Gabriel Smith serves as a Policy Fellow with the Congressional Black Caucus and the Capitol Hill office of New York Congressman Ritchie Torres. Previously, Smith worked as the Senior Associate for Learning and Dissemination with National Community Action Partnership (NCAP). In this role, he managed several learning cohorts of anti-poverty professionals from across the country as they explored the causes of poverty unique to their respective communities. Prior to his time at NCAP, Smith worked with Learning for Justice as the Program Associate responsible for curating LFJ’s text library and
Daniel Osborn, Ed.D. is a history instructor at Dean College. He is a Returned Peace Corps volunteer who served in Jordan. His scholarly background is in Middle Eastern and Jewish History and his research explores the relationship between historical narrative construction, collective identity formation, and the portrayal of subaltern communities in social studies textbooks and classroom discourse. He is the author of Representing the Middle East and Africa in Social Studies Education: Teacher Discourse and Otherness.
The Grand Council Fire of American Indians wrote this letter in response to the Chicago mayor's 1927 campaign against the use of British textbooks in public schools. The letter condemns the misrepresentation of Native American history in schools.
Cara Liebowitz is a college student, activist, and writer with multiple disabilities. She aims to change the way educators view disability by bringing disability culture, history, and pride into the classroom. She will graduate in Fall 2013 from Kutztown University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor’s degree in special education.
In this poem, the speaker explores how our culture would be lacking—in people, in music, in movements, in contributions—without contributions of African Americans.
Ric has 20 years experience in teaching history and social studies courses at high schools and colleges in northeast Ohio. He is especially interested in incorporating human rights into his teaching and has developed and taught a course entitled International Human Rights for many years. Follow his ideas here.
In this lesson, students examine voting rights in the early years of the United States and the causes and effects of the first major expansion of voting rights, which took place in the late 1700s and first half of the 1800s. By the end of the lesson, students will be able to explain where various groups of Americans stood regarding the right to vote before the Civil War, and will hypothesize about what they expect happened next.
Samantha has been a social studies teacher in New York City public schools since 2007. During this time, she has taught a wide range of history, art, health, research and writing courses to high school students. In 2013, she was the recipient of the Teachers Who Make a Difference Award from Scholarship Plus.