Library Guides: High School Ethnic Studies Initiative Library Guide: Classroom Resources

Classroom Resources

Below are resources where you can browse a broad range of Ethnic Studies topics. This page is where you can find reference materials, classroom tools, definitions, and general information.

Classroom Tools and Curriculum Support

People's history, social history, history from below, and counternarratives are terms that refer to the ways that marginalized and historically oppressed have tried to maintain and reassert their ways of knowing, worldviews, and cultures. These projects and organizations provide lesson plans and educational resources.

Association for Ethnic Studies
The oldest ethnic studies association in the United States, the Association for Ethnic Studies (AES) was founded in 1972. A non-profit organization, AES provides an interdisciplinary forum for scholars and activists concerned with the national and international dimensions of race and ethnicity. The Association welcomes scholars and teachers at all educational levels, students, libraries, civic and governmental organizations, and all persons interested in ethnicity, ethnic groups, intergroup relations, and the cultural life of ethnic minorities. As a non-profit corporation, AES provides a vehicle for interested members and donors to promote responsible scholarship and advocacy in the diverse fields of inquiry which constitute ethnic studies.
Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum
The Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum vision is to promote the advancement and implementation of well designed Ethnic Studies courses and programs for the purpose of advancing students’ academic achievement, educational equity, community activist scholarship, and community leadership skills.
Howard Zinn Education Project
The Zinn Education Project promotes and supports the teaching of people’s history in classrooms across the country. Since 2008, the Zinn Education Project has introduced students to a more accurate, complex, and engaging understanding of history than is found in traditional textbooks and curricula. With more than 150,000 people registered, and growing by more than 10,000 new registrants every year, the Zinn Education Project has become a leading resource for teachers and teacher educators.
Learning for Justice
Learning for Justice provides free educational resources—articles, guides, lessons, films, webinars, frameworks and more—help foster shared learning and reflection for educators, young people, caregivers and all community members. Our engagement opportunities—conferences, workshops, and school and community partnerships—provide space where people can harness collective power and take action.
Learning for Justice: Social Justice Standards
The Social Justice Standards are a road map for anti-bias education at every stage of K-12 instruction. Comprised of anchor standards and age-appropriate learning outcomes, the standards provide a common language and organizational structure educators can use to guide curriculum development and make schools more just and equitable. Divided into four domains—identity, diversity, justice and action (IDJA)—the standards recognize that, in today's diverse classrooms, students need knowledge and skills related to both prejudice-reduction and collective action. Together, these domains represent a continuum of engagement in anti-bias, multicultural and social justice education. The IDJA domains are based on Louise Derman-Sparks’ four goals for anti-bias education in early childhood. Each of the IDJA domains has learning outcomes and school-based scenarios organized by grades K-2, 3-5, 6-8 and 9-12.
Teaching for Change
Teaching for Change offers professional development, develops lessons, and curates resources to help classroom teachers supplement pre-K-12 curriculum.

Lessons in Liberation by The Education for Liberation Network & Critical Resistance Editorial Collective; Bettina L. Love (Contribution by); Mariame Kaba (Contribution by)
ISBN: 9781849354363
Publication Date: 2021-09-28
This toolkit for educators, parents, and youth, shines a light on innovative abolitionist projects, particularly in the K 12 teaching and learning contexts. The book consists of three parts, each divided into sections on analysis, knowledge, and power.

Redefining Research

Resources that can support bringing concepts and practices of research justice, participatory research, and supporting students in exploring and building upon their experiential knowledge and lived experiences.

Collaborative Indigenous Research Digital Garden
The Digital Garden is designed to bring together two fields of research: participatory research and Indigenous research. Given that these fields have their own distinct methodologies, methods, approaches to study and theories of change, we created the Digital Garden as a virtual visiting place to bring these fields in conversation with each other.
INCITE! Participatory Action Research
Participatory Action Research, or “PAR”, is a way of collecting information for organizing that honors, centers, and reflects the experiences of people most directly affected by issues in our communities.
Othering & Belonging Institute Transformative Research Toolkit
This transformative research toolkit refers to a wide range of processes where people center their lived experience and visions for social transformation, lead a process that systematically builds on this knowledge through investigation and learning rooted in their own ways of knowing, and take action to influence public narratives, policies, and power dynamics. In a nutshell, transformative research is any research process that positively transforms the people directly involved, the communities they are part of, and the structures shaping their lives.
Power Shift Network: Introduction to Research Justice Toolkit
Intended for community organizers to apply tools and concepts of Research Justice to organizing. This toolkit encourages marginalized communities to recognize their own expertise and to develop their own analysis of the issues that impact them. We hope readers use this toolkit to spark their own conversations about community-driven research strategies. In each section we have included sample workshops from our Research Justice Training Program as suggested guides for these discussions.

Open Educational Resources

Open Educational Resources (OER) are learning, teaching and research materials in any format and medium that reside in the public domain or are under copyright that have been released under an open license, that permit no-cost access, re-use, re-purpose, adaptation and redistribution by others.

California Community Colleges Open Educational Resources Initiative
The curated list provided here is intended to facilitate faculty selection of an OER text in lieu of a commercial text.
Digital Public Library of America - Ethnic Studies Open Educational Resources
Open Educational Resources on Ethnic Studies topics.

Data and Statistics

While data and statistics may seem neutral, it is important to consider critically what data is being collected, by whom, and why. Here are some examples of resources that look critically at data.

Pew Research Center: Race and Ethnicity
Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. Pew Research Center conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, content analysis and other data-driven social science research.
Radical Data
Radical Data is a collective of mathematicians, technologists, dancers and designers who believe that data, used with care, can move us towards a world that is autonomous, just and joyful.

Reference Resources and More

The Asian American Education Project
Provides online lesson plans tailored to K-12 curriculum focused on Asian American communities and histories.
Black Lives Matter Collective Storytelling Project
A University of Washington storytelling project published with a creative commons license featuring student reflections on race, racism and racial justice.
Ethnic Studies Library Omeka Digital Archives
Digital archives and projects from student, community, activist, and scholars in Ethnic Studies.
Keywords in American Cultural Studies
Keywords for American Cultural Studies includes 150 essays, each focused on a single term such as “America,” “culture,” “diversity,” or “religion.” More than forty of the essays have been significantly revised for this new edition, and there are nineteen completely new keywords, including crucial additions such as “biopolitics,” “data,” “debt,” and “intersectionality”.

Secondary menu

High School Ethnic Studies Initiative Library Guide

Classroom Resources

Classroom Tools and Curriculum Support

Classroom Tools and Curriculum Support

Redefining Research

Redefining Research

Open Educational Resources

Open Educational Resources

Data and Statistics

Data and Statistics

Reference Resources and More

Reference Resources and More