Quick Guide to this Guide

This guide provides faculty across SUNY with resources to deliver SUNY’s civic discourse competency requirement. The goal is NOT to get into your business. This guide will not tell you how to design or deliver your course. Your course is yours. It does not offer a one-size-fits-all model. Rather, it operates on the assumption that course design and delivery is most effective when it grows out of an instructor’s expertise combined with an instructor’s own authentic teaching personality. The resources found here are intended to support and amplify your existing efforts. The guide will have been successful if it makes your life at least a little easier.

The hope is that there is something here for everyone, though the guide is built with the recognition that not everything contained here will be appropriate for every situation. Some of you will make a series of small tweaks to your existing courses. Some might be looking for a more dramatic overhaul. Others might decide to formulate a multi-semester implementation plan in which you include some new elements now with a plan to integrate additional elements in the near future. You’re encouraged to take what is most useful and adapt for your own purposes. If there are elements that do not fit (or do not yet fit) your plan for course delivery, then feel free to revisit them at a later time or set them aside altogether.

• Unpacking Civic Discourse (what is it anyway?)
• Why Civic Discourse skills matter
• Integrating Civic Discourse into your classroom
• Building Opportunities for students to practice