Editorial Cartoons: Language Diversity
Activities meet the following objectives:
- understand the importance of context in decoding an editorial cartoon
- understand how a cartoon uses satire to make a political statement
Biased Judgments
Early grades activity to confront gender stereotypes.
Happy Faces
Everyone has a bad day once in a while. This activity helps students be sensitive to schoolmates who might be having a bad day and gives them a way to cross boundaries and bring cheer to others.
Editorial Cartoons: A Historical Example of Immigration Debates
Activities will help students:
- understand how a cartoon uses irony and caricature to make a political statement
- understand a cartoon in its historical context
- connect past and present debates about immigration
Editorial Cartoon: Equal Opportunity
Activities will help students explore how editorial cartoons often use familiar adages or idioms in new ways to make a point about something.
Editorial Cartoons: Gay Rights
Activities will help students:
- understand how a cartoon uses idioms and puns (plays on words) to make a political statement
- interpret visual and written material in an editorial cartoon
Editorial Cartoon: Intolerance
Activities will help students see how artists can use cartoons to express their opinions about society and culture.
Editorial Cartoons: Poverty/Environmental Justice
People who are poor don’t have access to the kinds of resources—good jobs, high-quality education and health care, for example—that people with more money have. One thing they do have access to, unfortunately, is a disproportionate share of environmental problems. You can see why: People who can afford to, live in places far away from oil wells, factories and toxic waste dumps. People with less money more often live near those environmentally undesirable—and often dangerous—places.
A Bullying Quiz
Understand how evidence regarding behavioral patterns might challenge personal beliefs and assumptions about social behavior
Hanan Ashrawi
"I am not a politician by choice. Instead I try to pursue the objective of institution building, an essential component of the reconstruction of our nation."
Editorial Cartoon: Censorship
Activities will help students understand how images can come together to make a statement in an editorial cartoon
Shulamit Aloni
"The fight should be for all human rights - - religious, ethnic, sexual. We have to stop grouping people; they aren't pickle bottles and you can't stick labels on them."
Aung San Suu Kyi
"One must ask, 'Are you doing everything you can?' and I think if the answer is try 'Yes,' then you fell neither hopeless nor despairing."
Ela Bhat
"I realized that although eighty percent of women in India are economically active, they are outside the purview of legislation."
Peace Bikunda
"It started with five women, then 15, then 80, then 150. When it reached these numbers, I realized I had to do something for these women."
Wangari Maathai
"The myth of male superiority can only be demolished with shining examples of female achievement against which nobody could argue intelligently."
Graça Machel
"We Africans may be impoverished, but we are not poor. ... We can learn things from others, but we also have a lot to offer the world."
Madres de Plaza de Mayo
"What remains in the end is a deep longing for justice. . .We want you all to remember what happened to our children so that it never happens again."
Rigoberta Menchú
"Now I would like to see Guatemala at peace, with indigenous and nonindigenous people living side by side."
Mary Robinson
"We turn away so often. ... Each one of us has an individual responsibility to inform ourselves. To care. To respond."
Maj Britt Theorin
"Everyone has to take responsibility and do whatever they can to avoid a nuclear war [even] contacting the US President."
Activity for Home Was a Horse Stall
Ways to use "Home was a Horse Stall" in the classroom
Getting To Know Each Other
The game centers on a question: "Could you be friends with someone who. . . ?"
Papalotzin y las monarcas
Discussion questions for Papalotzin and the Monarchs / Papalotzin y las monarcas.
Reading Between the Bubbles: A Three-Part lesson
This lesson, excerpted from Rethinking Schools' The New Teacher Book, helps students demystify testing and engage in meaningful test prep activities.
Testing, Tracking, and Toeing the Line: A Role Play
In this special excerpt from Rethinking Schools' Rethinking Our Classrooms, Volume 1, Bill Bigelow offers a scripted role play to help students' analyze the power dynamics of testing.
In Search of Balance
Teaching Tolerance offers tools to help teachers and students get through the grueling and seemingly unrewarding weeks of mandated testing.
Cooperation
Activities for The Fighting Mynahs
How Do Families See Your School?
In its free publication, “Choosing a School for Your Child” the U.S. Department of Education advises parents and guardians to look for 10 things
The Shape of Home
Jennifer Greene’s story tells of Chief Charlo and a small band of Salish being forcibly removed from their home, the Bitterroot Valley, in 1891. To the Salish, home was not a structure, a town or even a specific site. Home was the land.
This activity was developed to facilitate awareness and understanding of diverse definitions of home as well as the many issues related to children and their homes.
Looking at Labor
Labor Day was created in 1882. Originally, it was intended to be a less controversial workers' day than May Day, with its Socialist origins. Today, however, much of this history is forgotten and Labor Day is often thought of as simply the official end to summer. Although around Labor Day is a really good time to consider the work that people actually do in a society, this lesson is relevant year around.
Often we take aspects of the work world for granted. For example, that a CEO will be better paid than a construction worker. Or that being a teacher is more important than is being a waiter. These assumptions allow us to perpetuate a system that allows gross inequities in pay between professions, and designates some jobs as less important than others, no matter how much society depends on them.
Test Yourself for Hidden Bias
Psychologists at Harvard, the University of Virginia and the University of Washington created "Project Implicit" to develop Hidden Bias Tests — called Implicit Association Tests, or IATs, in the academic world — to measure unconscious bias.
Take a test at Project Implicit's website and see what may be lingering in your psyche.
Who Has Hair?
Who Has Hair? explores one of the things mammals share in common: hair! Our hair may be different—Polar Bear's doesn't look exactly like Orangutan's or like yours— but we all have hair and want it to be clean and pretty.
The March Continues
On November 5, 1989, thousands of people gathered in Montgomery, Ala., to witness the dedication of the Civil Rights Memorial. It is a granite monument inscribed with the names of 40 martyrs who gave their lives fighting for civil rights. Since then, a museum has been added to the memorial. One of its displays, “The March Continues,” honors later campaigns for social change. These movements were based on the nonviolent principles of the civil rights era.
Taking a Closer Look at Religions Around the World
“Taking a Closer Look at Religions Around the World” offers a starting point for exploring religions and faith traditions, creating an ongoing respectful dialogue about religious tolerance. By understanding where and how varying faiths began and developed, it’s possible to better comprehend the reasons behind divergent national and international origins in religion. Building knowledge and comprehension of context can assist our compassion and consideration for other people and faiths.
Racial Profiling
Racial profiling occurs when law enforcement agents impermissibly use race, religion, ethnicity or national origin in deciding who to investigate. This lesson focuses on racial profiling. Students learn what the term means, discuss why it matters, conduct research and present their insights.
Six Lessons from Jena
The oak tree where nooses were hung at the Jena High School campus in the Fall of 2006 no longer stands. It was chopped down, presumably in an effort to erase racial tension in the small Louisiana town of Jena.
Understanding Religious Clothing
In the United States, different types of religious clothing exist just about everywhere. In this lesson, students will explore how articles of clothing are linked to different religions. First they will research issues around some common articles of religious clothing, such as the hijab and the yarmulke. Then they will explore misconceptions and stereotypes associated with those articles of clothing.
The Sounds of Change
David Brooks wrote an Op Ed piece for the New York Times called, “The Other Education.” In it, he reflected on the role of music in creating a different kind of education with lessons about personal stories, moral consequences, and life itself. His teacher? Bruce Springsteen, and the stories told through his music. Brooks refers to this second education as one that has influenced and shaped him as much as, if not more, than his formal education. Springsteen seems to agree. In a 2009 Rolling Stone interview, he lamented on the role of music in society, believing that while rockers “don’t have a whole lot of influence,” they can “create a vision of the world as it should be.”
Stereotypes and Tonto
This lesson revolves around Sherman Alexie’s poignant yet humorous and accessible essay, “I Hated Tonto (Still Do).” It explores the negative impact that stereotypes have on the self-worth of individuals and the damage that these stereotypes inflict on pride in one’s heritage. The reading is supported by a short video montage of clips from Western films. The clips offer students the opportunity to evaluate primary sources for bias and bigotry, as well as providing context for the protagonists’ experiences in the essay.
Poetry for Home: Homelessness
Home Sweet Home. Home is that chipped teacup in the china cabinet that belonged to your grandmother. Home is your artwork proudly displayed on the refrigerator. Home is that favorite place you prefer to sit when you watch television. Home is knowing where the best snacks in the house are kept. Home is the place that always welcomes you back.
Respecting Nonreligious People
Students often learn the importance of respecting people of different religions, and of respecting religious beliefs that are different from their own. But what about people who do not hold religious beliefs at all? Too often the right not to believe is excluded from lessons about tolerance.
Reading for Social Justice: Book Clubs and Summer Reading Challenge
It is often said that reading opens up new worlds. It also opens up the opportunity to ask deep questions about the world that we—and the literature we read—exist in. Book clubs or literature circles are one way to encourage children to embrace the interactive pleasures associated with literacy.
Discrimination on the Menu
The Chicago Tribune article, “Race Gap Seen in Restaurant Hiring,” explores the roles of race and class in staffing and uncovers examples and statistics pertaining to employment-related bias at our nation’s restaurants. According to the article, a recent Chicago-based survey revealed that 80 percent of whites work in the “front” of restaurants as waitstaff and hosts while nearly two-thirds of Hispanics work in the back. “Front” jobs pay more, offer more opportunities for advancement and better working conditions. This has led to several lawsuits. In fact, the McCormick & Schmick’s Seafood Restaurant chain recently paid $1.1 million to settle a class action suit by black employees who said they were passed over for jobs as hosts and servers.
Indian Removal: Does History Always Reflect Progress?
History is often seen as the march of progress. In U.S. history, the chronology of events that led from the settlement of to the formation of colonies, from a newborn nation to the current 50 states, is considered the natural sequence of the nation’s progress. The outcomes of historical events are presumed to be steps forward in our collective journey.
Editorial Cartoon: Racial Profiling
Activities will help students:
- understand how a cartoon uses irony to make a political statement
- interpret visual and written material in an editorial cartoon
Editorial Cartoons: An Introduction
Activities will help students learn strategies for analyzing editorial cartoons.
'And Maybe I Can Change That Too'
A high school teacher helps his students challenge their own racist beliefs.
Romeo and Juliet Mix-It-Up
Shakespeare’s classic play is a must-read for all high school students. Might the tragic end of Romeo & Juliet have been different if the Montagues and the Capulets had crossed their social boundaries?
Defusing School Violence
In this lesson, students imagine themselves attending a high school that is polarized by violence between U.S.-born students and foreign-born African immigrants. After learning about the situation, students use problem-solving skills to determine what they would do to deal with the violence if they attended that school. The lesson is adapted from an actual situation that took place at Edward Little High School in Auburn, Maine.