Observe the world through Pedro’s lens, a blind, undocumented immigrant, studying to become a social worker. Pedro’s story provides a glimpse into the complex reality of being an immigrant and having a disability while navigating school, social services with the desire to support others. Pedro’s journey teaches the audience the power of resilience, healing and self-worth as Pedro fights to live a life that is fulfilling and protected, while having limited access and opportunities.  

Teaching Tips | Pedro’s Lens and the Struggle to Give Back to the U.S.

Essential Question

• Access to federal social services, employment and higher education is limited for people with disabilities and immigrants. What are some ways to support people with disabilities and immigrants in the absence of structural, or state, support? 
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Sensitive: This resource contains material that may be sensitive for some students. Teachers should exercise discretion in evaluating whether this resource is suitable for their class. 

Teaching Tips | Brief Tender Light

This film explores the following issues:

• African visions for the future
• Coming of age
• Education and social mobility
• Im/migration: leaving home, making home in a new place
• LGBTQ+ rights in Africa
• Race and Blackness in the US 
• Reconciling personal dreams and wishes with family and community needs and expectations
• What makes a good life
• What it means to be African
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Essential Questions

• How do our identities intersect or clash with family, community, and culture?
• How does access to education influence our perception of personal and social development?
• Why is the story of the international student studying abroad in America important, and what can we learn about ourselves as a country through this new lens? 
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Supporting Questions 

• How do our cultural differences contribute to our sense of self? 
  
  • How do cultural differences contribute to how we conceive of others?
  • How does the concept of cultural responsibility come into play here? 
• How can social institutions create opportunities for minority groups, or economically disadvantaged individuals? 
• Why are policies like Affirmative Action important to creating equal opportunities in education? 
  
  • Why would there be pushback against such policies?  
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Historical Thinking Skills

This resource provides students with the opportunity to practice the following historical thinking skills:

• Applying Geographical Literacy
• Analyzing multiple perspectives

• Analyzing Primary Sources
• Developing Civic Understanding and Engagement 
• Understanding Diversity of Experience

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Teaching Tips | Independent Journalism Today

Essential Question

• What is the relationship between an independent free press and a democracy?

Supporting Questions 

• What is the definition of good journalism?
• What qualities are necessary for a journalist to maintain their objectivity?
• What are the greatest threats facing independent journalism today?
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Historical Thinking Skills

This resource provides students with the opportunity to practice the following historical thinking skills:

• Developing an Argument
• Developing Civic Understanding and Engagement

How do people define a family and a home in the aftermath of war? Near the frontlines in eastern Ukraine, a safe haven provides refuge for children who have been temporarily separated from their parents. A House Made of Splinters chronicles the experiences of three displaced kids who, despite the perils surrounding them, find moments of joy and friendship with the aid of dedicated social workers who work tirelessly to protect them from harm. This lesson takes place in The Lysychansk Center for the Social and Psychological Rehabilitation of Children in the Donbas region of Ukraine, which has been at war with Russia since 2014.

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Teaching Tips | Family and the Aftermath of War 

Essential Question

• How do people define a family and a home in the aftermath of war?

Supporting Questions 

• How does violent conflict and war affect the lives of children? 
• What is intergenerational trauma?
• What role does civil society play in helping families rebuild their lives after violent conflict or war? Should society play a greater role in rebuilding, why or why not?

Historical Thinking Skills

This resource provides students with the opportunity to practice the following historical thinking skills:

• Analyzing multiple perspectives
• Applying Geographical Literacy
• Understanding Diversity of Historical Experience

Teaching Tips | Dynamic Landscapes: Historical Transformations and Collective Memory 

Essential Question

• How does the history of a place shape the lives of the people who live in that place and what can these relationships teach us about individual and collective inheritance? 
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Historical Thinking Skills: 

This resource provides students with the opportunity to practice the following historical thinking skills:

• Applying Geographical Literacy: This skill is central to the lesson as students explore how physical landscapes hold historical significance and how they are intimately connected to issues of identity, memory, and ownership.
• Understanding Diversity of Historical Experience: This is critical as students will examine how different groups, especially African Americans in the South, have experienced history and how these experiences are remembered and commemorated.
• Analyzing Primary Sources: While the film itself is a secondary source, it may include or reference primary sources such as photographs, letters, or oral histories from African American communities in the South. Students might analyze these elements to better understand personal and community experiences.
• Developing Civic Understanding and Engagement: By connecting historical events to contemporary issues of justice and equality, students can deepen their understanding of civic engagement and the importance of historical awareness in shaping active citizenship.

La casa de Mama Icha is a heartwarming documentary that centers around the journey of abuela Mama Icha and her american dream to go back to her home land in Mompox, Bolívar - Colombia.  Despite all the odds, Mama Icha decides to leave her safe space in Philadelphia, USA  and follows her heart to go back to the place that saw her grow. This film by Oscar Molina, displays the struggles and hardships that a divided family has had to endure in order for them to coexist and be able to live a decent life. This lesson is meant to provide students with a deep understanding of the concept of home and it allows them to reflect on their privilege and lack of opportunities that other humans have to face in multiple latinoamerican cultures, such as Colombia.

Use this lesson to give your students a closer look at the reality that many immigrants go through when they leave their homelands behind in pursuit of a better life for them and their families. Through the documentary and this lesson, you will be able to help your class grow self awareness and mindfulness about their privileges as citizens of our country. 

Mirroring the underside of a unique moment in history, LANDFALL Film asks us to remember the long-standing legacies of U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico. Through a series of intimate interviews and slow-moving, haunting shots that reveal major differences in everyday life, LANDFALL carefully calls into question the complexity of competing narratives regarding the recovery and future of post-disaster Puerto Rico. Directed by Cecilia Aldaronado, this film intentionally holds space for the people of Puerto Rico to uplift their community-led mutual aid efforts and amplify their voices and visions for self-determination and sovereignty.

Using the framework of disaster colonialism, this lesson will provide a historical context of LANDFALL film to allow students to critically examine the ongoing crises in Puerto Rico. It will offer an opportunity for students to consider the competing narratives of characters in the film, and how these personal narratives underlie and influence rebuilding policies and approaches to recovery. Students will also have an opportunity to reflect on their own knowledge and understanding of colonialism and coloniality, and how their own personal narratives may be informed by these concepts. 

Thank you for hosting a screening of the award-winning documentary feature film Remake.

For nearly forty years, filmmaker Ross McElwee has turned his camera on his own life - chronicling romance, marriage, family, and loss. His son, Adrian, grew up in front of that camera, and eventually picked one up himself. When a Hollywood producer sets out to remake McElwee's 1986 breakthrough Sherman’s March as a fiction film, Adrian sees it as his father's long-overdue shot at wider recognition. But the adaptation stalls for years, and meanwhile Adrian’s life unravels into addiction. In 2016, Adrian dies of a fentanyl-related death at his father's home. Drawing on decades of footage, some shot by Ross, some by Adrian himself, Remake becomes an act of grief, reckoning, and love: a father searching the frames he kept for the son he couldn't save. Every screening of Remake is unique because each audience member and community brings different experiences of love, loss, recovery and hope. This guide is designed to help you create an environment where those experiences can be shared safely, respectfully and meaningfully.

Screenings can become:
- conversations
- acts of remembrance
- community healing
- spaces that reduce stigma
- catalysts for policy change
- opportunities for people to find support

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We hope through this guide to support you to create a space where you can reflect together on how the story of Remake resonates in your own lives, listen deeply to one another, and connect with hope.

What is Reproductive Justice?

On The Divide takes a journey through three different walks of life surrounding the decades long argument: Are you “pro-choice” or “pro-life”? Filmmakers Maya Cueva and Leah Galant provide insight on how the topic of abortion impacts the lives of many people – beyond how we perceive the issue. This lesson plan was created by Cathy Torress – Organizing Manager of the Frontera Fund. The Frontera Fund’s Mission is: “To make abortion accessible in the Rio Grande Valley by providing financial and practical support regardless of immigration status, gender identity, ability, sexual orientation, race, class, age, or religious affiliation and to build grassroots organizing power at intersecting issues across our region to shift the culture of shame and stigma.”

This lesson explains the realities of the need for accessible abortion care and how the pro-life movement has used various strategies to enforce opposition to abortion, primarily through the development of crisis pregnancy centers. 

With the guidance of clips from On The Divide, the lesson lays out the different ways that restrictions to reproductive healthcare greatly impact our communities. Students will learn that access to abortion care goes beyond being “pro-choice” vs. “pro-life”. The lesson encourages students to see access to abortion through a reproductive justice lens. 

A Note from Curriculum Creator, Cathryn Torres

In 2014, when I started college, I was introduced to different progressive issues and social justice movements, including the abortion rights movement. I’ve always supported abortion access, in fact, when I was a teenager, I naively thought being “pro-choice” was a no-brainer and that there wasn’t even an opposition. It was when I learned about abortion restrictions and saw how they impacted people very close to me that I felt compelled to do something about it. Since then I committed to learning more and more about abortion access and dug even further into the reproductive justice movement. 

This film highlights the work that activists like South Texans for Reproductive Justice have done to work towards achieving RJ in border communities. From defending the clinic from protesters, to telling pro-life politicians like it is, this is the grassroots work that builds the foundation for our moment. The activists involved with South Texans for Reproductive Justice are some of my closest friends and I am proud to be co-conspirators with them fighting back against harmful abortion restrictions.  

Today, Texans are facing the most hostile abortion restrictions in the country, but we are doing everything we can to organize against these laws and ensure abortion is accessible to everyone in our community. While we remain resilient in this constant battle to keep abortion legal, we must understand the foundation of why abortion should be accessible and how it impacts each person’s experience through life. This lesson provides a framework for an introduction to reproductive justice and why we must view access to abortion through an intersectional lens. 

An Introduction to Radical Black Women-Led Activism

For far too long, Black women’s significant contributions to movements for racial justice in America have been overshadowed and undervalued. The 2020 documentary Unapologetic gives Black women leaders within the ongoing Movement for Black Lives their flowers now while they can still smell them. Directed by Ashley O’Shay and produced by Morgan E. Johnson– two Black women– the film follows two young Chicago-based activists, Janae and Bella, as they fight for justice for the police murders of Rekia Boyd and Laquan McDonald.

Using clips from Unapologetic, this lesson provides a framework for viewing radical Black women’s activism in Chicago today as part of a continuum. Students will learn that there is no Janae and Bella without foremothers like Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Margaret Burrroughs. The lesson encourages students to think about how the past has shaped the present and how the present will shape the future. 

A Note from Curriculum Creator Bella BAHHS

I came into Black womanhood during the first wave of the ongoing Movement for Black Lives and joined other young Black women on the frontlines of direct action protests– with the intention of disrupting, challenging and changing the conditions that have rendered our experiences of (and resistance to) racially gendered violence inconsequential and erasable. I created this lesson plan for the same reason that I agreed to be filmed for Unapologetic: to amplify Black women’s leadership and creative and professional contributions to historic Black liberation movements.

The film is so much bigger than me, Janae, Ashley and Morgan. We are all part of a growing collective of Black women who are seeking and becoming examples for what it means to be Black and woman and decompartmentalized, and we do not exist within an ahistorical vacuum. We build upon the legacies of the Black women who dared to engage in radical activism during the movement to abolish slavery, the Reconstruction Era, the Progressive Era, the Women’s Suffrage Movement, the CIvil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement. Their movements enabled ours. 

Our movement popularized the use of hashtags, social media campaigns, interstate takeovers and mutual aid as tools for political education and political defiance. We made defunding police departments a nationwide call to action, and we made police and prison abolition a part of public discourse– all while amplifying the need for intersectional policy analysis and development. What we’ve contributed to this temporal moment is undeniable and has already begun to change the future of this nation. 

But we could not have been empowered to lead if we had not learned whom to follow. This lesson plan grounds our work in its relationality to the work of the movement women who paved the way for us to be unapologetic.

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Memory Work: Creative Writing and Re-assembling ourselves through Story

In North By Current, we encounter a teacher in the form of a child’s voice. This child’s wisdom leads us to consider the way that: “Memory must be created against an abundance of information. But also against an absence. It has to be constructed. You assemble the fractures, arrange the incidents, to build a story.” For every story we choose to tell there are hundreds that we don’t, and the ties that connect our past and the future selves are entanglements of narratives that give texture and meaning to our lives. Creative writing is one approach to tapping into memory and imagination as sibling forces in processes of meaning-making and storytelling. This work allows writers to put pieces of a past together towards a future vision of possibility.

In this lesson students will engage in “memory work” through practices of creative writing and revision. They will move through stages of the writing process, understand key components of the craft, study models of literature that serve as examples of these genres, and support one another through collaborative revision processes that encourage re-vision, trust, and confidence in their own voices and narrative points of view.

A Note to Teachers 

In this lesson you will be asking students to do “memory work” as they construct a story or poem that stems from personal experiences with one another, to workshop, revise, and offer feedback. Before doing this you need to be sure you’ve established a community of care within your classroom and that you remind students that what they will be writing will be shared with one another. This allows students to use their own discretion about what memories they will call forth into the work of creative nonfiction.