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These robust, ready-to-use classroom lessons offer breadth and depth, spanning essential social justice topics and reinforcing critical social emotional learning skills.

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“[Learning for Justice] provides me with the means to promote social justice, challenge bias, and engage students in discussions about diversity that would perhaps not happen otherwise.”

Grade Level
Social Justice Domain
Subject
Topic

139 Lessons

The New Mad Men

“The New Mad Men” explores how changing demographics in the United States have changed the face of advertising. In particular, the focus is on the purchasing power of the 54 million Latinx people currently living in the United States. The episode visits the headquarters of LatinWorks, an advertising agency in Austin, Texas, with a specialty in multicultural advertising.
Grade Level
November 24, 2014

Politics of the New South

In “Politics of the New South,” Maria Hinojosa revisits Clarkston, Georgia, featured in a previous episode and notable for its immigrant population. It’s three days before an election in which three former refugees are running for city office for the very first time.
Grade Level
Topic
Social Justice Domain
October 27, 2014

Dismantling Racial Caste

What is needed to end mass incarceration and permanently eliminate racial caste in the United States? Legal and policy solutions alone are not enough to dismantle racial caste because the methods of racial control within this system are “legal” and rarely appear as outwardly discriminatory. A social movement that confronts the role of race and cultivates an ethic of care must form or else a new racial caste system will emerge in the future.
Grade Level
Subject
Social Studies
Civics
History
Social Justice Domain
October 14, 2014

Parallels Between Mass Incarceration and Jim Crow

What are the most salient similarities between mass incarceration and Jim Crow? Mass incarceration is a system of racialized social control that, like slavery and Jim Crow before it, operates to discriminate and create a stigmatized racial group locked into an inferior position by law and custom.
Grade Level
Subject
Social Studies
Civics
History
Social Justice Domain
October 14, 2014

Understanding the Prison Label

What is the long-term harm and wider impact of mass incarceration on people and communities of color? The racial caste system established and perpetuated by mass incarceration continues beyond a prison sentence and extends into families, communities and society at large. The criminalization and demonization of black men creates a “prison label” of stigma and shame that damages the black community as a whole.
Grade Level
Subject
Social Studies
Civics
History
Social Justice Domain
October 13, 2014

Mass Incarceration as a Form of Racialized Social Control

What is the “new Jim Crow”? Throughout its history, the United States has been structured by a racial caste system. From slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration, these forms of racialized social control reinvented themselves to meet the needs of the dominant social class according to the constraints of each era.
Grade Level
Subject
Social Studies
Civics
History
Social Justice Domain
October 13, 2014