Let’s make teaching for Black lives the norm, not the exception.
When we reject racism and anti-Blackness in our teaching, equip our students with information about the truth of our history and engage them in critical self-reflection, we help them access their own power to define their roles in the world.
Explore the links below to find everything you need to build a toolkit to advocate for Black lives in your schools and classrooms, starting with the book, Teaching for Black Lives.
Teaching Resources
Teaching for Black Lives Book
Rooted in the Black Lives Matter movement, this book provides resources and demonstrates how teachers can connect curriculum to young people’s lives and root their concerns and daily experiences in what is taught and how classrooms are set up.
Study Groups
Facilitated by the Zinn Education Project, study groups are a free professional learning opportunity open to teachers across the United States. Study group participants can dive deeper into Teaching for Black Lives and create action plans to share with their teaching community.
Lessons
The Zinn Education Project offers dozens of lessons on the history of the Black Freedom Struggle — from resistance to enslavement to redlining to the ongoing fight for voting rights and reparations. Find highlighted collections of lessons at the Teach Truth Syllabus, Teach the Roots of the 2020 Rebellion, People’s History Lessons for Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, and Teaching with the New York Times 1619 Project.
Online Classes
Our “Teaching the Black Freedom Struggle” online classes offer the chance to learn directly from leading historians and to meet peers from across the country. In each session, a historian is interviewed by a teacher, and participants break into small groups to meet each other, discuss the content, and share teaching ideas. Sessions are designed for teachers and other school staff — but parents, students, and others are also welcome to participate.
Teaching for Black Lives Podcast
The forthcoming Teaching for Black Lives Podcast will provide both the historical context and pedagogical strategies for educators to teach about the ongoing Black Freedom Struggle. This podcast will feature educators who have designed and implemented dynamic lessons, as well as leading historians of African American history.
Additional Resources
In addition to the book, Teaching for Black Lives, Rethinking Schools offers a number of other titles to support educators in pursuit of racial justice, such as Teaching a People’s History of Abolition and the Civil War, Rethinking Ethnic Studies, Rethinking Mathematics, Rhythm and Resistance, Reading, Writing, and Rising Up, and more.
Teacher Stories
On the two-year anniversary of Zinn Education Project’s Teach the Black Freedom Struggle online classes, we express our appreciation to the educators, scholars, students, organizers, and advocates for teaching people’s history…
As you know, the right-wing attacks on racial justice teaching have become more shrill, more frightening. But despite claims of “political indoctrination” — or worse — specific descriptions of problematic teaching are…
The comment is from one of the Teaching for Black Lives study group member’s evaluation of our workshop in January of 2022. Jesse Hagopian facilitated a planning session for study…
The Zinn Education Project hosted Dr. Jarvis Givens, author of Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching. Givens shared with the audience of mostly-teachers the story…
In September of 2021, 100 Teaching for Black Lives study groups were selected, received copies of Teaching for Black Lives, attended orientation sessions, and began meeting. Here are a few…