This paper provides an overview and critique of a team taught, senior level, interdisciplinary college course entitled "AIDS: Challenges and Crises." The details of the course and its underlying rationale are outlined. The paper concludes with a curriculum proposal rooted in the idea of critical education for citizenship. Those who teach political science in higher education can best achieve educational goals by utilizing critical education for citizenship. A course fitting this model would have the following characteristics: (1) be interdisciplinary in nature; (2) focus on public policy concerns and allow students to see the importance of participating in public decisions; (3) ask educators and students to conceive of democracy broadly to include community discussions, community action, public service, and protest politics; (4) ask students to conceptualize participation broadly to include workplace and community opportunities for participation; (5) encourage students to take into account the important relationships among gender, race, and class concerns in the participatory process; and (6) ask students to confront their assumptions regarding power and leadership as well as the sources of such assumptions. The specific course described focuses on the formulation of and responses to AIDS within three communities, the global, U.S. policy, and the art and theater communities. The curriculum proposal was intended to develop a course that allowed students to link learning outside the classroom in the form of community action or service with learning inside the classroom through reading and discussion rooted in the connection between democratic theory and democratic practice as reflected in timely public policy issues. (DK)