Saturday, August 11, 2007

Free Lesson Plan: Teaching Social Justice, Exceeding Standards: Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God

So some teachers are possessive about their lesson plans and their syllabi. Why? Isn't the point of teaching to spread knowledge and awareness? Are these teachers really serving this purpose if they're thinking about their individual recognition before the development of students' minds? I don't buy the argument, "I worked hard to create this, why should someone have it without having put effort into it"?

Well social change and anti-racist teaching (and work in general) DOES involve busting your ass for the benefit of our communities and society as a whole. And much of the time that will mean sweating blood and tears for someone to have access to a new way of understanding this complex fucked up world.

So I'm sharing this lesson plan I created for one of my grad school courses that I actually want to utilize in a real classroom. When? It depends if I hook up with a radical enough teacher mentor this coming year who will let me carry it out, or if I have to wait until I have my own classroom. If you're a teacher and you use it, you HAVE TO (well you don't have to, but it would be nice) tell me what worked for you and what didn't. And if folks have some constructive feedback, that would be great too! Enjoy!

Oh, can I also say that I LOVE google documents?

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