Social Studies

Our First Amendment Freedoms

Enter to win a $5,000 Scholarship!

Grade 7 - 11 Students can submit an essay or work of art addressing this topic:

Describe or portray how one or more of the five freedoms in the First Amendment Personally affects your daily life.

Enter online at: chicago.adl.org

Kennedy Library Writing Competition - Learn More!

Our courses also emphasize skills appropriate for today’s citizens who are encountering an increasingly interconnected and interdependent twenty-first century world.

These skills include:

• Thinking: a set of abilities including crafting arguments from evidence, chronological reasoning, comparison and contextualization, and interpretation.
• Information Literacy: questioning and exploring issues and problems, searching and locating credible sources of information from diverse sources, understanding and analyzing ideas, evaluating multiple perspectives, synthesizing ideas, and giving credit where it’s due.
• Writing: using the written word to communicate an organized argument that includes a thesis and claims backed by reasoning and evidence in a clear and compelling manner.
• Multi-literacies: using other mediums - including oral, visual, audio, tactile, gestural, and spatial - to communicate ideas and points of views of view for diverse audiences.

Civic engagement includes more than knowledge and skills. It also requires dispositions such as personal efficacy, respect, attentiveness, and a concern for the rights of others. These are fostered through pedagogy that emphasizes understanding the world through disciplinary and interdisciplinary study, recognizing others’ and their own perspectives, and identifying and creating opportunities for students to take action individually or collaboratively