America by the Numbers with Maria Hinojosa, a PBS documentary series produced by the Harlem-based Futuro Media Group, reveals how dramatic changes in the composition and demographics of the United States are playing out across the country.

During this lesson, students will reflect on the ways they have experienced or participated in bias based on physical size and appearance—and will discuss how society’s expectations about body image and appearance affect people. Students build on their media literacy skills as they examine media images for messages that consciously and unconsciously affect attitudes and behaviors toward others. Finally, the class will explore ways to get beyond appearance as a dominant force in their social lives.Note: This lesson has been adapted with permission from the original created by GLSEN for its program, No Name-Calling Week.

In this lesson, students will explore how technology can be a useful tool for active citizenship.

Invite students to share and discuss a song of their choice with lyrics that contain a social, political or cultural message relevant to a contemporary social justice issue. Students will lead their peers through a close reading and discussion of the song’s lyrics, and create a written analysis of the song, its lyrics, and its message. To help anchor their analysis, teachers may use the Critical Literacy Text-Dependent Question Stems template in the lesson. Students can organize their writing along the eight areas, while choosing from the list of prompts in each area. (Note: Teacher discretion will be necessary for handling lyrics that use explicit language.) Use the suggested activity and strategies below to empower students to lead the lesson with their peers as the students.

Children are surrounded – and targeted – by advertisements: on television, the computer, even on their journeys to and from school. Children need specific strategies for reading and talking about advertisements and their impact. Reading Ads with a Social Justice Lens is a series of 13 multidisciplinary mini-lessons that provide such strategies and build critical literacy. The lessons are designed for students in grades K-5 and include suggestions for simple adaptations. These lessons open up important conversations about the relationship between advertisements and social justice. Children will see that they have the power to decide how media will influence them. They will also engage in social justice projects that address some of the unfair messages they find in advertising.