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In recent years, student interest in civic engagement has resulted in increased opportunities to volunteer on college campuses across the country. Unfortunately, these efforts are often not supported by or coordinated with academic curricula, and, as a result, their benefits can be short-lived. Students who serve hot meals in soup kitchens are not often taking courses that address root causes of hunger or theories and strategies that might help combat it. Despite a growing consensus that civic education needs to be integrated more fully into higher learning, many educators are unsure about how to accomplish this goal. With the Civic Engagement Course (CEC) Program™, Project Pericles helps them to do so.
Jan R. Liss is executive director of Project Pericles. Previously associate director of the Aspen Institute's Business and Society Program, she was the founding director of CasePlace.org: Developing Leaders for a Sustainable Society. She has also served as vice president for strategic planning and new product development at Consumers Union (publisher of Consumer Reports) and been an independent consultant to academic and not-for-profit institutions.
Ariane Liazos, a program consultant for Project Pericles, is an historian and lecturer at the Princeton Writing Program. She studies the history of civic engagement and reform movements in the United States. With Theda Skocpol and Marshall Ganz, she co-authored What a Mighty Power We Can Be: African American Fraternal Groups and the Struggle for Racial Equality. She was also a research assistant for the Civic Engagement Project at Harvard University.
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