Date of Award

2019

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Education

Abstract

Zoe M. Prevatt Loyola University Chicago PILOT STUDY OF TEACHER PREPAREDNESS FOR MANDATED CIVICS EDUCATION IN ILLINOIS Following thirty-nine states, Illinois became the 40th state to make Civic Education a mandatory class for students to graduate high school in 2015. The mandated class is a semester long and usually occurs in the students Junior or Senior year of high school. The Illinois General Assembly then passed a separate bill that indicated that the 2016-17 school year would be when the mandated class would be fully implemented. Throughout my piece I look to this implementation plan as well as the original Call to Action laid out by Barack Obama and Arne Duncan from 2012. These two pieces work together to build the foundation of my study. I also use theoretical discussions on democratic education to further understand education in this civic context. I pose the question if civic education is really "working" in terms of the standards and guidelines set out for it in the original Call to Action. I chose to tackle this question in terms of teacher training and implementation of this mandate. A detailed survey was sent to high schools in 65 counties in Illinois which will help us begin to see how teachers were or were not prepared and possibly what the future of the mandate will look like. Responses came back from eleven different high school teachers in seven different counties. The responses showed that teachers in Illinois were left wanting in terms of their training and the resources available to them to implement a civics education class at their school.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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