Voting Rights Teaching Toolkits Reaching Classrooms Across the Country

Finding materials that explain the critical timeline of voting history without whitewashing it is tough. I believe the Zinn Education Project’s Voting Rights Toolkit fills that gap.

I used the Who Gets to Vote? Teaching About the Struggle for Voting Rights in the United States lessons, and what worked best was the focus on primary sources. Having students read firsthand accounts from activists like Fannie Lou Hamer gave them a critical look at what voter suppression actually looked like on the ground. The timeline activities and posters helped break down a complex legal history into something that students could easily understand. Creating graphic organizers that complement this also helped in the classroom.

It’s a solid well-researched resource that has saved me hours of preparation and has helped my students understand the reality of voting rights always being contested depending on the historical context. Thanks for all these resources, they have helped me so much in my class. Thanks to these resources, my students now have a deeper understanding of voting history in this country.

In my role as a teaching and learning coach, I am using this Voting Rights Toolkit to share with my government and U.S. history teachers. We have already worked on getting our students registered to vote this week and we have reached out to multiple organizations including the League of Women Voters. We’re using this information in our Center for Democracy and Civic Education organization and we are using it with the New Mexico Council for Social Studies to support teachers.

We have an event this coming week and we will be sharing the documents and the book with them there, particularly highlighting pieces of it in our weekly newsletters. So this one material is being used not just with students in the school where I work but with students and teachers across the state of New Mexico. Posters, stickers, and flyers have already been hung up and we have been discussing voting rights in all the different organizations and in my school classrooms. We are also using this material as a resource as we work on the New Mexico diplomacy legislation as well as the Freedom to Read legislation that we are trying to push in the next 60-day session.

These materials were instrumental in my unit on the unfinished revolution that is the fight for civil rights. I’ve used both Teaching About Unsung Heroes, Resistance 101: A Lesson and Activists and Strategies and the Woman Make History lessons that were shared and I will tell you that it’s been a really exciting exercise for my students to engage with. Students are currently in the process of studying change-makers and defenders that were part of that role play, doing a deep dive into their lives so that they can share what they learned with the larger school community. The posters will be displayed in the hallway so that they will be available for kids as young as 2 to see and engage with.

I’m planning on using What Does the Constitution Mean to Me Today? with my study of the constitution later this year and I love the updated resources that are allowing me to bring diverse viewpoints into the classroom in a way that feels safe for everybody. It has given my students a broader view of what change looks like and how they can be apart of it.

I used Jesse Hagopian’s “We the People”: Whose Rights Does the Constitution Protect? lesson with high school students at my small community school in the Metro Detroit area. This lesson was eye-opening to say the least. My students have only heard history teachers say positive things about the U.S. Constitution. They groan whenever the word ‘Constitution’ is uttered because the incessant glorification of this foundational document is, to be frank, a mind-numbing and boring tradition. Students are instinctively turned off by the uncritical praise that is too often heaped on the Constitution.

Hagopian’s lesson sheds much-needed light on everything that the Constitution does (not) guarantee to the American people. When I provided my students with the list of 25 rights, most of them assumed that a majority of these rights had been written into the Constitutional amendments. Surely basic needs such as clean water, food, and housing must be written into the famous document, right? They were shocked and dismayed to learn just how few of these rights are indeed guaranteed. Furthermore, the lesson did a great job of exposing how the federal government has neglected to protect even the rights that are guaranteed in the amendments.

The mixer discussion format of the lesson made the learning experience active and fun for my students. Each child became an expert on one particular right, and was tasked with educating their peers. This lesson format is far more engaging and memorable than a lecture would have been. Thank you Zinn Education Project for helping my students think critically about a key document that has been too often over-glorified!

My students and I just started delving into the materials in the voting rights teaching toolkit. I teach at a Deaf school and the majority of my students are students of color. Talking about voting rights generally with specific examples has been very useful in broadening the conversation beyond just one group and one time period.

We started talking about who “should” be allowed to vote, which led seamlessly into a reading of the interview with Fannie Lou Hamer. They were fascinated by her personal story and also the challenges she and other organizers faced. Using their personal experiences of barriers they have faced, as well as information from Fannie Lou Hamer’s story, they were then able to discuss voting scenarios and think of how people in power may have prevented different marginalized groups from voting.

All of my students have identities in groups that have been prevented from voting in the past, so it felt very personal. They also were challenged to think of how strategies might have been different in different time periods.

Recently, I spent the week launching some of the content in the Voting Rights Toolkit to augment the Constitution Day lessons I already teach. After a brief discussion regarding the history of the Constitution, the students completed the “yes/no” sheet asking them if particular rights were in the Constitution. After that, they circulated around the room to find the answers.

I used the sheets provided by Zinn and, as they are only 10 and 11, I highlighted particular passages and lines on each excerpt for ease of reading. In addition, I wrote a few guiding questions on the bottom of each excerpt to encourage deeper thinking. Our vice principal came in to engage with the kids, and they loved it. She really pushed their thinking also. The whole class discussion phase was fantastic and surpassed what I thought would happen (we had only been in school for two weeks at this point).

We spent much time talking about the “why” of “missing rights,” especially ones that they hear their parents talking about — particularly healthcare and childcare. Our vice principal shared her monthly daycare costs and they were stunned! So much rich conversation resulted and they remained focused for an hour! We also had a jigsaw lesson using the excerpts from Fannie Lou Hamer and they were eye opening. I shared examples of literacy tests from the era and a wonderful discussion followed.

In the coming weeks, we have guest speakers from the Washington Secretary of State regarding voting rights and we will be participating in a mock election for kids.

Overall, the lessons we used that you provided really enhanced and enriched previous work. We used these to launch topics that are, quite honestly, a stretch in some respects for fifth graders. We will be utilizing more of these resources throughout the year. These were easy lessons to implement and required little prep other than reading the material. As a very busy teacher, that means a lot. We also focus on facts, truth and using primary resources; thus, these documents also aligned with those goals.

Today we used the “Ten Ways to Rethink the Constitution” Gallery Walk in my U.S. history classes in order to explore the Constitution, review its key components, and help place it in the context of history.

I had the students work on what I called “poster conversations.” Putting each of the “Ten Ways” posters on a larger piece of paper, I asked small groups to rotate between them. At the start, I had them work on rewriting the students in their own words, then I had them look for evidence in the Constitution and the textbook that could help support those statements. I had the larger essay/article on hand if students were struggling to find evidence.

Finally, as they rotated through later rounds of the posters, I had them consider what questions came to mind and whether they agreed with the statements made or not. This is where the thinking (and magic!) really happened. Students started responding to each other’s statements on the paper, identifying cycles and patterns of history that we are stuck in as a nation, and sparking questions for further research.

This was an excellent lesson for a U.S. history class that has some familiarity with the Constitution from their Civics days, but needs to think about the founding era and how the framers of the Constitution preserved and protected their own status and wealth. It’s also a great opportunity to get students thinking about what could look different and how things could change moving forward.

I have used lots of Zinn Education Project material in my AP U.S. Government classes over my 20 years of teaching. But, after I got the voting rights teaching toolkit, I hung the “Teach, Vote, Resist” poster in my room, and several of my students asked me what it meant. So, we talked about how, as a civics teacher, I want my students to think critically, learn the material, rediscover our history, and plan for their future.

We have been reading Dr. King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, so we have been talking about how the best time for activism is now — that we can’t wait. Since it is one of the required documents for the AP U.S. Government exam, I think the poster fits in really well with the document.

Also, one of the lessons I incorporate in my interest groups module is about propaganda, so we often speak about how language is used in politics. I provide lots of political advertisements, posters, slogan, photos, and yard signs, all to make the point that political activism can take many forms. Thanks for the materials!

This year for Constitution Day, I incorporated components of the lesson “We the People”: Whose Rights Does the Constitution Protect?. I used the lesson in my twelfth grade government classes, my eleventh grade U.S. history classes, and even in my twelfth grade economics and dual-enrollment psychology classes. Every student needs to learn their rights to be sure they are protected, so I figured it was important to engage all 125 of them in dialogue. If I don’t, who will?

Having students determine what rights they believed were guaranteed by the Constitution was a wonderful conversation starter. They started responding individually, but then slowly engaged each other in spontaneous chatting. As I shared what statements were their Constitutional rights and those that are not, their disbelief was honestly encouraging. It gave me more hope that this generation is ready to dig in, do the work, and create positive change.

As a result of their small conversations, I adjusted the lesson so that instead of completing a written response to the prompt, “Do you think any of the rights from the list that are not guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution should be?”, I had them write their responses on sticky notes. Once everyone was finished, I collected them and shared them with the class. We looked for trends and discussed who would benefit from the change.