As we all watch the events tearing apart Ferguson, Missouri, one thing becomes clear: Our nation needs to find a more productive way to deal with issues of race and injustice. Protests that result in police in battle gear gassing residents and fringe elements tearing apart communities night after night are proof positive that we’ve forgotten — or abandoned — dialogue as a tool for making progress together.
To that end, I wanted to share a few instructional materials that I’ve used to structure classroom conversations with middle school students about justice and injustice.
What you’ll find are two readings that give kids the chance to think carefully about what fairness is supposed to look like and two sets of “seed questions” that you can use to start conversations in your classroom. Neither of the readings addresses the Michael Brown incident specifically and none of the seed questions is designed to provoke extreme emotions. Instead, the materials are designed to be used to guide a Socratic Seminar where kids can wrestle with their own beliefs about the role that responsible citizens should play when our communities are struggling with fairness.
Hope you can use them:
Elizabeth Eckford Reading and Elizabeth Eckford Seed Questions – No story challenges my students more than the story of Elizabeth Eckford and the Little Rock Nine — the first African American students to integrate an all-white high school. This reading shares Elizabeth’s first-hand recollections of her first day at school. The seed questions encourage kids to think about what they would have done had they been a white student at Central High School in Arkansas on the day that Elizabeth and her friends tried to attend school for the first time.
Mother to Son Reading and Mother to Son Seed Questions – Langston Hughes was one of America’s best African American poets. He wrote regularly about the challenges faced by African Americans in the 1950s and 1960s. One of his best poems was Mother to Son — told from the point of view of an African American mother encouraging her son to keep on climbing through life even if “it ain’t no crystal stair.” The seed questions for this reading encourage kids to think about just how easy it is to keep climbing in the face of injustice.
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Related Radical Reads:
