Teacher Resources

Additional resources that offer curriculum and lesson planning support for adult ESOL educators

#IAmABE Curriculum: #IamABE is a 3 lesson standards-aligned curriculum, developed at three different levels, geared towards Adult Basic Education ESOL students. Designed to be easily implemented in any classroom, lessons and materials are available at the beginning, intermediate, and Advanced levels. Lessons include understanding First Amendment rights, to voicing one's political opinions on social media. This project-based curriculum builds towards launching a social media campaign to elevate student voices.

Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy

Culturally Relevant, Multimodal Text Sets: Developed as a Capstone project for Hamline University by Tamara Twiggs, this website provides four multimodal text sets on the Challenges of Migration; Civil Rights in America; Science, Climate, and Genetic & Social Engineering; and Self-Sacrifice for the Common Good, with links to the digital or publisher sources of the specific texts in the set. 

Facing History and Ourselves: Facing History and Ourselves uses lessons of history to challenge teachers and their students to stand up to bigotry and hate. Teachers can find compelling classroom resources and get ideas for innovative teaching methods to exploring challenging topics. 

Immigrant Learning Center Educator Resource Hub: a carefully curated collection of resources to help you support your foreign-born students and educate all students about U.S. immigration. Includes lesson plans and resources on immigration, family and parental engagement, U.S. immigrant data and policy, trauma and mental health, undocumented immigrants, immigrant stories, and more!  Immigrant Learning Center Educator Resource Hub: a carefully curated collection of resources to help you support your foreign-born students and educate all students about U.S. immigration. Includes lesson plans and resources on immigration, family and parental engagement, U.S. immigrant data and policy, trauma and mental health, undocumented immigrants, immigrant stories, and more!  


Islamic Networks Group (ING): Educating for Cultural Literacy and Mutual Respect: a peace-building organization providing face-to-face education, online curricula, and engagement opportunities that foster understanding of Muslims and other misunderstood groups to promote harmony among all people. 

Learning for Justice: Recently rebranded from Teaching Tolerance, this organization provides free anti-bias and social justice curricular materials, (designed for K-12 but easily adaptable for adult ESOL), including a multigenre, multimedia searchable library of short texts reflecting diverse stories and perspectives.  Topics include Civil Rights Movement, Slavery, Race & Ethnicity, Religion, Ability, Class, Immigration, Gender & Sexual Identity, Bullying & Bias, and Rights & Activism. 

New York Times: The Learning Network: Guided support for integration of teaching materials from the New York Times into instruction, providing "Resources for Bringing the World Into Your Classroom", with activities based on Times articles, photos, videos, graphs and more.

Our History Has Always Been Contraband (New Fall 2023!): "Since its founding as a discipline, Black Studies has been under relentless attack by social and political forces seeking to discredit and neutralize it. Our History Has Always Been Contraband was born out of an urgent need to respond to the latest threat: efforts to remove content from an AP African American Studies course being piloted in high schools across the United States. Edited by Colin Kaepernick, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Our History Has Always Been Contraband brings together canonical texts and authors in Black Studies, including those excised from or not included in the AP curriculum." (excerpt from the online description of the book) 

This collection of texts and authors is available as either a hardcopy or a free ebook.  

  

PBS Educators: Instructional resources, online PD opportunities, digital innovation strategies, and a teacher's blog to support thoughtful integration of PBS materials into curricula.   

Quizlet "Be the Change" Social Justice Library : (Intermediate-Advanced ESOL) Quizlet's social justice library, filled with impactful and approachable information for educators to use in and out of the classroom. With materials from NPR and the New York Times' 1619 project, Be The Change offers a variety of lesson plans, including relevant texts with accompanying vocabulary sets to start or continue your social justice education. 

StoryCorps DIY is a collection of multimedia resources for educators, libraries, and nonprofit organizations who want to embed StoryCorps practices into their classrooms and communities. The asynchronous courses provide tools, insights, and knowledge to capture milestones, create connections, and fuel learning within your community. 

Teaching for Change: Teaching for Change makes connections between real world issues and social justice, and encourages teachers and students to question the world, build a more equitable, multicultural society, and become active global citizens. (K-12 content is readily adaptable for adult learners.) Resources include Units and materials for:

Voice of Witness: Voice of Witness is an oral history nonprofit that advances human rights by amplifying the voices of people impacted by--and fighting against--injustice. The organization produces a book series that "depicts human rights and social justice issues through the edited oral histories of people who are most deeply impacted and whose lived experiences are at the heart of finding solutions." In addition, they promote these stories and issues with educators through curricula based on oral history, training, and other forms of educational support. 

YES! Magazine: A nonprofit independent publisher of solutions journalism. Through rigorous reporting on the positive ways communities are responding to social problems and insightful commentary that sparks constructive discourse, YES! Media inspires people to build a more just, sustainable, and compassionate world. 

The Zinn Education Project promotes and supports the teaching of people’s history in classrooms across the country, with an emphasis on  the role of working people, women, people of color, and organized social movements in shaping history.  Teaching materials can be searched by time period, theme, and resource type.