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In this section, we present some tools to help educators explore the significance of race through multiple disciplines. Lesson plans draw from the television series, the Web site and carefully selected resources.
Be sure to check out the Teaching Tips included in the Go Deeper sections of each featured interactivity. Click on a lesson title to view the full document.
NOTE: We are continuing to develop new lesson plans and will add them as they are ready. Check back regularly for new additions.
Title: Jamestown:Planting the Seeds of Tobacco and the Ideology of Race
Grade levels: 10th grade through sophomore year of college
Subjects: U.S. History, American Studies
Description: The focus of this detailed lesson is American racial ideology as it began to evolve in late 17th century Jamestown and Virginia. It aims to help students question their own assumptions about what race is and is not. Using segments of Episode 2 - The Story We Tell, the RACE companion Web site, and primary documents from online resources, students will examine the unique conditions and events that led to the world's first system of slavery based on race.
Time Allotment: 8 class sessions + extensions |
Title: Just an Environment or a Just Environment? Racial Segregation and Its Impacts
Grade levels: 10th grade through sophomore year of college
Subjects: Civics, Government, Sociology, Institutional Racism, Environmental Racism, White Advantage
Description: This lesson explores the multiple causes of racial segregation and environmental racism, and helps students understand how institutional racism is perpetuated in the post-Civil Rights era. Students will perform a mock tribunal in which they will research, interpret, analyze and apply historical evidence of factors that contribute to continuing racial segregation and disparity in the United States.
Time Allotment: 5-6 class sessions + extensions |
Title: The Empirical Challenges of Racial Classification
Grade levels: 9-14
Subjects: Biology, Anthropology, Genetics, Geography
Description: This lesson will help students examine their preconceptions and assumptions about racial categories and understand the impossibility of constructing a consistent biological system of human racial classification.
Time Allotment: 2-3 class sessions + extensions |
Title: Comparing mtDNA Sequences to Learn about Human Variation
Grade levels: 9-14
Subjects: Biology, Physical Anthropology, Genetics
Description: This computer-based lesson will enable students to test their notions of "racial" similarity and difference by comparing mtDNA sequences as the students do in the Episode 1 of RACE - The Power of an Illusion. Students can either sequence and compare their own mtDNA (with each other as well as with individuals from around the world) or compare public sequence files from different world populations to gain an understanding of human genetic variation.
Time Allotment: 2-3 class sessions + extensions |
Title: Comparing Chimpanzee mtDNA Sequences to Learn about Races
Grade levels: 9-14
Subjects: Biology, Physical Anthropology, Genetics
Description: In this computer-based lesson, students will measure genetic diversity within and between three subspecies of chimpanzees in order to gain a better understanding of genetic distinctiveness and explore race as a genetic concept.
Time Allotment: 1 class session + extension |
Title: The Growth of the Suburbs - and the Wealth Gap
Grade Levels: 11th & 12th grades
Subject Matter: Economics, Social Studies, American History
Description: This lesson demonstrates the important role that family wealth plays in shaping life chances and creating opportunity and it explores the roots and consequences of the current race-based wealth gap.
Time Allotment: up to 4 class sessions |
A newly proposed education-in-schools agenda designed to reduce racism threatens to promote and perpetuate it. If the curriculum is implemented, young teachers will learn and teach Black history and children will be exposed to America's racist past at an early age. It is unclear why educators thought this was a good idea but this would negatively impact future generations of students.
This new education agenda focuses on teaching about racism through history. This education will begin in elementary school classrooms. According to PBS, teachers will be taught Black History so they can feel comfortable with discussions of race in their classrooms. These mostly young, white educators will recall the past, making Black children the focus of information children never had access to so early in life, information which doesn't eliminate racism and might even increase it because racism is not about history; it's about a way of life that continues today.
There are many real-life examples to be used in explaining discrimination and racist practices. Dredged up from the past, discriminatory practices will be pulled from the past into the present and into the hearts and minds of today's children. Children victimized by a racist history will be inadvertently seen as "different," less endowed, or less than equal, starting in elementary school. This will have a negative impact on white children's level of tolerance and black children's level of self-esteem.
If schools teach black oppression and genocide, they need to also teach the same about the Native American massacres and the Holocaust. They need to teach about disenfranchised whites living in poverty. Otherwise, it makes black and brown children appear singled out. The negative impact of "outing" children of color could be devastating.
There are ways for teachers to learn OUR collective history and infuse it into the educational agenda without making Black children feel lost in a cycle of racist practices that has lasted more than 400 years.
Written by EmH Johnson, Education Specialist
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