CTLI Impact

CTLI fulfills these purposes in a variety of ways. The following examples from 2022 highlight its activities and impact through—

• Teaching foundational civics courses to over 425 UVU students during the Fall 2022 semester.
• Providing day-long or multiday civics instruction. More than 250 elementary and secondary teachers received training on topics such as the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, civil public dialogue, and building bridges across political divides.
• Hosting on UVU campus or conducting mobile K-12 teacher-development. The training equated to more than 3,400 teacher-hours of civics instruction, with approximately 45,000 K–12 students impacted in 2022 (based on 30 students per teacher per year [elementary] and 200 students per teacher per year [secondary]).
• Publishing the leading report on the state of civics education in Utah
• Sponsoring a “Civic Thought and Leadership” study abroad to Oxford University. Eleven 11 students participated in the two-week course, which used readings and lectures to survey the academic disciplines connected to civics. Students also worked in groups to develop a solution to the real-world civics problem of strengthening trust in elections.
• Hosting civics-educator conferences. About 160 Utah social-studies teachers learned lessons in civility and compromise from the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and how to implement these lessons in their classrooms.
• Conducting the third installment of the Constitutional Literacy Institute. Nearly 40 teachers attended a weeklong conference in June 2022. Attendees deepened their personal knowledge and understanding of the Constitution, which in turn provided them tools to be better prepared to teach about the Constitution and to address their students’ present-day questions.
• CTLI’s Drs. Robert Burton, Lisa Halverson, and Glori Smith were asked by members of the Utah State School Board to advise on revisions to the State’s K-6 social studies standards. They submitted more than 70 pages of recommendations, focused on increasing the number of quality of standards addressing fundamental civic knowledge, skills, dispositions, and virtues. The final standards contain a number of provisions proposed by the CTLI team.
• Publishing a Report on the State of Civics Education in Utah in April 2022. It is the leading research on the state of civics in the classroom and among Utah adults, which found that while the state of civics education may be promising within the classroom, it is alarming beyond the school grounds. The survey of adult Utah residents’ civic knowledge demonstrated ignorance of basic civics facts, earning Utah adults a failing grade.
• Writing opinion-editorial pieces on the themes of civics and civility. The following pieces were published in the Deseret News or Salt Lake Tribune in 2022, authored jointly or individually by Drs. Robert Burton, Lisa Halverson, Glori Smith, and Eleesha Tucker:
  • June 3: Sharing findings of CTLI-sponsored research on civics education.
  • June 15: Encouraging Utahns to celebrate a state-sponsored “civics season,” including Indian Citizenship Act (June 2, 1924), Juneteenth, Independence Day, Pioneer Day (July 24), and more.
  • July 27: Promoting Abraham Lincoln’s “electric cord” of unity.
  • Aug. 18: Reminding readers of the importance of teachers.
  • Sept. 16: Highlighting the promise of our Constitution.
  • Sept. 20: Calling for increased voter registration and actually casting ballots.
  • Dec. 15: Celebrating Bill of Rights Day and showing that dialogue across political differences made the Union possible.