ABC Poverty

Teaching Tolerance ran The ABCs - The Anti-Bias Classroom Series - from 2006 to 2008. The ABCs were online curriculum packages for educators and each installment of The ABCs offered classroom activities and professional development resources for teachers at all grade levels. From women’s history to service learning to hip hop, each thematic unit allowed for educators to “click, print and use” materials immediately.

The ABCs gave Jeff the opportunity to co-write with some of the most prominent scholars in the field of multicultural education, scholars like Bill Bigelow and Linda Christensen of Rethinking Schools Magazine, Carl Grant of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Jacqueline Jordan Irvine of Emory University, Christine Sleeter of California State University, Monterey Bay, and Paul Gorski of EdChange.org. These scholars have contributed to the classic works that multicultural educators use to teach and cite as core pieces of literature in research.

The ABCs of Domestic Poverty

November 6, 2007 - Classroom experiences that critically investigate the causes and meaning of poverty in our own nation offer students tools for change, and new ways to interpret the world around them.

By Jennifer Holladay

Introduction

Sixteen million Americans live in deep or severe poverty; and nearly one in five of our nation’s children experience poverty. Yet, classroom explorations of this social problem remain largely taboo, particularly when focused on contemporary disparities in the U. S.

Educators with whom we spoke in developing this edition of the ABCs told us that their instructional coverage of poverty was largely limited to service activities like canned food drives for the “needy” or focused on poverty outside the U. S. Many expressed concern about how one should teach about poverty when many of the children studying it also would be living in it.

While Teaching Tolerance has no hard-and-fast answers about ways to balance this tension, studying the nature, scope and history of poverty can help children across the socioeconomic spectrum understand the world around them and the ways in which they experience it.

This edition of the ABCs (Anti-Bias Classroom) offers activities tied to U. S. history, math, language arts, economics and life skills, as well as core material to help teachers better support students living in poverty.

Special thanks to Carl Grant (University of Wisconsin, Madison), Jacqueline Jordan Irvine (Emory University) and Christine Sleeter (California State University, Monterey Bay) for their early advice; and to Heather Hunt (Center of Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), Paul Gorski (EdChange), Jeff Sapp (California State University Dominguez Hills), J. Mac Holladay (Market Street Services), and Heidi Beirich (Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project) for their comments on the included primer on economic (in)equality.