Teaching that Food Justice Is Racial Justice
Swinehart highlights the work of Leah Penniman to teach about the connection between food and racial justice.
Lesson Plan
Teaching the Reconstruction Revolution
A high school social studies teacher describes a lesson that uses improvisations, historical fiction, and found poems to help students appreciate the first era of Black power: Reconstruction.
As She Rises
I recently stumbled across a podcast that made a wonderful addition to my students’ study of the climate crisis — As She Rises.
Who Killed Reconstruction?
Sanchez describes a role play about the demise of Reconstruction that helps students get beyond the question “Was Reconstruction a success or failure?”
The Teaching for Black Lives Starter Pack
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Teaching the Radical Rosa Parks
My wife Linda and I began our COVID-19 shelter-in-place pretty early in the pandemic. I went to my last in-person meeting on Wednesday, March 11. The next day, we canceled […]
Teach the Struggle for Voting Rights
Let’s bring the election of 2020 into our classrooms and help our students learn about democracy — and those who would subvert it.
Wash Your Hands
I hadn’t ever planned to teach online, but the Saturday before our college campus closed because of the coronavirus pandemic, I decided to cancel our face-to-face class because one of the […]
The Largest Civil Rights Protest You’ve Never Heard Of
The largest civil rights protest wasn’t in the South, it was in New York City in 1964 when hundreds of thousands of students stayed home to protest school segregation. Here’s how today’s students reacted to a lesson about this historic boycott.
Where Are the Climate Change Superheroes?
An elementary school teacher developed the Quetzal Conundrum game to help students understand the impact of global warming in Costa Rica.
Seeing Ourselves with Our Own Eyes
A special education teacher uses poetry to help her middle school students write their own narratives and celebrate themselves.
“Young Women Like Me”
Since 1993, the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juárez has been shaken by disappearances of teenage girls and young women. Officials say they have few leads. The murders in Juárez have received some international attention, primarily due to government inaction. Yet little has been done by the government to prevent violence against women and girls, as officials neglect to bring their perpetrators to justice.
Residents do not let these deaths go unnoticed as hundreds of pink crosses — a symbol of these missing women — dot the border. An increase in these deaths coincided with the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). A treaty between Mexico, the United States, and Canada, NAFTA sought to increase investment opportunities by eliminating tariffs and, like many other economic agreements, benefited the economic elites of the three countries while resulting in widespread unemployment, increased class stratification, and mass emigration. Most of the “disappeared” women work in assembly plants or maquiladoras, owned by the United States and transnational corporations that dashed to northern Mexico post-NAFTA to reap the benefits of lower wages and lax environmental regulation.
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.
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.
The (Young) People’s Climate Conference
A teacher adapts the “Climate Change Mixer” designed for older students as a springboard for a unit on global warming and climate justice.
From Many Sides Now
A teacher uses poetry and the creation of found poems as a way to get her students to think beyond the simple “two sides to every story” narrative of the Vietnam War.
Unlearning the Myths that Bind Us
Students analyze cartoons from Popeye to Brave to see how media teaches children white- and male-supremacist ideas.
Standing with Standing Rock
A high school social studies teacher centers Standing Rock Sioux history and leadership in a unit on resistance to DAPL.
“I See Birds Everywhere I Go”
A science teacher in Washington, D.C., overcomes her students’ fear of nature by turning them into avid birdwatchers.
Elbow Is Not a Sexy Word
A 9th-grade teacher lays groundwork for sex education that is sex-positive and inclusive.
Other People’s Lives
An introduction to persona poems, which ask students “to find that place inside themselves that connects with a moment in history, literature, life.”
Celebrating Skin Tone
An early elementary school teacher combines a science lesson and poetry to encourage children to celebrate their own skin tone and that of their classmates.
Teaching a People’s History of Abolition and the Civil War
Teaching a People’s History of Abolition and the Civil War is a collection of 10 classroom-tested lessons on one of the most transformative periods in U.S. history. These lessons encourage […]