Students explore a variety of sources for information about voting. They evaluate the information to determine if it is fact or opinion, and then create a graffiti wall about voting.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Unit of Study
Students will identify how Martin Luther King Jr's dream of nonviolent conflict-resolution is reinterpreted in modern texts. Homework is differentiated to prompt discussion on how nonviolence is portrayed through characterization and conflict. Students will be formally assessed on a thesis essay that addresses the Six Kingian Principles of Nonviolence.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
As part of their study of Richard Wright's "Black Boy", students research and reflect on the current black-white racial divide in America. By examining the work of literature in the context of contemporary events, students will deepen their understanding of the work and of what it means to be an American today.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
This lesson uses the "1984" Macintosh Commercial to introduce students to dystopian characteristics. Students analyze techniques used in the commercial and identify the comments that it makes about contemporary society.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Students across the board will get a kick out of researching a historical figure from the American Revolution to create an acrostic poem.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Unit of Study
Parochial? Segregated? Shattered? Deadly? Which of these words most accurately describe the "story of the 1960s?" This lesson, which features National Book Award-winning author Kevin Boyle, guides students through a choice-board case study to try to answer that question. The lesson opens with reflective questions that ask students to consider what determines how the past is described and how individuals' experiences with the past can differ. Students then view an introductory video clip in which Boyle provides an introduction to his lecture on the social and political history of the United States during the 1960s. From there, students then engage in a case study choice board activity, choosing to one of four individuals who experienced the 1960s in different ways: Stella Cahill, Elizabeth Eckford, Estelle Griswold, or Allison Krause. After the class shares their findings from the case study activity and records the answers to other students' sections, students then view a final video clip in which Boyle provides concluding remarks to his lecture. Finally, students respond to a summative writing prompt that asks them to describe "the story of the '60s."
Material Type: Lesson, Lesson Plan
The Vietnam War was a conflict between communist North Vietnam and South Vietnam that began in 1955. However, the war took on a greater worldwide significance within the backdrop of the Cold War between the United States and Soviet Union. The United States involvement began as only sending military advisors, but continued to increase until they sent combat troops in 1965, and did not end until the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in 1973. However, the war did not officially end until the fall of Saigon in 1975. The involvement of the United States was very controversial within the country, and led to a large anti-war movement. In this lesson, students will learn about the causes, events, and impact of the Vietnam War within the United States and around the world.
Material Type: Lesson, Lesson Plan
This clip includes an archival audio clip of President Lyndon B. Johnson's 1965 speech on immigration policy.
Material Type: Primary Source
This 10-minute video examines how race-based federal lending rules from New Deal programs in the 1930s kept Black families locked out of suburban neighborhoods, a policy that continues to slow their economic mobility.
Material Type: Primary Source
No Turning Back immerses young people in daily life under segregation and voter intimidation in the South during the 1960s. Playing as Verna Baker, a fictional teen from the Mississippi Delta, the player experiences and responds to racial restrictions and inequalities known as "Jim Crow," including limited access to education, health care, and voting rights. The TEACH page includes a wealth of materials to support the learning goals of the mission, including comprehension questions, writing prompts, vocabulary activities, and primary source analysis.
Material Type: Interactive
Indigenous people have been forming governments and building nations for hundreds of years. The formal treaties that were made between the first colonists and the First Peoples of America was nothing new to the native communities as they had already had treaties in place between other tribes.
Material Type: Primary Source
Indigenous people have developed sophisticated methods to communicate. Given the number of nations and tribes with language differences and vast distances across the world, it's important for people to be able to understand each other. But how does that act of communication actually work?
Material Type: Lecture
Wampum are small beads made by Native people on the Northeastern coasts of North America, using the lustrous Quahog shell. Our host Dr. Lee Francis IV of Laguna Pueblo discusses how these delicate and beautiful beads were made using Indigi-Genius methods!
Material Type: Lecture
Cartography is the art and science of graphically representing a geographical area on a flat surface such as a map. For Indigenous peoples, cartography is more than just topography or mapping locations. For many Indigenous communities, it's about values, culture and traditional understandings.
Material Type: Lecture
Indigenous peoples were able to gather their most basic needs for shelter using the items around them. Before lumber became the go to, adobe was a staple building material for the southwest and other Indigenous communities. But what makes this humble brick so simple yet sturdy and sustainable?
Material Type: Lecture
Ever since there have been babies, there has been a need to carry those babies. The cradleboard is art meets science and function for parents and children. This unique design was made for easy transport and care of a child.
Material Type: Lecture
This student discussion guide accompanies the "All Minus One" graphic novel and is ideal for use in college courses, advanced high school classes, or in any organization in which people would benefit from productive, constructive disagreement. Heterodox Academy invites students, professors, teachers, and other heterodox enthusiasts to adopt or adapt these discussion questions as warranted by their interests and circumstances. Our one request: within an environment of open-mindedness, curiosity, and intellectual humility, please encourage disagreement and ensure everyone has an opportunity to be heard. Citation: Cicirelli, D., Haidt, J., Reeves, R. (2018). All Minus One: John Stuart Mill's Ideas on Free Speech Illustrated. Heterodox Academy
Material Type: Homework/Assignment, Student Guide
Students in Fred Whittaker’s class create a bulletin board display filled with pictures of themselves and similar pictures of Jews who died in the Holocaust. The project helps students make deep connections to the people lost in the Holocaust. Over six million Jewish men, women, and children were murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust. When we read that fact, it is hard to understand what it actually means. The scale of the tragedy is simply too overwhelming. It is only when we recognize that each one of those six million people was an individual—someone just like us—that we begin to understand. Many of the photos we see of the Jewish people during the Holocaust show prisoners who are starving. But what did these people look like before the Holocaust? Did the children love their families and play with their friends? Did they go to school and ride bicycles? Before undertaking this project, watch the video, Holocaust Pedagogy, in which Fred Whittaker introduces best practices in Holocaust education.
Material Type: Lesson, Lesson Plan
For over 20 years, a summer program for gifted adolescents at Western Kentucky University has offered an arts-integrated history course on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. The course concludes with students working as a group to create a large mural on the Holocaust. In this way, students use the power of art to deal with their own emotions as well as to educate others. The murals from the past 20 years went on a traveling display in Kentucky to engage a broader audience in thought-provoking conversation on the topic. In this video collection, hear the stories of a Holocaust survivor and the son of a Holocaust survivor who are involved with the program, learn how students in the program decided on a theme for their mural, and learn how one teacher incorporates the arts into Holocaust history lessons.
Material Type: Lesson, Lesson Plan, Module, Primary Source
The three video collections here offer educators a detailed exploration of different ways to approach the topic in the classroom. Murals of the Holocaust describes a summer program that offers an art-integrated history course on Germany and the Holocaust. Juliek’s Violin focuses on three pieces of classical music, including music from the scene in Elie Wiesel’s Night where Juliek plays the violin in the concentration camp. Teaching the Holocaust explores how two middle school educators approach the teaching of Holocaust history to their students.
Material Type: Lesson, Lesson Plan, Module
