Salisbury University’s Civic Engagement Across the Curriculum

Faculty need access to training to integrate civic engagement into their classrooms, especially in disciplines without an obvious connection to civics. To do so, universities need to ensure faculty are prepared to incorporate civic topics and democratic practice into their curricula in an academically grounded way. Salisbury University, a public four-year institution that is part of the University System of Maryland, has developed the kind of programming necessary to help faculty make democratic practice part of their classroom experience.

Program Description: 

Salisbury University prepares faculty to incorporate civics into their classroom through a faculty-development program called Civic Engagement Across the Curriculum (CEAC). Developed in 2014 by the university’s Institute for Public Affairs and Civic Engagement, CEAC begins from the standpoint that a substantive civic engagement component (approximately 20 percent of course material and assessment) can be adopted into any course. CEAC itself takes various forms, including a ten-week, ninety-minute seminar with six to eight faculty members and a fifteen-hour, online, self-paced module.

The seminar begins by introducing and defining civic engagement—drawing particularly upon the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching’s Elective Classification for Community Engagement. From there, CEAC uses a “discipline-oriented citizenship” conceptual framework to support civic education across disciplines. The framework assumes that faculty members are experts in their own disciplines and thus will be the ones best suited to see how civics might fit into their coursework.

CEAC invites faculty to consider a few key questions:

• How does your discipline characterize ways of knowing and forms of inquiry?
• How does your field contribute to society, and what are the responsibilities of practitioners in your discipline toward society?
• How do members of your discipline interact with individuals and communities on local, national, and/or international levels?
• What skills can your discipline leverage toward examining social issues?
• What knowledge in your discipline comes from the community?

A discipline-orientated citizenship approach to civic engagement in the classroom stresses three elements: grounding the design of civic engagement activities within the academic discipline, fostering reciprocal relationships with partners in the community, and providing students with mechanisms to demonstrate the knowledge needed to engage their community. Without this three-part grounding, course activities (for example, volunteering to pick up litter in a park) might benefit a community without necessarily enhancing the course’s discipline-based learning objectives. Rather than provide a list of examples that may not fit a course’s learning objectives, CEAC facilitators encourage participants to find examples of engagement within their fields and subfields.

In addition to introducing community-engaged teaching, CEAC also presents theoretical frameworks for civic education, such as ecological systems theory, situated learning theory, and action civics. These theories of education provide faculty a basis for best practices in the conveyance of knowledge in teaching and learning. From this base, faculty work to revise an existing syllabus or design a new course. The goal is to leave the seminar with a syllabus that includes project-related readings, assignment guidelines, and reflection and assessment mechanisms.

Another strategy CEAC encourages for developing syllabi is backward design: identifying a course’s intended outcomes and designing it backward from those outcomes. This process helps faculty embed civic components throughout the semester (rather than relegating them to a single stand-alone module) and ensures civic materials align with course objectives.

Impact:

To date, faculty from across Salisbury Uni­versity have participated in CEAC. A few examples of civic engagement projects include:

• a finance class assessing a local food assistance program and presenting results at a community forum to increase understanding of the barriers to access;
• a geography class collaborating with community groups to evaluate local water issues;
• an environmental studies class surveying the community to support the implementation of a city sustainability plan; and
• a student-led forum outlining the moral, ethical, and political implications of animal rights legislation proposed within the Maryland General Assembly.

Surveys show that, after seminar participation, faculty are likely to incorporate elements of civic engagement in a variety of courses, even those without a specific “civic engagement assignment,” accounting for 20–30 percent of the course grade. Through this seminar, faculty are empowered to incorporate civic work into their classrooms, thereby empowering students to incorporate civics into their collegiate journeys.

Population Served:

The faculty of Salisbury University are invited to participate in this faculty-development program. 

Learn more here. 

Page last updated in August 2026