Ursula Wolfe-Rocca

Ursula Wolfe-Rocca

Ursula Wolfe-Rocca has taught high school social studies since 2000. She is on the editorial board of Rethinking Schools and is the Zinn Education Project Writer and Organizer. She has written articles and lessons on voting rights, redlining, deportations, COINTELPRO, climate justice, Red Summer, the Cold War, and more.

All Content By This Author

More than McCarthyism: The Attack on Activism Students Don’t Learn About from Their Textbooks

Resource Types: Articles
By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca
In legislatures across the country, Republican lawmakers are introducing bills to curtail what educators — in public schools and universities — can say and teach about racism and sexism. This latest moral panic from the Right comes on the heels of recent legislation dangerously curtailing the rights of transgender people — especially young people — and enacting another round of voter suppression. It is paramount that we organize to defeat these threats to the health and safety of LGBTQ people, voting rights, and the freedom of educators to tell the truth. It is also worth reminding ourselves — and our students — of other times in U.S. history when powerful politicians manufactured threats and whipped up fear to neutralize progressive challenges to the status quo — the McCarthy Era being a well-known high-water mark of state repression.

The United States Is Not a Democracy. Stop Telling Students That It Is.

Resource Types: Articles
By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca
When our students only learn about this exceptionally strange system, the electoral college, from their corporate-produced history and government textbooks, they have no clue why this is how we choose our president. More importantly, they develop a stunted sense of their own power — and little reason to believe they might have the potential to create something better.

Teaching Climate Disobedience: Using the Film Necessity in the Classroom

Resource Types: Teaching Activities (Free)
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.
Remembering Red Summer If We Knew Image | Zinn Education Project

Remembering Red Summer — Which Textbooks Seem Eager to Forget

By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca
Confronting a national epidemic of white mob violence, 1919 was a time when Black people defended themselves, fought back, and demanded full citizenship in thousands of acts of courage and daring, small and large, individual and collective.
protester holding up signs reading "Economic Justice" and "Reparations Now!"

Repair: Students Design a Reparations Bill

Resource Types: Teaching Activities (Free)
Teaching Activity. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca.
In this activity, students take on the role of activist-experts to improve upon a Congressional bill for reparations for Black people. They talk back to Congress’ flimsy legislation and design a more robust alternative.

Disguising Imperialism: How Textbooks Get the Cold War Wrong and Dupe Students

Resource Types: Articles
By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca
The perpetual interventionism and global hegemony exercised by the U.S. government today urgently need to be questioned and dismantled. Such a monumental task requires a citizenry armed with clear-eyed understandings of its past. That cannot be accomplished when the Cold War is sanitized and downsized, confined to one chapter of a textbook . . .