Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow and Norm Diamond. 7 pages.
This lesson teaches some of the nuts and bolts of labor unions and then moves beyond to ask students to consider what rights they have at work, and to recognize that “rights” depend in large part on what people have fought for and won.
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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow and Norm Diamond. 4 pages.
Activity for students to write from the point of view of one of the women featured in the film Union Maids.
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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow and Norm Diamond. 8 pages.
In this lesson, students re-examine and restructure a burger joint so that it is more democratically and imaginatively operated.
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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow and Norm Diamond. 8 pages.
Lesson engages students in a lively simulation that helps them experience some of the pressures that lead workers to organize.
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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow and Norm Diamond.
This lesson uses Charlie Chaplin’s hilarious classic film, Modern Times, to help students think about the impact of “scientific management” on the workplace.
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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow and Norm Diamond. 7 pages.
Students explore the power of songs to build solidarity and increase understanding. This is the final activity from Bigelow and Diamond’s labor history book, The Power in Our Hands, and draws on the other lessons.
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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow and Norm Diamond. 8 pages.
In this “mystery” activity, students receive clues and discuss some of the factors that contributed to the intensification of racism in the 1920s in the United States.
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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow and Norm Diamond. 11 pages.
This role play activity on the famous 1892 Homestead Strike, explores the possibility of solidarity among workers of very different backgrounds and at different levels in the workplace hierarchy.
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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow and Norm Diamond. 6 pages.
Students work with a chapter from Milton Meltzer’s classic book, Bread and Roses, to see the impact of late 19th century factory work on workers’ home lives.
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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow and Norm Diamond. 4 pages.
In this simulation, students make paper airplanes to learn about the origins and effects of “scientific management”—owners’ attempt to capture workers’ skills and knowledge, and then to exploit that knowledge to reorganize work and cut costs by deskilling workers.
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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow and Norm Diamond. 7 pages.
Writing activity for students to complete the narrative of women workers striking at a glove-making factory, exploring possible outcomes.
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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow and Norm Diamond. 20 pages.
Students “become” several of the social groups who participated in the 1934 Longshore Workers Strike — some of whom had to answer the question, “Which side are you on?”
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Teaching Activity. By Hyung Kyu Nam. 2003.
Explores the multiple causes of racial segregation and environmental racism, and helps students understand how institutional racism is perpetuated in the post-Civil Rights era.
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Teaching Guide. By Bill Bigelow. 6 pages.
Lessons to accompany the 1985 video "Sun City" that promoted the cultural boycott of South Africa initiated by Little Steven van Zandt of Bruce Springsteen’s E St. Band.
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Teaching Activity. Zinn Education Project. 21 pages.
Two lessons to introduce key facts about the Vietnam War and the Pentagon Papers, documents that provide essential history that is often ignored by textbooks.
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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow. Rethinking Schools. 15 pages.
Using chocolate chip cookie "mining," this lively activity takes a critical look at how the coal industry teaches the impact of coal mining.
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Teaching Activity. By Abby MacPhail. Rethinking Schools. 17 pages.
A lesson on the Keystone XL Pipeline battle.
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Teaching Activity. By Linda Christensen. Rethinking Schools. 21 pages.
Role play and writing activities for language arts and social studies on Brown v. Board and the Little Rock Nine. Designed for use with the memoir Warriors Don’t Cry.
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Teaching Activity. By Moé Yonamine. Rethinking Schools. 11 pages.
Lesson based on ANPO: Art X War, a documentary about visual resistance to U.S. military bases in Japan by Japan’s foremost contemporary artists.
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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow. 7 pages.
A lesson to introduce students to the numerous and varied ways African Americans resisted their enslavement, using the autobiographical Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.
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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow. 17 pages.
A role play allows students to examine issues of race and class when exploring both the accomplishments and limitations of the Seneca Falls Convention.
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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow. 5 pages.
A lesson in which students develop critical literacy skills by responding to Andrew Jackson's speech on "Indian Removal."
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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow. Rethinking Schools. 16 pages.
In this lesson, students explore many of the real challenges faced by abolitionists with a focus on the American Anti-Slavery Society.
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Teaching Activity. By Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 3 pages.
Text of speech by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the Vietnam War, followed by three teaching ideas.
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Teaching Activity. By Moé Yonamine. Rethinking Schools. 18 pages.
Poetry, photography, and text are used in this role play to teach about the seldom told history of Japanese Latin American internment during WWII.
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