Ms. Ariel Alford, has been a high school social studies teacher at Hayfield Secondary School (FCPS) for four years. For three of these, DCAESJ has born witness to the transformative racial justice education work she’s fostered with her African American history students, the wider school community, and, as you’ll come to know, far beyond the school’s walls.
Read MoreEarly childhood students at School Within School @ Goding explore Black joy through the Afrofuturist art of Cyrus Kabiru, who creates glasses (he calls c-stunners) out of discarded materials.
Read MoreBy Ashley Bryant
After a busy morning of attending the BLM at Schools Virtual Curriculum Fair on Saturday, January 30, 2021 with powerful conversations about teaching resistance and oppression, global issues of restorative justice, and displacement and protest in Washington D.C., Dekebra’s presentation titled “Mindful Moments: Radical Wellness for Black Lives” was a welcomed and much-needed call to self-care.
In Spanish 1 at Thurgood Marshall Academy, students learned about several Afrolatinos during the Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action.
Read MoreAn afterschool ceramics class explores the Black Lives Matter guiding principle of globalism.
Read MoreAt School Without Walls at Francis Stevens (DCPS), students in my elementary ESOL class read a newsela article and watched a Ted Talk in order to understand the term "systemic racism" and how it impacts people in the United States and in other countries.
Read MoreIn my fifth grade classroom at Rockview Elementary School (MCPS), we spent the majority of the reading block during the Black Lives Matter Week of Action in Schools reading and analyzing poems by Langston Hughes.
Read MoreInspired Teaching Fellow Jay Banks’ 2nd-grade classroom at DC Scholars PCS focused on Black Lives Matter by discussing resistance and advocacy. The class read Crossing Bok Chitto by Tim Tingle, the fictional story of the friendship between a young Choctaw girl and an enslaved African boy.
Read MoreHigh school U.S. history students attended a presentation by SNCC veteran Courtland Cox, coordinated by teacher Lordsline Exantus. Cox explained to the students that his years of activism began when he was their age, and like many of them, he grew up in an immigrant household. He also told them that the in the 1960s, the apartments near their school were for whites only and that he protested the DC football team for not allowing Black players.
Read MoreOn Tuesday, students were able to make connections between our world history content and Black Lives Matter movement today. We are currently studying the Indian Independence Movement and Partition. This allowed us to relate the Civil Rights Movement's peaceful methods to Gandhi's Salt March and history. From there students were able to evaluate the principles of the Black Lives Matter movement and compare those to the writings of Gandhi.
Read MoreTeachers filled the house for an evening #BlackLivesMatterAtSchool Week of Action book talk by University of Florida associate professor Paul Ortiz about An African American and Latinx History of the United States.
Read MoreHere are stories from DC area classrooms from Day Five of Black Lives Matter Week of Action in Schools.
Read MoreProducers, Dr. Kmt Shockley and Kofi LeNiles, provided an engaging and interactive African centered history workshop for ninth grade students at Friendship Technology Preparatory Academy. At the core of their workshop was the history and culture of a maroon community called Palenque, San Basilio (Palenque). Palenque is located in Colombia, South America and is the focus of their upcoming documentary entitled "For Humanity: Culture, Community and Maroonage."
Read MoreThis week, in my middle school and high school Spanish classes we have engaged in discussion about the Black Lives Matter Movement and also Black people of Latin America in many different ways. These have been meaningful discussions, and my Spanish 1 class is working on a project that will turn into a Socratic Seminar next week (here's the lesson) and a video news report on their research.
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