May 26, 2020

Mental Health and Support Are Always Important

Throughout May, we’ve been sharing resources supporting educator and student mental health. Now, as Mental Health Awareness Month comes to a close, we hope you’ll commit to integrating mental health literacy into your curricula and normalizing discussions of mental health and wellness year round. These resources can help.

Teaching America’s Interwoven Stories // Monita K. Bell 

The New YA // Julia Delacroix

They Deserve Better // Jey Ehrenhalt
Story Corner: The America Project
Carmen’s class is learning all about the states, and she can’t wait to tell her friends about her birthplace. But when she learns Puerto Rico isn’t a state but a territory, Carmen wants to understand what it means to be Puerto Rican and American. Talking to her mom to find the answer, she learns a valuable lesson about identity and culture in “The America Project.”

AAPI Month: A Remote Control for Learning

Award-winning graphic novelist and cartoonist Gene Luen Yang hit his big break with the trailblazing graphic novel American Born Chinese, in which he explores themes that he personally grappled with as a youth reconciling his cultural identities. Yang talked with us about growing up on comics, teaching high school for 17 years and amplifying diverse identities in his work. Read more here.

What White Colleagues Need to Understand

Antiracist educators often focus on the impact of white supremacy on students—but don’t spend enough time talking about its impact on educators. For our Spring issue, two Philadelphia teachers talked to educators of color across the U.S. about their experiences. Here are their recommendations for white educators who want to be better colleagues.

Catch Up on These Teaching Tolerance Podcasts

If you’re catching up on podcasts, check out these podcasts from TT! Each series explores an aspect of a TT topic or framework and is produced with educators in mind. You’ll learn about digital literacy with The Mind Online, the history of American slavery with Teaching Hard History and LGBTQ history with Queer America. Download, listen and subscribe via Apple iTunes, Google Music or Spotify.

Check Out What We’re Reading

“Since 2018, a group of Duck Hill teens and community leaders have been tackling the climate-related problems that their state and local government neglect or haven’t had the capacity to fix. In the process, they have worked to change how their tiny town views climate change.” — The Hechinger Report

“There’s something that white people, even the ones who believe that they hold no biases, that they wield no power, must admit to themselves and begin to unpack. They are complicit—and even participatory—in the system of white supremacy. Individual white people may not believe they are, but their ability to tap into that system is always within reach.” — HuffPost

During the school closures to contain the spread of the coronavirus, educators are worried about students falling behind. This period of remote learning, technology divides and lowered expectations has stalled progress for almost everyone. But students who are still learning English—a group that's swelled to 5 million nationwide, about three-fourths of them Latino — are losing even more ground.” — USA Today

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