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PenPal Schools is a website where students from 150 countries can communicate and learn about various project-based topics from one another. Teachers have the capability to monitor every message and student interaction to ensure safety.

Using PenPal Schools is useful in building and practicing digital literacy and safety. While using digital citizenship guidelines, students are able to view real world problems, or even content-based projects. One lesson that can be implemented is learning about holidays around the world. While studying holidays, students can collaborate with other children globally, as well as learn content vocabulary and make meaningful connections. This allows students to not feel so "far away" from other cultures and traditions and allows them to embrace them. This is especially helpful for English language learners.

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In our culture today, students are exposed to many things in the news and media, both good and bad. Common Sense Education reviews IF educators should discuss current events, and HOW to discuss them.

Discussing current news and media is not always easy to do and not always appropriate for the classroom (especially younger grades). Utilizing some of these techniques, educators can facilitate conversations about what is happening locally and globally, with an emphasis in using technology responsibly. Lessons that are worthy of investing time in is the Common Sense Digital Citizenship Curriculum. Using these lessons creates a sense of understanding and responsibility for what students put out into the digital world.

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Talking with Students About Shocking or Disturbing News | Common Sense Education

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Age-based tips and lessons to help students process upsetting events.

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Touchable Earth is an engaging, video-based, way to learn about different countries. Although there are only nine countries to choose from, students are able to watch and listen to children from around the world and see how they live.

A fun lesson to implement would to have each student/group choose one country to research. Students can go through the different information given about each country and the family life and create a slideshow or brochure about it, then present it to the class. In addition to this fun lesson, students can find similarities and differences between their own culture and the chosen country. This can easily become a compare/contrast (venn diagram) lesson that students would enjoy writing about. These lessons will help students become more aware of life around the globe.

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Common Sense Education provides a plethora of resources for teachers to tackle social and cultural literacy. It gives educators ideas how to fight against personal biases and build a strong sense of culture and digital literacies.

Digging through the research better equips educators with the proper tools for multiple conversations that may occur in the classroom. While supporting each child and their learning experience, students can learn about societal movements, digital responsibility, and become more culturally aware. Designing a lesson can be as simple as choosing one from the provided resource. An alternative is using Scratch, or ScratchJr, as a digital tool for students to demonstrate their learning about these topics. Using Scratch allows students to code, animate, and share their knowledge and creative works.

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Teaching and learning happen within cultural, political, and social circumstances. As much as we want to deny it, we all have biases based on our life experiences. Each of us -- teachers and students alike -- enter classrooms from different perspectives and points of view. We must learn to negotiate those differences to better understand each other and our worlds, and to advocate for a better, more equitable future. To do so, we need to build a set of social and cultural literacies via multicultural education, social justice education, and culturally responsive pedagogy that help us navigate difficult conversations, acknowledge and challenge bias and prejudice, create inclusive classroom spaces, and fight for social justice.

In this collection, you'll find hand-picked, regularly updated resources to help you better understand and practice these important social and cultural literacies. At the top, there are featured resources as well as more comprehensive curricula. Then you'll find lessons, videos, downloadables, and games organized by a few key topic areas like facilitating tough conversations, understanding bias and prejudice, and getting students civically engaged.

Jump down to a section
Social and Cultural Literacy Curricula
Challenging or Difficult Conversations
Bias and Prejudice
Civic Engagement, Activism, and Social Justice
Inclusive Communities
Research on Social and Cultural Literacy
Social and Cultural Literacy Organizations to Explore for More = one of our favorite resources
Social and Cultural Literacy Courses and Curricula

The providers below offer more comprehensive resources for media literacy, from courses (from just a few hours to weeks) to a curriculum linked to a scope and sequence and standards.

Digital Civics Toolki t (by the Civic Engagement Research Group): Created by the same researchers behind Deep Dive: Educating for Democracy, this toolkit offers easy-to-implement conversation starters (among other resources) for activating students' passion for civics and democracy. For more, check out our review.

Educating 4 Democracy (by the Civic Engagement Research Group): This series of videos (featuring real students and teachers) and associated lesson materials is backed by research and sure to inspire and support productive classroom discussions.

Talking About Race (by the National Museum of African American History & Culture): This toolkit provides in-depth resources for caregivers, educators, and individuals to reflect on race, power, and privilege, all in the interest of having constructive, equity-oriented conversations.

The Teaching Tolerance Social Justice Standards: A Professional Development Facilitator Guide (by Teaching Tolerance): This downloadable not only features a set of social justice standards schools can use to make anti-bias education a priority in their communities, but also a great PD guide for getting your educators and administrators on board with weaving these practices into daily teaching and learning practice.

Challenging or Difficult Conversations

Controversial and difficult conversations are unavoidable in classrooms, especially those grappling with important cultural, social, and political issues. Fortunately, these conversations are often a lot scarier in theory than in practice given the incredible research and resources available for handling them effectively.

Websites, articles, feeds, and newsletters

Lesson plans and activities

Building Classroom Community: Lessons for the First Day of School (by Facing History): Framed as a back-to-school toolkit, these five lessons will help prep classrooms to have meaningful, respectful conversations about identity and more.

Critical Practices for Anti-Bias Education: Classroom Culture (by Teaching Tolerance): These PD activities and reflections for educators help teachers make their classrooms more open and respectful, leading to better discussions and outcomes for all students.

"Where I'm From" Poem (by Remix at the University of Notre Dame): Use this poetry lesson to get students reflecting on -- and sharing -- who they are. Along the way students also get some experience using Audacity, an audio recording and editing tool.

Videos

Handouts, infographics, and posters

Games, apps, and tools

Help students build collaboration and communication skills using the tools on these lists.

Bias and Prejudice

We all carry biases, and it's important to reflect on them and work to expand our perspectives, experiences, and communities so we act and think with less prejudice and take aim together at systems of oppression.

Websites, articles, feeds, and newsletters

8 Ways Teachers Can Address White Supremacy in the Classroom (by Common Sense Education): Take these steps to make sure your classroom is actively anti-racist.

Anti-Racism Resources for All Ages (by Nicole A. Cooke): An excellent collection of videos, books, articles, and lessons on anti-racism, activism, and critical race theory curated by Dr. Nicole A. Cooke of the University of South Carolina.

Anti-Racist Resources: This comprehensive, crowd-sourced Google doc (created in the wake of the Charlottesville, Virginia, white supremacist rally) is a must-bookmark resource for any educator committed to combating bias and bigotry in their classroom and community.

Five Ways to Reduce Racial Bias in Your Children (by Greater Good magazine): Trustworthy practical tips from UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center.

Research-Based Advice on Teaching Children Not to Be Racist (by the Atlantic): Two researchers offer proven and age-appropriate strategies for reducing bias and prejudice in the early grades.

ocial Justice Books (by Teaching for Change): A highly recommended resource for preschool and elementary school educators, this list of books intersects with all kinds of important cultural and social issues and will help students build perspective.

Lesson plans and activities

Anti-Bias Tools & Strategies (by ADL): A collection of ADL's articles ranging from teaching strategies to historical info to topical and definitional overviews, all aimed at anti-bias education.

Real Fake News: Exploring Actual Examples of Newspaper Bias (by Common Sense Education): Have students go beyond the buzzword, and explore inaccurate or outright false reporting about Black people, driven by bias, prejudice, and racism.

Reflecting on George Floyd's Death and Police Violence Towards Black Americans (by Facing History): Use this reflective activity to get every member of your classroom -- including you -- to reflect on police violence, racism, protest, and paths to justice.

Teaching About Race, Racism, and Police Violence (Teaching Tolerance): This combination of articles, lessons, professional development, and more is a great starting point for classroom discussions about police violence and its role in systemic racism.

Videos

Handouts, infographics, and posters

Games, apps, and tools

Civic Engagement, Activism, and Social Justice

When studying tough topics like injustice and oppression, it's important to connect people -- especially young people -- to outlets for their frustration, rage, and political goals. This is where activism comes in: It can channel these feelings toward meaningful ways to build community and create social change.

Websites, articles, feeds, and newsletters

10 Organizations That Empower Latinxs in America (by Cultura Collectiva): A good overview of Latinx-focused organizations for students looking to advocate for the rights and futures of Latinx people worldwide.

10 Ways Youth Can Engage in Activism (by ADL): Share these methods with students to give them an outlet for their political passions.

28 Organizations That Empower Black Communities (by the Huffington Post): While this is far from comprehensive, this list has a lot of great organizations for Black activists, and some are led by young people.

International Indigenous Youth Council: Started during the Dakota Access Pipeline protests at Standing Rock, this organization fights to protect the natural world and indigenous culture while encouraging young people to become leaders in their communities.

March for Our Lives: Formed in the wake of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, March for Our Lives has mobilized young people to end the epidemic of gun violence.

LGBT Youth & Schools Resource Library (U.S.) (by ACLU): An excellent roundup of organizations offering resources for supporting, protecting, and empowering LGBTQ+ students in your classroom and/or school community.

Sunrise Movement: This youth-led climate change organization has been making headlines the past two years, most notably for being behind the push for a Green New Deal.

Lesson plans and activities

Activism Online (by Teaching Tolerance): A great introduction to both the possibilities and limitations of online activism.

Democracy & Civic Engagement (by Facing History): There are dozens of lessons -- across all grade levels -- available at Facing History that help students understand past struggles for justice and encourage them to imagine possible futures.

Social Media for Social Action (by Teaching Tolerance): Get students thinking more deeply about how social media can be leveraged for activism and change, but also about the negative effects inherent in the medium.

Transformational action through Art Build (by NEA EdJustice): This article shows how several school communities brought their schools and communities together to create and showcase activist art. There's also checklist of tasks you can use to organize your own Art Build event.

Vote by Design (by Stanford d.school): This non-partisan, free curriculum aims to get students civically engaged by having them think about and discuss the qualities they want in a President.

Videos

Handouts, infographics, and posters

Games, apps, and tools

Inclusive Communities

To be good citizens -- and digital citizens -- we must actively work against toxic ideas and communities rife with conspiratorial thinking, cynicism, and hate. Instead, we must create spaces where everyone is welcome and ideas and points of view are discussed constructively.

Websites, articles, feeds, and newsletters

Increasing Inclusivity in the Classroom (by the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University): This is one of the best roundups of mostly academic research and best practices for inclusive teaching and facilitation.

A Look at Implicit Bias and Microaggressions (by Edutopia): Bias manifests in many subtle, unconscious ways, and this list of resources will help you recognize small steps you can take to forge a more inclusive classroom.

Lesson plans and activities

Awareness Activities (by the Critical Multicultural Pavilion): These icebreakers and reflective activities help classrooms map and discuss their identities, differences, and commonalities.

Constructively Engaging in Digital Communities (by Teaching Tolerance): An in-depth lesson that ends with students developing classroom guidelines for effective community participation.

Countering Hate Speech Online (by Common Sense Education): Get students to explore the relationship between hate speech and xenophobia and how they can combat it in digital spaces.

Part of a Community Online (by Teaching Tolerance): Introduce young kids to the idea of emotionally supportive and empathic community-building.

Participating in Digital Communities (by Teaching Tolerance): Get students to make a commitment to creating inclusive communities and to practicing how to respond to bias and prejudice.

Responding to Online Hate Speech (by Common Sense Education): Help middle schoolers learn techniques to deal with hate speech when they see it or experience it.

Should Online Hate Speech Be Censored? (by Common Sense Education): Is hate speech free speech? Use this lesson to get your high school students to explore this quandary and offer an informed perspective.

Videos

Handouts, infographics, and posters

Games, apps, and tools

Research on Social and Cultural Literacy

Below you'll find some researchers and research organizations that focus on social and cultural literacy. We've also highlighted a few key pieces of their work.

Biased (by Jennifer L. Eberhardt): Dr. Eberhardt provides a highly readable mapping of the landscape of research into bias, bias's impact on our world, and ways forward.

Culturally Responsive Teaching & the Brain (by Zaretta Hammond): This book and study guide offers an important perspective on how to create inclusive but challenging classroom environments that are equally attuned to the way our brains work and how culture affects the way we engage with each other and the world.

Equity Literacy Institute (by Paul Gorski and others): Dig into this extensive list of equity-focused books and articles published by longtime educator and social justice advocate Paul Gorski and his collaborators.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed (by Paulo Freire): Dense but foundational book focused on how to upend top-down approaches to pedagogy and restore the revolutionary potential of education.

Social and Cultural Literacy Organizations to Explore for More

Help students think critically about current events and media with this collection of lessons, videos, and more.

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Social and Cultural Literacy Resources for Classrooms | Common Sense Education

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A best-of-the-best collection of resources for social justice- and equity-focused educators.

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Children Are Citizens is a project that is based in Washington, D.C. but can be used anywhere! Children are taught how to become community members and gain a sense of citizenship.

To implement a lesson, you can research your local area and the history of your city. Local field trips to places with history, art, or any interest in general can start this sense of community and curiosity for young learners. Creating civic engagement in the classroom can lead to students thinking outside their own community and expanding their interests globally. Students can then extend their learning by creating digital presentations and sharing on a digital platform.

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As the world becomes increasingly connected, knowledge of ourselves as individual learners and as members of a community becomes more important. When children begin their schooling with support for thinking, feeling, and acting in groups, they are more likely to participate in and practice democracy…