AMERICAN CREED EDUCATION CAMPAIGN

American Creed is an ongoing PBS multiformat project that helps students explore foundational ideals and institutions, and develop the skills responsible civic participation requires.

With curricular support from PBS LearningMedia and the National Writing Project, students watch and discuss documentary shorts and then write standards-aligned essays. They also have the option to compose their own media, for dissemination by the project’s public media partners.

Since the first American Creed feature-length film launched in 2018 (available to watch now on PBS and YouTube), many thousands of students have engaged with American Creed content in classrooms across all 50 states.

A new PBS season of the American Creed: Citizen Power series interweaves stories of "extraordinary, ordinary" young adults with on-camera dialogue facilitated by historian David M. Kennedy and political scientist Condoleezza Rice, who come together from their notably different perspectives as scholars of American democracy. To mark the launch of this new season, some PBS stations are collaborating with educators in their communities to host public screenings and showcases of youth media composed in response to PBS films.

Visit PBS LearningMedia to view new short films, documentary clips and standards-aligned curriculum.

Professional development equips teachers to bring resources and activities into their classrooms. To stay connected and learn about PD workshops and events, join the American Creed mailing list.

AMERICAN CREED EDUCATION CAMPAIGN

Explore this step-by-step guide for educators to use the American Creed PBS LearningMedia collection:

VIEW CURRICULAR GUIDE

PBS LearningMedia resources include discussion activities, critical analysis walk-throughs, and step-by-step guides for students to compose standards-aligned persuasive essays, personal voice narratives, and/or journalistic photography projects exploring their own place in the American story.

Education Partners

After viewing and discussing American Creed shorts, students compose their own work—essays, photography projects and other media exploring the relevance of ideals like freedom, fairness and opportunity in their own communities and family history.

Student engagement is amplified by the following partners:

The National Writing Project is America's largest network of teachers of writing, which creates and distributes resources that support the use of American Creed documentary films and photography projects in classrooms.

Facing History & Ourselves uses lessons of history to challenge teachers and their students to stand up to racism, antisemitism, and other forms of bigotry and hate. Their civic identity curriculum centers around short-form American Creed: Citizen Power documentary work.

Produced by KQED Education, the Youth Media Challenge is a national youth media publishing platform is a vehicle through which students contribute their voices and visions to a national conversation.

Citizen University is a mutual aid society for civic organizations with millions of collective members across the United States. Their "Power + Character" training for civics educators uses video from the American Creed PBS LearningMedia collection to illustrate strategies and tactics.

PBS LearningMedia is America’s largest and most trusted source of curricular materials, utilized by over 1.6 million educators nationwide, PBS LearningMedia hosts American Creed short films, clips and open-source educational assets intended for classroom use.

Working Assumptions engages students in combining photography and writing to explore family, community and care. Working Assumptions’ teaching artists helped guide the young adults featured in American Creed — like Jace Charger, Jonathan Blair, Ryan Chae, and Trinity Colón — to create photo projects that provide models for teens' exploration of their own ideas and experiences.