TOLERANCE MAGAZINE: HOW WE LIVE OUR LIVES

The great promise of the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education was that children would grow up in integrated schools. The latest issue of Teaching Tolerance magazine shows that's just not what has happened.

Unmaking Brown

America's schools are more segregated now than they were in the late 1960s, and statistics show that the problem is getting worse. To reverse the trend, we need to radically rethink the meaning of "school choice."

The Only One

When you're the only person of color in your class, school can become a struggle between two worlds. Students in that situation are often expected to represent and explain their ethnic or racial group, and this can create a lot of stress.

Toward a More Civil Discourse

There is a pressing need to change the tenor of public debate from shouts and slurs to something more reasoned and effective. But it is difficult for teachers already burdened with standardized tests and administrative duties to find the time to craft lessons to teach civil discourse in their classrooms. To support teachers working to change the terms of our national debate, Teaching Tolerance offers a new curriculum entitled “Civil Discourse in the Classroom and Beyond.”

‘I Don’t Think I’m Biased’

Multicultural understanding and proficiency have never been more important to teachers than they are right now. Never before have we had so many young children entering schools populated by teachers who reflect neither their race, nor their language tradition, nor the communities from which they come. This growth in culturally diverse classrooms has unfortunately coincided with an “achievement gap” of historical proportions.

Get ideas for Mix it Up Lunch Day

The event is a simple call to action: take a new seat in the cafeteria. By making the move, students can cross the invisible lines of school division, meet new people and make new friends. Mix it Up at Lunch Day helps students become more comfortable interacting with different kinds of people.

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TEACHERS LEARNING THE VALUE OF MEDIA LITERACY

Filmmaker George Lucus has been interviewed discussing how we should rethink the way we teach communications skills to young people and that should not only be about grammar and punctuation, but other associated skills like interpreting art, color, and perspective. Lucus, who is also the publisher of Edutopia Magazine says, “Art and music are usually thought of as therapeutic or fun, but not approached as a very valid form of communication.”

An eight minute video by the George Lucus Foundation includes a segment on the Greater Brunswick Charter School in New Brunswick, NJ where a teacher works with the class to analyze an advertisement. Voices of Hope Productions also interviewed numerous teachers, staff and kids at this school for the New Jersey Community Capital (NJCC) short film, Invest in Change because NJCC helped to finance the school. The Jacob Burns Center in Pleasantville, New York is also highlighted for their work with 8000 children who can access communications classes. 4th graders are shown learning how to produce animated shorts.

Students and teachers throughout the country are not only making media, but are dissecting newspapers and advertising and critically analyzing the messages held within. This video illustrates that writing along with critical thinking skills and media analysis instructs young people on how to become well-rounded individuals. Hopefully in the future we will see this more consistently as the traditional classroom experience. One where the student will not only learn grammar and writing, but will also be exposed to graphics, cinema, illustration, animation and music--taught in a basic class called communications. As Lucus explains, communications should be taught as a language all its own and not as an “arty thing, but a practical tool to be used to sell, to influence people, get your point across and to communicate with other people, especially at an age where kids are using more and more multi-media.”

Read the Edutopia article

Watch the Voices of Hope Productions’ video "Analyze this: Message in the Media"