Lessons
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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

58 Lessons

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

The Color of Law: Winners and Losers in the Job Market

This lesson is the second lesson of the series The Color of Law: The Role of Government in Shaping Racial Inequity. In this lesson, students examine how government policies helped white people access economic benefits while preventing African Americans from accessing these same benefits.
Grade Level
Subject
Reading & Language Arts
Social Studies
History
Economics
Social Justice Domain
October 10, 2019

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

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.
Grade Level
September 2, 2016

Slavery as a Form of Racialized Social Control

How did racial hierarchy adapt and persist after Emancipation? 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