January Meeting

Happy New Year!


We'll meet at 3:30 on January 13th in the Charlton Room to learn about the 4th grade team's work with their International Issues experiences. We'll use a Consultancy Protocol to guide that work. We'll also spend some time considering Martin Luther King's Letter From Birmingham Jail with a Text Rendering Experience. 

Some extension resources related to January's CFG:
Teaching Tolerance is hosting a Twitter chat on MLK Day: Monday, Jan. 18th at 6 pm Central Standard Time. The focus is how to deepen classroom coverage of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement. 

An electronic version of Dr. King's Letter from Birmingham Jail is available here. Dori recommended these additional  resources:

Coretta Scott King offers a personal context to the Birmingham jail letter in her interview with Mike Wallace (start at 8:25 and listen to the end).   

Dr. King's Addison Jr. High School speech is directed at students and offers his direct message to young people.  It is a good read and has some powerful and provocative thoughts. What possibilities are there in this speech?

Dori also passed along an article from Teaching Tolerance, "Resist Telling a Simple Story". 
From that article:  Telling only one story of civil rights marginalizes the voices we ignore. It also prevents us from doing exactly what the story of civil rights is supposed to teach us to do―fight for justice in our own communities as those before us did.

Also from Teaching Tolerance, a comprehensive resource called "The Five Essential Practices for Teaching the Civil Rights Movement."  There are links there with more information and resources for each of these five key practices:

Practice 1. Educate for empowerment.

Practice 2. Know how to talk about race.

Practice 3. Capture the unseen.

Practice 4. Resist telling a simple story.

Practice 5. Connect to the present.

You might also be interested in this recent article from The Atlantic titled "The Revolutionary Aims of Black Lives Matter," using the Letter from Birmingham Jail as a point of connection to the Black Lives Matter movement.