About the Jim Ellis Civics Curriculum
The purpose of this teaching material is for students to see themselves as shapers of our civic life, to understand that big problems in our region can be solved, and to appreciate the skills, creativity, relationships, and time that can animate civic issues, spark community action, and build impactful coalitions.
This curriculum encourages students to step out of the daily news cycle to envision the region they want to build over the next 20 years. To support this effort, it provides a case study of the transformational leadership of Jim Ellis from the 1950s to the 2010s, profiles of civic leaders across our history, and the perspective of current civic leaders.
This curriculum is place-based, is centered on inquiry, incorporates primary sources, invites cooperative learning, and allows students a range of possibilities to demonstrate learning. It features speeches, memoir excerpts and artifacts from the Jim Ellis Collection at Seattle Public Library as well as biographies and obituaries of dozens of civic leaders past and present to help students find their own civic vision.
Teachers can use this curriculum as a two-week standalone civics unit. They can take individual lessons to incorporate in civics or US History. The Jim Ellis Challenge is a potential project that students can work on over the course of a semester.
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Curriculum
The Jim Ellis: Civics Curriculum was generously funded by donors to the Jim Ellis Project
About the Jim Ellis Project
Several years ago the Ellis family shared their late father Jim Ellis’ unfinished autobiography manuscript with HistoryLink. The effort to complete and publish this important memoir, A Will to Serve: Stories of Patience, Persistence, and Friends Made Along the Way, evolved into a larger Jim Ellis Project which included an array of articles written by Ellis that are published on HistoryLink.org, the cataloguing of Ellis’ personal papers for safekeeping and public access at the Seattle Public Library (coming soon), and the Ellis civics curriculum for public schools.
The entire Jim Ellis Project is meant to promote his accomplishments and share his philosophy of civic engagement with a new generation of leaders.
