For 8 years now I have orchestrated a required, undergraduate course at Drexel called Introduction to Civic Engagement (CIVC 101). The course began in 2012 as an extension of Drexel’s civic engagement mission—which encompasses both preparing students to meet pressing challenges in the world and being a responsible institutional neighbor to the communities surrounding campus.
The CIVC 101 curriculum focuses on building student capacity to participate in collective, public problem solving, introducing them to and helping them build their toolkit of knowledge, skills, values, and motivations to sustain civic responsibilities. Lessons cover topics such as:
What are social issues and how can we better understand them?
What does identity have to do with social issues?
What is our responsibility to our communities?
What does it mean for a social issue to be “systemic” and how does that change the approach to changing it?
What are some of the mechanisms of social change, and how can we find an effective way to plug in?
The course is not about any specific social issue—instead it introduces broad concepts related to civic engagement and social change and invites students to apply those concepts to social issues they care about personally. You can learn more about CIVC 101 on the Lindy Center for Civic Engagement’s website.
Even before participating in the Climate Pedagogy Incubator, I started thinking more deeply about environmental justice and how it fits into the universe of my civic engagement work. My thinking was not just about climate change/environmental degradation as a social issue, but more broadly about how environmental justice presents a framework to think about civic engagement work and how we define and care for community. One big influence on my thinking was adrienne maree brown, who explored similarities between human organizing and the natural world in her book Emergent Strategy (shout out also to Alexis Pauline Gumbs and her book Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals).
In April of 2024, there was a solar eclipse that was partially visible from Philadelphia. I remember scrambling to find eclipse glasses and standing on the lawn across from the Lindy Center, passing them around with some random students and staff who were walking by, all delighted by this natural occurrence that forced us to pause in the middle of our workday and look up at the sky. It also got me thinking about how nature is governed by rules and processes very different from the human world—but still it exists alongside us and we affect each other in countless seen and unseen ways.
I write a weekly email to the CIVC 101 team of adjunct instructors and Course Assistants, and in my email the week of the eclipse, you can tell I was starting to articulate a new thread in my thinking on civic engagement and the environment, inspired by Native American ideas about eclipses:
In the video on this website, “A Time for Renewal - Navajo (Diné) Knowledge of Eclipses”, one teacher shares the following:
"When we talk about clanships and relationship, the kids think that it’s only between a person and a person. And so we try to take it beyond that. The earth is your mother… the sky and the universe is your father… the moon is your grandfather… and then other things… the home is our mother… and the fire is our grand. So we develop all these relationships with other things that go beyond just human to human relationships. And so that’s to establish, you know, respect for earth, respect for sky. So we try to take it beyond that. That relationship exists beyond just a human."
To me, this emphasizes a really important point about civic engagement that I regrettably don’t think about enough—that our civic life is not just about how we interact with other people and with man-made environments and systems, but it also encompasses natural elements that we cannot control (as much as we might try): our bodies, nature and the earth, the cosmos, etc. We impact these things and they impact us, but we don’t often see them as equals in our relationship to them, rather they are things we try to manipulate and control for our own benefit, or things we simply overlook and ignore. An event like an eclipse, however, forces us to stop and really think about these things all around us that we may take for granted but that work in concert to shape our experience of life (the sun coming up in the morning and going down at night, the moon, the weather, etc.) Earthquakes and other natural phenomena that interrupt our daily life do the same thing (like the one we had in Philly on Friday – if you felt it I’m sure it stopped you in your tracks!)
As you speak with students about the definition of civic engagement this week and the concepts of social change and relationships, I hope you’ll reflect on how natural elements of our world affect the work of civic engagement, and how considering our relationship to nature changes how we view the work of civic engagement. What happens to our organizing when we consider the earth? How does it change what we understand about housing justice, food justice, healthcare justice, education justice, and other forms of justice? When we work to make social change, is it just for fellow humans or also the earth where we live? Is it even possible to separate the two?
This was clearly a moment of revelation for me—for so long my understanding of civic engagement focused solely on humans—how we live together in communities, build structures to shape our communities, and work together to solve issues that affect us. But thanks to all of these influences, I started to think beyond human-centered frameworks of civic engagement. To ask myself: what if the environment is a fellow citizen that, like us humans, has something to give and take from being a part of our community?
During my time in the Spring 2025 CPI cohort, these ideas found fertile soil in which to grow and influence the curriculum of CIVC 101. I thought a lot about how to incorporate the idea of “environment as fellow citizen” into the CIVC 101 class.
In the fall of 2024 when I was teaching my own section of CIVC 101 in partnership with the Pennoni Honors College, I was lucky enough to come across a reading that I felt really exemplified this concept in a way students could grasp: the chapter “Maple Nation” in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s pivotal book, Braiding Sweetgrass. In this chapter, Kimmerer talks about the Maple sugaring season overlapping with tax season, and opines on what it would be like to be a citizen in what she calls “Maple Nation”.
Here it is, almost tax day, when my fellow humans are getting ready to make their contribution to the well-being of the community, but the maples have been giving all year long. Their contribution of limb wood kept my old neighbor Mr. Keller’s house warm all winter when he couldn’t pay the oil bill. The volunteer fire department and the ambulance squad as well rely on maple contributions to their monthly pancake breakfast, to raise funds for a new engine. The trees make a real dent in the energy bill for the school with their shade, and, thanks to big canopies of maples, nobody I know ever pays a bill for air-conditioning. They donate shade to the Memorial Day parade every year without even being asked. If it weren’t for the maples’ ability to break the wind, the highway department would have to plow snowdrifts off the road twice as often.
As I was preparing for a week in the course where we were going to talk about what it means to be a citizen in a community, I added this reading as an assignment (alongside the USCIS Oath of Allegiance to the United States. In our class discussion, we addressed the meaning of citizenship, asking things like: What rules do we all agree to, explicitly or implicitly, to live harmoniously together? What do we ask people to do to follow these rules? How do we conduct ourselves? What do we give up? Etc. I worried the reading would be too “crunchy,” but the students reacted positively, which led me to want to incorporate this reading more widely into the CIVC 101 curriculum.
That opportunity came in summer 2025, when I was updating an Honors-specific curriculum for CIVC 101 that would be taught across several sections in Fall 2025. I decided to start the class off in week 2 (week 1 was all about community building) with a framing discussion about the concept of citizenship, putting the Kimmerer chapter alongside excerpts from John Dewey’s essay “The Public and it’s Problems.”
Here is an excerpt from my lesson plan for that week, where you can see how the readings are worked in:
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Week 2 is an opportunity to explore the concept of "citizenship" through two readings, which are quite different from one another in several ways - when they were written, the identities of their writers, the language they are using, and the ideas they are espousing. But both pose interesting ideas about the nature of a society and what the inputs and outputs of citizens, whether human or otherwise, should and could be.
Grounding activity (5 minutes): Ask students to put away their technology and sit comfortably in their chairs. You can say you're going to do a short visualization exercise, and they can close their eyes if they want. Ask students to think about and visualize all the things they are grateful for in their communities, however they define that - all the people who have supported them and what supports they've provided, the natural world and how it has sustained their ability to do the things they do, the built environment that shelters them, the body that contains them and carries them through the world. If there's anything else you want to add, feel free, but at this point you can tell them to open their eyes and "come back" to the classroom and thank them for being in class today!
Setting the Scene (10 minutes): Have the students get into pairs and each of them share for 3 minutes what their idea of "citizenship" is with their partner. They can refer to the readings but don't have to - it can be purely an individual understanding of the word. You can use your phone as a timer. Then come back to the big group and ask if anyone wants to share anything that they discussed in their pairs. This might bleed into the next part of the conversation which is okay.
Deeper application/activity: Citizenship rights and responsibilities (25 minutes). You could discussion around these prompts (as a big group or in pairs):
What are examples from the readings of rights and responsibilities?
What are things we come to expect from our society and what are we willing to do to get them? Small and concrete (like public roads) or big and conceptual (like safety). If something feels too big, you can ask students to further define it.
What are hidden infrastructures - things about our society that we take for granted until they are gone or not working the way we expect them to? (Maple Nation - the earth)
Do we have a responsibility to be knowledgeable enough to engage in political affairs in an informed way? An equitable way? Some other way? Should there be citizen tests for everyone? What are barriers to us having this kind of education?
How does this discussion happen on a community level? Not just individuals saying what they want but a "public" expressing what it wants? One of the challenges Dewey writes about ("The prime difficulty, as we have seen, is that of discovering the means by which a scattered, mobile and manifold public may so recognize itself as to define and express its interests.")
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While I consider this just a small way of incorporating my larger ideas into the CIVC 101 curriculum, it has also been a great starting point and I know it will grow into more and continue shaping my practice of civic curriculum development.