Scott Hicks, PhD, a professor of English at UNC Pembroke, was welcomed into the second cohort of the Civic Engagement & Voting Rights Teacher Scholars program.
The program unites faculty nationwide to work together and create classroom teaching materials that support a thriving American democracy. It is part of a national effort to develop open-source instructional materials for civics education that are ready-to-deploy, cross-curricular and pro-democracy for use on college campuses nationwide. The Mellon Foundation funds the scholars program.
Dr. Hicks attended the program’s kick-off summer institute at Clemson University this summer where he explored ideas related to civic learning, strategies for transformative teaching and curriculum development and challenges to democracy posed by disinformation and artificial intelligence.
During the 2024-2025 academic year, Hicks will create open-resource educational materials for improving civic and voter rights education. A mentor will support him and meet twice monthly with a smaller group of cohort members. After a peer review of his work and revision, the Clemson University library’s digital institutional repository will publish his teaching materials.
Hicks plans to focus on integrating civic learning into the composition and literature courses he teaches, such as using service-learning in partnership with a local school to role-play registering to vote and casting a ballot in composition classes and incorporating archival and literary texts focused on voting in literature classes.
“I’m grateful to have been selected for this program,” Hicks said. “It’s a wonderful way for me to make my classes more meaningful and relevant to my students, to connect what I do in the humanities with the world that exists outside campus, and I’m excited to help students see the powerful role they play as citizens who have leadership responsibilities.”
For more information about the Civic Engagement & Voting Rights Teacher Scholars program, visit clemson.edu/cah/sites/civic-education/index