The initial learning goals for my fellowship focused on my relative lack of knowledge about geological science. When I lead my students through explorations of the geological timescale, fossils, and distribution of resources, I stick close to published curricula to ensure that I provide them with factual information. With my Fund for Teachers grant, I sought to contextualize this science in our geographic space of the Western US and to learn enough to provide connections to which my students can relate. I planned a two-week RV road trip itinerary circling from Portland, Oregon, down the coast to Los Angeles, over to Arizona, and up through Utah and Idaho.
As I researched sites of interest along this route, I noticed the prevalence of Indigenous cultural sites, museums, and partnerships between the National Parks and Indigenous Nations. After a day of planning and writing, I shared my excitement with my 9- and 11-year-old children, who would be my travel partners. My daughter’s reaction added another primary learning target: “There are still Native Americans?” I was aghast that her formal learning in elementary school and our casual learning as a family had left her with this thought.
My itinerary shifted to ensure that we learned together both about modern Indigenous culture and the events that lead us to the intentional erasure of history.
I approached this learning with humility, respect, and an understanding that the lands I was planning to visit were taken from people who lived in and cared for these places since time immemorial. Three sites in particular stand out for providing opportunities to learn from Indigenous people: The Heard Museum in Phoenix, the visitors center in Bryce Canyon National Park, and the Utah Museum of Natural History in Salt Lake City.
The Heard Museum (picture courtesy of kid101.com) is an art museum with a beautiful collection of traditional and modern American Indian art. It houses a powerful collection that showcases the diversity and commonalities of Indigenous art and craft. The portion of the museum that left us in quiet contemplation, however, was not the stunning artwork. Upstairs, there is an exhibit that documents the experience of American Indian boarding schools. Through a collection of historic documents, photographs, and recorded interviews, the exhibit conveys the horror of the intentional cultural genocide, as well as the resilience of the students, who found ways to preserve their identity. Our visit coincided with news reports of the mass graves in Canada.
With this experience center of mind, we continued north through the Grand Canyon National Park, the Navajo Nation, and into Bryce Canyon National Park (top picture). In the Bryce Canyon Visitors Center, there is an exhibit called Native American Perspectives. Through interviews, representatives from several nations communicated a clear theme: You are always on Indigenous land. These parks which are your vacation that you will enjoy for a week are sacred. We have lived here for tens of thousands of years and we are still here.
Traveling onward, we visited the Utah Museum of Natural History. The Native Voices exhibit again showed the rich cultural history and the dispossession of land and resources. This exhibit had an additional focus: “We are among you. We are not limited to reservations. We are thriving, preserving our heritage, and teaching our children to continue our legacy ever stronger into the future.
At the Heard Museum, there is a placard referring to Navajo weaving that stuck with me. It reads:
“All at once, hundreds of years of songs, prayers, and traditions come together in every contemporary Navajo textile. All at once, an artist’s idea crystalizes. All at once, the artist’s years of training and practice combine to make the idea a reality.”
Together, these three exhibits provided me with a perspective of the “all at once” message that I internalized on this fellowship: I personally benefit from a brutal history of genocide and dispossession. I am always on Indigenous land. I have an opportunity and responsibility to incorporate this history and contemporary reality into my students’ learning.
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Melody Childers (pictured on her fellowship at the Grand Canyon) teaches middle school science at Beaverton Academy of Science and Engineering in Beaverton, Oregon. She enjoys writing curriculum that present students with an opportunity to learn about current scientific challenges in a solutions-focused context. Melody has worked with the Bonneville Environmental Foundation on solar, hydrogen, and renewable natural gas technology project-based units. She sees outdoor recreation as a pathway to develop a stewardship mindset in students.
This is the final in a four-part series in which we consider what innovation in the classroom will look like going forward. Thank you to today’s contributor, FFT Fellow Liza Eaton. Liza is also our director of Ramsden Project programming.
In 2017, Fund for Teachers began to envision a new chapter for itself — doubling down on its commitment to teachers’ professional learning by asking the questions:
What if, in addition to self-designed fellowships, we engaged teachers in the design of additional opportunities to identify, address and solve problems of practice in partnership with other Fellows?
Typically, programs are designed by contractors who observe classrooms to identify needs and dream up new (and sometimes crazy) ideas to implement in schools. Notable programs have been designed this way, like Khan Academy flipped classrooms, or IDEO’s lunch redesign. What rarely happens, however, is that designers sit alongside users to design programs. This approach takes teachers out of the design process. Instead, they are expected to use ready-made curriculum, fit into ready-made schedules and implement ready-made assessments — neglecting important teacher insights.
However, with Fund for Teachers grants, teachers have stepped up to the plate and created their own, self-designed professional learning experiences for the past twenty years. Time and time again, teachers share how this experience re-charged their batteries and elevated their professionalism. Beyond that, the relevant and purposeful learning experiences that teachers were inspired to create have increased engagement and ownership in classrooms across the country.
In 2020 we began to expand our programming beyond the summer fellowship, sitting alongside Fellows to do so. Of course, we used surveys, focus groups and interviews to understand our Fellows’ most pressing needs. But beyond that, we engaged a consistent Fellow Design Team to partner with us to glean insights and opportunities. Following the Design Thinking process, we dreamt up solutions to teachers’ needs:
These programs are new so the results of our endeavors are still to be realized, but we have already identified important benefits to our approach. Partnering with Fellows helped us understand more clearly teachers’ needs and elevated our insights beyond those gathered from more traditional methods. For example, early this year, we set out to design an online platform to host Fellow-designed lesson and unit plans, only to find that that was not something that our teachers’ really needed. In addition, we have been struck by how many fellows are looking for leadership opportunities. We have been flooded with interest from our fellows – many wanting to be mentors, leaders and designers. Not only is this trend important to our program design, but it points to a real need in education: leadership pathways for teachers.
Time will tell how our programming will grow and develop, but our experience thus far has reinforced our belief in our program mindset: for teachers, by teachers.
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Liza Eaton (a 2006 FFT Fellow) is the director of Fund for Teachers’ Rasmden Project, an initiative to support and engage grant recipients beyond their initial fellowships. Her expertise lies in educational design and instructional coaching, leveraging her experience as a consultant and teacher with EL Education, Shining Hope Communities in Nairobi, and various schools in the Denver area. Liza holds an undergraduate degree in Environmental Policy & Behavior from the University of Michigan; a master’s of Curriculum and Leadership from the University of Denver; and is pursuing a doctorate in Education Equity from the University of Colorado Denver.
Reflecting on today’s birthday of Malcolm X, we share the thoughts of an FFT Fellow used her grant to research past and present resistance movements (but in Mexico) to use these as a model for student writing and meaningful resistance to injustice in local communities. Sara Boeck Bautista teaches English at Leaders High School in Brooklyn, NY, and works to make language arts a catalyst for social change in her students’ lives. She chose to research grassroots political and social movements in Mexico, where movements have often hinged on the words and actions of young people and other oppressed groups. “I wanted to document, study, and model these grassroots movements by people in society who, like my students, have historically felt that their voices didn’t matter.”
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As a social justice educator, the struggle to continue moving forward in the face of increasing inequity and continual global and local problems is difficult. My studies in central and southern Mexico with a Fund for Teachers grant not only gave me countless practical materials, texts, artifacts, interviews, and photographs to bring back to my students, but it also revitalized my passion for social justice and renewed my belief that the struggle of social justice is worth it.
Over the course of six weeks, I met women’s rights activists who are providing support for women in indigenous communities in central Mexico, professors who are committed to lifting up the indigenous culture into the space of the dominant culture of formal education, LGBTQ activists and scholars who know that change will come and believe that the system can be changed, and ordinary women and men who work to empower families and inspire gender equity by helping their communities walk away from the legacy of machismo.
In Mexico, I learned at length about the ties between the history of colonization and the current daily challenges of indigenous and other oppressed people (queer, Black, women, and those at the intersections of these identities). In my class, we have continued to explore the ties between history and our present by studying the role that science fiction and Afrofuturism in particular have on supporting visions outside of the norm that seek to liberate oppressed people. In my class this semester, students are reading Octavia Butler’s 1993 science fiction novel Parable of the Sower and are considering their own relationship to change in their lives and in this pandemic and racial uprising. The lessons I learned six years ago in Mexico are still embedded in my mind as we grapple with the recent turmoil in the US political system, justice system, and educational system.
In response to the colonial legacy of oppression, I have framed my thinking as decolonizing and reindeginizing my classroom and my approach to social change. This looks like lifting up oppressed voices and honoring the vast knowledge, creativity, and expression that has come from oppressed communities and honoring the creativity it takes for those who are not free to imagine a future of liberation.
What sticks with me in reading Parable of the Sower and reflecting on my experience learning about the Zapatistas, in particular, is the power that change and autonomy can have even if it is not done through the powers of government. In Chiapas, I met people who are making their own utopias in spite of the colonialist legacies that still exist in Mexico. But the autonomous communities in Chiapas are a living example of an intentionally developed autonomous community. The main character in Parable of the Sower also develops and creates her own intentional community, envisioning and creating her own sacred space outside of the oppressive systems in her world. The connections are endless and endlessly inspiring.
To quote Octavia Butler, “All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change.”
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In recognition of Sara’s professionalism and student impact, Expeditionary Learning awarded her it’s highest honor in 2019 – The Klingenstein Award. Listen to her acceptance speech here (starts at 4:05).
On this Election Day, we’re focusing on a different type of vote, one conducted by students at the Brooklyn School for Collaborative Studies. Inspired by their teachers’ fellowship in Mexico, seventh graders explore colonialism, feminism and the indigenous history of Mexico to vote on whether the female translator and daughter of an Aztec chief was a hero, victim or traitor. Thank you for FFT Fellow Glen Meinschein for this story of turning an original idea into action…
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It seems that now more than ever it is important for us to learn to think like historians. To think critically. To determine the reliability of sources. To analyze and corroborate evidence. To try to understand perspectives that are different, even contrary to our own.
When we started our grant proposal for Fund for Teachers, we had the goal of reframing the typical “American History” curriculum. We sought to teach American history not as the history of the United States, but the history of the Americas: an entire hemisphere, two continents, 35 countries whose histories are inextricably linked. We wanted to root it in narratives often ignored in history- by drawing from perspectives of indigenous people, women, and people of color. We wanted our diverse group of New York City students to see themselves in the history we taught.
We saw the perfect opportunity in the story of La Malinche – best known as the indigenous translator and lover of Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes. A woman forced into slavery and given to Cortes as a gift upon his arrival in the “New World.” In Mexico today, her name is synonymous with “traitor,” but her legacy has evolved as the country has grown.
As we interviewed locals about their opinions on La Malinche and her role in helping the Spanish during the conquest, we quickly realized how divisive this topic could be. The interviewees often had to take time to really think through the question, and had strong and complicated feelings about the subject. Seeing people grapple with this question proved to me how important picking a challenging central question is to push students to think deeply and to care deeply about learning history.
Three years after our fellowship we continue to use the story of La Malinche and the research we were able to conduct in Mexico as the learning expedition which kicks off the year in this Brooklyn 7th grade Social Studies class. It is the introduction that we hope teaches students the importance of understanding context, analyzing bias, looking at history and current events through multiple perspectives, and learning the power one individual can have to create change in the world around them.
Here are a few student samples showing their perspectives on the legacy of La Malinche:
- “Today in history many people see La Malinche as a traitor for helping the Spanish instead of her own people, but it is important to remember that she was a survivor. La Malinche should be remembered as a hero because she helped to unite two cultures to create the place we know of today as Mexico.” -Ella
- “La Malinche is a traitor because she turned her back on her own people. She helped Cortez and the Spanish who only wanted to find gold. As Cortez and his men arrived in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, Malinali didn’t think twice about helping Cortez wipe out the entire Aztec capital.” -Julian
- “The reality is, even with the ability to speak three languages she was still a woman in an era where women held no power or importance. Her job was to translate. She did not command the battles or fire the cannons. So, in a time where women could be regarded as property to be passed on as gifts from one man to another with no say in all aspects of their own lives, are we to believe that this woman’s ability to translate could be seen as betrayal that brought down a whole empire? Her natural intelligence allowed her to survive, creating a better life than the one she had. She was a victim not a traitor.” -Lia
My fellowship through Fund for Teachers allowed me to learn first hand about a topic that had fascinated me for some time. Through our explorations, museum visits, interviews, and conversations, we were able to better understand the legacy of the conquest of Mexico, and local perspectives on La Malinche’s controversial role in helping the conquistadores. Learning about these perspectives first hand has challenged me to think more deeply about the way history is often taught at home.
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Glen Meinschein is a middle school social studies and special education teacher at Brooklyn Collaborative, Brooklyn, NY. After graduating with concentrations in Spanish, International Studies, and Business from the University of Oregon, Glen spent two years teaching in Spain. Soon after, he moved to New York to join the NYC Teaching Fellows and finish his graduate studies at Long Island University, Brooklyn. Glen is currently the Social Studies department head at Brooklyn Collaborative.
In one week, many will commemorate Juneteenth, the day the Emancipation Proclamation – issued on January 1, 1863 – was read to enslaved African Americans in Texas. Today’s Fellow Friday highlights Chris Dolgos (Genesee Community Charter School – Rochester, NY): the inspiration for his 2020 fellowship researching Frederick Douglass’s UK speaking tour, and resources you can use in your own classroom.
Chris is a veteran teacher within EL Education, an innovative network of schools across the nation dedicated to equal emphasis on students’ mastery of knowledge and skills, high-quality work and character. The school’s unique approach to curriculum divides the school year into distinct, cross-curricular “expeditions” culminating in a final products. The inspiration for Chris’ 2020 fellowship focusing on Frederick Douglass was catalyzed by such a product that, interestingly, had its roots in Chris’ 2015 fellowship research on how Romans constructed public works projects (such as Hadrian’s Wall) to divide, as well as unite, people in a multicultural society.
Chris’ sixth graders’ AdobeSpark presentation Whose Renaissance Is It? led to a grant from Teaching Tolerance for a collaboration with community-based artists, to four murals the painted across Rochester. And just last week, the students presented this final presentation to the Genessee Comunity Charter School board of directors via Zoom. The board immediately motioned to revise the school’s code of conduct based o the recommendations of students’ work.
“After a year like this – it was satisfying and timely to see the students’ work received so warmly,” Chris said.
We asked Chris how he arrived at this particular fellowship (his previous ones focused on Hadrian’s Wall, bird migration and Neanderthals – what can we say, there’s a reason why he’s one of 5 four-time FFT Fellows). Chris’ response mirrored his path toward becoming the the anti-racist and abolitionist teacher he wants to be.
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“Working with amazing Shawn Dunwoody, our kids helped paint four murals across the four quadrants of Rochester. It was the first time we’d engaged the class to see neighborhoods beyond their own and see our city as a whole – flaws and all and it was a powerful moment for all of us,” Chris said. “It also laid bare just how much work there is to do in understanding the inequity in our city. Seeing it through my students’ eyes forced me to see the systemic barriers and my own role in upholding them.”
Chris dug into Layla Saad‘s “Me and White Supremacy” workbook, which launched months of facing up to “biases, classism and even racism that had no doubt seeped into my interactions with kids.”
[minti_blockquote]”I picked up the work and with other white people, dug in. I wrestled with my prejudice and sat with the guilt of not doing enough – or even worse – just enough. I cycle back through that workbook every few months. A few weeks later came the news that a Frederick Douglass statue – one of many celebrating the bicentennial of his birth – had been vandalized. I don’t really know why that hit me as hard as it did, but I was furious.”[/minti_blockquote]
“We talked about it as a teaching team and with the class (now a new group of students) and posed the question – what do we do?” said Chris. “Naturally, the kids had the answer : ‘We show up.’ So we did – we alerted parents that we’d be taking a walk to the site where the vandals struck on the day a new statue took its place to show that hate and ignorance has no place in our community. Highlight of the day? Seeing Margaret Finch, my mentor from my first year of teaching (20 years ago!) thanking me for making time in the day to have our students be a part of this. That day was really the day I knew I needed to commit to becoming and anti-racist teacher and anti-racist human being. I had started with baby steps, head down making sure I didn’t trip over my words and actions and now was ready to look up and fail forward, as often happens when taking risks.”
“That year our students were examining food justice and the need for a food policy council in our city. A lot of our work was around the intersection of race and class. The data told the story of systems of oppression and discrimination towards people of color. Diminished health outcomes, food deserts and nutritionally empty foods in black and brown communities, poverty and time constraints that limit food choices – the kids learned about all of it. It was a privilege check time and I realized I still had more to do and more to learn.”
“For the 2019-20 school year, Alexis and I were approached by our school leader and members of our board to examine our school’s code of conduct and have the kids help us reframe the rules through the lens of restorative justice. That was eye-opening work and we’re just about ready to share those recommendations with our board. That and lots of reading and reflection of the past few years’ projects helped bring into focus my 2020 FFT Fellowship – to explore what it means to be an anti-racist educator and abolitionist teacher.”
Chris’ reading list included: Dr. Ibram Kendi (How to Be an Anti-Racist) and Bettina Love (We Want to Do More than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom). His other inspiration was local hero Frederick Douglass.
Read about Frederick Douglass’ deep connection with Rochester here.
“Douglass’ travels to Great Britain, where he spoke to white people to reject and dismantle slavery and join the abolitionist cause, were unfamilar to me. It was on these trips that enough money was collected and donated that would allow him to purchase his freedom and buy the printing presses that gave birth to his abolitionist newspaper, The North Star. I made contact with professor Hannah Murray in the UK who had done the research on Douglass in Great Britain that shaped the itinerary I proposed,” Chris said.
“And then came COVID. Schools closed. Travel was suspended. Fear and anger raged as the death toll climbed. FFT made the wise decision to postpone all fellowships until summer 2021. And then Breonna Taylor was murdered. Then came Ahmad Aubrey. Then came George Floyd. Then came the righteous anger of hundreds of thousands of Americans, followed by many more thousands around the world. A lot of folks were in the shallow end of anti-racist work when this tidal wave hit. Being only a few years into this work myself with any real sense of commitment, I struggled with how to best serve my students – but our team opted to simply listen and let them share and process through a listening circle. It was a start and a conversation that is hard to maximize through the tiny boxes of a Zoom meeting. And with the year drawing to a close, we want the kids to know they should keep speaking and keep listening and be active in questioning the status quo. Several went to the protests. Others joined in the clean up of the looting and vandalism that followed. I keep thinking, “Man, I could REALLY use that fellowship this summer!” but a lot of the work that needs to be done in my classroom needs to be done internally, by me.
“While it’s no substitute for my fellowship, current events and these activities are already conspiring to shape the direction we’ll be taking with next year’s sixth graders. And in June of 2021, as I begin to follow in Frederick Douglass’ steps in the UK, I will already be one step closer to becoming the anti-racist and abolitionsit teacher I want to be.”
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Chris is a sixth-grade teacher at Genesee Community Charter School in Rochester, NY and is a three-time Fund For Teachers Fellow. History and geography are two passions he brings to life in his classroom, through field work, guest experts and product-driven Learning Expeditions. Chris has contributed to EL Education publications and Common Core curricular efforts, was awarded EL Education’s Top Teacher Honor for the nation, and is a NY Educator Voice Fellow. Follow him on Twitter at CJDTeaches.
America’s men’s curling team won the gold and the hearts of many of us unfamiliar with the sport. However, students at World of Inquiry School in Rochester, NY, are old pros at it after three of their teachers used a Fund for Teachers grant to research curling alongside Olympians and build an outdoor “sheet” to encourage physical activity and sportsmanship.
“Kids have been very excited to use our sheet, frozen over with help from the fire department,” said Kristen Burgmaster. “We’ve extended our indoor curling curriculum from two to four weeks and hope to have an after school club, as well.”
Why did Kristen, Brian Fedele and Lisa Tilley design a fellowship around curling? Most well-known winter sports require expensive equipment that many students don’t own or can’t afford. Curling equipment is minimal (the teachers purchased stones and brushes through a local grant) and kids can wear regular clothes.
Thanks to the Rochester Teacher Association for creating this video. We love seeing students engaged in active learning inspired by our Fellows!
Congratulations to Lindsay Slabich, founding teacher at the Springfield Renaissance School in Springfield, MA, who just received EL Education’s 2017 Klingenstein Teacher Award and its $5,000 cash prize.
Voted on by peers within EL Education’s national network of schools, the Klingenstein Award is given to the teacher who most successfully transmitted to students the essence of EL Education culture, building exemplary character, driving outstanding academic achievement, and instilling an ethic of “citizen scholarship.”
In 2008, Lindsay, along with two peers, designed a Fund for Teachers fellowship to research the Ladakhi society in India concerning their efforts to balance globalization with preservation of culture and resources. The teaching team’s insight into their experiences align beautifully with the award’s criterion:
“As we experienced a fascinating cultural exchange, and grew individually, we also expanded our thinking about development. We began to ask more and more questions. What makes development sustainable? Whose responsibility is development? What role should local Ladakhis play in deciding how their society develops in the context of a globalized world? What about local, state and national government, what role should they play? And what about us, citizens of a powerful and developed country, what responsibilities do we have for development in places like Ladakh? Our visit to Ladakh and other parts of India are helping us to make sense of these important questions.”
For more information about Lindsay’s honor, click here. An FFT Fellow also won this prestigious award last year; click here to view Chris Dolgos’ acceptance speech and enjoy the blog he kept researching Hadrian’s Wall here.
by, Jessica Mascle, Anthony Riccio, Nate Streicher & Eric Levine – Amherst, NY
On an early Sunday morning in July the Tapestry Charter School Civil Rights team traveled to Little Rock, AR for a truly unique experience. We designed our Fund for Teachers fellowship to attend an educators’ Civil Rights Institute to help students make important connections between historic events and challenges of modern society in a way that engages the question, “How can I make a difference?” Little did we know that casual conversations had with fellow educators, hotel workers, shop keepers and cab drivers would be engraved in our minds and retold in our stories of the battle for civil rights.
During the course of the week, we were students engaged in the investigation of primary sources, fieldwork, experts and assessment tools. Our group traveled to several historic sights including the Arkansas State Capital and Little Rock Central High School. During these experiences, participants read excerpts from Warriors Don’t Cry by Melba Pattillo Beals, which fostered a visual understanding of the author’s writing and therefore created an emotional connection that reading the text in a classroom would not foster.
The importance of the Little Rock Nine is incalculable. Perhaps the most compelling discovery was the idea of personal narratives of the students themselves and the community at large. During our time in Little Rock, we were surprised by the impromptu “narratives” we were told by cab drivers as we were given informal sight seeing tours of the city. We were inspired by working with other educators, learning how different schools teach social justice issues, learning from the people who were living in Little Rock during the school integration crisis, learning new ways to use protocols for writing and processing fieldwork, and gaining new ideas for writing projects and final products.
The zenith of the week was sitting down and speaking with our interview subjects. Our conversations turned into our product:personal narratives telling the story of our subjects – their struggles, hardships
and ultimate ability to succeed in the South.
Far north of the Mason-Dixon Line we returned with the reality that although the fight for Civil Rights has come a long way, we still have a long way to go. From conversations with other Institute participants, informal conversations with cab drivers and shop keepers, and the interview sessions, all those involved painted a vivid picture of how America is still not equal.
Our experiences during the Institute allowed us to reevaluate our teaching plans to focus on connections from the Civil Rights Movement to modern day civil rights efforts, including those in our own school community, and what they hope to achieve. Western New York is a very diverse place and being so lends itself to the stories, struggles and tribulations of those who live here. By examining Western New York and our own school, we will be able to create a personal connection with our students, making the content more meaningful.
Experiences on our fellowship taught us is that history is better told by listening to a story than simply reading it out of a textbook. We now teach our students interview and oral history recording techniques that we learned and send them out into the Western New York community to obtain first hand stories of community members that have encountered hardships and struggles trying to achieve equality and respect so that future generations will be able to read and partake in the local civil rights movement. Additionally, we:
The most memorable experience of our fellowship was a conversation we had with a cab driver named Owen. We asked him to reflect on his 60 years living in Little Rock and if life has changed for the better. He told us “you are naive to think that discrimination has ended. It has simply just changed its shape, color and stripes.“
Our job as educators is to make sure our society does not become complacent with injustices, and to make sure our students and children know that issues can not be changed if others do not know about them. Through case studies in classes and activities in crew, students will deepen their understanding of civil right and the importance of community.