The Project Citizen: A Portfolio-Based Civic Education Program

            The Project Citizen is a curricular program for middle, secondary, and post-secondary students and adult groups that promotes competent and responsible participation in local and state government. The program helps people learn how to monitor and influence public policy. In the process, they develop support for democratic values and principles, tolerance, and feelings of political efficacy. Entire classes of students or members of youth organizations work cooperatively to identify a public policy problem in their community. They then research the problem, evaluate alternative solutions, develop their own solution in the form of a public policy, and create a political action plan to enlist local or state authorities to adopt their proposed policy. Participants develop a portfolio of their work and present their project in a hearing showcase before a panel of civic-minded community members.
       
Curriculum

            The curriculum involves an entire class of students or members of youth or adult groups in a series of structured, cooperative-learning activities that are guided by teachers, organization leaders, and adult volunteers. Working in four cooperative teams, the students learn to interact with their government through a five-step process that includes the following:

-          Identifying a problem in their community
-          Gathering and evaluating information on the problem
-          Examining and evaluating alternative solutions
-          Developing a proposed public policy to address the problem
-          Creating an action plan to get their policy adopted by government.
         Students’ work is displayed in a class portfolio containing a display section and a documentation section.

 Project Activity:

- 25 selected teachers from PDO have been trained by civic education trainer from Thailand
- teaching civic education to the children by 25 selected teachers from PDO
- student showcase about their portfolio

 Project Period:
September, 2011 to February, 2012

Note:

      The Center for Civic Education (CCE) is a non-profit organization based in California, U.S.A with four decades of experience promoting civic education in the U.S and more than 80 other countries. The Center proposed to collaborate with partners in Myanmar and Thailand (King Prajadhipok’s Institute to establish a Thai/Myanmar Civic Education Consortium.