2017 Civic Learning & Democratic Engagement Meeting

The American Democracy Project (ADP), The Democracy Commitment (TDC), and NASPA are committed to advancing the civic engagement movement in higher education. Join us from June 7-10, 2017 in Baltimore, Md. for our annual conference which brings together faculty, student affairs professionals, senior campus administrators, students, and community partners. Together we will work to ensure that students graduate from our colleges and universities–both public and private–prepared to be the informed, engaged citizens that our communities and our democracy need. 

About the conference:

The 2017 Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement Meeting (CLDE17) is a conference designed around an emergent theory of change adapted from elements of the 2012 Crucible Moment report.  Like this report, the CLDE17 conference invites participants to consider what does a civic-minded campus look like? To this end, several threads within the civic engagement movement will be considered including: how to build campus cultures and contexts that foster:

• civic ethos,
• civic literacy and skill building,
• civic inquiry,
• civic action, and
• civic agency

These threads and others will be revisited in plenary and concurrent sessions that ask participants to deepen their thinking with an eye toward institutional change and action aimed at systematically enhancing civic learning and democratic engagement in higher education. Participants will be engaged throughout the meeting in helping to refine and define our emergent theory of change as we consider together how to move our work forward.

Participants will have opportunities to network and develop their civic-minded thinking and practices through engaging plenary sessions, informative general interest sessions, interactive workshops, research and program-based poster sessions, roundtable discussions as well as in working groups and in informal expert led forums.

The meeting begins for all attendees in the early morning of Thursday, June 8th and ends on Saturday, June 10th at approximately 3 p.m. Pre-conference workshops and meetings are planned for Wednesday, June 7th beginning at 9 a.m. Please plan on arriving in Baltimore no later than Wednesday, June 7th (Tuesday, June 6th for pre-conference participants). You can plan to depart Baltimore on Saturday in the late afternoon; know that the conference hotel rate will be available June 6th and extended through Sunday, June 11, for those who would like to stay longer to explore the city of Baltimore and/or nearby Washington, D.C.