Teaching Activity. By Adam Sanchez. Rethinking Schools, 2020.
This multimedia, creative role play introduces students to the ways African American life changed immediately after the Civil War by focusing on the Sea Islands before and during Reconstruction.
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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 Renée Watson. Rethinking Schools. 7 pages.
A teacher's reflection on the power of poetry to spark critical discussion and reflection on current issues of inequality surrounding disaster response in the United States.
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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 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, Adam Sanchez, and Tim Swinehart.
A role-play activity engages students in building solidarity among different groups and organizations fighting fossil fuels and searching for alternatives.
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Teaching Activity. By Linda Christensen. Rethinking Schools. 20 pages.
Teaching about racist patterns of murder, theft, displacement, and wealth inequality through the 1921 Tulsa Massacre.
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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow. 10 pages.
What led up to the Trail of Tears? In this lesson, students learn about the decision to remove the Cherokee and Seminole people from their lands.
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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow. Rethinking Schools.
Who — or what — is to blame for the terrible effects of the climate crisis? This trial role play helps students understand the complicated factors involved.
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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 Ursula Wolfe-Rocca. Rethinking Schools. 29 pages.
Through examining FBI documents, students learn the scope of the FBI’s COINTELPRO campaign to spy on, infiltrate, discredit, and disrupt all corners of the Black Freedom Movement.
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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow. 6 pages.
A lesson on the countless colonial laws enacted to create division and inequality based on race. This helps students understand the origins of racism in the United States and who benefits.
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Teaching Activity. By Alison Kysia. 28 pages.
In this lesson, students learn about the colonial history of Congo, debate responsibility for crimes against humanity, and investigate the connection, past and present, between the exploitation of natural resources and violence.
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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow. 24 pages.
The U.S. Constitution endorsed slavery and favored the interests of the owning classes. What kind of Constitution would have resulted from founders who were representative of the entire country? That is the question addressed in this role play activity.
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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow. 7 pages.
Students read a poignant excerpt from Agnes Smedley's novel, Daughter of Earth, and use it to think and write about how schooling—their own included—teaches lessons about social class.
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Teaching Activity. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca.
In this role play students analyze who is to blame for the illegal, mass deportations of Mexican Americans and immigrants during the Great Depression.
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Teaching Activity. By Abby Mac Phail. Rethinking Schools. 17 pages.
A lesson on the Keystone XL Pipeline battle.
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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow. Rethinking Schools. 6 pages.
How to engage students in a critical analysis of the textbook version of "discovery."
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Teaching Activity. By Julie Treick O’Neill and Tim Swinehart. Rethinking Schools. 16 pages.
A role play on the Indigenous Peoples' Global Summit on Climate Change asks students to develop a list of demands to present to the rest of the world at a climate change meeting.
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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow. 9 pages.
Students are invited to solve a mystery, using historical clues, about the real story of the Draft Riots.
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Teaching Activity. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca.
Students discover “echoes of enslavement” in their own state — discrete sites of remembering, forgetting, honoring, lying, or distorting — in this lesson based on the book How the Word Is Passed by Clint Smith.
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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow. 12 pages.
A role play based on the election of 1860 allows students to explore the political debates of the time and the real reasons for the Civil War.
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Teaching Activity. By Dale Weiss. Rethinking Schools. 3 pages.
A teacher's reflections about a curriculum unit on women's rights contextualizes the history of the feminist movement within the broader struggle of people working for greater equality in the United States.
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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 Tiffany Mitchell Patterson and Jessica Rucker.
In this lesson, students explore the core ideas of Black Power through a gallery walk with images and quotes connected to the life of Rosa Parks, and then consider how to define Rosa Parks’s activism.
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