Teaching Tolerance news

Throughout the summer months, Teaching Tolerance will present a series of lessons using photographs to teach about social justice. Each lesson will focus on a contemporary social justice issue. The lessons are multidisciplinary and geared toward middle and high school students. A new lesson will be posted online each week from June 6 through Aug. 22.

Teaching Tolerance has named 52 schools from across the country as Mix It Up Model Schools. They were chosen for their exemplary efforts to foster respect and understanding among their students and throughout their campuses during the 2010-11 school year.

As part of the kick-off to the Southern Poverty Law Center's 40th anniversary festivities, second grade students from Notre Dame Elementary in Portsmouth, Ohio, offered congratulations and insight into just how simple it could be to change our world.

The Association of Education Publishers (AEP) has announced the 2011 finalists for its Distinguished Achievement Awards. We’re proud to note that Teaching Tolerance won 16 finalists spots in three of the four award categories.

Think of Teaching Tolerance as a running conversation. We do. Thanks to the Internet, our magazine, our blog, and our Facebook posts all give us a chance to talk back and forth with educators.

Helpful as that is, there’s nothing quite like a face-to-face conversation. That’s why last weekend, 20 educators visited personally with the Teaching Tolerance staff. We shared lunch and had a great conversation about how to better help them in the classroom. 

The Spring issue of Teaching Tolerance arrives in schools this week. Here’s a sneak peak:

Alma wanted to put milk in her children’s bottles. In her native Mexico, she could only afford to fill them with coffee. Like many recent immigrants to the United States, Alma came here to spare her children such grinding poverty. “I’d like to live [in the United States] for my kids,” she says, “for them to study and not live the life I lived in Mexico, because it was very hard.”

Once here in the States, though, Alma could only find employment as a farmworker in Florida. She still lives in poverty as one of the country’s estimated 10.8 million undocumented immigrants. These laborers do the backbreaking work that puts billions of dollars of food on our plates.

The beginning of the school year is such an exciting time—meeting new students, reuniting with former ones, working with trusted colleagues. It’s a time for discovering new possibilities and opportunities.

It’s also a time to remind students and staff that classrooms and schools are communities, built on relationships. As you start this school year, consider some of these community-building activities.

In today’s overheated political climate, how do you teach about immigration?

Some kids belong to families of recent immigrants (or are immigrants themselves). Others had ancestors who immigrated long ago. Are you able to connect the experiences of these two groups? And what about students who bring stereotypes and anti-immigrant sentiments into the classroom? How do you deal with them?

'One should use praise to recognize what one is not.' -Elias Canetti, Nobel Laureate in Literature