Recent headlines point to all kinds of student action, from tackling climate change to advocating for more equitable schools. But those of us who work with students know they're doing what young people have always done: leading the way toward necessary change. In this edition of The Moment, we offer resources to help you support your students when they stand up against injustice, fight for equity and take the lead in shaping a better future for all of us.
LGBTQ Pride Month starts Saturday, and we're excited to honor it with some of our favorite resources! In this edition of The Moment, you'll find a history of the Stonewall Uprising that you can use to teach the fight for LGBTQ equality alongside other civil rights movements. We're also including our extensive guide for serving LGBTQ students. And we extend a heartfelt reminder that we see you standing up for your students every day—and we appreciate you.
This Mental Illness Awareness Week, we call on educators to see their vital role in removing stigmas that surround mental health issues, normalizing open conversations and recognizing the unique needs of students with historically marginalized identities or invisible disabilities. With these resources, we hope you and your students can take steps toward a world where—like Max at the end of our story "Washed Away"—you feel a little less alone and more prepared to face tough times alongside people who care.
We’ve updated our Future Voters Project! Check out our new resources, including a lesson bank for teaching about voter suppression, PD for managing partisanship in your classroom, discussion guides for addressing current events and more! Educators in the Deep South can check out our grants supporting school-based voter registration. And educators nationwide can sign up for this week’s free webinar on registering student voters during this unprecedented election season!
Disinformation and extremism in the current politically polarized landscape threaten the well-being of young people and communities across our country. Helping young people build resilience against manipulative extremist narratives and conspiracy theories requires all adults in a young person’s trusted network to be equipped with the skills and knowledge to intervene. A key strategy for building this resilience is offering communities tools to both identify insidious extremist narratives and strengthen their own care networks. These LFJ articles provide resource connections.
In the latest LFJ article, school counseling professor Riley Drake, Ph.D., outlines a model of social and emotional learning and explains “‘feeling safe’ is contextual,” especially for Black and Brown children whose needs are often overlooked in our nation’s classrooms. Relying on community partnerships, promoting mutual aid to foster solidarity and advancing restorative justice are strategies educators and other adults can employ to increase children’s feelings of safety and well-being. These LFJ resources offer more detail.
Traumatic stress can have long-term health effects on developing brains and, in response, districts across the United States are acknowledging the role that trauma plays in students’ achievement opportunities. But how well are districts defining trauma? And how well do educators understand what it really means to practice trauma-informed pedagogy? These LFJ resources can help educators learn how to recognize the signs of trauma, better understand the causes of trauma, and take steps to establish social and emotional safety in the classroom.