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This toolkit provides lesson plan ideas for taking a virtual civil rights tour with your students and for bringing the voices of civil rights veterans into the classroom.

This middle school teacher has an idea that can greatly impact student learning—with students leading the way.

I wish I could introduce Santos to many residents in my state. Santos is a fifth-grader at my school. I want to keep him safe. He was in my classroom for the first half of second grade. His parents are migrant workers, so when the spring, summer and fall work on South Carolina farms slows and stops for the winter, they take their family to other places and look for life-sustaining employment. Over the past three years, Santos has spent part of the school years here and part away.

My student Belinda got into a fight last year. It wasn’t a prissy, slappy, name-calling fight, either. It was a reality television-worthy, punch- throwing, eye-bruising fight that didn’t end until Belinda’s opponent had ripped the weave out of her hair and waved it around in front of the student spectators.

My third-grade daughter has no idea what it’s like to have a brother with autism. Neither do I. So we are lounging on this Sunday afternoon in February, munching on Teddy Grahams, attempting to understand Catherine’s life. Catherine, 12, is David’s sister and his teacher; David has autism. Mostly, Catherine teaches her brother about life’s rules, over and over again. He forgets. She reminds him.

There are some new labels kids have created for one another since I was in school. When I grew up, there were no skaters or noobs. No one was goth or emo. In my day, kids who wore collared shirts and madras were preppy. Kids who smoked cigarettes and listened to Led Zeppelin were burnouts. Jocks were still jocks, although the jocks of my youth were all-inclusive. Today, they separate themselves by sport.

Most students have heard Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. They also know of Rosa Parks’ refusal to move to the back of the bus. Unfortunately for many students, knowledge of the civil rights movement stops there.

Bring social justice into the science lab. It’s easier than you think.

Teaching Tolerance director Maureen Costello addresses concerns over the meaning of "tolerance."