Tackling Difficult Topics

Facilitating Critical Conversations With Students

Educators play a crucial role in helping students talk openly about the historical roots and contemporary manifestations of social inequality and discrimination. Learning how to communicate about such topics as white privilege, police violence, economic inequality, and mass incarceration requires practice, and facilitating critical conversations with students demands courage and skill.

This guide offers classroom-ready strategies you can use to plan discussions and to facilitate these conversations with your students.

Webinars

Teaching Hard History in Grades K-5

Join Learning for Justice for a deep dive into our Teaching Hard History framework for grades K–5! Participants will learn how our elementary framework centers the stories of enslaved people to teach the history of American slavery in a way that is both age-appropriate and accessible. They will also gain strategies for teaching about topics like freedom, race, enslavement and resistance while avoiding common pitfalls.

Teaching Hard History: American Slavery

With Teaching Hard History, we’re calling on American educators, curriculum writers and policy makers to confront the fact that slavery and racial injustice are not only a foundational part of the nation’s past, but a continuing influence on the present.

Let’s Talk! Discussing Race, Racism and Other Difficult Topics With Students

Join NEA and Learning for Justice for our second of three school-climate webinars. This time, we will provide guidance on how to have relevant and rigorous conversations with students about race, racism and other important topics.

Let’s Talk! Discussing Black Lives Matter

This sequel to Let’s Talk! Discussing Black Lives Matter in the Classroom reviews the education related policy demands within the Movement for Black Lives’ platform: Invest-Divest and Community Control.

Let’s Talk! Discussing Whiteness

In this interactive webinar, we’ll discuss whiteness as a racial identity with the understanding that acknowledging whiteness and the privilege and power attached to it is a necessary step in working toward racial justice.

Let’s Talk! Teaching Black Lives Matter

In this first webinar in the Let’s Talk! series, we’ll explore Black Lives Matter, an activist group that media, schools and communities often struggle to understand.

Equity Matters: Confronting Implicit Bias