Democracy as a Lived Practice: CREATE250 Educators Study Civic Learning in Washington, D.C.
From July 19–22, 2026, a cohort of Indiana educators traveled to Washington, D.C., for an intensive CREATE250 civic immersion organized by Ball State University’s Center for Economic and Civic Learning in partnership with the Close Up Foundation.
The four-day experience brought together historical inquiry, institutional study, public-policy discussion, and professional learning focused on civil discourse. Rather than treating Washington simply as a collection of monuments or government buildings, the program approached the capital as a complex civic text: a place where the nation’s founding principles, historical conflicts, constitutional institutions, and continuing democratic debates can be examined in relationship to one another.
The immersion formed part of CREATE250, a three-year initiative supported by a $1.76 million award from the U.S. Department of Education. Led by Ball State’s Center for Economic and Civic Learning, CREATE250 is building a statewide professional community for K–12 educators, with particular attention to teachers serving Title I schools. The initiative prepares educators and students for the nation’s Semiquincentennial through primary-source inquiry, deliberative pedagogy, place-based learning, and classroom experiences that connect civic knowledge with civic agency.
Civic learning beyond the classroom
High-quality civic education requires more than the transmission of facts about government. Students need historical knowledge and constitutional understanding, but they also need opportunities to interpret evidence, consider competing perspectives, deliberate across disagreement, and recognize themselves as participants in public life. The Washington immersion was designed around that broader conception of civic learning.
Throughout the program, educators moved between sites of national memory, repositories of primary sources, governmental institutions, museums, policy organizations, and structured professional-development sessions. Each setting raised a different set of educational questions. How does a nation remember sacrifice and injustice? How should teachers help students interpret founding documents whose principles have been invoked, contested, and expanded across generations? What distinguishes principled nonpartisanship from avoidance of difficult issues? How can a classroom sustain disagreement without allowing disagreement to become dehumanizing?
These questions are central to CREATE250’s work. The project is grounded in the conviction that civic knowledge, civic skills, and civic dispositions are mutually reinforcing. Knowledge without opportunities for judgment and participation can remain inert. Participation without historical knowledge or disciplined inquiry can become shallow or reactive. The work of civic education is therefore to help students become informed, reflective, and capable of acting with others across differences.
Sunday, July 19: National memory and the obligations of citizenship
The immersion began Sunday evening with a program orientation and a guided study of the World War II, Lincoln, Korean War, and Vietnam Veterans memorials. Visiting these sites together established an important intellectual and ethical frame for the week. Memorials do not merely preserve information. Through architecture, inscriptions, landscape, symbolism, and silence, they shape how later generations encounter the past.
For educators, the memorials offered a setting in which to consider how public memory is constructed. The Lincoln Memorial links the preservation of the Union to the unfinished meaning of equality. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial joins individual names to collective loss. The Korean War Veterans Memorial and World War II Memorial invite reflection on service, sacrifice, national purpose, and the costs of war. Read together, the sites reveal that civic memory is neither simple nor static. It asks citizens to hold achievement and suffering, unity and conflict, gratitude and critical reflection in the same field of view.
This kind of place-based inquiry has direct classroom relevance. A monument can be approached as a primary source: Who designed it? What story does it tell? Whose voices are present or absent? What values does it ask the public to affirm? Such questions allow students to move beyond passive observation toward historical interpretation and civic judgment.
Monday, July 20: Founding ideals, public policy, and disciplined nonpartisanship
Monday began with visits to the Jefferson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King Jr. memorials, followed by the National Archives. The sequence placed the language of American ideals alongside the history of their interpretation and expansion. At the National Archives, educators encountered the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights—the documents the Archives identifies collectively as the Charters of Freedom.
Seeing these documents in person underscores an essential principle of historical study: foundational texts are not abstractions. They were created under particular circumstances by people confronting practical political problems. They have also acquired meaning through subsequent interpretation, amendment, institutional practice, social movements, and public argument. For teachers, the challenge is to present the documents neither as untouchable relics nor as merely historical artifacts, but as enduring sources that continue to structure American political life.
In the afternoon, the group participated in a policy seminar at the Center for American Progress with Paige Shoemaker DeMio, senior policy analyst for K–12 education, and Devon Ombres, senior director for courts and legal policy. The session gave participants an opportunity to consider how research organizations develop and communicate policy arguments and how questions involving education, constitutional institutions, and the courts enter contemporary public debate.
The day concluded with a Close Up professional-development workshop on navigating challenging conversations and disciplined nonpartisanship. Participants examined discourse norms, strategies for restoring conversation when dialogue breaks down, and methods for teaching controversial issues without directing students toward a prescribed political conclusion.
Disciplined nonpartisanship does not require teachers to pretend that evidence, constitutional principles, or human consequences do not matter. Nor does it mean giving every claim equal standing. It asks educators to distinguish between teaching students what to think and equipping them with the knowledge, evidence, questions, and habits necessary to think responsibly. That distinction is especially important in a polarized environment, where teachers must create space for genuine inquiry while maintaining intellectual rigor and the dignity of every student.
Tuesday, July 21: Encountering the institutions of constitutional democracy
Tuesday centered on Capitol Hill. Participants visited the United States Capitol, the Library of Congress, and the Supreme Court and met with members of Indiana’s congressional delegation, including U.S. Senator Todd Young and U.S. Representative Frank Mrvan. The day also included time connected to the work of Congress and the public life of the Capitol complex.
The visits allowed educators to study the separation of powers not only as a diagram in a textbook but as an institutional arrangement embodied in distinct places, procedures, professional roles, and traditions. The Capitol represents lawmaking and political representation; the Supreme Court, constitutional adjudication; and the Library of Congress, the preservation and organization of the knowledge on which democratic deliberation depends.
Meetings with elected officials added another dimension. Representative government depends on more than elections. It requires channels through which citizens communicate with public officials, ask questions, present concerns, and understand how competing interests are negotiated. For educators, such encounters can help demystify government and provide concrete examples for students who may otherwise experience national institutions as distant or inaccessible.
The afternoon visit to the National Museum of African American History and Culture extended the day’s institutional study by examining the relationship between American democracy and the long struggle to realize its promises. The museum’s collections place slavery, emancipation, Reconstruction, segregation, migration, cultural achievement, protest, institution-building, and continuing movements for equality within the central narrative of the United States.
For civic educators, this history is indispensable. Constitutional democracy is not sustained only through formal structures. It is also shaped by people who organize, petition, teach, litigate, publish, worship, protest, create, and build institutions. The history of African American civic life makes visible the agency of citizens who compelled the nation to confront contradictions between its professed principles and its practices.
Wednesday, July 22: From experience to classroom practice
The final day turned explicitly toward instructional application. In a workshop on facilitating productive discourse, educators explored how common political values can serve as entry points for discussion across differing perspectives. They participated in a model deliberation and considered ways to emphasize careful listening, evidence, individual judgment, and the possibility of revising one’s position.
Participants also examined Close Up’s Civil Discourse Credential and nonpartisan instructional resources. The emphasis throughout was not on eliminating disagreement, but on improving its quality. Democratic education should prepare students to disagree with greater knowledge, precision, humility, and regard for others. Productive discourse is therefore not an optional classroom technique; it is a civic capacity.
The group concluded its program with a visit to the National Museum of the American Indian. The visit reinforced the importance of teaching American history through multiple perspectives and of recognizing Native nations as living political communities rather than only as subjects of the distant past. It also provided another opportunity to consider how museums select, organize, and interpret evidence for public audiences.
From Washington to Indiana classrooms
The significance of the immersion will ultimately be measured by what follows it. Participants return to schools across Indiana with new primary-source connections, instructional resources, professional relationships, and questions for continued inquiry. The goal is not to reproduce a Washington itinerary in the classroom. It is to translate the intellectual structure of the experience into learning that is locally meaningful and developmentally appropriate.
A memorial in a student’s own community can become a source for investigating public memory. A local government meeting can illuminate representation, procedure, and public participation. A contested historical marker can prompt evidence-based discussion about whose experiences are commemorated. A classroom deliberation can help students distinguish assertion from argument and disagreement from disrespect. In this way, the civic landscape of Washington can sharpen educators’ attention to the civic landscapes already surrounding their students.
CREATE250 is built on the premise that strong civic learning joins historical understanding with the capacity for public work. Students should know how constitutional institutions developed and function. They should also learn how to evaluate sources, communicate across differences, identify shared concerns, and participate constructively in the life of their communities. Those capacities are not acquired through a single lesson or field trip. They develop through sustained practice in classrooms where inquiry is rigorous, disagreement is disciplined, and students are treated as emerging civic actors.
As the United States approaches the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the task of civic education is not simply commemorative. It is interpretive and forward-looking. The anniversary invites Americans to study the nation’s founding principles, examine the distance between those principles and historical realities, recognize the citizens who have expanded the meaning of freedom and equality, and consider the responsibilities of self-government in the present.
The CREATE250 Washington immersion embodied that purpose. It treated democracy not as inherited machinery that operates on its own, but as a demanding form of common life—one that must be understood, practiced, criticized, repaired, and renewed by each generation.
CREATE250 is led by the Center for Economic and Civic Learning at Ball State University and supported by the U.S. Department of Education. The Washington, D.C., civic immersion was conducted in partnership with the Close Up Foundation.