What Is Civics Remix
Civics Remix is a peer-led civics, humanities, and AI ethics program for students in grades 5 through 12. We serve any learning community where young people gather to think: schools, homeschool co-ops, and youth organizations.
We use the Harkness discussion method, with a trained fellow facilitator at every table, to connect classical and modern texts to contemporary questions about AI, power, and civic life.
You choose the texts and topics. We build the discussion framework around your choices. Nothing gets replaced. Everything gets deeper.
The Civics Remix method is content-neutral. The Harkness discussion framework, the AI Bias Detector activity, and the prompt engineering exercises work with any text, any topic, and any ideological starting point. A conservative classroom and a progressive classroom can run the same Civics Remix session and both walk away with stronger critical thinking skills — not a shared political conclusion.
First Pilot — Documented Results
What happened in the room.
Naomi L. Brooks Elementary School · Alexandria, Virginia · 5th Grade
Students participated
Every student engaged in structured Harkness peer discussion for the full session.
Completed Changemaker Footsteps
Every student completed their note sheet using their own discussion contributions.
SOL standard aligned
Session aligned directly to Virginia’s existing 5th grade reading and information literacy standard.
Session. Real writing followed.
Writing followed organically from discussion. Students left with documented civic findings in their own words.
From the Classroom
“The use of Civics Remix sparked excitement and engaging conversation between fifth graders as they explored the use of AI.”
Ms. Felicia Baskin · 5th Grade Teacher, Naomi L. Brooks Elementary School
Grade Levels & Audiences
Core inquiry adapted to age. Texts, language, and depth calibrated for younger learners.
Ideal for Fellows training. 8th graders become the facilitators who lead future cohorts.
Deep civic and AI ethics inquiry. Civic Artifacts for college applications and portfolios.
Community Showcase, advanced text analysis, and documented leadership credentials.
Public, charter, and independent schools
Homeschool co-ops & small groups
Youth organizations & community programs
How It Works
A 30-minute conversation to understand what your students are studying, what texts you use, and what thinking skills matter most.
We build a Harkness discussion framework around your chosen texts and topics and prepare the fellow facilitators.
Trained fellows sit at the table with every group. Your teacher or organizer remains present and in charge.
Post-session review with your team. Pre and post assessment data shared. Program strengthened for the next cycle.
Program Tracks
Civics Remix meets any learning community where they are and grows with them over time. A trained fellow facilitator sits at every table in every track.
Single Session
One complete Harkness discussion with a trained fellow facilitator, built around a text or topic you already use. No advance preparation required beyond a brief conversation with our team.
Includes
Multi-Week Program
Everything in Track 01, sustained over several weeks. Students culminate with a tangible Civic Artifact, a podcast, op-ed, AI agent prompt, or research brief for college applications and portfolios.
Includes
Rewrite the Classics
Everything in Track 02, plus the Rewrite the Classics component. Students identify the missing perspective in a classical text, rewrite it, and perform it at a public Community Showcase.
Includes
The Discussion Model
The round table removes hierarchy. Quiet students speak. Dominant voices learn to listen. No one stands at the front of the room.
Students form and defend arguments on the spot, respond to challenges, and change their minds based on evidence.
Students engage seriously with disagreement and build on what others say. That is what civic life requires.
Students discover their peers have ideas worth hearing. Real intellectual respect develops over time.
Student Outcomes
Civics Remix uses a pre- and post-assessment framework to document student growth across all six core skills, evidence your organization can share with boards, donors, and grant funders.
Challenge every claim. Ask for evidence. Build arguments that hold up under scrutiny.
Facilitate real discussions. Lead peers through inquiry. Practice civic and intellectual leadership.
Understand how AI encodes assumptions. Recognize bias in technology. Ask who built it and for whom.
Ask AI better questions. Understand how the way you ask shapes what you get.
Read texts for bias, power, and truth. Identify whose perspective shapes what we are taught.
Investigate real civic questions using verified sources. Connect history to the present.
The Fellows Model
When Civics Remix operates as a multi-year school partnership, students in 8th grade and above begin structured facilitator training — becoming the peer leaders who run Harkness sessions for younger students in subsequent years. The program grows from within the school community. Sustainable by design.
Fellows receive structured training in the Harkness model, the Civics Remix curriculum framework, and the facilitation skills needed to guide small group discussion.
Not instructors. They sit with the group, participate in the discussion, and guide it through questions. Their role is to encourage every voice.
An 8th grader trained this year becomes the fellow who trains next year's class. The program grows from within the student community. Sustainable by design.
Fellows develop transferable skills for college applications and scholarship programs. They earn community service hours for every session they facilitate.
You choose the texts and topics. We build the Harkness framework around your choices. Nothing gets replaced. Everything gets deeper.
Pre- and post-skill assessments document student growth across all six competencies. Evidence for boards, donors, and grant funders.
Fellows trained from 8th grade up. Each cohort trains the next. The program grows from within and does not depend on outside instructors.
Pilot programs are offered at no cost to partner schools, co-ops, and youth organizations during our current development phase.
Civic Artifact & Community Showcase
Every multi-week program culminates in a Civic Artifact: a tangible piece of work where critical inquiry becomes civic contribution. Proof of learning students can show on college applications, portfolios, and scholarship programs.
Students investigate a civic question, conduct research, and produce audio or video that reflects their inquiry.
Students write an original argument or policy analysis on a civic topic for a real audience.
Students document the AI gap their circle identified, the community whose story was missing, and the policy decision at risk if that gap goes uncorrected.
Students rewrite a classical text to restore a missing perspective and perform it at a Community Showcase.
Research Alignment
The cognitive bar is rising, not falling. As AI handles execution, the skills that resist automation — critical thinking, ethical judgment, civic reasoning, evidence evaluation, leadership — become more essential, not less.Which Skills Matter Now?, aiEDU & Burning Glass Institute, February 2026
Four-Quadrant Alignment
Active listening & dialogue, ethical reasoning, civic literacy, and metacognition. The report places all four in the ANCHOR quadrant, skills that must be developed through authentic practice. Every Civics Remix session is built around these four simultaneously.
Evidence evaluation, source credibility assessment, and intercultural competence. The Four-Filter Protocol, AI Ethics, Humanities, Trust, Civic Consequence, is Civics Remix's operational answer to the DEEPEN quadrant. Applied to every AI output in every session.
Systems thinking, collaboration, and research design. The research-policy-community loop is the program's structural spine. Students trace how policy creates data conditions, data trains AI, and AI recommends policy, and they learn to interrupt that loop.
The report identifies peer leadership, real-time adaptation, and collective decision-making as irreducibly human. Civics Remix builds all three into its delivery mechanism: 10th–12th grade Fellows develop these skills by teaching them. The pipeline is the model.
Students in under-resourced schools face a double bind: they are most likely to be educated for automatable work and least likely to have access to AI tools or expert teachers. If students in wealthy districts learn to direct AI while students in under-resourced districts only learn to use it, this work will have exacerbated existing divides.Which Skills Matter Now?, aiEDU & Burning Glass Institute, February 2026
This is the passage that most directly describes the problem Civics Remix was designed to address. Civics Remix is designed for exactly this population and is actively seeking DC school partnerships. It scales through MBSYEP, a DC Government workforce initiative designed to put paid skill development in the hands of young Washingtonians who need it most. Civics Remix does not teach students to use AI. It teaches them to interrogate it.
Tools for AI Ethics
The AI Bias Detector is not a product. It is what students do — in every session — using real, publicly available tools. These four tools make bias visible, measurable, and discussable. Students query them, compare outputs, and document what they find using the Four-Filter Protocol.
MIT Media Lab
Gender Shades
Timnit Gebru and Joy Buolamwini’s documented investigation of facial recognition AI bias across skin tones and gender. Real data. Real disparities. The research that helped launch the AI ethics field.
Partnership on AI
AI Incident Database
A running public database of documented cases where AI systems caused real harm — in hiring, criminal justice, healthcare, education, and more. Every entry is a real civic consequence of AI bias.
Google Jigsaw
Perspective API
A live AI tool that scores text for toxicity. Students input the same sentence written about different communities and compare the scores in real time. Bias becomes visible and measurable in seconds.
Hugging Face
Model Cards
Every major AI model published on Hugging Face includes a Model Card — a document written by the builders themselves that names known limitations, biases, and gaps in the training data.
The Civics Remix Method
Students do not just notice bias. They name it, locate its civic consequence, and document their finding. This is the Four-Filter Protocol — applied to every AI output in every session.
Filter 01
AI Ethics
“What bias does this answer carry?”
Filter 02
Humanities
“Whose story is absent from this answer?”
Filter 03
Trust
“Would a civic institution rely on this?”
Filter 04
Civic Consequence
“What decision gets made wrong because of this gap?”
From the Classroom
“The use of Civics Remix sparked excitement and engaging conversation between fifth graders as they explored the use of AI. Students were intrigued by the discrepancies between AI generated responses and primary sources, reinforcing the need to consider multiple sources without reliance on technology.”
Ms. Felicia Baskin, 5th Grade Teacher, Naomi L. Brooks Elementary School
Sample Curriculum
Civics Remix meets students where they are, in the stories they already know, and asks them to go deeper. Below is our first complete lesson, live and ready for your classroom today. Additional lessons are in development.
An interactive graphic novel that takes students inside the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and then asks them to interrogate how AI tells that story today.
The 7 Chapters
What Is Built In
Each chapter ends with two tiers of discussion prompts, comprehension and critical analysis — with text input fields for written responses.
Students compare two AI responses about Rosa Parks, identify what's missing or distorted, and record their observations.
A structured final prompt where students connect Rosa Parks' story to their own civic voice and lived experience.
All student responses are saved by name and timestamp. Download a CSV or view responses in the admin dashboard anytime.
One QR code, posted in the classroom. Students scan and start, no logins, no app downloads, no setup required.
An offline HTML version is available for classrooms without reliable WiFi. Students complete the full lesson; teacher downloads responses at the end of class.
Standards Alignment
The Rosa Parks lesson is the first in a growing library. Additional lessons across grade levels, subject areas, and historical periods are in development. Join the list to be notified when new lessons are available.
The Civics Remix AI Agent
The Civics Remix AI Agent is currently in development. When complete, every Civic Finding from every session will feed directly into it. Not a grade. Not a worksheet. A documented research contribution: the AI gap the circle identified, the community whose story was missing, and the policy decision at risk if that gap goes uncorrected.
Students will not just be using the tool. They will be building it. Every circle that documents what AI got wrong about their community will add to a growing knowledge base of bias findings, identified by the students those gaps affect most.
That flips the usual relationship between young people and AI. Normally the algorithm knows things about them. Here they know things the algorithm does not, and they are putting it on the record.
When complete, the Agent will be a Socratic thinking partner available to every student, every day, on any device. It will never lecture. It will never give opinions. It will meet students where they are and do what every Civics Remix fellow is trained to do: ask the question that pushes thinking one level deeper.
When a fellow is not in the room, the Agent will be.
Over time the knowledge base becomes something genuinely valuable: a living record of AI bias findings sourced from students across communities, grade levels, and subject areas. That is not a school project. That is original research. And the students who produced it are the authors.
The people most qualified to audit AI for bias are the ones whose stories it got wrong. Civics Remix built the infrastructure for them to do it.
The Flip
Normally the algorithm knows things about them. Here they know things the algorithm does not, and they are putting it on the record.
Each session produces a documented research contribution: the AI gap identified, the missing community, and the policy risk.
Available every day on any device. Never lectures. Never opines. Asks the question that pushes thinking one level deeper.
A growing knowledge base of AI bias findings sourced from students across communities, grade levels, and subject areas. Original research.
The Agent carries the Harkness spirit into every day, not as a replacement for peer discussion, but as its always-available extension.
Partnership Overview
Get the full Partnership Overview — program tracks, the Harkness method, six skills, the Fellows model, grade levels, and the partnership process. Send us a note and we will get it to you.
Email Us to Partner
Ready to talk? A first conversation takes 30 minutes. No commitment required.
rockstars4impact@gmail.com
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