Center for Citizenship & Just Democracy - The Frederick Gunn School

stand up. make your voice heard.

The Center for Citizenship and Just Democracy is a time-tested 4-year curriculum at the core of a student's experience at Gunn committed to inspiring our students to pursue engagement over cynicism, involvement over aloofness and action over acquiescence. It would be simple to call this character development, and while we agree that strong character is essential, our CJD program is so much more. We work with our students to embrace reasoned dialogue, rationale debate and listening to all viewpoints. Our students learn to persuade others, remain open to changing their own minds and in the end learn how to lead. It was these skills that inspired the founding of our school in 1850 and without question we believe these traits are even more relevant today. These are the skills that allow our graduates to be engaged citizens ready for college and ready for life.

Mr. McMann

Dean of Programmatic Innovation

Maya

Class of '26

Michael

Class of '26

Blake

Class of '26

Kent Burnham

Director of Theatre Arts and CJD Faculty

9th grade: Pathways

Our citizenship curriculum begins in the ninth grade with this term course committed to helping our newest students seamlessly transition to high school. Students are led on a journey of explore their own self awareness and beginning the process of understanding what it takes to lead. Through Pathways, we push students to recognize what it means to make healthy choices and how they can behave responsibly within our community while simultaneously teaching the basics of executive functioning skills to become intentional in their approach to learning. Through this work, we ensure that the foundation is in place for our 4-year citizenship curriculum and equally important begin a conversation with each student encouraging them to start thinking about their Gunn journey from the moment they arrive on campus. At the end of our Pathways course, students write a final project known as a "Letter to Self" that they read at their Senior Dinner - a memorable tradition for students that brings them back to the moment it all started for them in ninth grade.

10th Grade: Citizen Gunn

This sophomore year class begins the journey of guiding our students to become active members of our community through an intense study of what inspired Frederick Gunn's life combined with community building initiatives that ensure our students learn to become engaged citizens. Students will grow to understand that our founder believed in teaching young people to be curious and thoughtful, to stand up for what they believe in and to be actively engaged members of their communities. Through this work, our students begin to formulate their own values and reflect upon how it is that they can be engaged contributors on our campus. And while we believe that these traits that founded our school more than 175 years ago are as relevant today as they were then, we also use our Citizen Gunn course to help students learn to navigate their digital world in ways that our consistent with our commitment to being engaged and thoughtful members of any community. At the conclusion of the year, each student develops and presents a personal statement of moral principles for themself - setting the stage for the Junior Speech in the following year.

11th grade: The Declaration

Before embarking on your Junior Speech, this term class begins by taking a deep dive into documents and speeches that have greatly influenced our country. Through this work, students explore the ideas of liberty and equality as they pertain to active citizenship. As the class progresses, students learn about the art of rhetoric and how to craft a message for an audience of any size. These skills are refined through weekly classroom debates where students are able to practice the skills of persuasion and equally important the skills of listening to others. This class culminates with the Junior Speech, a rite of passage for our students that is both daunting, yet memorable for a lifetime. Everybody does it and all 400-plus members of our community listen and cheer. For us, this is the moment when students speak with courage and conviction for what matters to them. It takes bravery to stand on the stage and we do it because we believe in the inherent value of doing hard things.

12th grade: Civic Changemakers

The Civic Changemakers Project is an opportunity for seniors to craft an initiative that allows each student to act on their convictions in a way that benefits the broader Gunn community. Each project is approved by the Director of The Center for Citizenship and Just Democracy - requiring each proposal to be thoughtfully organized and compelling to the mission of the program. Successful completion of the project is a diploma requirement for all seniors. Immersion into this project allows students to practice networking skills, project management capabilities and to take civic action that reflects on the values that are important to them. And above all, this project represents students learning to act and engage with the community so that one day they will take the skills honed on our campus and do the same in their colleges, workplaces and hometowns.

Civic Journalism & Media Making

Gunn@work

Powerful Partnerships

A $100,000 matching grant from the Edward E. Ford Foundation has provided for expanded levels of professional development for faculty around the topics of ethics, leadership, and civic engagement, and will continue to create opportunities for faculty to become involved in how character education happens on campus.

Meet the director

Bart McMann holds a bachelor’s degree in government and legal studies from Bowdoin College and a master’s in social sciences from Wesleyan University. In June 2019, he participated in the Summer Institute of Civic Studies at the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University to learn more about the current scholarship on civic engagement. A former chair of the History Department at The Frederick Gunn School, he currently serves as Dean of Programmatic Innovation and is also the Director of the Center for Citizenship and Just Democracy. He is also Connecticut State Coordinator for Braver Angels, the nation's largest cross-partisan, volunteer-led movement to bridge the partisan divide and strengthen our democratic republic.