Social Studies + Government Archives

Christopher Columbus and the Iraq War

How the myth built up around Columbus has helped condition kids to accept imperial adventures like the Iraq war.

Integrals and Equity

This content is restricted to subscribers

See You When We Get There

Profiling an African American teacher on Chicago’s south side.

Teaching About Toxins

A Rethinking Schools editor explores the environment’s effects on her students’ health in the classroom.

Why We Should Teach Reconstruction

Unfortunately, the transformative history of Reconstruction has been buried. First by a racist tale masquerading as history and now under a top-down narrative focused on white elites. It’s long overdue we unearth the groundswell of activity that brought down the slavers of the South and set a new standard for freedom we are still struggling to achieve today.

40 Acres and a Mule

A high school teacher uses a role play so students can imagine life during Reconstruction, the possibilities of the post-Civil War era, and the difficult decisions that Black communities had to wrestle with.

Queering Black History and Getting Free

A Black freedom organizer demands that teachers and activists radically change their frameworks around Black history by lifting up the stories of Black LGBTQ people like Marsha P. Johnson.

“Love Is Shining in My Heart for You, Dear Haiti”

“Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the world.” That’s the only thing this Haitian American teacher remembers being taught in school about her family’s country of origin. She calls for a revolution in how educators teach Haiti.

Sorry Not Sorry

A high school teacher uses the #MeToo movement and students’ own experiences with apologies to interrogate the government’s 1993 apology to Native Hawaiians for the 1893 overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawai’i.

Pushing Past Hate, Pushing Past Paladino

Trump supporter Carl Paladino’s racism, misogyny, and transphobia galvanized community members to oust him from the Buffalo School Board. Their struggle also laid the groundwork for new coalitions and progressive change.

How My 4th-Grade Class Passed a Law on Teaching Mexican “Repatriation”

How 4th-grade students in Southern California were helped by their teachers to develop curriculum surrounding the mass deportation of U.S. citizens of Mexican heritage in the 1930s and pass a law to investigate what happened.

Student Athletes Kneel to Level the Playing Field

In the initial weeks of the 2016 football season, as Kaepernick’s fledgling protest began to take shape, critics bombarded him with insults and it was unclear what the response around the country would be. And that’s when Garfield, and high schools and students around the nation, stepped up to the challenge.

It’s Imperialism.

A high school teacher critiques the textbook treatment of the Cold War and U.S. imperialism. She describes her approach to the “curricular conundrum” that the Cold War presents because it lasted so long, and was so far-flung. “”If we are ever to create a different world, one in which the United States does not cast an outsized and militarized shadow across the globe, we need our students to understand how and why that shadow was created in the first place.”

Elementary Student T-Shirt Workers Go on Strike

An elementary school teacher uses his students’ T-shirts to launch a lesson about child labor, basic economics, factories, unions, and strikes. “When I was a child, I remember ‘playing pretend’ with my cousins. We could be anyone we imagined, and in that moment, we were those people. Why not use that energy and imagination as a resource? When we use our imagination to walk in another’s shoes, that’s where real learning begins.”

What We Don’t Learn About the Black Panther Party — but Should

The history of the Black Panther Party holds vital lessons for today’s movement for Black lives and all movements to confront racism, inequality, and police violence. But our textbooks distort the significance of the Panthers — or exclude them completely.

How One Elementary School Sparked A Citywide Movement to Make Black Students’ Lives Matter

Teachers at one Seattle school show the important role educators have to play in the movement for Black lives, in part by creating a Black Lives Matter at School day, having 3,000 teachers wear Black Lives Matter T-shirts, and responding together to issues like the death of Charleena Lyles.

Beyond Just a Cells Unit

A science teacher includes Black voices and Black history in her classroom by building curriculum around The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. In doing so, she shows how nonfiction books should not be relegated to language arts but can be effective in a science classroom.