This is the introduction to the special issue on the New Civics.

This article considers conservative critiques of the New Civics movement, places the arguments within a context of broader culture wars, and discusses possible ways for scholars and practitioners to transcend the culture-v war framework and pursue their cardinal goal of preparing all youth to initiate and engage in action that leads to social change.

In this article, we argue that digital civic dilemmas merit attention in New Civics education. We analyze educators' (N = 769) responses to a timely dilemma about using social media to identify and publicly shame people who participated in a hateful protest and propose a set of ten questions to facilitate ethical engagement with digital civic dilemmas in educational contexts.

Self-proclaimed Christian Humanists at mid-twentieth century Harvard, Princeton, and Yale embraced three tenets in their formulation of a neo-Puritan education: The human being as unchangeable; the virtue of ignorance (given the Puritan belief in the fall of man and man’s failure to obtain true knowledge); and the unity of all truth, including supernatural and religious truth.

This paper explores a new holistic, sociocultural approach to youth civic engagement, based on four constructs: civic knowledge, morals, discourse, and positioning. Based on an empirical study analyzing 200 Mexican and Spanish adolescents’ explanations of a controversial advertisement, the study shows four types of engagement—pragmatic, complacent, critical-cynical, and empathetic—that demonstrate how youths assess social issues and get involved with them as structural and subjective factors resonate with their personal experiences.

This qualitative study examines the civic engagement experiences of a cohort of Asian American youth. In particular, it explores civic engagement in the context of motivation and how the motivation that initiates their civic participation differs from the motivation that sustains their continued civic involvement.

This paper shares findings from a critical media project that utilized arts-based and youth participatory methods in a community arts organization. It shows that combining these methods with a community-based organization can be a powerful vehicle for developing critical consciousness and social engagement.

This article draws on three youth participatory action research (YPAR) collaborations with displaced youth living in Burundi, Jordan, and Kenya. It underscores the empowering potential of developing young people’s civic capacity and instilling their rights to understand and interact with their communities in exile.