Teaching Materials Archive

Portrait of Palestinian family of Ramallah, circa 1900-1910.

Teaching the Seeds of Violence in Palestine-Israel

Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow. 2024. 33 pages.
A mixer/mystery activity on Zionism, anti-Zionism, peasant resistance, the Great War, the British Mandate, and more.

Who Gets to Vote? Teaching About the Struggle for Voting Rights in the United States

Teaching Activity. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca.
Unit with three lessons on voting rights, including the history of the struggle against voter suppression in the United States.

Standing with Standing Rock: A Role Play on the Dakota Access Pipeline

Teaching Activity. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca, Bill Bigelow, and Andrew Duden. Article by Ursula Wolfe-Rocca. Rethinking Schools. 15 pages.
A role play helps students recognize the issues at stake in the historic struggle of the Standing Rock Sioux to block construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline.

Woman screaming at Elizabeth Ann Eckford | Zinn Education Project

“A School Year Like No Other”: Eyes on the Prize: “Fighting Back: 1957-1962”

Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow. Rethinking Schools. 7 pages.
A companion lesson to the Eyes on the Prize segment on school integration.

The Cherokee/Seminole Removal Role Play

Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow. 10 pages.
What led up to the Trail of Tears? In this lesson, students learn about the decision to remove the Cherokee and Seminole people from their lands.

A Roadmap to Peace?: Promises Documentary Lesson

A lesson to accompany the 2001 documentary Promises, which explores the Palestinian-Israeli conflict from the eyes and experiences of Israeli and Palestinian children living in the West Bank.

“I Think the Word Is Dignity” — Rachel Corrie’s Letters from Gaza

Letters to her family from 23-year-old U.S. peace activist Rachel Corrie, who was killed in 2003 while trying to prevent the Israeli army from destroying homes in the Gaza Strip. Followed by questions by Bill Bigelow for classroom discussion.

Independence or Catastrophe? Teaching Palestine Through Multiple Perspectives

Teaching Activity. By Samia Shoman. Rethinking Schools. 2014.
A social studies teacher uses conflicting narratives to engage students in studying the history of Palestine and Israel, focusing on the events of 1948.

The Heroes We Need Today: Teaching About the Radical Ida B. Wells

Teaching Activity. By Matt Reed. Published by Rethinking Schools. 2023.
This mixer activity helps students uncover the radical legacy of Ida B. Wells.

Water and Environmental Racism

Teaching Activity. By Matt Reed and Ursula Wolfe-Rocca. Rethinking Schools.
A mixer activity, inspired by the 2016 Democracy Now! documentary Thirsty for Democracy, introduces students to the struggle of residents to access safe water for drinking, cooking, and bathing in the majority-Black cities of Flint, Michigan; Jackson, Mississippi; and Newark, New Jersey.

Five Black women who served as officers of the Women’s League in Newport, Rhode Island.

Teaching the Reconstruction Revolution: Picturing and Celebrating the First Era of Black Power

Teaching Activity. By Adam Sanchez. 2022. Rethinking Schools.
A lesson that help students understand, imagine, and celebrate the Reconstruction period as the first era of Black power in the United States.

Rosa Parks and Ericka Huggins at a Black Panther Party free breakfast program.

Framing Black Power Through the Life of Rosa Parks

Teaching Activity. By Tiffany Mitchell Patterson and Jessica Rucker.
In this lesson, students explore the core ideas of Black Power through a gallery walk with images and quotes connected to the life of Rosa Parks, and then consider how to define Rosa Parks’s activism.

Rosa Parks Lived a Long and Active Life, So Why Is This Timeline So Boring and Short?

Teaching Activity. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca. 3 pages.
This timeline activity builds on students’ viewing of the 2022 film, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, and involves collaborating on a new timeline of Mrs. Parks' life.

Reconstructing the South: What Really Happened

Teaching Activity. By Mimi Eisen and Ursula Wolfe-Rocca. 47 pages.
A follow-up lesson to “Reconstructing the South,” using primary source documents to reveal key outcomes of the Reconstruction era.

Rosa Parks: Countering the Master Narrative

Teaching Activity. By Jesse Hagopian. 4 pages.
With a short video and readings with competing viewpoints, students will learn about master narratives and counter-narratives and how they apply to Rosa Parks’ life. This activity can be introduced before watching the film or reading the book, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks.

How Should Rosa Parks’s Legacy Be Memorialized?

This lesson by Cierra Kaler-Jones invites students to consider how Rosa Parks’ legacy is memorialized by critically examining her statue at the U.S. Capitol. Students learn the fuller story of Rosa Parks’ life and use that information to determine how they would memorialize her legacy.

“Intolerable Conditions”: Teaching About Northern Racism Through Rosa Parks’s Detroit

Teaching Activity. By Say Burgin, Jeanne Theoharis, and Ursula Wolfe-Rocca.
Students learn to “talk back” to official accounts of the Detroit Uprising of 1967 by focusing on its root causes. They also get a fuller sense of Rosa Parks’s life and politics, and the Black freedom struggle outside of the South.

Teaching With Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All

Teaching Activity. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca. 25 pages.
Students engage in an interactive activity with short excerpts from Martha Jones’ book to learn about the leading role of Black women in the fight for voting rights throughout U.S. history.

Teaching With Seizing Freedom

To facilitate bringing the Seizing Freedom podcast to the classroom, we are sharing teaching ideas for selected episodes, beginning with "A Powerful Black Hand."

Who Killed Reconstruction? A Trial Role Play

Teaching Activity. By Adam Sanchez. 2022. Rethinking Schools
A role play about the demise of Reconstruction that helps students get beyond the question “Was Reconstruction a success or failure?”

Organizing Against Racial and Sexual Violence: Rosa Parks’ Life-Long Pursuit of Justice

Teaching Activity. By Say Burgin, Jeanne Theoharis, and Ursula Wolfe-Rocca. 7 pages.
In this activity, students investigate Rosa Parks’ activism — and the gender and racial injustice to which it was a response — before and after her famous bus refusal.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott: Understanding the Organizing Tradition

Teaching Activity. By Say Burgin and Jeanne Theoharis. 6 pages.
This lesson expands students’ knowledge of how Black Montgomery secured a victory in the 1955–56 bus boycott by asking them to pay close attention to activists’ tactics — and what they did as white resistance mounted.

Lives in Our Lineage: A Lesson on Oral Histories

Teaching Activity. By Cierra Kaler-Jones.
In this lesson, students use key excerpts from How the Word Is Passed by Clint Smith as inspiration for a project where they tell their and their loved ones’ stories.

Teaching A People’s History of the March on Washington

Teaching Activity. By Jessica Lovaas and Adam Sanchez. Rethinking Schools. 2021. Updated in 2023.
A lesson with case studies from Los Angeles; Birmingham, Alabama; Brooklyn; Detroit; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Albany, Georgia; and Cambridge, Maryland — to introduce students to the diverse struggles across the United States that were represented at the March on Washington.

Teaching the Impact of the Gold Rush on Native Americans of California: A Source Investigation

Teaching Activity. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian Native Knowledge 360° initiative. 9 pages.
Provides primary sources, maps, images, and background history to offer teachers and students insight into a little-known but vitally important aspect of one of the most iconic events in U.S. history — the California gold rush.