Throughout July we celebrate the diversity of our students in Disability Pride and Awareness Month. Students in our classrooms have always been diverse, and research has shown that most students who request accommodations or special education still learn in the general education classroom. Others who receive exclusive education still engage with general education classrooms and curricula to the greatest extent possible (California History-Social Science Framework, Chapter 20, p 537).
People with disabilities are an essential part of the history we teach and their stories should motivate inclusive change within our curriculums and classrooms.
As educators, it is our privilege and our responsibility to introduce students to history. This includes introducing them to their own history – to allow them to see themselves in the past. But it also includes introducing them to the history of the people they live side-by-side with in their communities today.
Julie Law-Marín is a high school educator in the Sacramento area. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in History with a minor in Asian American Studies; she continued on to earn her Master of Arts degree in Education with a concentration on Multicultural Education. She kindly sat down with us to offer her expertise on culturally-responsive classroom practices and community based teaching. Below are her responses to the questions we asked her.
What does culturally-responsive teaching mean to you?
Jazmine Fortes is a third grade educator in the Bay Area. She completed her Bachelor of Arts in Ethnic Studies, with a double minor in Urban Education and Spanish. She has worked to create an equitable, holistic, relative, and empowering curriculum. She considers creating environments in which parents, students, and their community feel welcomed is central to this work. She sat down with us to help us see how she implements these strategies in her classroom.
The pandemic years of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage month have been as sobering as celebratory. Last May, in the shadow of the tragic and murderous deaths of spa workers and patrons in Atlanta, and in light of the necessity for a #StopAsianHate campaign, I urged our teaching and teacher community to integrate AAPI histories within their curriculum.
The CHSSP is excited to announce that Tom Adams has been appointed by Governor Newsom to serve on the CHSSP Advisory Board. Currently a Board Trustee for the Davis Joint Unified School District, and formerly Deputy Superintendent of the Teaching and Learning Support Branch at the California Department of Education (CDE), Adams is well versed in history-social science education. Adams holds a Ph.D.
How did women exercise political power before they had the right to vote? This is one question that teachers and students consider as they explore the myriad ways that women led political groups, mounted campaigns for justice, and worked to preserve tribal sovereignty, for example. Now teachers and students have more resources that help fill out the contours of women’s activism in the west. A digital history project, Women’s History in the Pacific West, offers 69 new b
