Our Process

We had elected to take a Social Justice class in Congregation Neveh Shalom's Tichon program. The first half of the year, we met on Wednesday evenings and studied other activists' approaches to making the changes they wanted to see. Then we were guided through a process to learn how to create our own project and set it into motion. My group decided that we did not like how little our schools taught about Judaism, so we based our project around that. We figured, if Judaism isn't taught well, probably other minority groups feel the same way.

Our first plan: To create a petition and get people to sign it. This petition would be about including more diverse and accurate material in Social Studies curricula. We agreed that, while there didn't have to be lessons upon lessons specifically about Judaism, we wanted the classes to be less Christian-centric.

However, we soon discovered that we really did not know enough about curricula and lesson plans to write an effective petition that would attract signatures. We headed in the direction of research so that we could inform ourselves, and soon, that turned into our whole project.

We met with Amit Kobrowski, the K-12 Social Sciences specialist for the Oregon Department of Education. We wanted to know more about curricula, lesson plans, and how much choice teachers have in what to teach vs what is required of them. He gave us really helpful insights into our questions, and we are sharing what we learned with you on the Six Ways to Make Change page in this very website. One of the most important facts we learned was that state standards matter more than curriculum, and that a petition to integrate more about Judaism (or any other religion) into Social Studies classes was most likely not going to work.

That's when we decided to abandon not only the petition but also our idea of trying to add more Judaism to Social Studies classes. The more we learned about how curriculum and state standards change, we realized that our initial plan just wasn't feasible.

Instead we decided to publish a list of six of the most effective ways to make change. This way, we can help (and possibly inspire) people to find new ways to educate their community on whatever you feel is important.

Enjoy our website, and use our tips well. Thank you for your support!

- A group of teenagers from Congregation Neveh Shalom