The 2022 Midterm Elections are a teachable moment to engage students in media literacy and civic learning. This winter and spring, the Illinois Civics Hub has hosted a series of webinars aligned to the Educating for American Democracy Roadmap  featuring academic experts and civic learning partners to explore:

• Strategies and tools that enrich the curriculum and provide students with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions for effective civic engagement.
• Media literacy strategies to help students become wise consumers and producers of information.

This month, Leah Bueso, JD, a Ph.D. postdoctoral scholar from the Civic Engagement Research Group (CERG) at the University of California-Riverside and Noorya Hayat, Ed.M., Senior Researcher at the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) at Tufts University John M. Tisch College of Civic Life, joined the Illinois Civics Hub to host a webinar on “Teaching for Informed and Equitable Voting.”

The issues of youth civic engagement, election laws, and voting rights have taken center stage in the current “culture wars.” In addition, a “battle of the billionaires” looms in Illinois as the gubernatorial campaigns ramp up with what is sure to be record-breaking campaign expenditures to influence voters. How can educators help students navigate the information landscape and the electoral process? How can students see themselves as “we the people” working to form “a more perfect union” with more equitable opportunities to vote? In our recent webinar, our friends from CIRCLE and CERG: 

• focused on the critical role that school leaders and teachers across grade levels and content areas can play in promoting informed and equitable voting as well as preparing youth to participate in democracy. 
• helped participants learn about trends in youth voting, inequalities in turnout, and misconceptions about youth engagement.
• connected participants to resources and models for teaching about elections and voting so that they can identify approaches that will fit in their own context and align with other core priorities. 
• explored examples of how teachers across the country created high-quality lessons that promote informed and equitable voting.

If you missed the webinar or previous offerings in this series, you can access a recording on the Illinois Civics Hub Webinar Archive. If you are interested in more resources around voting and elections, visit the Illinois Civics Hub Elections and Voting  Toolkit.

This summer, the Illinois Civics Hub is partnering with CIRCLE, and CERG to host a 4-day Summer Institute on Informed and Equitable Voting for PD credit. The institute will meet virtually from 11 a.m.-2 p.m. over four days, with one hour of independent work between each session. Participants can choose to attend June 27-30 or July 11-14, 2022. Registration details are available at this link.