National Civics Fellowship

Sarah Jencks

National Civics Fellow

Sarah Jencks is the founder of Every Museum a Civic Museum, guiding museums and historic sites to articulate their civic missions, and a Civic Partnerships Fellow at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, steward of Monticello. She is a leader in national initiatives including the Educating for American Democracy Community Learning Partners Task Force, served fifteen years as director of education at Ford’s Theatre, and sits on the boards of the National Council for History Education and Literacy InterActives. 

Project Description

Sarah will conduct a series of interviews with leaders from cultural organizations participating in Monticello’s Cultivating Civic Imaginations project to collect examples of how civic engagement is integrated into cultural programs, exhibitions, and resources, with a particular focus on the use of the Educating for American Democracy roadmap. The interviews will be published as either podcast episodes or a series of blog posts.

Joseph Kahne

National Civics Fellow

Joseph Kahne is the Ted and Jo Dutton Presidential Professor of Education Policy and Politics at the University of California, Riverside, and director of the Civic Engagement Research Group. He researches school practices, digital media, and youth political development and leads national projects such as Connecting Classrooms to Congress and the Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy. Kahne serves on multiple national commissions and is a member of the National Academy of Education.

Project Description

Joseph has partnered with Stanford's Deliberative Democracy Lab on his project, “Building a Supermajority for Civic Education.” They have engaged a national sample of adults in an all-day deliberation on the purposes and desirability of civic education and have identified numerous substantive goals for civic education that have supermajority support among the public, demonstrating the potential for a functional consensus. 

Stephen Morris

National Civics Fellow

Stephen Morris is superintendent/principal of a TK–8 charter school serving approximately five hundred students in Fresno, California. He is also cofounder and former CEO of the Civic Education Center, where he advanced civic dialogue, service learning, and civics education among students and educators. With more than twenty years of experience in K–12 education, he cofounded a private school serving underserved youth in Los Angeles and developed ethnic studies and civics education curricula grounded in US founding ideals. His work explores educational equity, school choice, reflective patriotism, and the role of America’s founding principles in democratic renewal. 

Trygve Throntveit

National Civics Fellow

Trygve Throntveit is a research professor in higher education at Ball State University and associate director of its Center for Economic and Civic Learning. He is a historian and national leader in civic renewal who created and directs the nationwide Third Way Civics initiative for undergraduate civic learning and regularly consults with higher education institutions and associations on curricular reform. Widely published in the civic studies field, he also directs the Institute for Public Life and Work and has presented on civic learning and civic renewal in the US, Europe, and Asia. 

Project Description

Trygve will promote and expand the Third Way Civics initiative for undergraduate civic learning, or 3WC, a program that trains faculty across multiple disciplines at institutions nationwide to weave student-centered, active, and collaborative civic learning into their regular courses without sacrificing existing content or methodological learning objectives. Beginning as an effort to move students past polarized “triumphant vs. tragic” narratives of American history and politics, the initiative has grown into a model for fostering information literacy, civic agency, and collaborative problem-solving skills adopted at colleges and universities in California, Florida, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, and beyond.