Professor Hilary Conklin, whose research focuses on civic education, most recently served as chair of Teacher Education, Kinesiology, and Educational Studies, stepping down for Fall 2026 to focus on her research in civic education. The College of Education recently talked with Prof. Conklin about her work in the field and in the classroom and why civic education is so essential to students growing up to living in a democracy.

COLLEGE OF EDUCATION (COE): Why is civic education important?

HILARY CONKLIN: I think it's always been important for young people to learn about how to participate in society, in communities, how to participate politically, to be knowledgeable about how they can make change, those kinds of things. But in our particular historical moment, I think it's especially important. And actually, there's a history since No Child Left Behind, the legislation in the early 2000s. We actually eliminated a lot of social studies education because schools were so focused on math and literacy. And so we actually have a couple of decades where there's been a lot less social studies and civic education. And, I would argue, we are seeing some of the consequences of that. But now, in particular, we’re in a moment where our country is deeply politically polarized. We have severe affective polarization, meaning, not only do people have really different Ideologies politically, but they also really dislike each other. And so affective polarization means that if I disagree with you ideologically, now it's meaning I also don't see you as a good person. I just dislike you, and that's something that is different than in previous decades, although that's been building for a while now.

COE: What led to your interest in this field of study?

CONKLIN: I've always been interested in how people understand one another. I think it dates back to my own upbringing. I moved around a lot and lived in a lot of different places, and I was always just curious about people's different customs and cultures and ways of being in the world and experiences. I think that generated my interest early on in social studies education in general. Then when I was in graduate school, I studied with a mentor who was really focused on civic education in particular—she uses the term democratic education—so how we think about preparing young people specifically for democracy and engagement in democracy. And I found that really compelling because it's about these fundamental questions: how do we live together in communities? How do we make decisions that take multiple perspectives into account and how do we make thoughtful policy that allows people with diverse experiences and perspectives to live together in community? I have been working with a political scientist at DePaul, Molly Andolina (a professor in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences); she and I have been studying civic education together since 2014, different iterations of projects, so that continues to fuel me and it just feels desperately important right now.

COE: What specifically does your research into civic education focus on?

CONKLIN: Molly and I have been working on studying different civic education curricula in high schools. First, we were studying something called an action civics curriculum, Project Soapbox, which is a curriculum created by Mikva Challenge, which is a Chicago-based nonprofit organization. That is a curriculum where students choose a community issue that's important to them. And they learn how to deliver a speech that helps other people understand why it's an important issue and what they should do about it. We studied that curriculum initially together and found that young people developed skills in public speaking and a greater interest in political engagement, which is kind of what we expected and hoped. Something we weren't anticipating is that as part of the speeches, a lot of kids told some personal stories about how a particular community issue had impacted them, or their experience with it. And so what we hadn't anticipated is that listening to each other's speeches helped foster empathy around all of these different issues. Which is a long way of saying that the thing that we're most interested in now is the relationship between listening, empathy, and humanizing others in the context of civic issues. And so that's really what we're focused on now: how do we help young people humanize each other as they think about civic issues and how do we address the complex social problems, of which there are many.

COE: Can we teach empathy?

CONKLIN: There is evidence [we can]. There’s a book by Jamil Zaki [The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World (Crown, 2019)], a Stanford psychologist, and he says that, with practice, we can increase people's empathy. And so there is some evidence to suggest that we can change people's empathy.

COE: How do you incorporate your research into the classroom?

CONKLIN: In a lot of different ways. The majority of the classes that I'm teaching, I'm preparing secondary social studies teachers, and so I have my students read some of the things that have informed my thinking, so that they're thinking about some of these issues, about both how we can foster empathy, some of the tools that we know about that can do that kind of work. But I also introduce them to a lot of the practical resources that we have developed and are using with high school teachers as well as other ones that I am familiar with. It very much sort of drives how I think about my work in the classroom. I try to model in my classes the practices that I know from research are going to foster these competencies, civic competencies, that we want. One of the things we know is that you have to really build community and trust in a classroom space in order to move toward these capabilities. And so that's something I work very deliberately at in my class. I do all sorts of exercises to help students learn about each other, learn about the values that inform their perspectives, and learn about the experiences that shape their values. I work hard at building community so that we can build trust in our own space, and then I'm explicit about the fact that what we're doing in our classroom, these are the practices that you can use in your classroom to foster these civic competencies.

COE: Now that you've served your time as chair, do you have any big projects on the horizon that you're really excited about when it comes to your research?

CONKLIN: I do. I'm on research leave this Fall [2026], and the project that I'm working on is with Molly. We created this curriculum, a two-week civics curriculum for high school students that is basically trying to help young people humanize each other and learn relational skills, civic relational skills. Learning how to listen with empathy, learning how to humanize others as it relates to civic issues. We have been working with area high school teachers over the last three years now. We've done several iterations. Starting in 2023, we worked with two high school teachers who implemented the curriculum and we studied it. Last year, we worked with another three high school teachers, we had made revisions to the curriculum, and then they implemented it and we studied it again. We have two final teachers who are working with us this fall and so we'll do one last round of data collection. We've been observing the classrooms to see how the teachers are implementing the curriculum. We have been collecting student work, seeing what they're learning as they work through the curriculum, and then we've been doing focus groups with the high school students. We’ve asked them lots of questions about their experiences with the curriculum. Our plan is to write a book about those three iterations of our work, try to come up with a model of how we develop these civic relational skills in high schools.