The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Learning for Justice program recently released a new publication to help teach high school-age students about Black Americans’ struggle for equality and civil rights. The Teaching the Civil Rights Movement framework offers five teaching strategies:
- “Connecting the past to the present highlights the importance of the Civil Rights Movement by examining current local struggles….
- “Knowing how to talk about race and racism helps students learn about identity. ….
- “Educating to realize power teaches students to understand their own capacity for action ….
- “Revealing the unseen expands the lens of the freedom struggle to include activists beyond the Rv. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. Textbooks traditionally focus on court victories and federal legislation and oftentimes obscure lessons on activism and local action.
- “Resisting sanitized accounts of history involves using resources within this framework to provide age-appropriate and culturally responsive ways to refuse sanitized history lessons, which limit students’ understanding of racial injustice and oppression.”
The full framework plus guides, lesson plans and films can be found at www.learningforjustice.org . This column is prepared by the BYM Working Group on Racism (WGR) and sent to the designated liaison at each local Meeting. The BYM WGR meets most months on the first Saturday, 10:00 am to 12 noon, currently via Zoom. If you would like to attend, contact the clerk at david.etheridge@verizon.net.