Current Events: Free Lessons to Teach Outside the Textbook

Zinn Education Project - Teaching People's History

Teach Current Events

Free Lessons

Right-wing lawmakers are criminalizing truth telling in the classroom. They don’t want students to learn the history that would help them see through lies from politicians and corporate media.

Given the multiple crises we face, it is urgent that teachers insist on the right to teach outside the textbook — especially about current events.

Here are lessons on the climate crisis, the FBI, and voting rights.

Find many more lessons at the Zinn Education Project website, including lessons on McCarthyism, COVID, the New Deal, slavery, civil disobedience, and more.

Thingamabob Game

A Simulation on Capitalism vs. the Climate

The Thingamabob Game helps students grasp the essential relationship between climate and capitalism.

And coming to this realization is not merely academic. How we think about solving the climate crisis depends, in large part, on what we think is causing it.

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COINTELPRO

A Lesson on the FBI

Through examining FBI documents, students learn the scope of the FBI’s COINTELPRO campaign to spy on, infiltrate, discredit, and disrupt all corners of the Black Freedom Movement.

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Teaching with Vanguard

How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All

Martha S. Jones’ Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All includes profiles of more than two dozen Black women who organized for voting rights.

In this lesson, students read short excerpts from Jones’ book to learn about these women, share what they learned with each other, and use what they’ve gathered to analyze Jones’ provocative title: In what sense did these women constitute a “vanguard” and why?