Educate, engage and empower: Collaborative teacher resource website to make integrating Social Justice easy in any subject.

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Justin I

people helped100
People Doing It 2

The Problem

Juniors and Seniors in high school across North America are preparing themselves to enter a globalized world full of intertwined and complex issues. While these students should be preparing to face these issues, teachers often struggle to find the resources or ideas to integrate themes of Social Justice into subjects such as math or science. This lack of resources results in a teaching community which can be motivated but does not necessarily have the support to become a great Social Justice movement preparing future leaders for the world they have inherited. The Global Education Association, formed by young educators and with strong Web planning and integration knowledge, can support this community. Local teachers have already shown support for initial efforts and test materials created by the organization.

Plan of Action

At the start of this year, the Global Education Association provided basic resources and lesson plan ideas to teachers on the Class Afloat program to see how teachers without outside reference materials (i.e. the internet) could integrate even basic ideas into their classes. Initial response has been positive and is providing ongoing feedback. An initial work proposal, based on this feedback and research, was sent out in October using Idealist.org's "pro-bono web design" service, but was not successful in returning a candidate for design and programming. That document can be found at http://www.scribd.com/doc/7404133/GEA-Website-Work-Proposal . Plans are in progress to form partnerships with teacher colleges to create lesson plans as part of graded course work and seed the website with initial content and introduce it to new teachers who are the future consumers of the information. If funding can be found, advertising and search engine optimization will be undertaken to make the service easier to find for teachers and drive natural search traffic. If not, then we will push word of mouth and social networking promotion which is free but can still be highly effective. Our goal is to have 3 lesson plans or activities for each of the core grade 11 and 12 subjects live by the start of the 2009/2010 school yeah and at least one partnership with a teacher college for that year. Teachers using the service will be asked to evaluate the experience and if they would continue to use it or what changes need to be made.

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