On the way to commercial, Brian Williams mentioned a New Jersey boy who was giving back. When he returned he introduced the story over top of Bon Jovi’s “Living on a Prayer.” The piece focuses on Bon Jovi’s Soul Foundation and features 52 apartments it has made available for homeless and special needs families. In an easy conversation at the table in one of these new apartments, Bon Jovi struck a constitutional chord:

We have created a society of haves and have nots and there are political differences up and down any state’s borders. And we won’t bother to politicize this but the issue is that we are all in this together. And at the end of the day we’re supposed to be ladies and gentlemen helping other ladies and gentlemen.

Watch the clip below to hear Bon Jovi’s response to the prompt, “Forget the government. Can we fix the problems we have?” When necessary, Bon Jovi wields his celebrity to break the chains of bureaucracy and suggests solutions require WE THE PEOPLE.

For this installment, we focus on the goal of forming a more perfect union. What does this mean to you as a teacher and how does your work make achieving this goal possible?

Please click on “comments” below and add your thoughts.

–Shellee

There’s the text presented as a single paragraph as you’ve seen on posters or at the back of the textbook. There are then two versions of separating key components of the text. Are there three distinct phases present or six imperatives? Are they actually phases and imperatives or something else? Three versions play with enlarging key text like “WE” or presenting words in boldface: Union, Justice, Domestic Tranquility, Constitution.

It’s an interesting question. Do you see something different when the same text is presented in different ways? Does one technique or another suggest there is something more there or something less?

Our treatment of the Preamble as well as the other pieces of our constitutional kit often starts and stops with reading the words as though everything is said through those marks on paper. What do they mean to you? What are you doing as a classroom teacher to support our achieving those goals?

These are the questions Professor Harris presented us and questions we should deliberately discuss professionals committed to the very best in civic education. If our goal is promoting constitutional citizenship, we must consider what constitutional teaching demands of us.

This post is the first in a series interpreting the goals of the Preamble as professional educators and discussing how our work supports those goals. Please leave your thoughts in the comments as we start this project and return to the site to discuss each facet. We need your voice.

To set this thing up on the launch pad, what are your thoughts on the role of the teacher as an officer of the Constitution? Is that aligned to your thinking on your role as a teacher? Are there inherent strengths or challenges to this proposition?