Teaching for Change

Teaching for Change

Founded	1989 December
Type	501(c)3
Tax ID no.	52-1616482
Focus	educational
Location	Washington, DC
Coordinates	38°55′04″N 77°01′54″W / 38.917813°N 77.031777°W / 38.917813; -77.031777
Area served	United States
Method	parent organizing, professional development, and publications
Key people	Kate Tindle, Board Co-Chair
Employees	21
Slogan	"Building social justice, starting in the classroom."
Mission	Teaching for Change provides teachers and parents with the tools to create schools where students learn to read, write and change the world.
Website	http://www.teachingforchange.org
Formerly called	Network of Educators on Central America

Teaching for Change is a non-profit organization founded in 1989 and based in Washington D.C. with the motto of "building social justice, starting in the classroom." This organization uses publications, professional development, and parent organizing programs to accomplish this goal.^[1]

Programming

Teaching for Change coordinates a variety of programs that aim to encourage teachers, students, and parents to build a more equitable, multicultural society through education.

Tellin' Stories

The Tellin' Stories program is a process for building parent engagement in schools. This program uses a bottom-up approach, encouraging parents to define what their roles will be.^[2] The training plan has four stages:

• Community Building: families meet each other and learn about their schools;
• Information Gathering: parents analyze the school climate, the facilities, and the quality of teaching and learning at their school;
• Identifying and Prioritizing Concerns: parents investigate concerns with schools (using Right Question Project methodology); and
• Taking Action: parents determine the action required to achieve desired results and work collectively to promote those actions.^[3]

Teaching for Change Bookstore

Teaching for Change founded and operated an independent, non-profit bookstore ^[4] located inside Busboys and Poets 14th and V Streets location for ten years.^[5] The bookstore hosted author events and provided vetted selections of books focusing on progressive politics, multicultural lessons for pre K-12, and people's history. Teaching for Change helped bring noted authors to host readings, discussions and book signings, including Alice Walker, Howard Zinn, Cornel West, Ronald Takaki, Michelle Alexander, Melissa Harris-Perry, John Sayles, Nikki Giovanni, Robert Parris Moses, Juan Gonzalez, Ralph Nader, Taylor Branch, Dave Zirin, Naomi Klein, Tariq Ali, Clarence Lusane, Marita Golden, Charles E. Cobb Jr., Bernie Sanders, Edwidge Danticat, Judy Richardson, and Junot Diaz. Teaching for Change closed its bookstore in April of 2015 and shared its recommendations for books online. ^[6]

Zinn Education Project

Teaching for Change co-founded the Zinn Education Project with Rethinking Schools in 2008 to provide teachers with free resources to help teach a people's history including free downloadable lesson plans as a companion to Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States and other classroom resources for educators around the country.^[7]

Civil Rights Teaching

Teaching for Change works with the McComb School District and the Mississippi Department of Education to incorporate lessons on the civil rights movement and labor history in the curriculum. The stated intention is to help schools "end a decades-old culture of silence" on difficult historical events in the region.^{[8] [9]} McComb Legacies, an after-school and summer enrichment program, grew out of the partnership between Teaching for Change and the McComb School District. As part of McComb Legacies, high school students work as historians to uncover the history of the voting rights struggle in McComb and Mississippi. In the spring of 2013, two McComb student projects made it to the national level of the National History Day competition. The Voting Rights Struggle, a documentary film created by McComb students, tells the story of the first SNCC voter registration drive, which was located in McComb.^[10] The film can now be seen at the African American Civil War Museum in Washington, DC ^[11]

History

In the 1980s, with a growing Central American population and U.S. involvement in the region, 11 committees of educators and community leaders formed across the country to assess how to address the needs of Central American students and increase public awareness about U.S. foreign policy in Central America. These committees convened in Los Angeles to form a national organization, the Network of Educator’s Committees on Central America (NECCA) that became incorporated in December 1989^[12]

Through the early 90s they produced teaching resources on Nicaragua and El Salvador and hosted teacher workshops around the country based on the book Rethinking Columbus.^[13] In 1993, NECCA won the Humanities award from the DC Humanities Council and in 1994 they launched a mail order catalog for progressive teaching resources.

As the organization expanded its focus, NECCA changed its name to Teaching for Change. Through the 1990s, Teaching for Change organized seminars for educators on social justice education topics and published their own teaching guide, Beyond Heroes and Holidays: A Practical Guide to K-12 Anti-Racist, Multicultural Education and Staff Development.^[14]

In 1999, Teaching for Change hosted a seminar for educators in the DC area focusing on "putting the movement back into Civil Rights" history teaching at Howard University. That seminar led to the production of a teaching guide with the same name, in collaboration with the Poverty and Race Resource Action Council (PRRAC).

Putting the Movement Back into Civil Rights Teaching ^[15] won the Philip C. Chinn book of the year award and Teaching for Change won the National Association for Multicultural Education^[16] Organization of the Year in 2004.

In 2005, Teaching for Change was invited by former board member and restaurateur Andy Shallal to open a bookstore in Busboys and Poets.

In 2008, in partnership with Rethinking Schools, they launched the Zinn Education Project to provide middle and high school teachers with free access to lessons for Howard Zinn’s A People's History of the United States and other people's history resources.

Teaching for Change launched the Teach the Beat initiative ^[17] to bring go-go artists to D.C. classrooms and was among the national recipients of the Kellogg Foundation Family Engagement Awards ^[18] in 2014.

To help D.C. area teachers deepen their own practice and visibility as writers, and to build community among D.C. area social justice educators, Teaching for Change launched the Stories from Our Classrooms writing course for DC area social justice teachers in 2015. ^[19]

To document the approach developed by Teaching for Change's Tellin' Stories Project, the organization published Between Families and Schools: Creating Meaningful Relationships in 2016 ^[20] In the same year, Teaching for Change launched a website to provide teachers with background information and teaching resources on Central America ^[21].

To promote high quality, multicultural children's books, Teaching for Change launched the website Social Justice Books.org. The site features critical reviews of children's books from the See What We See collaborators. ^[22]

References

External links

• Teaching for Change website
• Zinn Education Project website
• Teaching Central America website
• Civil Rights Teaching website
• Social Justice Books website