Curriculum Submission Guidelines

What unites all Zinn Education Project curriculum is the conviction that young people should be given opportunities to comment and act upon the world they have inherited. Students are not passive recipients of historical knowledge; like all of us, they are historical actors with the power to read the world and bend its course toward justice. This active, participatory approach to learning is what we call “a people’s pedagogy.” 

Many types of teaching activities can embody this pedagogy and encourage historical consciousness — of oppression and violence, of justice and care, of the ways the past bears on the present. 

Our collection of trials, role plays, primary source investigations, discussion questions, and other teaching activities aim to:

• Explain complex social phenomena, like white supremacy, settler colonialism, social class division and wealth inequality, and environmental exploitation.  
• Focus on events, groups, and individuals too often erased, minimized, or oversimplified in corporate curricula, especially movements and individuals who have acted for justice.
• Increase students’ capacity to act for justice by:
  • Growing their imaginative capabilities, the cornerstone of empathy and solidarity.
  • Exploring how systems affect people’s choices, analysis necessary to solve seemingly intractable problems.
  • Allowing time and space for participatory, problem-solving pedagogy.
  • Thwarting cynicism and resignation by emphasizing activism and resistance, and the recognition that at all points in history, there are choices; nothing is inevitable.

Before you submit a lesson plan for review toward publication, please read the guidelines below and make sure that your submission meets these criteria. 

We publish lesson plans that offer curricular confidence and wisdom to other educators of conscience. For that reason, we look for lessons that have been tried and refined based on teaching experience. We expect that you will pilot your lesson in your classroom — or a colleague’s classroom, if you are not currently in a teaching position — and incorporate these experiences into the lesson plan. There is no set page or word limit, but lesson plans should be easy to read and replicate. To make them as legible as possible, we look for submissions that weave through several key components:

• Introduction: A lesson plan should begin by framing the content area and pedagogy of the lesson. Readers should come away from the introduction with a snapshot of the lesson itself and a sense of the “so what?” behind it. Why have you chosen to write this curriculum? Why does it matter? How does it connect to broader themes of social justice? What will students learn from this lesson? (In other words, the objectives should be embedded in the narrative. We are not looking for a list of objectives or standards.) There are many ways to address these questions. You might start with a historical note, a classroom vignette, or another hook — but be sure to paint a picture of the lesson early on. Don’t bury the lesson description under a long anecdote or article. Get to the core of it quickly, and then elaborate as you see fit. (A few published lessons that exemplify strong introductions and suggested procedures are linked farther down, for reference.)
• Time Required: After the introduction, approximate the amount of time needed to complete the lesson. Please note the time in minutes or hours — not class periods, which can vary widely. For example, you might list the time required as “about 90–100 minutes for the mixer and follow-up discussion.”
• Materials Needed: Note the materials that teachers and students will need in the lesson. For example, a lesson might require a name tag, a copy of discussion questions, and a mixer role for every student. Please list these out in brief bullet points.
• Suggested Procedure: You have already given readers a glimpse of the lesson in the introduction. Here, describe the lesson in a numbered list that guides them through each step. Begin each step with a clear instruction that moves the lesson forward. For example, “Ask students to reflect on. . .”; or “Hand out a role to each student. . .”; or “Distribute the mixer questions. . .” Some steps may call for more explanation than others. Maybe you pause with a caveat, a suggestion for additional scaffolding, or a classroom experience that helped hone your teaching. As with the introduction, this is not a one-size-fits-all piece. But taken together with the introduction, a solid suggested procedure shows how and why the lesson unfolds as it does. It should give readers confidence that this curriculum is worthwhile and replicable. (A few published lessons that exemplify strong introductions and suggested procedures are linked farther down, for reference.)
• Handouts: In the final part of the lesson plan, include all handouts that teachers will need to print out for their students. If there is a handout that all students get, put that first. For example, a set of mixer questions or a note-taking sheet. Follow that with handouts that may vary by student or group, like mixer roles or primary source documents. 
• Optional/other components: Some lesson plans include additional suggested activities or materials. For example, you might offer an extension activity, or prediction questions that link to the next unit, or a chart that organizes primary source documents by theme. Include any of these components after the suggested procedure, but before the handouts.

Here are a few published lessons that exemplify strong introductions and suggested procedures through a variety of approaches:

• When the Impossible Suddenly Became Possible: A Reconstruction Mixer
• The Climate Crisis Trial: A Role Play on the Responsibility of Global Warming
• Reconstructing the South: What Really Happened

For more guidance or inspiration, see the list of popular lessons at the Zinn Education Project site. This is, of course, not an exhaustive list of the kinds of lessons we publish. But these can serve as a collection of “mentor texts” or templates for structuring a wide variety of lessons.

A final note on content: We do not accept lessons with text or images that have been produced or edited with Generative AI. 

When your lesson plan is ready for review, please submit it as a Google Doc to [email protected]. The process that follows is often long, with rounds of editing and no guarantee up front that the submission will be published. If a lesson seems solid, a curriculum editor will work with the writer toward publication. The curriculum editorial board decides which lessons to publish. Once accepted, a lesson will need to go through proofing, layout, and permissions checks on images and text before it is posted at the ZEP site. 

Thank you for your interest in contributing curriculum to the Zinn Education Project.