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Listen to the episode by clicking the link to your preferred podcast platform below: No matter how long you’ve been teaching, curriculum design requires ongoing growth and development. Creating relevant and impactful curriculum that hits learning targets is no easy task! But if we want to truly set up our students for success in this world, it’s a necessary one. To help make this process a bit simpler, I’ve pulled together seven resources to support justice-based curriculum design. Some are pre-determined projects while others are resource banks to pull from. Either way, they’re designed to help you build curriculum that gets students to think, engage, and learn through a justice-focused lens. I elaborate on all of these resources on episode 94 of the Time for Teachership podcast, so if you want the full run-down, have a listen! 7 Resources for Justice-Based Curriculum Design There are two categories within this list of resources. The first three are specific project-based curriculum ideas that are designed to bring learning outside of the classroom. The last four are text libraries for you to access justice-centered and justice-focused resources for your classroom. 1. KQED Call for Change Youth Media Challenge What is it? This project is designed to amplify student voices around relevant current events. Students are invited to create a 1-3-minute video or audio project about a prompt of their choosing. There are clear standards, rubrics, and resources for teachers to use as well. All student submissions are published online, and some submissions are shared on KQED or NPR—a huge potential audience to amplify student voices! More details: www.learn.kqed.org/challenges 2. CSPAN StudentCam What is it? This is a similar project-based curriculum idea to the first one. Students from grades 6-12 are invited to submit a 5–6-minute video documentary on a topic that relates to this theme: If you were a newly elected member of Congress, which issue would be your first priority and why? This competition offers cash prizes to the top 150 documentaries, totaling $100,000. It’s a great way to get engaged in current events with real-life impact and some cash incentive. More details: www.studentcam.org 3. Learning for Justice: Do Something What is it? Learning for Justice has compiled 34 different performance tasks that are designed to have students demonstrate their anti-bias awareness and civic competency in a real-world context. Tasks range from artistic showcases to a community newsletter to a film festival. Students can pick the medium to demonstrate their knowledge and learning about relevant current events and issues. More details: www.learningforjustice.org/classroom-resources/student-tasks/do-something 4. Learning for Justice What is it? This resource database has over 628 different texts and resources, including social justice standards for all educators to use in their classrooms. The database can be filtered by social justice domain (i.e., race and ethnicity, ability, or religion), grade level, subject, medium, and topic. More details: www.learningforjustice.org 5. Facing History and Ourselves What is it? With nearly 5,000 resources in its collection, the Facing History and Ourselves website is an excellent resource for justice-centered curriculum design. Their content is divided into topics such as democracy and civic engagement, justice and human rights, global immigration, bullying and ostracism, etc. There is also a wide variety of resource types and mediums, including blogs or webinars as well as more common types like books, podcasts, or videos. More information: www.facinghistory.org/resource-library 6. Zinn Education Project What is it? This is an excellent resource to access teaching materials. They’re divided into three options—time period (i.e., colonization, civil war era, cold war, present day), theme (climate justice, African American art and music, food, labor, Latinx, LGBTQ, math, sports), or resource type (books, film clips, photos). More information: www.zinnedproject.org 7. Newsela What is it? This learning platform is a great place to access material on current events and news stories at various reading levels. While not all of it is specifically justice-focused, it provides key texts and materials on relevant, timely issues that you want to discuss in the classroom. More information: www.newsela.org --- Creating justice-focused curriculum can take time and energy, especially for new educators or those who are new to this space. Luckily, there are so many resources out there to help us out! Take a look through each of these in the list and spend some time exploring what they have to offer. Then, consider: what will this look like in my class? For more discussion about these resources, check out episode 94 of the Time for Teachership podcast. TRANSCRIPT educational justice coach lindsey Lyons and here on the time for teacher ship podcast, we learn how to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice design curricula grounded in student voice and build capacity for shared leadership. I'm a former teacher leader turned instructional coach. I'm striving to live a life full of learning, running, baking, traveling and parenting because we can be rockstar educators and be full human beings if you're a principal assistant superintendent, curriculum director, instructional coach or teacher who enjoys nursing out about co creating curriculum students, I made this show for you. Here we go. Today's solo show is going to be a resource dive. So in line with the five different kind of themes of the solo show is moving forward. We're diving into a resource specifically actually seven resources for justice based curriculum designs that we're going to give you three resources that give you authentic project opportunities and submissions for students that have an authentic audience beyond the teacher purpose beyond the grade and also for kind of text libraries. 00:01:08 I'm calling them sources for actually using and finding texts when you're teaching justice based curriculum, let's dive in. Okay, so today's episode is going to be a resource dive and we're diving into actually seven resources for justice based curriculum design. So as I said at the top of the episode, we're looking at three project opportunity sources. So this is avenues for, you know, I'm designing a project and I want students to submit and they're gonna have an audience beyond just me as the teacher, right? They want to um like actually impact something. They want to either be part of a competition or have these messages heard by the general public that they create. So their work is going to be consumed um and also uh kind of evaluated to an extent in these other kind of spaces I'm also going to share for what I've been calling text libraries. These are basically great places to always go to find resources on a variety of topics that always link back to justice. 00:02:18 So sometimes we have these great ideas and then we're like, okay, I want to teach this thing, but I've never taught it before and I also don't really know where to get a great source on that. These are kind of what I would recommend as the starting points if you don't have an existing starting point when you come up with the idea. Okay, so let's dive in. First Source I want to share is K Q E D s Call for Change Youth Media challenge. So KQED has a ton of great resources and their youth media challenges. Excellent. It is super cool. I'm going to just kind of share a little bit about what it is and it's basically a project where students are sharing submissions with KQED around a prompt that basically provides them again with an authentic audience because the projects that students submit are going to be published on the public online Youth media showcase. 00:03:21 So this is going to have an impact far beyond the classroom. And then some submissions even get shared on either KQED or local NPR or PBS channel. So it's going to be really cool to have students voices and students work and creations really expanded beyond just the classroom. There is a clear standards which I really appreciate. Its its kind of has a rubric and there's all this alignment in detail about what is required for submission. So for example, this is a video or audio that is 123 minutes in length. It must be free of hate speech. It is inclusive of a script that's 300-500 words. We have kind of this writing component. This verbally spoken component or all the stuff. There's a bunch of um kind of teacher resources and a project roadmap where you get to look at examples and different things like this. But the call for change basically is framed as you know, youth are actually leading the way as advocates for change on a local, national and global level, they say. 00:04:30 And so this is great for these are the recommended subject areas, English history, social studies, government, economics, all the kind of social studies there any other communities, science health, any class interested in really reflecting on real world issues, which I would argue is basically should be anything submissions are accepted through June 2023 and the prompt is as follows climate change, civil rights, health care, college access book banning the economy. The list goes on what issue inspires you to advocate for change or if you're not sure think about it this way, what would make your community or city a better place? What change do you want to see in the nation in the world, whether you pick a local issue or global concern, record a podcast, a selfie, video narrated slideshow or create an original animation. Your commentary can speak to the community or world in general or you can direct it to your school board, the mayor or another public official organization or institution. We can't wait to hear your voice. So I love that there is a range of kind of what students can do in terms of the actual platform or kind of format, I should say for how they're submitting. 00:05:40 They can also choose what their audience is, what their topic is. There's so much student voice involved in this project and it's so expensive and it's also relevant. It's relevant to their lives right now. What is important to them, what's going on in the world. There's these current events connections and it's really great in terms of its setup, right? That's going to give you a public audience just naturally as part of the process, it already has all of the rubrics and the teaching resources and project maps, all the stuff. There's examples embedded in these resources. You can see what other students have done. I absolutely love it. Also K Q E D. Kind of as a bonus resource here. I'll just name that they have above the noise practice civil discourse around timely topics. And so that's Above the Noise is a video series specifically for teens. So if you're in the secondary space, it looks at the research behind the issues that affect our daily lives and so it's looking at book banning social media algorithms, inflation, right, whatever is happening in the current time. That might be interesting to students. 00:06:42 And so what it's trying to do is help viewers or or students draw their own conclusions and practice crafting arguments that are evidence based in safe online space. So it provides that space for them. And there's a range of topics that you can expose students to. What's really cool about this is that every episode is actually, it comes with a free modifiable student viewing guide, a glossary sentence frames and transcripts in both english and spanish. So you can use them to kind of facilitate conversations with students and really get started with this. So it's very teacher friendly. Okay, so that is K Q E D s resource kind of left. So we have the youth media challenge and we also have the bonus above the noise as just an opportunity for a bunch of topics to kind of dive right in and get students exposed to those that I think they work really nicely in conjunction actually. So I'm gonna do a bunch above the Noise videos for students, kind of expose them or give them a choice board and see, you know, pick a couple, see what you're interested in and then when they choose, then they go into the youth media challenge and actually created as an actual project above the noise is kind of a quote unquote text that I would use in the course of a unit or several texts from it in the course of a unit where the summit of assessment for that unit is the call for Change Youth Media challenge and that's what they submit, I'll say also that as a teacher, I had my students do something very similar and they submitted to C span's student camp. 00:08:11 So similarly, c span student camp invites students to do some evidence based research and compilation, create some sort of video or submission That they share around competition theme. So there there's is secondary six through 12 are the grades that they invite to submit. Students are invited to create a short 5-6 minute video documentary. So it does name the specific Like format that students can use. And then what's cool, is there cash prizes because they actually have cash prizes, just mind look um they total $100,000 each year, and the C span awards prizes to the top 150 student documentary. So there's a real chance right that students can absolutely do that. And also teachers who are advisor on one of the top 50 winning films also receive a cash reward. So that is pretty cool. This year's student competition theme is if you were a newly elected member of Congress, which issue would be your first priority and why each year they're very similar. 00:09:22 Their issue based what's relevant to students, what's going on in the news. Very much connected. So that's this year's and just so, you know, the submission deadline for this year is january 20th, 2023. So coming up kind of soon, they also have a bank of resources of prior winner videos. And so I think it's really helpful as KQED does in terms of the library of student examples to review that with students to just kind of talk about, you know, what works and what doesn't and what makes a good submission and that kind of thing. Okay, so that's student cam from c span another authentic audience, right? They are publishing that. They have an authentic review process where you're getting people beyond the teacher to see it. And they also have the added bonus of a cash prize if they win. So, really nice incentive. Next, I would say, And this is our third resource for kind of authentic tasks, audience beyond the classroom, kind of resources. This is learning for justices do something student tasks. 00:10:25 So they have a list learning for justice formerly called teaching tolerance, they have a list of student tasks under the category of do something and they call them do something performance tasks, basically the kind of tagline for this is that these tasks ask students to demonstrate their anti bias awareness and civic competency by applying their literacy and social justice knowledge in an authentic real world context. So basically everything that we've been talking about, They have a list of 34 student tasks from things like an artistic expression showcase where they produce original art that conveys a social justice message and then plan a public display of their work to things like be the change where students are identifying and investigating a community problem and then they propose plan and implement an action or solution directed to kind of improve the problem. So many things in here. Community murals, consuming and creating political arts, film festival, identity portraits, A. 00:11:28 P. S. A. S. Musical movement, oral history project, photo essay exhibits, um poetry and storytelling cafe still iterating campaign, um, tweeting for change if you want a social media element um and voting and looking at voter registration and turnout rates in their local communities And then exploring potential roadblocks the voting process and working to overturn those. So, I think there's so many great options in here. Again, there's 34 in misleading for justice research. That's pretty awesome. Okay, so those are the three resources that will give you an authentic kind of project space where the audience automatically extends beyond the class. Now, I want to give you four more and these are resources for texts. So while those first three, I named them first because I typically like backwards design, figure out what the final project is first and then work backwards to say, okay, what are the individual lessons and resources and what I call texts within those lessons that I'm gonna use to introduce content to students so that they're learning and then putting it all together in their final project. 00:12:41 I wanna name here and I've named before, but I just want to be very clear that when I say texts that could be written text, it could be uh, you know, an article or song lyrics. It could be also a video picture, had oral history recording from the Library of Congress could be um, some other piece, a poem or something. Right. It doesn't always have to be the written word, but I just want to name that. It could be any sort of kind of video, audio textual thing that I kind of put under the band of text. And that purpose is to introduce students to a concept to an idea, share some research with them. And that is going to be useful for their final project. So when we're designing around Justice, it feels for me very helpful to have kind of a go to text library or what I've been calling. Text library, which is like a resource bank for justice centered or justice topic related resources. 00:13:44 This could be primary or secondary sources. It could be again a range of things from written text to video or audio. And I have found four that I really like. Three that are very concretely aligned I would say to being about justice and then one that helps with kind of differentiation and personalizing to your kind of student age and reading level. And is, I would say a good source for more current events. So let's start with our three very justice specific ones. So learning for justice, I mentioned them already. They have a list of student texts or a bank of student texts and they have a search feature. They have an ability to filter text by the type. So you can do literature, multimedia, visual or informational, the social justice domain, identity, diversity, justice or action, the grade level. So they have bands of like three grades, 3 to 4 grades. 00:14:46 The subjects specifically. They name social studies, civics, history, economics, geography, very social studies. E and then also the topic. So for example, their topics are civil rights movement, slavery, race and ethnicity, religion, ability, class, immigration, gender and sexual identity, bullying and bias rights and activism. So that's a really good one. and again, they also have a search feature which I really like because then you can actually go in and type a particular thing you're looking for. So they have 628 texts in this library. So there's a lot going on there. And I also like again the filters have a great way to kind of um filter down what you're looking for if you're just doing a broader exploration. I really like them especially if you are using learning for justice is social justice standards in your class because they align to those four categories of the standards as well. The second kind of text library I want to share is facing history and ourselves. So when you look at the website for facing history and ourselves, they have a page that they call topics and I think this is kind of the best option for kind of browsing. 00:16:01 And so I'll tell you what those are. They also have on that page. A link to current events, their current events collections. You can actually just click on current events if you're looking specifically at a current event or trying to browse what are the current events that I could talk about at the moment. So the topics that they are organized under on the topics pages Democracy and civic engagement, Race in U. S. History, justice and human rights, anti Semitism and religious intolerance, bullying and ostracism. Global immigration, genocide and mass violence holocaust. And then they also have an option to click search our collection and that's where you can actually type in particular thing you're looking for. They also have as I think several other resources have as well events in training and P. D. For Teachers who kind of want to learn more about how to use this. So they have 4,908 results. Um in in all when you look specifically at classroom materials they have 3,302. 00:17:02 They also have filters on here that you can filter by subject. So they have um civics and citizenship L. A. And they have a bunch of arts that kind of correspond to different things um different time periods. So different areas of history or regions of history. Music, art, culture, psychology, religion. They also have a resource type that is very extensive. So things like a blog. Uh Handout a webinar that people could look at a teaching idea, a teaching strategy, a unit outline a visual essay, a video, right? There's like all the stuff that you can filter by. So that's another great opportunity to engage specifically around history or kind of like um I like the arts component because I think it also gets after kind of joy and in many ways we talk about oppression when we're talking about justice. We forget the joy elements right? Which dr Goldie Mohammed talks about a lot as the fifth pursuit in her H. R. L. Framework. I think that's really important in a great way to be able to kind of dive into art and music and visual art and literature and all the fun things. 00:18:11 Okay, the third resource I want to share with you is the zen education project. They have teaching materials archive that you're able to kind of peruse. And I think this is also a wonderful opportunity to be able to just check out what's going on. Um when you click into just kind of a logistics note here, when you click into teaching materials, that's kind of one of their um categories at the top of the menu bar, at the top teaching materials, I would suggest kind of hovering over and you can then see three options because when you click on teaching materials, they don't give you a lot of filter options. And so it might seem frustrating initially to check it out. But if you do explore by time period, explore by theme or explore by resource type, then it gives you the filter option. So for example, if you go explore by time period, it gives you um and it gives the dates for these as well. But colonization, revolution, constitution, early 19th century, Civil war era, Reconstruction, Industrial revolution, turn of the century, World War One, Prosperity Depression in World War Two, Cold War people's movement, post civil rights era and present or 2001 to present. 00:19:27 Excuse me. So it gives you a little bit more to dive into. Um and then also the themes we have as well, things like african american art and music asian, american, civil rights movement, climate justice, criminal justice and incarceration, Democracy and citizenship, disability, economics, education, environment, food, housing, immigration, imperialism. Labor language arts latin. Next Law and citizen rights. L. G. B. T. Q. Math media. Native american. I just want to name that math is an actual uh category. So that really helpful for our math teachers who may find that it is more challenging for them to kind of break free of the typical math teaching and talk about integrating justice, organizing, pacific islander racism and racial identity, Reconstruction science, slavery and resistance. Social class sports. I think this is a really huge one for getting any student involved who's interested in sports but also the pe teacher right? 00:20:30 Like so good that they have their own category. U. S. Foreign policy, voting rights wars and anti war movements. I like that those are linked together. Um And so you can kind of look at at at multiple perspectives here and women's history, World history and global studies. So those are your themes if you want to go by theme and then also they have a bunch of resource types. So things like books, film clips, posters, songs, teaching guides. There is a category for spanish bilingual articles, lots of stuff going on there. So that is an opportunity for folks to explore this in education. Project for against justice based resources. Finally I'll share news Ella while not specifically justice based often talks about current events and then also has and I'm sure many educators are already familiar with news L. A. But I just want to name it because it does talk about current events a lot and I think it's really helpful to be able to personalize the reading level of a particular current events article. 00:21:35 So you find a current events article. Great. It's talking about this thing that I want students to be learning about and then I can go in and select or have students select what the reading level is that's appropriate for them. So so much good stuff. Everyone popping in here quick just to remind you that you're free resource for this episode is my media critique project which I've used at the high school and college levels. You can grab that and take a look at lindsey Beth Lyons dot com slash blog slash 94. Now let's get back to the episode built in beautiful project. You can just kinda take and run with and then backwards planning let's think about the text we want to expose students to so they can be able to have success with that project and embed this research and these great resources into their project. There are four of those. So just to name them one more time cake ups. Youth media challenge. They also have the above the noise is a bonus video series. Learning for justice. Do something student tasks student can from C span those your three project opportunities and then our text libraries are learning for justice, perspective tax facing history and ourselves is an education project and news. 00:22:39 Ella I hope this resource dive episode was helpful for you. I am very excited to hear how you are going to be using some of this in your class. I think it's going to be really powerful when we start identifying more resources that make this feel doable, right and sustainable. What I will add as a free resource for this episode is my media critique project, which gives you a sense of what does it look like to have this final Justice space project? What do all the pieces of that look like? And then also what are all the texts that I used along the way to help support students in accessing the information that that they would embed and use to answer the driving question for the project and put into their final submission. So if that feels helpful for you as just an example of all the things that we've been talking about, feel free to check that out. I'll include that in the bonuses of the blog post of this episode. Thank you so much. I can't wait to see you again next week. If you're leaving this episode, wanting more, you're going to love my live coaching intensive curriculum bootcamp. 00:23:43 I help one department or grade team create feminist anti racist curricula that challenges affirms and inspires all students. We leave current events into course content and amplify student voices, which skyrockets engagement and academic achievement. It energizes educators feeling burns out and it's just two days plus you can reuse the same process any time you create a new unit, which saves time and money. If you can't wait to bring this to your staff, I'm inviting you to sign up for a 20 minute call with me, grab a spot on my calendar at www dot lindsey beth Lyons dot com slash contact Until next time leaders continue to think big act brave and be your best self. This podcast is a proud member of the teach, Better podcast network, Better today, better tomorrow and the podcast to get you there, explore more podcasts at teach better dot com slash podcasts and we'll see you at the next episode. Quotes:
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AuthorLindsay Lyons (she/her) is an educational justice coach who works with teachers and school leaders to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice, design curricula grounded in student voice, and build capacity for shared leadership. Lindsay taught in NYC public schools, holds a PhD in Leadership and Change, and is the founder of the educational blog and podcast, Time for Teachership. Archives
March 2025
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