What is VOICE? An Overview
VOICE is a year-long elementary social studies program created by the
Constitutional Rights Foundation Chicago that is designed to increase academic
achievement, foster peaceful resolution of conflict, and spark community
service. VOICE combines law education, peer mediation and service learning to
educate 4th grade through middle school students about our democratic
government and offers ways to resolve conflicts non-violently. Research has
shown the VOICE curriculum to be highly effective in helping students retain
and use essential information and skills relating to government and to resolve
conflict peacefully.
Through VOICE, students gain basic civic knowledge about how our government
works and about their roles as citizens in our constitutional democracy. They
practice creative problem-solving and cooperation, using math, science, and
writing skills. They learn and practice peaceful ways to resolve conflict. They
develop positive connections to their communities and healthy attitudes toward
legitimate authority. VOICE provides students with authentic,
multi-disciplinary opportunities to address issues in their schools and
interact with police, attorneys, and other adults in their community.
VOICE is based on effective violence prevention strategies identified by youth
development, delinquency prevention, and risk-and-resiliency research and
research on instituting productive and lasting educational change. The
50-lesson curriculum helps students develop the cognitive and social skills
critical to violence prevention while addressing grade-level appropriate
content crafted to meet expectations for Illinois and individual school
performance standards. As students learn traditional government and history
content, they also learn how to mediate disputes, and they engage in a service
learning project.
Developed in 1995 with support from the Office of Juvenile Justice and
Delinquency Prevention of the United States Department of Justice, VOICE is
implemented with the assistance of outside resource persons and a field
experience, and is designed to complement the upper elementary grade social
studies American government and U.S. history curriculum. VOICE has undergone
three years of field-testing and revision at pilot sites in the Chicago Public
Schools and in District U-46, Illinois' second-largest school district centered
in Elgin, and is now used by teachers and students in Alabama, Kansas,
Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Vermont, and
Wisconsin.
Last updated: January 2, 2002
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