After attending a summer webinar about the Black Lives Matter at School movement, Emily Todras, an arts teacher in District 15, in Brooklyn, applied to form a Teaching for Black Lives study group with nine elementary educators from P.S. 172 Beacon School of Excellence (preK–5).
Our goals are to help build a critically conscious teaching staff, remove white supremacy from our teaching materials and pedagogies, and learn about and build systems of culturally responsive and sustaining education — all in order to help our students thrive and find success in our school environment.
In 2022, Rethinking Schools magazine published an article by Emily called “Choreographing for Justice.” She describes how members of her study group engaged in the Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action.
By the end of the school year in 2020, I knew I wanted to do more to make social justice a stronger part of our dance curriculum, supporting my students in becoming choreographers who use their platforms to challenge social, cultural, and economic inequities to make the world a better place. After attending a summer webinar about the Black Lives Matter at School movement, I applied for a study group grant to take this journey along with some of my fellow educators. We were accepted and began our staff book club reading Teaching for Black Lives.
As 2021 approached, I invited teachers and parents to join me in an ad hoc committee to plan our first recognition of the Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action. We brought together a week with classroom visitors, virtual assemblies, special projects, movie and music nights, and more. Some of us wore Black Lives Matter shirts and face masks our students had designed with help from the art teacher. We brought together a week with classroom visitors, virtual assemblies, special projects, movie and music nights, and more. Some of us wore Black Lives Matter shirts and face masks our students had designed with help from the art teacher.
I also began teaching a unit I had created based on the Black Lives Matter at School (BLMAS) principles as retold by Laleña Garcia in What We Believe: A Black Lives Matter Principles Activity Book (Lee & Low Books, 2020). The lessons revolve around sharing various picture books to help children understand and embody the essence of the different BLMAS principles, then adding dance-making skills to create choreographic expressions of them.