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. 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 Activity. By Julian Hipkins III, Deborah Menkart, Sara Evers, and Jenice View.
Role play on the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) that introduces students to a vital example of small “d” democracy in action. For grades 7+.
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Teaching Activity. By Brian C. Gibbs. Rethinking Schools. 6 pages.
A teacher uses the activist history of Theodore Roosevelt High School in East Los Angeles to pose students the question: “What would you be willing to do to create change?"
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Teaching Activity. By Adam Sanchez. Rethinking Schools. 14 pages.
A role play investigating the economic consequences of the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
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Teaching Activity. By Adam Sanchez. Rethinking Schools. 12 pages.
A trial role play asks students to question the role played by the U.S. government and other international actors in the 2010 earthquake.
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Teaching Activity. By Adam Renner, Bridget Brew, and Crystal Proctor. Rethinking Schools. 5 pages.
An article describing how math teachers in a San Francisco high school shed light on the ways economics and racism affect education, housing, and job opportunities.
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Teaching Activity. By Katharine Johnson. Rethinking Schools. 10 pages.
An elementary school teacher introduces the history of redlining through a role play designed for 1st and 2nd graders.
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Teaching Activity. By Willow McCormick. Rethinking Schools. 7 pages.
An elementary school teacher connects the Civil Rights Movement to students’ family history by asking their grandparents to share their memories of the Movement.
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Teaching Activity. Teaching for Change. 2015. 20 pages.
Introductory lesson on key people and events in the long history of the Selma freedom movement.
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Lesson. By Bill Bigelow. 17 pages.
This role play engages students in thinking about what freedpeople needed in order to achieve — and sustain — real freedom following the Civil War. It's followed by a chapter from the book Freedom's Unfinished Revolution.
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Teaching Activity. By Rosemarie Frascella. Rethinking Schools.
Our extractive fossil fuel-based economy has always demanded that some people’s homes and health be sacrificed for the benefit of more privileged and powerful others. This article explores how one teacher engages her students in thinking about how “sacrifice zones” play out in their lives.
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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 Adam Sanchez. Rethinking Schools. 24 pages.
A series of role plays that explore the history and evolution of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, including freedom rides and voter registration.
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Teaching Activity & Article. By Michelle Nicola. Rethinking Schools.
Using Marshallese poet and climate justice activist Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s poem “Dear Matafele Peinam,” a teacher helps 7th graders think about the sacred spaces in their own lives and how they will be affected by climate change.
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Teaching Activity. By Rowan Shafer. Rethinking Schools.
A teacher adapts the “Climate Change Mixer” designed for older students as a springboard for a unit on global warming and climate justice. She asks, "How could I bring up an issue so big and abstract, so gloom and doom, with 3rd graders? How could I not?"
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Teaching Activity. By Eric Fishman. Rethinking Schools.
An elementary school teacher developed the engaging Quetzal Conundrum game to help students understand the impact of climate change in Costa Rica.
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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow. 2009. Rethinking Schools.
The environmental crisis requires a profound social and curricular rethinking.
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Teaching Activity Draft. By Matt Reed and Tim Swinehart. 2019.
Students learn the names and stories of dozens of climate justice activists.
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Teaching Activity. By Adam Sanchez. Rethinking Schools.
Through role play, students explore how different social groups influenced New Deal legislation.
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Teaching Activity. By Adam Sanchez. Rethinking Schools.
A simulation helps students understand the causes of economic crises.
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Teaching Activity. By Flannery Denny. Rethinking Schools, Summer 2019.
A math educator brings data from a friend’s solar panels — and the story to win them in their community — into her 7th-grade classroom to build a bridge between math and climate justice education.
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Teaching Activity. By Adam Sanchez, Brady Bennon, Deb Delman, and Jessica Lovaas.
This mixer role play introduces students to the stories of famous and lesser-known abolitionists, through biography and investigation.
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Teaching Activity. By Rachel Hanes. Rethinking Schools.
A 2nd-grade teacher shows how connecting a student's home to the classroom led to profound lessons for all her students — in this case, about pipelines and climate justice.
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Teaching Activity. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca.
Unit with three lessons on voting rights, including the history of the struggle against voter suppression in the United States.
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