Meet the Teaching People’s History Team at NCSS 2019

Join the Zinn Education Project staff and volunteers at the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) conference in Austin, Texas from November 22-24, 2019 for workshops and booth activities.

At Booth #333 in the Austin Convention Center Exhibit Hall, conference attendees can preview the lessons offered by the Zinn Education Project, register for the website, enter a raffle for people’s history books, browse popular Rethinking Schools books, and subscribe to Rethinking Schools magazine.

In advance of the conference (Nov. 21), Bill Bigelow will offer a free, full-day teacher workshop, “Teaching Climate Change and Environmental Justice.” Bigelow will introduce lessons from the Rethinking Schools book he co-edited, A People’s Curriculum for the Earth: Teaching Climate Change and the Environmental Crisis and each participant will receive a free copy.  Read more and register.

Over the course of the two-day conference, Zinn Education Project authors and collaborators will be at our booth when they’re not running workshops.

Zinn Education Project Workshops

The Birth of the Mexican Border
Friday, Nov. 22 — 2:05pm – 3:00pm
Facilitator: Bill Bigelow
Location: Room 18D Level 4 (Session #987)
After the U.S.-Mexico war, the United States took almost half of Mexico. Experience a classroom-tested mixer that explores the origins and effects of that war.
(See lesson.)

Poetry of Defiance: How the Enslaved Resisted
Friday Nov. 22 — 3:10pm – 4:05pm
Facilitator: Adam Sanchez
Location: Table 1 Palazzo Level 1 A (Presentation #324)
Explore the myriad ways enslaved people resisted their enslavement in an activity designed to understand and celebrate enslaved people’s resourceful and heroic defiance of the system of slavery. Roundtable format.
(See lesson.)

Who Freed the Slaves?
Saturday, Nov. 23 — 8:30am – 9:25am
Facilitator: Adam Sanchez
Location: Room 12B Level 4 (Session #326)
Meet the extraordinary, though not always well-known, abolitionists who worked to end slavery, challenging the dangerous myth that Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves.
(See lesson.)

Deportations on Trial: Mexican Americans During the Great Depression
Saturday, Nov. 23 — 8:30am – 9:25am
Facilitator: Ursula Wolfe-Rocca
Location: Room 18C Level 4 (Session #320)
Who is to blame for the illegal, mass deportations of Mexican Americans and immigrants during the Great Depression? That is the question students confront in this trial role play.
(See lesson.)

Pipelines and People: Investigating the Dakota Access Pipeline
Saturday, Nov. 23 — 5:15pm – 6:10pm
Facilitator: Ursula Wolfe-Rocca
Location: Room 18C Level 4 (Session #317)
Explore the diverse perspectives of Indigenous People, the fossil fuel industry, organized labor, climate justice activists, and small farmers on the contentious Dakota Access Pipeline.
(See lesson.)

Other Sessions of Interest

Resisting the National Commodification of the Social Studies: Exhibit Hall
Friday November 22, 4:15pm – 5:10pm
Presenter: Jennice McCafferty-Wright, Missouri State University
Location: JW Marriott Lone Star C (Session #681)
Whose business plans and policy agendas are your classroom and labor part of? Discuss how not to become a Policy Tool, Corporate Fool, or Government Mule in conference exhibition halls.

Book Giveaway

• A People’s History of the United States
• Eyes Wide Open: Going Behind the Environmental Headlines
• Forty Acres and Maybe a Mule
• Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything American History Textbooks Get Wrong (Young Readers Edition)
• Never Caught: The Story of Ona Judge (for Young Readers)
• On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal
• Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore
• Teaching Climate Change to Adolescents: Reading, Writing, and Making a Difference
• The Amazing Age of John Roy Lynch
• The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World
• This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate
• When We Fight We Win!: Twenty-First-Century Social Movements and the Activists That Are Transforming Our World

Thank you to Simon & Schuster, The New Press, HarperCollins Publishers, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Penguin Random House, Milkweed Editions, Candlewick Press, Scholastic, and Little, Brown & Company for making this giveaway possible.

Speaker Highlights

Peniel Joseph, historian and author of numerous books including Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America, Stokely: A Life and The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. (2020, Basic Books) is the keynote speaker on Friday, Nov. 22, from 1:00pm – 1:55pm.

Erica Armstrong Dunbar, historian and author of Never Caught: The Story of Ona Judge, is the keynote speaker on Saturday, Nov. 23 from 9:30am – 10:30am, followed by a book signing from 10:45-11:45 am.