This fall marks the beginning of an important new chapter for undergraduate education in Ohio. Through Senate Bill 1, the state has established a new American Civics requirement that all students earning a bachelor's degree beginning in Spring 2030 must complete.
In response, faculty from across С»ÆƬÊÓƵ came together to build a thoughtful academic framework that meets the state's expectations while staying true to the university's commitment to rigorous, evidence-based learning.
A Collaborative Framework
A faculty committee in the College of Sciences and Humanities including Patrick Miller and Michael Ensley from Political Science; Leslie Heaphy and James Seelye from History (both on the Stark Campus); and Stephanie Smith from Communication Studies. This faculty committee worked alongside colleagues from the Dean's Office and Curriculum Services to develop the guiding principles, university learning outcomes and implementation framework that shaped how the requirement would look across С»ÆƬÊÓƵ.
The first approved courses come from the Departments of Political Science and History, disciplines whose faculty have long provided students with the historical knowledge, constitutional understanding and civic context central to informed citizenship.
Patrick Miller (Political Science) and Kim Gruenwald (History) have served as lead faculty for their respective courses, working closely with С»ÆƬÊÓƵ Online to build high-quality online offerings while coordinating instructors across multiple campuses and sections. Their leadership has helped ensure that students, regardless of where or how they take these courses, experience a consistent curriculum aligned with the university's learning outcomes. С»ÆƬÊÓƵ is offering more than 2,000 seats in these courses this academic year.
Watching Policy Become Practice
For Patrick Miller, an associate professor of Political Science who served on the university's civics literacy committee, including the group that wrote the centralized portion of the civics literacy exam, the process offered a firsthand look at how a new law moves from statehouse to classroom.
"I enjoyed the opportunity to see the proverbial 'sausage being made,'" Miller said, describing how the legislature passed the law, the Ohio Department of Higher Education developed regulations, and it then fell to the university to translate that into workable policies and procedures. "That required the university to develop new policies and procedures, which in many ways is the part of policy making that affects average citizens most directly."
To keep students engaged, Miller is carrying over a writing assignment he has used in previous courses. Students choose a current news article from a set of approved sources, summarize it and apply a concept from that week's course module to the article — the same assignment repeated five times over the semester, with the content shifting each time. "It turns out to be a challenging assignment for many students," Miller said, "but I hope that they learn writing and analytical skills from it."
Grounding Citizenship in History
On the history side, the department's course, HIST 12061:American Foundations: From Pre-Colonization to Civil War and Reconstruction, traces the development of the United States from its Native American roots and European immigration through the Civil War and Reconstruction, according to Ann Heiss, chair of the Departments of History and Philosophy.
The course weaves together major political, social, cultural and economic developments with a set of foundational American civic literacy texts: the Declaration of Independence, selected essays from the Federalist Papers, the U.S. Constitution, selections from Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Gettysburg Address, and Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail." Together, Heiss said, these documents form the framework for understanding the development of the U.S. system of government and its capitalist economic system.
Rather than studying those texts in isolation, HIST 12061 places them within the sweep of U.S. history. This was a deliberate design choice, Heiss explained, meant to show students not just what the documents say but why and how they came to be written in the first place.
"Studying documents alone without their historical contexts provides an incomplete picture of their importance," she said.
Like all of С»ÆƬÊÓƵ's civic literacy courses, HIST 12061 is built around three learning outcomes: summarizing the central ideas in foundational American political, civic and economic texts; explaining the evolving responsibilities and challenges of citizenship in the United States; and analyzing how those foundational documents shaped the development of American government, democracy and capitalism.
By the end of the course, Heiss said, students should be able to explain how the founding documents guided the development of American government, democracy and capitalism and how the ideas first articulated in texts like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were refined and revised over time.
Looking Ahead
This is only the beginning. As implementation continues, additional courses have been proposed from multiple colleges, opening the door for more disciplines to contribute to the university's civic literacy offerings.
The new civics requirement represents more than a graduation requirement. It's an opportunity for С»ÆƬÊÓƵ faculty to help students build the knowledge and critical-thinking skills they need to engage thoughtfully with American civic institutions and public life. The first courses launch this fall.
