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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 Bill Bigelow. Rethinking Schools. 16 pages.
In this lesson, students explore many of the real challenges faced by abolitionists with a focus on the American Anti-Slavery Society.
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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow and Norm Diamond. 8 pages.
In this “mystery” activity, students receive clues and discuss some of the factors that contributed to the intensification of racism in the 1920s in the United States.
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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 Katie Baydo-Reed. Rethinking Schools. 10 pages.
Students hold a mixer and a mock trial in preparation for reading literature about internment.
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Teaching Activity. By Mark Sweeting. Rethinking Schools. 4 pages.
How one teacher engaged his students in a critical examination of the language used in textbooks to describe the internment.
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Teaching Activity. By Moé Yonamine. Rethinking Schools. 18 pages.
Poetry, photography, and text are used in this role play to teach about the seldom told history of Japanese Latin American internment during WWII.
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Teaching Activity. By Bob Peterson. Rethinking Schools. 7 pages.
How a 5th grade teacher and his students conducted research to answer the question: “Which presidents owned people?” Available in Spanish.
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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow and Linda Christensen. Rethinking Schools. 3 pages.
Empathy, or "social imagination," allows students to connect to "the other" with whom, on the surface, they may appear to have little in common.
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Teaching Activity. By Gilda L. Ochoa. Rethinking Schools. 5 pages.
Reflections on teaching students about the 1968 walkouts by Chicano students in California.
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Teaching Activity. By Thom Thacker and Michael A. Lord. Rethinking Schools. 4 pages.
An art contest is used as the basis from which students can examine primary historical documents (advertisements for runaway slaves) to gain a deeper understanding of the institution of slavery in the North.
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Teaching Activity. By Alan J. Singer. Rethinking Schools. 7 pages.
How a teacher and his students organized a tour of the hidden history of slavery in New York.
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Teaching Activity. By Nathanial W. Smith. Rethinking Schools. 6 pages.
A teacher describes a series of lessons he teaches to help his students understand race as a social construct.
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Teaching Activity. 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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