TCNJ

33 WINTER 2023 Working with colleagues in Georgia, Burroughs built a curriculum that introduced the tenets of democracy as well as hands-on action projects that required students to identify problems in their communities and implement solutions. Over the next decade, with support from the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, a non-profit that promotes global democracy, the course expanded from Georgia into Ukraine, Armenia, and Serbia. When the war began in Ukraine, Burroughs was bereft. She'd visited the country 10 times to work with teachers and students whose belief in the possibilities of democracy seemed limitless. "I thought everything we'd worked for was going to be destroyed," she says. "I kept thinking about the stu- dents that I taught in summer school in 2019. There had been so much hope, such a sense of how they wanted to transform their country." But when her colleagues made it clear that the attacks on the country would not stop their work, Burroughs jumped in to support them. Together, they modified lessons, sometimes to avoid traumatic subjects, while other times using the real-life examples " We, as students, understand it is our duty to study because we are the future of our country." — Kristina Karnaushenko She first began thinking about how to sustain healthy democracies early in her career as a social studies teacher, increasingly fascinated by the ability of social movements to bring about change. "It was never those who were in power who said, 'We need to reform ourselves,'" she says. "It solidified for me that the public has to be an engaged partner. We have this concept of democracy, but if we are not active players in telling our representatives what we want and holding them accountable, it doesn't work." Alongside her work in early childhood and elementary education, Burroughs began developing inter- active strategies to teach students civic engagement skills. In the late 2000s, she was invited to speak in Georgia, a country that had gained its independence from the Soviet Union less than 20 years earlier. There, the idea to create a civic education course for university students in transitional democracies emerged.

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