Teaching About Resistance to Slavery: Workshop for DC Area Teachers

Caneisha Mills with Teaching a Peoples History of Abolition and the Civil War.

On Saturday, August 29 at 2pm EST, the DC Area Educators for Social Justice (DCAESJ) is hosting a workshop for up to 40 DC area teachers on using the lesson Poetry of Defiance. DCPS Middle school teacher Caneisha Mills will model how to teach the lesson using remote instruction. 

The session is free. The lesson is written for middle and high school students and some teachers have adapted it in upper elementary classrooms.  

While most textbooks mention isolated acts of resistance (the Underground Railroad and Nat Turner's Rebellion), resistance to slavery was widespread and happened every day of the year. This lesson introduces students to the various ways that enslaved people resisted, and celebrates that resistance, culminating in a collective poem. The lesson, by high school teacher Adam Sanchez, provides seven types of resistance as a guide: Theft and Property Destruction, Maintaining the Family, Culture, Music, Religion, and Education, Resistance at Work, Running Away, Verbal and Physical Confrontation, and Revolt. This lesson is published by Rethinking Schools in Teaching a People’s History of Abolition and the Civil War.

The session offers an opportunity to learn how to teach key people's history lessons online and also to be in community with other social justice teachers in the DC metro area.

The zoom link will be sent two days before the workshop.