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. 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.
The Thingamabob Game helps students grasp the essential relationship between climate and capitalism.
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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. By Bill Bigelow, Chris Buehler, Julie Treick O'Neill, and Tim Swinehart. Rethinking Schools.
This role play invites students to take on identities of La Vía Campesina activists around the world, to compare/contrast circumstances in order to discover the common goal of “food sovereignty.”
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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.
Through a mixer activity, students encounter how enslaved people resisted the brutal exploitation of slavery. The lesson culminates in a collective class poem highlighting the defiance of the enslaved.
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Teaching Activity. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca. Rethinking Schools.
The mixer role play is based on Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law, which shows in exacting detail how government policies segregated every major city in the United States with dire consequences for African Americans.
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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 Ursula Wolfe-Rocca, Alex Stegner, Chris Buehler, Angela DiPasquale, and Tom McKenna.
Students meet dozens of advocates and recipients of reparations from a variety of historical eras to grapple with the possibility of reparations now and in the future.
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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. 2020.
Unit with three lessons on voting rights, including the history of the struggle against voter suppression in the United States.
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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.
In this mixer lesson, students learn about Rosa Parks' many decades of activism by taking on roles from various times in her life. In this way, students learn about her radicalism before, during, and long after the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
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Teaching Activity. By Caneisha Mills.
This people’s tribunal begins with the premise that a heinous crime is being committed as tens of millions of people’s lives are in danger due to COVID-19. But who was responsible for this crime? Students weigh the evidence.
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Teaching Activity. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca.
In this activity, students take on the role of activist-experts to improve upon a Congressional bill for reparations for Black people. They talk back to Congress’ flimsy legislation and design a more robust alternative.
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Teaching Activity. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca.
A lesson about multiple cohorts of climate activists: Indigenous leaders in the Climate Justice Movement, valve turners using civil disobedience to stop the flow of oil, and the legal team that uses the “necessity defense” in the courts.
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Teaching Activity. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca.
Students explore three documents produced in the wake of three major episodes of racial violence (1919, 1967, 2014) to understand the long trajectory of police violence in Black communities.
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Teaching Activity. By WorldOregon's Young Leaders in Action.
In this role-play, students explore the challenges and perspectives of people — climate refugees — who have "no option except escape" from homes devastated by climate change.
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Teaching Activity. By Suzanna Kassouf, Matt Reed, Tim Swinehart, Ursula Wolfe-Rocca, and Bill Bigelow.
The stories of twenty people whose lives were touched by the New Deal of the 1930s come to life in this classroom activity, intended to open students' minds to the possibilities of a Green New Deal.
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Teaching ideas and discussion questions for How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith.
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Teaching Activity. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca.
In this mixer lesson, students meet 27 different targets of government harassment and repression to analyze why disparate individuals might have become targets of the same campaign, determining what kind of threat they posed in the view of the U.S. government.
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