Educational Tools

Facilitation, Training, Teaching

ET 1: Make a World of Difference: 50 Asset-Building Activities to Help Teens Explore Diversity by Dawn C. Oparah: A wide range of cultural competence is addressed in this creative resource for raising diversity awareness in teenagers. With a comprehensive approach that incorporates a variety of learning styles and skill levels, the three sections include personal-awareness activities for those with little exposure to diversity issues, a section for building cultural awareness around a particular topic, and practice activities for trying out new relationship-building methods. Each activity invites participants to examine their attitudes and behaviors about diversity and make the lesson tangible with group discussion. More than 20 reproducible activity sheets and scripts provide group leaders with hands-on tools and ready-to-use lesson plans, and a section on facilitation techniques helps program leaders guide sensitive discussions.

ET 2: Rethinking Globalization: Teaching for Justice in an Unjust World Edited by Bill Beigelow and Bob Peterson: Rethinking Globalization is the best single-volume source for teaching strategies that will help students make sense of an increasingly complicated and scary world. Rethinking Globalization alerts readers to the challenges we face–from child labor to sweatshops, from global warming to destruction of the rainforests–and also spotlights the enormous courage and creativity of people working to set things right. This essential resource includes role plays, interviews, poetry, stories, background readings, hands-on teaching tools, and much more!

ET 3: Rethinking Our Classrooms: Teaching for Equity and Justice, Volume 1, a rethinking schools publication: This revised and expanded edition includes new essays on science and environmental education, immigration and language, military recruitment, teaching about the world through mathematics, and gay and lesbian issues. Creative teaching ideas, compelling classroom narratives, and hands-on examples show how teachers can promote the values of community, justice, and equality while building academic skills.

ET 4: Rethinking Our Classrooms: Teaching for Equity and Justice, Volume 2, a rethinking schools publication: The new companion volume to the original Rethinking Our Classrooms is packed with compelling articles about teaching, as well as curriculum ideas, lesson plans, and resources, all grounded in the realities of the classroom. Like the bestselling first volume, Rethinking Our Classrooms, Volume 2 is an invaluable tool for educators striving to promote social justice and high-quality student learning.

ET 5: It’s Your World, If you Don’t Like it, Change it: Activism for Teenagers by Mikki Halpin: With a wealth of practical detail and hands-on, up-to-date information, this chatty resource will be in demand by teens who want to become activists. The issues are of crucial interest, encompassing everything from the environment, war, civil liberties, and racism to gay rights, birth control, and women’s rights. Each chapter includes how to get involved at home, at school, and in the community, and in compelling sidebars, individual teens speak out about their activism and, sometimes, about the harassment they experienced because of it.

ET 6: Teachings for Diversity and Social Justice: Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice presents a well-constructed foundation for engaging the complex and often daunting problems of discrimination and inequality in American society.

ET 7: Theatre for Community, Conflict, and Dialogue: The Hope is Vital Training Manual by Michael Rohd: The first step forward in working with today’s youth is to create a dialogue, and that is exactly what this exciting new book does. It helps you provide opportunities for young people to open up and explore their feelings through theatre, offering a safe place for them to air their views with dignity, respect, and freedom.

ET 8: Drama and Diversity: A Pluralistic Perspective for Educational Drama by Sharon Grady: Drama and Diversity offers a pluralistic perspective for the field of educational drama and theatre practice, demonstrating how we can respectfully work across and between differences such as race, social class, gender, sexual orientation, and ability.

ET 9: Strategies for Playbuilding: Helping Groups Translate Issues into Theatre by Will Weigler: Strategies for Playbuilding is a step-by-step manual for anyone who wants to help young people evaluate what they already know, learn more about the issues that affect them, and turn their perceptions into artistically engaging scripts, song lyrics, or choreography. It offers the reader a comprehensive script-writing process specifically designed to enable participants of different ages, abilities, and experiences to contribute equally – a process that promotes ownership of a script that is the result of the cast’s own work, rather than something written for them by an adult. A process that also results in quality work. Strategies for Playbuilding also includes sections on directing, rehearsing, and developing performance skills.

ET 10: Games for Actors and Non-Actors by Augusto Boal: Games for Actors and Non-Actors is a unique piece of writing. Boal’s Methods transform theatre into a democratic arena where the spectator becomes the `spectactor‘, contributing ideas, taking over roles, and using theatre to confront problems such as sexual harassment, poor pay, homophobia, and racism. For this first translation into English, Boal has included fresh material to make it the most up-to-date introduction to the techniques of Image Theatre and Forum Theatre available. Games for Actors and Non-Actors is a valuable handbook of methods, techniques, games, and exercises, and is a genuinely inspiring work by the world-famous author of Theatre of the Oppressed. It is designed to help anyone – whether actor on non-actor – rehearse for real life: make the fictional real.

ET 11: Enacting Participatory Development: Theatre Based Techniques by Julie Mccarthy: Theater can play a significant role in addressing issues of power in social, political and cultural relationships and acting as a catalyst for personal and societal change. This book advocates the use of theatre in participatory development as a way for groups to discover their own goals and aspirations and to develop strategies for improving their lives based on need and experience.

ET 12: Educating for a Change by Rick Arnold, Bev Burke, Carl James, D’Arcy Martin, Barb Thomas: Drawing on the authors’ experiences in facilitating a wide range of workshops, the book offers theory and practical tools for consciously applying the principles of democratic practice to daily work in social education, anti-racism, and organizing.

ET 13: Open Minds to Equality by Rethinking Schools: Open Minds to Equality is an educator’s sourcebook of activities to help students understand and change inequalities based on race, gender, class, age, language, sexual orientation, physical/mental ability, and religion. The activities also promote respect for diversity and interpersonal equality among students, fostering a classroom that is participatory, cooperative, and democratic.

ET 14: Acting Out The Workbook: A Guide to the Development and Presentation of Issue oriented, Audience-Interactive, Improvisational Theatre by Mario Cossa: This handbook offers a compilation of background information, techniques and scenarios based on the Acting Out program that offers theatre skills/counseling for groups of adolescents, free of charge. AO teens become performers, creating issues-oriented, audience-interactive, improvisational scenes with a variety of audiences. Written for leaders who are familiar with improvisational theatre and working with groups.

ET 15: Theatre Games for the Classroom: A Teachers Handbook: Viola Spolin: This best-selling book by Viola Spolin offers the most comprehensive theater instruction for all types of students, from small children to young adults. It includes over 130 theater games, plus exercises and instructional strategies.

ET 16: Training for Transformation by Anne Hope: This classic 3-volume set of innovative training techniques integrates various approaches and methodologies essential for participatory education, organizational development, and community self-reliance. By motivating training through helping groups find the root causes of problems, it is ideal for adult education, social workers, community organizers, churches, trade unions, and all those concerned with creating social justice.

ET 17: Teaching American Indian Students Edited by Jon Reyhner: A comprehensive resource for educators that maintains that Indian students can improve academic performance through educational approaches that don’t force them to choose between their home culture and the school’s. It summarizes research on Indian education, provides practical suggestions for teachers, and offers a vast selection of resources and includes chapters on bilingual and multicultural education; the history of U.S. Indian education; teacher-parent relationships; language and literacy development, with particular discussion of ESL and American Indian literature; and teaching in the content areas of social studies, science, math, and PE.

ET 18: Cultural Diversity and Social Skills Instruction: Understanding Ethnic and Gender Differences By Gwendolyn Cartledge: This unique manual provides valuable information and insights for working with students from the four largest minority groups — Hispanic American, African American, Native American, and Asian American. The authors differentiate between skill deficits that need to be changed and cultural differences that should be respected in their current form or altered according to specific situations. The book also addresses differences in social skills instruction for male and female students.

ET 19: Problem Solving and Comprehension by Arthur Whimbey and Jack Lochhead: Like previous editions, this 6th edition shows readers how to increase their analytical thinking & problem solving skills, leading to improved performance on tests, academic courses, and in jobs requiring analytic & prob solving skills.

ET 20: Eight Ways of Teaching: The Artistry of Teaching with Multiple Intelligences by David Lazear: This practical guidebook takes readers through each of the eight intelligences and helps teachers expand their teaching repertoire by exploring hundreds of new ways for teachers to present, and their students to process, information.

ET 21: Diversity Icebreakers: A Guide for Diversity Training by Selma Myers and Jonamay Lambert: A Guide for Diversity Training. The goal of this guide is to provide short experiential activities that can be used as icebreakers to increase awareness of diversity and its influence in the workplace.

ET 22: How to Sponsor a Minority Cultural Retreat: The Human Relations Activity of the Decade by Charles Taylor: Suggestions on how to plan a minority retreat.

ET 23: Children and Language by Dorris M. Lee and Joseph B. Rubin

ET 24: A Primer: The Activist’s Handbook by Randy Shaw: The Activist’s Handbook details the impact of specific strategies on campaigns across the country: battles over homelessness, the environment, AIDS policies, neighborhood preservation, and school reform among others. Though activist groups can have widely different aims, similar tactics are shown to produce success.  Further, the book offers a sophisticated analysis of the American power structure by someone on the front lines. In showing how people can and must make a difference at both local and national levels, this is an indispensable guide not only for activists, but for everyone interested in the future of progressive politics in America.

ET 25: Conflict Resolution Across Cultures: From Taking it out to third party Mediation by Selma Myers and Barbara Filner: This handbook is an extension of the very popular Mediation Across Cultures. While Mediation Across Cultures focuses exclusively on mediation as an approach to resolving conflicts that involve a cross-cultural component, this handbook expands on this material to present less formal approaches and skills for people to resolve such conflicts themselves. It contains specific scenarios about cross-cultural conflicts and approaches to resolving these conflicts. Topics and materials include the impact of culture on behavior in a conflict situation; skills for resolving conflicts; a value preference questionnaire; and making talk work.

View other library items here: