Lessons
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These robust, ready-to-use classroom lessons offer breadth and depth, spanning essential social justice topics and reinforcing critical social emotional learning skills.

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“[Learning for Justice] provides me with the means to promote social justice, challenge bias, and engage students in discussions about diversity that would perhaps not happen otherwise.”

Grade Level
Social Justice Domain
Subject
Topic

147 Lessons

Looking Closely at Ourselves

In this lesson, students explore race and self-identity by creating self-portraits. The lesson aims to help students develop detailed observational skills and use these skills in relation to themselves and others. It also begins constructing a vocabulary that is crucial in helping build community and discuss some of the more challenging aspects of race and racial identity formation.
Grade Level
Subject
Reading & Language Arts
Arts
Social Justice Domain
September 1, 2011

Different Colors of Beauty

The overall goal of these lessons is to help students develop their racial or ethnic identities in a safe and open classroom environment. Each lesson capitalizes on a slightly different modality of learning. The lessons
Grade Level
Subject
Reading & Language Arts
Social Studies
SEL
Arts
ELL / ESL
Social Justice Domain
September 2, 2011

Girls’ Attitudes About STEM Careers: Similarities and Differences Among Race/Ethnic Groups

This lesson presents excerpts from a recent Girl Scouts Research Institute study showing girls may be more interested in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) careers than previously thought. Students compare and contrast white, African-American and Hispanic girls’ perceptions of STEM fields.
Grade Level
Subject
Reading & Language Arts
Social Studies
Science & Health
Social Justice Domain
April 6, 2012

Maya Angelou

This lesson focuses on questions of identity as students read and analyze Angelou’s inspirational poem “Still I Rise” and apply its message to their own lives. Students learn how Maya Angelou overcame hardship and discrimination to find her own voice and to influence others to believe in themselves and use their voices for positive change.
Grade Level
Subject
Reading & Language Arts
Social Studies
Social Justice Domain
May 3, 2012

Beyond Rosa Parks: Powerful Voices for Civil Rights and Social Justice

Most history textbooks include a section about Rosa Parks in the chapter on the modern civil rights movement. However, Parks is only one among many African-American women who have worked for equal rights and social justice. This series introduces four of those activists who may be unfamiliar to students.
Grade Level
Subject
Reading & Language Arts
Social Studies
History
Social Justice Domain
May 3, 2012

Mary Church Terrell

In this lesson of the series, “Beyond Rosa Parks: Powerful Voices for Civil Rights and Social Justice,” students will read and analyze text from “The Progress of Colored Women,” a speech made by Mary Church Terrell in 1898. Terrell was the first president of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), an organization that was formed in 1896 from the merger of several smaller women’s clubs, and was active during the period of Jim Crow segregation in the South.
Grade Level
Subject
Reading & Language Arts
Social Studies
History
Social Justice Domain
May 11, 2012

Mary McLeod Bethune

In this lesson, students will read an excerpt of an interview given by Mary McLeod Bethune and will learn that she founded the Daytona National and Industrial School for Negro Girls (now Bethune-Cookman College) in 1904. Through close reading, they will explore and discuss connections between events from Bethune’s life experiences and their own lives, and connections between past and current events.
Grade Level
Subject
Reading & Language Arts
Social Studies
History
Social Justice Domain
May 17, 2012
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