IN THE COMMUNITY

The Freedom and Citizenship Program

Professor Casey Blake (left) and the 2010 Teagle Program students.

The Freedom and Citizenship program is a partnership project of the Center for American Studies and the Double Discovery Center (DDC) at Columbia University, with financial support from the Teagle Foundation. The program seeks to introduce students to college-level work, place their experiences as twenty first-century New Yorkers in a historical conversation that dates back to the ancient world, and prepare them for lives as active, responsible citizens.

Each year the Center for American Studies and DDC select a small group of rising seniors from public high school students, who are invited to campus for a rigorous three-week seminar that examines major philosophical works on the meanings of freedom and citizenship from the classical period to the present. Led by Roosevelt Montas, Director of Columbia's Core Curriculum, the seminar emphasizes close reading and analysis of works by Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, the American Founders, Lincoln, Du Bois, Dewey, King, and others. Several Columbia faculty have participated as visitors to the seminar, including Columbia College Dean Michele Moody-Adams and Professors Eric Foner (History), Andrew Delbanco (American Studies), and Casey Blake (History and American Studies).

In addition to attending the seminar, students work closely with undergraduate tutors and a graduate student coordinator on improving their reading, writing, and study skills. The tutors and coordinator also join the students on field trips, which have included walking history tours and a visit to the United Nations. We seek in these activities to foster a community of intellectually ambitious students that might not be available in their high schools.

After the completion of the seminar, students collaborate on a year-long project that explores an aspect of civic life in contemporary New York. The 2009-2010 Teagle students developed a website and blog, Informed and Involved, on New York City politics and the high school curriculum, and completed the DDC Oral History Project telling the story of the founding and evolution of the Double Discovery Center.

The Freedom and Citizenship Program was founded by Professor Casey Blake. He specializes in modern U.S. intellectual and cultural history and American studies, with an emphasis on topics at the intersection of modernist art and politics in the twentieth century. He is the author of several works including The Arts of Democracy: Art, Public Culture, and the State. His forthcoming publications include Public Art and the Civic Imagination in Modernist America and Crisis of Confidence: Politics, Culture and Social Thought in the 1970s.

Visit the Teagle Dreamers website.

Read more about The Teagle Program in Columbia News.

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