Follow Up Lesson On Civic Participation
Prepared by Deborah Schwartz
Adult Literacy Resource Institute (617) 782-8956 x20

To Teachers,

Some overall suggestions:

·        If you have developed or have adapted a civics or American History curriculum or unit
(and most ABE GED classes do for instance) now is the time to visit or revisit it so that both
you and your students are reminded that this budget crisis is part of something larger, part
of a political/civic engagement process.

·        Because this is such a stressful time for both you and your students, don’t forget to do the
things that you always do to take care of each other. If you’re lobbying at the state house for
instance, as many programs in Boston are doing, make sure to take breaks, bring water, listen
to each other.

·        Also, I’ve been reminded by students how powerful an experience it can be for them to visit
the place where laws are passed and to be heard by people who are representing them in this
process. Don’t underestimate the power of that experience.

·        Use material that we have all been collecting. Sandra Darling at the Adult Literacy Resource
Institute is currently collecting newspaper articles about the budget cuts and the role that students,
teacher and programs have played in restoring the cuts.

·         If you know of another teacher, who has been visiting the state house, doing PR or coalition
building in their community, ask them to share what they’ve been doing, or join along and learn
as you go. Now is the time for programs to support one another!

·        I also found that as I started to lobby with students that I had to be willing to learn along with
them about this sometimes messy, non-linear legislative process.

·        Finally, document everything. In class, for instance, ask students to keep a running log on poster
paper of who has been called and how they responded. And bring out those digital cameras.

If you feel able and willing to broaden the scope of the campaign by (re) introducing Civics and
Government into the classroom for the first time in a formal way, I found it really useful to look
at large popular movements in the US- the women’s movement, the civil rights movement and
then look at the legislation that came out of it (the 1964 Civil Rights Act, for instance, or the Voting
Rights Acts) and then do a step by step- how is a bill made into a law.

Because I wanted to frame a particular piece of state law within a broader context of civic engagement
and empowerment, for both my students, and myself I used the Civil Rights Movement and information
about how federal laws are passed as the larger frame:

Following is a rough outline of how I did my US History and Civics Unit at the Archdale Family Literacy
Project in Roslindale, MA in 1996 in the middle of the state’s implementation of the federal welfare legislation
and which I  hope you’ll find useful in the next few weeks of classroom teaching:

1. Begin by passing out blank index cards where students can write down the name of a civil rights movement
   leader, event or law. (I adapted this idea from Martha Merson and Amy Gluckman in their Fabric of
   History Curriculum) Have back up completed index cards to throw into the mix in case students feel stuck,
   and keep this clothesline up for the whole unit so that you can add more and more information to it.

If your students are really stuck, you can show a clip of a MLK or Malcolm X speech or the episode where
Rosa Parks gets arrested as a way to jog their memory.

     2.   Have each student talk (or write) about the importance of this person, event or law.

They can answer questions like: How did you first hear about this person, event or law? Name one important
thing about this person, event or law, etc. Does this person, event or law have any impact on your life today?
Why? etc. …The idea here is to get students invested in the topic, to see what it is they already know about,
how they personally relate to the history and which of the students have which areas of expertise.

2. After hearing about a few of these leaders, events or laws, invite students (in

      groups, peers or individual) to be or become experts on that chosen topic.

4. From there, you can divide classroom time into individual group reading/writing/research time, report
   back time, updating the clothes line time, AND whole group discussions and activities so that students
   are becoming experts on their one or topics of focus while gaining some general knowledge.

For the general sessions I used the following topics:

Slavery/Reconstruction and the Reparation Movement.

We used the 1^st chapter of Beloved by Morrison and the Morrison interview on tape (at the ALRI)
and then we used materials from the Reparation Movement (see most recent Change Agent).

We did a week of film viewings from the first tape of Eyes On the Prize (I used the first tape in the series of
Emmett Till being killed in 1955 for looking at a white woman in the wrong way and the subsequent law
case that came out of it, the whole tape on the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the later tape of the King
Speech to the Sanitation Workers’ Union.

We also looked at the Civil Rights legislation of 1964 and learned about Brown versus Board of Ed from
the tape about the lawyer and educator Charles Hamilton Houston who paved the way for Brown.
(The ALRI has this video, The Road to Brown.) I have hard-copy material for these lessons.

How a Bill Becomes Law

Once the class was familiar with some of the important concepts and people and how the process also
pushed laws into being- Brown Vs. Board of Ed and the Civil Rights Laws, then I introduced the topic
of the federal government: 3 branches of government, checks and balances, elected officials, how a bill
gets made into a law, etc. I used a lot of commercial GED material (from Steck Vaughn) and we did a lot
of reenactment and drama exercises. On group of students would play the President and another the lobbyers,
and another the judicial branch and another congress (both house and Senate) and we would make a bill and
try to pass it.

I assigned one person to yell out what they thought happened next in the process to cue people, and eventually,
people learned the process themselves. Because there’s so many variations/possibilities, this exercise was always interesting.

Looking at a State Law and Various Responses to it

Finally, as a class we decided to look at the Massachusetts state’s response to the Temporary Aid to Needy Family
and the Personal Responsibility Act of 1996 which created the Welfare time limits as we know it. We worked
with the Mass. Law Reform Institute and we started lobbying our state senators and reps to support a bill that
was meant to create exemptions to the cuts based on disability, trauma, homelessness, educational barriers, etc.

During this period of class, the students would write their narratives, they studies the bill, registered to vote, set up
appointments with legislators, spoke to legislator, debriefed, met with other Welfare Activists, some students,
some not and wrote up their experiences in essays, journals and scrap books.

We went back and forth between reading and discussing the civil rights movement, lobbying for extensions to
the DTA time limits, meeting other student advocates at other programs, writing about our experience and
doing GED prep exercises.

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Two other simple approaches to introducing advocacy into the classroom:

If concepts of individual or group involvement in the political process have not been introduced yet into
your class, one simple way of doing this is to bring in the various systems of government around the world.
If your class is multi-national, you can break students into peers and have them interview each other about
the various systems of government they have lived with.  I like to begin with my students’ experience
of government. Simple discussion questions

1.      Do we live in a democracy? Why? What are our rights under a democracy?

2.      Have you ever lived under another system like a monarchy, a dictatorship, etc.?

3.      How about our economic systems? Capitalism? Socialism? How would you define
living within these systems?

Then introduce some basic premises of the free market, a controlled market, etc. I have lots
of material on this.

Another way to introduce notions of advocacy is to ask students and teachers to discuss ways people
advocate for themselves, their neighbors, their family at work, the welfare office, at your child’s school,
for an apartment, for a job. And then to also do a scene where everyone is advocating for the restoration
of the line item.

I’ve found that my students love this activity and that they have their own ideas about which scenarios
they want to act out.

One effective method of problem/solving and analyzing the situation (which I borrow from Western
Massachusetts’ Social Action Theatre) is to set up stage in class where these scenarios can be acted
out and analyzed. You can use the model where as a conflict starts to happen, you freeze the action
and ask for student input on who should do what.