Professional Development

Teaching 'The New Jim Crow'


Teaching Tolerance teamed up with Michelle Alexander—author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness—to offer educators two FREE webinars exploring mass incarceration in the United States and how to teach about it. Don’t miss out on these unique opportunities to hear Alexander speak about how mass incarceration represents a form of racialized social control, one that traps millions of people of color in a permanent undercaste and parallels an earlier system of racial control—Jim Crow.

These webinars can help you and other educators bring the topics, themes and central arguments of The New Jim Crow into your classrooms. They are appropriate for educators who have read The New Jim Crow as well as those who have not but want to know more about the topics.

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The first webinar, held September 23, 2014, is an informal conversation with Alexander about The New Jim Crow, its thesis and its relevance in high school classrooms. (A transcript of this webinar is available here.)

The second webinar, held October 29, features an in-depth discussion of the Teaching Tolerance guide, Teaching The New Jim Crow. (A transcript of this webinar is available here.)

Here’s an overview of the contents of the guide:

  • A collection of ten lessons closely aligned to topics and themes of The New Jim Crow
  • Abridged excerpts of the book’s introduction and six chapters
  • Tools that equip educators to teach about race and racial justice.
  • Alignment to Common Core State Standards
  • A compendium of strategies aimed at understanding vocabulary, close and critical reading, speaking and listening
  • Text-dependent questions to assess comprehension
  • Activities that prompt students to engage in collective action toward change

We look forward to engaging with you and other educators interested in discussing mass incarceration through the lens of racial justice.

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