The Center on Great Teachers & Leaders at American Institutes for Research has created a guide outlining the work conditions for educations, how to identify those work conditions, standards that should be in place in our to create better working and learning conditions, and how to identify the challenges in place in order to create change.

Drawing on her lifes work of teaching and researching in urban schools, Bettina Love persuasively argues that educators must teach students about racial violence, oppression, and how to make sustainable change in their communities through radical civic initiatives and movements. She argues that the US educational system is maintained by and profits from the suffering of children of color. Instead of trying to repair a flawed system, educational reformers offer survival tactics in the forms of test-taking skills, acronyms, grit labs, and character education, which Love calls the educational survival complex. To dismantle the educational survival complex and to achieve educational freedomnot merely reformteachers, parents, and community leaders must approach education with the imagination, determination, boldness, and urgency of an abolitionist. Following in the tradition of activists like Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, and Fannie Lou Hamer, We Want to Do More Than Survive introduces an alternative to traditional modes of educational reform and expands our ideas of civic engagement and intersectional justice.

H.E.A.L. (Honest Education Action & Leadership) Together is building a movement of students, parents, and educators in school districts across the United States who believe that an honest, accurate, and fully funded public education is the foundation for a just, multiracial, and pluralistic democracy. This H.E.A.L. Together toolkit shares why the recent controversies around CRT and education deemed divisive are showing up in your school district. This toolkit equips you with strategies not just to respond to these manufactured controversies but to also organize students, parents, and educators on making your schools and community more equitable and inclusive. This is a living document and will be updated to include the lessons learned from campaigns and to share examples of other efforts from communities across the country.

Teaching for Black Lives grows directly out of the movement for Black lives. We recognize that anti-Black racism constructs Black people, and Blackness generally, as not counting as human life. Throughout this book, we provide resources and demonstrate how teachers connect curriculum to young peoples lives and root their concerns and daily experiences in what is taught and how classrooms are set up. We also highlight the hope and beauty of student activism and collective action.

Teachers of Color describes how racism serves as a continuous barrier against diversifying the teaching force and offers tools to support educators who identify as Black, Indigenous, or people of Color on both a systemic and interpersonal level. Based on in-depth interviews, digital narratives, and questionnaires, the book analyzes the toll of racism on their professional experiences and personal well-being, as well as their resistance and reimagination of schools.

Mathematics teaching requires political agility on the part of teachers who must negotiate their contexts in order to advocate for their students. Yet, most teachers of mathematics are not prepared for this work. This article presents a set of strategies that teachers can use in their everyday interactions with administrators, colleagues, parents, and students when political scenarios arise related to mathematics teaching and learning.

First published in Portuguese in 1968, Pedagogy of the Oppressed was translated and published in English in 1970. Paulo Freire's work has helped to empower countless people throughout the world and has taken on special urgency in the United States and Western Europe, where the creation of a permanent underclass among the underprivileged and minorities in cities and urban centers is ongoing.

We acknowledge that the federal government funded Rutgers as a Land Grant University through the Morrill Act of 1862, which authorized white colonists and the US government to sell "unclaimed land" they had stolen through violent warfare and the forced removal of tribal nations.

We acknowledge that Rutgers depended on enslaved people to build its campuses and serve its students and faculty. As we commit to learning about histories and counter narratives of power and oppression, we must be mindful that we teach, work, and live on Indigenous land at an institution that depended on the sale of Black people to fund its very existence. 
We acknowledge the Indigenous and enslaved people who contributed to the wealth of Rutgers and the histories of New Jersey and the United States as complicit in a system of racism based on white supremacy. 

Through our efforts, we will work to honor the Lenni-Lenape, other Indigenous caretakers of these lands and waters, Indigenous and Black elders who lived here before, those who were forcibly removed to the west and north, those who were enslaved, the Indigenous tribal and Black communities here today, and the generations to come. We lift the voices of members of these communities, working to abolish racism and discrimination through our teaching and community work; and support community-driven organizations aimed at economic, social, and political empowerment of these communities. 

Take Action!

Donate, Volunteer, Direct Relief

• Black Community Watchline
• New Brunswick Tomorrow
• New Labor
• Civic League of Greater New Brunswick
• Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania
• NAACP- New Brunswick Chapter
• Indigenous Kinship Collective

Resources

• Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribal Nation Website 
• Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Regalia in New Jersey 
• Download this document as a PDF here

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Seed the Way has created a helpful guide for navigating and responding to racist, inappropriate or insensitive comments.