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Divisibility rules are mathematical shortcuts or patterns that help determine if one number is divisible by another without performing the actual division. These rules are particularly useful when dealing with large numbers or when you need to quickly check divisibility. Here are some common divisibility rules:

1. Divisibility by 2: A number is divisible by 2 if its last digit is even (ends in 0, 2, 4, 6, or 8).

2. Divisibility by 3: A number is divisible by 3 if the sum of its digits is divisible by 3.

3. Divisibility by 4: A number is divisible by 4 if the last two digits form a number divisible by 4.

4. Divisibility by 5: A number is divisible by 5 if its last digit is either 0 or 5.

5. Divisibility by 6: A number is divisible by 6 if it is divisible by both 2 and 3.

6. Divisibility by 9: A number is divisible by 9 if the sum of its digits is divisible by 9.

7. Divisibility by 10: A number is divisible by 10 if its last digit is 0.

8. Divisibility by 11: To check if a number is divisible by 11, you can take the difference between the sum of the digits at odd positions and the sum of the digits at even positions. If the result is divisible by 11, then the original number is also divisible by 11.

These are just a few of the most commonly used divisibility rules. There are more rules for larger divisors, but they tend to be more complex. Remember that these rules are shortcuts and not definitive tests for divisibility. For a rigorous proof of divisibility, actual division or the use of prime factorization is necessary.

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Discover & share this Math GIF with everyone you know. GIPHY is how you search, share, discover, and create GIFs.

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Growth Mindset Tips for Students & Parents 

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Growth Mindset Tips for Students & Parents 

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National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)

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Learn about how the teen brain grows, matures, and adapts to the world.

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https://www.parentingdecoded.com/mood-meters.html

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Reflection Questions - Your Brain on Hormones & Your Brain on Puberty

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Reflection Questions - Your Brain on Hormones & Your Brain on Puberty

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Abstract

Puberty is a normal part of development, but it is also different for everyone. For some teenagers, puberty comes earlier than for others, and for some it goes faster than for others. Because of this, kids of the same age can look very different from each other-their bodies are growing at different rates. However, researchers have discovered that puberty not only changes your body, but also your brain. This is because puberty involves changes in hormones that also attach to your brain cells and change how the brain learns and grows. These changes are useful because they help shape the brain for new forms of learning. They might also lead to some "bumps in the road"-for example, you might take some risks that do not quite work out. In this article we explain what puberty does to the brain, and why these brain changes are important to prepare you for adulthood.

What is Puberty and What Are Hormones?

Puberty is a normal part of development that happens in the early teenage years. When you think of puberty, you might think of zits, body odor, and hair growth-among many other, sometimes awkward body changes-but do you know what happens in your body to cause these changes? The brain signals the body to start puberty by passing along messages in the form of . Hormones are small molecules made by your body that travel in your bloodstream to various parts of the body, including the brain. Hormones are important for passing messages over long distances in your body, so that different organs can communicate with each other. When a hormone reaches its destination, it attaches to what is called its on or in a cell (see Figure 1). This triggers a response in the cell that can influence the cell's behavior and even its survival. How the cell responds depends on the type of cell and type of hormone.

Figure 1 - A brain cell and all its parts.

The box is a zoomed in view of how hormones can attach to receptors in or on the cell. In blue is myelin, a protective sheet that wraps around the axon and allows the signals to travel faster.

Hormones are really important for kicking off the process of puberty. This is because puberty starts when the brain signals the body to make more of certain hormones. Figure 2 explains how this works.

Figure 2 - This figure shows how a signal from the brain leads to increases in puberty hormones.

It starts in a brain region called the hypothalamus. That makes a hormone called GnRH, which travels to the pituitary gland, a small organ at the bottom of the brain. In the pituitary gland, other hormones are made (LH and FSH). They then travel to your sex organs (these are testes in male bodies and ovaries in female bodies), which make testosterone and estradiol.

Testosterone and estradiol are two important hormones that cause a lot of the body changes that people associate with puberty. Levels of testosterone increase much more in boys, while estradiol increases more in girls. Testosterone can, for example, travel to the hair cells, leading to darker and thicker hair, and hair growth on the underarms or face. Estradiol is important for breast development in girls. Both testosterone and estradiol are also important for fertility, making it possible for people to have children.

The age at which this whole process happens varies a lot from person to person. On average, girls tend to start puberty around age 10, while boys start a year later. Part of the individual differences are based on genes, but they are also partly related to experiences earlier in childhood. For example, children who have been through a lot of stressful times early in life tend to go through puberty at an earlier age.

Hormones Can Change How the Brain is Organized and How Brain Cells Behave

Hormones like testosterone and estradiol can attach to your brain cells. A brain cell looks different from cells in other parts of the body: it has a cell body, but also has parts that look like wires sticking out (see Figure 1). A brain cell often has many shorter "wires," called , for receiving signals from other cells. These cells also have one longer "wire" called an , which sends signals to other cells.

There are two main ways that hormones can influence your brain cells [].

First, hormones can influence how the brain is organized, and these are changes that take some time to occur. Changes in brain organization can include changes in the number of cells, or changes in the size and shape of dendrites or axons. Testosterone, for example, influences the development of new cells in a brain region called the medial . Because boys make more testosterone during puberty, this region becomes bigger in boys than girls []. This was found in animal research, but studies on humans that looked at hormone levels and the size of the amygdala suggest it works the same in humans.

Second, a hormone can influence the way that brain cells become activated in response to a situation or environment. Hormones might help or prevent a cell from exchanging signals with other cells. This can also lead to long-term changes in brain cells. For example, the levels of testosterone in mice (and humans) increase during a competition or fight. One study showed that mice who win a fight develop more receptors for testosterone in brain regions that are important for reward and social behavior []. These new receptors might also change the behavior of the mouse in the next fight. This shows a process where experiences, like winning a fight, and hormones work together to shape brain development. This process is especially important during puberty, when the hormone levels are higher than during childhood and the brain is still developing.

There is still a lot we do not know about how hormones influence the organization and actions of brain cells in humans. We do know that these effects are different in some ways between boys and girls, and between regions of the brain. Researchers are just starting to figure out how the hormone-related changes in the brain are important for behavior and learning, so there are a lot of unanswered questions.

Puberty May Make It Harder to Learn Some Things, but Easier to Learn Others

Children can learn certain things better than teenagers or adults can. For example, young children are particularly good at learning new languages. It becomes much harder to learn a second language after a person is 9-11 years old. This is probably because of changes in the way the brain processes speech and other language information. One study looked at the role of puberty in these changes. The researchers let children listen to speech from a fake "alien" language and studied how the brain tried to make sense of this []. The activity in several brain regions important for language changed as children got older. Activity in some of these language-related brain regions was also lower for children who were further along in puberty. This suggests that puberty might play a role in the brain's changing responses to language.

However, puberty might open a window for other types of learning. It might bring opportunities for learning about yourself and learning social and emotional skills that prepare teenagers for adulthood. The brain might change during the teenage years in ways that support such learning. For example, one important part of learning new skills is responding to feedback-that is, how your brain uses information telling you whether or not you have gotten the right answer. One study of over 200 children, teenagers, and adults looked at how the brain responds when learning from feedback. How well people learned from feedback was related to activation in different parts of the , a key brain region for learning. Some parts of the striatum were more active in teenagers than in children or adults, suggesting that people might learn from feedback differently during their teenage years [].

Another important part of learning new skills requires exploration and risks, like sharing information about yourself, trying out a new hobby that you might not be good at, or trying to talk to someone you have a crush on. Deciding to take a risk might be more likely when you think you have something to gain-like a reward. Scientists have seen that part of the striatum also activates when a person receives rewards, including food and money. One study of people ages 8-27 focused on this brain region. The researchers found that people who were further along in puberty and people who had more testosterone in their bodies showed more activation in this part of the striatum when winning a reward. This suggests that hormones may be important for making your brain more sensitive to reward during puberty [].

These studies show that the way the brain responds to feedback and rewards changes around puberty. This may encourage teenagers to learn more about themselves and others, supporting self-discovery and personal growth. However, these brain changes might also be related to the reality that certain mental health problems and drug addictions tend to develop during the teenage years. For example, if teenagers are more sensitive to rewards, they might also be more sensitive to the rewarding feeling from taking alcohol or a drug. Also, kids who go through puberty earlier or faster than their peers can have more mental health struggles, which researchers think could be partly due to hormones having a different impact on their brains-but more research is needed to see if that is true. Most kids go through puberty without any mental health problems, and researchers are studying ways to encourage positive outcomes for even more kids.

Conclusion

Puberty is a time of great change, including changes that might be at times awkward, confusing, or overwhelming. Some of these changes come from the actions of hormones on cells throughout your body, including your brain. Hormones can influence your brain in the long term by directly changing how it is organized, or by changing how it responds to certain situations. These changes might be important for opening up new opportunities for learning that prepare teenagers for adulthood, although the same brain changes might also close windows for other types of learning that happen earlier in childhood. Schools might be able to take advantage of these brain changes in their students, for example by creating opportunities for positive forms of exploration and risk taking. Learning is more than maths and reading-making decisions that help us to better understand ourselves and others is another important kind of learning that the brain might be especially sensitive to during puberty.

Glossary

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

TC was supported by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under award number TL1TR002371. The content was solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health. The authors would like to thank those who assisted in the translation of the articles in this Collection to make them more accessible to kids outside English-speaking countries, and for the Jacobs Foundation for providing the funds necessary to translate the articles. MB translated this article into Dutch.

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Puberty is a normal part of development, but it is also different for everyone. For some teenagers, puberty comes earlier than for others, and for some it goes faster than for others. Because of this, kids of the same age can look very different from each other-their bodies are growing at different rates.

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Authors Savannah R. Roberts, Sasha Gorrell, Daniel Le Grange

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As humans grow from children into adults, they pass through a stage called adolescence. Adolescence is a time of major social, environmental, and biological change in a person’s life. The start of puberty, which often happens around the teenage years, is an important period of human physical and emotional development. In addition to the more obvious bodily changes that happen during this time, an adolescent’s brain also goes through changes that may not be as visible. These changes are directed by chemicals called hormones. Hormones help our bodies become taller, change shape, and even grow hair. Although hormones act on different parts of the body (like bones, muscles, or skin), several crucial hormones for puberty are actually made in the brain. Scientists are learning more about the ways hormones affect how the brain grows and changes, and in turn, the way that changes how you act and feel!

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https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6_V4o_YK9MKRE5IMTllaUlQeU0/view?ts=663b23e6&resourcekey=0-iQduClepNmzaVntWdy6FPw

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Edutopia is a free source of information, inspiration, and practical strategies for learning and teaching in preK-12 education. We are published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.

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EmbraceRace supports parents to raise children who are brave, informed and thoughtful about race. Join the movement!

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During WWII, the United States sent more than 110,000 Japanese Americans to prison camps without charges or trial. Learn about this historic violation of civil rights, and how prisoners fought for justice.

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In January 1955 in Hardin County, Texas, Leo Carr had to pay $1.50 to vote. That receipt for Carr's "poll tax" now resides in the collections of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. In today's dollars, Carr paid roughly $13.

"It's a day's wages," explains William Pretzer, the museum's senior history curator. "You're asking someone to pay a day's wages in order to be able to vote."

Pretzer says the museum accepted the donation of the receipt from Carr's family in 2012 as a vivid and a significant example of the way that voting rights were denied to African Americans. Poll taxes, quite simply a tax to pay to vote, were enacted in the post-reconstruction era from the late 19th to the very early 20th century. But they remained in effect until the 1960s.

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court's Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections decision to strike down poll taxes. And as voters head to the polls for the upcoming 2016 presidential elections, some, including former U.S. Attorney Eric Holder, have suggested that voting rights are once again under siege.

"After the 1870s, particularly in the southern states, there was an effort to restrict any kind of political power for African Americans," Pretzer says. In the immediate post-Civil-War era, when voting rights were accorded to African Americans in the south, thousands registered, voted and ran for office. "There was great concern on the part of the white power structure that this was a revolution in their lives."

Southern legislators began to find ways of limiting African-American rights, and one of the major ways was to enact barriers to prevent them from voting. A series of laws were passed state by state in the south, ranging from literacy tests to poll taxes. This was an effort to keep blacks as far out of politics as possible without violating the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibited governments in the nation from denying a citizen the right to vote based on that citizen's "race, color or previous condition of servitude."

By 1902, all 11 of the former Confederate states had enacted a poll tax, along with other measures including comprehension tests, voter intimidation and worse.

"When people went to register to vote, their names would become known in the local community," Pretzer says. "What you see is everything from simple harassment-people being insulted, pushed, shoved or harassed on the street-to being murdered."

Poll taxes survived a 1937 U.S. Supreme Court challenge in the case Breedlove v. Suttles, which upheld a Georgia poll tax on the grounds that voting rights are conferred by the states, and that the states may determine voter eligibility as they see fit, save for conflicts with the 15th Amendment concerning race, and the 19th Amendment concerning sex.

But during the tumultuous battles of the civil rights movements, particularly following the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, activists saw poll taxes and similar policies as barriers to the voting rights of African Americans and the poor.

In 1962, the 24th Amendment was proposed, prohibiting the right to vote in federal elections from being contingent on the payment of a poll tax. It was ratified in 1964. But five states still retained the use of poll taxes for local elections.

Two years later, on March 24, 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, that poll taxes for any level of election were unconstitutional.

Lena Carr says she donated the 1955 Texas poll tax receipt from her uncle, Leo, partly because of her surprise that her family had been involved in the battle for voting rights in the Civil Rights era. The family found the receipt in a suitcase, after Leo's mother passed away. When they went through it, there it was, nestled among old family pictures.

"I really was surprised, because my uncle never really talked a lot about voting," says Carr, 54, who now lives in Kansas City, Missouri. "It shocked me that he actually went out and participated and paid. . . . In that era, I didn't really know my family actually did any of that until I opened up that suitcase."

Carr says the other reason she chose to donate this piece of her family's history is because she thought it would be useful and inspiring.

"A lot of the young people don't realize the things people had to go through to vote," Carr says thoughtfully. "I thought they would recognize and realize what people did before them, how far they came, and what they got from that generation."

Carr says that she is concerned about the voting restrictions that are being enacted in states ranging from Texas to Virginia to Wisconsin.

"I feel like history repeats itself, and if people don't start to become aware of what's happening in the world and take stock, we'll be back at that point," Carr says.

In 2012, then-U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder blasted Texas over its voter ID law, saying "we call those poll taxes," adding that many of those without IDs "would have to travel great distances to get them, and some would struggle to pay for the documents they might need to obtain them."

Smithsonian curator Bill Pretzer sees similarities.

"You have to have a particular kind of ID," he explains. That includes identification offered through the state or federal government, military IDs, a state handgun license, a U.S. citizenship certificate, or a U.S. passport.

"The kinds of documentation that's needed for this voter ID cost money," Pretzer says. "An individual who doesn't have their own transportation, or would need to take time off on an hourly basis ... is going to suffer economically."

The Department of Justice is in ongoing litigation related to voter ID laws in both Texas and North Carolina, saying both states laws would "have the result of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority group."

Texas was allowed to enforce its law during the 2014 elections and also during its primary this month.

Last August, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that the Texas law discriminated against African-American and Latino voters. But it also said that a district court must re-examine its conclusion that Texas acted with discriminatory purpose, and that the lower court should seek ways to change the voter law without overturning it entirely.

At the time, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued a statement saying the intent of the law "is to protect the voting process in Texas," and noting that the U.S. Court of appeals had rejected the claim that the law was a poll tax. This month, the full 15-member Fifth Circuit voted to hear the case again. Paxton called the decision "a strong step forward in (Texas') efforts to defend the state's voter ID laws."

"There are some very standard issues from time immemorial, about power, about control, about hierarchy, about opportunity, about equality, that people struggle over," Pretzer says.

The Carr family poll tax receipt will likely go on view in the new museum (which opens on September 24, 2016) some time in 2018 and until then will become available online. Pretzer says such artifacts are important because they make real something that is hard to imagine.

At the BET Honors in Washington, D.C., this month, former U.S. Attorney General Holder issued a call to arms to people who are considering not voting in this current election season.

"There is absolutely no excuse not to vote," Holder said. "People fought and died for the right to vote. It is an obligation of every American. ... Otherwise, you are doing a disservice to the people who shed blood."

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Recalling an Era When the Color of Your Skin Meant You Paid to Vote

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In January 1955 in Hardin County, Texas, Leo Carr had to pay $1.50 to vote. That receipt for Carr's "poll tax" now resides in the collections of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. In today's dollars, Carr paid roughly $13. "It's a day's wages," explains William Pretzer, the museum's senior history curator.

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Scientists, including those who study race, like to see themselves as objectively exploring the world, above the political fray. But such views of scientific neutrality are naive, as study findings, inevitably, are influenced by the biases of the people conducting the work.

The American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois once wrote, "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line." His words were borne out, in part, by science. It was the century when the scientifically backed enterprise of eugenics-improving the genetic quality of white, European races by removing people deemed inferior-gained massive popularity, with advocates on both sides of the Atlantic. It would take the Holocaust to show the world the logical endpoint of such horrific ideology, discrediting much race-based science and forcing eugenics' most hardline adherents into the shadows.

The post-war era saw scientists on the right-wing fringe find ways to cloak their racist views in more palatable language and concepts. And as Angela Saini convincingly argues in her new book, Superior: The Return of Race Science, published May 21 by Beacon Press, the "problem of the color line" still survives today in 21st-century science.

In her thoroughly researched book, Saini, a London-based science journalist, provides clear explanations of racist concepts while diving into the history of race science, from archaeology and anthropology to biology and genetics. Her work involved poring through technical papers, reports and books, and interviewing numerous scientists across various fields, sometimes asking uncomfortable questions about their research.

"Mainstream scientists, geneticists and medical researchers still invoke race and use these categories in their work, even though we have been told for 70 years that they have no biological meaning, that they have only social meaning," Saini says.

Scientific research has struggled with concepts of race for centuries, often proposing misleading or erroneous explanations of racial differences. Contentious debates among Europeans about the origins of modern humans began in the 19th century, and many of the continent's leading scientists believed firmly that Europeans exemplified the most evolved and intelligent humans. Human fossils in Europe provided the first data points in the budding field of paleoanthropology, but the region was in reality just where European archaeologists happened to start looking. Fossils, as well as cave art, DNA samples and other evidence later uncovered around the world pointed to a more complex picture of human origins: Elements of modern humans emerged throughout Africa, and those people migrated east and then north and west in waves.

Rather than distinct races, groupings or borders, the continually mixing populations produced only gradients, with some traits slightly more common in some regions than others. Lighter skin color in northern climates emerged late; some Britons were shocked to learn that Cheddar Man, the remains of a man who lived in southwest England almost 10,000 years ago, would today have been considered black.

In the 1950s, geneticists began to confirm what some archaeologists had already surmised: "Individual variation within population groups, overlapping with other population groups, turned out to be so large that the boundaries of race made less and less sense," Saini writes. The conclusion was that no "pure" races exist that are distinct from others. Despite this evidence, those eugenicists still practicing sought to prevent their supposedly superior race from being overrun by immigration, miscegenation and higher birth rates among other ethnicities.

While few people study or advocate for eugenics today, some scientists in the rapidly advancing field of genetics held onto related ideologies after World War II. They simply used different terms, Saini points out, as some continued with race-focused research while referring to "populations" and "human variation" rather than "races" and "racial differences." Geneticist James Watson, for instance, a co-discoverer of DNA's double helix structure, has frequently been the subject of withering criticism for voicing racist beliefs, including that differences on tests of intelligence have a racial component, and arguing that Indians are servile and that Chinese people have somehow become genetically conformist.

A handful of researchers with similar beliefs, including former Nazi scientist Otmar von Verschuer and British eugenicist Roger Pearson, had trouble getting their research published in reputable journals and formed their own journal in 1961. Mankind Quarterly became a platform for race science-a place to publish questionable research under the trappings of objective science. Intelligence, a more respected psychology journal that's published by the major publishing company Elsevier, also occasionally included papers with pseudoscientific findings about intelligence differences between races. Until recently, that journal had two eugenics supporters, Gerhard Heisenberg and Richard Lynn, on its editorial board. But by the time Saini finished her book late last year, after interviewing the journal's editor-in-chief, she saw that the pair had been removed from the journal's list of board members.

"The extreme stuff poses a dilemma for legitimate scientists, since you can't read every crank's work and falsify it," says Aaron Panofsky, a sociologist of science at UCLA and author of the book, Misbehaving Science: Controversy and the Development of Behavior Genetics. Researchers don't want to endow these papers with more legitimacy than they deserve, but they don't want to ignore them and risk fueling conspiracy theories, either.

While Mankind Quarterly has managed to hang on into the 21st century, "hard-core scientific racists are mostly old white men, and they're not being reproduced in academia," Panofsky says. Even so, plenty of racist, young white men continue to promote concepts of scientific racism, such as the participants in the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia-an event that even the scientific journal felt the need to condemn.

Even more well-meaning epidemiological scientists nonetheless still use race as a crude proxy for myriad social and environmental factors. Saini cites an example of a 2017 study with statistical errors claiming that race and biology indicate that the airways of asthmatic black Americans become more inflamed than those of asthmatic white Americans. Black Americans do suffer more from asthma than whites do, but they're also affected more by environmental hazards like air pollution from highways and factories as well as disparities in access to high-quality healthcare. These many forms of inequality and structural racism-which sociologists have documented for decades-were swept under the rug in favor of a race variable that led to findings that could be easily misinterpreted.

In another example, Saini describes the ill-fated 1990s Human Genome Diversity Project, which analyzed the genetic variations of small, remote populations referred to as "isolates," including the Basques in Europe, the Kurds of eastern Turkey and Native American tribes. Indigenous rights activists, understandably sensitive to being exploited, resisted the project, surprising the naive scientists.

Time and time again, groupings by race, even if they don't use the term "race," can be dangerous and misleading to people looking for inherent biological differences. But Saini doesn't think we can be "colorblind" or "post-race" in scientific research either. Scientists who claim to be so tend to have the same problem as the asthma study, ignoring racial inequalities all around that influence a study's findings. Saini also explores the possibility of affirmative action policies, reparations or environmental justice advocacy, all intended to mitigate structural, historical and scientific racism.

Like many geneticists, Saini argues that since race is a social construct, it doesn't belong in genetics research. Scientists in other fields have the freedom to study race, she writes, but with that freedom comes responsibility. They can't afford to leave room for misinterpretation. Researchers using racial categories "should fully understand what they mean, be able to define them, and know their history," Saini writes.

The rest of us, too, need to be aware of racial stereotypes, lest we fall prey to them. "That's part of the reason that we're fascinated by DNA ancestry testing," Saini says. "The reason it matters to us is because we feel that these racial categories have some meaning, that they can tell us something about ourselves, and that's just wrong. They can't."

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The Disturbing Resilience of Scientific Racism

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A new book explores how racist biases continue to maintain a foothold in research today

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© Annie Griffiths Belt/CORBIS

Culture, a shared set of traditions, belief systems, and behaviors, is shaped by history, religion, ethnic identity, language, and nationality, among other factors. The Middle East consists of approximately 20 countries, with many different religions and a variety of ethnic and linguistic groups. Given this diversity, we should not be surprised to find a multitude of different cultures coexisting in the region.

During the 19th century, translations of the Arabian Nights and archaeological discoveries in Egypt dominated the imaginations of people in the West who had never visited the Middle East. These armchair explorers conjured up competing images of a desert region populated by nomads and camels and, of course, pyramids, but also brimming with all manner of sweet and savory treats in bustling urban bazaars. During the 20th century, stories about the Middle East have tended to focus on oil wealth, territorial wars, and religious conflicts. All of these do exist, but there is much more to life in this area.

Daily life in the region is too complex to be summarized on a Web page; we can only begin to suggest the multiple variables involved in the lives of people there. A common thread that runs through many lives is the importance of family and the values that derive from having a strong extended family: respect, honor, and loyalty.

The Middle East is the birthplace of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, all monotheistic religions that grew from the same tradition. Each religion used the texts from earlier groups, and so they share many rules and beliefs. For example, Islam and Judaism observe the same dietary rules and have a similar focus on religion as a foundation for civil law. All three share a tradition of prophets, from Adam and Abraham to Solomon and Joseph. Jesus is significant for both Christianity and Islam, and Muslims in addition follow the teachings of Muhammad.

Religion plays a large part in the rhythm of daily life, not only through prayer and study, but also in determining the end of the work week. Shops in different neighborhoods close down on Fridays for the Muslim holy day, Saturdays for the Jewish Sabbath, and Sundays for the Christian day of rest. Religious festivals and remembrances, like Id al-Fitr (the Festival of Fast-Breaking, celebrated at the end of Ramadan), or the Jewish Passover holiday, or Easter Sunday as determined by the Roman or Eastern Orthodox Christian churches, are all recognized as national holidays in different countries.

An awareness of God (Arabic: Allah) is exhibited in common Arabic expressions that are used throughout the region -- even in Turkey and Iran, where Arabic is not the local language. A common response to "How are you?" is "Ilhamdillah!" -- "Praise be to God." When expressing hope for a future event, one might say "Inshallah" -- "God willing." The exclamation "Mashallah" -- "What God wills!" -- is often heard as an expression of delight, at the sight of a new baby, for example. While there are those for whom these phrases reflect the divine, others use them the way many English speakers use "Good-bye" (literally, "God be with ye").

Religion plays a role in national and international politics as well. Turkey has a Muslim majority, but is officially a secular nation. Other countries in the region identify themselves with a specific religion, mostly Islam. Lebanon's constitution attempted to provide for power sharing among 18 officially recognized religions, including Maronite and Orthodox Christians, Sunni and Shii Muslims, and Druze. But because the populations of the various groups grew at different rates, this system eventually became less representative of the nation as a whole and civil war broke out.

The poor relations between Israel and most of its Arab neighbors are sometimes described in terms of a perpetual religious conflict between Jews and Muslims. This reading, however, is too simplistic. Although control over important historical sites of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is a factor in the disagreements, many of the details that stall negotiations have to do with control of land and access to water resources. Furthermore, many Palestinians who demand restitution for their property are Christian, not Muslim, and Egypt's historic treaty with Israel provides a model for how Muslim and Jewish neighbors can live peaceably.

Situated between Africa, Asia, and Europe, the Middle East has been a crossroads for traders, travelers, and empire builders for thousands of years. Africans, Central Asians, and Celts have all added to the ethnic mix. Major ethnic groups in the Middle East today include Arabs, Iranians (also known as Persians), Turks, Jews, Kurds, Berbers, Armenians, Nubians, Azeris, and Greeks.

Most of the countries in this region are multiethnic. But even as diversity enhances the cultural richness of a society, it unfortunately may also lead to political conflict. The Kurds, for example, do not have their own nation-state, but are instead spread across Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. Their political and military attempts to create an autonomous Kurdistan have been strongly resisted by those states.

The multiplicity of languages spoken in the Middle East reflects its ethnic diversity. Most of these languages come from three major language "families":

Semitic (including Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic)

Indo-European (Kurdish, Persian, Armenian)

Turkic (Turkish, Azeri)

These language families reflect the successive migrations of different peoples into the region. A quick examination of these languages reveals the influence they have had on each other. Persian, for example, is written in Arabic script, while Turkish incorporates vocabulary words from Persian and Arabic. Arabic itself is spoken in regional dialectics that are not always mutually understood. Some ethnic and religious communities have preserved "native" languages for religious use, such as Coptic and Greek.

The family is an important part of culture in the Middle East, as is evident in the Arabic honorific names that are often used in preference to given names. A man may be called Ibn ("son of") followed by his father's name or Abu ("father of") followed by his child's name.

In traditional Arab societies the family unit is an extended family -- cousins, grandparents, second cousins, cousins-in-law, nieces, nephews, and more -- all living together. This remains true in rural areas particularly. Migration to the cities has broken up some of these extended families, and the number of people living only with their nuclear family in urban areas is increasing.

The difference between life in the village and life in the city sometimes seems to be as great or greater than the difference between living in the Middle East and living in America. Two men in Egypt, for example, may share the same language (Arabic), religion (Islam), and nationality (Egyptian), but one may live in an air-conditioned apartment building with his wife and two children and wear a suit to his government job, while the other may live in a naturally cool mud-brick house surrounded by three generations of relatives and wear a traditional robe, called a galabiya, to work a plot of land.

These differences are eroding, however, with the introduction of inexpensive cellular phone service and the ubiquity of television. Even some mud-brick houses are now equipped with satellite dishes that bring news, entertainment, and fashions not only from the capital city, but from around the world as well.

Over the past 200 years, and increasingly in the contemporary age of globalization, more and more Western goods -- everything from clothing to food to computers -- have appeared in Middle Eastern markets. Not only goods, but culture as well, have been imported from the West. Western books and movies are popular, especially (but not exclusively) among the urban elite.

In fashion, Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, banished the fez and other aspects of Ottoman dress in favor of European three-piece suits. Today, one might see young people clad in jeans and T-shirts that advertise their fondness for Britney Spears or Titanic walking down the same street as their peers who are wearing traditional hijab or galibiyas.

There is an active debate in most Middle Eastern communities about how much Western culture and technology can and should be adopted before such influences begin to compromise their culture, traditions, and identity. This discussion will require defining that identity to some degree. Will they characterize themselves as Egyptian? Muslim? Arab? a resident of a particular village? a member of a particular tribe? Most importantly, in what order would they prioritize these qualities? These are not easy questions, but the encroachment of Western influences requires some answers.

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Related sites

Inside the Kingdom: Fatina Shaker:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east /saudi_arabia/saudi_shaker_full.html
A Saudi Arabian sociologist talks to NewsHour about women's issues, religion, and politics.

Life in Israel and the West Bank:
http://search.npr.org/cf/cmn/cmnpd01fm.cfm ?PrgDate=04/08/2002&PrgID=5
Talk of the Nation speaks with Palestinians and Israelis about what life is like. Can kids go out and play? Can adults have dinner with friends? How do people make it to religious services?

Fiesta Bowl:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/poems/jan -june01/middleeast_06-13.html
NewsHour presents poems from Israeli and Palestinian poets.

Fashion Slideshow:
http://www.pbs.org/adventuredivas/index.html
This slide show exhibits Iranian women wearing different kinds of veils.

Observing Islam:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/religion/ july-dec01/islam_11-16.html
Islamic scholars discuss the future of Islam as Ramadan begins amid curiosity and concern. (Novemeber 2001)

Crescent and Star: Turkey Between Two Worlds:
http://freshair.npr.org/guestInfoFA.cfm?name=stephenkinzer
Writer Stephen Kinzer describes a country caught between the entrenched ruling elite and its younger, well-educated population who wants democracy.

Pari Zanganeh: Prima Folk/Opera Diva:
http://www.pbs.org/adventuredivas/iran/divas/zanganeh.html
Singer Pari Zanganeh speaks about women and music.

Beauty Shop Bop:
http://www.pbs.org/adventuredivas/iran/dispatches /beauty_video.html
This page links to streaming video of an Iranian beauty parlor and offers a clandestine peek underneath the veil.

Iranian Culture:
http://www.pbs.org/visavis/culture_mstr.html
Vis à Vis looks at Iran's rich traditions of cinema, literature, and music.

Religion & Culture:
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/classroom/lp5.html
Students will consider the theme of religion and culture as they learn about the Hindu-Muslim conflict in the province of Gujarat, India.

Arab Americans: In the Aftermath of the Terrorist Attacks on the U.S.:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/teachers /lessonplans/lifeafter911/arabamerican.html
Students will begin to understand who Arab Americans are, where they come from, and the cultural diversity and complexity of what it means to be Arab American.

Advertisers Tread Lightly:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/teachers /lessonplans/october01/warads/index.html
Students will analyze how one national company responded to the recent tragedy by incorporating special messages into its advertising.

Gender Issues in Islam:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/teach/muslims/
Students will compare and contrast the roles of men and women with regard to various topics in the six countries featured in the film.

Renaissance Man Comparison Poster:
http://www.pbs.org/empires/islam/lesson5.html
Students will learn about both the Sultan Suleyman (b. 1494 C.E.) and another Renaissance character and make comparisons.

Great Thinkers and Accomplishments of Islam:
http://www.pbs.org/empires/islam/lesson4.html
Students will learn about the diverse accomplishments of great Islamic scholars.

Creating a Textile Museum Piece from the Islamic Empire:
http://www.pbs.org/empires/islam/lesson4.html
Students will learn about the importance of the textile industry to the strength and stability of the Islamic Empire in the 11th and 12th centuries.

A Woman's Place:
http://www.pbs.org/visavis/resources_mstr.html
Students will learn about women's status in Iran and the U.S. across different points in history, explain why women in Iran dress and interact with men in specific ways, and relate this to certain groups/religions in the U.S., and adopt the perspective of a woman living at a different time in the U.S. or Iran.

Tolerance in Times of Trial:
http://www.pbs.org/americaresponds/tolerance.html
Students will explore the problems inherent in assigning blame to populations or nations of people. Students will also look at contemporary examples of ethnic conflict, discrimination, and stereotyping at home and abroad.

An Introduction to Islam and Muhammad:
http://www.pbs.org/empires/islam/lesson1.html
Students will compare the major monotheistic belief systems of the world.

Afghanland.com Web Site:
http://www.afghanland.com/home/home.html
A Web site on Afghan culture and politics

Religion: Three Religions, One God

How were the modern nation-states of the Middle East created?

What role have natural resources played in the politics and economy of the Middle East?

Historic Political Borders of the Middle East

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© Annie Griffiths Belt/CORBIS Culture, a shared set of traditions, belief systems, and behaviors, is shaped by history, religion, ethnic identity, language, and nationality, among other factors. The Middle East consists of approximately 20 countries, with many different religions and a variety of ethnic and linguistic groups.

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Some Americans believe that Muslim women are oppressed by their religion, forced to cover themselves completely, denied education and other basic rights. It is true that Muslim women, like women all over the world, have struggled against inequality and restrictive practices in education, work force participation, and family roles. Many of these oppressive practices, however, do not come from Islam itself, but are part of local cultural traditions. (To think about the difference between religion and culture, ask yourself if the high rate of domestic violence in the United States is related to Christianity, the predominant religion.)

In fact, Islam gives women a number of rights, some of which were not enjoyed by Western women until the 19th century. For example, until 1882, the property of women in England was given to their husbands when they married, but Muslim women always retained their own assets. Muslim women could specify conditions in their marriage contracts, such as the right to divorce should their husband take another wife. Also, Muslim women in many countries keep their own last name after marriage.

The Quran explicitly states that men and women are equal in the eyes of God. Furthermore, the Quran:

forbids female infanticide (practiced in pre-Islamic Arabia and other parts of the world)

instructs Muslims to educate daughters as well as sons

insists that women have the right to refuse a prospective husband

gives women rights if they are divorced by their husband

gives women the right to divorce in certain cases

gives women the right to own and inherit property (though in Sunni Islam they get only half of what men inherit. Men are expected to care for their mothers and any unmarried female relatives, and would, it is reasoned, need greater resources for this purpose.)

While polygyny is permissible, it is discouraged and on the whole practiced less frequently than imagined by Westerners. It is more frequent in the Gulf, including Saudi Arabia. Many Muslims cite the Quranic phrase "But treat them equally... and if you cannot, then one [wife] is better" and argue that monogamy is preferable, or even mandatory.

As the Islamic state and religion expanded, interpretations of the gender roles laid out in the Quran varied with different cultures. For example, some religious scholars in ninth- and 10th-century Iraq were prescribing more restrictive roles for women, while elite women in Islamic Spain were sometimes able to bend these rules and mix quite freely with men (see Walladah bint Mustakfi below).

Some contemporary women -- and men as well -- reject the limitations put on women and are reinterpreting the Quran from this perspective.

Before the arrival of Islam in the seventh century, upper-class women in Byzantine society and Sassanian women of the royal harem wore the veil as a mark of their high status. This custom was adopted by elite women in early Islamic society in the same region. Many nomadic women, however, maintained their traditional freedom of movement and less restrictive dress codes even after conversion to Islam.

Quranic rights for women were not always followed, depending on the strength of local patriarchal customs. Women in 19th-century Ottoman Egypt, for example, were often not given the full inheritance due them by law. If they challenged the family members who withheld their money in an Islamic court, however, they could win. This is still the case in family law practices in some countries.

Some women in Muslim societies have been prominent political actors. Female relatives of the Prophet Muhammad were particularly important in the early Muslim community because they knew his practice and teachings so well. Other women came to power through fathers or husbands. Still others wielded power behind the scenes.

Aisha, the favored wife of Muhammad, had great political clout and even participated in battle (the Battle of Camel).

Razia was a Muslim woman ruler of 13th-century India.

Amina was a 16th-century queen of Zaria in present-day Nigeria.

Shajarat al-Durr was briefly sultan in Mamluk Egypt, but was the power behind the throne for even longer.

The so-called "sultanate of women" in the Ottoman Empire during the 17th century was a period when several strong women had enormous power over affairs of state.

Huda Shaarawi, who became famous for discarding her face veil, also established a women's political party and worked for Egyptian independence from Britain in the first half of the 20th century.

Today there is a small but growing number of women in the parliaments of Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon, and in the fall of 2002, the Moroccan parliament is hoping to bring women into 25 percent of its seats. Contemporary Muslim women heads of state have included Megawati Sukarnoputri of Indonesia, Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan, Tansu Ciller of Turkey, and Khaleda Zia and Sheik Hasina Wazed of Bangladesh.

Sufism is an important branch of Islam emphasizing mysticism and one's personal relationship with God. The tenets of Sufism were first articulated by a woman named Rabia, a freed slave who became a prominent scholar in the eighth-century city of Basra in Iraq. She refused to marry because she did not want any earthly distractions from her love of God. Fatima, the Prophet Muhammad's daughter, and Zaynab, the Prophet's granddaughter, are also very important role models of piety for women in the Islamic world.

Contemporary women are also important religious leaders. Zaynab al-Ghazali led the women's wing of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. There are numerous women teachers, preachers, and Islamist leaders in contemporary Iran, one example being Zahra Rahnavard. In the United States, Riffat Hassan is a well-known American Muslim scholar.

Wealthier women historically have had more economic and educational opportunities by virtue of their class. Many wealthy women were and continue to be highly educated, their money and intelligence giving them the power to ignore society's traditional expectations of women and to participate fully in the economic, political, and cultural life of their community.

Wealthy women, however, have often been more restricted in their clothing and movement in public, since keeping them covered and out of public life is a way to demonstrate status. Poorer and rural women have had relatively more freedom of movement but fewer educational opportunities. In addition, women in highly segregated Muslim societies sometimes created (and still do create) their own society set apart from the male world. Segregation does not necessarily mean isolation for women, though it obviously has many other effects.

Whatever the cultural and economic background of a woman, her own abilities and personality greatly determine what she can achieve in her society.

Khadija, first wife of the Prophet, was a confident and shrewd businesswoman. She first hired the Prophet to lead her trading caravans, then proposed marriage to him although she was many years his senior. She was the first person to convert to Islam.

Walladah bint Mustakfi, a spirited noblewoman and noted poet of 11th-century Cordoba, gave parties with both men and women where she read her poetry. She declared, "I am by God fit for great things/And go my way armed with pride."

The contemporary singer Umm Kulthum, who came from a modest village background, was considered by many to be the voice and conscience of Egypt. Even today her memory and music have great appeal throughout the Arab world.

The veil is often seen in the West as a symbol of Muslim women's subordinate position in society, but its meaning and use vary enormously in Muslim societies.

The Quran directs both men and women to dress modestly, but the actual interpretation and implementation of this rule varies enormously.

Historically, the veil has been related to social class, not religion. The veil was first adopted from pre-Islamic Byzantine and Persian customs. In most areas, poor and rural women have covered themselves less than urban and elite women.

Within Islam, head coverings (hijab) vary by culture. They range from loose scarves to veils and full-length coverings, such as theburqa worn by many Afghan women. There is also a new style called "Islamic dress," in which a loose coat is worn with a scarf tied over the hair. Covering of the face was more common in the past than it is today, more so in some regions than others. Head covering is not solely a facet of Islam, however, and women of many cultures and religions cover their heads in different ways.

Veiling rules vary from country to country. In the modern period, strict laws about women's dress are often used to emphasize the religious orientation of a particular government, as in Iran or Saudi Arabia. On the other hand, Turkey does not allow women to wear the veil in public offices or universities because the Turkish state is committed to a more secular identity. The veil is also discouraged in Tunisia. In all cases, many citizens are dissatisfied with the law.

Veiling and Feminism (2:48) Watch

In many cases the varied practice of veiling is a personal, but not necessarily a permanent, choice made by women.

Back to top

Related sites

Muslims: Women and Islam:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/ shows/muslims/themes/women.html
Is Islam inherently discriminatory? What is Muslim women's role in the Islamic resurgence? And what does it mean to be a Muslim "feminist"?

Muslim Women's League Web Site:
http://www.mwlusa.org
The Muslim Women's League is a nonprofit American Muslim organization working to implement the values of Islam and thereby reclaim the status of women as free and equal.

Women in Afghanistan:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/asia/july -dec01/afghanwomen_11-21.html
Four Afghan women talk to NewsHour about their repression during Taliban rule. (November 2001)

Introduction to Islam:
http://www.mideasti.org/library/islam/introislam.htm
This introductory book on Islam includes a chapter on women.

Biographical Sketches:

Biographical sketches of influential Muslim women

Women, Class, and Islam during the Ottoman Empire:
http://www.humanities.ualberta.ca/ottoman /module2/tutorial2a.htm
A tutorial on women, class, and Islam during the Ottoman Empire

Rabi'ah:
http://www.tl.infi.net/~ddisse/rabia.html
Biographies on Rabia, one of the first Sufis, including translated quotations from her speeches

The Muslim Sisters' Homepage:
http://www.jannah.org/sisters/
This Web site is meant to help people to understand the true stance Islam takes on gender issues and the role of women.

Women in Iran:
http://www.pbs.org/visavis/women_mstr.html
Vis à Vis discusses women's rights in Iran, pre-Islamic Revolution through today.

Gender Issues in Islam:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/teach/muslims/
Students will compare and contrast the roles of men and women with regard to various topics in the six countries featured in the film.

A Woman's Place:
http://www.pbs.org/visavis/resources_mstr.html
Students will learn about women's status in Iran and the U.S. across different points in history, explain why women in Iran dress and interact with men in specific ways, and relate this to certain groups/religions in the U.S., and adopt the perspective of a woman living at a different time in the U.S. or Iran.

Divas: The Interviews:
http://www.pbs.org/adventuredivas/iran/divas/index.html
Interviews with Iranian women about poetry, religion, politics, marriage, film, youth, and freedom of the press

Reaching Across the Divide:
http://www.npr.org/news/specials/sixmonths/muslim.html
Attacks prompt a Muslim woman to teach others about her faith, dispel myths, and build understanding.

Center for Near Eastern Studies: Media: Veiling and the Media:
http://www.isop.ucla.edu/cnes/outreach/media/veiling/
This site provides a variety of viewpoints and resources in the Western popular media that look at veiling of Muslim women.

Culture: A Rich Mosaic

Religion: Three Religions, One God

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Global Connections . Roles of Women | PBS

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Some Americans believe that Muslim women are oppressed by their religion, forced to cover themselves completely, denied education and other basic rights. It is true that Muslim women, like women all over the world, have struggled against inequality and restrictive practices in education, work force participation, and family roles.

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An accurate and nuanced knowledge of the Middle East is important in understanding the behavior of residents there, and understanding their perceptions of foreigners. Unfortunately, both sides -- Middle East and West -- hold a number of common misperceptions about each other, informed more often by stereotypes than by facts or firsthand knowledge.
Perception: "Arab" and "Muslim" refer to the same people.
Arabs are people who speak Arabic as a native language and identify themselves as Arabs; Muslims are those who practice the religion of Islam.

Many Arabs are not Muslims, and not all Muslims are Arabs. More than a billion people in the world are Muslims, but fewer than 15 percent of Muslims worldwide are Arabs. The majority of Muslims live outside the Middle East, in places like Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, India, and Pakistan.

The confusion between these terms may stem from the fact that Arabic is the primary language of the Islamic faith, just as Latin was for Catholicism until recently. Therefore, all Muslims are expected to know at least a few key words and phrases in the Arabic language.

Muslims, Christians, and Jews worship the same god. All three are monotheistic religions, with many common doctrines, texts, and beliefs.

Muslims respect the same prophets as Jews and Christians, including Abraham, Noah, Moses, and Jesus. In fact, Muslims consider Islam to have existed since Abraham, with Judaism and Christianity being intermediate forms of the final religion revealed to Muhammad.

Jews and Christians are specifically protected in the Quran as Peoples of the Book, since Islam considers both the Torah and the New Testament to be revelations from God, though flawed in the process of human transmission. As an example of a difference in interpretation, Muslims do not believe Jesus is the son of God; this acceptance would contradict the Islamic belief in the uniqueness of God's divinity.

Like Judaism, Islam has a strong legal tradition that describes the rules by which members of the religious community should live. Some of these rules -- like the dietary restriction against eating pork -- are very similar.

Media Depictions of Women (2:12) Watch

Islam was a major reform for women and granted them new rights, including the right to agree to their marriage partner, the right to education, and a guaranteed share of family inheritance.

Muslim societies, however, may interpret those rights very differently. In most Middle Eastern countries, the law allows women to vote, work outside the home, and even run for office, but -- as is the case in other countries, too -- custom and practice may not always be as liberal as the law allows.

Just as it is in the United States, the "proper" role of women is a subject of debate. Some Muslim groups consider a woman's role in the home and family primary and seek to prevent inappropriate behavior -- sexual and otherwise -- by restricting fashion choices or independent access to public life. Others believe women should have equal and independent roles in society, without restriction by the law, family, or custom.

The seemingly contradictory rights and restrictions for women in some Muslim countries may seem very foreign. In Saudi Arabia, for example, women vote, work, and have excellent access to education, but they must wear a restrictive veil and are prohibited from driving cars.

But religion is not always conservative in its attitude toward women. There are scholars today who advocate an Islamic feminism, using the basic texts of Islam as justification. These feminists demand that the rights women are given in the Quran replace the restrictive customs of society.

Perception: The Middle East is one big sandy desert with lots of camels, populated by... men in turbans and long white robes... women in black with their faces covered... men waving long curved swords... harems with scantily clad women serving one man... husbands with four wives... rich oilsheikhs... and terrorists.

The Middle East and the Islamic world are diverse societies. More Muslims live in fertile plains and fishing villages than in deserts. Clothing and customs for men and women vary enormously in different countries and depend on variables like class, education, political structures, urban vs. rural location, and individual preference.

... " Harem" refers simply to the family's part of the house in gender-segregated societies where strange (unknown) men were not admitted. Most families in the Middle East consist of one husband and one wife, their children, and perhaps one or more of the husband's or wife's parents.

... While there are individuals in the Middle East who have certainly become very wealthy because of oil, the majority of people in the region are either poor or middle class.

... Acts of terrorism are carried out by only a few. While there is some ambivalence among Muslims about attacks carried out by Palestinian extremists against Israelis -- since many Muslims consider this a legitimate national struggle against a much stronger enemy -- there is wide condemnation of attacks against civilians.

Muslim societies through history have tended to be more tolerant of religious minorities -- especially Jews and Christians -- than the West has.

The Middle East has a long history of trade, communication, and cultural exchange with Europe and the United States, as well as other cultures around the world.

Some groups in the Middle East today disagree with U.S. foreign policies, but this is a political rather than a purely religious issue. While it's true that there are those in the Middle East who mistrust extremes of Western cultural influence and want to protect local cultural norms and practices, many Muslims want to adopt (or adapt) other aspects of Western culture and technology.

While some Muslims have a very strict interpretation of how one should live as a Muslim, there is enormous diversity in the Islamic world -- just as there is in predominantly Christian and Jewish societies -- in how religion is practiced daily and how religious law should be applied.

Most Muslims condemn violence as heartily as any non-Muslim and resent being presumed violent on the basis of a shared religion or the rhetoric of a particular group. Muslims often ask, "Did Timothy McVeigh's bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City mean all Christians are terrorists?"

News stories about "Islamic terrorism" often imply that Islam upholds the idea of jihad as a holy war fought against nonbelievers. For most Muslims, the most important meaning of "jihad" is intensely personal; it is the internal struggle to be a moral person. "Jihad" can also refer to the struggle for social justice or the defense of the Islamic community against outside attack.

The Quran permits war to defend and expand the Islamic community, but it sets strict limits: No one should be forced to convert; and in battle, the lives and livelihood of noncombatants must be protected.

Muslims live normal lives in societies throughout the world -- shopping, cooking, telling jokes, going to work, raising families. They also have a long history in America. For example, a large proportion of the African slaves brought to America in the 18th and 19th centuries were Muslim. Arab immigrants came to this country in waves starting in the late 19th century; most were Christian, but many were Muslim.

While it is difficult to get an accurate count, it is estimated that there are about six million Muslims in the United States. Among this six million are Muslims who were born and raised here, including African American Muslims, and others who migrated here from cultures around the globe. Islam is the fastest growing religion in the United States.

Muslims live in the modern world. Even the most conservative Islamists are trying to work out how to live as good Muslims in the present, not how to turn back the clock.

Since before the Crusades, European visitors to the Middle East have often exaggerated the differences between themselves and local Middle Eastern communities, concentrating on the "exotic" rather than the similarities. The concept of "Orient" that was invented by Europeans was based on these fanciful perceptions rather than on facts. The insistence on creating and upholding negative stereotypes worked to justify wars, colonial expansion, and the exploitation of native peoples and resources. This trend, called Orientalism, continues today.

Stereotypes are often perpetuated by the media. When the news media reports on violence in the Middle East, there is rarely an effort made to find quotes (or at least air them) from those who condemn the acts. For example, a few Palestinians celebrating the events of September 11, 2001, were shown on CNN, but little airtime was given to the Palestinians who were mourning. In general, fast-breaking and headline news tends to concentrate on the negative or threatening aspects of other societies in times of conflict, but to ignore the productive aspects of these cultures when they are at peace.

Movies, travel agencies, advertisers -- the outlets and agencies that form our ideas of the Middle East and elsewhere -- generally emphasize the exotic and strange. Stereotypical images are used repeatedly as shorthand to evoke a particular reaction. A sheikh in a robe, for example, suggests the erotic and mysterious, and this image can be used to sell everything from movie tickets to cigarettes to perfume.

People in other countries, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, often have misperceptions about life in America. Ironically, they get their images of the United States from American movies, popular music, and television shows. And where the national media is run by a foreign government, particularly one that doesn't agree with U.S. foreign policies, it may choose to reinforce negative stereotypes of the U.S.

The Portrayal of the American in Arabic Literature (1:33) Watch

Consider the following common perceptions about Americans and how they have developed:

While it is true that most Americans enjoy a higher standard of living than most people in the Middle East, many in the Middle East assume that all Americans live the lifestyle of the rich and famous reflected in popular TV series like Beverly Hills 90210 and in movies. This perception does not take into account the many socioeconomic levels at which Americans live.

Just as there is a vast diversity in ethnicities, religions, cultures, and language groups in the United States, there are also broad differences in the definition of family values here. For some outside America, the high U.S. divorce rate and the practice of putting older relatives in nursing homes rather than caring for them in the family home are used as evidence that the American family structure has broken down completely.

America is sometimes seen as a sexually permissive society, where casual sexual activity, near nudity, teenage pregnancy, single motherhood, HIV/AIDS, and drug use are common. The reality, however, is that none of these characterizations is the norm.

While some Americans would agree with this statement, pointing to something like the difference in wages paid to male and female workers as evidence, many Americans would not agree with the view held by some foreign societies that America's casual attitude toward sex, fashions that bare women's bodies, and commercial exploitation of images of women harm women's dignity and expose them to sexual danger. Nor would many in the U.S. agree that the American ideal of equality -- men and women taking on the same roles in the work force -- denigrates the role of mothers in society.

America's values of democracy, freedom, and economic opportunity are sometimes seen as being only for Americans, despite what American leaders may say publicly. It is thought that the United States is willing to defend these values abroad only when this defense is compatible with strategic interests. Some believe that America is the new world imperial power, supporting Israel and corrupt, oppressive governments in the Middle East and around the world for its own gain and to the detriment of the Arab people and Muslims. Furthermore, it is sometimes said that to make a profit, the U.S. harms local cultures by exporting its commercialized cultural products around the world.

By recognizing the stereotypes we hold about others -- and others hold about us -- we can begin to understand each other better and communicate our positions more clearly.

Back to top

Related sites

Reaching Across the Divide:
http://www.npr.org/news/specials/sixmonths/muslim.html
Attacks prompt a Muslim woman to teach others about her faith, dispel myths, and build understanding.

Muslims:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/muslims/
Frontline examines Islam's worldwide resurgence through the story of diverse Muslims struggling to fit Islam into their lives.

Reaching Out:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/media/jan -june02/public_2-18.html
NewsHour examines recent developments in the U.S. government's efforts to combat the anti-American sentiment brewing in parts of the Arab and Muslim world. (February 2002)

Mutual Misperceptions: The Historical Context of Muslim-Western Relations:
http://www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/cib/2001-02/02cib07.htm
Not all perceptions are justifiable in fact, but they can have the power to inform or inflame popular reactions, and even influence the policies of governments.

100 Questions and Answers about Arab Americans: A Journalist's Guide:
http://www.freep.com/jobspage/arabs/
Culture, language, and religion are distinct qualities that act in different ways to connect Arabs and to distinguish them from one another.

Arab Stereotypes and American Educators:
http://www.adc.org/index.php?id=283& no_cache=1&sword_list[]=stereotype
An overview of American stereotypes in popular culture

Beauty Shop Bop:
http://www.pbs.org/adventuredivas/iran/dispatches /beauty_video.html
This page links to streaming video of an Iranian beauty parlor and offers a clandestine peek underneath the veil.

Motherly Pearls:
http://www.pbs.org/adventuredivas/iran/dispatches/index.html
Advice on traveling in Iran from filmmakers Jeannie and Holly Morris

Arab Americans: In the Aftermath of the Terrorist Attacks on the U.S.:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/teachers /lessonplans/lifeafter911/arabamerican.html
Students will begin to understand who Arab Americans are, where they come from, and the cultural diversity and complexity of what it means to be Arab American.

Advertisers Tread Lightly:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/teachers /lessonplans/october01/warads/index.html
Students will analyze how one national company responded to the recent tragedy by incorporating special messages into its advertising.

Media Analysis:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/teach/muslims/
Students will compare coverage of Islam or Muslim-related news stories, such as Ramadan, in a U.S. and Islamic newspaper.

Stereotypes and Myths about Islam:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/ teach/muslims/activities.html
Students will explore what they know about Muslims and/or Islam, and then they will look for information that confirms or contradicts what they know.

Tolerance in Times of Trial:
http://www.pbs.org/americaresponds/tolerance.html
Students will explore the problems inherent in assigning blame to populations or nations of people. Students will also look at contemporary examples of ethnic conflict, discrimination, and stereotyping at home and abroad.

Geography: An Ancient and Modern Crossroads

Religion: Three Religions, One God

Culture: A Rich Mosaic

Muslim Population Worldwide

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An accurate and nuanced knowledge of the Middle East is important in understanding the behavior of residents there, and understanding their perceptions of foreigners. Unfortunately, both sides -- Middle East and West -- hold a number of common misperceptions about each other, informed more often by stereotypes than by facts or firsthand knowledge.

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Our Path Forward The National Geographic Society's Strategic Plan, NG Next, celebrates our legendary legacy and takes the next step forward by charting a dynamic, five-year plan that strengthens our foundation, builds on our momentum, embeds diversity, equity, and inclusion into every aspect of our work, and sets a clear vision for the future to ...

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By Jeff Haynes | March 1, 2023

We know the gaming industry is a huge part of kids' and teens' day-to-day lives. So it's incredibly important that families have access to high-quality content in this growing industry. The increasing popularity of games like The Last of Us, which inspired HBO's hit TV series, showcases how realistic representation can be done well. This epic game portrays diverse characters in an authentic and positive way, which broadens its audience and provides players with an accessible, inclusive experience.
It's good for kids to see diversity when they play video games.
Our own research has shown that positive, authentic portrayals of their culture or race makes kids everywhere feel included and celebrated.When kids see their own cultural backgrounds and values represented, it has a positive effect on their mental well-being. That's why we've used that research to add a section to our media reviews for rating the diversity of representations in media.

Gamers want to see characters they can identify with and whom they might encounter in their everyday world or IRL (in real life). It's important for developers to include options that let kids play as characters that reflect who they are. According to a recent study at the University of Saskatchewan by Cale Passmore, the lack of diversity in video games can leave players feeling " the same long-term effects of depression, detachment, disengagement, low self-worth...as you would see in everyday, daily racism."
There's a lack of diversity in the gaming industry as a whole.
There's a vicious cycle when it comes to the lack of diversity in gaming, with limited representation in both the products and the industry itself. According to a 2021 study from the International Game Developers Association, only 10% of developers are of Latino or Hispanic background, and only 4% are Black. And while 32% of developers surveyed indicated that they were LGBTQ+, systemic unconscious bias and homogeneity within the workforce are seen as the biggest problems related to diversity in the gaming industry. Even worse, people of color and women are predominantly working as part-time, contract, or freelance employees, instead of having full-time positions where they can more comprehensively impact and direct game production.

It's little wonder that games featuring people of color, LGBTQ+ stories, or female-led narratives have harder times being made or promoted, if the voices in control lean away from telling them-or decide they can tell those stories without authentic lived experiences. The furor that erupted around Forspoken's team of acclaimed but all-White writers telling the story of a Black woman from New York who's transported to a fantasy land is a perfect example of this. More underrepresented groups need to be present in gaming companies so stories like these can be told authentically.
Independent content producers are leading the way on diversity.
Kids and teens would also benefit from greater access to and promotion of indie games and spaces, where diverse titles are produced and celebrated without watering down their content or smothering them with big industry advertising. Studios like Outerloop Games, MidBoss, and Humble Games frequently tell underrepresented tales, but they have to go up against games with larger budgets and significantly more buzz. Larger publishers do provide some space for indies: EA has EA Originals, Microsoft has ID @ Xbox, and Nintendo has Indie World. But too frequently, the titles they release are blips on the radar compared to the massive pushes and promotions associated with AAA games.

Only a few indies escape the "hidden gem" cult status that plagues this segment of the industry, meaning that most of these diverse tales will languish in obscurity. And because independent producers don't get a ton of attention, people then falsely believe that indies aren't worth investing in. It's a vicious cycle.
Some gaming developers are moving in the right direction.
Still, some positive examples from 2022 show that developers are taking a step in the right direction. For instance, Don't Nod's Gerda: A Flame in Winter was inspired by a real-life story of the Danish resistance. The game focuses on a Danish nurse whose life is turned upside down when the Nazis take over her small town. It's set against the backdrop of war, where there are no perfect answers or absolutes for everyday citizens who are simply trying to survive. The cultural nuances of Denmark are proudly displayed, and the game even goes out of its way to offer facts about Danish culture and customs.

Team OFK's We Are OFK deals with the struggles of young LGBTQ+ 20-somethings in Los Angeles as they try to pursue their dreams of making music while unpacking their own personal baggage and drama. The game's themes-which range from relationship issues and attachment to familial expectations and hopes-are ones that people can understand and empathize with.

And Naughty Dog's release of Uncharted: The Lost Legacy in 2022 proved that two female leads could anchor a blockbuster franchise, with Chloe and Nadine picking the treasure-hunting mantle up from Nathan Drake and embarking on an adventure anchored in Indian mythology. Both of the lead characters are strong women who are just as clever and capable as the men they fight, and the story has strong themes of friendship and loyalty.

These games are great examples of diversity and positive, authentic representation. We need to see more options like this to improve the state of gaming for our kids. It's only by engaging gamers from all demographics that the industry can truly reach audiences in a more meaningful way.

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Why Aren't We Seeing More Diverse Content and Positive Representati...

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As the gaming industry grows, kids and teens need more quality games with authentic characters and stories. Advice from Common Sense Media editors.

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By Betsy Bozdech | July 27, 2021

In 2018, the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative released its landmark study on the demographics of film critics. Ever since, we've been hearing about the need for increased diversity in media criticism, especially when it comes to coverage of big-budget Hollywood movies. And with numbers like the ones in the Annenberg findings (77.8% of the critics in their study were male, and 82% were White), there's no denying that mainstream movie criticism can function as an echo chamber.

When you pair these facts with the popularity and influence of Rotten Tomatoes, which promotes an aggregate score over individual voices, the result is that most critics from underrepresented groups simply don't have a fighting chance to be heard. And that's a significant problem for both filmmakers and moviegoers, because critical reception has a big impact on what gets produced -- and for whom. It's to everyone's benefit when critics are able to bring diverse perspectives and their own lived experiences to bear in evaluating and responding to a movie (or TV show, book, game, etc.).

It's been encouraging to see some companies making efforts to support increased diversity in criticism, including Rotten Tomatoes itself, which overhauled its Top Critics program in late 2020. But there's a significant piece of the puzzle that isn't being addressed: access to high-profile content. Traditionally, major movie studios schedule preview screenings for critics in major cities: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, etc. You get invited, you RSVP, you show up, and you watch the movie. All well and good, but what if you're a critic who doesn't happen to live in an urban area? Or you're physically unable to get to a theater? Should that automatically leave you out?

During the worst part of the COVID-19 pandemic, when movie theaters were closed and studios were forced to get creative with their release strategies, they also had to change the way they got their films in front of reviewers -- i.e. they distributed review screeners. Screeners -- physical or, more often these days, digital copies of media provided to critics and award voters so they can watch the films at their convenience -- aren't a new concept. But until lockdown, they were largely reserved for either end-of-the-year promotional pushes (ahead of the Oscars, etc.) or used to help promote smaller titles whose distributors don't have the marketing budget to rent out theaters for screenings.

COVID put the big studios in the same situation as the smaller distributors, which was rough for their bottom lines but great for leveling the critical playing field. For almost a year and a half, if you had a laptop and WiFi and figured out which publicist to email, the top releases were much more accessible, and to a much broader cohort of critics.

Now, with theaters open again, the studios are going back to their old ways, limiting preview access to critics who can attend in-person screenings in major cities. And that plays right into the circumstances that led to the lack of diversity in film criticism in the first place. Living in Birmingham, Alabama, instead of L.A. or New York City shouldn't disqualify you from being part of the opening-weekend conversation about Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins. That's exactly what happened to the Common Sense Media critic who was originally assigned to cover that title for us, and it had a direct impact on our ability to offer a fresh perspective on that franchise to our community.

If studios and filmmakers truly believe in fostering diversity -- behind the scenes, on camera, and in the dark rooms where writers who care passionately about film and media engage with their work -- then it's time to help make access to those films as equitable as possible. And that means continuing to make screeners available regularly so that reviewers everywhere, from every demographic, have the chance to make their perspectives heard.

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The One Thing Every Movie Studio Can Do TODAY to Support Diversity...

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Equitable access to media screeners will give more voice to reviewers everywhere Advice from Common Sense Media editors.

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In 1619, the first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia, one of the newly formed 13 American Colonies. They had been kidnapped from their homes and were forced to work on tobacco, rice, and indigo plantations from Maryland and Virginia all the way to Georgia. According to the law, they had no rights and were not free.

Escaping to freedom was anything but easy for an enslaved person. It required courage, wit, and determination. Many fled by themselves or in small numbers, often without food, clothes, or money. Leaving behind family members, they traveled hundreds of miles across unknown lands and rivers by foot, boat, or wagon. To be captured would mean being sent back to the plantation, where they would be whipped, beaten, or killed.

Not everyone believed that slavery should be allowed and wanted to aid these fugitives, or runaways, in their escape to freedom. As more and more people secretly offered to help, a freedom movement emerged. It became known as the Underground Railroad.

How the Underground Railroad started

Americans had been helping enslaved people escape since the late 1700s, and by the early 1800s, the secret group of individuals and places that many fugitives relied on became known as the Underground Railroad.

The Underground Railroad was not underground, and it wasn't an actual train. It was a network of people, both whites and free Blacks, who worked together to help runaways from slaveholding states travel to states in the North and to the country of Canada, where slavery was illegal.

No one knows exactly where the term Underground Railroad came from. "Underground" implies secrecy; "railroad" refers to the way people followed certain routes-with stops along the way-to get to their destination. The phrase wasn't something that one person decided to name the system but a term that people started using as more and more fugitives escaped through this network.

The operators of the Underground Railroad were abolitionists, or people who opposed slavery. Many were members of organized groups that helped runaways, such as the Quaker religion and the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Often called "agents," these operators used their homes, churches, barns, and schoolhouses as "stations." There, fugitives could stop and receive shelter, food, clothing, protection, and money until they were ready to move to the next station.

A dangerous journey

The Underground Railroad was secret. Nothing was written down about where to go or who would help. So once enslaved people decided to make the journey to freedom, they had to listen for tips from other enslaved people, who might have heard tips from other enslaved people. If they were lucky, they traveled with a conductor, or a person who safely guided enslaved people from station to station.

Whether alone or with a conductor, the journey was dangerous. Slave catchers with guns and dogs roamed the area looking for runaways to capture. People who spotted the fugitives might alert police-or capture the runaways themselves for a reward. The fugitives were often hungry, cold, and scared for their lives.

To give themselves a better chance of escape, enslaved people had to be clever. For instance, fugitives sometimes fled on Sundays because reward posters could not be printed until Monday to alert the public; others would run away during the Christmas holiday when the white plantation owners wouldn't notice they were gone. The fugitives also often traveled by night-under the cover of darkness-following the North Star.

Once they were on their journey, they looked for safe resting places that they had heard might be along the Underground Railroad. A hiding place might be inside a person's attic or basement, a secret part of a barn, the crawl space under the floors in a church, or a hidden compartment in the back of a wagon. At these stations, they'd receive food and shelter; then the agent would tell them where to go next.

To avoid capture, fugitives sometimes used disguises and came up with clever ways to stay hidden. One bold escape happened in 1849 when Henry "Box" Brown was packed and shipped in a three-foot-long box with three air holes drilled in. After traveling along the Underground Railroad for 27 hours by wagon, train, and boat, Brown was delivered safely to agents in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Agents of change

Runaway slaves couldn't trust just anyone along the Underground Railroad. Fortunately, people were willing to risk their lives to help them. Many were ordinary people, farmers, business owners, ministers, and even former enslaved people.

In 1826, Levi Coffin, a religious Quaker who opposed slavery, moved to Indiana. By chance he learned that he lived on a route along the Underground Railroad. Coffin and his wife, Catherine, decided to make their home a station. More than 3,000 slaves passed through their home heading north to Canada.

Frederick Douglass escaped slavery from Maryland in 1838 and became a well-known abolitionist, writer, speaker, and supporter of the Underground Railroad. He hid runaways in his home in Rochester, New York, and helped 400 fugitives travel to Canada.

Another Underground Railroad operator was William Still, a free Black business owner and abolitionist movement leader. By day he worked as a clerk for the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, but at night he secretly aided fugitives. He raised money and helped hundreds of enslaved people escape to the North, but he also knew it was important to tell their stories.

That's why Still interviewed the runaways who came through his station, keeping detailed records of the individuals and families, and hiding his journals until after the Civil War. Then in 1872, he self-published his notes in his book, The Underground Railroad. It's one of the clearest accounts of people involved with the Underground Railroad.

The most famous conductor of the Underground Railroad was Harriet Tubman, who escaped from slavery in 1849. Determined to help others, Tubman returned to her former plantation to rescue family members. Later she started guiding other fugitives from Maryland. Tubman made 13 trips and helped 70 enslaved people travel to freedom. William Still even provided funding for several of Tubman's rescue trips.

Fugitive slave laws

Americans helped enslaved people escape even though the U.S. government had passed laws making this illegal. In 1793, Congress passed the first federal Fugitive Slave Law. This law gave local governments the right to capture and return escapees, even in states that had outlawed slavery. Plus, anyone caught helping runaway slaves faced arrest and jail.

But the law often wasn't enforced in many Northern states where slavery was not allowed, and people continued to assist fugitives. Politicians from Southern slaveholding states did not like that and pressured Congress to pass a new Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 that was much harsher.

This law increased the power of Southerners to reclaim their fugitives, and a slave catcher only had to swear an oath that the accused was a runaway-even if the Black person was legally free. So slave catchers began kidnapping any Black person for a reward. No place in America was safe for Black people. Many enslaved and free Blacks fled to Canada to escape the U.S. government's laws.

But the 1850 law only inspired abolitionists to help fugitives more. Widespread opposition sparked riots and revolts. In 1851, a group of angry abolitionists stormed a Boston, Massachusetts, courthouse to break out a runaway from jail. Other rescues happened in New York, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

It wasn't until June 28, 1864-less than a year before the Civil War ended-that both Fugitive Slave Acts were finally repealed by Congress.

Future generations

The Underground Railroad successfully moved enslaved people to freedom despite the laws and people who tried to prevent it. Exact numbers don't exist, but it's estimated that between 25,000 and 50,000 enslaved people escaped to freedom through this network.

The Underground Railroad was a social movement that started when ordinary people joined together tomake a change in society. It's an example of how people, regardless of their race or economic status, united for a common cause.

As the late Congressman John Lewis said, "When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have to speak up. You have to say something; you have to do something." That's why people today continue to work together and speak out against injustices to ensure freedom and equality for all people.

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The historic movement carried thousands of enslaved people to freedom. This is their journey.

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By Déjà Rollins | June 14, 2022

We see them in the back seat, propped on the living room couch, or in their rooms, headphones in, focused for hours, watching YouTube videos. In the past four years, online video viewing has seen a significant increase among kids of all ages. In fact, many teens say YouTube is the platform they cannot live without-and my 14-year-old son would agree. The popularity of YouTube and other online platforms creates a unique opportunity for user-generated content to positively affect the ethnic-racial development of millions of kids across the country. As the largest user-generated platform for online video, YouTube could be a groundbreaking leader in shaping kids' view of the world.

However, YouTube seems to be missing the mark. Our new report, Who Is the "You" in YouTube?: Missed Opportunities in Race and Representation in Children's YouTube Videos, reveals that kids are watching content that doesn't represent the diversity of the world we live in. And this same material either presents content that supports stereotypes or misses opportunities for teaching about race and ethnicity at all. We know that kids and parents want more from the media they consume, and research shows that exposure to negative depictions of a child's own racial or ethnic identity can result in myriad negative outcomes, from negative self-esteem and academic performance to a lessened sense of value in their own ethnic-racial group and their future aspirations. With the rise in user-generated content and the increasing popularity of this media, it's important for Common Sense to understand how user-generated content fits into the narrative around representation and ethnic-racial development. Researchers in this study looked at 1,242 videos watched by children age 0-18, and here are some of the key findings that emerged:

Young kids are watching content that perpetuates stereotypes and doesn't accurately represent the world they live in-even more so than tweens and teens.
Common Sense found that 62% of YouTube videos watched by kids 8 and under didn't feature any Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) characters, and another 10% showed shallow or stereotypical portrayals. And those videos that did feature BIPOC characters were significantly more likely to include interpersonal violence (e.g., bullying, meanness, pranks; 27% compared to 16% of videos with prominent White characters), bad language (32% vs. 13%), and higher drinking/drugs/smoking (7% vs. 2%). Videos featuring White individuals were more likely to portray those characters in a positive light.

When we looked at the YouTube viewing histories of tweens/ teens, an average of 9% of videos contained stereotypes. This means that if a tween/teen watches 10 YouTube videos a day, every day for a year, they might see over 300 videos depicting ethnic-racial stereotypes in that time.

There are missed opportunities for YouTube to elevate positive representations and voices from BIPOC people and to leverage important conversations and representation about race and ethnicity.
Children age 0-8 watched a considerable amount (27% of the videos in our sample) of "colorblind" cartoons in which the main character doesn't have a clear ethnicity or race. Teaching about race and ethnicity was extremely rare: Of the 1,242 videos watched by children, only two discussed race and ethnicity. This is a significant missed opportunity to teach young children through storytelling by highlighting characters from diverse backgrounds in main roles. We know that babies begin recognizing race and ethnicity at a very young age, so if we want to change the narrative, it's super important to seize these opportunities from the start.

While YouTube does have a Black creators fund, it needs to do more to invest in and highlight BIPOC creators who feature real-life, inspiring stories and ensure their channels get promoted to a greater content distribution audience. Regarding YouTube Kids, for example, the creators' fund makes no mention of diversity and inclusion, and given how crucial representation is for young kids, there should be more emphasis on representation here as well.

There is an appetite for inspiring and empowering content that elevates the voices and perspectives of BIPOC characters and creators.
YouTube videos containing ethnic-racial stereotypes had lower viewership compared to those without stereotypes. Videos without ethnic-racial stereotypes in our sample had a median of about 1.3 million views, while videos with ethnic-racial stereotypes had a median of only about 734,000 views.

Tweens and teens also sought out content that contained characters that looked like them. This pattern suggests that YouTube could act as a source of positive representation for youth who are seeking messages and entertainment that align with their ethnic-racial identity.

YouTube has the power to be the platform that gets it right on diverse representation.
Although YouTube states that it aims to elevate high-quality content for kids, it's clear that kids are still watching content that features negative ethnic-racial representation. Because user-generated content is unmoderated, stereotypes can be perpetuated and even rewarded by the YouTube algorithm.

More attention needs to be focused on promoting diverse creators in the YouTube algorithms. And by making it easier for users to flag inappropriate content and institute policy violations for offenders, YouTube could avoid the spread of trending videos promoting questionable/biased portrayals.

The answer shouldn't be just to suggest that children use YouTube Kids. Although YouTube has been making changes to improve the quality of content presented to children on the YouTube Kids site and child-directed content on the main YouTube site, most kids are accessing content on the main platform.

YouTube should take accountability and exert its power to positively influence how race and ethnicity are represented and discussed on its platform. By elevating diverse voices and real-life experiences, making it easier to flag biased content, and improving the quality of content across its entire platform, YouTube could change the narrative. YouTube can have a positive impact on kids' view of the world by helping them build their ethnic-racial identities and promoting understanding that goes beyond stereotypes and tropes.

In the meantime, families, caregivers, and educators can find content that elevates BIPOC experiences when YouTube isn't highlighting that for them, or check out these alternative kid-friendly platform s.

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YouTube Is Missing an Opportunity to Be a Leader in Diverse, Repres...

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New research from Common Sense reveals kids are viewing content that isn't representative of the world they live in, and that matters. Advice from Common Sense Media editors.

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New Report & Parent Poll by Common Sense Media Reveals Gap Between Consumer Demand and Hollywood Reality

San Francisco (October 20, 2021)- Despite efforts by the entertainment industry to improve diversity and representation in front of and behind the camera, screen media continues to fall short on its portrayal of diverse races and ethnicities, even while parents are indicating they want more representation in the media that their kids consume. And unfortunately, the slow pace of change in Hollywood comes at the detriment of children's ethnic and racial development.

A new report released today by Common Sense, " The Inclusion Imperative: Why Media Representation Matters for Kids' Ethnic-Racial Development," reveals that media plays a critical role in kids' sense of identity and helps parents start important conversations about race. Almost 6 in 10 (57%) parents say that the media their child consumes has prompted conversations about diversity, and an even larger percentage of parents say it is important that their children are exposed to content that helps them learn more about their own culture, religion, or lifestyle. Additionally, 78% of parents want their children to be exposed to media that teaches them about cultures, religions, and lifestyles that are different from their own, underscoring the importance of narratives and storylines that represent the diversity of a multicultural America.

But the report shows that glaring diversity issues remain in media, as people of color continue to be underrepresented and mischaracterized in movie and television roles across media platforms, networks, and services. For example, characters of color in shows most watched by children age 2-13 are more likely to be depicted as violent, and women of all ethnic-racial groups in adult programming are more likely to appear in sexualized roles.

"Media has a profound influence on how we see, understand, and treat people, especially those within and different from our own race or ethnicity. And this is no different for kids," says Onnie Rogers, PhD, a researcher from Northwestern University who co-authored the report. "Media representation is important to how kids build their perspectives on their own ethnic-racial group, as well as that of others. This research gives us a deeper understanding of how media, race, and representation are all intertwined with lasting effects."

The report, which is co-authored by Rogers; Dana Mastro, PhD, professor of communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara; Michael B. Robb, PhD, senior director of research at Common Sense; and Alanna Peebles, PhD, assistant professor of communication, media, and technology at San Diego State University, synthesizes existing research from more than 150 journal articles, book chapters, reports, and other academic sources to get the best available understanding of how media could influence children's ethnic-racial development. A nationally representative survey of over 1,100 parents of children from 2 to 12 years old was also conducted to help shed light on what parents expect from media geared toward kids and how it can be a valuable tool to help kids gain a better understanding of race and ethnicity. Parents responded with a clear message: It's about more than just seeing their race/ethnicity in the media-it's about being culturally and linguistically inclusive.

"This report makes it clear that parents use and value quality media to help teach their kids understanding, acceptance, and inclusion," said James P. Steyer, founder and CEO of Common Sense. "At the same time, the entertainment industry isn't giving them enough choices. Parents want more from their media in terms of inclusivity and representation, and it's time for content creators and the platforms that make that content available to create TV shows, movies, games, and apps that help all kids feel included and celebrated."

The lack of representation in media has parents coming up short when searching for realistic, three-dimensional representations of diverse races and ethnicities that aren't rife with stereotypes. (Sesame Street and Dora the Explorer are the examples parents gave the most often for shows that have positive and nuanced representation of different groups.) To address this concern, Common Sense Media is adding a new rating for diverse representations that can help parents identify high-quality media that includes and elevates accurate portrayals of characters of color. Common Sense Media has provided research-backed ratings for nearly two decades, and this latest research brings deeper nuance to how media is rated and reviewed for diverse representations.
'Inclusion Imperative' Report Key Findings

People of color are underrepresented in movie and television roles across media platforms, networks, and services. Latinos are underrepresented in every form of media and across all leading roles (for example, despite being 18% of the population, Latinos make up only 5% of speaking roles in film). Native Americans are essentially invisible across the media landscape.

Media representation is important to how kids build their perspectives on their own ethnic-racial group, as well as that of others. Our review of available research reinforced the idea that media can have both positive and negative impacts on kids' ethnic-racial development. On the negative side, stereotypical portrayals of people of color can promote harmful views about and responses to people of color among White audiences, and can also negatively affect children's future professional aspirations and undermine their sense of self. At the same time, high-quality children's media can promote positive ethnic-racial attitudes and interactions.

Even when people from Asian, Black, Latino, Middle Eastern, or Native American groups are represented across media platforms, they are commonly stereotyped. Characters of color in shows most watched by children age 2-13 are more likely to be depicted as violent, and women of all ethnic-racial groups in adult programming are more likely to appear in sexualized roles.

White people are overrepresented across all media platforms and roles, including in children's TV, in top-grossing films, and in lead roles on network, cable, and streaming television. Recent studies have found that White people occupy 76% of lead roles on streaming and network TV shows, even though they represent only 60% of the population. The overrepresentation of White people may contribute to children developing an inaccurate understanding of the social world.

Exposure to negative media depictions of their own ethnic-racial groups can undermine children's sense of self. Studies examining the influence of media use on Black children and adolescents found that exposure to stereotypic media representations was related to lower self-esteem, satisfaction with one's appearance, confidence in one's own ability, feelings about one's ethnic-racial group, and academic performance.

Watching favorable depictions of their own ethnic-racial group can positively impact children's self-perceptions and views about their own ethnic-racial group. For example, among Black elementary school girls, exposure to liked Black TV characters is associated with more positive feelings about their own status, appearance, and happiness.

Parents' Survey Key Findings

Representation is important to parents, and it's about more than just seeing their race/ethnicity in the media. About 6 in 10 parents (57%) say it is important for their children to see people of their own race/ethnicity in the media they consume. This is most important to Black parents, with 75% saying it is important.

Parents find it very important that their children be exposed to media content that encourages acceptance of others who don't look like them. Two in three parents believe that the media has a big impact on how their kids treat others (67%) and on the information they get about other races/cultures (63%). As such, over 80% of parents say it is important that the content their children are exposed to teaches them to be accepting of people who don't look like them and their families.

There is a lot of room for improvement in terms of how diverse communities are represented in children's media. Most parents feel that White people are often portrayed in a positive light in the media their children are exposed to; one in four believe that portrayals of Black, Hispanic, and LGBTQIA+ people are more likely to be negative. Almost half of parents (47%) believe that Black representation in children's media is often stereotypical; 4 in 10 believe Asian, Hispanic, Middle Eastern, and LGBTQIA+ representation is often also stereotypical.

Parents want to see more nuanced, sophisticated representations of BIPOC people and communities that provide positive role models and dispel damaging stereotypes about these groups. Unprompted, parents most often said they wanted BIPOC people and communities to be portrayed with more respect, as good people, and as educated and successful.

About two in three parents (65%) feel that media has a big impact on their children's professional aspirations, underscoring the importance of providing positive role models for BIPOC children. In addition, 62% feel that media has an impact on how well their child does in school. 63% of parents believe that media has an impact on the information children have about people of other races, ethnicities, religions, and cultures.

Methodology
For the literature review, authors reviewed existing research from more than 150 journal articles, book chapters, reports, and other academic sources on child development, ethnic-racial development, and media.

For the parent survey, Common Sense's goal was to assess parents' and caregivers' views on the quantity and quality of racial and cultural representations in children's media content. The survey was conducted in June 2021 with 1,143 participants in a nationally representative sample of parents and caregivers (age 18+) of children between the ages of 2 to 12 years old. Demographic quotas were set within each ethnic-racial group to ensure proper representation. The data was ultimately weighted by actual ethnic-racial representation in the U.S. to make the total aggregated data representative. The survey was offered both in English and Spanish.

A copy of the full report can be downloaded here.

###

About Common Sense
Common Sense is the nation's leading nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the lives of kids and families by providing the trustworthy information, education, and independent voice they need to thrive in the 21st century. Learn more at commonsense.org.

Media Contacts
Lorena Taboas, Media Relations Manager
[email protected]
786-521-4215

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Parents Seek More Diversity in Movies & Television for Kids, But the Entertainment Industry Continues to Fall Short

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New Report & Parent Poll by Common Sense Media Reveals Gap Between Consumer Demand and Hollywood Reality San Francisco (October 20, 2021)- Despite efforts by the entertainment industry to improve diversity and representation in front of and behind the camera, screen media continues to fall short on its portrayal of diverse races and ethnicities, even while parents are indicating they want more representation in the media that their kids consume.

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YouTube Videos Consumed by Kids and Teens Are Often Devoid of Diversity or Perpetuate Racial, Ethnic, and Gender stereotypes

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A new report by Common Sense Media takes a unique look at YouTube content through the lens of kids’ ethnic-racial development.

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As a girl in New York City in the 1930s and '40s, Bernice "Bunny" Sandler wasn't allowed to be a school crossing guard-only the boys at her school could do that. Running the classroom projector was also forbidden for girls. And though the boys had plenty of opportunities to play sports at school, there weren't teams for girls-and they weren't allowed on boys' teams.

Sandler didn't think it was fair but told herself that's just the way the world works. Then years later, she wasn't hired for a teaching position at a public school because she was a woman.

Enough was enough. Sandler began a three-year-long fight for equal opportunities for all females. Here's how that struggle led to the passage of Title IX, the 1972 law banning gender discrimination at places that get money from the government.

The fight for girls in schools

In 1964, the Civil Rights Act was passed by the United States Congress to expand the rights of all Americans, especially people of color. It made racial segregation, or separation by race, illegal in public places like swimming pools and buses, as well as in private businesses like restaurants and stores. It also banned discrimination against workers at privately owned businesses because of their race, color, religion, gender, and national origin.

However, the act didn't include protections for women and girls in public institutions, meaning places that received money from the U.S. government in order to run. This included places like schools, libraries, museums, and government agencies. Women who worked at these places-as well as girls who attended public schools-could legally be treated unfairly because of their gender.

After complaints from equal rights activists, President Lyndon B. Johnson issued an executive order in 1967 to ban gender discrimination at places that receive federal money. (An executive order is rule made by a president instead of Congress.)

Because a new president can overturn executive orders, activists wanted to strengthen and expand the protections for women. Sandler had a plan.

How schools discriminated against girls and women

To draw attention to the challenges facing girls and women in education even after the passage of the executive order, Sandler studied hundreds of schools. Her research found that many universities had quotas, or limits, on how many women could attend. One veterinary school allowed only two women to enroll each year-no matter how many applied or how smart they were.

Other schools required women to have higher test scores and better grades than men to get in. And once enrolled, female students didn't have equal access to scholarship money to help pay for their education.

Women and girls also didn't have equal opportunities to play on sports teams because schools spent money mostly on boys' teams. (For instance, in 1969, one college budget set aside $90,000 for boys' sports-and $200 for girls'.) Locker rooms, equipment, and training programs for female students were often not as good as what the boys had.

These were all violations of the executive order. Sandler wanted lawmakers to pay attention.

The campaign begins

With the help of like-minded people, Sanders used her research to file official complaints with the government against 250 colleges and universities that had violated the executive order. She encouraged people affected by the unequal treatment to share their stories with their congressional representatives. The protesters created so much mail that several full-time employees were assigned to handle the letters.

Lawmakers noticed Sandler's complaints about these violations and realized that stronger rules were needed to protect females from discrimination. Representatives Patsy Takemoto Mink of Hawaii and Edith Starrett Green of Oregon, along with Senator Birch Evans Bayh of Indiana, worked to convince their colleagues to support the bill. After several months of discussion, other elected officials agreed, and Title IX of the Education Amendments Act was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Richard Nixon on June 23, 1972. It states:

"No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance."

The impact of Title IX

Even though Sandler's research was on colleges and universities, Title IX would apply to elementary, middle, and high schools, too. That meant that girls were no longer forced to take classes in cooking, sewing, or typing. They could also learn to build things in shop class and repair cars-just like the boys.

Although the law wasn't specifically written to address sports, it had a huge impact on athletics as well. With three million more athletic opportunities than they had in the 1970s, girls can now play school sports like soccer, track, and basketball. Some girls even wrestle or play on football teams.

Thanks to equal opportunities in school, today nine out of 10 girls have at least a high school education, up from six out of 10 before Title IX. Women now make up about 60 percent of all college students, often in fields like law and medicine, areas of study that very few women were allowed to enter in the past. And the number of girls participating in sports is 10 times greater since the passage of Title IX. That's an increase of more than 1,000 percent!

Before her death in 2019, Sandler told reporters she's proud of the work she and her allies did to gain equality for female students. And she smiles when she sees female athletes walk "with their heads up and feeling like, 'Yeah, I can handle this world.'"

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Equality in schools: Title IX and the fight for women's rights

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A civil rights law called Title IX makes sure girls have the same opportunities as boys in schools. Here's how the 1972 act was passed.

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Look within these articles for nuance. Look for racial stereotypes. They are subtly mentioned in each of these articles. Read between the lines.

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Harriet Tubman cautiously watched the shore from one of three gunboats on the Combahee River. She and several hundred Union soldiers were preparing a raid to free hundreds of enslaved people from plantations in South Carolina, part of the Confederate states that were fighting against the Union during the Civil War of 1861 to 1865. Enemy soldiers were hiding nearby-success was far from guaranteed.

Harriet Tubman is well known for risking her life as a "conductor" in the Underground Railroad, which led escaped enslaved people to freedom in the North. But the former enslaved woman also served as a spy for the Union during the Civil War. Tubman decided to help the Union Army because she wanted freedom for all of the people who were forced into slavery, not just the few she could help on the Underground Railroad. And she convinced many other brave African Americans to join her as spies-even at the risk of being hanged if they were caught.

A SECRET MISSION

The Civil War was a time when women were usually restricted to traditional roles like cooking and nursing. Tubman did jobs like that, but as a spy she worked side-by-side with men, says Tom Allen, author of the Nat Geo book Harriet Tubman, Secret Agent.

In one of her most dramatic and dangerous roles, Tubman helped Colonel James Montgomery plan a raid to free enslaved people from plantations along the Combahee (pronounced "KUM-bee") River in South Carolina. Early on the morning of June 1, 1863, three gunboats carrying several hundred male soldiers along with Tubman set out on their mission.

Tubman had gathered key information from her scouts about the Confederate positions. She knew where they were hiding along the shore. She also found out where they had placed torpedoes, or barrels filled with gunpowder, in the water.

As the early morning fog lifted on some of the South's most important rice plantations, the Union expedition hit hard. The raiders set fire to buildings and destroyed bridges so they couldn't be used by the Confederate Army. They also freed about 750 enslaved people-men, women, children, and babies-and did not lose one soldier in the attack.

A WRITER'S QUEST

To gather the facts, Allen searched libraries and the internet, and even walked in Tubman's footsteps. "I went on the river just south of the area where the raid took place," he says. "You're in that kind of country she would have known, with plenty of mosquitoes and snakes, and dirt roads are still there today-so you get a feeling of what it was like."

Allen says his most exciting moment came when a librarian led him to written accounts by people who actually saw Tubman and the raiders in action.

"She was five feet two inches (157 centimeters) tall, born a slave, had a debilitating illness, and was unable to read or write. Yet here was this tough woman who could take charge and lead men," Allen says. "I got to like her pretty quickly because of her strength and her spirit."

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You might know her as a conductor for the Underground Railroad. She was also a spy.

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It wasn't unusual for the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, to be noisy with cars and trucks. But on March 9, 1965, traffic wasn't the source of the commotion on the structure-the noise came from the chants of peaceful protesters streaming across the bridge. Marching behind civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr., thousands of U.S. citizens carried signs bearing the words "We Demand Voting Rights Now!" and "Protect My Vote."

While some U.S. citizens gained the right to vote in the United States as early as 1789, others-including many Black people-didn't earn the right until much later. In fact, throughout U.S. history, many citizens have been denied the right to vote, including women, enslaved people, African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, immigrants, the impoverished, people convicted of a felony, and adults unable to read and write.

It took almost two centuries for a nation whose founders wrote equality for "all men" into the Declaration of Independence to achieve something close to universal suffrage, or the right to vote for everyone. What took so long?

Voting then and now

In 1789, 13 years after the United States declared itself an independent country, the U.S. Constitution allowed each state to determine who could vote there. Most states granted the right to vote to white men who owned property. Since then, changes in voting rights have come gradually, and the people granted those rights weren't always allowed to vote, even if a law protected that right. Yet little by little, most Americans have gained the right to vote in the country's elections.

Today, if you're 18 years old and a U.S. citizen, you're most likely able to vote. (Among those who can't are non-citizens-including permanent legal residents-some people with felony convictions, and some people who are mentally disabled.)

Voter suppression

Although the federal government has the last word on voting rights, states oversee how votes are cast and counted. Those state laws vary over who can vote, how people register to vote, and the ways people vote. And sometimes those laws try to restrict people from voting.

Sometimes to help a political party's chance of winning, officials will try to prevent other people from casting ballots. This is called voter suppression, a method that has long been used in U.S. elections.

For instance, authorities have forced people to pay to vote (known as poll taxes), changed the boundaries of voting districts so that one political party would dominate (a process called gerrymandering), required voters to live in one place a long time, and created difficult tests people had to pass to vote. At times state officials have refused to comply with federal voting laws, and sometimes voters were harassed and even murdered for attempting to register for voting.

To help make sure everyone is allowed to vote and that authorities enforce voting laws, Congress has passed a series of amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Here are a few:

Progress for minorities

The 15th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1870 and granted African-American males the right to vote. At first thousands of former enslaved people were able to cast ballots, but many white people turned to violence to prevent Blacks from voting. White people also tried to pass laws that made it more difficult for Black citizens to vote. In 1965 a series of peaceful protests in Alabama turned violent after police and white counter-protesters got involved. People all over the world witnessed the events on TV and in newspapers, which drew attention to the issue of voting rights. This eventually led to the federal government passing the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and forced local authorities to uphold the 15th Amendment.

The 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920 and granted women the right to vote. Starting in 1848, women began a 72-year-long struggle to gain their voting rights. And even though the amendment was supposed to include all women, many African-American women were still prevented from voting because of racist laws and behavior. They would wait another 45 years to have their voting rights enforced through the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Wartime voting

In 1971, Americans expanded voting rights again when the 26th Amendment lowered the voting age from 21 to 18. At the height of the Vietnam War in 1971-a war between what was then the two separate countries of North and South Vietnam-young people didn't think it was fair that they could be forced into military service but still not be old enough to vote. Their protests led Congress and the states to reduce the voting age to match the age for military service.

Wars influenced the passage of the previous suffrage amendments as well. The Union victory in the Civil War directly contributed to former enslaved men getting the right to vote, and the desire to support democracy in other countries during World War I led to women's voting rights in the United States.

Voting in a pandemic

Voting became a challenge for all U.S. citizens during the 2020 election. COVID-19 was extremely contagious, and people needed to stay apart so they wouldn't catch this deadly disease. Many state election officials tried to make the process easier by allowing higher numbers of mail-in voting than ever before. Social distancing and mask wearing were encouraged at the polls. The efforts apparently worked: More Americans voted in the 2020 election-two-thirds of the voting-eligible population-than in any other in 120 years.

The fight for voting rights continues.

Debates continue over who should be able to vote and how. Should voters have to show photo IDs to prove their identities? Should there be a paper record of every vote cast? Should convicted felons who have served their sentences be banned from voting? Should immigrants be allowed to vote, even if they are not yet citizens? Should the voting age be lowered to 16?

How will such debates be settled? Perhaps they'll be put to a vote!
From the Nat Geo Kids book Our Country's Presidents by Ann Bausum; revised for digital by Kay Boatner.

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Discover how voting rights have changed throughout history in the United States.

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Six-year-old Ruby Bridges walked up the steps to her new school on November 14, 1960. It was her first day at William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, Louisiana. Ruby's mother had walked with her, but they weren't alone

Four U.S. federal marshals were with Ruby, too. They were there to protect her from the angry crowd of people at the school who didn't want Ruby there. Why? She was the first African American student to attend an all-white elementary school in the South.

At the time, many schools-especially in Southern states-were segregated, meaning that Black children attended different schools from white kids. Even though this had been against the law since 1954, it was still happening at William Frantz Elementary when she integrated, or attended school with children of different races.

People had been fighting against school segregation for many years, ever since the first laws to separate Black and white students were passed after the Civil War. It would take many brave people-including children like Ruby-to make people see that the laws did not provide equal education for all children and needed to change.

A long road ahead

Before the Civil War (1861-1865), enslaved children were not allowed to attend school. Soon after the war ended, the U.S. government required former slaveholding states that had fought against the Union to educate both white and Black children. Then, in 1868, Congress passed the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guaranteed every citizen equal rights and protection under the law-including equal access to education.

Not everyone agreed with these decisions. Southern leaders did not want Black people to have the same rights as white people. So most Southern states adopted a group of laws in the late 1870s, called Jim Crow laws, to segregate Black and white people. Throughout the South, nearly all public places-restaurants, parks, movie theaters, trains, swimming pools, schools, and even drinking fountains-were separated by race. It was because of these new laws that Black children could not attend the same schools as white children in the South.

Separate but not equal

Despite the 14th Amendment, Southern states were able to legally segregate Black and white children because of a U.S. Supreme Court decision from 1896 called Plessy vs. Ferguson. After Homer Plessy, a Black man, tried to sit in a whites-only train car, the court ruled that as long as Black and white people were treated equally, they could be separated by race. This became known as "separate but equal."

But "separate but equal" wasn't truly equal-conditions in places meant for Black people were usually much worse than those for white people. For instance, Black schools often had leaking roofs, sagging floors, and windows without glass. They were also overcrowded, with too many students per teacher and not enough desks or books. If books were available, they were old, outdated ones from white schools.

Black families knew that if they wanted their children to have an equal education that these laws needed to change. And the only way to do that was through the U.S. Supreme Court.

Hope for equality

In 1951, eight-year-old Linda Brown was not allowed to attend an all-white elementary school in Topeka, Kansas. Her father, Oliver Brown, did not think this was fair and filed a lawsuit against the Topeka Board of Education.

Around the same time, four other lawsuits challenging school segregation had been filed, so in 1952, the Supreme Court combined all of them into one. The justices would decide once and for all if schools could separate students based on the color of their skin.

Thurgood Marshall-who would later become the first African American Supreme Court justice-represented the five children and their families in a case called Brown vs. Board of Education. He argued that segregation was not equal and was actually harmful to children. The court agreed. On May 17, 1954, every single justice decided that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional, which meant that separating children in public schools by race went against what had been outlined in the U.S. Constitution.

School segregation was now against the law. States were ordered to begin desegregating their public schools. But changes were slow to come.

The Little Rock Nine

Some school districts defied the 1954 order by not integrating immediately or simply doing nothing. Other school boards purposefully delayed integration by years by integrating only one grade each year. Other white parents refused to send their children to integrated schools or held angry protests that were sometimes violent to prevent Black children from registering.

To help move integration along, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) decided to recruit a group of nine Black students to integrate Little Rock Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. The teenagers gathered on September 4, 1957, to enter the school. But the governor had called in the Arkansas National Guard, which blocked them from entering the building.

The story made headlines across America, and many people were outraged that Southern states were still defying the Supreme Court ruling. A few weeks later, on September 25, President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered federal troops to escort the students-now known as the Little Rock Nine-into the school. This time the students' integration efforts were successful.

The fight continues

After the Little Rock Nine, more and more Black families courageously started sending their children to all-white schools. It wasn't an easy decision for parents to make, since kids often faced bullying and loneliness. For instance, Ruby Bridges often sat in class with only her teacher because white parents didn't want their children in school with a Black student. Even Vice President Kamala Harris was part of a program in 1970 to bus children far from their neighborhoods to integrate schools in Berkeley, California.

Racial inequalities in the nation's school system still exist today, more than 65 years after the Brown decision. Schools in wealthier, mostly white neighborhoods sometimes have better technology, higher-quality books, and smaller class sizes; schools in disadvantaged neighborhoods with more people of color sometimes have older or broken computers, overcrowded classes, and buildings in need of repair.

But people continue to speak out against these inequalities and fight for equal education for all students. As former President Barack Obama said, "In the years to come, we must continue striving toward equal opportunities for all our children. ... Because when children learn and play together, they grow, build, and thrive together."

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For years, many public schools separated children based on their race. Here's how that changed so that kids of all races could go to school together.

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For age-appropriate and child-friendly research, here are four websites that provide educational content suitable for a fifth-grade student without exposing them to explicit photos or extreme content:

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For age-appropriate and child-friendly research, here are four websites that provide educational content suitable for a fifth-grade student without exposing them to explicit photos or extreme content:

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1. **National Geographic Kids** (https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/)

- This site is excellent for learning about different cultures and the importance of diversity. It can help in researching the positive aspects of learning from different backgrounds and the celebration of cultural diversity.

2. **PBS LearningMedia** (https://www.pbslearningmedia.org/)

- PBS offers a range of resources on historical and social topics, including the history of racial stereotypes and their impacts. Their materials are curated to be age-appropriate and are often used in educational settings.

3. **BrainPOP** (https://www.brainpop.com/)

- BrainPOP features educational videos, quizzes, and games that cover a wide range of topics, including social studies and character education like empathy and apology. It’s engaging and designed specifically for children.

4. **Common Sense Media** (https://www.commonsensemedia.org/)

- While primarily known for its reviews of media content for children, Common Sense Media also offers resources on digital citizenship and ethics. It can provide guidance on understanding the impact of one's words and actions in a digital and real-world context.

These websites should provide a safe and informative base for the student to conduct their research and learn about the topics in a manner suitable for their age.

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Use this link to make a Google Doc copy of the homework: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aW62ukBX8bxAWVrHfnriz-nlsyP9kd__YJhU_QNxi2I/copy

You may turn this in digitally by selecting --> share --> and typing cdenson@baliis.net in the "add people" section --> Hit enter.

Or, you can click on Share --> General Access --> Anyone with the link --> "Commenter" or "Editor."

These two options above give me access to the document.

This is the link to view the homework details:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aW62ukBX8bxAWVrHfnriz-nlsyP9kd__YJhU_QNxi2I/edit?usp=sharing

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Write your Central Idea on your Group's Padlet Under "Our PYPx Planning"

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Either a pop-up blocker blocked it, the test window was moved or minimized, or the test window opened and was accidentally closed.

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The International Baccalaureate (IB) Primary Years Programme (PYP) is designed around six transdisciplinary themes

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© 2020 NWEA. NWEA and MAP are registered trademarks, and MAP Growth is a trademark, of NWEA in the US and in other countries.

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Use the example as you choose two or more of your LP skills. Explain why and include the main idea and supporting details.

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Choose your Approaches to Learning (ATLs)

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Choose your Approaches to Learning (ATLs)

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Choose two ATLs and explain why with the main idea and two supporting details.

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Use your questions to find something you are passionate about learning more about. Follow the templet. You may solve a problem, create something new, and the list continues. Then, learn more using "THICK QUESTIONS" with multiple answers. Finally, decide how you would like to present what you've created and learned.

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PYPx Home Learning: 26th Feb - 1st March

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should we make like an art project for our pypx?

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should we make like an art project for our pypx?

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should we make an art project for our pypx and poster in the art becuase i kinda like the art room its more cool. -vanessa

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In groups, students looked at mentor texts to generate ideas about the features of informational reports.

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Make your sentence structure interesting for your readers by using compound and complex sentences in your writing.

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Super Bowl & SDGs: A Global Classroom Experience

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Super Bowl & SDGs: A Global Classroom Experience

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Super Bowl & SDGs: A Global Classroom Experience

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Make a copy on Google Docs to answer the questions.

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Interland is an adventure-packed online game that puts the key lessons of digital citizenship and safety into hands-on practice. Play your way to being Internet Awesome.

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Is there anyway anyone can get my face to open my phone? - Ella

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I wonder what ISPs know about my digital life, browsing, and internet use. -Mr.D

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The main source of energy for this biome would be the sun. The producer is grass because almost every animal here would not survive if there wasn't grass. The fluctuations in the numbers of each...

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An energy pyramid is used to show the relative amount of energy available at each trophic level of a food chain or food web. If 100% of the energy is available at the first trophic level then there would only be .1% energy available at the last or highest trophic level. But the energy pyramid may vary because it will depend on how many trophic levels you have on it. But there will only be 10% percent of the energy passed on from the trophic level before and 90% of it is lost. Most of the energy received by an organism is from eating. That energy is used to keep the organism alive. Heat is a by-product of cellular respiration. Which means that most of the energy taken in is also lost by heat. Eventually the amount of useful energy left can't support another level in the energy pyramid.

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An energy pyramid is used to show the relative amount of energy available at each trophic level of a food chain or food web. If 100% of the energy is available at the first trophic level then there...

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FYI... I have not watched this full video or tried this. Make sure to do these projects with your family and not alone.

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🔴How To Make Artificial Realistic Water for Diorama, Terrarium, or Fairy Garden. DIY Fake Water

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Winter can be such a great season for sensory play, especially if you live in a snowy place. Cold, soft, and moldable snow allows for so many creative opportunities for kids of all ages. From tasting to tossing, scooping to sculpting, the sensory nature of snow makes it a wonderful natural playground. However, those who don't live in a snowy environment may want their kiddos to experience the magic of this chilly substance indoors. The good news is that artificial or fake snow can be easily made right from home! Even better, it creates the perfect opportunity to teach your kiddos a little bit about the science of snow. Explore the lessons, fake snow recipes, and sensory play activities below so you feel confident to facilitate this wonderful winter treat with your kiddos. There are so many important ways that winter play helps your child to have fun, develop, and stay active.

What Is Snow Made Of?

As tiny ice crystals are falling from the sky, your little one may ask you, "What is snow made of?" You can tell them that snow forms high in the clouds from water vapor: water in the form of gas. When it gets really cold (under 32 degrees Fahrenheit), the vapor freezes around dust in the clouds and creates ice crystals. If the crystals become heavy enough, they fall to the ground or onto the tongues of kiddos seeking a taste of this mystical element. One snowflake can contain between one and one hundred ice crystals and each one is unique just like your baby! Snowflakes are hexagons. They have 6 sides to them, or very occasionally 3 or 12 (a multiple of 6). This is how snow forms. Of course, the process is quite different for those of us who want to make artificial or fake snow indoors.

How to Make It Snow Indoors
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You can find a number of homemade snow machines on the market to blow fake snow for a party. Alternatively, you can also buy a can of snow to decorate your windows or get a fake snow maker for snow cones and other chilly treats. However, if you want to make indoor snow for sensory play, you'll need a few different ingredients.

How to Make DIY Fake Snow at Home

Artificial or fake snow can easily be made right from home with just one or two ingredients. Depending on your kiddo's sensory preferences and interests, you can combine a number of different materials to DIY different types of homemade artificial snow. Take a look at the fake snow recipes below and choose the one you think your kiddos will enjoy the most. Consider adding glitter and beads to make the dough a little extra sparkly.

Edible Homemade Fake Snow Recipes

Baking soda snow is the most common fake snow recipe. However, cornstarch can also be used. The second ingredient is up to you! Although all of these ingredients can be ingested, they shouldn't be in large quantities. The coconut flakes will definitely be the most delicious edible fake snow recipe.

Baking Soda & Water

Have your little one practice scooping, pouring, and conversation of volume by taking 1 cup of baking soda and dropping it into a bowl. Then add water just one tablespoon at a time, while your little one uses a fork or whisk to combine the mixture. When the texture appears to be light and fluffy, it's ready to play with!

Flour & Oil

Mix together white flour and a little bit of oil (coconut or vegetable both work great!). Let your little one stir them together until the mixture becomes soft and fluffy.

Coconut Flakes

For an actually yummy edible fake snow recipe, consider using coconut flakes! They can be quickly baked at 175 degrees Fahrenheit then blended just slightly for a non-sticky artificial snow option. Sprinkle it over cakes and cookies for a decorative and tasty winter treat.

Whipping Cream

Another tasty option is simply spraying some whipping cream on a plate or in a bin with other winter toys! Avoid the sugar high though by making sure your little one doesn't eat too much.

Non-Edible Homemade Fake Snow Recipes

White shaving cream, conditioner, and lotion can all be used as the second ingredient in artificial snow recipes to make a smooth and soft snowy texture.

Baking Soda & Shaving Cream

Measure one cup of baking soda into a bowl. Then teach your little one to press on the shaving cream button and combine the materials until a thick, snowy substance forms.

Baking Soda & White Conditioner

With ½ cups of conditioner and about three cups of baking soda, you can make fake snow for your kiddos! Simply combine the ingredients until they match the texture of your preference. This recipe makes more of a snow dough for your littles to sculpt all winter long!

Cornstarch & Shaving Cream

Shaving cream and cornstarch in equal parts will also yield a snow dough that can be molded into so many fun shapes and sizes like snowmen.

Cornstarch & White Lotion

This mixture in equal parts will create a more powdery substance that resembles snow.

Making Artificial Snow Into a Science Experiment

When you combine citric acid, baking soda, and water, a chemical reaction occurs. The molecules mix around and produce carbon dioxide gas, which is what forms the bubbles! It's a very exciting and safe reaction. You can explain that carbon dioxide is the same substance we exhale after inhaling oxygen.

There are many chemical reactions. Some of them are endothermic or exothermic. Endothermic reactions absorb energy (heat) from their surroundings while exothermic reactions release energy. This baking soda and citric acid experiment absorbs energy (heat) from the environment, which means if you touch it while it's happening, it will feel cold to you because it absorbs the heat from your fingers! On a small scale like a home experiment, this is completely safe to touch.

Other chemical reactions examples:

Endothermic: melting ice, photosynthesis (absorbs energy from the sun and turns it into carbon dioxide), and cooking.

Exothermic: certain chemical reactions that produce flame/fire/explosions/light

Making Fake Snow for Christmas

If your family celebrates Christmas, you can dump your fake snow into a plastic container and make a Christmas sensory bin! Just throw in your kiddos' favorite Christmas themed toys. Maybe they like the nativity characters and want to learn the story while they play. Or, if you celebrate xmas as a secular holiday, consider getting toy trees, a Santa Claus, reindeer, and a sled. You can also just make the sensory bin winter themed.

Making Fake Snow for Crafts for Kids

Babies

Babies who are old enough to ingest food can definitely play with the coconut flake fake snow. They may also enjoy smooshing the other edible options, just be careful that they don't put too much in their mouths.

Toddlers

With a plastic container, sensory table, or sensory tray, your toddler can create their very own sensory play snow scene! They can make a town with houses, roads, and cars that drive through the snow. Or an animal wonderland where deer frolic through woods. If they like sports, they can build a snow mountain and have toy skiers or snowboarders race down it.

Preschoolers

Snow crafts and sensory play can be a little more interesting with this older bunch. They can practice writing their letters or numbers in shaving cream snow. Or try giving them some winter or Christmas themed stamps so they can decorate their baking soda or cornstarch snow dough. Snowmen can be sculpted and decorated too!

Where to Buy Fake Snow

If you want to buy fake snow, you can purchase instant snow from a number of retailers. Or you can order the Arctic Sensory Bin. It includes instant snow that comes portioned in three bags. It can be dried and reused, played with inside or out, is nontoxic (of course) and feels just like real snow. Make it with cold water for an even more realistic experience, or make snowballs and freeze them for 45 minutes! Or try making it with warm water for a really bizarre mind trick! The bin also comes with arctic toy animals, scooping devices, and toy ice rocks and beads to make a beautiful and wintery wonderland.

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The Best DIY Fake Snow Recipes for Sensory Play With Kids

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Here are my favorite recipes to DIY your own artificial or fake snow for holiday sensory play activities with kids.

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This article aims to answer any questions you may have about desert soil. We will discuss the uses of desert soil types and their physical traits, and also take a look at how deserts vary between the dry climates around the world. A lack of nutrients is common, but other aspects also determine the fertility or infertility of these desert soils. Click here to learn about other types of soil and their chrectaristics.
Desert Soil Physical Properties

The physical properties and appearance of deserts can depend on the type, location, climate, minerals, and other environmental factors. Desert soil characteristics, which generally apply to any type of desert soil, include (but are not limited to) a mostly sandy soil composition, very little moisture, and lack of nutrients.

Some desert soils do have the necessary desert soil nutrients to provide a haven for succulents and other desert plants and animals, but most of the vast deserts in the world have zero vegetation for miles in some places. This has to do with the climate in those regions and the fact that most desert soils tend to have slightly to highly basic soil pH levels which has a negative effect on nutrients that plants need to grow.

A desert soil's nutrients, or lack thereof, can contribute to its physical appearance and feel. For instance, a nutrient-rich, moist, desert soil will have a thick texture and almost dirt-like appearance, while dry, infertile desert soils can blow away in the wind and are practically all sand.

Desert Soil Texture

The texture of a type of soil depends on three things - sand, silt, and clay. Some types of soil have mostly clay, while others, such as desert soils, have mostly sand. Typically, a soil that can allow plants to thrive contains equal parts of at least two of those factors. Garden soils often have equal parts of silt and sand or a generous combination of all three.

When it comes to deserts, 90-95% of their composition is sand.

Deserts are unique because of how it can still maintain life in some regions, even without a load of nutrients and water on standby. The physical texture of desert sand is dry and coarse, with large particles that come from eroded rocky parent materials.

Desert Soil Composition

There are four basic components of soil - minerals, water, air, and organic material (plant and animal matter).

Various regions around the world have different types of sand, each with a unique composition. This variation is due to the differences in climate and parent materials that first begin to form the sandy soils.

Many deserts contain minerals in the sand, such as quartz, feldspar, and mica. Desert soil has very little moisture content. Water in the desert sand depends entirely on nearby desert water sources, which are often scarce.

Desert plants, like cacti, store an excess of water since the desert soil does not provide much, thus making cacti and other desert plants drought tolerant.

Deserts also have a low amount of organic material. Since water is a rare occurrence in deserts, fewer animals are living in them and thus, less decomposing organisms. Soils that are rich in organic material are more life-sustaining.

Air is abundant in desert soils. Air in-between the sand particles is what allows the desert sand to fall easily between your fingers and be picked up so easily by the wind. Thick, black soil has less air in its composition because it is compacted with a high amount of water and organic matter.

Desert Soil Colors

Some deserts have red sand, some have white, and some are golden-brown. Desert soil takes on the color of the sand it contains. The color itself comes from its mineral content. Red sand soils have high levels of iron, desert soil from white sand typically has gypsum, and yellow sand soils have quartz.

Desert Topography

Topography refers to the small elevations on the Earth's surface. This includes hills, plateaus, mountains, valleys, and any organic structure that protrudes from (or idents into) the ground. Surveyors can determine the exact topography of an area using a topographic survey and interpret it into a topographic map.

In areas of desert soil, the most common topographic features on the land are dunes, mountains, and desert flats.

Dunes

Dunes are one of the most recognizable features in the desert. Dunes form when the wind picks up sand and carries sand across the desert until it accumulates into hills. Widespread areas or "seas" of dunes are called ergs.

Most dunes consist of loose sand, but some can contain other materials, such as organic matter. Deserts have all variations of desert soil, and some areas contain a greater portion of pure sand than others.

Mountains

Deserts commonly have inselbergs or isolated rock masses. Inselbergs resemble the mountains you can see in other regions, but they have an entirely different composure because of being made from sandstone and other desert soil rocks.

Desert Flats

Most deserts have areas of flat desert soil. These desert flats occur because of the lack of living things in the area. You may see cacti, birds, and other small desert animals, but most desert flats are virtually without living organisms.

Watercourses

Deserts can get less than 10 inches of rainfall each year. The rainwater travels fast through the desert and rarely accumulates into bodies of water.

Water drainage in the desert soil is much different than in brown gardening soils. There are very few times of the year in which rainwater builds up enough to form a stream. The rest of the year, it dries to create watercourses, which have steep sides and jagged ravines in the ground that go through rocks.

Desert Soil Formation

Soil Horizons

Soil horizons are the visible layers in soil that show when you collect a profile. Soil profiles are vertical extractions from the ground that include bits of soil from all ranges of depth. Each visible layer is one of the 6 soil horizons - O, A, E, B, C, and R.

These soil horizons give hints into the desert soil formation. The identification of the different horizons that are in a soil profile can be informative to a soil scientist (pedologist) of the origins of soil, its organic content, and its classification.

Desert Soil Layers

The horizons in a desert soil profile show the different types of sand, rock, and minerals that have formed the soil over time. The horizons in a desert soil usually start with a hard desert pavement as the top layer - most desert soils are dry, and so the surface remains compacted and brittle.

Below the thin first layer of humus, the layers of the desert soil usually include thick, dry accumulations of clay, calcium carbonate, and soluble salts, along with a rocky parent material. There is an exception for arctic desert soils that have a layer of permafrost deep in the soil.

Types of Desert Soil and Their Uses

Different soil types have different properties and therefore each soil type is good for different uses. Deserts have aridisols and entisols.

Aridisols are dry, desertlike soils with low organic content. They are categorized by minimal vegetation and drought-tolerant plants. Most soils in deserts of the world are aridisols.

Entisols are much like aridisols since they are present in extreme temperatures. The only difference between the two is that entisols form with an absence of soil horizons. While other soils have multiple layers, entisols have the majority of horizon A under the surface. Entisols also occupy 11% of the nonpolar continental land surface of the Earth.

There is more than one type of desert soil. Desert soil types include subtropical desert, semiarid, coastal, and polar.

Subtropical and Tropical Desert Soil

Subtropical deserts are hot and dry. There are low humidity levels and severe swings in temperature. The gap between the low and high points of the day can be as extreme as 80 o F. And, because of the extreme fluctuations in weather, water evaporates from the desert soil extremely quickly.

Sandy soils found in subtropical deserts are similar to the ones in tropical deserts.

The tropical sandy soils in tropical deserts have less than 18% clay, and at least 68% sand and are hardsetting soils, which means that it becomes hard and structureless when dry and thus is nearly impossible to cultivate. Desert sandy soils are already difficult to cultivate, no matter what type, but hardsetting desert soils are even more problematic.

Although tropical soils are lacking in most nutrients, the application of nitrogen can make it possible to produce rice crops. Subtropical and tropical desert soils are often similar to rainforest soil.

Semiarid Deserts

Semiarid deserts, also called Cold Winter deserts, are dry and have moderately low temperatures compared to other types of deserts. Semiarid desert temperatures usually do not rise above 100o F.

Cacti grow well in semiarid desert regions. Other desert plants such as creosote bush, bur sage, whitethorn, catclaw, mesquite, and brittle bushes, all provide shade for the small animals that live in semiarid deserts.

Coastal Deserts

Coastal deserts have low to moderate temperatures, cool winters, and warm summers. Organisms thrive better in coastal deserts than most other types of desert soil.

The rainfall in this type of desert is the same as most other deserts staying at an average of 8 to 13 cm of rain per year. However, the soil is higher in nutrients and contains excess salt, allowing plants such as saltbush, buckwheat bush, black bush, rice grass, black sage, and Chrysothamnus (rabbitbrush) to grow. These plants have many uses for medicine and landscaping restoration.

Polar Deserts

Arctic soils in polar deserts are unique. The soil receives 15 to 26 cm of rain each year, and plants thrive in some places (when the temperature allows). Polar desert soil has no soil horizons and no surface humus. You will also find that most polar soils are actually frozen.

Polar desert soils are found around the Earth's North and South Pole. The frozen soil there can preserve anything that gets caught inside before freezing. This type of soil does not unfreeze as it is permafrost.

Organisms in the Desert

Many desert organisms make their home in the hot sands of deserts. You may have heard about snakes, camels, and cactus plants, but have you heard about these other organisms in the desert?
Desert Plants Desert Reptiles Desert Birds Desert Mammals
Deserts Around the World

Deserts in the USA are not the only deserts in the world. In fact, there are many deserts in other countries that are far larger. For example, the Sahara Desert, which takes up 3.552 million square miles, is located in Northern Africa. The Sahara Desert has some grassland, but the majority of its soil is aridisols, which are dry and hot.

Here are some other deserts, in and out of the USA.
Death Valley, California
Typic Torrifluvent (hot and dry soil / subtropical)
Monument Valley, Arizona
Red Soil
Erg Chebbi (Merzouga Desert) in Morocco
Entisols Soils

Frequently Ask Questions - Desert Soil

Where is desert soil found?

Desert soil occurs in areas of the world that have very little rainfall or an abundance of sand. Desert soils can be found in subtropical states of the USA, such as Florida, in drier areas of the middle eastern countries, or any major desert of the world.

How many deserts are in the world?

There are at least 27 deserts in the world. However, as years pass, this number can change because of fluctuations in the environment and the effects of climate change. Click here to view a list of deserts in the world.

What makes desert soil infertile?

Desert soil has at least 90% of sand as its composition. Other types of soil have more clay and silt, which are better for allowing plants to thrive. Desert soil is also usually located in dry climates, and so, organic materials are not present to fertilize the soil in the first place.

Why are desert soils low in organic matter?

Desert soil does not provide adequate nutrients and sustainability for plants and animals, which means they are most likely to decompose over another type of soil, and the desert soil misses out on the creation of organic matter.
Read Next:

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Desert Soil Overview: Formation, Layers, Colors, and Uses

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desert soil: Texture, composition, sand, silt, clay, colors, topography, dunes, aridisols & Entisols, semiarid, coastal & polar deserts.

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"Ecological Interactions"

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An arctic food chain is found in the Arctic Circle that surrounds the North Pole. It experiences freezing temperatures, often below -50° F.

Like other food chains, the different trophic levels of an arctic food chain are producers, primary consumers, secondary consumers, and apex predators.

Here, we will explore the arctic food chains of the ocean and the grassland. While the terrestrial food chain is quite diverse, the oceans remain frozen with ice. Despite these challenges, oceans also inhabit various small and large aquatic organisms.

Ocean Arctic Food Chain

Arctic Food Chain

The tiny, microscopic organisms, the phytoplanktons (diatoms, dinoflagellates, green algae, and some autotrophic bacteria), are the producers in the arctic food chain. They prepare their food using sunlight. The primary consumers in the Arctic are zooplanktons which include krill, and pelagic crustaceans like copepods. Arctic cob and harp seal are secondary consumers that eat smaller fish like Arctic cod, Arctic char, and some crustaceans.

The tertiary consumers, such as leopard seals, feed on the secondary consumers. Polar bears and Orca whales act as tertiary or apex (quaternary) consumers, depending on their participation in the food chain. Polar bears feed on and eat seals and fish, while Orca whales feed on small fishes and larger fishes like whales and seals.

When the predators die, decomposers in the soil mineralize their bodies, releasing the nutrients that the producers readily take up.

Terrestrial Arctic Food Chain

Small moss-like plants, the lichens, are the producers of this food chain. They are found on the ocean floor and attached to rocks and other surfaces. Shrubs, seaweeds, seagrasses, and microscopic algae in the ground are also producers. Grazing animals like rabbits and caribou feed on the producers for their livelihood. The arctic fox feeds on grazing animals and thus is a secondary consumer. During winters, the arctic fox follows the polar bears, picking up the pieces. Tertiary consumers include polar bears, wolves, and eagles, which prey on secondary and primary consumers.

Arctic Tundra Food Chain

The lichens, mosses, and small shrubs constitute the producers of the arctic tundra food chain. Plant-eating animals (herbivores), such as caribou, musk ox, lemmings, and arctic hares, act as primary consumers. Secondary consumers are mostly omnivores from different trophic levels of the food chain. Caribou, Musk Ox, and Arctic hares are some secondary consumers feeding on producers and herbivores. Polar bears, arctic foxes, and wolves feed on primary and secondary producers and are, thus, apex consumers.

Article was last reviewed on Tuesday, December 12, 2023

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Arctic Food Chain - Examples and Diagram

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Food chain in the arctic described with examples and a simple diagram

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"Ecological Interactions"

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Arctic Food Web: Everything You Need To Know | Poseidon Expeditions

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Learn about the food chains in the Arctic to find out about the primary, secondary, and tertiary consumers, their food connections, and the influence of global…

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Desert Plants - Cactus - Wildflowers - Flora - DesertUSA

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Desert plants have adapted to the extremes of heat and aridity by using both physical and behavioral mechanisms, much like desert animals.

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The Ocean's Least Wanted: 4 Invasive Species to Know - Ocean Conservancy

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This week we are diving into one of the biggest conservation threats worldwide: invasive species. Defined ...

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Nearly one fifth of the Earth's surface is at risk of plant and animal invasions − including many biodiversity hotspots. Alien species have doubled in the last 50 years ( IPBES, 2018). The 2019 UN IPBES (Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) Assessment highlights the threat posed by invasive and alien species as one of five principal drivers impacting global biodiversity. It warns that cumulative records of alien species have increased by 40% since 1980, due to increased transport of goods and people and human population dynamics and trends ( IPBES, 2019).

Marine invasive species can have a devastating impact on biodiversity, ecosystems, fisheries, human health, tourism and coastal development and are very difficult and expensive to tackle.

WHAT IS AN INVASIVE SPECIES?

An invasive species is one that has been introduced by human activity - deliberately or accidentally - to geographic areas outside its native range and caused ecological or economic impacts in that location.

The World Register of Introduced Marine Species estimates that globally there are 1,711 introduced marine species ( WRiMS, 2019), but not all of these are - or will go on to become - invasive in their new locations. Many introduced species perish, but some thrive in the absence of the predators and parasites encountered in their native range. Such species can reproduce rapidly and take over their new environment, smothering native species. The IUCN Global Invasive Species Database lists 59 invasive species in the marine realm ( GISD, 2019).

PRINCIPAL PATHWAYS FOR MARINE INVASIVE SPECIES

In the 20th and 21st centuries, trade and travel have been the most important factors in the widespread distribution of invasive species in both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems.

Rapid globalisation and increasing trends of trade, travel, migration and pollution have accelerated marine biological invasions by increasing rates of new introductions through various pathways, including:

shipping - through ballast water and biofouling of ship hulls

navigational canals - transporting species via inland waterways

aquaculture - escape/overspill of non-native species introduced for farming

aquarium trade - deliberate and accidental release of exotic species

plastic pollution - transport of invasive species attached to plastic waste.

Shipping is the most significant vector for the introduction of marine invasive species. As much as 10 billion tonnes of ballast water is carried around the world per year, carrying up to 7,000 species of aquatic plants, microbes and animals every hour of every day ( GEF-UNDP-IMO, 2017). Large boats fill their tanks with seawater to counterbalance cargo weight at their loading port, and release it at their destination - along with whatever species it contains, from fish to crustaceans, to algae and microscopic organisms. The other way that ships transport invasive species is via biofouling - species attached to ships hulls, anchors and other equipment. Pieces of plastic move species around the ocean in much the same way.

Invasive species can alter marine ecosystems by:

disrupting native habitats

causing the extinction of flora and fauna (by consumption and out-competing for space and resources)

overwhelming important vulnerable ecosystems such as coral reefs and mangroves

decreasing water quality

increasing competition and predation among species

spreading disease.

Invasive fish, crabs, clams, mussels, algae and corals have also resulted in adverse economic impacts, such as collapse of fish stock, loss of tourism, damage to coastal areas and enormous costs. Invasive species can also impact human health via the introduction of pathogens, such as cholera bacteria. ( OECD, 2017).

MOST "UNWANTED" SPECIES

Among the many invasive species blighting the marine environment, some cases stand out as destructive, difficult and expensive to control ( IUCN, 2019; Smithsonian Institute, 2011; GEF-UNDP-IMO, 2017).

Green crab (Carcinus maenas)

This European crab has been carried widely in ballast water and is sold as fish bait around the world. It now has established populations on both US coasts, in southern South America, Australia, South Africa and Japan. It is a ferocious predator and in some areas has affected the commercial shellfish industry. Its introduction to the US in the 1950s has since cost the American fishing industry millions of dollars.

Killer algae (Caulerpa taxifolia)

A strain of this algae, native to the Indian and Pacific Oceans, escaped aquariums and has spread widely in the Mediterranean, replacing native plants and depriving marine life of food and habitat. In 1984, non-native "killer algae" was discovered along the coast of Monaco and has since spread over more than 13,000 hectares of seabed. Caulerpa taxifolia forms dense monocultures that prevent the establishment of native seaweeds and excludes almost all marine life, affecting the livelihoods of local fishermen and tourism. In California, it was eradicated at huge cost using toxic chemicals.

Sea walnut (Mnemiopsis leidyi)

This stingless jellyfish-like creature is native to the east coast of North and South America. In 1982, it was discovered in the Black Sea, where it had been transported in ballast water. From there it also invaded the Caspian Sea. In both seas, it formed immense populations, contributing to the collapse of local fisheries. The species has also been found in the Mediterranean, Baltic and North Seas.

Veined rapa whelk (Rapana venosa)

A large marine snail native to the northwest Pacific was discovered in the Black Sea in 1946 and later spread to the Mediterranean Sea. In 1998, it was found in the Chesapeake Bay in the US, probably transported in the ballast water of ships. It is also established in European coastal waters from Norway to Spain and has severely reduced shellfish in the Black Sea, where it is now fished and sold to Asian countries as food.

Zebra mussel (Dreissena polymorpha)

Native to the Caspian Sea, Black Sea and their inflowing rivers, the zebra mussel travelled through European canals in the 18th and 19th century, reaching the Baltic Sea and spreading to the Great Lakes and many rivers and lakes in North America. The estimated cost of dealing with the freshwater zebra mussel introduction in the US from 1989-2000 is US$750 million to US$1 billion.
Briefing prepared on behalf of the OneOcean initiative www.oceanprotect.org contact info@oceanprotect.org

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Nearly one fifth of the Earth's surface is at risk of plant and animal invasions − including many biodiversity hotspots. Alien species have doubled in the last 50 years (IPBES, 2018). The 2019 UN IPBES (Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) Assessment highlights the threat posed by invasive and alien species as one [...]

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Humanity impacts the planet's biodiversity in multiple ways, both deliberate and accidental. The biggest threat to biodiversity to date has been the way humans have reshaped natural habitats to make way for farmland, or to obtain natural resources, but as climate change worsens it will have a growing impact on ecosystems.
The main direct cause of biodiversity loss is land use change (primarily for large-scale food production) which drives an estimated 30% of biodiversity decline globally. Second is overexploitation (overfishing, overhunting and overharvesting) for things like food, medicines and timber which drives around 20%. Climate change is the third most significant direct driver of biodiversity loss, which together with pollution accounts for 14%. Invasive alien species account for 11%.

Some models predict that climate change will become the primary cause of biodiversity decline in the coming decades. The impact of all the main drivers of biodiversity loss is accelerating and, as a consequence, so is the pace of biodiversity decline.

Growing demand for natural resources due to the increasing human population, more rapidly increasing per capita consumption and changing consumption patterns has meant that ever more natural habitat is being used for agriculture, mining, industrial infrastructure and urban areas.

Key areas of human activity causing biodiversity loss include:

Deforestation. Tropical rainforests are particularly rich in biodiversity and are being destroyed

Habitat loss through pervasive, incremental encroachment such as that caused by urban sprawl

Pollution such as that associated with widespread pesticide use and overuse of fertiliser which are 6 and 12 times greater than they were before 1961 respectively

It is estimated that half of the species at risk are threatened by agriculture

Water use in some of the largest water catchments in the world where dams and irrigation reduce water flows

Hunting and the over-exploitation of species such as in wild capture fisheries but also for wildlife trade

Spread of invasive species and diseases through trade and travel

Climate change, as warming and changing rainfall patterns alters species ranges and the underlying water and chemical cycles which define current ecosystems

Pollution from plastic waste although its long-term effects on biodiversity are far from clear

For more on this issue visit: Amazonia's future: Eden or degraded landscapes? | Royal Society; Preserving global biodiversity requires rapid agricultural improvements | Royal Society; and Past and future decline and extinction of species | Royal Society

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What is the human impact on biodiversity? | Royal Society

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Humanity impacts the planet's biodiversity in multiple ways, both deliberate and accidental. The biggest threat to biodiversity to date has been the way humans have reshaped natural habitats to make way for farmland, or to obtain natural resources, but as climate change worsens it will have a growing impact on ecosystems. The main direct cause of biodiversity loss is land use change (primarily for large-scale food production) which drives an estimated 30% of biodiversity decline globally.

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Not everyone lives in a tropical rainforest - but everyone benefits from them.

Home to nearly half of the plants and wildlife on Earth, tropical rainforests perform an essential function for the climate by absorbing carbon dioxide. Unfortunately, tropical forests are being cut down at an alarming rate across the globe, and releasing more than 1.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere - equivalent to 15 percent of all human-induced carbon emissions.

Multiple studies show that climate change is harming tropical forests. But there's hope. With insight from climate experts, Conservation News explores how the climate crisis is hurting tropical forests - and how humanity can protect them.

1. Changing climate leads to forest degradation.

Scientists say that deforestation in the Amazon is pushing this ecosystem to a tipping point at which the forest will gradually turn into dry savanna. Once sufficiently degraded, the forest will lose its ability to generate its own rainfall, thereby preventing the rainforest ecosystem from being able to exist at all. Instead of leafy forests teeming with wildlife, the Amazon would be a desolate expanse of shrublands.

"We know that there has been an increase in deforestation in the last couple of years in the Amazon," said Karyn Tabor, senior director of ecological monitoring in Conservation International's Moore Center for Science, in a recent interview with Conservation News. "And when there is more deforestation, there are going to be more fires."

Studies in the Amazon River basin predict that a rise in temperature corresponds with a 10-20 percent reduction in rainfall. As temperatures increase, so do forest fires. Tropical rainforests typically get more than 100 inches of rain a year, but each year this number decreases - creating a chain effect of consequences.

"In the tropics, especially the tropical Amazon - the forests are not meant to burn. So, once these forests burn, then the forests are really degraded and they're more likely to burn again," said Tabor. "The key is preventing the fires and also improving resilience of these forests - keeping them intact, trying to prevent degradation."

The good news: Tabor developed Firecast, a NASA-funded forest fire monitoring and alert system for the tropics, which uses satellite inputs to alert to dangerous fire weather conditions and detect fires before they spread. "The satellites will detect a fire and within a couple hours we can send an alert to decision-makers in the field about where fires are happening," she said.

Technological innovations are a way in which science and data can be used to combat climate change.

2. As deforestation increases, so do food shortages.

Studies show that since 1980 a decrease in annual rainfall due to the changing climate has created a steady decline of corn, wheat, soybeans and rice. Additionally, a rise in global temperatures is causing trees and plants to produce fruit earlier or later than before - throwing off the species that feed on them, including humans.

This jeopardizes the livelihoods of local farmers, who depend on the crops commonly grown in the rainforest including coffee, bananas, lemons and peanuts to make money and to feed their families.

The good news: Farmers surrounding tropical forests can help stop climate change, without sacrificing agricultural production, according to recent research by Conservation International's Bronson Griscom.

This research revealed that protecting or restoring carbon in soil can provide 3 billion tons of cost-effective climate mitigation per year, while increasing agricultural production.

"In agricultural systems, such as crop or livestock farms, carbon can actually increase the fertility of the soil, which can improve crop growth, increase water storage and enhance the health of the entire farm," said Griscom, who leads Conservation International's natural climate solutions work, in a recent interview. "This research does not suggest that agricultural systems should be abandoned, but rather that they are better managed to improve carbon storage, soil health and sustainable food production."

Through climate-smart agricultural techniques, farmers in the tropics can increase the carbon stored in their soil and produce more food for growing populations, while decreasing their overall carbon footprint.

3. Degraded forests and food shortages result in an increased number of threatened species.

Tropical rainforests are home to nearly 30 million species of plants and animals, which heavily rely on another for survival. As plant growth dwindles, these animals become vulnerable.

In 2019, a landmark UN report revealed that nearly 1 million species face extinction due to human activities and climate change. In response to increasing temperatures, animal species are moving toward the north and south poles and up mountains to escape the heat as the climate warms - which could also lead them closer to extinction, explained Senior Climate Change Scientist Lee Hannah.

"When human activities accelerate climate change, species are going to try to follow those climates that are suitable for them rather than adapting to new ones," explained Hannah. "For many species, this requires moving upslope - but at a certain point, there will be nowhere left to go, which is what we call the ' escalator to extinction.'"

The good news: Recent research led by Hannah shows that conserving just 30 percent of tropical lands could cut species extinction rates in half.

"It's really important to note that 'conserving 30 percent of tropical land' isn't just about creating national parks or protected areas (although that's a good start for many places)," said Hannah. "There is a whole suite of possible conservation tools that governments can implement to protect biodiversity while benefiting from the land, including protected areas, national parks, community conservancies and indigenous-managed conservation areas."

However, establishing these areas is just the beginning, Hannah added, keeping them intact and supporting them is crucial to conserving tropical forests and slowing climate breakdown.
Jessica Pink was an editorial intern for Conservation International. Further reading:

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3 ways climate change affects tropical rainforests

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Not everyone lives in a tropical rainforest - but everyone benefits from them. Home to nearly half of the plants and wildlife on Earth, tropical rainforests perform an essential function for the climate by absorbing carbon dioxide.

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Acid Rain Can Cause Health Problems in People
Air pollution like sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides can cause respiratory diseases, or can make these diseases worse. Respiratory diseases like asthma or chronic bronchitis make it hard for people to breathe. The pollution that causes acid rain can also create tiny particles. When these particles get into people's lungs, they can cause health problems, or can make existing health problems worse. Also, nitrogen oxides cause ground-level ozone. This ground-level ozone causes respiratory problems, like pneumonia and bronchitis, and can even cause permanent lung damage. The health effects that people have to worry about are not caused by the acid rain, but are caused when people breathe in these tiny particles or ozone. Swimming in an acidic lake or walking in an acidic puddle is no more harmful to people than swimming or walking in clean water.

Acid Rain Harms Forests
Acid rain can be extremely harmful to forests. Acid rain that seeps into the ground can dissolve nutrients, such as magnesium and calcium, that trees need to be healthy. Acid rain also causes aluminum to be released into the soil, which makes it difficult for trees to take up water. Trees that are located in mountainous regions at higher elevations, such as spruce or fir trees, are at greater risk because they are exposed to acidic clouds and fog, which contain greater amounts of acid than rain or snow. The acidic clouds and fog strip important nutrients from their leaves and needles. This loss of nutrients makes it easier for infections, insects, and cold weather to damage trees and forests.

Acid Rain Damages Lakes and Streams
Without pollution or acid rain, most lakes and streams would have a pH level near 6.5. Acid rain, however, has caused many lakes and streams in the northeast United States and certain other places to have much lower pH levels. In addition, aluminum that is released into the soil eventually ends up in lakes and streams. Unfortunately, this increase in acidity and aluminum levels can be deadly to aquatic wildlife, including phytoplankton, mayflies, rainbow trout, small mouth bass, frogs, spotted salamanders, crayfish, and other creatures that are part of the food web.

This problem can become much worse during heavy downpours of rain or when the snow begins to melt in the spring. These types of events are known as episodic acidification.

Acid Rain Damages Buildings and Objects
Acid rain can also have a damaging effect on many objects, including buildings, statues, monuments, and cars. The chemicals found in acid rain can cause paint to peel and stone statues to begin to appear old and worn down, which reduces their value and beauty.

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Acid Rain Students Site: Why is acid rain harmful?

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Acid Rain Can Cause Health Problems in People Air pollution like sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides can cause respiratory diseases, or can make these diseases worse. Respiratory diseases like asthma or chronic bronchitis make it hard for people to breathe. The pollution that causes acid rain can also create tiny particles.

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Indonesia’s Rainforests: Biodiversity and Endangered Species

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Indonesia’s Rainforests: Biodiversity and Endangered Species

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Indonesia’s Rainforests: Biodiversity and Endangered Species - Rainforest Action Network

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Indonesia’s rainforests are home to some of the highest levels of biological diversity in the world. Many sources credit Indonesia as the most species rich country on earth. Spread over...