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Make a class constitution to start the school year!

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Make a class constitution to start the school year!

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Refer to it in teachable moments

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvRfy_EoY9A

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THE ROUGH-FACE GIRL By Rafe Martin and David Shannon I My Cozy Corner Storytime

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How to teach kids to talk about taboo topics - Liz Kleinrock

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How to teach kids to talk about taboo topics - Liz Kleinrock

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How to teach kids to talk about taboo topics | Liz Kleinrock

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The Upside Down Boy written by Juan Felipe Herrera

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGKm201n-U4

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SlamNation: Taylor Mali - "What Teachers Make"

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https://www.learningforjustice.org/

**Look particular at lesson plans and learning plans.**

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Learning for Justice is a community education program of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) that centers civic and political action education for everyone.

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Sulwe - Read by Lupita Nyong'o!!! (author)

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Sulwe - Read by Lupita Nyong'o!!! (author)

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Lupita Nyong'o Reads "Sulwe" | Bookmarks | Netflix Jr

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnJZ1SPH7FA

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Creating Social Change Through Early Childhood - teaching about Black Lives Matter to young learners

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Creating Social Change Through Early Childhood - teaching about Black Lives Matter to young learners

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​

Hi! My name is Laleña. When you talk about me, the words that feel good to me are she and her. I'm a kindergarten teacher in New York City. I also sometimes teach grown-ups, and last summer, I wrote a book! It just came out! You can buy my book from your local independent bookstore, directly from Lee & Low, or on the internet from Bookshop and Indiebound, among other places.)

Big Ideas! And how we talk about thosebig ideas with little people

Things like:

Race!

Equity!

Gender!

Justice!

Consent!

Where do I like to talk?

My favorite place to talk is in schools. I used to go to schools to meet with teachers for professional development, or to run workshops with parents. These days, it's all online, and I'm doing a lot of work with grownups about how to talk (and listen!) to kids about "difficult" topics, like race and gender. Want to know more about how Black Lives Matter in Education?

I also like talking about other things, like how to be a good friend, how to take care of our community, and what my favorite color is. When I'm in school, there's one thing I like even more than talking.

Listening

​

I love listening to kids talk. They say really smart things. At school, I like that I get to listen while my students talk, and then write down what they say. Here are some things they said last October.

Want to sign up for my course?

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Creating Social Change Through Early Childhood Education | Laleña Garcia

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Offering strategies for teachers and parents to address what's happening in our world with their young children, with a focus on the work adults need to do on themselves in order to support their young people. Emphasis on Black Lives Matter as a social movement for systemic change.

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Draft a statement that you could share with students’ caregivers identifying the guiding principles in your philosophy of teaching social studies, and how they influence what and how you teach. Use the subheading questions in this chapter as prompts. In your manifesto, be sure to explain what obligations you feel with regards to your social studies teaching— to whom do you feel them, and why? For those who are currently teaching, link your manifesto to what you learned in the survey we recommended conducting in Chapter 3 so that the children and families you serve are directly reflected.

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Draft a statement that you could share with students’ caregivers identifying the guiding principles in your philosophy of teaching social studies, and how they influence what and how you teach. Use the subheading questions in this chapter as prompts. In your manifesto, be sure to explain what obligations you feel with regards to your social studies teaching— to whom do you feel them, and why? For those who are currently teaching, link your manifesto to what you learned in the survey we recommended conducting in Chapter 3 so that the children and families you serve are directly reflected.

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https://native-land.ca/

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Mapping

We strive to map Indigenous territories, treaties, and languages across the world in a way that goes beyond colonial ways of thinking in order to better represent how Indigenous people want to see themselves.

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Native Land is a resource to learn more about Indigenous territories, languages, lands, and ways of life. We welcome you to our site.

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https://www.zinnedproject.org/

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The Zinn Education Project is my compass in a sea of corporate textbooks, packaged common core curriculum and standardized testing. My entire curriculum is based on lessons that can be found on the Zinn Education Project.

High School Social Studies Teacher, Portland, Ore.

Your support is needed to help more students learn people's history. 100% of Zinn Education Project funding comes from individuals like you. Donate today.

By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca

From voter ID laws to voter-roll purges, gerrymandering to poll closures to the deadly in-person voting conditions during a pandemic, the right to vote is under attack and the stakes are high. It is critical that students learn about the fight for voting rights, past and present.

Nov. 30, 1924: Shirley Chisholm Born...

Teaching About the Violence in Palestine and Israel...

I can UNDERSTAND pessimism, but I don't BELIEVE in it. It's not simply a matter of faith, but of historical EVIDENCE. Not overwhelming evidence, just enough to give HOPE, because for hope we don't need certainty, only POSSIBILITY.

-Howard Zinn

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Zinn Education Project: Teaching People's History

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The Zinn Education Project promotes and supports the teaching of people's history in middle and high school classrooms across the country. Based on the lens of history highlighted in Howard Zinn's best-selling book A People's History of the United States, the website offers free, downloadable lessons and articles organized by theme, time period, and reading level.

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https://www.teachingforchange.org/featured-lessons-resources

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Young people are looking for ways to make sense of our current political moment and resist injustice. Students need the opportunity to learn the history of people's movements in order to deepen their protests into organizing that can win real change. To help introduce a history of resistance, Teaching for Change has created Resistance 101, a lesson for middle and high school classes... Read more.

Civil Rights Teaching

Teaching About Selma: We share here interactive lessons and recommended resources that invite students to step into the history and think critically and creatively about the continued fight for justice today.

Teaching About Freedom Schools: The Freedom Schools of the 1960s were part of a long line of efforts to liberate people from oppression using the tool of popular education.

Teaching About 1963: To support teaching the modern Civil Rights Movement beyond "I Have a Dream," Teaching for Change recommends teaching about the 1963 events that shed light on the everyday people who organized in their communities to struggle for freedom and justice.

All too often in the midst of reporting on Haiti, we hear that the country is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere without the infrastructure to deal with disaster. But little explanation is provided as to why, leaving students to assume it must be the fault of the people there. Nor do we hear of the strong grassroots Haitian organizations. It is important for students to gain a deeper understanding of the history and the roots of the poverty in Haiti. The U.S has been involved with Haiti for centuries, yet it has received little attention... Read more.

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Featured Lessons & Resources - Teaching for Change

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Resistance 101: A Lesson for Inauguration Teach-Ins and Beyond Civil Rights Teaching Teaching About Selma: We share here interactive lessons and recommended resources that invite students to step into the history and think critically and creatively about the continued fight for justice today.

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Uncovering the Dominant Narrative - Ms. Green's Class Blog

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Uncovering the Dominant Narrative - Ms. Green's Class Blog

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https://msgreensclass.com/2017/12/22/uncovering-the-dominant-narrative/

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So much of what we do in fifth grade at UT Elementary is surrounding the idea of dominant and counter narratives. Students are constantly identifying dominant narratives, poking holes in those stories, and looking elsewhere to uncover counter narratives that might have something different to say. But before we can get to this place, we have to first define what a dominant narrative is. So this year, we started out with a new activity which I called our "Famous American Heroes" project.

First I told students about this idea of a dominant narrative. A dominant narrative is the story of US history that you can find in most textbooks and in most classrooms. We defined it as "the story that's in charge." Counter narratives, on the other hand, are the stories that "fight back." These stories are not often found in textbooks, and if they are, they're definitely not at the center of the story. After discussing these ideas, I sent my students on a quest to uncover what these dominant narratives really are. What is the story that's in charge of US history? Who is at the center of that story?

I compiled a lit of all of the people included in the fifth grade US history standards (it's a lot of people!), and each student spent a couple of days researching one person from that list. After completing their research, students created a poster (I very strongly encouraged students to make sure the skin color marker/crayon/colored pencil they were using was as accurate as possible), and we hung all of these posters up outside of the classroom. Students then participated in a gallery walk of all of the posters, collecting data on what these people had in common.

We looked specifically at race, gender, age, accomplishments, and sexual orientation (students looked to see if a historical figure was married, and whether they were married to a man or woman).

At the end of our data collection, we found out of a list of a total 30 people that we researched, 27 were men, 26 were white, and all were straight and gender binary. In the words of one of our students, "somebody's gotta change that."

From here, we were able to conclude that the dominant narrative centers the people who have, and who have historically held, the most power: straight, white men. Anyone who doesn't fit that category is pushed to the outside of the story.

After uncovering dominant narratives, students were pumped up and ready to spend the rest of the year uncovering counter narratives (which we can do, because we just covered all of our history TEKS in two days 🤣). What are these counter narratives all about, these stories that are so dangerous they can't be heard? Who are these trouble makers whose voices people in power have tried to silence? We can't wait to find out!

Teachers, would you like to do a similar project in your classroom? I'm happy to share my resources with you! You can download the project packet here, and you can download the data collection sheets and interactive notebook pages here. If you have any questions, please let me know and I'll be happy to help!

Love, Learning, & Li'l Longhorns,

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So much of what we do in fifth grade at UT Elementary is surrounding the idea of dominant and counter narratives. Students are constantly identifying dominant narratives, poking holes in those stories, and looking elsewhere to uncover counter narratives that might have something different to say.

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Challenging the Dominant Narrative of Veteran's Day

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Challenging the Dominant Narrative of Veteran's Day

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https://msgreensclass.com/2019/11/11/challenging-the-dominant-narrative-of-veterans-day-through-a-study-of-navajo-code-talkers/

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Today is Veterans' Day. This morning, I asked my students to take five minutes to draw a picture of a veteran. The majority of my students drew a white man, and I wasn't surprised. When we searched "veteran" on Google Images, we saw the same thing.

While many white men have served our country in the military, is does our students and our country a disservice to center their stories, while continuing to marginalize the stories of women and POC. I do not find it appropriate to discount the service of white men in the military, but I do find it necessary to honor a more inclusive and honest story of the United States military history.

The best way to challenge dominant narratives is by questioning them, so, that's what we did. I followed a simple framework that could be used with any counter narrative. I chose to center Navajo Code Talkers because we're studying World War II, and will also be talking about indigenous people in our discussion of Thanksgiving narratives next week. You could, however, substitute the narrative of the code talkers with any other military counter narrative.

Framework

What does a veteran look like?

How might this stereotype be harmful and/or inaccurate?

What can we learn about to challenge this dominant narrative?

How can we connect this counter narrative to our present day lives?

What should we do about it?

Through these steps, we are :

1. uncovering the dominant narrative

2. questioning the dominant narrative

3. de-centering the dominant narrative

4. centering a counter narrative

5. moving towards action

1. What does a veteran look like?

Upon walking into class today, I asked students to take five minutes to draw a veteran. After drawing their pictures, we discussed: Who drew a man? Who drew a woman? I took tally marks on the board as I surveyed their responses. Who drew a white person? Black person? Latinx person? Asian? With only five minutes to draw, none of my students had time to add color. I rephrased the question to, "while you were drawing, what were you imagining the skin color of this person was?"

We then searched "veteran" on Google Images, and saw the same results. We discussed why this stereotype of a veteran is inaccurate and harmful, (who is included this narrative? who is excluded?), and I told students that we would be challenging this dominant narrative through a study of the Navajo Code Talkers.

2. Learning About the Navajo Code Talkers

During our reading and social studies block, we read "The Unbreakable Code," by Sara Hoagland Hunter, while stopping to discuss indigenous boarding schools, the ways in which the US government relates to people of color when they are needed/not needed, and why people of color continue to fight for the United States in the midst of such complex relations. Students were able to make some good connections to our study of the Bracero program from this same time period. (We are currently using one of my old World War II blog based lessons to learn about World War II).

Next, students read an informational article about the code talkers from Newsela. After these two readings, students now have a firm understanding of the code talkers and their role in World War II. The last question students were asked to answer on their article annotations was, "how do you think code talker veterans should be honored today?" This was a springboard for our next exploration, which we will continue with this week.

3. How are Navajo Code Talkers (and many veterans) treated today?

I assigned students this Newsela article about Navajo veterans struggling to find adequate housing. This article does a really great job of tying in the current day struggles of veterans, and the disconnect we see between the way the United States claims to honor its veterans, and the everyday realities faced by many US veterans, and especially veterans of color.

4. What Should We Do About It?

After all three of our readings, students will complete this comparison assignment of the two readings (tying in all of the reading standards we are covering this week), and will sum it all up with their choice of a short writing assignment. Their options are to write to one of the following prompts:

explain three ways the United States could/should honor Navajo veterans

write a letter to a Navajo veteran, thanking them for their service and explaining why their work was so important

explain why it's important to challenge the dominant narrative of a veteran

That's it! As I mentioned above, this lesson could easily focus on any other counter narrative, such as the Tuskegee Airmen, WASPs, etc.

Extended Resources for Teaching the Code Talkers:

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Challenging the Dominant Narrative of Veterans' Day Through a Study of Navajo Code Talkers

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Today is Veterans' Day. This morning, I asked my students to take five minutes to draw a picture of a veteran. The majority of my students drew a white man, and I wasn't surprised. When we searched "veteran" on Google Images, we saw the same thing.

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https://msgreensclass.com/2016/11/28/wwii-america-and-the-dominant-narrative/

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What do you know about WWII? You probably know that the United States fought other countries. (Remember that a civil war is a war within one country, and a world war involves multiple countries?) This week we're going to focus on many groups of American people during World War II, many of whom have been excluded from the dominant narrative.
Talk with a partner: What do you think the dominant narrative of American involvement in World War II is? Which groups of people might be excluded from this story?
Here are some things that you should know about World War II before we get started:

The war involved many different countries, and these countries split into two "teams": the Axis powers and the Allied Powers. When is another time that you have heard the word "allies" used? Think back to our civil rights unit.

The Axis Powers included Germany, Italy, and Japan.

The Allied Powers included the United States, Britain, France, the USSR, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, Greece, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, South Africa, Yugoslavia. That's a lot of countries! Our study will focus specifically on the United States, with some mention of Britain and France.

World War II lasted from 1939 to 1945, but the United States didn't get involved until 1941. The United States entered the war after Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, was bombed by Japan.

The dominant narrative paints a heroic picture of the United States fighting against the Nazis. While part of this may be true, the reasons behind US involvement, and the things happening at home in America, were much more complicated. (Remember that at this time, the United States was segregated! It seems kind of backwards that we would fight for freedom for the Jewish people while at the same time committing such acts of racism within our own country.)

If you have read all the way to this last bullet point, but a star on the top right corner of the first page of your exploration packet.

This week, we are going to take a look at how this war affected people here in the United States. Next week, we will zoom out and look outside of the United States and into Europe to learn more about the Holocaust.

As you rotate through these stations, record your thoughts and answers in your exploration packet.

Station One: Women on the Home Front

Part A: Women at Work

While the men of the United States went away to war, they left jobs open at home. Not only did they leave jobs vacant, but war also creates jobs. Employees were needed to make clothes for soldiers, and to create weapons. American women were left to fill these roles.

Look at the following 2 posters. Both posters were used to recruit women into jobs that needed to be filled. Answer the questions that follow.

Here is a Newsela article about the original "Rosie the Riveter." Take a look for a current events connection.

Part B: Flipping the Script: Women of Color

Station Two: Japanese Americans

In 1941, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. After this bombing, many Americans acted in fear towards all people of Japanese descent, even Japanese Americans, many of whom were citizens who had been living in the United States for generations. After this bombing, Franklin Roosevelt signed an order that put all Japanese Americans into internment camps.

Newsela has adapted the order signed by FDR. Use your Newsela account to read this article and answer the questions that follow.

After you have read and responded to the Newsela article, let's take a closer look at this photograph:

1. What do you see in this photograph?

2. What stands out to you?

3. Who do you think owns this store?

4. Who do you think hung the sign that says "I Am an American"?

5. Why did this person hang that sign?

6. Do you think that signs like this would have been common during World War II? Why or why not?

Now let's examine some more primary sources. Let's take a look at the words of Yuri Kochiyama, who experienced the Japanese Interment camps firsthand.

" The Japanese-American civil rights activist and author Yuri Kochiyama was born and raised in San Pedro, California. She and her family were among the 120,000 Japanese Americans on the West Coast who were rounded up in a wave of anti-Japanese hysteria that followed the bombing of Pearl Harbor. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, giving the army the power to arrest all Japanese-Americans (mostly children born in the United States) and transport them to camps to live under prison conditions. Yuri Kochiyama describes the conditions in the detention camps. "

Continue reading "Yuri Kochiyama on Japanese Internment Camps," (paper copies are in your exploration packet), and respond to the questions that follow.

Station Three: The Bracero Program
The following resources surrounding the Bracero Program are adapted from a journey box created by Juana Marquez, an undergraduate student at the University of Texas, as a class project for Noreen Rodriguez. For more resources from Noreen and her students, visit her website.
The Bracero Program was an agreement between Mexico and the Unites States of America that let millions of Mexican men come to the United States to work for a short period of time. Most of these men worked in the fields with certain rules, or contracts, that they needed to follow to be able to stay to work.

The Bracero Program was created during the time of World War II. During this time, America used all of its resources, including its workers, for the war. Even women were sent to work in factories. America soon realized that it needed more people to work the fields in the United States. Therefore, on August 4, 1942 the United States agreed to let Mexican agricultural workers come to the United States to work.

The Bracero Program was only supposed to last about five years, but it ended up lasting more than twenty years. The Bracero Program ended in the year 1964. Over the twenty-two years that the Bracero Program lasted, more than 4.5 million Mexican citizens were hired to legally work in the United States. Most of the Braceros worked in the states of Texas and California, both in the farms and on the railroads.

Braceros were recruited from different cities in Mexico, including Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua. Many Mexicans went to these recruitment sites in search of better opportunities in the United States. Once the Braceros arrived to the United States, they were inspected in processing centers. In these processing centers, personnel looked for weapons, and hopeful Braceros were sprayed with DDT, a chemical pesticide that was commonly used in the US to protect plants against insects. (This chemical was canceled in 1972, after people working around this chemical reported harmful side effects.) Despite this poor treatment, the Braceros were still hopeful of having a better life in America.

Once the Braceros entered the United States and began work, they were only paid about $3.00 a day. Braceros not only had to deal with such little pay, but they were also discriminated against by the American people. Similar to African Americans during the era of Jim Crow, Mexicans were not allowed into many places, like restaurants and movie theaters. Many Americans were angry about the Braceros, and demanded they return to Mexico. These people believed that American jobs were unfairly being given to foreigners, who were willing to work for less money.

The Bracero program was a big milestone, or step, for the United States. It helped create a migration pattern in the United States in which individuals such as Mexicans could come into the US to work, go home for awhile, and then return to the US once again to make more money to bring home to their families.

Despite their hard work for the United States during wartime, the Braceros were treated poorly. When they were no longer needed, they were told to go home, and they never received recognition for their contributions to America during World War II. The dominant narrative largely excludes Braceros from American history.
Answer the questions in your exploration packet before watching the following video.
1. What do you see in this photo?

2. Why do you think Americans wanted to clean these migrant workers before letting them enter the United States?

3. The word dehumanizing means to make someone feel like they are not human. Do you think this process might have been dehumanizing for these men? Why or why not?

Station Four: African American Soldiers

Complete the DBQ "African Americans in WWII," copies are in your exploration packet.

When the DBQ begins to talk about Charles Drew, watch this video before answering the questions:

Station Five: Contrasting the Dominant Narrative

This week, we have examined four different perspectives on American life during World War II. Each of these stories challenges the dominant narrative in one way or another. Like we mentioned earlier, the dominant narrative paints a very heroic picture of the United States. These next two photographs fit into the heroic dominant narrative of the United States during World War II.

Take a look at these two pictures and answer the following questions.

1. What do you see in this photograph?

2. What can you see on the people's expressions? What do you think they're feeling?

3. Why do you think they're feeling this way?

4. How many different skin colors do you see in this photo?

5. Do you see any women in this photograph?

6. Why do you think this photograph is part of the dominant narrative?

7. What statement is this photograph making about America?

1. What do you see in this photograph?

2. Who do you think these people are? Why?

3. What are these people doing?

4. Why do you think these people are doing this?

5. Why do you think this photograph is part of the dominant narrative?

6. What statement is this photograph making about America?

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WWII, America, and the Dominant Narrative

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What do you know about WWII? You probably know that the United States fought other countries. (Remember that a civil war is a war within one country, and a world war involves multiple countries?) This week we're going to focus on many groups of American people during World War II, many of whom have been...

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https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Famous-American-Heroes-Project-Uncovering-the-Dominant-Narrative-3550226

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Use this project packet to help your students uncover the dominant narrative of US history! This project uses the TEKS and is specific to the dominant narrative presented by Texas history standards.

Includes project instructions, poster template, and rubric.

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Famous American Heroes Project (Uncovering the Dominant Narrative)

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Use this project packet to help your students uncover the dominant narrative of US history! This project uses the TEKS and is specific to the dominant narrative presented by Texas history standards. Includes project instructions, poster template, and rubric.

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https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Dominant-Narrative-Interactive-Notebook-Pages-3550233

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This file pairs with the "Famous American Heroes" project to help your students uncover the dominant narrative of US history.

This file includes notebook pages and data collection sheets.

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Dominant Narrative Interactive Notebook Pages

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This file pairs with the "Famous American Heroes" project to help your students uncover the dominant narrative of US history. This file includes notebook pages and data collection sheets.

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"as much as possible, recognize each other as stakeholders with a shared investment in the growth and learning of a young person"

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https://rethinkingschools.org/

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Rethinking Schools is a nonprofit publisher and advocacy organization dedicated to sustaining and strengthening public education through social justice teaching and education activism.

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https://rethinkingschools.org/articles/dia-de-los-muertos-talking-with-students-about-death/

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A Latin-American holiday offers an opportunity for discussion and grieving

By Dale Weiss

Illustrator: AP/World Wide Photos

Students in Albequerque, N.M. wear traditional Latin American puppets in a Day of the Dead parade.
- photo: AP/World Wide Photos

Although death and dying are not topics usually covered in elementary school curricula, I had a powerful experience when I taught a unit on Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), a Latin-American holiday celebrated in early November that honors deceased family members and friends. The unit helped integrate an understanding of other cultures into my second/ third grade classroom of predominantly white students.

With the exception of one student, whose mother was Mexican, none of my other students were familiar with Day of the Dead. Though the customs of Día de los Muertos vary regionally, one common element is constructing commemorative altars. The relatives decorate altars with photos of the departed, their favorite mementos and foods, and an adornment of flowers and candles. Most people honor Día de los Muertos by remembering deceased infants and children on November 1 (All Saints Day) and adults on November 2 (All Souls Day). It is thought that the spirits of the dead are expected to pay a holiday visit home and should be provided with bountiful sustenance for the journey.

Most children in the classroom had not experienced the death of a family member. But they had heard stories of relatives who had died. I asked each student to decide which deceased family member they would like to commemorate for our Día de los Muertos unit. At the same time, I communicated with the parents of my students my intentions for our study of Día de los Muertos.

Through interviews with family members and looking through family photos, students discovered valuable information about the family members that they were honoring. Each student created a diorama inside an empty shoebox, where they placed tiny photos, mementos, and food made from clay. We placed the dioramas - referred to as altars - in one corner of the classroom. Students decided that when they entered this area, they should remove their shoes and become silent.

The students loved visiting the altar area. Though it was not blocked off in any particular way, it held a sacred kind of warmth. Students could often be found "speaking with the ancestors," both their own and those of their classmates. Other times they would comment to one another about the family members being honored.

"I liked learning about your grandpa because of all the jokes everybody said he told."

"I think that person looks really nice in the picture and that they were probably a very nice person too."

"I think it's sad that people die but I'm glad we get to know them from the altars."

As our Día de los Muertos unit continued, my students asked many questions about death and dying. "Why do people die?" "Do people only die when they get real old?" "How come animals don't live as long as people?" I read several books to the students about life cycles of plants and animals, which eventually led to questions about people dying. I have often found that the topic of death is shunned in school settings, a practice I do not agree with. It was important to me that my students felt comfortable asking their questions, that their questions be taken seriously, and that the topic of death and dying be approached as an ongoing, open discussion.

Several students chose to write a poem together during our Writing Workshop time. They always enjoyed writing group poems, where a group would agree on a core set of ideas and each student would write a line about the topic. Then they worked together to fine tune the poem.

This poem, "The Circle of Life" was also set to music by a local cellist, Jami:

"The Circle of Life"
There's a beginning and an end
And a life in between
And this we know
For all living things.
For plants and people
And trees and animals
Life circles round
As we sing this song.
The world is a big chain of life
The world is a big chain of life
For plants and people
And trees and animals
Life circles round
As we sing this song.

In their best penmanship, each student wrote a short biography of the family member they had honored, and included why this person was important to them. I duplicated the biographies in a spiral-bound a book for each student. As our Día de los Muertos unit came to an end, students hosted a celebration for their family members. Each student read the tribute they had created for their deceased family member, and we invited everyone to join in singing "The Circle of Life." Students then proudly acted as tour guides in the altar area. Many family members expressed gratitude for experiencing their children so deeply honoring a loved one from their family.

I learned many things that year. I learned that children are able to embrace difficult topics and do not fear talking about death nearly as much as adults do. Death is a topic largely avoided in the United States, and in our curricula.

I also realized it is not only students' minds that walk through the classroom door day after day, their hearts show up as well. Some days children come to school in great pain. Was I, as a teacher, welcoming their fears, doubts, grief, and sadness? What was I doing to encourage or discourage students' ability to share from a place deep within them? What topics do I have great difficulty discussing and as a result pass onto my students the message that "we just don't talk about that in here?"

I learned that children need the opportunity to honor their ancestors and the safety in which to do this.

And finally, when one of our cherished classmates and friends passed away towards the end of our school year (see Remembering Tyson), we were better equipped as a group to share our grief and process our loss together.

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By Dale Weiss Illustrator: AP/World Wide Photos Although death and dying are not topics usually covered in elementary school curricula, I had a powerful experience when I taught a unit on Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), a Latin-American holiday celebrated in early November that honors deceased family members and friends.

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Morningside Center in General / Roleplaying a Teacher's Strike in specifics

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Morningside Center in General / Roleplaying a Teacher's Strike in specifics

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https://www.morningsidecenter.org/teachable-moment/lessons/roleplaying-teachers-strike

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Chicago Teachers Strike, September 2012 photo by Brad Perkins

Note to the teacher:
You may want to pair this activity with our lesson Why Did LA Teachers Go on Strike, which invites students to learn about and discuss some of the issues surrounding the January 2019 strike by teachers in Los Angeles.

This roleplay introduces students experientially to the concept of a strike, including some of its risks and benefits. You as teacher play the role of district superintendent and students play the role of teachers. By having to make decisions about whether to strike, and by defending their reasoning, students will better understand the risks and benefits of the choice to strike, both for the teachers themselves and for the school district as a whole.

Because the roleplay immerses students in the perspective of strikers, be careful to ensure that students truly consider all perspectives. You should adjust the way you play the superintendent role based on your particular students and their starting assumptions. If students are too quick to go on strike, you can slow them down by mustering as many arguments as possible for the school district's side and asking them to grapple with the financial struggles that school districts face. On the other hand, if the class is reluctant to even consider the possibility of striking as the game continues, you can prompt the students to think more about why teachers might strike, not just for themselves but for their students and communities.

The roleplay ends with a debrief that is, in some ways, the most crucial part of the lesson. In the debrief, you will encourage students to step back and reflect instead on how public education faces larger systemic issues. Be sure to leave plenty of time for the debrief; students are often eager to explain their choices and question others about theirs.

Before class, label four sides of the room with different signs saying "Keep Working," "Quit and Find Another Job," "Complain to the Superintendent," and "Go on Strike."

Introduction

To introduce this roleplay exercise, ask students what they know about the teachers' strikes in 2018 and 2019. Explain that today they will get to pretend they are teachers and make their own decisions about what they should do for themselves and for their students.

First round

Say to the class, "Imagine you are all teachers and you each have a classroom of about 20 students. You like teaching even though it is challenging, and you are paid enough to have a house and support your family. But then one fall, you are told that this year you will have to teach 30 students instead of 20, and you will be paid the same amount - even though having more students means much additional work each week. The school district is running low on money and can't hire more teachers to keep classes the same size. Think to yourself: How do you feel about this change? ... How will it affect your life? ... How will this change affect your students' lives?

Ask the room of "teachers" to discuss in small groups how this change in classroom size will affect them and their students, and what they should do. Then point out the four options around the room to them, and have all "teachers" stand up and go to the sign that shows their choice.

Once everyone has made their choice, ask students to share how they feel about their choice, why they made the choice they did, and what they think will happen as a result.

Then, in the role of the "district superintendent," respond to each group.

Tell the "Quit and Find another Job" group, "By quitting, you're only hurting your students. We'll just have to hire new teachers to replace you.

Assuming that less than half the class has joined the "Go on Strike" group, tell them, "You're fired. All of your colleagues are still working. Why can't you just work harder like them? We'll just hire different teachers!" Then send them to the "Quit and Find Another Job" group. The goal is to demonstrate that this choice is very risky for strikers personally, and has little power in small numbers. This response also subtly encourages strikers to think about their colleagues' choices and how those choices might affect the strike's power. (If more than half the class has already decided to go on strike, skip down to the Strike! section.)

Further rounds

Have everyone sit back down, and tell those who quit or were fired that they are starting over as if they had never quit. Tell all "teachers" that now, their classrooms have 40 students and their pay stays the same, even though the cost of rent and food has gone up this year. Ask "teachers" once again to discuss in small groups how this will affect them and their students, and what to do. You may wish to leave them more discussion time than before, to help them reconsider their choices. (During discussion time, you may wish to quietly prompt a few of your more energetic students to convince their classmates to all strike together.)

When ready, ask everyone to go to the sign that shows their choice. If less than half the class wants to go on strike, give similar responses to each group as you did before. Then just keep increasing class sizes or announcing budget cuts (classroom equipment breaks down, librarians and nurses go part-time, teachers have to buy more and more supplies, etc.) until over half the class goes on strike.

Strike!

Once more than half the class goes on strike, your responses as the "district superintendent" will become much longer and less scripted. You should act more nervous and uncertain than before, to show students how the power dynamics have shifted. You now begin an extended debate/negotiation with the strikers. Choose from the bullet points below to present various emotional and political arguments against strikes, depending on how you wish to challenge students. Try to provoke strikers to respond further to you with reasons, arguments, and demands. Allow the noise level in the room to rise. If strikers can convince those in other groups to join them as debate continues, all the better.

When you are ready to end the game, you can agree to some of the strikers' demands, applaud their persistence, and announce that the strikers get to keep their jobs. (If students haven't been effective in presenting their arguments, you could alternately announce that the strikers have lost community support and you refuse to negotiate further, but it's more fun to end with the students "winning.")

Debrief

Ask students to share their thoughts on what just happened. Prompt them with some of these questions:

Do you think it is wrong for teachers to strike if it means students can't learn during the strike? Or what if parents have trouble affording childcare when schools are closed?Do you think that parents and students would support your strike based on your reasons for striking and your demands for change? Why or why not?

Does the superintendent have the power to fix all the problems with the educational system? What other groups or people might play a role in these problems, or have the ability to solve them?

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Note to the teacher: You may want to pair this activity with our lesson Why Did LA Teachers Go on Strike, which invites students to learn about and discuss some of the issues surrounding the January 2019 strike by teachers in Los Angeles.

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Start Here Now: A Guide to Antibias and Antiracist Work in Your School Community

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Start Here Now: A Guide to Antibias and Antiracist Work in Your School Community

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https://www.heinemann.com/products/e11864.aspx

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Most educators want to cultivate an antibias and antiracist classroom and school community, but they often struggle with where and how to get started. Liz helps us set ourselves up for success and prepare for the mistakes we'll make along the way.

Each chapter in Start Here, Start Now addresses many of the questions and challenges educators have about getting started, using a framework for tackling perceived barriers from a proactive stance. Liz answers the questions with personal stories, sample lessons, anchor charts, resources, conversation starters, extensive teacher and activist accounts, and more. We can break the habits that are holding us back from this work and be empowered to take the first step towards reimagining the possibilities of how antibias antiracist work can transform schools and the world at large.

We must remind ourselves that what is right is often not what is easy, and we must continue to dream. Amidst the chaos, our path ahead is clear. This is our chance to dream big and build something better.

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Start Here, Start Now addresses many of the questions and challenges educators have about getting started with antibias and antiracist work, using a framework

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https://www.stenhouse.com/content/black-ants-and-buddhists

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Mary Cowhey Foreword by Sonia Nieto

What would a classroom look like if understanding and respecting differences in race, culture, beliefs, and opinions were at its heart? Welcome to Mary Cowhey's Peace Class in Northampton, Massachusetts, where first and second graders view the entire curriculum through the framework of understanding the world, and trying to do their part to make it a better place.

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What would a classroom look like if understanding and respecting differences in race, culture, beliefs, and opinions were at its heart? Welcome to Mary Cowhey's Peace Class in Northampton, Massachusetts, where first and second graders view the entire curriculum through the framework of understanding the world, and trying to do their part to make it a better place.

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https://courageousconversation.com/courageous-conversations-about-race-book/

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Courageous Conversations About Race Book - Courageous Conversation

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https://www.meandwhitesupremacybook.com/

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~Cada familia es única~ | ~Every family is unique~

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~Cada familia es única~ | ~Every family is unique~

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I used this activity during a unit on family. As a whole-group, we composed a bubble map of who can be in a family. Then we assigned each of those potential members a color. Students "built" their family using small colored squares following the key the class generated. Important considerations: 1) not everyone lives with every member of their family; 2) not all families live in houses!!; 3) talking about family may be traumatizing for children for a variety of reasons.

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What is it that we're trying to do in this classroom?

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What is it that we're trying to do in this classroom?

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Are we disrupting norms / creating new ones?

For every pedagogical choice: "What is the reason I'm trying to do this?"

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https://www.familyequality.org/resources/inclusive-schools-family-survey-for-teachers/

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Inclusive Schools: Family Survey for Teachers - Family Equality

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Understanding a student's family structure is key to creating safe and inclusive schools, and an easy way to start is by sending out a survey!

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"your child's well-being is wrapped up in another child's well-being" - Annelie

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"The traditional family tree presents certain assumptions about families. Its rigid hierarchy privileges children who have siblings, biological links to both parents, and unbroken family lineage to grandparents and great-grandparents" (Kesler, 2011, p. 420).

"The modern nuclear, or 'traditional' biological family, has been the normative standard against which all other family models have been measured, and where, in contrast, alternative family structures may be represented as deficient or illegitimate" (Laidlaw & So-Har Wong, 2013, p. 109).

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https://www.amazon.com/You-Come-Earth-Sophie-Blackall/dp/145213779X

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If You Come to Earth [Blackall, Sophie] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. If You Come to Earth

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Reflection Prompt: "At first I thought..., now I think..."

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Reflection Prompt: "At first I thought..., now I think..."

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"In recent decades, educators have worked to disrupt normalization, particularly during those initial weeks of the school year as they work to build community with a new group of students. But some of these efforts still end up centering some students while alienating others." - Rodríguez & Swalwell, Social Studies for a Better World p. 52

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Teaching Critically About Lewis and Clark

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Teaching Critically About Lewis and Clark

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https://www.tcpress.com/teaching-critically-about-lewis-and-clark-9780807763704

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"Not only are the lessons presented in this text practical and relevant to today's teacher, but the text offers additional teacher resources that truly challenge the dominant narrative surrounding Lewis and Clark. The text supports teachers in understanding the multiple perspectives and vast history surrounding the Doctrine of Discovery. In addition, the resources offer voices other than those of Lewis, Clark, Jefferson, and other prominent white males, instead offering counternarratives. Inherently, the lesson plans and resources push students to dive deeper into the content at hand. Thus, they become active, engaged participants in their learning, leading to their evaluation and challenging of the dominant curriculum."

- Teachers College Record

"The authors' efforts to empower students, as both scholars and citizens, to learn and then reconceptualize dominant narratives of exploration and discovery will undoubtedly make the book an invaluable and controversial contribution to contemporary battles over history education."

- Teaching History: A Journal of Methods

"This amazing book, and the thoughtful lesson plans included therein, should be required teaching materials in all K-12 classrooms in the United States. The unique and invaluable information that the authors provide will expose students to the federal law that still restricts Native Nations today and will require students to think more critically about this chapter of American history and what they have previously been taught on the subject. This book is revisionist history in the best sense of that tradition because it teaches students a more complete, more true, and more complex history about the Lewis and Clark expedition."
- Robert J. Miller, professor, Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law, Arizona State University

"The story of the 'Corps of Discovery' remains one of the most persistent yet misunderstood historical narratives within K-12 classrooms. Teaching Critically about Lewis and Clark offers rare support for teachers, teacher educators, and schools 'to challenge these issues, to defend tribal sovereignty, and to stand in solidarity with Indigenous peoples' (p. 10). The book's resources and strategies advance historical rigor, contemporary relevance, critical thinking about multiple perspectives, inquiry-based experiences, and alignment with state level initiatives like Montana's Indian Education for All and Washington's Since Time Immemorial, all while revitalizing Indigenous histories that have been marginalized or suppressed for 200+ years."
- Christine Rogers Stanton, associate professor of K-12 social studies education, Montana State University

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Teaching Critically About Lewis and Clark

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"Not only are the lessons presented in this text practical and relevant to today's teacher, but the text offers additional teacher resources that truly challenge the dominant narrative surrounding Lewis and Clark. The text supports teachers in understanding the multiple perspectives and vast history surrounding the Doctrine of Discovery.

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Latino Americans | Episode 1: Foreigners in Their Own Land | PBS

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https://www.ted.com/talks/john_hunter_teaching_with_the_world_peace_game/transcript?language=en

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Transcript of "Teaching with the World Peace Game"

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TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: John Hunter puts all the problems of the world on a 4'x5' plywood board -- and lets his 4th-graders solve them. At TED2011, he explains how his World Peace Game engages schoolkids, and why the complex lessons it teaches -- spontaneous, and always surprising -- go further than classroom lectures can.

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Potlatch Game: Goal is to have all players' needs met

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Potlatch Game: Goal is to have all players' needs met

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https://www.ndnplayers.com/informaton-resources

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https://www.onewaytomakechange.org/teaching-for-social-justice-at-the-elementary-level.html

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We are halfway through our presentation at a conference. Participants are buzzing about the simulation they just experienced and asking procedural questions, sharing their responses and reactions. Then the inevitable happens. Someone asks, "How do you handle your students feeling guilt or shame? I don't want to make my students feel bad." We freeze. We look at each other. Our response? "We're afraid they won't feel bad."

We need our students to feel something because students will not truly understand or even engage with the dynamics at play unless they have an emotional involvement-including discomfort. In fact, discomfort is often where learning begins. It is good for our students to wrestle with it, especially those who live with great privilege. Beyond that, our simulations are never about assigning individual blame. They are about recognizing and experiencing (briefly, temporarily, and minutely) the systemic effects of privilege. Without that realization, students will be allowed to think that oppression is disconnected from them or someone else's problem.

The simulation in question is our pom-pom activity. We created it to attempt to simulate the dynamics of cyclical wealth and power and disrupt students' belief that poor people just need to work harder in order to no longer be poor. As co-teachers at a progressive private school in Washington, DC, we tried to teach with a social justice lens in all of our curriculum. This means we continually questioned whose voice is/is not heard, or who is advantaged/disadvantaged by institutions and systems. This means that when we taught economics, we explicitly addressed cyclical poverty, wealth, and oppression, and investigated who is (and who is not) valued in economic systems. The simulation we created was one of the most dynamic learning experiences we have ever had with fifth graders. Before we explain it, however, a few words of caution.

First, while we love when students have fun, that was not the intention of this activity. In fact, many of our students did not find this experience "fun," instead feeling a mixture of anger, guilt, and shame. Secondly, this simulation was woven within an explicit instructional framework and should not be taught in a "constructivist" way. Cyclical poverty is a real concept that we can define-we do not want students to leave this experience with fuzzy understandings of that. We did not just toss the simulation into our day but planned meticulously for this experience with explicit pre- and post-reflections. Lastly, students' misconceptions and questions should never be left floating in the air after this simulation as they need multiple ways throughout the curriculum to think through their experience, make connections, and receive feedback. Without these caveats, we fear (and know) that the simulation and others like it will be used as an "exciting" experience that students are left to sort out by themselves. This explicit instruction also helps make the information accessible for all of our students.

The Simulation
There are three rounds to the pom-pom simulation. Round One consists of collecting as many differently sized and colored pom-poms as they can in two minutes. Pom-poms, of course, represent wealth and power. There is a catch, however. Students receive slips of paper with "assignments" on them with instructions for how they can gather pom poms (e.g., You can use both of your hands, but you may not move your feet at all). Only two people are allowed to use their hands and move around as they typically would. We also caution all students that if you touch or bump another body, you lose pom-poms. This is a safety requirement but also makes it harder for those already limited by their instructions.

After setting up the simulation and answering questions, we start a timer and tell them to go. Once pom-pom collection is over, we put students into three groups based on the number of pom-poms they collected: Group 1 includes a few students (out of 26 total) who have "great wealth and power," Group 2 has another few students who have "some wealth and power," and Group 3 is everyone else with "little wealth and power." For debriefing, we ask students to move to different areas of the room for each group to discuss Round 1. Group 1 moves to the biggest, most comfortable area. Group 2 moves to a smaller but still comfortable area. Group 3 is corralled into an uncomfortable corner of the room. Students are typically very engaged in the debrief, animatedly talking about how the process was "not fair" and how they deserved another chance. Group 3 students often loudly complain about the instructions they had, saying things like, "I could only use my two pointer fingers behind my back!" or "This is not fair-why are we all smushed back here?" As they air their grievances, we say, "We hear you complaining that Round One was not fair, so we will give you another chance in Round Two."

Round Two consists of making "baskets" of crumpled up balls of paper with each group using different color paper. We tell the third group with little wealth and power that they will have an advantage in the next round due to their large number of members. Every time one member of the group makes a "basket," each member of the group will earn another pom-pom. There are cheers when this is announced, but the celebration is short lived as we show each group where they have to stand to shoot. Group 1 is in front and Group 2 is behind them, and Group 3 is in the back of the room. Naturally, Group 1 makes many baskets, while Group 2 and 3 rarely make any. During this round, we witness some very creative teamwork, as well as enterprising blocking tactics. After Round 2 ends, we tend to hear more frustration about how "unfair" the whole situation was and many requests for a new "fair" round. "We couldn't even see the baskets. And Group 1 blocked our shots! They already have so many pom-poms." "It was basically impossible. I don't even know why we tried."

We move onto Round 3 during which each group gets to decide what they think is a "fair" system to distribute all of the pom-poms. We give them five minutes to discuss with their group and come up with a system they support. Each group must choose a spokesperson to present their plan to the class with one minute to make a pitch for their group's plan. What students do not know until voting happens is that voting is weighted (Group 1 members get five votes each, Group 2 gets two each, and Group gets a half vote each) to represent the influence that wealth confers. When students see the unequal voting power, Group 3 is livid. They planned on winning the vote by virtue of their large number of people. Group 1 is pleased as they planned on retaining their "wealth and power" and now had the votes to do so. When we voted, Group 1's proposal got the most votes after calculating the weighting. The other students were frustrated. Group 1 was pleased-they had started out trying to think of a "fair" system, but soon realized "it doesn't say it has to be fair." They also were influenced by two members who repeatedly said, "Stay wealthy! We should keep our power!"

The Debrief
At this point, we stopped the simulation for a debrief. First, we asked students to verbally share their reactions and feelings, limiting them to one comment per person and giving them time to reflect.

When I first saw the amounts each group got, it made me feel like the people in the third group were being treated like they aren't humans... ½ a vote. ½ human! Half not real. Not seen. When the people with more wealth get so many more votes, it feels like just because they have more, they also should get more of everything always. We are the people working the hardest, but we can't get the things they have that we want and need. (Student from Group 3)

I do agree with [student's name] that it wasn't fair. But our group was trying to make it so that we would still be at the top of the ladder, so it wouldn't be as fair-you had to be strategic and life isn't always fair. (Student from Group 1)

Once everyone shared, we reminded students that this was a simulation and therefore not the same as actually experiencing poverty, discrimination, etc. We do not suddenly understand how others in these situations feel because we did an activity about pom-poms. This reminder is essential to avoid trivializing or minimizing oppression or injustice as most people (whether they are fifth grader or adults) find having perspective difficult when they are frustrated. After this, we asked them to make connections to real life-both in the debrief discussion and later as a homework reflection. 1 A sample of their responses is included below.
[T]hough the law says everyone can vote, there are examples in history when our voting wasn't fair. Even now, some people can't vote because they don't have access to it. I think that was an accurate representation of those with more or less power because there are less super wealthy people then super unwealthy people but if someone super wealthy says they are doing something it might sway other people to do the same. I think an example is endorsements during the election. I used to think that if you work hard you can get wealth but now, I think there is more to it. I think this because If you are born without wealth you will have a disadvantage and you will be stuck behind someone who started with a lot of resources and wealth.
We wrote this simulation as an antidote to the idea that people experiencing poverty should just "work hard" and in hopes of simulating the experiences and effects of privilege (or not having privilege), but students have made connections to ableism, racism, sexism, classism, politics, and more in their written reflections.

Considerations
For teachers considering using simulations like this as a strategy for social justice education in "elite" settings, we recommend the following essential elements:

Simulations should be long enough for students to feel emotions/responses genuinely (e.g., guilty for watching friends in an "unfair" situation or frustrated and ready to give up). Even after an hour, students will report that a simulation was "endless," "unbearable," and "went on forever."

Simulations must have an explicit, real world analog.2 Our pom-pom simulation occurs in the midst of our economics unit, after we teach students about the distribution of wealth in the United States. They often think of other applications on their own, especially as we continue to learn more economic systems.

Try to have multiple rounds so that students can feel and observe the cyclical, repetitive, and defeating nature of the experience. If it is too short, it will just be a funny or odd activity and easily shrugged off. Multiple rounds also give students the possibility of redemption or "fresh start," so they often react with frustration when they thought it was finally going to be fair but is the same dynamics all over again.

Debrief is key. Start with feelings and observations, move to reflection and connections, and end with identifying how your thinking has changed and next steps. Without a debrief, the students simply played a game or did an activity, so the application must be explicit!

We have students share out orally immediately after the simulation about how they felt and what choices they made. Every student is given a chance to speak. Students are allowed to pass, and we encourage them to add to the discussion instead of repeating. We have them journal immediately after this share to get out their thoughts and reactions and complete a question sheet for homework. The sharing out, discussing, and journaling take at least thirty minutes and we usually have to cut the discussion short (or at least pause it until the next class).

Make sure to add a disclaimer that it is a simulation that only lasted an hour or so and is NOT the same as the actual experience. If this is not our lived reality, we cannot fully understand how others who are actually in the situation feel.

Simulations are critical teaching tools to make learning relevant, personal, tangible, and felt. We become numb to stories of injustice or misfortune that happen to others and report sadness or outrage, but soon move on. When we experience an injustice, even in small ways, those emotions stay with us far longer. When students have an experience like this, they use these feelings as prior knowledge that can be activated when confronted with new vocabulary and complex content. In addition, everyone (including children) already has preconceived ideas: people are poor because they are lazy, racism was "fixed" by Martin Luther King, only bad people believe stereotypes, etc. Once we have established these "facts," it is very hard to change our minds about things we already "know." Experiencing something that disproves our preconceived notions is key because it forces us to acknowledge what we think we know, and it shows how it is not necessarily true. It also demonstrates to our students the ways in which they can grapple with some of the more unequal or unjust aspects of our society.
Sometimes, understanding concepts in our world like this might feel bad-and we won't avoid that. Concepts like oppression or cyclical wealth are painful. It does feel bad. But this is teaching, and this is learning. And one thing the students consistently see in this experience is that their learning is vast and connected to the actual world around them-and that their learning and voices matter.
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______________________________
Interview with Gabby Arca and Nina Sethi

Katy: What was your philosophy as a teaching team?

Gabby: What Nina and I did really well was that "one-two-punch": you know you're loved and supported-- and you will be challenged and near tears and you're going to write in your journal "I can't stand my teachers" right now and then we'll be there for you two seconds later when you come in from recess after a fight with your friend. It's not a constant either/or-it's a both/and. You are challenged because you are cared for.

Nina: It takes time. Someone might be upset in the moment. Hopefully, later on-you may not hear about it-it sinks in. We were very transparent about what we were doing-if you walked into our classroom, it was very obvious. Being two women of color, people did not like certain things and sent us emails-such a wonderfully passive aggressive tool to throw a compliment in there but CC the head of school! When push comes to shove, we've had administrators back us up. We would often invite parents to come in and talk to us-while they were super uncomfortable, they knew we shared facts. One of my favorites was when a mom came in because her white son said that she was racist and she was crying. She clearly wanted us to reassure her, but we said, "It sounds like you were." A year later, she told me she had learned a lot from her son being in our class and tries to incorporate what she learned into her Sunday school. I appreciated that. It took her awhile and I'm sure it was painful for her son to call her racist.

Gabby: You also can't deny when dynamic learning is happening-a classroom has a buzz. We built a reputation, families that expressed their appreciation and kids who loved us, and we had the administration's backing. I think a lot of that was the power of two of us. What private schools need to do is put two teachers of color together. That setup gives safety, support, and power that you can't beat. We also understood this is one way to make change-we have access to super wealthy white people. The parents won't listen to us or talk to us, but we had access to their babies. And their babies loved us, and we got them thinking and asking questions-and they will listen to their kid who brings home really important questions. Then when that mom came in swinging that finger, crying, saying her kid called her racist-usually that feels really terrible as a teacher, but reframing those moments as successes because that's what they really are. That, in combination with what I call "speaking it into existence." We'd say, "Thank you so much for being in this work." Even if they weren't, they would pretend because that's part of whiteness and we know that and would use it. Also, Nina was especially good at framing our tough content as "rigorous," which was totally factual. Talking about the world around us and thinking critically is higher level work and there's nothing private school families love more than their kid doing something their friends' kids aren't doing.

Nina: Just make it about the kids. "Your student asked a really great question and I gave him facts about his question that he was curious about."

Gabby: We'd also be sincerely excited for the kids and say, "Gosh, our generation doesn't know how to talk about these things" and parents would agree, and we'd talk about how proud we were that their kids could.

Nina: I've had some success referring to our mission. It requires a lot of patience and I reserve my patience for children.

Gabby: We would retreat to our rooms sometime, which is not a solution, but when you walk through the hallway and encounter multiple microaggressions-we're saving our patience and we want to keep our job and the world is the world on top of that, so it's hard to always find the right words. In my experience, white people need the exact right words in the exact right tone. It can take a lot to be heard, even when you're trying to be supportive. People could come to our room literally any time, but rarely did-I struggled with that feeling of that diversity eye-roll vibe. At conferences is when I would feel most valued-when people would say "This is really great" and saw how complicated and important this type of education is. It requires two women of color, who have been in a range of spaces and studied a great deal with degrees from "elite" institutions who know a lot of layers about a lot of things-quality social justice education requires a lot for us to pull these things together and make it work.

Katy: What dimensions of anti-oppressive education were especially tough to tackle?

Nina: At well-meaning white liberal progressive schools there is a lot of "Don't say that-we don't want to hurt anyone's feelings," but that's not why we don't use that language. Dehumanizing someone debases all of us and lowers our collective humanity. Wealth and inequality also dehumanize people. The reason we wrote the simulation is because we had students who would talk about poor people and say, "They're poor because they don't work hard." They're fifth graders, so they're just repeating what they hear their parents say. And we're like, "Okay, that's one opinion." We never directly said, "Your dad is wrong." We would say, "Why don't we try this and see what we all think?" And then students could reflect on their own. A lot came from our students' questions. In terms of what was difficult, talking about disability-we did our best, but I always felt like that the kids were still very concrete about it.

Gabby: Disability is so complex. We really wanted to avoid the pity or overcomer narratives and struggled to find the way to do so successfully. One of our good friends was in a wheelchair (she passed away in 2019, we love you Anne Thomas!) and she told our students that she would not have liked it if people held the door for her. Wealth took some guts. That first year we had a few Black kids in our class and almost all were very wealthy. We thought of those kiddos and families first and how they wanted to present and be. The dynamics of looking at the wealth gap was really important because white kids would be confused: "Race means people don't have money, but my friend here is rolling in it!" The other thing that was hard, but we were both jazzed about, is that the justice lens we have is incessant. It would be the choices we were making on a rolling basis, both of us figuring out how we were going to pull a book or write a simulation because we heard a kid say something. We missed stuff, for sure, but it was incessant.

Katy: Talk to me about assessment, or how you calibrated when to push harder or pull back.

Nina: We always had written reflections. Sometimes they got something wrong because they're ten and made a connection that doesn't make sense, so we would clear that up. Other times, students would say, "I don't want to learn about this anymore-it's too painful." Depending on who they are, we would take that different ways. And some kids just aren't there yet-they can't make the connections yet because they're so concrete. That's okay.

Gabby: Sometimes we had to connect the dots for them because it was too important to leave hanging. Another way we would know it was working is when we would hear them start correcting each other, gently and kindly, taking on certain language. We would look at each other and think, "That kid really gets humanity." And then we had drawings and writing reflections in case they didn't want to share what they were thinking with the whole group. It's kind of "spidey" sense subtle, watching your kids having reactions to things. It's truly listening to your kids.

Katy: A common question is if you're teaching them racism or homophobia because they wouldn't otherwise know about it. What's your response to that line of thinking?

Nina: That feels like if we hide under the bed, then nothing exists.

Gabby: One thing that is really sincere with both of us is that we respect kids as brilliant thinkers. That question is disrespectful to kids. Time and time again, our students said what they liked about our teaching was that we treated them as real people who got to learn about the world. It doesn't mean throw everything at them-but it does mean respect how thoughtful they can be. We definitely got parent complaints that we were "scaring" kids, which we had to debunk and work through and honor all at the same time. But the kids were savvy. They already knew at ten how to be avoidant of race. Sometimes we would prompt them, and they would act like they don't know-especially in a progressive crowd of kids. They actually do know, and they've learned from adults so they're doing a level of pivoting that's pretty impressive. Regardless, they need the vocabulary, the frameworks, and the time to make connections with this content. They live on Earth.

Katy: What messages did you give kids about their obligations?

Nina: We ended the year with a storytelling unit where kids would perform their stories and we would talk about the importance of using your voice, about how some of our voices are heard more than others and what obligation that leaves us with.

Gabby: Some of the pushback we would get, especially in our conversations around race, was parents saying, "My kid comes home and thinks everything is their fault. You guys did this to them." One thing we would be explicit about is that they are ten. It wasn't removing this sense of obligation to be a good human, which was a non-negotiable in our room. They got that you have a voice, but so does everyone else-all of us are speaking up for humanity when and how we can. We didn't nail the obligation piece because we had too many kids who were so loving that they would have thought, "I must wake up at 6am and cry about this every morning!" And that isn't their weight to carry in that way. They didn't start racism, so our work is to work against it-but it is not you.

Katy: Were you explicit with kids about transitioning to places where that baseline expectation isn't there?

Gabby: We would talk about it as them having dissonance-noticing what didn't match. A lot of them had dissonance from classroom to home, which was tricky. I struggled with how confusing that would be for some of our kids. We felt for them. People can spiral down being annoyed or frustrated with parents and it's really not effective. We tried to just celebrate how awesome the kid was being so they'll expand their realities through their engagement and critical thinking. Their life is going to be swimming in these different spaces and they just got this huge dose of Women-of-Color-Education-Land intensely for a year. We can't make every connection for them as they move on-we have to trust that the intensive year gave them something and they're going to connect to it and build. There were hard moments. Every year I've ever taught, a kid has said the "n" word at least once and it's so disappointing. We were good keeping in mind that they are ten years old, but there were still moments of treating them like a full human. I remember having to tell a kid that they hurt my feelings: "I'm shattered inside by what you did, and I need a moment before we can talk through this." Maybe that's crummy but remembering they're ten and celebrating them and then owning how you've hurt someone.

Katy: Is that the flip side of respecting them?

Gabby: Yes. But I can't imagine a teacher having said that to me! But that's the learning. If I took that away from them, they miss it. We respect them enough-we want them to have the whole learning process.

Nina: That's what we're fighting against. If, at the end of the day, everything is okay for you-well, it may for you, but what about everyone else?

Gabby: In my house, we say, "It's not me versus you-it's us versus the problem."

Katy: Whenever I visit private schools, someone pulls me aside and says, "I care about social justice. I shouldn't work here." Have you ever felt that way?

Nina: Before I worked at Sheridan, I taught in public schools. I know not all public schools are the same, but I felt like I was hurting children due to high stakes tests and inappropriate tasks. We weren't encouraged to talk about race, even though the city was really segregated. I wanted to work at a progressive school and the most progressive ones are private. We have a lot more flexibility and freedom. I think about how I'm teaching kids who have access to power and it's really important that they know about these systems of oppression. So many public school teachers are doing so many amazing things-just the constraints of the system really got me down. Know what's best for you and be kind to yourself-so many teachers aren't, and they burn out.

Gabby: If you understand systemic oppression, there is such an opportunity for change in terms of having access to folks in the top 1% during such formative years. It's powerful and you can't deny that. Beyond that, creating a space that inundated these messages-even in the best public school, I can't imagine having that freedom. I will also say, we applied to different jobs every year. And we were not in the minority-we have other friends of color who worked at private schools and we all talked to get a pulse on where you can be treated well. We know our value and then we know what mission statements are trendy at private schools-we're well-educated women of color.

Nina: Every day at Sheridan I'm reminded that representation matters. I was explaining it was okay to say "Indian American" and how I call myself Asian American and how Asians are the majority of the world. We had a student who was East Asian adopted by white parents and the next week I heard her say, "I'm Asian American" for the first time. No one had ever modeled that you could say that because everyone she knows is white.
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Gabby: And the modeling-that intimacy. We love these kids. We love them to pieces. They knew, the families knew. That's what kept us afloat even when it was hard. For me, the narrative so often goes around the white kids when we talk about this. But there are other kiddos in those rooms and I think we always thought of them first. It was really powerful for us and for them that we were there for them. They also deserve women of color teachers who love them fiercely and can give them the tools they need as they navigate the world so they can value themselves and self-advocate and all of that. A lot of times it sounds like "we're talking about private schools, we're talking about white kids," but so much of the fight is for them.

Gabby Arca is currently the Special Education teacher at a bilingual public elementary school in Oregon. She's passionate about supporting all kids in being their best selves, and in honing their voice for themselves and others.

Nina Sethi is currently a 3rd grade teacher, the Co-Teaching Faciliator, and a faculty facilitator of a Students of Color affinity group at an independent school. Learn more about Nina & Gabby's work at teachpluralism.squarespace.com and @teachpluralism.

REFERENCES
Jones, S. (2020). Ending curriculum violence. Teaching Tolerance, 64. https://www.tolerance.org/magazine/spring-2020/ending-curriculum-violence

1 The discussion prompts included the following questions: Why were some people given more votes than others? Was this an accurate representation of those with more or less power in the world? What examples can you think of where this might play out in the world? The homework was to respond to the following prompt: "I used to think ___, but now I think ___."

2 Editors' note: This point Gabby and Nina make about analogs with real world applications is crucial. We do not recommend engaging students in simulations that directly replicate injustice (e.g., holding a mock slave auction). Also, be careful never to assign students roles because of their real-world identities so as not to retraumatize or tokenize them. See Stephanie Jones' (2020) work on curriculum violence for more on this.

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Teaching for Social Justice at the Elementary Level

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We are halfway through our presentation at a conference. Participants are buzzing about the simulation they just experienced and asking procedural questions, sharing their responses and reactions. Then the inevitable happens. Someone asks, "How do you handle your students feeling guilt or shame? I don't want to make my students feel bad."

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https://rethinkingschools.org/articles/the-young-people-s-climate-conference/

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Teaching Global Warming to 3rd Graders

By Rowan Shafer

Illustrator: Erik Ruin

Erik Ruin

The room was bustling with 28 3rd graders diligently working in pairs and practicing their scripts for next week's "People's Climate Summit." The 8- and 9-year-olds were discussing parts, devising props and costumes, and sounding out Bengali words and scientific terms.

"Ms. Shafer, what is a gla-ker?"

Paris, her partner Adrian, and I looked at their script and sounded out the word "glacier" together.

"I remember what a glacier is. That's what's melting in the North Pole!" Adrian exclaimed.

"Exactly, Adrian. But does your character live in the North Pole?"

"No, Nancy Tanaka lives in Oregon," he responded. We looked at a map of North America. Most of my New Orleanian students hadn't heard of Oregon before.

"I didn't know we had glaciers, are they melting here too? Isn't that bad?" Paris asked.

This was one moment, of many, when I wondered how to answer an 8-year-old.

When I began brainstorming this unit, the 2015 United Nations Climate Conference in Paris had just ended; I thought about how I could use this significant event as a way to teach my students about climate change. Was this global concern too big and abstract to address with 3rd graders? How could I bring up an issue so complex, so gloom and doom? How could I not? I was concerned about how environmental issues are often taught to young children in a way that is artificially divorced from social concerns, and I felt learning about the pressing issue of climate change could not wait until my students were older.

I knew my students would have myriad experiences relating to this crucial topic, and that most of their knowledge wasn't coming from school. In Louisiana, there are pretty clear real-life examples of climate change negatively affecting my students in their own backyard. Changing weather patterns, sea levels, and temperatures influenced the magnitude of Hurricane Katrina; rapid coastal erosion - at the rate of a football field per hour - is compounded by rising sea levels and the continued destruction of wetlands for human use (including for the Gulf Coast oil industry); and "Cancer Alley" is the nearby petrochemical industrial corridor in predominantly poor, African American communities between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

While most white and middle-class children attend private schools in New Orleans, my public charter has prioritized creating an institution that reflects the diverse neighborhood around it. With a majority African American and low-income student population, and a full-inclusion model, my school is known as one of the most diverse public charters in the city. I wanted to not just teach what climate change is, but to frame it as a social and environmental justice issue my students could directly relate to and take action to change.

The inspiration for this unit came from Bill Bigelow's article "Climate Change Mixer" in Rethinking Schools' A People's Curriculum for the Earth. In the introductory activity, each student takes on the role of someone affected by climate change and, walking around the room, meets people from the world as they tell their stories based on short autobiographies. I was inspired by the active, yet profound way high school students were learning about the climate crisis and believed my 3rd-grade students could too. I created a unit around a "People's Climate Summit" in which 3rd graders would present mostly underepresented voices of people around the world in a conference-like group performance. The conference was the culmination of students' learning about the topic, and led to students taking action around Congress' upcoming decision to adopt the U.N. agreement.

Setting the Stage

To begin this unit, I showed students a short clip from the U.N. conference panning all of the global leaders as they announced the agreement in various languages. "Hundreds of leaders who live in different places and speak different languages came together to make a decision about something that affects the whole world," I explained. Animated chatter stirred in the classroom; many students excitedly pointed out President Obama on the screen. "These leaders from around the world had a big decision to make about the whole Earth. But only the leaders from each country were there. Not everyone's voices were heard," I told them, setting up a scenario. "It is going to be your job, in the next month, to prepare for our own conference where you will represent regular people from all over the world. This is so important that you're each going to get to write President Obama and tell him what you think he should do. But first, we need to learn about something called global warming."

Big Issues, Small Kids

"Who knows what global warming is?" Some students had never heard the term before while others had a lot to share. They referenced pollution from cars and garbage, concerns about endangered species, and changing temperatures at the beach.

During the first half of this unit, I focused on providing the scientific background students needed in order to interact with the larger concepts of climate change (such as the composition of the Earth's atmosphere and phases of matter). These were big, abstract ideas for 3rd graders. The notion that the air around us is composed of different molecules, let alone that this is changing, was hard to grasp.

"The atmosphere is all around us, it's the air we breathe. We can't see it, but without it, humans, animals, and plants couldn't live on Earth. It's made up of tiny parts called molecules. Who's heard of oxygen before?" Lots of hands shot up. "That's one of the molecules! A really important one that plants breathe in is called carbon dioxide." I used lots of visuals, including YouTube videos like Climate Change for Kids and Climate Change (according to a kid), to help students understand the science behind global warming. The videos shied away from a lot of scientific vocabulary and instead used animated representations like color-coded cartoon molecules of greenhouse gases to demonstrate how industrial sources are increasing the "blanket" of these molecules around the Earth, trapping heat inside. I used these visuals to build a common vocabulary and a conceptual understanding of the human impact of global warming: We are upsetting a natural balance of the Earth by producing more and more greenhouse gases that keep heat from the sun inside our atmosphere, while cutting down plants that use up carbon dioxide. The result is that our planet is getting warmer, which is causing dangerous changes. I then had students illustrate their own diagrams of global warming as a way to assess their understanding. Most drew pictures of the Earth getting hotter and hotter due to ball-like molecules of carbon dioxide forming a barrier and balls of solar energy bouncing around inside. Once I knew my students had a common foundation, I presented the problem of global warming as both an environmental and social issue.

"Why is this a problem?" I asked. "Is this a problem just for animals?"

"No," Dante piped in. "We're polluting the air, and people can't breathe. Sometimes in other countries people have to wear masks because the air is bad to breathe." This really concerned students, and I could tell it made an impression on them.

"My mom said Hurricane Katrina happened because of global warming." So far all of the class examples were about abstract, faraway places, so I was grateful to Janelle for bringing the issue close to home.

Instead of discussing scientific concepts we hadn't studied, such as how warmer waters influence air masses and weather patterns, I decided to focus on the connection between the storm surge, rising sea levels, and coastal erosion. So the next day I started with a question: "When ice melts and melts and melts in Antarctica, where does it go?" They were stumped. I tried again. "When an ice cube melts in your soda, what happens?" It gets watery, they agreed. "So when glaciers melt into the ocean what happens to the ocean?"

"There's more water!" Paris exclaimed.

I used this analogy to help students visualize global rising sea levels and coastal land loss. To illustrate one of the ways climate change is affecting our state, I showed a video from the U.S. Geological Survey showing coastal land loss in Louisiana in fast motion over 50 years. You can literally see peninsulas about two hours from New Orleans shrink to tiny islands. "The land we're losing in Louisiana is our natural sponge to soak up huge waves from hurricanes before they get to where people live. Now," I asked the class, "do you think all those global leaders who met in Paris had an important job to do?"

Adapting the Activity for Elementary School Students

I knew right away that a mixer in which students walk around the room and introduce their characters to each other was too advanced for my class; I needed to create a structure in which I could guide them through the complicated ideas each character would present. Making this into a presentation with an audience could motivate students to take more ownership over their role. So I modified the mixer into a performance modeled after an actual conference.

Next, I set about adapting the content. I rewrote each script from Bigelow's original high school mixer, replacing big words and concepts with more accessible ones. There were a few parts that were just too complex, but I tried to preserve the big ideas as much as possible. For example, part of a Russian oil executive's write-up (one of the characters who "benefits" from climate change) read, "Already our competitors in Norway - Statoil - are working on project Snow White, which will generate an estimated $70 billion in liquefied natural gas over the next 30 years. I'm not going to sit back and let the Norwegians or anyone else beat me out of this new business opportunity." I changed this to "A company in Norway is expected to make $70 billion from drilling in their part of the Arctic. It's not fair for them to be the only ones to make money, I have a business to run!" I understood my students still weren't going to internalize everything each character talked about, so I planned several ways to scaffold students through these concepts as we went through the preparation and performance. I also adapted the script so two students played one character together. The length was more suitable for 3rd graders and also provided each student a peer helper.

To introduce the activity to the class, we revisited the idea that there were many people around the world whose voices were not heard at the Paris summit. We watched Democracy Now! clips of groups protesting outside the summit, such as Indigenous women from Ecuador and youth leaders from some of the countries most affected by climate change. To really engage students in the importance of their role, I wanted to appeal to their sense of fairness. I used a clip of Kichwa activist Nina Gualinga from Ecuador to get my students thinking about the injustice of only a few making a decision for the whole world:

Indigenous people should be inside the actual negotiations, but we are not. Those who are actually negotiating right now, they might not have to live with the consequences of climate change, but I will. I will have to live with it. My sister, my little brother, and my children, they're all going to have to live with the consequences of climate change.

The next day I told students we were going to have a people's climate conference right here at our school and that each of them would be representing a real person's voice. "Similar to the United Nations Climate Conference that happened in Paris last month," I read from the PowerPoint I had ready, "all your characters will meet at a conference and hear each different perspective. You will share your character's experiences of climate change, and hear how other characters feel similarly or different." I added, "There are also people who think climate change can mean good things for them. Some of you will be representing people in businesses who are making money from letting climate change continue. Is this wrong? You will have to decide what you think by listening to all the voices at the summit."

I wanted to give my students some context for the people they would be representing and meeting at the conference, so I decided to organize each of the characters by continent. On a slide of each continent I highlighted the location of each country. I then paired the maps of country locations with pictures of people (I tried to include non-stereotypical pictures of children) from that nation. After showing the pictures, I addressed issues of cultural representation in our performance.

"Your characters are based off of real people whose voices weren't heard at the conference in Paris. One way we're going to respect their voices is by not making up things about them we don't know," I instructed. "No one is going to use accents in their performances, OK? Because we don't know what the real people sound like, it's not respectful to guess."

By the time we'd gone through the slideshow, viewing where each character was from, the students were hooked and couldn't wait to get their parts. I passed out the role descriptions I had purposefully assigned to each pair considering students' interests and strengths. Some scripts were even designed with a specific student in mind. For example, one might have simpler vocabulary for a student who was learning English as a second language, or a short passage for a student with autism to recite with prompts. I started to circulate, checking for conceptual understandings particular to each reading.

I also encouraged students to think of props they might bring to help illustrate something about their character. I used "clues from the text" to steer most students toward props like a basket of apples for Oregon farmers.

The People's Climate Conference

We spent three days preparing for the performances. Students were more engaged than I had anticipated. Joseph, for example, one of my most struggling readers, came back after the weekend and had memorized his whole script, proudly reciting the Bengali river names he practiced. "I am the mayor of Antapara, a village in Bangladesh," he proclaimed. "Antapara is on the Brahmaputra River that flows from the Himalaya Mountains in India." Matthew was bursting to share the research he had done at home about the Ecuadorian Amazon, "I saw pictures of just dirt and mud where there used to be rainforest and homes, and those trees made the air cleaner too." Students worked with their partners to research and make the flag of their country, which, stapled to a straw, they stuck into Play-Doh on the music stand I fashioned as a podium for their presentations.

On performance day, our classroom was transformed into a conference room, with the chairs in rows facing the four-desk panel and podium. Performers were called up by their region, and sat at the desks facing the audience until it was their turn to speak. I projected the slideshow in the background, to help visually orient audience members to where we were in the world. As students performed, I wrote new keywords or significant phrases from their speeches on the whiteboard to help guide our debrief, and aid struggling students identify the big ideas on their guided notes handout.

When they were part of the audience, each student had a scavenger hunt handout on their clipboard that was also adapted from A People's Curriculum for the Earth. This was to help students organize the overload of information from these presentations into a recognizable, game-like framework. Students were asked to identify someone who is affected by climate change in a different way from their character or someone whose life will change because of climate change. Following each performer, I gave students a few minutes to finish scribbling down ideas or reading over what I wrote on the board. Then I asked volunteers to share one of the "find someone who" questions they answered and used this as a jumping-off point for a dialogue about the effects of climate change.

Matthew and Jaelyn represented Moi Enomenga, a Huaorani leader from Eastern Ecuador: "We say, 'leave the oil in the ground.' Oil kills the Huaorani through pollution and kills everyone through global warming. Why do rich companies come here? People from the richest and most crowded countries come here to take our resources."

I wrote phrases on the board from their speech such as "spilled millions of gallons of oil," "toxic rivers and streams," and "oil burned to make energy." Then I provided background information about oil extraction, describing the process of drilling and transporting oil across oceans to refineries. Paris made a connection to several oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico and a barge spill on the Mississippi in New Orleans. "The air smelled so bad," she said. Students responded to Enomenga's statements about rich countries exploiting poor countries. "They don't even want the oil!" Matthew exclaimed. "But getting it ruins their homes and poisons their water, and then they don't get any money. It's not fair."

We talked briefly after each performance, but I saved a lot of the conversations for the next few days. The purpose of the debrief was to unpack what students learned from the conference using their handouts and my notes on the board. It was an informal conversation in which I used students' questions and comments to draw a global picture of the climate crisis and the responses to it. I also explained some concepts I could tell were not understood during the performances, such as the new possibility of drilling in the Arctic or the processes of extracting, transporting, and storing fossil fuels and uranium.

Elementary Students Take Action

One performance discussed at length during our debrief was about Tuvalu. Aaron and Janelle, playing the prime minister of Tuvalu, shared that there will be no more Tuvalu in 20 years. "How can anyone say that people in Tuvalu should suffer so that people on higher land can continue to fill our atmosphere with carbon dioxide by driving their big cars and buying stuff made halfway around the world?" Janelle implored. "This is sick."

These words really stuck out to the class, and they referred over and over again to the disappearance of this Pacific island because of the choices of rich countries to not curb fossil fuel consumption.

I used this as an opportunity to talk about the institutional versus individual changes that curbing climate change would require because I wanted to make sure my students left this unit with a bigger picture. I steered the solutions we discussed to focus on larger systems such as governments holding polluters accountable, and whole countries curbing emissions. "It's important that we make sure we turn off the lights when we don't need them, or that we use fewer plastic water bottles. But that's not enough to help Tuvalu," I told them. "Prime Minister Sopoaga knows that it's companies that pull the oil out of the ground, or use energy in huge amounts that can make a big difference. Moi Enomenga knows that some of these American businesses go to other countries like Ecuador and damage his communities to get materials to sell, while they stay poor. But we can speak up and speak out like your characters, and tell these companies to change or tell the government to make them change."

The empathy that came from embodying characters whose voices were marginalized led to outrage and a sense of purpose. At this point, one of my students suggested that the biggest polluters - China and the United States - should be paying the people of Tuvalu when they have to move. I also shared videos of local environmental justice activists fighting oil refineries in mostly rural, poor, Black neighborhoods of Louisiana.

This unit illustrates my constant struggle with how to present and discuss complex issues with young kids, particularly because there is no easy solution for something like climate change. I wanted to discuss a relevant issue without reinforcing a feeling of helplessness. When dealing with such issues with elementary students, I tend to focus on education as the way students can take action because this can take the form of many age-appropriate activities like writing, performing, and/or creating a school-wide campaign. I emphasized the agency of "ordinary people" by making the conference a people's climate summit and empowering them to feel that all of us can use our voices to make change.

We ended the unit analyzing the Paris Climate Conference agreement and writing letters to President Obama. We used modified versions of a DOGO News article and an IndyKids article written by a 10-year-old to break down how the agreement sets out commitments to prevent global temperatures from rising past the two degrees Celsius threshold. The whole class was adamant that climate change was a pressing issue that our government needed to address. However, the group was divided about whether this agreement should be adopted. Some students thought it was a good goal. Others thought that because there weren't penalties for breaking the rules, it didn't hold polluters accountable.

Jewel wrote, "Dear President Obama, I think you and the U.S. government should not adopt the U.N. Climate Conference agreement because I don't think it will help. I think this because I'm very concerned about global warming because 14 percent of the world's greenhouse gases come from the United States. . . . When people signed they could raise the limit. And nothing or nobody is making them live up to their goal."

Dante referenced the institutional equity issues we discussed: "(Kenya) is not even polluting that much, and they're experiencing the worst effects. A woman named Wangari Maathai works in the Green Belt Movement and this is what she said: 'Wealthy countries who are polluting more should raise money for the ultimate victims of the crisis: the poor people of the world.' I agree with that! And I know that you might say that you are donating money to poor countries. But that's poor countries, not poor people."

I reflected on the unit after it was over and decided there were parts that worked well and parts I would do differently on the next go-around. I would have liked my students to be able to do more research about the countries and cultures they were representing, and less of me presenting. Also, our post-conference discussions were so rich that I would have liked more time with them and less time presenting background scientific information.

Climate change will undoubtedly be a pressing issue throughout my students' lifetimes. As this issue goes to press, Trump announced plans to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. Now, more than ever, I strongly believe that we can - and must - trust in young people's abilities to grapple with issues that impact them. My hope is that through exploring the scientific and social impacts of climate change early in their education, we can better prepare students to face the challenges of their world.
Resources

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By Rowan Shafer Illustrator: Erik Ruin The room was bustling with 28 3rd graders diligently working in pairs and practicing their scripts for next week's "People's Climate Summit." The 8- and 9-year-olds were discussing parts, devising props and costumes, and sounding out Bengali words and scientific terms. "Ms. Shafer, what is a gla-ker?"

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https://www.confluenceproject.org/wp-content/uploads/Storypath-Celilo_intro.pdf

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Fry Bread: A Native American Family's Story

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Fry Bread: A Native American Family's Story

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https://socialjusticebooks.org/fry-bread-2/

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Indigo’s Bookshelf: Voices of Native Youth

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Reviewed by Ashleigh (13), Alexis (19), Charlie (17), Langston (13), and Michael (18) Review Source: Indigo’s Bookshelf: Voices of Native Youth Book Author: There is no doubt about it–Native children’s literature and YA literature, fiction and nonfiction, is having a moment. Every time we turn arou…

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https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/566582/we-are-grateful-otsaliheliga-by-traci-sorell-author-frane-lessac-illustrator/

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We Are Grateful: Otsaliheliga by Traci Sorell: 9781580897723 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

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2019 Sibert Honor Book 2019 Orbis Pictus Honor Book NPR’s Guide To 2018’s Great Reads 2018 Book Launch Award (SCBWI) Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2018 School Library Journal Best...

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https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/652007/we-are-still-here-by-traci-sorell-author-frane-lessac-illustrator/

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We Are Still Here! by Traci Sorell: 9781623541927 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

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A 2022 American Indian Youth Literature Picture Book Honor Book A 2022 Robert F. Sibert Honor Book Twelve Native American kids present historical and contemporary laws, policies, struggles, and victories…

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https://socialjusticebooks.org/indian-no-more/

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Reviewed by Ashleigh, age 13

Review Source: Indigo's Bookshelf: Voices of Native Youth
Book Author: Charlene Willing McManis, Traci Sorell

Indian No More, by Charlene Willing McManis with Traci Sorell, is one of the best books I've ever read. Thank you to Tu Books and Stacy L. Whitman for sending @ofglades the uncorrected proof to review. At first, I was sorry it wasn't an audio book, because it is sometimes easier for me to listen to books. But just after reading the first chapter, "The Walking Dead"-SNAP!, the voice of ten year-old Regina Petit was in my head. It stayed there till the last page, and it's still talking to me now.

Regina says, "My family was Umpqua. I was Umpqua. That's just how it was." But it gets messy fast. She has always lived on the Grand Ronde reservation, thirty miles from Salem, Oregon, but Congress passes a bill that says that the Umpqua (and other tribes in Oregon) have been terminated. Regina's grandmother Chich tells her, "The President has just signed the bill from Congress saying that we're no longer Indian."

But before that we are treated to an exact, beautiful description of the res and the people there. You write about things this way if you really love them, even if they aren't perfect.

"Our house, with chipped white paint and warped boards, was surrounded by acres of tall grasses, plots of fragrant mock orange, and a forest filled with chirping squirrel and robins."

She says, "Getting a toilet inside was one of the happiest days of my life." But then she tells the tales her Daddy shared: "Old Sasquatch won't bother you. First, he's shy. Second, he's over six feet tall and smells like a wet dog. And third, well, if he does bother you, you must've been misbehaving."

Not everyone who lives on a reservation is alcoholic and unhappy! That's my experience, but not all young people know that. Ms. Charlene draws such a warm, pretty picture that you feel the loss of this place and fellowship like a stab to your heart. When Chich tells Regina what's happened, Ms. Charlene describes Chich's "scarred breakfast table."

Regina answers Chich saying they're no longer Indians by saying, "But....what if I still want to be one?" In spring 1957, her daddy signs them up for the Indian Relocation Program, they will go to Los Angeles:

"The summer morning we left, a misty fog covered the train station so thick that the morning sun struggled to peek through. Chich spoke in Chinuk Wawa to Aunt Rosie...When adults didn't want us kids to know what was going on, they usually spoke it."

"The train's wheels pounded the tracks, like beating a log drum. Windows shook like dance rattles. I looked outside. Darkness looked back."

Daddy is optimistic, though Chich tells Regina and her sister Peewee about an earlier time in 1856 when the Umpqua were relocated to the reservation where the girls grew up. Continue reading.

Indian No More by Charlene Willing McManis, Traci Sorell
Published by Lee & Low Books on September 24, 2019
Genres: American Indians, First Nations, Metis, Inuit
Reading Level: Grades 3-5, Grades 6-8
ISBN: 9781620148396
Review Source: Indigo's Bookshelf: Voices of Native Youth
Buy at Powell's Books
Also by this author: We Are Grateful: Otsaliheliga, At the Mountain's Base

Publisher's Synopsis: Regina Petit's family has always been Umpqua, and living on the Grand Ronde reservation is all ten-year-old Regina has ever known. Her biggest worry is that Sasquatch may actually exist out in the forest. But when the federal government signs a bill into law that says Regina's tribe no longer exists, Regina becomes "Indian no more" overnight--even though she was given a number by the Bureau of Indian Affairs that counted her as Indian, even though she lives with her tribe and practices tribal customs, and even though her ancestors were Indian for countless generations.

With no good jobs available in Oregon, Regina's father signs the family up for the Indian Relocation program and moves them to Los Angeles. Regina finds a whole new world in her neighborhood on 58th Place. She's never met kids of other races, and they've never met a real Indian. For the first time in her life, Regina comes face to face with the viciousness of racism, personally and toward her new friends.

Meanwhile, her father believes that if he works hard, their family will be treated just like white Americans. But it's not that easy. It's 1957 during the Civil Rights Era. The family struggles without their tribal community and land. At least Regina has her grandmother, Chich, and her stories. At least they are all together.

In this moving middle-grade novel drawing upon Umpqua author Charlene Willing McManis's own tribal history, Regina must find out: Who is Regina Petit? Is she Indian? Is she American? And will she and her family ever be okay?

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Reviewed by Ashleigh, age 13 Review Source: Indigo's Bookshelf: Voices of Native Youth Book Author: Indian No More, by Charlene Willing McManis with Traci Sorell, is one of the best books I've ever read. Thank you to Tu Books and Stacy L. Whitman for sending @ofglades the uncorrected proof to review.

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https://www.bychristineday.com/i-can-make-this-promise

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A Charlotte Huck Award for Outstanding Fiction for Children Honor Book! One of NPR's Favorite Books of 2019! A School Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, and Chicago Public Library Best Book of 2019! A Publishers Weekly Flying Start selection! A contender for the 2020 Global Read Aloud!
-Hayley Chewins, author of The Turnaway Girls
"Day's novel brings an accessible, much-needed perspective about the very real consequences of Indigenous children being taken from their families and Native Nations. The absence of one's tribal community, loss of culture and lack of connection to relatives have ripple effects for generations."
-Traci Sorell (Cherokee Nation), award-winning author of We Are Grateful: Otsaliheliga

"A truly enticing, beautifully written story that delivers a historical reveal at just the right time." -Betsy Bird, A Fuse #8 Production (SLJ Blog)

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A Charlotte Huck Award for Outstanding Fiction for Children Honor Book! One of NPR's Favorite Books of 2019! A School Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, and Chicago Public Library Best Book of 2019! A Publishers Weekly Flying Start selection! A contender for the 2020 Global Read Aloud!

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Learning for Justice: Teaching Hard History - Grades K-5 Resource page

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Learning for Justice: Teaching Hard History - Grades K-5 Resource page

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Skip to main content

Our youngest students deserve a truthful, age-appropriate account of our past. These resources for elementary educators include a first-of-its-kind framework, along with student texts, teaching tools and professional development for anyone committed to teaching this hard history.

Download the Framework

Here are a few key elements of the framework and the accompanying resources:

Key Concepts
The foundation of the K-5 and 6-12 frameworks, the Key Concepts pinpoint 10 important ideas that all students must understand to truly grasp the historical significance of slavery. Explored through Essential Knowledge in the elementary grades and Summary Objectives in middle and high school teaching, the Key Concepts serve as tools educators can use to structure their teaching.

Essential Knowledge
Each of the 20 "Essential Knowledge" sections identifies an age-appropriate understanding for students to reach and outlines additional information that will help them get there. It also offers recommendations for supporting student learning. Essential Knowledge items 1-10 are designed for K-2 students, and items 11-20 are designed for students in grades 3-5.

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Our youngest students deserve a truthful, age-appropriate account of our past. These resources for elementary educators include a first-of-its-kind framework, along with student texts, teaching tools and professional development for anyone committed to teaching this hard history. Download the Framework

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Pulitzer Center: The 1619 Project Curriculum

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Pulitzer Center: The 1619 Project Curriculum

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The 1619 Project Curriculum in Lesson Plan Grouping - The 1619 Project, inaugurated with a special issue of The New York Times Magazine, challenges us to reframe U.S. history by marking the year when the first enslaved Africans arrived on Virginia soil as our nation’s foundational date. Here you wil…

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Oregon's Civil Rights Years - The Eugene Story

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Oregon's Civil Rights Years - The Eugene Story

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The 1960s and 70s brought conflict and change to the United States. Like the rest of the country, the civil rights years brought excitement and tension to Oregon. Come listen to stories from those years-stories of struggle, resilience, and uplift.

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The 1960s and 70s brought conflict and change to the United States. Like the rest of the country, the civil rights years brought excitement and tension to Oregon. Come listen to stories from those years-stories of struggle, resilience, and uplift.

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Smithsonian Magazine: The Wampanoag Indian Thanksgiving story deserves to be known

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Smithsonian Magazine: The Wampanoag Indian Thanksgiving story deserves to be known

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"The antidote to feel-good history is not feel-bad history, but honest and inclusive history." -James W. Loewen, Plagues & Pilgrims: The Truth about the First Thanksgiving
The Thanksgiving story you know and the one I know are most likely the same. It's the story deeply rooted in America's curriculum-the one that inspires arguably the most important and tradition-filled holiday in American culture. We're taught that in 1620 the Pilgrims fled harsh religious suppression in Britain, sailed across the Atlantic, and in December stepped ashore at Plymouth Rock, in what is now Massachusetts. With little food and no shelter, the colonists struggled to survive a brutal winter until a friendly Indian, Squanto, came along and showed them how to cultivate crops. Their first harvest resulted in a feast, as the Pilgrims gave thanks to the kind Indians for helping to bring the colony back to life.

This version of Thanksgiving, while pleasant, isn't terribly accurate. Told from a perspective that frames the Pilgrims as the main characters, the story leaves out major details, glorifying the Pilgrims' endeavor and the holiday it birthed, forcing the Wampanoag Indians into forgotten roles. It also erases a monumentally sad history. When we pay homage to the Pilgrims and their bravery, and react to the tragic background of America's founding myth with silence, we essentially support a mindset that only some people's history matters.

The true history of Thanksgiving begins with the Indians.

About four years before the Pilgrims anchored off Massachusetts, British fishermen had already started making their way through New England, storming through Indian towns to kidnap Native people for profit in the slavery trade. Although it's often left out of textbooks, this series of intrusions was the catalyst to what is probably the most important event in this nation's history, without which Europeans would not have been able to settle on top of the millions of Native people who already lived in America-at least, not as fast: epidemic illness.

Before 1492, the Western Hemisphere was largely isolated, sparing its indigenous peoples from diseases the rest of the world succumbed to time and time again. But this lack of contact prevented Natives of the Americas from developing any type of immunity to European, Asian, and African pathogens. When Europeans started trekking through Indian towns, they brought sickness with them. Indians died at an alarming rate, making it substantially easier for colonists to overpower entire villages-well, what was left of them.

The Pilgrims already believed they were part of God's plan. Finding empty villages as 90 percent-yes, 90 percent-of America's Indians perished in front of them only furthered Europeans' sense of their destiny, influencing them to continue the colonization westward. As Jolene Rickard (Tuscarora) and Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche) wrote in Our Peoples: Giving Voice to Our Histories, one of the opening exhibitions at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, "That initial explosion of death is one of the greatest tragedies in human history because it was unintended, and unavoidable, and even inevitable. But what happened in its wake was not."

One people who famously suffered from the onslaught of disease were the Wampanoag, a nation made up of 69 villages scattered throughout present-day Rhode Island and Massachusetts. Skilled hunters, gatherers, farmers, and fishers during spring and summer, the Wampanoag moved inland to more protected shelter during the colder months of the year. Like indigenous groups everywhere, the Wampanoag had a reciprocal relationship with nature and believed that as long as they gave thanks to the bountiful world, it would give back to them. Long before the arrival of the Pilgrims, the Wampanoag held frequent Thanksgiving-like celebrations, giving thanks in the form of feasts and ceremonial games.

Exposed to new diseases, the Wampanoag lost entire villages. Only a fraction of their nation survived. By the time the Pilgrim ships landed in 1620, the remaining Wampanoag were struggling to fend off the Narragansett, a nearby Native people who were less affected by the plague and now drastically outnumbered them.

For a moment of history, the interests of the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag aligned. When the Pilgrims landed in New England, after failing to make their way to the milder mouth of the Hudson, they had little food and no knowledge of the new land. The Wampanoag suggested a mutually beneficial relationship, in which the Pilgrims would exchange European weaponry for Wampanoag for food. With the help of an English-speaking Patuxet Indian named Tisquantum (not Squanto; he spoke English because he was kidnapped and sold in the European slave trade before making his way back to America), the Pilgrims produced a bountiful supply of food that summer. For their part, the Wampanoag were able to defend themselves against the Narragansett. The feast of indigenous foods that took place in October 1621, after the harvest, was one of thanks, but it more notably symbolized the rare, peaceful coexistence of the two groups.

The events that followed in New England also depart from the Thanksgiving ideal we celebrate. To read what happened to the New England Indians later in the 17th century, see the museum's earlier post Do Indians Celebrate Thanksgiving?

Lindsay McVay is a senior at the University of Central Florida, majoring in writing and rhetoric. Her professional experience includes writing grants for nonprofits; contributing to blogs, especially Book Baristas; and designing websites for Florida independent publishers. During the fall of 2017, Lindsay has worked as an intern in Marketing and Communications at the National Museum of the American Indian.

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Everyone's history matters: The Wampanoag Indian Thanksgiving story deserves to be known

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The Thanksgiving story deeply rooted in America's school curriculum frames the Pilgrims as the main characters and reduces the Wampanoag Indians to supporting roles. It also erases a monumentally sad history. The true history of Thanksgiving begins with the Indians.

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National Museum of the American Indian: Resources on Teaching Thanksgiving (among others!)

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National Museum of the American Indian: Resources on Teaching Thanksgiving (among others!)

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NMAI is committed to advancing knowledge and understanding of the Native cultures of the Western Hemisphere through partnership with Native people and others. The museum works to support the continuance of culture, traditional values, and transitions in contemporary Native life.

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Decolonizing Thanksgiving: A Toolkit for Combatting Racism in Schools

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Decolonizing Thanksgiving: A Toolkit for Combatting Racism in Schools

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Rethinking Thanksgiving: Myths and Misgivings (Rethinking Schools)

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Rethinking Thanksgiving: Myths and Misgivings (Rethinking Schools)

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By Vera L. Stenhouse

Illustrator: Eric Hanson

Illustration: Eric Hanson

In 2006, an Atlanta newspaper ran several photos with captions describing the celebration of the Thanksgiving holiday. The first picture featured a 5-year-old girl wearing a precision-cut fringe vest made out of a brown paper bag from a local grocery store (as identified by the store name and tagline detailed prominently in big blue letters on the vest). On top of her head sat a multicolored feather headdress made of construction paper. The caption under the picture read: "Feathers in her cap. Ava adjusts the headdress of her American Indian costume for a Clairemont Elementary School Thanksgiving feast. More photos from the feast are on page J9."

Page J9 includes three additional pictures-one showing a group of Pilgrims (with white paper collars and hats) and Indians (as identified by their feather headdresses, of course). A second picture shows students in "costume" working on a coloring project and a third captures a student showing off his "homemade American Indian costume." Between the pictures it reads: "Clairemont Elementary School studied American Indians and Pilgrims in preparation for today's big holiday. Last week, they re enacted the first Thanksgiving and dressed in costumes for a feast with family members." In the center is the phrase "Thanks for the lessons."

What lessons did they learn? Between Columbus Day in October and Thanksgiving in November, Native Americans [the "official" curricular name in Georgia] play a key role in the mythology of U.S. history as taught in schools. As someone who works with pre- and inservice elementary teachers, I see firsthand how these happy stories maintain children's ignorance and reinforce stereotypes.

The traditional first Thanksgiving story recounts Pilgrims from Europe settling in the wilds of the New World and celebrating their survival by sharing their bountiful feast with the Indians. As my students learn, this version of Thanksgiving is inaccurate. The Pilgrims did leave Europe and comprised 35 out of 102 colonists traveling on the Mayflower, eventually settling in 1621 at Patuxet-aka Plimoth. The "new" and "wild" world to which they arrived was neither new, wild, or unnamed, thanks to the Wampanoag, the indigenous people who lived there. Given the Pilgrims' ignorance of the "new" land, their survival was made possible through indigenous knowledge, labor, harvest traditions, and trade. Most significant to the first Thanksgiving story: According to the Wampanoag and the ancestors of the Plimoth settlers, no oral or written account confirms that the first Thanksgiving actually occurred between them in 1621. The Wampanoag, however, did participate in daily and seasonal thanksgivings for thousands of years prior to the Pilgrims' arrival.

Beyond the inaccuracy of the first Thanksgiving story itself are its omissions: Colonists initially stolebushels of corn buried and stored by Wampanoag families for their own use, robbed graves and homes, and left diseases that devastated (albeit unintentionally) Native American communities, subsequently enabling European settlers to overtake Indian land.

The traditional Thanksgiving story is continuously retold through plays, activities, worksheets, and children's books, perpetuating misinformation and stereotypes that maintain a deep misunderstanding of American Indian history and current issues. Thanksgiving Day, for example, is considered a Day of Mourning by many American Indians-a time to acknowledge the ongoing painful legacy of removal from their homelands, enslavement, and deaths from diseases. Thanksgiving images further negate significant cultural and sacred distinctions among indigenous peoples. Long feather headdresses and tipis are not part of an accurate portrayal of Northeast Coast Native Americans. Thanksgiving pictures tend to depict garments and housing of Plains Indians, whom the Pilgrims would have not met.

As a teacher of teachers, I attempt to engage students in a more accurate, inclusive, and culturally respectful approach to a time in history that began to set the pattern for U.S. race relations. I choose to critique the first Thanksgiving story because of its familiarity, inclusion in so many schools' curricula, and persistent misrepresentation of Indians and Pilgrims.

Flipping the Script on the First Thanksgiving

Before launching into the myths and omissions surrounding the "first Thanksgiving," I ask my teacher education students what they already know about the event: Who celebrated the original Thanksgiving and when? What was celebrated and for how long? Who initiated the celebration? Why? Where did the event take place?

My students find the details difficult to recall. Generally, their contributions reflect a disjointed recollection: Pilgrims and Indians; something about religious persecution; the Mayflower; Jamestown, Va.; an abundant harvest after tough times; the Pilgrims' generosity toward the Indians; and three days of fun, games, and eating popcorn, turkey, and pie. Sometimes students suggest names of actual "Indians" like the Sioux or Cherokee nations or people such as Sacagawea, Squanto, or Pocahontas.

I challenge my students' knowledge about Pilgrims, Indians, and Thanksgiving through a series of exploratory activities using elementary-appropriate materials. I designed activities meant to model how they might introduce a critique of Thanksgiving to their own elementary students that also identifies stereotypes about Native Americans and explores the events surrounding 1621. The activities require my students to work first within and then across small groups to compare and contrast the histories of the "Indians" and "Pilgrims," separate fact from fiction about the Thanksgiving story, and uncover new information concerning Native Americans past and present.

For one activity, I divide a set of students into "Indians" and "Pilgrims." Both groups visit www.plimoth.org/education/olc/index_js2.html#, a website elementary teachers and students could use that offers an interactive timeline with key dates in the history of the Wampanoag and the Pilgrims. I send the students to the "path to 1621" for their respective group's story. The "Indians" follow the Wampanoag ancestor Ahsaupwis' story and the "Pilgrims" follow English ancestor Remember Allerton. In the penultimate phase of the activity, I combine the "Indians" and "Pilgrims" and tell them to create a Venn diagram comparing and contrasting what they learned.

Other student groups work to determine the facts, fictions, and omissions of the first Thanksgiving story using a selection of traditional first Thanksgiving picture books. To add to their critique, students receive additional texts that provide perspectives and information often distorted or omitted in traditional texts.I send the students to partner-read their selected books with questions: From whose perspective is the story told? Whose voices are active and passive? What words are used to describe the groups? Whose story has the most detail? What details were offered or implied in the text or illustrations about Thanksgiving and each group's lifestyle (e.g., food, clothing, beliefs, and traditions)? Are the illustrations accurate? How do you know?

After partner-reading, students read the short version of Judy Dow and Beverly Slapin's article " Deconstructing the Myths of The First Thanksgiving." I tell them to mark new and surprising information. Typically during this activity, as students read and discuss, I'll overhear one say, "So there was no Thanksgiving at all? I'm confused." I clarify that although the Thanksgiving story as told is not historically accurate, Native Americans and Pilgrims had thanksgiving traditions exclusive of each other.

When the groups reconvene as a whole class, I ask each to report what they learned and to share what they believe to be the main points of their activities. It is clear from their reactions that in most instances, the activities presented different depictions from what they had previously believed or known. As Lorrie said, "I remember learning about a huge friendly feast between 'Pilgrims' and 'Indians.' It was taught almost as though it was a culmination of a friendship that had been building from day one."

Charlie commented, "I remember making the feather headdress for Thanksgiving. I had no idea it could be inaccurate, let alone inappropriate." Students often remark on the cultural disrespect implicit in illustrating Thanksgiving stories with clothing that the Wampanoag didn't wear.

By the end of our re-examination of Thanksgiving, students grow anxious and begin to consider if and how they might integrate a more critical perspective of Thanksgiving with their own students. As Iris later wrote:

So, how do we go about talking about Thanksgiving now that we have all of this new information? How should we treat it with our students? Truly, it is not a day of Thanksgiving for all people in this country. I am at a loss now. I think that we could approach it with the new information that Ms. Stenhouse gave us and debunk some of these myths for our students, but I'm beginning to question what the bigger message should be. Is the holiday real? Is there really something to celebrate? I mean, sure, I'm glad to be here, and I'm thankful for the blessings in my life, but am I celebrating at the expense of others? If I do teach my children that the coming of the settlers was at the indigenous people's expense, will they want to continue celebrating this day? Will their parents thank me if I do? I am not sure how to proceed.

My response to Iris' conundrum and to students who ask "now what?" starts with prompting my students to generate alternative ideas for teaching Thanksgiving. I want them to start thinking about how they might use or adapt our activities or their underlying concepts with their students. I notice that, as they share their ideas with each other, they introduce a variety of ways to reframe Thanksgiving based on what they experienced in class (for example, book critiques or use of the two-voice poem, as described in Rethinking Our Classrooms, Vol. 1) and begin to consider tactical approaches to parents' and administrators' potential concerns. Given my students' focus on the repercussions from school authorities, I also ask them to imagine for a moment what the first Thanksgiving story means for Native American children in their classes. And based on their own experiences, I ask them to keep in mind the lasting impressions about Indians and Pilgrims from their own schooling. I further encourage them to first find out what their students already know, which is how I started with them.

More recently, I have also begun showing a video clip of Monty, a former student of mine, who discusses how he addressed Thanksgiving with his 1st graders. After witnessing parents, students, and teachers delight in a Thanksgiving re-enactment held at his school, he determined he needed to provide his students with a more complex perspective of Native American-Pilgrim relations. Monty shares candidly the steps he took (including a trip to his principal's office) and the process he went through to teach his students about fairness through a lesson on the consequences of colonial encroachment on indigenous lands. Watching Monty adds a perspective to our discussion other than my own about the possibilities, relevance, and power of teaching critically at any grade level.

I know that what I am asking my students to consider is unsettling to many of them; however, I'm convinced that it is necessary in order for them to be the teachers they wish to be. In addition to our in-class discussion, I ask my students to continue thinking, problem-posing, and talking with me and each other through the class blogs and journals.

Waiting for Later to Disrupt the Status Quo

As preservice teachers, my students are overwhelmed by learning to teach the prescribed curriculum and consumed by their university schoolwork. They work in schools they assume are not populated by indigenous students or other students for whom it is relevant to know the unpleasant details of historical events. Why trouble a good story?

Silent in most discussions about indigenous peoples are the current realities of Native American life, including widespread poverty; relegation to reservations; the persistent political, social, and economic disregard for things cultural or sacred by the dominant U.S. society; and the advocacy necessary for linguistic, cultural, economic, and territorial sovereignty. I use the Thanksgiving story to provide an opportunity for my students to ask themselves, "If not me, who?" and "If not now, when?" as it relates to challenging the status quo.

In terms of measuring progress, we have come a long way from learning how to count to 10, one "Indian" at a time. Yet national multimillion-dollar franchise sports teams retain derogatory "Indian" names, logos, and chants; commercial products still utilize "Native" names and imagery as brands; and we still have the enduring uncritical portrayal of the first Thanksgiving. I believe a connection exists between the unwillingness to "give up" the beneficent 1621 Thanksgiving story and the ongoing appropriation of the imagery, spirituality, ceremonies, sovereign rights, and identity of this country's indigenous peoples. Students from all racial and cultural backgrounds learn early that it is OK to play Indian. They learn that Indians wear "costumes," feathers define cultural features for all Indians, and sacred cultural artifacts are crafts to be made from brown paper bags, paper towel rolls, paper plates, and construction paper. And after Thanksgiving, crafts and all, the "Natives" disappear back onto the shelf.

Confronting racism, injustice, prejudice, and stereotypes through a consciousness-raising education is a far cry from the fun-filled, feel-good activities characteristic of how schools approach holidays. With respect to indigenous peoples, I want my students to acknowledge the diverse and unique traditions among Native American cultures and to explore the historic and contemporary legacy of colonial intrusion, brutality, and cultural ignorance. As a teacher educator, I seek to invite my students on a journey of interrogating the fallacy of the "standard" curriculum as neutral and push them to develop an understanding of official knowledge as politically constructed and contestable. Critiquing received fact, such as the first Thanksgiving, is an integral piece of an overall critical approach to teaching and learning. I want my students to recognize that the histories of indigenous peoples have been subverted, silenced, and misrepresented in the curriculum. Equally important: I want my students to recognize that we can do something about it.
RESOURCES Evaluating resources about Native Americans:
Boston Children's Museum. Evaluating Resources: The Wampanoag in Teacher Resources on Native American History and Culture. ( www.bostonkids.org/educators/wampanoag/html/evaluate.htm)

Seale, D., and Slapin, B., eds. (2005)
A Broken Flute: The Native Experience in Books for Children. Lanham, Md.: Altamira Press.
Cultural appropriation in books for children. Evaluates hundreds of books for children and teenagers published from the early 1900s through 2004.
"Evaluating Children's Books for Bias." Integrating New Technologies into the Methods of Education. (www.intime.uni.edu/multiculture/curriculum/children.htm)
Wampanoag information past and present:
"Mashpee Wampanoag Timeline." Mashpee Wampanoag Tribal Website. ( mashpeewampanoagtribe.com/timeline.html)
Timeline of events from precolonial times to current federal recognition.

Boston Children's Museum. "People of the First Light." Teacher Resources on Native American History and Culture. ( www.bostonkids.org/educators/wampanoag)
Information and suggested activities about Wampanoag origins and life before, during, and after 1620; survival; and current day.
Teacher and student resources on Thanksgiving, Native Americans, and colonists:
Dow (Abenaki), J., and Slapin, B. " Deconstructing the Myths of The First Thanksgiving." Oyate. ( www.oyate.org/resources/longthanks.html)
Facts and fiction about the first Thanksgiving story, including critiqued excerpts from popular books.

Oyate. Primary Sources from a Colonialist Perspective. ( www.oyate.org/resources/booklistcolonialist.html)

Oyate. Recommended Books About Thanksgiving. ( www.oyate.org/resources/booklistrecommended.html)
Recommended books, links, and videos:
Goldstein, K. "As American as Pumpkin Pie." Plimoth Plantation.
( www.plimoth.org/discover/thanksgiving/pumkin-pie.php)
How, when, and why the "first Thanksgiving" came to be known as such.

Boston Children's Museum. Teacher Resources on Native American History and Culture. ( www.bostonkids.org/educators/wampanoag)
Wampanoag voices, information, and suggested activities.

Seale, D., Slapin, B., and Silverman, C., eds. (2001) Thanksgiving: A Native Perspective. Berkeley, Calif.: Oyate (available at www.oyate.org). Historical and contemporary information about Thanksgiving. Context and counterstories for a critical cultural approach to Thanksgiving.

Jones, G., and Moomaw, S. (2002) Lessons from Turtle Island: Native Curriculum in Early Childhood Classrooms. St. Paul, Minn.: Red Leaf Press.
Problems and appropriate alternatives to addressing Native peoples' experiences.

Loewen, J. (2007) Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. New York City: Touchstone Press.
Detailed information on the first Thanks-giving based on primary resources.

Bigelow, B., and Peterson, R., eds. (1998) Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years . Milwaukee: Rethinking Schools
Essays, poems, historical vignettes, and lesson plans.

Slapin, B., and Seale, S., eds. (2006) Through Indian Eyes: The Native Experience in Books for Children. University of California Press (available at www.oyate.org). Stereotypes and myths in children's literature.

Rethinking Schools. (2008) Unlearning "Indian" Stereotypes (DVD). Milwaukee: Rethinking Schools (available at www.rethinkschools.org). Introduction to Native American history through the eyes of children. Includes teaching ideas and resources.

Rosenstein, J. (1997) In Whose Honor? American Indian Mascots in Sports. New Day Films (available at www.oyate.org).
Examination of the use of racist logos, nicknames, and caricatures as "mascots" in college and professional sports-and the impact of this practice on Indian families and communities.

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Rethinking Thanksgiving: Myths and Misgivings - Rethinking Schools

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By Vera L. Stenhouse Illustrator: Eric Hanson In 2006, an Atlanta newspaper ran several photos with captions describing the celebration of the Thanksgiving holiday. The first picture featured a 5-year-old girl wearing a precision-cut fringe vest made out of a brown paper bag from a local grocery store (as identified by the store name and tagline detailed prominently in big blue letters on the vest).

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Oregon Department of Education: SB13 Tribal History/Shared History Professional Development Courses

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Oregon Department of Education: SB13 Tribal History/Shared History Professional Development Courses

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ATTENTION: Before attempting to access these courses, watch this video on how to correctly set up your iLearn account. Failure to set up your account correctly could significantly delay your access to the courses.

You can also use the following directions to set up your account. Select the iLearn account instructions sheet (either the text with screen shot images version or the text-only version) to establish an iLearn account. Once you have an iLearn account established you will be able to access the Professional Development Courses.

If you receive the following message when trying to access the courses: "This item cannot be opened due to the reasons listed below. Contact an administrator or manager to obtain access to the item." This video can help with updating your account.

Or follow these steps to update your account: Updating your Organization in iLearn (either the text with screen shot images version or the text-only version)

Click on the "+" to read the description of the Professional Development Course and to access the link to iLearn.

​​ SB13 Inservice​ is a storyboard project of short videos including presentations on the background of Senate Bill (SB) 13 Tribal History/Shared History, The Essential Understandings of Native Americans in Oregon process, The 6 P's (Critical Orientations for Indigenous Studies Curriculum), Tribal place-based curricula as well as lesson modeling demonstrations.

Module 1​ covers the follwing sections of the nine Essential Understandings:

Essential Understanding 1: Since Time Immemorial

Essential Understanding 2: Sovereignty

It is designed to support educators in building a foundation for teaching, training, and serving as a source of support, knowledge, and advocacy within their school, district, or organization for the Senate Bill 13 Tribal History/Shared History curriculum.

Module 2​​ covers the follwing sections of the nine Essential Understandings:

Essential Understanding 3: History

Essential Understanding 4: Tribal Government

It is designed to support educators in building a foundation for teaching, training, and serving as a source of support, knowledge, and advocacy within their school, district, or organization for the Senate Bill 13 Tribal History/Shared History curriculum.

Module 3​ covers the following sections of the nine Essential Understandings:

Essential Understanding 5: Identity

Essential Understanding 6: Lifeways

It is designed to support educators in building a foundation for teaching, training, and serving as a source of support, knowledge, and advocacy within their school, district, or organization for the Senate Bill 13 Tribal History/Shared History curriculum.

​

More modules coming soon!

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SB13 Tribal History/Shared History Professional Development Courses

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ATTENTION: Before attempting to access these courses, watch this video on how to correctly set up your iLearn account. Failure to set up your account correctly could significantly delay your access to the courses. You can also use the following directions to set up your account.

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ODE: 4th Grade Tribal History Lesson Plans

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ODE: 4th Grade Tribal History Lesson Plans

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Oregon Department of Education : 4th Grade Tribal History Lesson Plans : American Indian/Alaska Native Education : State of Oregon

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Lessons from the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde

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Lessons from the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde

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(Curated by grade level!)

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Mission Statement:

Welcome to the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde Tribal History curriculum unit. We appreciate that you are taking the time to learn and teach this curriculum to your class. This curriculum was created from the need for historically accurate and culturally relevant curriculum in Oregon schools about Oregon Native Americans and as a response to countless requests from Oregon teachers for classroom-ready materials on Native Americans. Our hope is that these lessons can be taught in a variety of settings and subjects - creating a more culturally responsive atmosphere for all students throughout all areas of their education experience. We hope you find these units useful and appreciate the positive difference you are making by teaching this as it will have an incredible impact on generations to come.
CTGR Tribal History Curriculum Feedback Form
Implementation

It is the intent that these lessons will be integrated into pre-existing school curriculums throughout the school year. They should be introduced to students as any other lesson would and can be applied in a variety of subject levels. While target "Native American Lessons and/or Learning Weeks" can convey much of the information and concepts, we encourage educators to approach these units/lessons as a classroom culture shift and use them to "sprinkle" culture throughout their curriculum. This conveys a message of inclusiveness and acceptance to students as they understand the concept of Native Americans' role in the present-day. While the lessons can be taught as small units, many also serve as stand-alone lessons and can be taught in conjunction with other non-Native curriculums.

The Tribal History Curriculum covers a wide variety of topics throughout multiple subjects.

o English Language Arts

o Science

o Social Studies

o Government

o World Trade

o US History

o Health

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Curriculum | Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde

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Welcome to the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde Tribal History curriculum unit. We appreciate that you are taking the time to learn and teach this curriculum to your class. This curriculum was created from the need for historically accurate and culturally relevant curriculum in Oregon schools about Oregon Native Americans and as a response to countless requests from Oregon teachers for classroom-ready materials on Native Americans.

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Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian: (So many resources!!)

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Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian: (So many resources!!)

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Native Knowledge 360° | Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian

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Educational resources, lesson plans, teacher training, and strategies to support positive change! Native Knowledge 360° is a national initiative to inspire and promote improved teaching and learning about Native America. #NK360

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Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian: Essential Understandings about American Indians!

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Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian: Essential Understandings about American Indians!

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Search: https://americanindian.si.edu/nk360/lessons-resources/search-resources to filter through lesson plans and other resources

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Native Knowledge 360° | Essential Understandings

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The National Museum of the American Indian’s Native Knowledge 360°: Essential Understandings about American Indians is a framework that allows you to see new possibilities for creating student learning experiences. #NK360

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Montana’s Indian Education for All: Model lesson plans on literature

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Montana’s Indian Education for All: Model lesson plans on literature

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montana office of public instruction website

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Indigenous STEAM - Indigenous science education resources

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Turtle Island Social Studies Collective Facebook Page

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Turtle Island Social Studies Collective Facebook Page

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For this , we want to continue our support for students and families by sharing online resources related to Indigenous education through technology and gaming. This week we are featuring apps and video games created by or in collaboration with Indigenous peoples. Listed next to each resource link is the ESRB rating (e.g., E for everyone, E 10+ for everyone 10 and older, T for teen) to assist parents, caregivers, and educators, but even the resources for the young... est among us are still fun for the whole family. The majority of these online platforms can all be accessed and downloaded free of charge.

Our post features Molly of Denali from PBS KIDS! Look for other games and descriptions in the comments!

"Go on adventures with Molly of Denali from PBS KIDS! In this app, kids ages 4-8 can play with Molly and friends in her Alaskan village, Qyah. Children can go on dog sledding missions, fish, create beading projects or help run the Denali Trading Post. The Molly of Denali app teaches children to use familiar texts such as books, diagrams, and captioned photos to solve problems, accomplish tasks, and help Molly's friends! The educational games in Molly of Denali support foundational literacy skills in using and understanding informational texts. (E) https://pbskids.org/apps/molly-of-denali.html (iPhone/Android)

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For this , we want to continue our support for students and families by sharing online resources related to Indigenous education through technology and gaming. This week we are featuring apps and video games created by or in collaboration with Indigenous peoples.

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Turtle Island Social Studies Collective

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American Indians in Children's Literature

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American Indians in Children's Literature

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American Indians in Children's Literature (AICL)

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Designed to help readers develop a critical eye about representations of American Indians in children's and young adult books

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The True, Grim Story of the First Thanksgiving

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The True, Grim Story of the First Thanksgiving

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The story of Thanksgiving helped create a common American heritage. But the so-called facts aren't so true. NPR's Bob Edwards explains that the real Thanksgiving was much more grim than grade school teachers will allow in the annual pageant.

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The True, Grim Story of the First Thanksgiving

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The story of Thanksgiving helped create a common American heritage. But the so-called facts aren't so true. NPR's Bob Edwards explains that the real Thanksgiving was much more grim than grade school teachers will allow in the annual pageant.

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Teaching Thanksgiving in a Socially Responsible Way

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Teaching Thanksgiving in a Socially Responsible Way

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School Thanksgiving activities often mean dressing children in "Indian" headdresses and paper feathers as they sing " My Country 'Tis of Thee" or " Mr. Turkey." Some teachers might even ask their students to draw themselves as Native Americans from the past, complete with feather-adorned headbands and buckskin clothing. These activities might seem friendly and fun, unless you are aware of how damaging this imagery is to perceptions of contemporary Native peoples. This imagery contributes to the indoctrination of American youth into a false narrative that relegates Indigenous peoples to the past and turns real human beings into costumes for a few days a year. It's not just bad pedagogy; it's socially irresponsible.

Native Americans have been speaking out and writing back against the colonialist narrative of Thanksgiving for as long as the American narrative has existed. More recently, comedian Jim Ruel (Ojibwe) includes Thanksgiving in his act ( starting at 1:40 in this clip), Dr. Debbie Reese (Nambe Pueblo) writes about children's books that "set the record straight," and Native American students speak out about what Thanksgiving means to them.

Doris Seale (Santee/Cree) and Beverly Slapin (Dakota/Cree/Abenaki) edited A Broken Flute in 2005, which includes a chapter that deconstructs the myths perpetuated about the first Thanksgiving. This chapter also includes critical reviews of many books on the market or readily available in libraries and classrooms. Providing ample evidence that many non-Native publishers, illustrators and writers are missing the mark in several critical ways, these books exemplify the ineffectiveness of good intentions, the perpetuation of misinformation and the exclusion of Native American voices and experiences.

Teaching about Thanksgiving in a socially responsible way means that educators accept the ethical obligation to provide students with accurate information and to reject traditions that sustain harmful stereotypes about Indigenous peoples. Thankfully, there are excellent online resources that can help educators interested in disrupting the hegemonic Thanksgiving story.

Challenging the dominant and inaccurate narrative about Thanksgiving, providing students with a more balanced perspective of this oft-romanticized holiday, and refusing to dress students in feathered headbands are socially responsible actions. They're actions that every teacher should undertake to benefit their students and the society their students will inherit.

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Teaching Thanksgiving in a Socially Responsible Way

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Educators have an ethical obligation to teach accurately about Thanksgiving. Here are some online resources that can help.

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Indigenous People's History (Learning for Justice)

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Indigenous People's History (Learning for Justice)

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Co-hosted by experts from the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, this webinar will delve into the ways American history instruction often fails to acknowledge—and contributes to—the erasure of Indigenous stories and perspectives.

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Review from "Reading is Resistance PDX": Julián Is a Mermaid is written and illustrated by Jessica Love. This is a book that introduces young readers to a world of freedom of individual expression. The story takes place in an unnamed location, and the characters in the book appear to be of Latinx descent and speak both English and Spanish. The main indicator that the characters are Latinx is their use of Spanish. Without the use of Spanish words, the race/ethnicity of the characters would be unknown but potentially perceived as black or Latinx.

The author, Jessica Love is a straight, white cis woman. She personally does not fit the culture of the characters in her book; however, she focuses on teaching the importance of personal expression, love, and acceptance. As a genderfluid person, I didn’t see this as a transgender book, but more of about the freedom of gender expression. This book does a great job challenging the reader’s bias and the social norms around gender expression and identity.

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Reviewed by Beverly Slapin

Review Source: De Colores: The Raza Experience
Book Author: Jessica Love

Dear Readers-

Since I wrote and published our review of Julián Is a Mermaid (see it here), there has been much online discussion about this book. Dr. Laura Jiménez has just published a personal and profound essay - entitled Trans People Aren't Mythical Creatures - and, in the hopes that her writing will generate more of this important discussion, I asked her for permission to reprint portions of her essay here and she generously consented.

Dr. Jiménez's essay begins:

In research we often provide what is referred to as a positionality statement. It helps our readers understand who we are, how our experiences and identities effect our understandings of the subject we are writing about. Positionality statements help avoid the fiction that research is neutral. In the age of #OwnVoices I have come to realize, or maybe I have come to admit to the realization, that I believe an author's identity, community, and experiences inform the work they produce.

Then, Dr. Jiménez calls attention to the ramifications - of this story and its author/illustrator and its publication and the publishing industry - on the queer community and especially on queer young people. She writes,

Literacy is a social act, and I find that my reading of the world is better when done in collaboration with others who do not share my view of the world, my history, or my identity. So, I talked to teachers who are Dominican, to librarians, and finally, to a trans girl named Indigo.

Had I known then - when I read and loved and wrote about Julián Is a Mermaid - what I know now, I would not have published the review as I wrote it. What I felt then was the power and love that Julián's abuela felt in encouraging her young grandson to grow into his authentic self. This was apparent to me in the first few pages in which Julián looks questioningly at a picture book of mermaids that his abuela had given him. As the story progresses, Julián comes out to his abuela, becoming more and more secure in himself and how he "fits" into his community. That, to me, was what empowerment looked like.

But Dr. Jiménez saw something that I hadn't seen. Continue reading.

Julián is a Mermaid by Jessica Love
Published by Candlewick Press on 2018
Genres: Latinx
Pages: 40
Reading Level: Early Childhood, Grades 1-2
ISBN: 9780763690458
Review Source: De Colores: The Raza Experience in Books for Children

Publisher's Description:

In an exuberant picture book, a glimpse of costumed mermaids leaves one boy flooded with wonder and ready to dazzle the world.

While riding the subway home from the pool with his abuela one day, Julián notices three women spectacularly dressed up. Their hair billows in brilliant hues, their dresses end in fishtails, and their joy fills the train car. When Julián gets home, daydreaming of the magic he's seen, all he can think about is dressing up just like the ladies in his own fabulous mermaid costume: a butter-yellow curtain for his tail, the fronds of a potted fern for his headdress. But what will Abuela think about the mess he makes -- and even more importantly, what will she think about how Julián sees himself? Mesmerizing and full of heart, Jessica Love's author-illustrator debut is a jubilant picture of self-love and a radiant celebration of individuality.

Filed Under: Book Reviews

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Julián Is a Mermaid - Social Justice Books

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Reviewed by Beverly Slapin Review Source: De Colores: The Raza Experience Book Author: Dear Readers- Since I wrote and published our review of Julián Is a Mermaid (see it here), there has been much online discussion about this book. Dr. Laura Jiménez has just published a personal and profound essay - entitled Trans People Aren't Mythical Creatures [...]

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All Boys Aren't Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto

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All Boys Aren't Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto

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Review: "In a series of personal essays, prominent journalist and LGBTQIA+ activist George M. Johnson explores his childhood, adolescence, and college years in New Jersey and Virginia. From the memories of getting his teeth kicked out by bullies at age five, to flea marketing with his loving grandmother, to his first sexual relationships, this young-adult memoir weaves together the trials and triumphs faced by Black queer boys."

Both a primer for teens eager to be allies as well as a reassuring testimony for young queer men of color, All Boys Aren't Blue covers topics such as gender identity, toxic masculinity, brotherhood, family, structural marginalization, consent, and Black joy. Johnson's emotionally frank style of writing will appeal directly to young adults.

****An Amazon Best Book of the Year optioned for television by Gabrielle Union!*

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George M Johnson is an Award Winning Black Non-Binary Writer, Author, and Activist located in the NYC area. From the scores of places that George has written for to the outlets who have written about George, their connections in the media world run deep with his knowledge and expertise being called upon from publishing to the big screen.

They are the author of the Bestselling Young Adult memoir All Boys Aren't Blue discussing their adolescence growing up as a young Black Queer boy in New Jersey through a series of powerful essays. Their book has been optioned for Television by Gabrielle Union and Sony TV.

George has written for major and niche media outlets like, Teen Vogue, Entertainment Tonight, NBC, The Root, Buzzfeed, Essence, Ebony, THEM, and The Grio. They have also served as Guest Editor for BET.com's Pride month.

They write on topics ranging from Race, Gender, Sex, HIV, Intersectionality, Politics, Culture, Health and Pop-Culture, and is never afraid to "go there" and ask the tough questions.

George has also been seen on Politics Nation with Al Sharpton on MSNBC, Buzzfeed's AM2DM, The Grapevine, PBS Nightly News, and various shows on Sirius XM Radio. George also moderates and speaks on many panels throughout the year including clients like Gilead Pharmaceuticals, Twitter & Proctor and Gamble and Human Rights Campaign.

On social media, George has an impressive presence, with nearly 80,000 engaged followers on Twitter who are always eager to see what George writing next.

George is an HIV and LGBTQ activist, serving as Chair of the Black Leadership AIDS Crisis Coalition for Black Gay Men for AIDS Healthcare Foundation, and being called upon to discuss various issues facing the LGBTQ community from civil rights leaders to politicians.

George is also proud HBCU alum twice over, and a member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Incorporated.

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All Boys Aren't Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto

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All Boys Aren't Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto [Johnson, George M.] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. All Boys Aren't Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto

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2020 Stonewall Book Award White Raven 2020 SelectionThis sweet #ownvoices picture book celebrates the changes in a transgender boy's life, from his initial coming-out to becoming a big brother.Winner of the 2020 Stonewall Book Award! When Aidan was born, everyone thought he was a girl.

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Sharice's Big Voice - read aloud by Sharice Davids!!!

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Sharice's Big Voice - read aloud by Sharice Davids!!!

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Congresswoman Sharice Davids on LGBT+ Activism in Education | HarperStacks

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Teaching for Change carefully selects the best multicultural and social justice books for children, young adults, and educators.

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More than 100 carefully selected lists of multicultural and social justice books for children, young adults, and educators. When you find a book at this site, please purchase it here. Our titles are linked to Bookshop. A portion of your book purchase helps sustain our work. New Releases Activism and Organizing Africa Afro-Latinx American Indians Arabs […]

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https://www.amightygirl.com/mighty-girl-picks/top-read-alouds

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Official Tumblr of the #WeNeedDiverseBooks Campaign

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Twitter, actually! Elsie and I started chatting on Twitter years ago, and our friendship has grown via social media and emails. Back in 2017, I was tweeting about The Joy Luck Club and how I'd love to read more books that include its themes - food, culture, family, and the tension between immigrant parents and their first-generation children.

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American Indians in Children's Literature

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American Indians in Children's Literature

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American Indians in Children's Literature (AICL)

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Designed to help readers develop a critical eye about representations of American Indians in children's and young adult books

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Books By or About People of African Descent

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Books By or About People of African Descent

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AALBC.com, the African American Literature Book Club

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AALBC is the oldest, largest, and most popular online bookstore dedicated to African American literature and Black Literature from around the world. We celebrate Black culture, through books, for ALL readers to enjoy. AALBC is: Books, Authors, Reviews, Events, Resources, Discussions, a Blog, Book Club, Articles, Home to#ReadingBlack, and Much More ►

We maintain a curated and growing collection of over 13,000 books covering a century of Black literature. You'll find reviews, bestsellers, awards, excerpts, publisher information, a variety of purchase options, and more. Visit our Books Section ►

We have profiles of over 4,800 authors and illustrators, which includes biographies, published books, interviews, videos, and more. You'll find writers, in every genre, from the United States, Africa, and the entire the African Diaspora. Visit our Authors Section ►

We've reviewed over 1,000 books and hundreds of films. Visit our Reviews Section ►

You'll discover almost 150 important book fairs and conferences coming up during the next 12 months, as well as videos, articles, and photos of events we've covered since 1998. Visit our Events Section ►

We share a wealth of information for both professional and aspiring writers. We provide manuscript editing, book printing, and a variety of other tools and articles to help writers produce their best possible book. We also share lists of bookstores, book clubs, book websites and provide a variety of advertising opportunities to help authors and publishers connect with the readers who will enjoy their books the most. Visit our Resources Section ►

We hold interesting conversions on Black literature, culture, blogging and website strategies, poetry, and more. Share your ideas and Join the Conversation ►

The mission of #readingblack is to encourage everyone to read quality books written by Black people and to purchase those books from independent booksellers. We strive to develop strategies that will make it easier for book buyers to support our mission. Join the #readingblack Movement.

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★ AALBC the Largest Site Dedicated to Books by or About People of African Descent

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AALBC is the largest and most popular online bookstore dedicated to African American Literature and Black literature from around the world. We publish reviews and biographical information on Black writers. We celebrate Black culture, through books, for readers of all backgrounds to enjoy. We also provide resources for authors.

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PBS Circle of Stories - Educator Resources

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PBS Circle of Stories - Educator Resources

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Circle of Stories . Lesson 1: It’s All Part of the Story | PBS

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Grades 8-12
Subject: Language Arts/Theater
Estimated Time of Completion: five to eight 50-minute periods

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Book List Spreadsheet Shared By Rachel Hsieh

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Book List Spreadsheet Shared By Rachel Hsieh

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Classroom Library List/ Professional Library *WIP*

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Presentation to EDST642 on 10/29/21

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10/29 Helen Thomas Class Visit Resources.pptx

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Handling Politically Sensitive Issues with Families

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Handling Politically Sensitive Issues with Families

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The Empowering Educators series promotes antiracist education through resources that support educators in facilitating effective, courageous conversations about race and social justice and in learning and teaching about racism.

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Indigenous Peoples Day & Month [Work in Progress]

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Indigenous Peoples Day & Month [Work in Progress]

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Classroom Management as a Curriculum of Care

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Classroom Management as a Curriculum of Care

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While visiting a 1st grade classroom once, I had the opportunity to observe a 15-minute independent reading session. I immediately noticed Luna, a 6-year-old girl, pulling out a stack of books from her backpack, hurrying to settle in so she could get right down to it. All her books-about five or six of them-were about bugs. She must really love bugs, I thought to myself.

I watched her open the first book to the first page. Repulsed by the detailed images of all kinds of creepy crawlers, she quietly gagged. She looked away from the book to give her eyes a break, and then slowly-cautiously-returned her gaze. Courageous, intent, determined, she started to read.

I was confused. She seemed to find bugs deeply unpleasant. So why was she so intent on reading about them? Unable to curb my curiosity, I made a beeline for her as soon as reading time was up. "You must really love bugs to have all those books about them," I said.

"No, I hate them," she replied matter-of-factly.

"Then why did you pick a million books about bugs?"

"Because they're all over my house," Luna explained. "And they're at recess and in the garden and they're just everywhere, all over. Even there was one in my bathtub! When I see a bug, I just scream until someone comes to kill it. But I need to be brave about them."

"I see," I said. "So, you want to be brave about bugs so you can kill them yourself?"

"No! I want to be brave about them so I can leave them alone. After they're killed-ed I feel sad for them."

Consider all that 6-year-old Luna had to know, understand, and be capable of to set forth on a project of reading about bugs so she could stop being afraid of them. She had a legitimate and sophisticated theory of change: If I learn about bugs, I won't want to hurt them.

While seemingly extraordinary, Luna is typical for a child her age in her desire to participate in making things safer and better for living things. Young children-in their capacity for empathy, their insistence on fairness, and their boldly imaginative problem solving-are uniquely suited for "care work" (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018), for healing-centered ways of being (Ginwright, 2018; Pour-Khorshid, 2020), and for practicing models of mutual aid in which skills and resources are exchanged for mutual benefit. These ways of organizing collective care and prioritizing well-being-practiced for centuries among the most marginalized and vulnerable among us as a necessary means of survival-come naturally to young children.

But this deep orientation toward care is frequently unlearned over time, replaced by ways of being that are traditionally rewarded in schools: competition over cooperation, individualism over collectivism, independence over interdependence. These school-driven values best prepare children for their lives as workers instead of as compassionate human beings and ethical stewards of the land.

Values that obfuscate the interdependence of all living things have consequences because they allow us to justify practices and policies-both inside and outside of schools-that normalize cruelty, indignities, and the sacrifice of some for the benefit of others. These normalized inhumanities include, to name just a few: expelling preschoolers; knowingly allowing children to drink water tainted with lead; placing aggressive policing programs in school buildings with Black and brown youth; and investing unconscionable amounts of money into the maintenance of prisons while urban and rural schools lack even the most basic resources. All of these practices, which should seem unimaginable, are instead part of a widespread acceptance of cruelties that are nearly invisible to some people while literally killing others.

So, how do we go from being children who believe that the death of a bug is tragic to becoming adults who regularly accept and normalize that some lives are throwaway?

As both the COVID-19 pandemic and racial injustice continue to disproportionately cause the premature death of our Black, brown, Indigenous, disabled, undocumented, trans and queer loved ones, we must invite children to contemplate what it means to live and behave in ways that refuse the idea that any human being is disposable, that any resource is ours to hoard, or that any person can be safe while even one of us is in danger.

In the early grades especially, one of the central ways to teach these lessons is through the practice of classroom management.

Three Essential Understandings

Here I offer three understandings that invite educators to explore new directions for classroom management, starting in the early grades. They are designed to emphasize care over control, inclusion over exclusion, and community over authority. These understandings draw on traditions and values of care regularly exercised by vulnerable communities as a means of survival.

1. Understanding Classroom Management as a Curriculum

By reframing classroom management as a curriculum, we can recognize that the current way we organize our approach to management is achieving certain objectives, and we can be as thoughtful and intentional in writing our objectives for classroom management as we are in our approach to the traditional core academic subjects. In short, if classroom management is a curriculum, what are we teaching now, and what might we want to teach instead?

Traditional approaches to classroom management, because they reward some behaviors and punish others, are a series of lessons for children on what we value, what is good, and how to be. I am disturbed by how quickly such classroom management practices have evolved to include new and creative ways to control bodies, even when not physically together in classrooms: strict demands for children to wear school uniforms and adhere to dress codes while at home; arbitrary rules forbidding them to eat or drink while on screen; using participation and attendance norms that ignore unequal access to devices and young children's inability to tolerate long hours on a computer. Even where children are together in school, they are too often punished for violating the rule to wear a mask, instead of educated into understanding that wearing our masks is part of how we take care of each other.

Through traditional practices that rely on authoritative control, policing, and exclusion, our children witness a model of power that punishes people instead of taking care of them. They learn that those in authority (and the rules they devise) mandate how we ought to behave-instead of guiding a commitment to live in right relationship with one another and with this planet we all share, which requires sacrifice, flexibility and judgment, discussion and debate, and attention to identity and power. Changing the way we understand the goals and objectives of classroom management may help us notice that when we are so worried about policing bodies, we miss opportunities to teach community care-even during a time when literally hundreds of thousands of people are dying.

Longtime elementary math teacher Marian Dingle supported her students in recognizing that their long list of generated classroom "rules" could be summarized in a single agreement: "We will take care of each other" (2018). Like Marian and her students, I fundamentally understand classroom management as the way we deal with the following kinds of questions:

How will we be in genuine community together?

How will we keep everyone safe, happy, and well?

What will we do and practice when harm or conflict happens in our community?

How will we take extra special care of the most vulnerable among us?

Because this is how I understand classroom management, I find its goals and objectives to be the same regardless of whether school is happening in person or virtually. We are still together as we socially distance, and our individual choices and behaviors powerfully impact the community. Indeed, these questions are particularly timely in light of both COVID-19 and the powerful uprisings against police violence and for Black lives. These are the questions governors and mayors asked themselves while devising COVID-19 lockdown plans. These are the questions education leaders asked themselves while making decisions about reopening schools. These are the questions police and prison abolitionists routinely challenge us to ask. They are authentic questions with use far beyond classrooms.

There are, however, no easy answers to these questions. They spark disagreements, reveal a diversity of values and beliefs, and can be very difficult to navigate. For this reason, it is especially useful to start exploring them with young children in the early grades-not because it will make the questions easier to answer, but because it will better prepare them as human beings to recognize and deal with the fact that really taking care of each other can be very difficult to do.

2. Understanding Care as Political Work

Because the idea of care, much like the idea of love, is too often misunderstood as apolitical, our work with children and with each other must be first to establish the relationship between care and justice. Care is not about being kind or charitable; rather, care is about being and working in ways that are fair, inclusive, and in solidarity with the most vulnerable.

For example, care is not just cheering for or serving free meals to essential hospital workers as they head in to treat COVID-19 patients. That is kindness, and it is important. But care is demanding that they have the personal protective equipment required to be as safe as possible and organizing to get them what they need in the absence of coordinated government efforts. Care is also about considering the other essential workers who keep hospitals functional, including janitorial staff, food service workers, and those who provide childcare, to name a few-and asking why these workers are less visible than doctors and nurses. Care is fighting for just treatment of the most vulnerable and most marginalized among us. Care is hard work because it requires a kind of genuine sacrifice and solidarity far beyond what is demanded by charity or kindness.

Young children can-and do -welcome hard work. They routinely wrestle with what is fair and unfair, and they want to debate and discuss the questions and conflicts that arise in their friendships, their attempts at sharing, and their efforts to get along with others. If we reduce and oversimplify this hard work to a set of rules children follow, we miss the chance to invite them into the messy, incomplete, difficult work of justice.

Instead, by modeling democratic participation, we can anticipate and welcome the discussion and debate that arise from conflict. We can intentionally create routines and structures that make space for these tough conversations about how to advocate for our own needs and wants, while also taking care of others and our planet. In this way, classroom management in the early grades might develop the first building blocks of skills like nonviolent communication (Rosenberg, 2015); making a good apology and holding ourselves accountable to others (Mingus, 2019); and using restorative practices to build community and respond to harm (Boyes-Watson &amp; Pranis, 2015; Winn, 2018).

With these approaches, rather than simply trying to avoid punishment from breaking rules, children are instead guided to worry about how to make things right when they've caused harm and how to take care of the people or the community that is hurting. These care-based, restorative skills and approaches are more than social-emotional qualities. Done with clarity and intention, they are political actions, engaging young children in the work of justice.

3. Understanding Young Children as Already Powerful

Finally, classroom management as the practice of care refuses the idea that our work with young children is always about preparing them for the future and instead recognizes that children can and do exercise their power already, acting on and impacting the world in daily life. We can affect the ways they use their power by teaching them values of interdependence and collective care. As educator Olivia Mulcahy (2020) writes in a beautiful ,

We must understand that self-care and care for family, community, and our world are each important and also inextricable from each other. Of course, this has always been true. But it is a lesson that clearly many have not yet learned well enough.

I am hopeful that teaching this lesson in the early grades-emphasizing the ways in which we are all inextricably linked-will allow us to leverage the brilliance of young children in the ongoing struggle for justice, starting now. Children are powerful people-we need them to help solve problems of care that continue to stump us as adults.

As young children work together in the here and now to wonder and worry about how best to balance their own needs against the needs of others, the needs of the community, and the needs of our planet, they do the work of justice in the here and now. When they figure out, with our support, how to make things right after harm has occurred, they slowly change our world into one in which relationships are more important than rules, where care is the political work we do together each day.

Luna, setting out to learn about bugs, is already engaging in political care work. I tend to think about her work in relation to a poem I recently read called "Mercy," by an award-winning, Belizean spoken word poet named Rudy Francisco (2017). Asked to kill a spider, he instead gently frees it. He writes of hoping for that same mercy, "If I am ever caught in the wrong place / at the wrong time, just being alive."

Luna is exercising and developing a fundamental understanding of the sanctity and preciousness of life-an understanding that animates the struggle and movement for Black lives. Let's invite all children into the work Luna is doing on mercy-the care and justice work she has already begun.

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Classroom Management as a Curriculum of Care

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Treat classroom management as an opportunity to teach young children what it really means to take care of each other.

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Amplify RJ (Restorative Justice) - Resource Shared By Helen Thomas

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Amplify RJ (Restorative Justice) - Resource Shared By Helen Thomas

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Why Our Trauma-Informed Teaching Must Be More Culturally Responsive - EdSurge News Article by Helen Thomas

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Why Our Trauma-Informed Teaching Must Be More Culturally Responsive - EdSurge News Article by Helen Thomas

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Years ago, before I became an educator, I took a contemporary Native American studies course as one of my first college classes. For the final research assignment, I choose to explore the disproportionate rates of suicide among Native American youth-an issue that impacts nearly all tribal communities, including my own, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.

From that assignment I learned that understanding trauma can help us better address complex behavioral issues in the communities we care about, whether those communities are our tribal nations or classrooms.

That research paper was the beginning of my relationship with what most educators know as "trauma-informed practices," a term used for acknowledging the widespread effects of trauma, and started me on my journey of advocating for Native youth through education. I realized that in many cases, our understanding of trauma-where it comes from and how to address it-is limited. In order to truly address trauma, we must also consider both the cultural experiences and socioeconomic inequities that impact our students.

Many years later, I find myself drawing on my early understanding of trauma from an Indigenous context quite often in my current position working for an urban school district in Arizona. As a Native American student achievement teacher for a federally funded grant program, I work directly with teachers of Native American students to develop their capacity for culturally responsive practices. On any given day, you might find me performing the duties of an instructional coach, professional development facilitator or classroom teacher for the 1,300 Native American students in our district.

The Native American students I work with, like so many other Indigenous youth, experience high rates of poverty and health disparities, especially in regard to COVID-19, which has hit Native populations particularly hard. All these things contribute to a higher chance of trauma-exposure, but more importantly the Native students in my district are citizens of tribal nations with longstanding cultural traditions of valuing reciprocal relationships with all living things, including their communities, lands and waters. In my experience, teachers who have the most success with their Native students take into consideration these cultural strengths during their planning and instruction.

While research has shown school-wide trauma-informed practices benefit all students, one-size-fits-all programs don't work. Mainstream approaches to trauma-informed practices often fail to address or prevent trauma, and at worst can actually perpetuate harm. In order for trauma-informed practices to be meaningful for students-especially the ones I work with-their teachers and school leaders must question whether those practices are being rolled out in a culturally responsive way.

Where Trauma-informed Practices Meet Culturally Responsive Teaching

As with trauma-informed practices, culturally responsive practices are often mentioned but rarely understood within school communities. Although there are many definitions, I frequently find myself turning to the work of educator-turned-author Zarretta Hammond for a clear and comprehensive meaning of culturally responsive teaching.

According to Hammond, culturally responsive teaching is the intentional integration of students' cultural experiences, knowledge and learning processes into teaching choices. Culturally responsive teaching is more than just a surface level recognition of multiculturalism. It requires educators to affirm and leverage what-and how-students learn in their homes and communities.

This requires teachers to raise their awareness of their students' cultural background, including the sociopolitical and historical contexts of their communities. Most importantly, culturally responsive teaching recognizes that students need to feel safe-socially, emotionally and intellectually-in order to engage in rigorous learning. This last aspect is what connects culturally responsive teaching and trauma-informed practices in classrooms.

As a starting point for making trauma-informed practices more culturally responsive, educators must critically reflect on the mindsets and assumptions they carry with them. In coaching conversations and professional trainings, I often share the following suggestions with educators who wish to bring a culturally responsive lens to their trauma-informed approach.

Consider the Sociopolitical and Historical Contexts of Your School Community

While working on that undergraduate research paper, I found the work of Dr. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, who coined the terms Historical Trauma and Historical Trauma Response. Historical trauma considers sources of trauma that often go unaddressed in trauma-informed conversations by bringing attention to the ways collective and massive traumatic events can impact multiple generations of individuals. When I hear discussions of trauma in schools, they are almost always limited to interpersonal instances of harm-often abuse, neglect or violence in the home. Rarely, though, do we consider collective or ongoing events, such as colonization or structural racism.

In the past, I have heard teachers claim that Native families "don't like to be involved at school" when discussing why we consistently see such low academic achievement among Native American students. Few think about the sociopolitical or historical reasons why Native families might be hesitant to trust schools and teachers.

Part of my job is to help teachers develop an awareness of the experiences of Native American students that may impact their academic achievement. This can be difficult because we have over 45 different tribal nations represented in my district, each with their own unique history and context. But the federal policy of forcibly removing Native children from their families to enroll them in government mandated boarding schools is one experience that has touched nearly all 570 federally recognized tribal nations in the United States.

This policy was in effect from the early nineteenth until the latter half of the twentieth century. Hundreds of thousands of Native children were placed in schools that punished any use of their traditional language or cultural practices with harsh impunity. Separated from their families, Native American students were intentionally stripped of their cultural identity. This continues to have negative impacts on Native American peoples' social, emotional, physical and psychological well being. For some, trauma has become associated with schooling itself.

Learning about historical trauma as a framework for understanding how the relatively recent colonization of North America has had lasting negative impacts on Native American communities helped me understand why I was seeing first hand disproportionate health disparities, including youth suicide, in my tribal community. This cultural context through which I came to understand trauma helped me to understand the importance of going beyond individual and interpersonal instances of trauma to consider sociopolitical and historical contexts as well. When we assume the source of students' trauma is individual or familial in nature, we run the risk of implying that students, their families and communities are damaged. Frequently, it's something larger.

Prioritize a Strengths-based Approach

"This place might be the only time they get positive attention" or "For those kids, you are the only caring adult in their lives." I hear statements like this tossed around often in the schools I support. This type of mindset positions students and their families in a deficit light. Too often, educators adopt a paternalistic view when they assume trauma-affected students have no strategies or safe relationships to help deal with their high levels of stress. In reality, students, families, and their communities have always had culturally specific strategies for sustaining their wellbeing, but historical injustices, such as the boarding school policy, have kept those strategies out of schools.

Instead, I often suggest a shift to a strengths-based approach, which values the rich knowledge and experiences students bring into the classroom, instead of viewing it as the source of their trauma. When applied to trauma-informed practices, this can look like honoring students and families' cultural and community-specific strategies for coping and maintaining well-being.

Teachers can create the time and space in their classrooms for students to share and practice those strategies in authentic situations, but they also need to develop opportunities for families to have input in trauma-informed policies and practices. Creating authentic partnerships with families requires two-way communication. Offering office hours, sending home surveys, and attending community events are a few ways that I have learned about the funds of knowledge, and specific wellness strategies, that my students bring into the classroom.

When I think about those wellness strategies already in place in my students' home lives, my mind often turns to ceremonies, which play a pivotal role in maintaining overall wellbeing in Native American communities. However, I know from personal experience as a Native American person who lived and attended school in a predominantly non-Native city that urban Indigenous students may be less likely to engage in these formative experiences. Yet many of the urban Native youth I work with now share stories of returning home to their reservations for coming of age and other culturally significant ceremonies. This diversity of experiences speaks to the need for educators to be willing to take more of an inquiry-based approach that treats students and families as the experts in their own wellbeing.

We are all adjusting to teaching and learning in the time of an ongoing global pandemic, and it is critical that we resist one-size fits all approaches that are limited in their understanding of where trauma comes from and position students and families as damaged. Instead, we must consider how we can shift trauma-informed teaching to become more culturally responsive to the students and communities we wish to serve. Only when we take the time to learn about the socioeconomic and historical backgrounds of our students and leverage their cultural strengths and knowledge, will our schools become spaces for healing from trauma.

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Why Our Trauma-Informed Teaching Must Be More Culturally Responsive - EdSurge News

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Years ago, before I became an educator, I took a contemporary Native American studies course as one of my first college classes. For the final research ...

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Eyes that Kiss in the Corners — Joanna Ho Writes

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She begins to wish for eyes like theirs until she realizes that her eyes are like her mother’s, Amah’s, and Mei Mei’s. They have eyes that kiss in the corners and glow like warm tea, crinkle into crescent moons, and are filled with stories of the past and hope for the future—they are beautiful.

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Families - Shelley Rotner and Sheila M. Kelly

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Families - Shelley Rotner and Sheila M. Kelly

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Many educators believe they are offering a balance when it comes to acknowledging holidays, but Christmas continues to receive the greatest emphasis. This excerpt from 'Celebrate!: An Anti-Bias Guide to Enjoying Holidays in Early Childhood Programs' can help you avoid this and other equity pitfalls.

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Many schools enjoy celebrating a non-religious "holiday season" but clearly favor Christmas in their traditions and decor. Moreover, important non-Christian holidays that don't occur in December are often overlooked completely.

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This article shows teachers how to bring rich cultural content into their teaching in a way that expands students' knowledge, interest, and respect for the group being featured. The article offers suggestions that teachers can use throughout the school year, as well as when observing cultural and religious holidays and celebrations.

Note: This article was originally written for the American Federation of Teachers.
The first step in implementing more culturally responsive instruction is recognizing how our own cultural conditioning is reflected in our teaching: how we set up our classroom, establish relationships with students, even how we design and deliver our lessons. This article shows teachers how to bring rich cultural content into their teaching in a way that expands students' knowledge, interest, and respect for the group being featured. The article offers suggestions that teachers can use throughout the school year, as well as when observing cultural and religious holidays and celebrations.

Meaningful Multicultural Education in a Nation of Immigrants

Related video

See this interview with Dr. Cynthia Lundgren for more great tips on culturally responsive instruction!

Our nation is rich in many cultural and religious traditions, and celebrations focusing on specific groups have grown and become more popular in the last twenty years. Some of the most prominent are African-American History Month, Hispanic Heritage Month, and Women's History Month. Growing in popularity are American Indian/Alaska Native Heritage Month and Asian Pacific Heritage Month. Along with these we also observe and recognize Martin Luther King Day, St. Patrick's Day, Cinco de Mayo, Kwanzaa, Labor Day, the Jewish holidays, and many others.

While we are more explicit about our recognition of various groups and ethnic differences, we have always been a diverse nation. In the beginning, our nation was primarily the home of Native Americans and other indigenous groups representing more than 400 languages, Africans from a wide range of different regions, and Europeans of mostly British heritage. Take America at the turn of the 20th century - that's when our country experienced one of its major influxes of newcomers, and waves of immigrants made their way to our shores. Soon, many of the children enrolled in our public schools had come from such faraway places as Italy, Poland, Greece, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Russia, and China.

Now turn the clock forward a hundred years. Our public schools are again being asked to meet the challenges that come with a rapidly growing and diverse population. With a global economy in place and our technology moving at a rate faster than we'd ever imagined, every teacher needs more help meeting the needs of and being culturally responsive to his/her students, many of whom now have roots in places like Mexico, Puerto Rico, Vietnam, Somalia, Croatia, and Jordan.

Our country has always been home to people of many different cultures and ethnic backgrounds. But meaningful multicultural education must go beyond saying that we're a "melting pot," having an ethnic food celebration a couple of times a year, and acknowledging a few well-known historical figures. We currently live in a world where our knowledge about other cultures, languages, and traditions is extremely important to foster understanding and mutual respect, and we are now expecting teachers to be our first responders on the front line in this complex task.

Given that research, test data, and anecdotal evidence repeatedly confirm that culture plays a significant role in teaching and learning, student diversity challenges us to explore ways to bridge cultural differences and develop culturally sensitive teaching practices that recognize and accept these differences.

And teachers, like their students, behave in ways that reflect their culture. We recognize the obvious cultural differences such as foods, heroes, holidays, arts, and clothing - differences that, much like the tip of the iceberg, are clearly visible above the water. Less visible are the different ways in which our cultures influence our understanding of the world and how we interact with others. These more nuanced differences might include how we understand and define concepts like family, responsibility, education, and success. These hidden aspects of culture can cause misunderstandings and cross-group conflicts; they can impact teacher-student and student-student relationships, and create hard-to-identify barriers to academic content matter.

Culturally Responsive Instruction

So at the point we decide that we want to implement more culturally responsive instruction, where to do we start? The first step is recognizing how our own cultural conditioning is reflected in our teaching: how we set up our classroom, establish relationships with students, even how we design and deliver our lessons. When we acknowledge that our classrooms are natural extensions of our own culture, we can begin to make room for the cultures of others. This can be done in a few simple ways:

Look for ways to integrate cultural traditions of your ELL families throughout your school. Becoming familiar with and including the cultural traditions of your ELL families within the larger school community not only creates a welcoming and respectful school environment - it has practical considerations for scheduling, opportunities in the classroom, and improved communication and engagement with families. (See more tips on how to integrate ELLs' cultures effectively in this excerpt from our ELL Family Engagement guide.)

Add classroom visuals reflecting the racial and ethnic diversity of the classroom. Look for images that come from various sources and steer clear of long-held harmful stereotypes (e.g., Latino people wearing large Mexican hats, Asian people working in rice fields, etc.). If you can not find any adequate images, hold an event inviting the various families to school and take photos of the children interacting together and with each other's families.

Incorporate books with multicultural themes and different perspectives into classroom readings. For recommended titles, consult our booklists on Colorín Colorado and Reading Rockets. Also, do not automatically discard books that reflect the mainstream culture. Discuss all these books (multicultural and mainstream) with students and ask them what they learned that they did not know before about the characters, situations, geographies, etc.

Explore themes that are common to all cultures. Discuss universal concepts like the importance of families, the search of a better life through migration, friendships, uses of music to express emotions and celebrate, and different kinds of work, etc.

Take interest in students' lives outside of school and asking questions about community events and traditions. When possible, call students at home to follow up on an assignment and introduce yourself to their parents (ask your school about an interpreter if needed). After this type of initial contact, try and visit students at home, visit their neighborhood and the places they shop, and participate in community events. Keep an open-door policy in your classroom for their families. Sometimes, families may be hesitant to interact with you due to language or perceived cultural barriers.

Ensure major assignments or exams do not fall on religious or cultural holidays. Plan this calendar far in advance. Students from a particular country may have more religious holidays than other groups and you also want to inform others in the school about this so that no misperceptions or misunderstandings arise.

Integrate ethnic art, music, and games into classroom activities. For information about ethnic art and games, consult Learning for Justice, and for international music selections and fun classroom activities, consult Putumayo. You can also visit special museum exhibits, conduct a field trip to a special performance, or invite artists and performers to your school.

Support English language learners and their families with materials in their first language. If your school does not have ESL or bilingual education teachers or specialists, see if the district can help. Do not make the children in your class who are becoming proficient in English be your primary mode of communication with other children of the same language background or with families. If an adult interpreter is not available, look into recruiting a volunteer from the community who is familiar with school issues. For more information on supporting ELLs and their families, visit Colorín Colorado's Educator Section.

Use current world events to teach students to read, think, and discuss from multiple perspectives. The internet and television broadcasts from other countries can provide international versions of world events. Responding to events from a variety of perspectives not only reinforces critical literacy skills, but establishes a forum for voicing disparate perspectives.

Celebrating Holidays

When it comes time to highlight specific cultural holidays, how do you pick the right culturally responsive materials? No matter what you choose to shed light on the subject (a lesson plan, ongoing unit study, field trip, cultural fair, special performance presentation, etc.), the goal is to expand your students' knowledge, interest, and respect for the group being featured. Here are some ideas to help you highlight multicultural and religious holidays appropriately, and select the right activities and materials:

Recognize various talents and accomplishments when focusing on people. Do not limit your commemoration to famous leaders and heroes. Go beyond Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez, and Susan B. Anthony to find other little-known role models who are historical and contemporary.

Consult more than one internet or library source and do not expect a student to be your sole "ambassador" or resource for finding out about a whole culture or ethnic background. Multiple sources are always a good idea for formulating knowledge about a particular subject. More importantly, do not put a particular student on the spot without asking them beforehand if they are comfortable sharing information with the whole class. Each student is an individual and their experiences may or may not be similar to that of the group they represent.

Incorporate the information you select into existing lesson plans or special projects. Don't miss out on the opportunity to make this into an ongoing process for learning. One great source of information is children's books, which often have background information and activities, such as these titles about Ramadan, Chinese New Year, and Día de los muertos.

Make it more than just about food, music, or popular icons. As with the earlier tips on holiday celebrations, it is best to precede these type of events or approaches with meaningful and thoughtful pre-planned lessons, information, and learning. There is more to St. Patrick's Day than wearing green and pinning up images of leprechauns - turn the holiday into an opportunity to learn about the Irish people and their history.

Seek various representatives to show the diversity within a common group. Keep in mind that no one group is as homogenous as it might seem. To illustrate, Latinos may share the same language and have very similar customs but there are many cultural differences between countries - for example, only Mexicans celebrate Cinco de Mayo; Argentinians, on the other hand, will most likely have never heard of the celebration or know what it stands for, and will celebrate different holidays. "Chinese" New Year, on the other hand, is not only celebrated by the Chinese. Other Asian cultures refer to it as Lunar New Year.

Plan ahead of time. Don't wait until the day of the celebration or designated month to bring up the subject. If the topic at hand involves a heritage group represented in your classroom, consult with the student and their families about your plans, and find out if they are interested in and comfortable sharing stories, traditions, or family history. Ask them for suggestions and ideas.

Encourage other children who may not have "official" holidays representing them or whose families have lived in the U.S. for multiple generations to explore and share their own heritage and background. For children who come from the mainstream background, ask them where their ancestry is from. Students may not realize that people of European background do not share the same languages or traditions - for example, explore the differences between countries like Sweden and Portugal or Hungary and Scotland. While they may not relate to the language and customs of their ancestors anymore, it is important to point out their own immigrant roots and emphasize how rich we are as a nation because of our immigrant heritages.

Religious Holidays and Traditions

When it comes to religious holidays or traditions, what is their appropriate place in the curriculum? How do teachers approach such issues as textbook content, values education, controversial issues, and religious holidays? The general rule of thumb is to do this carefully. The First Amendment Center, in coalition with the AFT and a number of other organizations including the NEA, have issued a guide for educators on such issues called "Finding Common Ground." Some of the guidelines urge educators to:

Have an approach that is academic and not devotional.

Focus on the awareness of religions rather than acceptance of any one religion.

Sponsor study about religion, not the practice of religion.

Expose students to a diversity of religious views and do not impose any particular view.

Educate about all religions - do not promote or denigrate any religion.

Inform students about various beliefs, rather than conform students to any particular belief.

The complete guide and a more comprehensive list of recommendations is available at the First Amendment Center website.

All of these recommendations are in line with the standard that officially guides states and schools on this issue - the "Lemon Test," named after the 1971 court case of Lemon v. Kurtzman. The Supreme Court decided that schools could not receive public funding if they engaged in religious instruction. However, it does not prohibit students from worshipping on their own. This court decision has three important parts to it:

1. The government or public action in question* should only engage in secular or civil matters, leaving religion up to the individual.

2. The government or public action in question must not actively promote or prohibit religion.

3. The government or public action in question must not involve itself excessively with religion.

[*such as classroom instruction in a public school]

It's important to know what your purpose is in bringing up religion - most often, teachers intend to foster tolerance for other beliefs and faiths, and one of the best ways for teachers to do this is to plan ahead and to consult with informed sources, colleagues, parents, and the community. If students of a certain religion will be missing school days, it would be helpful to post these on a classroom calendar and let everyone in the class know ahead of time. Likewise, if students need to excuse themselves for prayer during the school day, it'd be best to plan a schedule and accommodate them in such a way that it does not interfere with their educational time in the classroom or with other students.

Final Thoughts

Ultimately, all of these strategies for cultural responsiveness support our goals for student achievement in two ways. First, we build a democratic foundation for equal access to education. Secondly, we help students develop their own culturally sensitive skills to be successful in our diverse, multicultural, and global world, enriching not our classroom, but our nation as well.

Recommended Booklists

December holidays

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Culturally Responsive Instruction for Holiday and Religious Celebrations

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This article shows teachers how to bring rich cultural content into their teaching in a way that expands students' knowledge, interest, and respect for the group being featured. The article offers suggestions that teachers can use throughout the school year, as well as when observing cultural and religious holidays and celebrations.

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Lesson Idea: Analyzing the School Holiday Calendar

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Lesson Idea: Analyzing the School Holiday Calendar

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Vocabulary

accommodation [ ə-kä-mə dā-shən ] noun, An agreement that allows people, groups, etc., to work together

logistical [ loh-jis-tik-al ] adj., Related to the process of planning or organizing

pilgrimage [ pil-grə-mij ] noun, A journey to a holy or special place

secular [ se-kyə-lər ] adj., Not religious or spiritual; controlled by the government rather than by the church

Suggested Procedure

1. Point out to students that every religion has important holidays. Some examples include: Christian people celebrate Christmas and Easter; Jewish people celebrate Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanahand Passover; Muslim people celebrate Eid Ul-Fitr and Eid Ul-Adha. The handout, Religious and School Holidays, provides a description of each of these holidays. Share the definitions with the class, then discuss the reasons for and details of each of these holidays. (Although these activities primarily focus on Christianity, Islam and Judaism, we encourage you to adapt this lesson purposefully and thoughtfully to include beliefs of all religions and faith traditions represented in your school and the students' communities.)

2. Ask students to review their school calendar. Ask: "Which of the discussed holidays are on the school holiday calendar? Which are not?"

3. Divide students into small groups to read the Christian Science Monitor story "Should public schools close for Muslim holidays?" Have the students respond to the questions on the handout, and discuss their answers in class.

4. According to the article, 2 percent of the population of New Jersey is Muslim. Instruct your students to find out the religious composition of your community, town, or state by following the directions on the handout, Demographics and School Holidays. Complete the table on the handout.

5. As a class, discuss if and how those demographics are reflected in your school holiday calendar. What changes, if any, should your school district make to its holiday calendar? Other than closing school, how might a community mark religious holidays? In addition to community demographic, what other reasons might a community honor the holidays of different faiths?

Alignment to Common Core State Standards/ College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards CCSS RI.1, RI.3, RI.4, RI.8, W.1, W.2, W.4, W.7, W.9, SL.1, SL.2, L.5, L.6, RH.1, RH.4, RH.6, RH.7, RH.8, RH.9

Extension Activity

Write a 500-word letter to education officials in your community explaining the demographics of your school district and how the it might consider them in drafting next year's school calendar. If your community isn't religiously diverse, how might your district promote religious inclusivity and education?

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accommodation [ ə-kä-mə dā-shən ] noun, An agreement that allows people, groups, etc., to work together logistical [ loh-jis-tik-al ] adj., Related to the process of planning or organizing pilgrimage [ pil-grə-mij ] noun, A journey to a holy or special place secular [ se-kyə-lər ] adj., Not religious or spiritual; controlled by the government rather than by the church 1.

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This article originally appeared in School Library Journal's October 2010 issue.

Teachers and parents alike are unsure about the topic, but it's never been more important Islam proved a tough subject for Coco Huguet when she went looking for resources to use with a fifth-grade global history class at the Hewitt School five years ago. "I looked all over the Internet for teaching material on [Islam] and couldn't find anything," says the English and history teacher at the all-girls school on New York's Upper East Side. "Up until a few years ago, there was very little, especially for younger kids." But this fall, Huguet's students will read the novels The Breadwinner (Groundwood, 2001) by Deborah Ellis and Andrew Clements's Extra Credit (Atheneum, 2009), along with a National Geographic history reference, The Islamic World (2005)-as part of an attempt to enhance student understanding of the religion from an academic viewpoint and also provide a deeper context to the concerns permeating today's headlines. "This year they're going to be more aware," says Huguet. "Some of these issues, especially Afghanistan and the division you see about the Mosque are coming to a head." Between recent threats by a Florida pastor to burn the Quran, our nation's ongoing presence in Afghanistan, and protests at the planned site for Park 51, an Islamic community center and mosque set to be built two blocks from the World Trade Center site, the topic of Islam is a tricky one, especially in K-12 schools, say many educators. For starters, it can be difficult to find appropriate materials to bring into media centers and classrooms. And then, parents can object to Islam being taught to their children, as protest groups across the Internet can attest. Of all major religious groups in the United States, Muslims trigger the most feelings of prejudice among Americans, according to a poll released in January by the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies. More than four in 10 Americans, or 43 percent, admitted to feeling at least "a little" prejudice against Muslims-as compared to 18 percent feeling similarly toward Christians, and 14 and 13 percent toward Jews and Buddhists respectively. And just 37 percent of Americans say they even know a Muslim American personally, according to a recent Time-Abt SRBI poll, with 46 percent believing that Islam actually supports the idea of its followers bringing harm to nonbelievers (http://bit.ly/dlchZy). This prejudice can play out when organizations hear of Islamic culture being taught in schools, as Linda Tubach discovered when she launched a weekend professional development course for Los Angeles Unified School District's (LAUSD) teachers four years ago. "The Anti-Defamation League sent observers for a couple of years, and one person objected because [the class] was on the Jewish Sabbath," says the retired high school social studies teacher, who runs the program through the interfaith group Fellowship of Reconciliation, which offers teachers salary point credit for the two-day course. "But that's subsided, and our last class had no observers. People just seem to accept it at this point, and we feel very good about that." Participating teachers travel to the Helen Bernstein Professional Development Center in downtown Los Angeles to create lesson plans and review Internet sites for use in K-12 classes. They're also treated to Middle Eastern luncheons and dancing. But the goal of the class is for educators to learn how to encourage questions and dialogue among K-12 students, specifically on the subject of Islam. In a recent session, Tubach had two teachers role play-one assuming the role of an Israeli and the other a Palestinian-acting out a historic event from different viewpoints. The hope is that by addressing real history and potential stereotyping together, teachers will treat the subject matter with more confidence in a classroom setting. "People worry about backlash when they take on these issues," says Tubach. "But we found you can handle that successfully if you design a class that meets high standards." But few students have an opportunity to take a class on world religions-let alone Islam. With budget cuts fairly standard across U.S. school districts, electives beyond the standard English, science, history, and mathematics courses are pretty limited. "Our school can't afford to have more exotic classes because we're already cutting back on others," says Mithi Hossain, a senior at Stuyvesant High School in lower Manhattan. "We did have a college-level course on Arabic after school. But that's a language. And it was cut." Hossain, who serves as vice president of Stuy's Muslim Student Association (MSA), is very passionate about her Muslim identity. She's worn a hijab since the fifth grade and wishes more students at her school-beyond MSA's 25 members-understood details about Islam. While elementary school is a little early to introduce the topic, she says, she believes that certainly high school students should be educated in the nuances of world religions. "When you're going out into the world, you can't rely on stereotypes to make decisions," she says. "I believe school is the right place to learn about these subjects like Islam, as long as it's not biased. I know that's a very difficult thing to do. But if it's coming from a teacher who is well educated and not from a Muslim background, then sometimes it's more acceptable. Sometimes people are more willing to hear from a person with a different background than what they're teaching." Knowing how to craft such a lesson is key. For teachers who don't have access to professional development programs like Tubach's, guidance on how to structure lesson plans is available online. New York's Morningside Center for Teaching Social Responsibility has a "Teachable Moment" section on its site, which covers subjects from " Engaging the Muslim World" to a fairly topical one called " NYC Muslim Community Center: Why There? Why Not? ", which includes tips on how to guide a student discussion on U.S. and Muslim relations. Schools across the country have accessed these lessons and have also been helped directly by Tala Manassah, deputy executive director of the Morningside Center, who believes that a properly constructed course can be effective in combating stereotypes. "You want to approach this from a historical side so they have some context," says Manassah. "Because some of this squawking that goes on with controversial issues comes from ignorance." Nancy Gallin might concur. The history department chair at the Hewitt School for the past 15 years occasionally encounters queries from students that give her pause. "You'll get the odd questions like, 'Are Catholics Christians?'" she says. But her students are taught about Islam through multiple disciplines and over many years to help stem that lack of knowledge. In the eighth grade, students learn how the Quran figures as a document of religious law, while ninth graders study the Crusades and the extension of Islam into Europe. By 10th grade, they're prepared to examine the religion within a more current context. "My general approach is to note similarities between today and history," says Gallin. "Because of the Muslim Community Center, I'll talk this year about the fact that xenophobia goes back to the Alien and Sedition Acts [of 1798]. And I'll connect that to the point that even though we live in a country with such an eclectic culture, some people think they're more real of an American than others." Yet even a well-prepared teacher can watch a spirited conversation among students about burqas and the Five Pillars of Islam dissolve into a heated argument or even cross into proselytizing. Knowing not just how to present material, but how students may even respond, can make the difference. Diane Moore helped pilot an online program, launched this fall through Harvard Divinity School, to turn public school teachers into peer scholars who can then teach the topic of Islam to fellow educators. "One of the main things we'll be working with is not just content, but how do you teach about [Islam] and what you should be attentive to," says Moore, a professor of the Practice in Religious Studies and Education, and director of the Program in Religious Studies and Education at Harvard. "Content knowledge is not insignificant, but it is the how of teaching religion that is really critical. How do you introduce the subject to your students when they have their own misperceptions? So part of it is anticipating what your students already think about this." That kind of teaching may be imperative in helping teachers overcome concerns that prevent them from even broaching the topic of Islam or Muslims in class-even if they believe these are subjects that could be helpful for their students. "There's a real consensus that public schools need to teach more about religious diversity and aren't doing a better job because so many teachers are afraid of touching the topic with a 10-foot pole," says Henry Goldschmidt, program associate with the Interfaith Center of New York, which runs professional development courses for teachers every summer. For the two dozen or so educators who come for the weeklong program in New York, the Interfaith Center offers visits with community religious leaders including those from the Jewish, Santería, and Christian faiths, lectures from academic experts, and even field trips to different houses of worship-outings K-12 teachers can arrange for their own classes. The hope is that teachers will see religion as more a base of lived traditions and not just historical doctrines-and in that way make the subject more accessible and alive to K-12 students. "That's one of the reasons K-12 curriculum is reduced to historical facts and dates," says Goldschmidt. "It's simpler for students and teachers to get their hands around that. But while they may be able to recite the Ten Commandments, they may not have any understanding of the lives of Muslims, Buddhists, or Jews living in America today." But that's not going to be the issue with Gallin's students at Hewitt this fall. Every Thursday morning, the school holds a town meeting-usually filled with reminders for children to bring in permission slips, or about parent conferences. However, Gallin says she's going to use the time to keep the school community more aware of the current issues surrounding Islam. "I'm going to call people's attention to what's going on in downtown New York, in particular, with Islam," she says. "I think if we're assuming these young women are going to be citizens of the world, they should know what's happening around them."

Resources foR teaching about islam

Luckily, you can find a lot more material online today than in recent years. Many organizations offer K-12 curricular guides, and while it's still a challenge to find content for younger grades, these resources are a good place to start:

Elementary School

Access Islam Thirteen.org Ten multimedia lessons for grades 4-8 about Islamic holidays, traditions, and cultures, from Ramadan to the Quran. Children's Book Study Guides: The Librarian of Basra and Alia's Mission: Saving the Books of Iraq Morningside Center for Teaching Social Responsibility A way to introduce the Iraq war to younger children by discussing the Library of Basra that burned. Information on Islam Woodland Junior School, Kent, England Offers simple history questions for younger students complete with photographs and a multi-faith calendar.

Middle School

Extra Credit study guide Andrew Clements Guidance for teachers to help students discuss the story of two sixth graders, a young girl in Illinois and a boy in Afghanistan, who become pen pals. Geometry and Islam Asia Society A student activity that incorporates Islamic textiles and architecture. Teaching on Controversial Issues: Guidelines for Teachers Morningside Center for Teaching Social Responsibility A teacher guide to presenting complicated and potentially controversial subjects.

High School

NYC Muslim Community Center: Why there? Why not? Morningside Center for Teaching Social Responsibility Background regarding the proposed mosque and community center, with guidelines for conducting a discussion with students. Islam, Empire of Faith PBS Educational Resources The first of five lessons aimed at students in grades 6-12. The World of Islam National Geographic National Geographic story on Islam, with links to online forums, bibliographies, Muslim organizations, and a digital Quran.

SLJ's Recommended Titles
Picture Books
-During a visit to her grandmother in the Middle East, Yasmin learns about her religion and finds a way to pray at home, even though there are no mosques where she lives. A warm intergenerational story, told in English and Arabic, withillustrations that feature Islamic geometric designs and Arab architecture and culture.

-When Noor, who lives in Kuwait, sees the almost-full moon rise, she knows it's time to prepare for Girgian, a Muslim celebration observed mostly in the Arabian Gulf states during the middle of the month of Ramadan. The story underlines the importance of sharing, self improvement, and community welfare. Highlighted with moonlit hues, the attractive illustrations are done in a style that reflects one of many Muslim cultures.

Reza. Moon Watchers: Shirin's Ramadan Miracle. illus. by Anne Sibley O'Brien. Tilbury House. 2010. RTE $16.95. ISBN 978-0-88448-321-2. LC 2009046324.

-Shirin is disappointed because she is too young to fast, but her father encourages her to do good deeds. As Ramadan ends, the family prepares for Eid-ul-Fitr, and a big surprise awaits Shirin, a "miracle." O'Brien's watercolor illustrations depict a Persian-American family.

-A seven-year-old Pakistani-American girl learns about the Islamic calendar and enjoys a special dinner with her family. Typical events follow, such as a celebration of the "Night of the Moon" at the community center. Then Ramadan is over, and the next day is Eid. Paschkis's stunning paintings incorporate Islamic tile art, adding to an authentic sense of the culture.

-Leena faces a difficult decision when she wants to fast during Ramadan, but also wants to attend her friend's pony party. She decides to do both, but finds that resisting the tempting treats isn't easy. When it is time to end the fast, her friends come with cake, and her mother invites them to share the iftar dinner. This well-told story is a great resource for discussing choices and religious differences

-A girl explains what happens throughout the month as people pray in mosques, listen to imams read verses from the Qur'an, and perform good deeds. The language is poetic, and the art shows the moon's waxing and waning phases as the family worships and rejoices.

-In a lyrical text, Whitman describes how a modern family observes Ramadan. Soft pastels captures the events and family interactions, and show women in hijaab giving hugs and talking on cell phones.
For Older Readers Fiction
-Amal, a devout Muslim, decides to wear the hijab full time. She faces typical teen concerns and deals withmisconceptions non-Muslims have about her religion and culture. The novel deals with some heavy issues, but it's also very funny. See also Randa Abdel-Fattah's Ten Things I Hate About Me.

CLEMENTS, Andrew. Extra Credit. illus. by Mark Elliott. S & S/Atheneum. 2009. Tr $16.99. ISBN 978-1-4169-4929-9.

Gr 4-7-Illinois sixth-grader Abby Carson and Sadeed Bayat, the best English-language student in his Afghan village, become pen pals, but because it isn't proper for a boy and girl to correspond with one another, he must pretend he is his sister.He can't keep the secret though, and the two become friends and learn about one another's culture and connect through their shared love of Frog and Toad Are Friends.

ELLIS, Deborah. Parvana's Journey. Groundwood. 2002. Tr $15.95. ISBN 0-88899-514-8; pap. $5.95. ISBN 0-88899-519-9.

-This heart-wrenching sequel to The Breadwinner (Groundwood, 2001) follows 13-year-old Parvana as she searches through war-torn Afghanistan looking for her mother and siblings who had disappeared in the tumult of the Taliban takeover. An unforgettable read about the will to survive.

-Sami is bullied at school because he is a Muslim, and the administration doesn't do anything to stop it. Then the FBI breaks into his house and takes his dad away, unjustly assuming that he is a terrorist. A fast-paced thriller with strong characterizations.
Nonfiction
ea vol: 64p. (World of Islam Series). Mason Crest. 2009. Tr $22.95.

Gr 6 Up -These titles clarify issues facing the Muslim world and show the diversity of opinions within the religion. They also show the diversity of thought and opinion within Islam, In order to get a broad picture of the Islamic faith, the books work best as a set.

ELLIS, Deborah. Three Wishes: Palestinian and Israeli Children Speak. Groundwood. 2004. Tr $16.95. ISBN 0-88899-554-7.

-Alternating accounts from young people between the ages of 8 and 18 show the devastating effect of war on their lives and how any sense of childhood has been stolen from them.

-A fine introduction to the basics of Islam. Quotes from teens tell what it's like to be a Muslim in America, and the authors address dating, dancing, drinking, and drugs. The conversational style will appeal to teen readers, whether practicing the religion or wanting to know more about it.

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This article originally appeared in School Library Journal's October 2010 issue. Teachers and parents alike are unsure about the topic, but it's never been more important Islam proved a tough subject for Coco Huguet when she went looking for resources to use with a fifth-grade global history class at the Hewitt School five years ago.

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