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"I required that the projects not only share information about their issue in an accessible way but also that is offer solutions or suggestions for change."(125)

I like how the teacher didn't just have the students think about the problem they also had to problem solve which is not always easy for students, but it's good to have problem solving skills. -Michelle

"Their wholehearted participation gave me the greatest faith in the ability of individuals to improve the world we live in." (p.141)

If you introduce your students to people who have changed the world with actions and their words that will hopefully inspire your students to want to be part of that change, to want to make a difference. -Charlene

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What are the implications of your reading to your future classroom? The relationship you'll have with students, families, and colleagues?

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What are the implications of your reading to your future classroom? The relationship you'll have with students, families, and colleagues?

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I'd like to have workshops with my students and have all the resources they will need to be successful in class.  By learning where the students come from and their backgrounds, you can have a positive relationship with the students and their families. With colleagues, you can build a relationship by working together and sharing ideas. -Sayaka

Having a strong relationship with the people around you is crucial to develop  because this will only help the all around processes of any activity your students may be working on. When it comes to your students, knowing their funds of knowledge will help you create lesson in which you know will work on their strengths rather then their weaknesses.  -Charlene

Having readers workshops can help students organize their thoughts, I think it is important when teaching English class to have readers workshop and depending on the grade level book clubs. In any classroom it is necessary to have a library, some audio books, reading stations, and writing stations. No matter how the school is it is so very important to get to know your students. How can we expect them to learn if something major is going on in their home life. If you get to know your students than the more they will be willing to do the school work you give them. I'm a parent myself so I feel it is very important to get to know the parents. Even if there is a students that have bad behavior issues the way you talk with the parent will ether make the parent trust you or not trust you. Getting to know your colleagues and collaborating with them I feel is very important for teachers. Coming together with colleagues can help when you are unsure what to do an vice versa.Also having colleagues that you can talk to will help improve your mood that is needed for the classroom. -Michelle

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What are the implications of your reading to your teaching practice?

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What are the implications of your reading to your teaching practice?

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Allowing students to make personal experience connections can help students get a better understanding of what is being taught. It will be more relevant to them and more meaningful when students are able to make personal connections. -Sayaka

It's important to create lessons and workshops for students to be able to understand and explore a variety of work from activists. By doing this students can create activism projects that connect to their own interest. Knowing and realizing that this is a processes it is essential to realize to get the best from your student and in-depth thinking it takes time.
-Charlene

By creating a classroom that is not only rich in reading and writing, it is also important for the students to have a learning environment where they feel like they are heard and have a voice and they are able to express themselves creatively while learning different writing styles etc. -Michelle

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What salient thinking were you exposed to?

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What salient thinking were you exposed to?

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One big takeaway from this book is that teachers can show students how to make a difference in the world by writing and reading in the classroom. A curriculum can be focused on social justice, where students still do workshops and research while learning about social justice. -Sayaka

I think it is so important to be able to introduce your students to different types of writing from the points of view of people that have made some sort of change. By exposing students to different points of view you may encourage your students to see things differently or develop the confidence to write in the same manner they were introduced to.
- Charlene

Exposing the students to different types of readings and writings can help students thrive in learning. Not all students like to read and write, but if they are exposed to many different genres and styles or learning reading and writing they will find something that does interest them. - Michelle

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An organization where students can make a difference in the world.

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We Are A Youth-Led Movement for Good | DoSomething.org

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Ask teachers to describe the impact they hope to have on their students, and most will eventually say something along these lines: I want my students to grow into responsible citizens. I want my students to participate in society in an active, productive way.

And maybe: I want my students to change the world.

But how many of us know how to make that happen, really? Can we explicitly teach students how to change the world? If this question has been whispering in the back of your mind, the resources in this collection will help.

What is social justice, and how does it fit into the curriculum?

The National Association of Social Workers defines social justice as "the view that everyone deserves equal economic, political and social rights and opportunities." To study social justice is to learn about the problems that dramatically impact quality of life for certain populations, and how people have worked to solve those problems.

If you teach social studies, you'll have no trouble finding direct curricular links to social justice. The National Curriculum Standards for the Social Studies includes Civic Ideals and Practices as one of its 10 Themes of Social Studies, and this includes an emphasis on learning how to get involved in influencing public policy. In history and social studies class, social justice teaching is a natural fit.

In other content areas, teachers disagree over whether social justice has a place. We put ourselves in a vulnerable position by exploring issues that are seen as more controversial than others (a topic I will get into in the next section), and some teachers prefer to completely steer clear of those kinds of complications. For others, social justice was a driving force in why they became teachers, and they weave it into whatever content they are teaching. If you choose to address some or all of these issues in your classroom, the next section offers some tips for doing it effectively.

Some Advice for Teaching Social Justice

As an undergraduate, I served as a student counselor for three years and a resident assistant (RA) for one. I regularly delivered workshops on social justice topics, and I learned a few important lessons along the way. Here are some things to keep in mind when studying social justice issues with your students:

Make getting to know students a key component of any social justice teaching. If you and your students don't spend time examining your own backgrounds, biases, and beliefs, you will be missing an essential component of any social justice curriculum. We all view every social justice issue through the lens of our own experience, and these different lenses can block our growth and learning if we aren't aware of them. If we fine-tune our self-awareness, our individual lenses can richly inform classroom conversations and help us understand issues on a much deeper level, directly from each other.

Know that not all students feel the same way about these issues. Most, if not all, of these resources have been created from a pretty liberal, progressive viewpoint. For example, one of the lessons in the Learning for Justice (formerly known as Teaching Tolerance) series described below is on Confronting Unjust Laws. The lesson uses California's Proposition 8 as an example of an unjust law. But not all of your students (or their families) will see a law like Prop 8 as unjust. In fact, some may strongly oppose same-sex marriage. That doesn't mean you can't talk about controversial issues; in fact, teaching students how to respectfully discuss an issue with people who don't see things the same way is a lesson that will serve them for the rest of their lives.

Familiarize yourself with the material before teaching. Sometimes we just skim materials before we teach. With social justice topics, this would be a mistake. Not knowing exactly what's in all of your teaching materials, including the texts or videos you and your students will be looking at, can leave you vulnerable to problems when unexpected content pops up.

Keep your administrator in the loop. As with any potentially controversial lesson, it is essential that you talk to your administrator about it ahead of time. Show the curricular connections between your planned lessons and the standards you're teaching. Talk about potential problems or objections that may come up and how you both plan to address them. That way, if your administrator gets a phone call from a concerned parent, she or he won't be blindsided.

Featured Resources

When I set out to find good resources for social justice teaching, I was looking for classroom-ready materials, lesson plans with supplementary texts or videos that would prompt students to learn about, think about, and talk about social justice issues. I also hoped to find some that would actually teach students about activism, about how a citizen zeroes in on a problem, formulates a solution, then does the grassroots work necessary to see that solution come to life.

Some of these resources fit the bill perfectly, especially the first one on the list. Others do not include lesson plans at all, but serve such an important and innovative role in social justice education, I thought they were essential to include here.

Learning for Justice

This award-winning organization (formerly known as Teaching Tolerance) comes up most often any time social justice teaching is discussed. There's lots to explore on their site, including the Classroom Resources section, which is loaded with lesson plans and other resources teachers can use for free in their classrooms. One of these lessons is Confronting Unjust Practices, where students learn about the anti-segregation actions taken by the Freedom Riders and the attack on one of these buses in Anniston, Alabama (pictured above).

Other lessons from this library include What is Ageism?, Unequal Unemployment, and What Makes a Family? Lessons are available for elementary, middle, and high school students.

DoSomething.org

No lesson plans here: DoSomething.org is an outstanding organization whose goal is to support the work of young people who want to make a difference in their world. Students browse through a big list of campaigns, public education and activism projects students can launch right in their own communities, and choose one or more that they'd like to participate in. Once they have finished a campaign, students submit a photo or video to prove they completed the required steps. This entry makes them eligible to win prizes, including scholarships. Currently, only U.S. students are eligible for these scholarships, but DoSomething.org is expanding into other countries as well.

Although this site will not help you do any direct instruction about social justice, it provides incredible opportunities for students to actively participate in social justice projects. Most campaigns are just right for high school students, and some would be appropriate for middle schoolers as well. Some topics may be considered risque, so review the content before introducing it to students.

On a related note, DoSomething.org is the organization where Katia Gomez, the college student who started her own school in Honduras (featured in the first Cult of Pedagogy documentary last year), got her start. One more bit of trivia that totally doesn't matter but might if you are a Melrose Place fan: DoSomething.org was co-founded by 90's heartthrob Andrew Shue. Squeee!!

The Global Oneness Project

The Global Oneness Project offers a beautiful collection of multicultural films, photo essays, and articles that "explore cultural, social, and environmental issues with a humanistic lens." Many of the featured stories are paired with a lesson plan for high school or college classrooms, aligned with Common Core and national standards.

One such pairing starts with the film Amar, which follows a young Indian boy living in a high-poverty neighborhood through a typical day that includes rising before dawn to do one of his two jobs and attending school. The accompanying lesson plan is called A Day in the Life, which has students examine the film and other resources related to the economic situation in India.

The films are truly stunning. This collection doesn't include explicit teachings in any kind of civics or grassroots activism, but it will provide students with a deep understanding of lives completely unlike their own. And that kind of empathy is one of the most important building blocks for any kind of social justice action.

Pushing the Edge: Social Justice Resources Collection

Educator Greg Curran's podcast covers a range of educational topics, but quite a few episodes circle around issues of social justice. Recently, he curated these resources into a Social Justice Resources Collection. These episodes will be mainly useful for teachers to educate themselves about social justice education: what complications and questions come up, helpful do's and don'ts, and why it's worth it. He interviews practicing teachers and administrators who are walking the walk with social justice teaching. Listening to them will give you a template from which to build your own practice.

Here's an example of one episode, where Curran interviews Nakisha Hobbs, principal of the Village Leadership Academy, a k-8 social justice school in Chicago.

GLSEN: Educator Resources

For teachers who want to include consideration of LGBT issues in their study of social justice, a great source for materials is GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network. offers a nice collection of educator guides and lesson plans.

Here are a few examples: The ThinkB4YouSpeak Guide for Educators includes lesson plans, resources, and tips for teachers for addressing anti-LGBT language in the 6-12 classroom. Unheard Voices is a collection of audio interviews with "individuals who bore witness to or helped shape LGBT history in some way." And the Day of Silence Guide shows educators how to run a Day of Silence awareness campaign in their schools.

Educational Video Center

I love this idea: The Educational Video Center teaches students the skills of documentary filmmaking, telling important stories in the name of social justice. Although the EVC holds after-school workshops only for students in New York City, they do offer professional development for teachers anywhere who want to learn how to teach these skills to their own students.

Alumni of the EVC have created documentaries on everything from criminal justice to domestic violence to mental health. You can view a collection of trailers for student-created documentaries here.

The Two Dollar Challenge

The Two Dollar Challenge is a challenge issued to people who want to make an impact on poverty. The challenge is simple: For 5 days, live on just $2 per day, publicizing the complexities of global poverty and helping to raise funds for a partner organization.

What's most striking about this organization is their emphasis on cultivating a deep respect for people affected by poverty and raising participants' awareness of their own privilege. One look at the project's code of conduct shows just how serious they are about that mission: "At all times participants must respect those nearby who are truly in need. If at any time those taking the Challenge are using resources which are valuable for indigent residents in the area this action must be re-evaluated."

Anti-Defamation League

The ADL's collection of lesson plans explore topics in categories like gender issues, sexism, ableism, religious bigotry, and racism. For example, What is the School-to-Prison Pipeline?, a lesson for high school students, has students study and discuss the impact of zero-tolerance policies in schools, statistics on the connection between school suspensions and the juvenile justice system, and their own school discipline policy. The end of the lesson offers students a choice of next steps for taking action on this issue. Lessons are available for preschool through high school.

Update: Since publishing this post, a few readers have pointed out that some of ADL's other website content (separate from this curriculum) takes a strong stance on issues relating to Israel and may offend some users. I still feel that this curriculum contains incredibly valuable lessons on very recent events that you won't find anywhere else, but this reinforces my second and third points above: Know your audience, and read through the materials carefully. For more details on this issue, please read the comments below. This article may also shed some light on the topic.

Further Reading

Stirring Up Justice
Laurel Schmidt, Education Leadership, May 2009
Explores the value and process of teaching students about activism. Offers a template for how to engage students in authentic conversations about difficult issues, ask themselves what they can do about social justice issues, consider ways they have already acted in the past, study how other kids and young adults have successfully solved problems, and participate in their own social justice projects.

Turning Current Events Into Social Justice Teaching
Jinnie Spiegler, Edutopia, January 6, 2016
Spiegler, the curriculum director for the Anti-Defamation League (the first resource in this post) offers advice on teaching social justice topics in a way that's both sensitive and productive.

Educolor Resources
Educolor, an organization dedicated to an equitable, just education for everyone, maintains this list of books, movies, articles, and websites that will educate teachers and students on issues of social justice, especially as it pertains to educational equity.

The Best Teacher Resources Sites for Social Justice
Larry Ferlazzo, Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day, July 1, 2008
A big list of resources related to social justice education.
What Are Your Favorite Social Justice Resources?
This is by no means an exhaustive list. If you have a resource you like to use for teaching about social justice, please share it in the comments below. ♦

Keep in touch.
Join my mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration-in quick, bite-sized packages-all geared toward making your teaching more effective and fun. To thank you, I'll send you a free copy of my e-booklet, 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half, which has helped thousands of teachers spend less time grading!

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A Collection of Resources for Teaching Social Justice

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Want your students to actively engage in addressing inequality? Explore this annotated bibliography of resources for teaching students about social justice.

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Dixie Chicks Celebrate 15th Anniversary of Infamous Remarks

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Fifteen years ago, country music changed forever with one remark from Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks. As the Chicks were in London to play a show, just befo

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Your students may have a different idea of what activism may mean. By going over it from the beginning and brainstorming about what they already may know can help you know where to start.

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What is activism? Anjali Appadurai at TEDxYouth@Biddeford

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When a class sees their teacher as an ally in their quest for an education, they perform better. Combative power relationships between teachers and students are being abandoned as more teachers seek a pedagogy that acknowledges students' ownership of their own education and engagement with the world at large.

What is culturally responsive teaching?

An excellent way to help students tap into that capability is through culturally responsive teaching, or CRT. CRT seeks to empower students educationally and to expand their capabilities in other spheres including social, emotional, and political arenas by making students' own skills, languages, and attitudes meaningful in the classroom.

Adopting a culturally responsive pedagogy doesn't mean making assumptions about a person's culture based on their looks, age, or socioeconomic status. Instead, it means getting to know students in a way that is personal and individual.

Acknowledging and embracing a student's racial or ethnic background is important, but it is just a piece of who they are. Fully recognizing and respecting them means learning how they learn and what they are passionate about or interested in.

Identifying classmates' common passions and cultural intersections

Identifying a student's learning style is important, but learning who they are is essential as well. Once teachers know what students like, they are able to identify a classroom's shared passions and areas where cultures intersect.

While establishing a culturally responsive classroom, teachers should avoid awkwardly embracing things they think students will like - no student wants a teacher who seems like a fake. Curiosity about the student experience and insight, on the other hand, can truly open a path of understanding between students and teachers.

High expectations and discussions on code-switching

Finding a literal and metaphorical language for reaching students does not mean lowering standards. A culturally responsive teacher must maintain and communicate high expectations for students' behavior and performance.

Using students' cultural lingo in class discussions might mean some meta-discussions on code-switching and the importance of academic language in an academic setting. Students whose own cultures have been recognized and respected will be more likely to adopt, even temporarily, the code-switching necessary in the classroom. Students who engage in this practice will have learned far more than the content of the original discussion; their learning will translate to out-of-class applications.

Students who feel valued take ownership of their learning

Perhaps the most important quality of CRT is that teachers must shift toward a liberatory pedagogy that emphasizes student engagement and experience over a teacher's ability to lecture on content. Embracing a classroom style that puts a teacher in the position of facilitator instead of specialist can be very difficult, but the action has significant payoff.

Students whose lives and cultures are not treated as important are less likely to invest in the overall learning process, whereas those who are empowered and feel valued will be ready to learn, even if that connection is made through something as simple as teaching the lesson through pop culture, movies, or the music that the class will enjoy.

In addition, students who embrace their role as powerful actors inside the classroom may go on to act as change agents outside of the classroom. In this way, a culturally responsive curriculum makes room for service learning opportunities that connect classrooms to many cultures inside and away from school.

Teachers must examine their own belief systems as well

On a final note, a crucial - and challenging - aspect of culturally responsive instruction is to abandon old ideas about cultural deficits, whether they are related to ethnic or cultural backgrounds or socioeconomic status. Teachers must be careful not to convey judgment in the classroom that might reflect upon students' families, friends, or personal histories. This means addressing their own assumptions about different behaviors, like the parent who forgot to sign off on homework or missed an important parent-teacher meeting.

Educators should work to establish meaningful communication and relationships with student's families that allow them to understand why parent/teacher communication might break down and overcome those barriers. When students see family and teacher collaboration and mutual respect, they are more likely to invest in their education in meaningful and lasting ways.
Monica Fuglei is a graduate of the University of Nebraska in Omaha and a current adjunct faculty member of Arapahoe Community College in Colorado, where she teaches composition and creative writing.
Learn More: Click to view related resources.

Tags: Teacher-Parent Relationships

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How Does Culturally Responsive Instruction Benefit Students?

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When a class sees their teacher as an ally in their quest for an education, they perform better. Combative power relationships between teachers and students are being abandoned as more teachers seek a pedagogy that acknowledges students' ownership of their own education and engagement with the world at large.

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Here is an article that a teacher wrote who used Jessica Singer book to lead a writing workshop. It gives you different point of view from another class.

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Editor's note: This is the first blog in a series about an English unit using activist memoirs to teach about social justice. Read the second blog here.

Abigail Adams observed, "We have too many high-sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them." As an English teacher, I deal in high-sounding words, but I also want my students to learn how to take action against injustice.

My first idea for fitting activism into my English class was to look for fiction on this topic. Contemporary young-adult (YA) novels address social justice issues that, until recently, went undiscussed in schools (e.g., anti-LGBT violence and child homelessness) or that have escalated as problems (e.g., cyberbullying and the effects of climate change). But the trouble with some "issue novels" is that many are written as such-not as great literature. Others rely on tropes that reinforce stereotypes and ignore larger patterns: Children of color get rescued by kindly white adults, plucky heroines use their wits to escape hardship and perpetrators get their comeuppance or suddenly repent.

Of course there are well-crafted works of YA fiction that address social justice issues, but I found a different solution to my activist-literature problem: nonfiction. In Stirring Up Justice, educator Jessica Singer Early describes her unit in which students read biographies, autobiographies and memoirs about activists. I decided to design a unit around memoirs so students could read activists' own stories of responding to injustice with action. The unit aligns to Teaching Tolerance's Anti-Bias Framework, particularly to Justice standard 15: knowing social justice history.

In Early's unit, the students chose any book they wanted. Since I planned my unit to be more about the concept of activism than any one text, there was room for each student to choose a book of genuine interest. Still, I wanted my students to read well-crafted prose that matched their reading and experience levels, and that meant vetting the books.

Finding appropriate memoirs proved to be a challenge. It's not like everyone who acts against injustice writes a memoir, and individuals who might be great activists might not be great writers. Some memoirs, like environmentalist Wangari Maathai's Unbowed, were beautifully written but inaccessible to my seventh-graders without the level support I give when the whole class reads the same text. Other memoirs focused on childhood memories rather than the author's work.

I wanted to keep the book list fairly short to increase the chances that several students in a class would choose the same memoir and could help each other with comprehension and analysis-and to make it possible for me to read all the books they'd be reading. Within the list, I wanted diversity in terms of the authors' identities and the types of injustices they stood against.

Ultimately, I settled on five activist memoirs: The Good Food Revolution by urban farmer Will Allen, Warriors Don't Cry by Little Rock Nine member Melba Pattillo Beals, Glory Road by college basketball coach Don Haskins, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by Malawian inventor William Kamkwamba and In My Hands by Holocaust rescuer Irene Gut Opdyke.

It's not a perfect list. As important as the civil rights movement is, two of the five memoirs are about desegregation during that historical period. In several classes, half or more of the girls picked In My Hands, and half or more of the boys picked Glory Road.

Students selected their memoirs a month before the unit began so they could pace their reading and know their activists' stories when our inquiry started. During the unit, I paired students who did not read the same text so they could think about how the concepts they learned-what an injustice is, what kinds of action people can take against it and the strengths and supports activists need-came up in both books. Students thus had an authentic context to describe their activists' work, and they often commented on the surprising similarities and differences between their activists' experiences.

One student noticed that Irene Gut Opdyke and Will Allen each helped strangers by giving them access to food, albeit under vastly different circumstances. Another pointed out that William Kamkwamba and Melba Pattillo Beals risked physical and emotional harm in order to get better educations, and a third saw that Don Haskins and Opdyke used their positions of relative privilege to act as allies to targeted groups. In all of my classes, it came up that Opdyke, Kamkwamba, and Beals all worked against injustice as teenagers. That was particularly inspiring to students who'd said they were "too young to do anything."

I want my students to read not only critically but hopefully, to see reflections of their past experiences and indications of their future ones and to consider what's possible for them to do-even at their age.

I'd also like to find more well-written activist memoirs on the students' level that would become popular choices and further diversify the list. Any suggestions?

Porosoff is a seventh-grade English teacher, curriculum design consultant and author of Curriculum at Your Core: Meaningful Teaching in the Age of Standards.

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Teaching Tolerance provides free resources to educators-teachers, administrators, counselors and other practitioners-who work with children from kindergarten through high school. Educators use our materials to supplement the curriculum, to inform their practices, and to create civil and inclusive school communities where children are respected, valued and welcome participants.

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When your introducing your students to information make sure that the information that is being used is accurate. Provinding your students with false information cane lead you and their thinking processes into a sticky situation.