We are offering free copies of the new book Stolen Justice: The Struggle for African American Voting Rights (2020) by Lawrence Goldstone to teachers who share their experience with teaching any of the three lessons in “Who Gets to Vote? Teaching About the Struggle for Voting Rights in the United States.” This offer is made possible thanks to a generous donation of books by the author.
This young adult book documents the long and ongoing struggle for voting rights in the United States.
The “Who Gets to Vote” unit contains three lessons:
The first lesson considers the question of who should vote. Students first share their understanding of what makes a “qualified” voter, then reconsider their thinking after a close reading of an oral history by Fannie Lou Hamer.
The second lesson asks students to predict how policymakers might have restricted the right to vote for certain groups to thwart movements and laws that expanded voting rights.
The final lesson is a mixer role play in which students learn about a variety of people with firsthand experience having their voting rights granted or denied. The roles reach back as far as the colonial era and forward to the present. This lesson closes with a timeline activity in which students create a visual map depicting the expansion and contraction of voting rights over time.
We invite educators to send us 3-5 paragraphs about why they taught one or more of the lessons in this unit and how their students responded (student quotes are a plus!). Please include a photograph of yourself. Note: The story must be based on having used one or more of the lessons in “Who Gets to Vote? Teaching About the Struggle for Voting Rights in the United States.”
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