One of the thirteen principles of the #BLM movement is Black Villages. The Inspired Teaching Demonstration School hosted "Voices of our Village," an event during which families, teachers, and school leaders had honest conversations about diversity and equity. They looked at student work, discussed implications of taking this on, and brainstormed next steps to keep this energy in their school.

Here are stories from DC area classrooms from Day Five of Black Lives Matter Week of Action in Schools.

Early childhood students and families at The Inspired Teaching Demonstration School began to work on a #BlackLivesMatter mural this morning. Students in Pk through 8th grade will have the opportunity to add their messages throughout the week as part of the D.C. Area Black Lives Matter Week of Action in Schools.

Kenmore Middle School educator, Dr. Tiffany Mitchell, started her class today by asking her students to share what they know about the Black Lives Matter movement. Student responses included, “people marching and saying Black Lives Matter in response to police brutality,” and “football players taking a knee during the national anthem as a form of protest.”

Producers, 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."

This 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.

By Jorge Cordoba
At the Free Minds, Free People conference in Baltimore this summer, I stopped by the Teaching for Change table. They graciously donated copies of the book Caribbean Connections: Moving North for my high school ESOL students. This group of students, ranging in age from 14 to 20 years old, attend a large suburban high school in Gambrills, Maryland. They come from many different countries including Thailand, El Salvador, Nigeria… Read more >>

This month, all of the 8th grade social studies teachers at Alice Deal Middle School (DCPS) engaged their students in the popular role play, The People vs. Columbus, et al.  The lesson, written in the form of a trial by Bill Bigelow of Rethinking Schools, is available for free download on the Zinn Education Project website. The lesson is a prime example of how to engage students in learning through role play and debate. Read more >>

The news, the news, the news… it hit us all summer. And like most teachers, even when we are taking our time away from school, we think about how things will work or impact our kids—and in happy ingenious moments, maybe a great lesson plan idea. As my co-teacher and I prepared to meet our third grade class, we thought about how to approach all our wonderful young people at... Read more >>

National History Day projects are a wonderful opportunity for middle and high school students to research and learn about topics and individuals outside the typical textbook. We share here the experiences of D.C. eighth grade middle school teacher Beth Kara. Her students’ completed projects on Queen Liliuokalani, Sophie Scholl and the White Rose, Assata Shakur, Muhammad Ali, and many more people of note who stood fought for social justice. Read more >>

Third-grade teacher Andy Grayson wrote to tell us that he was thrilled to share Wilfredo: Un niño de El Salvador/A Boy from El Salvador with his students. He learned about the free downloadable book in a Teaching for Change workshop sponsored by the Alexandria City Public Schools. Here is what Grayson told us about why Wilfredo is so useful: After reading Wilfredo, I observed increased discourse and engagement from a wider range of students. Students whose families have... Read more >>

When fifth grade Spanish literacy teacher Cesarina Pierre realized that her nearly two decades of teaching Caribbean students in New York City Public Schools would not fully translate to teaching Central American students in Washington D.C., she sought resources from Teaching for Change. Pierre asked Teaching for Change, a longtime partner at the school, to help her understand the unique experiences of Central American families. Read more >>

The theme was “Feed Your Brain: Nourish Your Community” and the session topics included: Food Sourcing, Food Policy and Laws, Food Production, Food Waste and Composting, School Lunches, and Food Access.

Stapert became inspired to incorporate the curriculum from A People’s Curriculum for the Earth: Teaching Climate Change and the Environmental Crisis into Lowell’s academic program.

On Sunday, October 16, 2016, twenty D.C. area teachers gathered for the first session of Stories from our Classrooms 2016-2017, an annual course offered by Teaching for Change. The goals for this course are for teacher participants to deepen their own practice, build community among D.C. area social justice educators, and to contribute to the all-too-scarce collection of published descriptions of classroom practice by teachers themselves. Read more >>

On June 12, 2016, Teaching for Change celebrated the work of the teachers from our inaugural Stories from Our Classrooms social justice teacher writing group. Every month on a Sunday, social justice teacher writers came together to write, reflect, and share. The event opened with teachers each reading one of the lines below to highlight what they did and why. Read more >>

This spring my sixth and seventh grade reading students at Gunston Middle School in Arlington, Virginia researched the lack of diversity in children’s and young adult books. After learning about the statistics on diversity in books and the “We Need Diverse Books” and #StepUpScholastic campaigns, students did surveys of our classroom library and a selection of sports books to see which groups of people were under-represented.I started the sports books lesson by asking them... Read more >>

For two months in the spring of 2016, Teaching for Change staff member Julian Hipkins III taught a class in D.C. history at E.L. Haynes Public Charter School in Washington, D.C. The strategies and resources he used for teaching from a bottom-up perspective, described below, could be of use for other teachers of D.C. history. In addition to drawing on archives, key people, and historic sites, his core text was City of Magnificent Intentions by Keith Melder. Read more >>

Teaching for Change was pleased to attend and photograph the 2016 Food Justice Youth Summit. See our posts about 2014 and 2015, and view more photographs from 2016 in our Flickr album. On April 7, 2016, 11th graders at Capital City Public Charter School hosted the 2nd Annual Food Justice Youth Summit to build awareness about food justice issues, both nationally and locally, at Friends Meeting House of Washington. This year’s event featured keynote speaker, Lauren Nixon... Read more >>

Our 11th-grade FOOD JUSTICE EXPEDITION is an interdisciplinary three-part study (past, present, and future) of the impact of food on our community–both locally and globally. The expedition begins with an exploration of our students’ families’ cultural connections to foods; as 99% of our students come from African American and immigrant families, we discuss the significant role of food in dictating cultural identity. Read more >>