Announcements

Advertising is everywhere. It’s on the TV in our homes, on the Internet at schools, on billboards as we drive or walk through our communities, in the music we hear and the magazines we read. Students are sometimes influenced by it without even knowing it. So Teaching Tolerance is offering a series of lessons that includes specific strategies for reading and talking about advertisements and their impact. These lessons help kids understand what goes on when they view advertisements and develop critical reading skills to help determine what messages to believe.

The second annual Alabama Region 4 Conference on Multicultural Education is now seeking conference proposals through Feb. 17. The NAME conference will be held March 30 at the University of Montevallo and will include presentations on diversity research and innovative multicultural pedagogies.

Our cover story, “Possession Obsession,” focuses on teen dating abuse. With almost one-third of teen relationships involving abuse, it is imperative for educators to know how they can help their students avoid or escape unhealthy dating relationships.

We also examine stereotypes about low-income students. “The Poverty Myth” looks at how these stereotypes persist in classrooms, leading some teachers to view low-income students as unprepared and lacking ability. Too many believe “low-income” means low expectations.

When I found out I had been selected to serve on the first-ever Teaching Tolerance Advisory Board, I was overcome by simultaneous feelings of shock, honor, pride, excitement and joy. In a time in which the rhetoric surrounding teachers is becoming increasingly negative and dismissive, I commend Teaching Tolerance for looking to current classroom teachers and education practitioners for input regarding their resources. I was thrilled to have the opportunity to contribute to such a respected, invaluable organization.

I came to the first meeting of the Teaching Tolerance Advisory Board giddy with excitement, full of wonder, hope and pure idealism.

Through dinner, we listened intently to each other for hints of interests, objectives, convictions, passions and focus. We saw the realness of each individual emerge. We shared a purpose and vision in our task.

Sitting and standing. It’s amazing how much of our history involves those two simple acts.

A woman refused to relinquish her bus seat. Students sat at segregated lunch counters. People stood on street corners and boycotted public buses. A minister stood in front of hundreds of thousands delivering a dream. History echoes with the audacity of simple acts. My simple act was attending the first Teaching Tolerance Advisory Board meeting in Montgomery, Ala.

Walla Walla, Wash. is three plane flights, a few thousand miles and a climactic shift from Montgomery, Ala. As our recent report Teaching the Movement showed, there’s also a lot of distance between Washington’s sadly sketchy requirements for student learning about the civil rights movement and Alabama’s relatively ambitious standards.

We are happy to announce the selection of the 2011 Teaching Tolerance Advisory Board. We received more than 500 applications from outstanding multicultural educators across the country. We selected teachers from each grade category. It was extremely difficult to select just a few teachers from such a remarkable pool of applicants. Please join us in congratulating this year’s advisory board members.

An SPLC team, including staff members from Teaching Tolerance, led a two-day student leadership camp in Sandy, Utah. Nearly 100 students from the four Canyons School District high schools participated in a myriad of activities exploring identity and their understanding of themselves.