To help instructors teach and engage students, Boston public media producer GBH’s GBH Education division and PBS’s growing educational LearningMedia platform created the Civics Collection. It is a free multimedia digital instructional resource developed to teach middle and high school students (grades 6–12) about U.S. citizenship, constitutional democracy, and the intricacies of government. It covers topics from multiple perspectives and aims to accurately depict diverse audiences to help students recognize themselves in community life. 

Launched in August 2024, the Civics Collection greatly expands the range of classroom-ready content offered through PBS LearningMedia’s award-winning U.S. History Collection. It brings a trove of classroom-ready digital content meeting state and national curriculum standards, at no charge, to educators across the country. As of this writing, PBS LearningMedia has a plea front and center on its website that says, “The federal funding that supports Public Media is at risk of being eliminated. PBS LearningMedia and your PBS viewing experience are in danger of going away. Now is a critical time to act” by contacting Congress. There’s a prime example of democracy in action for students to see!

ORGANIZATION

The Civics Collection is organized into six topics:

• Foundations of American Constitutional Democracy
• The Structure of Our Government
• Constitutional Amendments and Interpretations
• Citizens’ Rights and Responsibilities
• Social and Economic Policy
• Power and Influence in Our Government

These main topics are each more deeply explored in two to four additional subtopics. Furthermore, the areas are aligned with six Civics Skills modules:

• Identifying and Applying Civic Knowledge
• Building Media Literacy
• Engaging in Civil Discourse
• Analyzing Civic Engagement
• Understanding the Lawmaking Process
• Assessing American Democracy 

MEDIA-RICH FEATURES

Curated to engage students, the collection offers more than 180 media and interactive components, including short-form videos, interactive timelines, maps, illustrations, and independent, self-paced lessons. Enriching the set are other interactive media activities such as click-through narratives and selectable images.

LESSONS

Self-paced lessons guide students through the Civics Collection and are designed around an “essential question” that helps students develop targeted skills. Participants can share information on social media platforms, with embedded links to Pinterest, X (formerly Twitter), and Facebook only a click away off of the site’s persistent navigation bar.

SUPPORT MATERIALS

The Civics Collection is available in Spanish and with accessibility supports. All resources in the collection are paired with teaching tips and discussion questions to help teachers amplify learning and cultivate civics skills.

NAVIGATION

The Civics Collection is easy to navigate, with jump-to buttons that toggle between topics and resources. Additionally, there are persistent search boxes on each page—one to explore topics within the Civics Collection and another to travel across the PBS parent site. Also, within the collection, search results can be filtered and sorted by grade, topic, skill, resource type, accessibility, and audio/video length to help users mine the site and focus on needed content.

COMPATIBILITY AND ACCESS

The Civics Collection and other offerings on the LearningMedia platform work with popular classroom teaching tools and apps. The collection is fully compatible with Google Classroom and ParentSquare’s Remind—a free, secure messaging app that teachers, students, and parents use to communicate.

PBS LearningMedia is an open platform that only requires its users to create an online account. After a few clicks, users have access to “assignments, resource organization tools, as well as class rostering and integration with platforms like Google Classroom. Teachers can create classes and invite students to join with a code or by synchronizing class rosters with Google Classroom,” the GBH Education Team told me via email. In the system, teachers can use any resource from the site in their assignments and send course work to their entire class or to individual students.

“When students access an Interactive Lesson assignment given by their teacher, their work is saved and returned to the teacher once completed. The platform does not automatically grade student work. Both teachers and students who have signed in can browse the site and [designate] favorite resources they’d like to save for later,” the GBH Education Team shared.

DEVELOPMENT

Creators designed the Civics Collection after researching the social studies curricula in 15 states, analyzing related online educational offerings, and gathering inputabout the program’s framework and scope from an educator advisory group, a youth advisory group, and a multidisciplinary Civics Leadership Council. Creators also mined existing social studies resources on the PBS LearningMedia platform that they updated and included throughout the Civics Collection.

IMPACT

The press release announcing the Civics Collection reports that in 2024, PBS conducted a study of 1,200 users from 86 classrooms across 17 states and found that students using the U.S. History Collection demonstrated measurable gains in historical knowledge and critical-thinking skills and were better able to understand multiple perspectives. The GBH Education Team tells me that, as of this writing, more than a quarter million people have accessed the Civics Collection resources, with users coming from all 50 states.

THE CONTRIBUTORS

The Civics Collection is produced by GBH Education and is supported with additional contributions from Georgia Public Broadcasting, PBS, PBS News/News Hour, numerous affiliate stations, Retro Report, StoryCorps, A Starting Point, iCivics, the Center for Civic Education, the Bill of Rights Institute, the Tax Foundation, and the National Educational Telecommunications Association.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Germeshausen Foundation provided major funding for the Civics Collection.