News & Events

Civic Circle students have written several heartfelt and expressive songs in our after-school workshops, on topics ranging from voting to immigration and bullying. Recently a group of students in Grades 3-5 wrote a song with Lea Morris called “We’ll Get There Soon” that seemed to capture both the upheaval they have faced in recent months, and their unquenchable hope for better days ahead. Lea’s beautiful video, which featured a virtual student choir created with the

The Civic Circle was excited to see that our lesson plans on democracy and women’s suffrage were among the Educator Resources included in an ambitious new Educating for American Democracy blueprint released last month. The blueprint is part of a national campaign to both invest in and reimagine civic learning for the 21st Century. The Civic Circle welcomes the chance to be part of this larger movement to revive civic education.

The Civic Circle’s new video about news literacy, “Whisper Down the Lane,” had its debut at the Maryland Civic Education and Engagement Leadership Summit. The song, performed here by the wonderful Lea Morris, was the curtain raiser for a summit round-table on media literacy in an era of “Truth Decay.” Put on by the emerging Maryland Civic Education Coalition (The Civic Circle is a member), the summit also featured round-tables on service-learning and civil discourse,

At The Civic Circle, performance-based learning tends to center on the humanities. Students sing songs, read poems, do “blended” poetry- and song-writing, and write their own original songs. But technology creates an opening that is more accessible to some students, and that can also support creative performance, thanks to digital back-beats and other cutting-edge music tools. Enter Jason Mullinax, a one-of-a-kind performer and instrument maker recently described by one blogger as “one of the most

Shutterstock One of Donald Trump’s very last acts as president was to release a report by his “1776 Commission” that trumpeted “patriotic education,” defended the Founding Fathers’ ownership of slaves, likened progressives to Mussolini, and was roundly denounced by historians. Four days later, one of President Joe Biden’s first acts as Commander in Chief was to toss out that report via executive order. Biden’s action came on the heels of an inaugural speech that invoked