July 18, 2022

The Civic Learning and Democracy Engagement (CLDE) Coalition was formed by five national organizations, the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), Campus Compact, Complete College America (CCA), College Promise, and State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEO), to bring together educational and policy leaders with the goal of making students’ Civic Learning and Democracy Engagement expected, inclusive, and “equity-committed.”

The Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC) recently signed on to the CLDE shared commitment statement to demonstrate its support of and commitment to civic learning and democracy engagement in higher education.

Signatories of the shared statement commit to:

  1. Affirm the civic mission of postsecondary education and take vigorous action to help higher education fulfill that mission;
  2. Showcase examples in our community of civic engagement and democracy learning at scale – involving all students and especially students from communities that have been chronically underserved in U.S. society;
  3. Engage public and policy leaders with the importance of higher education’s civic mission and the need to advance equity-committed civic learning in college;
  4. Support and align with educational reforms in P-12 civics and history that also are moving forward in U.S. states, communities, and schools;
  5. Work in our own contexts to provide high quality civic learning for students, including: connections between curricular and experiential learning; opportunities to work on significant public problems; practice in constructively engaging views different from one’s own; and disaggregated evidence about what works and what needs improvement in students’ experience of democracy learning;
  6. Provide leaders and educators the support needed to deepen civic learning and democracy engagement in their own contexts; to make equitable participation a documented achievement; and to work toward a common goal of creating a high quality, civic-oriented postsecondary education for all U.S. students.

For more information, check out https://collegeciviclearning.org/sharedcommitment.