Grassroots Curriculum Taskforce

The CGCT is a volunteer grassroots group working together to gather and create classroom-based and popular education curriculum (3rd - 12th) for high quality learning and action with extensive content archives, activities, skills, assessments, resources, tools, links & experiences in the world. The mission of this collective is three-fold. The first, is to serve as a clearing house for curriculum which is based on a popular education model and has a social justice-based theme. The website serves to make available lesson plans for educators to download and make their own. Underlying this effort is to bring a more holistic and socially conscious pedagogy to the Chicago school systems. Too often the outstanding work of our educators are kept hostage to their creators, whereas CGCT strives to offer a virtual space of shared resources, knowledge, and experimentation. The second goal is to promote learning that is relevant to Chicago students, as many youth have a hard time applying what they learn in class to their lived experiences. Rather, we purpose to provide materials that are self-reflective and civically engaged. The CGCT is collaboratively developing individual units, which will incorporate the multifacited landscape of Chicago’s past as a prompt to learning. In addition, these lessons will incorporate timelines, primary resources, and interviews with living historians. We aim to develop a democratic account of history through the telling of history through multiple and diverse lenses. Although state and national standards will be incorporated, our efforts in building this resource are intentionally imagined as a tool to re-engage students and facilitate critical thinking. Third, the CGCT office space at 4455 N. Broadway will house various primary and secondary resources, as a repository for Chicago Centric periodicals, catalogues, lesson plans, and books. In addition, this space will serve as a meeting space to further collaborate with other social justice based and/or educational organizations. (By appointment only. Please call or email to set up a meeting)