Do you teach Harper Lee's classic To Kill a Mockingbird?
Check out these two flipped classroom exercises that can help engage students in the issues central to the novel—and their own lives—including race, class, gender, justice, and moral growth. The first exercise activates student thinking about "stereotype threat," or how stereotypes can negatively affect us in our daily lives. The second sets the historical setting of To Kill a Mockingbird.
Topics: To Kill a Mockingbird, English Language Arts, Facing History and Ourselves, Video, Stereotype, EdTech, Online Learning, Flipped Classroom, Critical Thinking, Facing Technology
From over 400 nominations, we selected 20 finalists from around the world for the 2014 Facing History Together Teacher Recognition Contest. Then you voted for the educator whose story and work inspired you most.
Today we are so thrilled to introduce you to our 2014 Facing History Together Teacher Recognition Contest winner Hayden Frederick-Clarke, the founding math teacher at Diploma Plus, a small learning community at Charlestown High School in Boston, Massachusetts. Frederick-Clarke will receive a $5,000 teaching grant to benefit his school and community, and to further his work as a great educator.
Topics: Classrooms, Boston, Contests, Choosing to Participate, Teaching, Schools, Identity, Facing History Together, Upstanders, Facing History and Ourselves, Teachers
Next week marks the 51st anniversary of the assassination of American President John F. Kennedy. We can explore his legacy by examining the Kennedy administration's responses to the civil rights movement, and how these responses changed over time.
Topics: Civil Rights Movement, Books, Film, Democracy, Facing History Resources, Facing History and Ourselves, Teaching Resources, Civil Rights, History
To Kill a Mockingbird is set in a small town in Alabama in the 1930s, a town much like the one in which author Harper Lee came of age. Although I grew up a generation later, I see much of myself in Scout, the young white girl who narrates the book.
Topics: To Kill a Mockingbird, Classrooms, Books, English Language Arts, Margot Stern Strom, Human Rights, Facing History Resources, Teaching, Identity, Teaching Resources, Teachers, History
Teachers have to create this emotional space where it’s safe, but challenging. Where people can be themselves. Where people can take chances and fail. Where people can tell stories about themselves and reveal things about themselves without risk of derision, without fear of being marginalized. Without safety there is nothing, there is no learning.”
Topics: Classrooms, Choosing to Participate, Events, Safe Schools, Schools, Memphis, Identity, Facing History Together, Upstanders, Facing History and Ourselves, Teachers, Video
Topics: Classrooms, Student Voices, Choosing to Participate, Events, Human Rights, New York, Facing History Together, Upstanders, Facing History and Ourselves, Teachers
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Seventy years ago this fall, the word "genocide" made its debut into the English language, on page 79 of the 674-page Axis Rule in Occupied Europe [which you can find here in Reading 3], in a chapter called "Genocide—A New Term and New Conception for Destruction of Nations."
Topics: Books, Choosing to Participate, Armenian Genocide, Human Rights, Facing History Resources, Teaching, Upstanders, Genocide/Collective Violence, Facing History and Ourselves, Teaching Resources, Video, History
Facing History and Ourselves is saddened to note the passing of Thomas M. Menino, Boston's longest-serving mayor, at age 71. Mayor Menino was a champion for civic and educational equality, and a longtime supporter of Facing History.
Topics: Boston, Schools, News, Facing History and Ourselves
National Anti-Bullying Week takes place in the United Kingdom 17th to 21st of November. This year's theme is "let's stop bullying for all."
Topics: Classrooms, United Kingdom, Webinar, Online Tools, Professional Development, Film, Teaching Strategies, Bullying and Ostracism, Choosing to Participate, Human Behavior, Human Rights, Facing History Resources, Safe Schools, Teaching, Schools, Identity, Facing History and Ourselves, Teaching Resources
The recent row over Bill Maher and Ben Affleck's heated discussion of Islam on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher strikes me as an opportunity for a civic lesson–one rooted not in debating who is right or wrong, or who is bigoted or not, but one, that, in true Facing History and Ourselves fashion, is rooted in history. At Facing History, we have learned that history often provides a needed distance from which we can illuminate the present and inform more productive civic dialogue.
Topics: Antisemitism, Choosing to Participate, Human Behavior, Human Rights, Facing History Resources, Religious Tolerance, News, Readings, Identity, Facing History and Ourselves, Teaching Resources, History