Thanks to everyone who attended our session. I will upload the entire slidedeck as well as links to the apps and websites mentioned.

• Steller
• VoiceThread
• Yogile

Please make sure you contribute a photo to our "Making the Mundane Beautiful" #atwarwiththeobvious social slideshow HERE.

For now, here is the original slidedeck as presented to my American Studies students:

Thank you for attending our session today at the NCSS (National Council for the Social Studies) Conference in New Orleans. Please feel free to contact either of us:

• Spiro Bolos (Teacher, New Trier High School)
• Tom Kucharski (Instructional Supervisor, Glenbrook South High School)

Below is an unabridged version of our presentation that you can use in the classroom. It includes strategies for talking to students about race, as well as a full array of statistics on mass incarceration.



For classroom materials and embedded links to multimedia, please click on the image below:

For my "Opening Day" speech (as President of the New Trier Education Association), I chose to focus on the theme of race, and I used a publishing platform called "Medium" (iOS app available) because of the beautiful balance it affords between multimedia and text. See the original slidedeck here.

A Lighthouse

Thank you for participating in today's session. Below is an embedded slideshare of the presentation.

This presentation was given at the NCSS (National Council for the Social Studies) Conference in Seattle, WA, and at the CASE (Council on American Studies Education) Conference at the Art Institute in Chicago by Thomas E. Kucharski and Spiro Bolos, both of New Trier High School.

Using US History, Michelle Alexander's recently published book, The New Jim Crow, and 20th century African-American responses to racism, we will examine strategies for our students' social/political engagement with racism.

---

Our slides:
 

---

Our handout: 
 

---

Prison Industrial Complex links and video:

The Prison Industrial Complex from Spiro Bolos on Vimeo.

NOTE: to play the video fullscreen, click on the "expand" icon in the lower right-hand corner of the video box (while playing). If you are using a PC, hit "F11" to minimize the browser. 
 
Downloadable PDF of Zine illustrated and designed by Billy Dee. Music by Loscil.

Although I try to re-examine what I teach every year, I always begin the school year in the same way in my history courses. To briefly summarize, I fake my own death (with a wink and a nod), in order to introduce the students to the discipline of history. The students are asked to write a biography of their "dead" teacher, using personal artifacts, interviews, and other sources.
As our district focuses specifically on inquiry this year, I am reminded of Ron Ritchhart's Intellectual Character, and his chapter entitled, "First Days, First Steps: Initiating a Culture of Thinking". Here he asks these critical questions:

"What messages [do] teachers convey when they plunge students right in to a big subject matter issue?" (62)

How do the "first days of school...establish norms of interaction between students and teachers?" (69-70)

Below is a VoiceThread (narrated presentation) describing the specifics of the activity. NOTE: this was recorded for a group of 1st Year teachers who were in an orientation session the week before school started:






How do you begin the school year with your students? To see another possibility, listen and watch this radio piece (set to images) by English teacher John S. O'Connor.







Written by John O'Connor — English Teacher, New Trier High School. John O'Connor reflects on what teachers face on the first day of school. O’Connor is the author of Wordplaygrounds: Reading, Writing and Performing Poetry in the English Classroom (National Council of Teachers of English, 2004). Originally aired on WBEZ 91.5 Chicago.

---