Appendix I For Educators: Laying the Groundwork for Reading Groups This section offers guidelines for educators and suggests key questions to consider before bringing families together for the first planning meeting
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.
This curated reading list gives educators and students an opportunity to explore the themes of the 2019 Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action through picture books, poetry, non-fiction essays and literature.
Editor’s note: The author of this essay prefers the pronoun they. In a poignant letter to their teenage self, Jey Ehrenhalt—a transgender educator and advocate—recalls jarring and painful experiences of their youth and describes how many schools urgently need to become more welcoming and supportive places for transgender students.
In this lesson, students will describe aspects of their identities such as race, gender, ability, religion and more. Then after exploring Marley Dias' Black Girls Books campaign, students will analyze book illustrations and write their own book review noting how characters are similar and different from them.
Educators can take steps to stop the school-to-deportation pipeline. Use this toolkit to learn more about how you can reduce the risks undocumented students face.
Civil rights leader Malcolm X now appears in many history books and has been the hero of a feature film, but very few sources actually delve into the forms of leadership and resistance to oppression that Malcolm X advocated in the last year of his life.
In this lesson, students will work in pairs and use expert reading strategies to analyze the Court’s ruling in Hernandez v. Texas. After participating in a carousel discussion, students will write a three-minute paper describing how the United States would be different if the Court had reached an alternate conclusion.
In this lesson, students will revisit the life of James Baldwin, an African-American literary writer and critic, as well as an icon for civil and gay rights.