Lessons with Remote Teaching Materials

Remote teaching materials are available for the teaching activities listed below. You can find links to these materials by downloading each lesson and scrolling down to the final sheet. You will be asked to make a copy of the documents, which will allow you to edit your own copies freely and share them with your students. This list will be updated as we convert and share more lesson materials as Google Docs. Please read Ursula Wolfe-Rocca’s guide Teaching ZEP Lessons Remotely: Recommitting to the Why — If Not the How — of Our Pedagogy for more information about how to teach people’s history remote. Share your story about teaching remotely with our materials during the pandemic and we will mail you a copy of the 1619 Project with our gratitude.

The Color Line

Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow. 6 pages.
A lesson on the countless colonial laws enacted to create division and inequality based on race. This helps students understand the origins of racism in the United States and who benefits.

Teaching Activity by Bill Bigelow

Reconstructing the South: A Role Play

Lesson. By Bill Bigelow. 17 pages.
This role play engages students in thinking about what freedpeople needed in order to achieve — and sustain — real freedom following the Civil War. It's followed by a chapter from the book Freedom's Unfinished Revolution.

Teaching Activity by Bill Bigelow

Teaching SNCC: The Organization at the Heart of the Civil Rights Revolution

Teaching Activity. By Adam Sanchez. Rethinking Schools. 24 pages.
A series of role plays that explore the history and evolution of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, including freedom rides and voter registration.

Teaching Activity by Adam Sanchez

What We Don’t Learn About the Black Panther Party — but Should

Teaching Activity. By Adam Sanchez and Jesse Hagopian. Rethinking Schools. 33 pages.
A mixer lesson introduces students to the pivotal history of the Black Panthers.

Poetry of Defiance: How the Enslaved Resisted

Teaching Activity. By Adam Sanchez.
Through a mixer activity, students encounter how enslaved people resisted the brutal exploitation of slavery. The lesson culminates in a collective class poem highlighting the defiance of the enslaved.

How Red Lines Built White Wealth: A Lesson on Housing Segregation in the 20th Century

Teaching Activity. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca. Rethinking Schools.
The mixer role play is based on Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law, which shows in exacting detail how government policies segregated every major city in the United States with dire consequences for African Americans.

Teaching Activity by Ursula Wolfe-Rocca

Who’s to Blame? A People’s Tribunal on the Coronavirus Pandemic

Teaching Activity. By Caneisha Mills.
This people’s tribunal begins with the premise that a heinous crime is being committed as tens of millions of people’s lives are in danger due to COVID-19. But who was responsible for this crime? Students weigh the evidence.

Teaching Climate Disobedience: Using the Film Necessity in the Classroom

Teaching Activity. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca.
A lesson about multiple cohorts of climate activists: Indigenous leaders in the Climate Justice Movement, valve turners using civil disobedience to stop the flow of oil, and the legal team that uses the “necessity defense” in the courts.

Teaching Activity by Ursula Wolfe-Rocca

Who Gets to Vote? Teaching About the Struggle for Voting Rights in the United States

Teaching Activity. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca. 2020.
Unit with three lessons on voting rights, including the history of the struggle against voter suppression in the United States.

Teaching Activity by Ursula Wolfe-Rocca

Rini Templeton Climate (Art) | Zinn Education Project

Stories from the Climate Crisis: A Mixer

Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow. Rethinking Schools.
A role play introduces students to 23 individuals around the world — each of whom is affected differently by climate change.

Teaching Activity by Bill Bigelow

The Rebellious Lives of Mrs. Rosa Parks

Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow.
In this mixer lesson, students learn about Rosa Parks' many decades of activism by taking on roles from various times in her life. In this way, students learn about her radicalism before, during, and long after the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Climate Justice (Art) | Zinn Education Project

Meet Today’s Climate Justice Activists: A Mixer on the People Saving the World

Teaching Activity Draft. By Matt Reed and Tim Swinehart. 2019.
Students learn the names and stories of dozens of climate justice activists.

How to Make Amends: A Lesson on Reparations

Teaching Activity. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca, Alex Stegner, Chris Buehler, Angela DiPasquale, and Tom McKenna.
Students meet dozens of advocates and recipients of reparations from a variety of historical eras to grapple with the possibility of reparations now and in the future.

Teaching With Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All

Teaching Activity. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca. 25 pages.
Students engage in an interactive activity with short excerpts from Martha Jones’ book to learn about the leading role of Black women in the fight for voting rights throughout U.S. history.