Lessons

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.”

Mary McLeod Bethune

In this lesson, students will read an excerpt of an interview given by Mary McLeod Bethune and will learn that she founded the Daytona National and Industrial School for Negro Girls (now Bethune-Cookman College) in 1904. Through close reading, they will explore and discuss connections between events from Bethune’s life experiences and their own lives, and connections between past and current events.

Mary Church Terrell

In this lesson of the series, “Beyond Rosa Parks: Powerful Voices for Civil Rights and Social Justice,” students will read and analyze text from “The Progress of Colored Women,” a speech made by Mary Church Terrell in 1898. Terrell was the first president of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), an organization that was formed in 1896 from the merger of several smaller women’s clubs, and was active during the period of Jim Crow segregation in the South.

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.

Maya Angelou

This lesson focuses on questions of identity as students read and analyze Angelou’s inspirational poem “Still I Rise” and apply its message to their own lives. Students learn how Maya Angelou overcame hardship and discrimination to find her own voice and to influence others to believe in themselves and use their voices for positive change.

Media Consumers and Creators, What Are Your Rights and Responsibilities?

This lesson focuses on the concept of "fake news" and the responsibilities of news and media creators and consumers. Students will explore PEN America's News Consumers' Bill of Rights and Responsibilities and read an article about "fake news" that presents strategies on how to approach digital sources.

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.

The New Deciders

“The New Deciders” examines the influence of voters from four demographic groups—black millennials, Arab Americans, Latino Evangelicals and Asian Americans. Viewers will meet political hopefuls, community leaders, activists and church members from Orange County, California, Cleveland, Ohio, Greensboro, North Carolina and Orlando, Florida, all of whom have the opportunity to move the political needle, locally and nationally.

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95 Lessons