AI and Civic Engagement

75+ Cross-Curricular Activities to Empower Your Students

By Torrey Trust and Robert W. Maloy

ISBN: 9798888370605

Release Date: October 2025

Length: 150 pages

Integrate generative AI technologies into your teaching with activities and prompts designed to engage students in civic learning to become adaptable, critical thinkers in a time of ongoing change.

Many students have become disinterested and disengaged from politics and what’s happening in their communities. To ignite interest and activate engagement in civics, students need to learn how to analyze current events; make informed decisions; think and act democratically; and participate locally, nationally and globally as engaged citizens.

Generative AI (GenAI) technologies – which are transforming every aspect of modern life – can support and enrich civic learning in ways that were never before possible!

With this practical guide, you’ll discover how to integrate GenAI technologies into civic learning across all grade levels and in many different subject areas, including math, English language arts, engineering, science, computer science, history/social studies, music and art. This book features 28 learning plans that connect with the ISTE Student Standards – each with multiple interactive activities and example prompts – to support students in engaging with GenAI tools as active citizens and critical investigators of the capacities and risks of these technologies. 

The book:

• Offers more than 75 interactive activities and 90 example GenAI prompts to foster meaningful, exciting and engaged learning.
• Shows how to teach with and about GenAI technologies to enhance civic learning.
• Explores dozens of educational and public policy issues that students will find relevant to their lives and futures.
• Expands student learning about diversity and inclusion in every chapter.
• Integrates GenAI into activities in ways that support and extend, not replace, teaching and learning.

As students and teachers begin using GenAI tools to learn about civic issues and public policy topics that matter to them, they become more informed civic learners and more knowledgeable technology users. This book is devoted to making that crucial teaching and learning happen.

Audience: Elementary and secondary teachers across various disciplines including social studies, STEM fields, and the English language arts

About the Authors 

Torrey Trust, Ph.D., is a professor of learning technology in the College of Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her work centers on the critical examination of the interconnected relationship between teaching, learning and technology, and how technology can support teachers in designing contexts that enhance student learning. Trust has received the University of Massachusetts Amherst Distinguished Teaching Award (2023), the College of Education Outstanding Teaching Award (2020) and the ISTE Making IT Happen Award (2018). Trust has served as a professional learning network leader for the ISTE Teacher Education Network for five years, including a two-year term as the president. More recently, Trust has been a leading voice in exploring ChatGPT in education and has been featured by several media outlets in articles and podcasts, including U.S. News & World Report, WIRED, Tech & Learning, The Hill, EducationWeek and BAM Radio Network.

Robert W. Maloy, Ed.D., is a senior lecturer in the College of Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where he coordinates the history teacher education program and co-directs the TEAMS Tutoring Project, a community engagement and service learning initiative through which university students explore teaching and learning through tutoring others. His research focuses on technology and educational change, teacher education, democratic teaching and student learning. He is co-author of several books, including Transforming Learning with New Technologies (fourth edition); Kids Have All the Write Stuff: Revised and Updated for a Digital Age; Wiki Works: Teaching Web Research and Digital Literacy in History and Humanities Classrooms; and We, the Students and Teachers: Teaching Democratically in the History and Social Studies Classroom. Maloy received the University of Massachusetts Amherst Distinguished Teaching Award, the University of Massachusetts President’s Award for Public Service, a School of Education Outstanding Teacher Award), a University Distinguished Academic Outreach Award, and the Chancellor’s Certificate of Appreciation for Outstanding Community Service.