic experiences like Participatory Budgeting in schools, SoapboxNYC, and Take Action!
The work of scaling, sustaining, and restoring what works continues as we expand some of our most efficacious programs, like the Civics for All Partners which impact over 250,000 NYC students that also capitalizes on the expertise of our teachers and shares innovative social studies and civics practices across the city.
Recognizing that the work of curriculum and professional growth are never done and need to be put in the context of prioritizing wellness and its link to student success especially after the COVID-19 crisis, the Dept. of Social Studies & Civics is offering more professional learning opportunities than ever before to help accelerate student learning and best practices in social studies and civics instruction that are rooted in SEL practices and cultivate culturally responsive and sustaining classrooms and schools.
Because the nature of social studies and civics are so often bounded within and across communities, much of our work promotes engaging families to be our true partners. Programs like SoapboxNYC, Participatory Budgeting, Take Action!, and the new Civic Readiness graduation pathway have allowed us to support schools in not only engaging families, but as experts, and partners in the civic life of the school community.