What is Civic Engagement?
The Certificate in Civic Engagement prepares students to be active, effective, and ethical citizens in their professional and personal lives. Learn about issues of human and civil rights, environmental sustainability, community-building, public policy, and ethics. Put your learning into practice via service learning, community internships, and special projects. Combine the certificate with any baccalaureate major for a double dose of learning and engagement.
This program is intended for people committed to action for the greater good. You learn to:
- Translate theory into action
- Address concrete public problems such as human and civil rights, sustainability, and ethics
- Understand the values that shape society’s response to these problems and develop well-thought-out moral stances related to your personal values
- Develop communication and problem-solving skills to enhance your own civic imagination and the ability of communities to embrace a vision for the future
- Take a leadership role in groups capable of taking action on matters of common concern
When you earn a Civic Engagement Certificate in tandem with a disciplinary degree, you will have opportunities to apply and achieve outcomes in three domains: academic, personal, and civic.
Academically, you will achieve outcomes of your majors and will be able to:
- relate service and professional ethics to civic engagement frameworks;
- translate theoretical perspectives and frameworks of your disciplinary majors into actions solving concrete public problems affecting Alaskan, U.S. and international communities, with substantive emphases on ethics, poverty and sustainability;
- apply critical thinking skills and empirical evidence to make judgments regarding public problems outside the classroom.
Personally, you will be able to:
- develop moral dispositions of judgment, civic participation and public commitments related to your personal values;
- enter unfamiliar situations with confidence and participate effectively;
- identify the disciplinary, societal, and cultural values that shape your own and others’ responses to poverty and sustainability;
- assume responsibility for enacting public uses of your education and civic engagement in your anticipated vocational and personal trajectories.
Civically, you will be able to:
- utilize communication and problem-solving skills (e.g., persuasive communication, listening and deliberation, collaboration and negotiation, public planning) in addressing public problems at multiple levels;
- evaluate the places, interests and competing demands of others in the community and consider ethical implications to resolving them;
- demonstrate commitment to resolving public problems and fostering others’ involvement;
- transform civic imaginations to enhance abilities of individuals, groups, and communities to embrace a vision for the future;
- assume leadership roles in groups and organizations capable of taking action on matters of common concern.
