In 2018 Nadia Murad was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize alongside Denis Mukwege, according to the prize committee, “for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict.” Four years earlier, Nadia Murad was a young woman living peacefully in her small Yazidi village of Kocho in northwest Iraq. Not only had she never heard of the Nobel Peace Prize, but she could not have imagined that one day she would be an international activist speaking on behalf of her community in front of the United Nations.

This dizzying rise to international attention is as worthy of study and attention as the events that brought Murad to the world stage of humanitarian and human rights work. Today we see Murad as a source of strength and resilience. She is a survivor, even called a hero by many for telling her story of survival again and again on behalf of her Yazidi people. But at what cost does Murad tell her story, and for whose benefit?

In this lesson, students will have the opportunity to consider this question and broaden their media literacy skills by identifying the moral and ethical parameters journalists follow when interacting with and reporting on survivors of genocide. By viewing excerpts of On Her Shoulders—a documentary portrait of Nadia Murad, who survived the 2014 Yazidi genocide—students will evaluate the balance between the media’s desire for survivors to tell their stories, the public’s need for stories of strength and heroism and the survivors’ pursuit of justice for their community.

Important Note to Educators

On Her Shoulders is a film about a war, collective violence, rape and trauma as a weapon of war. Regardless of whether you or someone you know has ever been affected by war or sexual violence, the story of Nadia Murad’s torture and survival is emotional and difficult. Bringing these elements into a classroom requires care, context and a strong culture of respect and trust in one another in order to share and process this information.

To prepare yourself and your students for this lesson:

Watch all the film clips from On Her Shoulders prior to screening them in your classroom. Watching the full feature film is highly recommended.

Review the On Her Shoulders website and learn more about Nadia’s Initiative.

Read through all the handouts and review the Resources for Further Learning section of this lesson to learn more about the history and culture of the Yazidi people and Nadia Murad’s work and international recognition since 2014.

Pieniazek, Pawel. Translated by Malgorzata Markoff and John Markoff. Greetings from Novorossiya: Eyewitness to the War in Ukraine. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017.
Polish journalist Pawel Pieniazek was among the first journalists to enter the war-torn region of eastern Ukraine and Greetings from Novorossiya is his vivid firsthand account of the conflict. He was the first reporter to reach the scene when Russian troops in Ukraine accidentally shot down a civilian airliner, killing all 298 people aboard. Unlike Western journalists, his fluency in both Ukrainian and Russian granted him access and the ability to move among all sides in the conflict. With powerful color photos, telling interviews from the local population, and brilliant reportage, Pieniazek’s account documents these dramatic events as they transpired.

Kuzio, Taras. Putin's War Against Ukraine: Revolution, Nationalism, and Crime. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2017.
Putin’s war against Ukraine has killed over 30,000 civilians, Ukrainian and Russian soldiers and Russian proxies, forced a third of the population of the Donbas to flee, illegally nationalized Ukrainian state and private entities in the Crimea and the Donbas, destroyed huge areas of the infrastructure and economy of the Donbas, and created a black hole of crime and soft security threats to Europe. Putin's War Against Ukraine is the first book to focus on national identity as the root of the crisis through Russia's long-term refusal to view Ukrainians as a separate people and an unwillingness to recognize the sovereignty and borders of independent Ukraine.

De Toledo, Sylvie, and Deborah Edler Brown. Grandparents as Parents, Second Edition: A Survival Guide for Raising a Second Family. Guilford Press, 2013.
If you're among the millions of grandparents raising grandchildren today, you need information, support, and practical guidance you can count on to keep your family strong. This is the book for you. Learn effective strategies to help you cope with the stresses of parenting the second time around, care for vulnerable grand kids and set boundaries with their often-troubled parents, and navigate the maze of government aid, court proceedings, and special education. Wise, honest, moving stories show how numerous other grandparents are surviving and thriving in their new roles.

Scheeringa, Michael S. They'll Never Be the Same: A Parent's Guide to PTSD in Youth. Las Vegas Central Recovery Press, 2018.
A compassionate and accessible guide for parents whose children have experienced traumatic or life-threatening events written by one of the foremost authorities on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in children and adolescents. Dr. Scheeringa understands the desperation many parents feel and explains the impact of trauma, simplifies the science into layman’s terms, debunks the myths, and provides direction on navigating the confusing maze of the mental health world to find appropriate care.

Shore, Marci. The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution. Yale University Press, 2018.
In this lyrical and intimate book, Marci Shore evokes the human face of the Ukrainian Revolution. Grounded in the true stories of activists and soldiers, parents and children, Shore’s book blends a narrative of suspenseful choices with a historian’s reflections on what revolution is and what it means. She gently sets her portraits of individual revolutionaries against the past as they understand it—and the future as they hope to make it. In so doing, she provides a lesson about human solidarity in a world, our world, where the boundary between reality and fiction is ever more effaced.

Toal, Gerard. Near Abroad: Putin, the West and the Contest over Ukraine and the Caucasus. Oxford University Press, 2017.
In Near Abroad, Gerard Toal moves beyond the polemical rhetoric that surrounds Russia's interventions in Georgia and Ukraine to study the underlying territorial conflicts and geopolitical struggles. Central to understanding are legacies of the Soviet Union collapse: unresolved territorial issues, weak states and a conflicted geopolitical culture in Russia over the new territorial order. Toal explains the road to invasion and war in Georgia and Ukraine, thereafter, and provides an account of real life geopolitics, one that emphasizes changing spatial relationships, geopolitical cultures and the power of media images. Not only a penetrating analysis of Russia's relationships with its regional neighbors, Near Abroad also offers an analysis of how US geopolitical culture frequently fails to fully understand Russia and the geopolitical archipelago of dependencies in its near abroad.

Mikhail, Dunya. The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq. New Directions Publishing, 2018.

Since 2014, Daesh (ISIS) has been brutalizing the Yazidi people of northern Iraq: sowing destruction, killing those who won’t convert to Islam, and enslaving young girls and women. The Beekeeper, by the acclaimed poet and journalist Dunya Mikhail, tells the harrowing stories of several women who managed to escape the clutches of Daesh. Mikhail extensively interviews these women—who’ve lost their families and loved ones, who’ve been repeatedly sold, raped, psychologically tortured, and forced to manufacture chemical weapons—and as their tales unfold, an unlikely hero emerges: a beekeeper, who uses his knowledge of the local terrain, along with a wide network of transporters, helpers, and former cigarette smugglers, to bring these women, one by one, through the war-torn landscapes of Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, back into safety.

Simpson, Roger and Cote, William. Covering Violence: A Guide to Ethical Reporting About Victims & Trauma.Columbia University Press, 2006.

Reporting on violence is one of the most problematic features of journalistic practice: the area most frequently criticized by the public and those on the receiving end of that coverage. Now in its second edition, Covering Violence remains a crucial guide for becoming a sensitive and responsible reporter. Discussing such topics as rape and the ethics of interviewing children, the book gives students and journalists a detailed understanding of what is happening "on the scene" of a violent event, including where a reporter can go safely and legally, how to obtain the most useful information, and how best to interview and photograph victims and witnesses.

Goodnow, Katherine, Loham, Jack, and Marfleet, Philip. Museums, the Media, and Refugees.Berghahn Books, 2008.

Across countries and time, asylum-seekers and refugees have been represented in a variety of ways. In some representations they appear negatively, as dangers threatening to ‘over-run’ a country or a region with ‘floods’ of incompatible strangers. In others, the same people are portrayed positively, with compassion, and pictured as desperately in need of assistance. How these competing perceptions are received has significant consequences for determining public policy, human rights, international agreements, and the realization of cultural diversity, and so it is imperative to understand how these images are perpetuated. To this end, this volume reflects on museum practice and the contexts, stories, and images of asylum seekers and refugees prevalent in our mass media.

Murad, Nadia. The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State. Tim Duggan Books, 2017.

Nadia Murad was born and raised in Kocho, a small village of farmers and shepherds in northern Iraq. A member of the Yazidi community, she and her brothers and sisters lived a quiet life. Nadia had dreams of becoming a history teacher or opening her own beauty salon. On August 15th, 2014, when Nadia was just twenty-one years old, this life ended. Islamic State militants massacred the people of her village, executing men who refused to convert to Islam and women too old to become sex slaves. Six of Nadia’s brothers were killed, and her mother soon after, their bodies swept into mass graves. Nadia was taken to Mosul and forced, along with thousands of other Yazidi girls, into the ISIS slave trade. Nadia would be held captive by several militants and repeatedly raped and beaten. Finally, she managed a narrow escape through the streets of Mosul, finding shelter in the home of a Sunni Muslim family whose eldest son risked his life to smuggle her to safety. Today, Nadia’s story—as a witness to the Islamic State’s brutality, a survivor of rape, a refugee, a Yazidi—has forced the world to pay attention to an ongoing genocide.

Hisham, Marwan (Author) & Molly Crabapple (Illustrator). Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War. Penguin Random House, 2018.

Illustrated with more than eighty ink drawings by Molly Crabapple that bring to life the beauty and chaos, Brothers of the Gun offers a ground-level reflection on the Syrian revolution—and how it bled into international catastrophe and global war. This is a story of pragmatism and idealism, impossible violence and repression, and, even in the midst of war, profound acts of courage, creativity, and hope.

Heineman, Elizabeth D. Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones From the Ancient World to the Era of Human Rights. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.

Since the 1990s, sexual violence in conflict zones has received much media attention. In large part as a result of grassroots feminist organizing in the 1970s and 1980s, mass rapes in the wars in the former Yugoslavia and during the Rwandan genocide received widespread coverage, and international organizations—from courts to NGOs to the UN—have engaged in systematic efforts to hold perpetrators accountable and to ameliorate the effects of wartime sexual violence.

Bradley, Megan. Forced Migration, Reconciliation, and Justice. McGill-Queen's University Press, 2015.

At the start of 2014, more people were displaced globally by conflict and human rights violations than at any time since the Second World War. Although many of those displaced, from countries such as Syria, Iraq, Colombia, Kenya, and Sudan, have survived grave human rights abuses that demand redress, the links between forced migration, justice, and reconciliation have historically received little attention. This collection addresses the roles of various actors including governments, UN agencies, NGOs, and displaced persons themselves, raising complex questions about accountability for past injustices and how to support reconciliation in communities shaped by exile.

Colopy, Cheryl.Dirty, Sacred Rivers. Oxford University Press, 2012.

Dirty, Sacred Riversexplores South Asia’s increasingly urgent water crisis, taking readers on a journey through North India, Nepal, and Bangladesh, from the Himalaya to the Bay of Bengal. The book shows how rivers, traditionally revered by the people of the Indian subcontinent, have in recent decades deteriorated dramatically due to economic progress and gross mismanagement.

Eriksen, Marcus.Junk Raft: An Ocean Voyage and a Rising Tide of Activism to Fight Plastic Pollution.Beacon Press, 2017.

A scientist, activist, and inveterate adventurer, Eriksen is drawn to the sea by a desire to right an environmental injustice. Against long odds and common sense, he and his co-navigator, Joel Paschal, construct a “junk raft” made of plastic trash and set themselves adrift from Los Angeles to Hawaii, with no motor or support vessel, confronting perilous cyclones, food shortages, and a fast decaying raft. As Erikson recounts his struggles to keep afloat, he immerses readers in the deep history of the plastic pollution crisis and the movement that has arisen to combat it.

Greene, Ronnie.Night Fire: Big Oil, Poison Air, and Margie Richard’s Fight to Save Her Town.HarperCollins Publishers, 2008.

Margie Eugene Richard was raised in the shadow of a giant chemical plant operated by Shell, and witnessed her neighbors fall ill amid the toxic waste the plant emitted year after year. Her own sister, Naomi, eventually succumbed to a rare lung disease linked to environmental hazards. Determined to see Shell take responsibility for its actions, Margie and her neighbors— largely poor and with few obvious resources—educated themselves not only on the consequences of environmental poison but also how to fight back.

Jacobs, Chip and Kelly, William J.Smogtown: The Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles.Overlook Press, 2008.

Smogtownis the story of pollution, progress, and how an optimistic people confronted the epic struggle against airborne poisons barraging their hometowns. With wit, verve, and a fresh look at history, California based journalists Chip Jacobs and William J. Kelly highlight the bold personalities involved, the corporate-tainted science, the terrifying health costs, the attempts at cleanup, and how the smog battle helped mold the modern-day culture of Los Angeles.

Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. Simon & Schuster, 2014.

Klein exposes the myths that are clouding the climate debate. We have been told the market will save us, when in fact the addiction to profit and growth is digging us in deeper every day. We have been told it’s impossible to get off fossil fuels when in fact we know exactly how to do it—it just requires breaking every rule in the “free-market” playbook: reining in corporate power, rebuilding local economies, and reclaiming our democracies.We have also been told that humanity is too greedy and selfish to rise to this challenge. In fact, all around the world, the fight for the next economy and against reckless extraction is already succeeding in ways both surprising and inspiring. Climate change, Klein argues, is a civilizational wake-up call, a powerful message delivered in the language of fires, floods, storms, and droughts. Confronting it is no longer about changing the light bulbs. It’s about changing the world—before the world changes so drastically that no one is safe. Either we leap—or we sink.

I’ve been going to Bisbee, Arizona since 2003, when my mother-in-law bought an old cabin in the eccentric former mining town near the border. I immediately fell in love with the place. My partner was born in Tucson and we have roots in the area, but nothing prepared me for this strange, magical, truly haunted enclave – and the secret history buried there. Since then, I’ve been dreaming of making a film that captures the unique and troubled spirit of Bisbee. The centennial of the Bisbee deportation – a tragedy where 1200 striking miners, many of them immigrants, were marched out of town at gunpoint and loaded unto cattle cars – gave us the opportunity. Maybe it was just a matter of time before I made the Bisbee film – my first ever feature film idea back when I initially came to town was to “re-stage the deportation with the locals.” So after five feature documentaries, many of which use performance to try to create new ways of seeing and understanding, it was finally time to make the movie I’d been dreaming of.

The Bisbee deportation is one of countless untold tales of radicalism and oppression in American history and I knew I wanted to tell the story when I first heard it in 2003. But we had relatively little idea when we started pre-production in the summer of 2016 just how relevant the story would become. As the calendar turned to the summer of 2017, with the centennial approaching, labor rights under unprecedented attack and a humanitarian crisis gathering on the U.S.-Mexico border, a sense of urgency began to set in for all of us. The desire for the community to tell this story was palpable and we filmmakers were providing the stage. They knew what we knew: the images that we were creating together would matter. Bisbee, in many ways, is a microcosm of the country and understanding the depth of what happened in the old company town is a way to grasp where we are today as nation, how deeply ingrained American mythologies are used to divide us, and what calamities await if we don’t heed the lessons of our history.

Our first mission, then, was to document the emotional awakening the town was experiencing as the centennial of the deportation approached. Then we began working with everyone from descendants of deportees to company families to create scenes that helped facilitate a kind of truth and reconciliation by way of layered performance. In my last several films, I’ve pushed further and further into the possibilities of collaborative, performative documentary filmmaking, where subjects and filmmakers work together to stage semiconstructed scenes that help the viewer imagine the internal lives of real people. With Bisbee '17, we’ve pushed this idea significantly forward. What we see is a working through of story and history and mythology as non-actors engage in “roles” that relate to their real lives and this collective trauma. The historical, the political, and the personal all become entwined as locals play dress up, portraying ghosts of a buried past. It all leads to a surprisingly cathartic and emotional place, where the collective performance of a town playing itself reveals both divisions and connections between people. Should we bury the past forever or should we work together to exorcise our demons? One white guy who played one of the vigilantes declares at the end of the large-scale recreation, “this is like the largest group therapy session ever.” A Mexican- American man who had played a deportee saw things a little differently. “You guys were good,” he said to a friend playing a deporter, “maybe too good.”

—Robert Greene, Director/Editor, Bisbee '17

Combining the genres of documentary, musical theater, and western film, Robert Greene’s experimental film Bisbee ’17 follows members of an Arizona community as they reckon with a dark episode in their town’s history.

In 1917, over one thousand Arizona miners—on strike for better wages and safer working conditions—were violently rounded up by their armed neighbors, herded onto cattle cars, and deposited 180 miles away in the New Mexican desert. Most of the workers expelled from Bisbee were immigrants. This event came to be known as the Bisbee deportation, and was discussed only in hushed tones during the following century. Bisbee ’17 documents Bisbee locals as they plan a centennial commemoration. They stage dramatic scenes from 1917, culminating in a large-scale recreation of the deportation itself on its 100th anniversary. These scenes are based on historical research but also convey the actors’ interpretations of their characters’ motivations, underscoring the complexity of collective historical memory. The reenactment raises difficult questions about contemporary issues of immigration, labor rights, corporate power and state-backed violence with haunting scenes created by people who are reckoning with history in real time.

In this lesson for Bisbee ‘17, students will explore the concept of historical memory and consider the social and cultural factors that influence how the Bisbee deportation has been remembered by the town’s residents. Students will then research and reenact an event from their own community’s past and analyze cultural factors that shape modern interpretations of the event.

Important Note to Educators

Viewing and discussing sensitive material: This lesson and the accompanying film address sensitive social issues and teachers should screen the film clips and review all of the related materials prior to the lesson. It would also be helpful to connect with a school social worker for resources specific to your school community’s needs and guidelines.

Remind the class that this is a supportive environment and review your classroom’s tools for creating a safe space, including class agreements. These might include guidelines like “no name-calling,” “no interrupting,” “listen without judgment,” “use respectful language,” “share to your level of comfort,” “you have the right to pass,” etc. And remind students that when they talk about groups of people, they should be careful to use the word “some,” not “all.”

Visit Teaching Tolerance for additional resources and strategies for tackling challenging topics in the classroom:

• Classroom Simulations: Proceed with Caution
• Teaching Tolerance: Let's Talk! Discussing Race, Racism and Other Difficult Topics With Students
• Social Justice Standards | The Teaching Tolerance Anti-bias Framework
• Teaching at the Intersections: Honor and teach about your students’ multiple identities

The Teaching Curriculum for Inventing Tomorrow offers educators the opportunity to make science, technology, engineering, and math come alive by pairing screenings of the documentary with classroom learning. Each student story in the documentary lays the groundwork for one of the lessons in the curriculum.

An individual lesson, or the complete curriculum, can easily be incorporated into existing coursework in middle school Science and high school Biology and Life Sciences, Chemistry, Marine Biology/Oceanography, Earth and Environmental Science, Geography, Geology or supplement units on Sustainability, Media Literacy, Global Studies, Current Events, and more.

Download the Inventing Tomorrow Lesson Plans here (PDF).

Q & A with Laura Nix, Director and Producer of Inventing Tomorrow

“Our student scientists are observing the damaged planet they’ve inherited, asking the right questions, and inventing solutions to create a path forward. Their commitment to action and their clarity of purpose offers a model for how we should all proceed.”

- Laura Nix, Producer and Director

What made you decide to do a film based around a high school science fair?

I was approached by my producers Diane Becker and Melanie Miller to make a doc about the science fair ISEF, so I attended the fair in Phoenix in 2016 to both film and scout and immediately realized there was a great story to tell there as most people don’t know about the fair outside of the educational and science communities. The sense of hopefulness and optimism there was infectious. I found I was the most struck however by kids I met who were doing research because of issues they were confronting at home – whether it was lack of clean drinking water, or air pollution, or some other type of environmental challenge. They weren’t doing research because it would be cool on their college application, but because they were deeply and personally motivated to change where they lived.

How did you find and decide on the students you followed?

We started by reaching out to science teachers and fair directors all over the world, and asked them to identify students who were working on projects with an environmental theme. We then spent months interviewing hundreds of kids from all over the world. We were looking for kids who were doing science with a sense of purpose and who were addressing a range of environmental issues that were local, personal and that dealt with air, water, and earth. I was specifically looking for issues that were visual, and for students who could clearly describe their project to an audience. We purposefully went beyond the scope of just climate change, so we could tell a larger story of kids engaged in environmental stewardship. It was really important to me to create an emotional and character-based film, so I was also looking for kids who had a personal story or an obstacle that was compelling, so I could show how they were working to overcome it. We wanted diversity of region, race, and religion, and a balance of girls and boys. I traveled all over the world to meet the kids we eventually decided to film, and I followed them without having any idea of what would happen once they arrived at the fair. I spent time with all of them because I believed in them as people, and because I was fascinated by their ability to pay attention and ask the right questions about the world around them.

The film emphasizes the need for ingenuity and originality. After making it, how do you feel about the potential for ingenuity and originality to save humanity from itself?

I think each of our young scientists shows us a potential path forward, and it’s really up to us to decide to empower those young people. I’m hopeful that the film will show the absolute value of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) education in our culture. The key to creating innovative solutions for the future is access to high-quality STEM education. In the United States, we are not competitive with the rest of the world in that regard, and there are states where STEM education is coming under political fire. This stands in direct opposition to empowering the next generation to confront the future. We are not blocked by a lack of technological solutions; we’re blocked by political obstacles. Another thing that struck me about the kids was that they didn’t approach their work from a political standpoint at all. I find that hopeful, because they don’t see why politics should be an issue in addressing the environment. And they’re right; it’s not a political issue, it’s a moral issue.

The film documents some pretty intense environmental destruction, all within heavily populated areas, as people are continuing to go about their daily lives. What was that experience like for you and your crew?

The reality is that if you take a closer look at where you live, most places are facing environmental degradation. In some areas, you’re affected by it in a daily way. In others it might not be as visible, but dig a little deeper and you’ll find something in your own neighborhood. I was impressed by these students’ ability to observe where they were living, and identify what needed to be fixed. Whether or not they’re able to invent a solution today, their willingness to tackle the issue is what matters.

We do have options for how we as a culture can address these issues. But what really struck me about the kids was that they weren’t saying, “We need to stop this industry.” They were saying, “Industry is what gives people jobs where we live, so we need to engage in industrial remediation. There’s a way we could support our economy that doesn’t have to be so damaging.” It was interesting to me that all of the kids were invested in working within the systems that were already there. They wanted to come up with common-sense ways of making things better.

Buhle, Paul and Nicole Schulman. Wobblies!: A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World.Verso, 2005.

The stories of the hard-rock miners' shooting wars, young Elizabeth Gurly Flynn (the "Rebel Girl" of contemporary sheet music), the first sit-down strikes and Free Speech fights, Emma Goldman and the struggle for birth control access, the Pageant for Paterson orchestrated in Madison Square Garden, bohemian radicals John Reed and Louise Bryant, field-hand revolts and lumber workers' strikes, wartime witch hunts, government prosecutions and mob lynching, Mexican-American uprisings in Baja, and Mexican peasant revolts led by Wobblies, hilarious and sentimental songs created and later revived—all are here, and much, much more.

Carter, Bill. Boom, Bust, Boom: A Story about Copper, the Metal that Runs the World.Scribner Book Company, 2012.

Starting in his own backyard in the old mining town of Bisbee, Arizona—where he discovers that the dirt in his garden contains double the acceptable level of arsenic—Bill Carter follows the story of copper to the controversial Grasberg copper mine in Indonesia; to the “ring” at the London Metal Exchange, where a select group of traders buy and sell enormous amounts of the metal; and to an Alaskan salmon run threatened by mining. Boom, Bust, Boom is a highly readable account—part social history, part mining-town exploration, and part environmental investigation. Page by page, Carter blends the personal and the international in a narrative that helps us understand the paradoxical relationship we have with a substance whose necessity to civilization costs the environment and the people who mine it dearly.

Dray, Philip. There is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America.Doubleday, 2010.

From the nineteenth-century textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, to the triumph of unions in the twentieth century and their waning influence today, the contest between labor and capital for the American bounty has shaped our national experience. In this stirring new history, Philip Dray shows us the vital accomplishments of organized labor and illuminates its central role in our social, political, economic, and cultural evolution. His epic, character-driven narrative not only restores to our collective memory the indelible story of American labor, it also demonstrates the importance of the fight for fairness and economic democracy, and why that effort remains so urgent today.

Grandin, Greg. The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. Metropolitan Books, 2019.

Ever since this nation’s inception, the idea of an open and ever-expanding frontier has been central to American identity. Symbolizing a future of endless promise, it was the foundation of the United States’ belief in itself as an exceptional nation—democratic, individualistic, forward-looking. Today, though, America has a new symbol: the border wall. In The End of the Myth, acclaimed historian Greg Grandin explores the meaning of the frontier throughout the full sweep of U.S. history—from the American Revolution to the War of 1898, the New Deal to the election of 2016. For centuries, he shows, America’s constant expansion—fighting wars and opening markets—served as a “gate of escape,” helping to deflect domestic political and economic conflicts outward.

Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America.University of Oklahoma Press, 1998.

Slotkin examines an impressive array of sources—fiction, Hollywood westerns, and the writings of Hollywood figures and Washington leaders—to show how the racialist theory of Anglo-Saxon ascendance and superiority (embodied in Theodore Roosevelt’s The Winning of the West), rather than Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis of the closing of the frontier, exerted the most influence in popular culture and government policy making in the twentieth century. He argues that Roosevelt’s view of the frontier myth provided the justification for most of America’s expansionist policies, from Roosevelt’s own Rough Riders to Kennedy’s counterinsurgency and Johnson’s war in Vietnam.

Benton-Cohen, Katherine. Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands. Harvard University Press, 2009.

“Are you an American, or are you not?” This was the question Harry Wheeler, sheriff of Cochise County, Arizona, used to choose his targets in one of the most remarkable vigilante actions ever carried out on U.S. soil. And this is the question at the heart of Katherine Benton-Cohen’s provocative history, which ties that seemingly remote corner of the country to one of America’s central concerns: the historical creation of racial boundaries. It was in Cochise County that the Earps and Clantons fought, Geronimo surrendered, and Wheeler led the infamous Bisbee Deportation, and it is where private militias patrol for undocumented migrants today. These dramatic events animate the rich story of the Arizona borderlands, where people of nearly every nationality—drawn by “free” land or by jobs in the copper mines—grappled with questions of race and national identity.

Murolo, Priscilla and A. B. Chitty. From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend: A Short, Illustrated History of Labor in the United States. New Press, 2001.

From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend surveys the historic efforts and sacrifices that working people have made to win the rights we take for granted today: basic health and safety standards in the workplace, fair on-the-job treatment for men and women, the minimum wage, and even the weekend itself. With dramatic cartoon narratives by internationally-acclaimed artist Joe Sacco, this book brings labor history to life.

Punke, Michael. Fire and Brimstone: The North Butte Mine Disaster of 1917. Hachette Books, 2006.

While the disaster is compelling in its own right, Fire and Brimstone also tells a far broader story striking in its contemporary relevance. Butte, Montana, on the eve of the North Butte disaster, was a volatile jumble of antiwar protest, an abusive corporate master, seething labor unrest, divisive ethnic tension, and radicalism both left and right. It was a powder keg lacking only a spark, and the mine fire would ignite strikes, murder, ethnic and political witch hunts, occupation by federal troops, and ultimately a battle over presidential power.

Watson, Bruce. Bread and Roses: Mills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the American Dream.Viking Books, 2005.

On January 12, 1912, an army of textile workers stormed out of the mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts, commencing what has since become known as the "Bread and Roses" strike. Based on newspaper accounts, magazine reportage, and oral histories, Watson reconstructs a Dickensian drama involving thousands of parading strikers from fifty-one nations, unforgettable acts of cruelty, and even a protracted murder trial that tested the boundaries of free speech. A rousing look at a seminal and overlooked chapter of the past, Bread and Roses is indispensable reading.

Byrkit, James W. Forging the Copper Collar: Arizona's Labor-Management War of 1901–1921. The University of Arizona Press, 2016.

While the Bisbee Deportation was the most notorious of many vigilante actions of its day, it was more than the climax of a labor-management war—it was the point at which Arizona donned the copper collar. That such an event could occur, James Byrkit contends, was not attributable so much to the marshaling of public sentiment against the I.W.W. as to the outright manipulation of the state's political and social climate by Eastern business interests. In Forging the Copper Collar, Byrkit paints a vivid picture of Arizona in the early part of this century. He demonstrates how isolated mining communities were no more than mercantilistic colonies controlled by Eastern power, and how that power wielded control over all the Arizona's affairs—holding back unionism, creating a self-serving tax structure, and summarily expelling dissidents.

Jones, Reece.Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move.Verso, 2017.

In Violent Borders, Jones crosses the migrant trails of the world, documenting the billions of dollars spent on border security projects and the dire consequences for countless millions. While the poor are restricted by the lottery of birth to slum dwellings in the ailing decolonized world, the wealthy travel without constraint, exploiting pools of cheap labor and lax environmental regulations. With the growth of borders and resource enclosures, the deaths of migrants in search of a better life are intimately connected to climate change, environmental degradation, and the growth of global wealth inequality.

"Resist and participate in democracy! That is your right and it cannot be taken away from you.” This quote from Whose Streets?, a documentary film by Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis, responds to the systemic oppression at work around the world against people of color. This lesson provides a framework for critical analysis of current and historic race relations in America through the lens of the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown, Jr., a young unarmed black man, by white police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri.

In this lesson, students conduct a Socratic seminar in preparation for creating a plan of action to submit to local bodies of government with suggestions for improving relations between police departments and the people in the communities that they protect and addressing other disparities in our country’s criminal justice system. This plan of action is malleable and will be adjusted depending upon grade level and specific issues in your school community. The structured conversation of the Socratic seminar will help students generate questions and proposed solutions for their written plans of action.

A Note From the Directors, Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis

We made this film as an act of recognition. The people who took to the streets following the death of Michael Brown Jr. were mothers, fathers, teachers, students and everything in between. Through the chaos and political talk, the humanity of the situation got lost. Whose Streets?is meant to remind all of us that freedom comes with a responsibility, and that sometimes participation in democracy means taking risks, including the risk of being misunderstood. They called Dr. King a troublemaker. They called Ferguson protestors “thugs.” There will always be those who fear change. Our belief is that the act of protest, whether that be rallying in the streets or telling the truth in the classroom, is our best hope in the fight for a world that is just, fair, and safe for our children. If you have decided to take on the challenge of using this film as a teaching tool, we thank you for your courageous leadership.

A Note From Curriculum Writer Vivett Dukes

Teaching is a form of social activism. It is deeply embedded in my philosophy of pedagogy that all of us, regardless of our content of expertise or station in life are, at our cores, facilitators of change. At our best, our classrooms are labs where societal problems great and small are analyzed, reconstructed and moved closer to being solved by the students entrusted daily in our care. That is why I wrote this Whose Streets?lesson plan—to bring to the forefront the deeper implications about what the shooting of Michael Brown, Jr. and the reverberation of the protests that ensued as a result of his murder in 2014 mean today for us—all of us. You see, what you have before you is not just a lesson plan. It is a call to action. It is a charge to be not just the proverbial but the literal change that you want to see in the world. Through the posing of poignant yet challenging essential questions and structured, researched responses, it is the sincere hope that students and educators who engage in the activities of this lesson will move beyond their roles as momentary passive classroom participants to become lifelong informed and civically engaged community citizens. From one educator to another who is in this fight right alongside you, I thank you sincerely for adding Whose Streets? to your teaching repertoire. Together we win.

Ray, Douglas, ed. The Queer South: LGBTQ Writers on the American South. Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014.

This anthology, dreamed up and edited by Douglas Ray, features poetry and prose that sings of and explores the queer experience of the American South. From hilarious to heartbreaking, anxious to angry, religious to reluctant, contemplative to celebratory, this anthology expands our ideas of what it means to be queer and what it means to represent the land south of the Mason-Dixon.

Thompson, Brock. The Un-Natural State. University of Arkansas Press, 2010.

The Un-Natural State is a one-of-a-kind study of gay and lesbian life in Arkansas in the twentieth century, a deft weaving together of Arkansas history, dozens of oral histories, and Brock Thompson's own story. Thompson analyzes the meaning of rural drag shows, including a compelling description of a 1930s seasonal beauty pageant in Wilson, Arkansas, where white men in drag shared the stage with other white men in blackface, a suggestive mingling that went to the core of both racial transgression and sexual disobedience. These small town entertainments put on in churches and schools emerged decades later in gay bars across the state as a lucrative business practice and a larger means of community expression, while in the same period the state's sodomy law was rewritten to condemn sexual acts between those of the same sex in language similar to what was once used to denounce interracial sex.

New York Public Library, Edmund White and Jason Baumann, eds. The Stonewall Reader Paperback. Penguin Random House, 2019.

June 28, 2019 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, which is considered the most significant event in the gay liberation movement, and the catalyst for the modern fight for LGBTQ rights in the United States. Drawing from the New York Public Library's archives, The Stonewall Reader is a collection of first accounts, diaries, periodic literature, and articles from LGBTQ magazines and newspapers that documented both the years leading up to and the years following the riots. Most importantly the anthology spotlights both iconic activists who were pivotal in the movement, such as Sylvia Rivera, co-founder of Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries (STAR), as well as forgotten figures like Ernestine Eckstein, one of the few out, African American, lesbian activists in the 1960s.

Evans, Rachel Held. Searching for Sunday. Nelson Books, 2015.

Like millions of her millennial peers, Rachel Held Evans didn’t want to go to church anymore. The hypocrisy, the politics, the gargantuan building budgets, the scandals—church culture seemed so far removed from Jesus. Yet, despite her cynicism and misgivings, something kept drawing her back to Church. And so she sets out on a journey to understand Church and to find her place in it. Centered around seven sacraments, Evans’s quest takes readers through a liturgical year with stories about baptism, communion, confirmation, confession, marriage, vocation, and death that are funny, heartbreaking, and sharply honest.

Cantorna, Amber. Unashamed: A Coming-Out Guide for LGBTQ Christians. Westminster John Knox Press, 2019.

In this handy guide, LGBTQ people of faith will find personal and practical advice for the coming-out process. Unashamed tackles such topics as internalized homophobia, re-establishing your worth as a child of God, finding an affirming faith community, and deciding when and how to come out. In her accessible and compassionate style, Cantorna equips LGBTQ Christians for the coming-out process, helps them create communities that will support and love them during the journey, and offers a bridge to re-establish their relationship with God.

Howard, John. Men Like That: A Southern Queer History. University of Chicago Press, 1999.

We don’t usually associate thriving queer culture with rural America, but John Howard’s unparalleled history of queer life in the South persuasively debunks the myth that same-sex desires can’t find expression outside the big city. In fact, this book shows that the nominally conservative institutions of small-town life—home, church, school, and workplace—were the very sites where queer sexuality flourished. As Howard recounts the life stories of the ordinary and the famous, often in their own words, he also locates the material traces of queer sexuality in the landscape: from the farmhouse to the church social, from sports facilities to roadside rest areas.

Decaro, Frank. Drag: Combing Through the Big Wigs of Show Business.Rizzoli, 2019.
Drag is a multimedia collection of interviews, commentaries and photos on drag history and culture, featuring contributions from some of the most influential drag artists of our time from around the globe, including Bianca del Rio, Miss Coco Peru, Hedda Lettuce, Lypsinka, and Varla Jean Merman. Illustrated with more than 100 photos, many never-before-seen images from performers’ personal collections, and a timeline of drag “herstory.”

Sontag, Susan. Notes on Camp. Penguin Modern, 2018. (Originally published 1964.)

'The ultimate Camp statement: it's good because it's awful.' These two classic essays were the first works of criticism to break down the boundaries between 'high' and 'low' culture, and made Susan Sontag a literary sensation.

Naidoo, Jamie Campbell. Rainbow Family Collections: Selecting and Using Children’s Books with Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Content. Libraries Unlimited, 2012.

Research shows that an estimated 2 million children are being raised in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) families in the United States; that the number of same-sex couples adopting children is at an all-time high; and that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning (LGBTQ) couples raising children live in 96 percent of all counties in the United States. Today's educators and youth librarians therefore need guidance in choosing, evaluating, and selecting high-quality children's books with LGBTQ content. As one of the only highly praised resources on this important topic, this thoughtfully compiled book examines and suggests picture books and chapter books presenting LGBTQ content to children under the age of 12.

Harker, Jaime.The Lesbian South: Southern Feminists, the Women in Print Movement, and the Queer Literary Canon. The University of North Carolina Press, 2018.

In this book, Jaime Harker uncovers a largely forgotten literary renaissance in southern letters. Anchored by a constellation of southern women, the Women in Print movement grew from the queer union of women’s liberation, civil rights activism, gay liberation, and print culture. Broadly influential from the 1970s through the 1990s, the Women in Print movement created a network of writers, publishers, bookstores, and readers that fostered a remarkable array of literature. With the freedom that the Women in Print movement inspired, southern lesbian feminists remade southernness as a site of intersectional radicalism, transgressive sexuality, and liberatory space.

The United States has a history of imperialism that was intended to increase military reach, expand U.S. markets, identify and exploit cheap labor and resources and spread American culture and ideals. The policy and ideology of imperialism have led to devastating results for the economies and cultures of colonized nations around the world, including the Philippines. Inherent to a doctrine of imperialism is a suppression of indigenous cultures and, according to historian Kristin Hoganson, author of Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars, a gender-based exercise of power.

In the documentary film Call Her Ganda we see how the legacy of U.S. imperialism persists in the form of ongoing U.S. military presence in the Philippines and legal protections afforded to U.S. military personnel who commit crimes on Filipino soil. Call Her Ganda reveals the injustices and imbalance of power inherent in this legacy and how it leads to violence against the Filipino population in general and, in the case of Jennifer Laude, the historical erasure and degradation of transgender identity and the inability of the Filipino people to fight for their right to punish violent crimes committed against them on their own shores.

In this lesson students will study how the history of the U.S. military presence in the Philippines has an impact on families like the Laudes and how the murder of Jennifer “Ganda” Laude reveals the tragic intersection of imperialism, gender, transphobia and violence.

If students are unfamiliar with the disproportionate rates of violence against transgender individuals in the U.S. and around the world, it may be instructive to share this information:

"Every day millions of transgender people in all regions experience rejection, stigmatization, harassment and physical violence because they do not conform with prevailing gender norms. Such violence may be physical (including murder, beatings, kidnappings, rape and sexual assault) or psychological (including threats, coercion and arbitrary deprivations of liberty)."

— 2013 United Nations Development Programme Discussion Paper on Transgender Health and Human Rights

Trans Murder Monitoring Map, a project of transrespect.org, monitors murders of transgender people by country throughout the world.

Important Note to Educators

Call Her Ganda includes violence and sexual assault that can be difficult to watch and talk about. Bringing these elements into a classroom conversation requires establishing an environment where students have been prepared in advance and exhibit the maturity to share and process this information.

To prepare for this lesson:

● Watch all the film clips suggested for this lesson prior to screening them in your classroom.

● Review the Resources of this lesson and familiarize yourself with the recommended organizations and materials.