The news—and disturbing footage—of police officers assaulting an unarmed black teenager in Florida last week shines yet another spotlight on the dangers black youth face every day. Your students have likely seen the video and conversation surrounding #JusticeForLucca. These resources will help you understand how this violent footage can affect students, how to discuss this news with them and how you can bring #BlackLivesMatter into your classroom.
Even if your students are too young to vote, there are plenty of ways they can get involved in the last few days of this year's election season. Try sharing our Voting and Voices pledge and Story Corner video to encourage them to talk with their families about voting. Or check out our Voting and Voices classroom resources for ready-to-use lessons, texts and activities that can get students of all ages excited about Tuesday's elections!
Saturday will mark a historic moment in the fight to grant LGBTQ people equal access to public life and justice. The first National Trans Visibility March will bring together members of the transgender, gender-nonconforming and non-binary communities with allies in Washington, D.C., and in marches across the nation. We echo the marchers’ call with this question: What can you do to make sure students feel visible and heard in your school? We hope these resources can offer some answers.
This week, a photograph of a math assignment asking fifth graders to set prices for enslaved people went viral. Assignments like this are clearly harmful. But students can learn about slavery in ways that recover the lives and histories of enslaved people or dehumanize them; celebrate their resistance or erase their agency; recognize how slavery shaped our nation or ignore it completely. Educators can teach this hard history—and teach it well—in any discipline, to students of almost any age. Here are a few examples of how.
We’ve updated our Future Voters Project! Check out our new resources, including a lesson bank for teaching about voter suppression, PD for managing partisanship in your classroom, discussion guides for addressing current events and more! Educators in the Deep South can check out our grants supporting school-based voter registration. And educators nationwide can sign up for this week’s free webinar on registering student voters during this unprecedented election season!
Traumatic stress can have long-term health effects on developing brains and, in response, districts across the United States are acknowledging the role that trauma plays in students’ achievement opportunities. But how well are districts defining trauma? And how well do educators understand what it really means to practice trauma-informed pedagogy? These LFJ resources can help educators learn how to recognize the signs of trauma, better understand the causes of trauma, and take steps to establish social and emotional safety in the classroom.
