Danny Vương, a 5th-grade teacher in Renton, Washington, created a TikTok video that highlights the…
Julia SalcedoSeptember 23, 2024
Let’s make teaching for Black lives the norm, not the exception.
The Teaching for Black Lives Campaign helps educators reject racism and anti-Blackness through critical self-reflection in study groups, equips them with classes and curricula that enable the teaching of honest history, and creates a network of collaboration and support for social justice educators across the country.
Explore the links below to build a toolkit to teach for Black lives.
Monthly Teach the Black Freedom Struggle Online Classes.
The Zinn Education Project offers a series of online classes with people’s historians on the history of the Black Freedom Struggle. Teachers learn directly from leading historians and also interact with peers from across the country. Professional development certificates and ASL interpretation are provided. Listen to excerpts from the classes below and register today!
Teaching Resources
Teaching for Black Lives Book
Emerging from the Black Lives Matter movement, this book highlights the ways educators can and should make their classrooms and schools sites of joy, justice, and liberation in the movement to dismantle anti-Blackness and white supremacy in education.
Study Groups
The Zinn Education Project supports Teaching for Black Lives Study Groups across the United States. Each study group receives copies of Teaching for Black Lives, a Rethinking Schools, subscription for each participant, access to dozens of workshops and seminars over the course of the year.
Lessons
The Zinn Education Project offers dozens of lessons on the history of the Black Freedom Struggle — from resistance to enslavement to redlining to the ongoing fight for voting rights and reparations.
Online Classes
Our “Teaching the Black Freedom Struggle” online classes offer the chance to learn directly from leading historians and to meet peers from across the country. In each session, a historian is interviewed by a teacher, and participants break into small groups to meet each other, discuss the content, and share teaching ideas. Sessions are designed for teachers and other school staff — but parents, students, and others report loving the classes too.
Teach the Black Freedom Struggle Podcast
Zinn Education Project’s popular Teach the Black Freedom Struggle classes are available as audio recordings. Listen to teacher interviews with leading people’s historians and journalists including Jarvis Givens, Martha Jones, Robin D. G. Kelley, Clint Smith, Bryan Stevenson, Jeanne Theoharis, Kidada Williams, Dave Zirin, and many more.
Rethinking Schools Magazine
In addition to the book, Teaching for Black Lives, Rethinking Schools publishes a quarterly magazine dedicated to promoting equity and racial justice in the classroom. Each issue offers new ideas for how educators and communities can make schools sites of joy and justice and dismantle white supremacy and other oppressive structures.
Snapshots
Greensboro T4BL Study Group Members Study group members trickled in, grabbed a chair, and warmly…
Julia SalcedoSeptember 4, 2024
On May 20, 2024, the Zinn Education Project hosted an end-of-year celebration for the 2023–2024…
Julia SalcedoJune 25, 2024
Events & Announcements
The Healing of Organized Remembering: The Struggle to Teach Truth
Monday, January 13, 2025: Teaching for Black Lives co-editor Jesse Hagopian and Rethinking Schools executive director Cierra Kaler-Jones will discuss Hagopian’s latest book, Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education…
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