Summary of ideas and discussion

[Katie Hendrickson]

Thanks for attending the workshop session on Saturday! We had some
really interesting discussions and I hope that you all were able to
learn from each other and inspire one another to develop some place-
based social justice lessons. Here is a summary of the ideas that
were shared during the session. Feel free to post messages on here or
include links to your own files (I use google docs to share mine).
Let's keep the collaboration going!

-Class budget lesson
-What does diversity mean? How does the population of our school
compare to the demographics of similar schools?
-How does scholarship money relate to the amount of hours students
have to work? (AB 540) Create a system of equations.
-Homicide rates in the neighborhood: open with a discussion of recent
events, introduce a meh problem, and wrap up the discussion.
-Income inequality
-Dropout rates
-Gang violence
-Who is voting?
-Cost of war- how could this money be used instead to help the
community? (with the use of a website that calculates exactly how much
your community pays for the war)
-Gender inequality in media coverage
-Immigrant policy and statistics
-Addition to the DC project (see other post with link to lessons): As
a class, develop a model of the mall, have students create their own
scale models and place them around the mall to display it. (Or have
one class develop the model, and other classes create the building
scale models?)
-Count the number of parks, grocery stores, etc in various
neighborhoods and compare the numbers and the rates and ratios (or
keep simple for elementary students!)
-Keep the social justice conversation after the lesson- maybe write
lessons to congress.
-Create social justice math club
-Need activities to get to know students- i.e. what makes you angry
-Student journals
-Positive aspects of social justice!


I would love to collaborate on developing some of these ideas into
fleshed-out lesson plans. Not all of these apply to my (rural, mostly
White, many low-income) students, but I think many of them would
apply... and although the rest may not be place-based to me, I think
it's good for my students to start thinking about the world outside
southeastern Ohio and people in other parts of the country. I think
they would find a lot of similarities with those students.

If you're interested in collaborating on lesson development, respond
to this message and we can start working!

Best,

Katie