It Did Happen Here - High School Curriculum now available

As the Executive Producer of the podcast version of It Did Happen Here, and one of the 6 authors of the book version, I was part of the team that translated all that information into 8 lessons! These lessons now can be taught to high school students all over the state of Oregon and correspond to their learning objectives and all kinds of other state codes that teachers have to deal with on the daily. Thank you teachers! (Support the strike!)

Katie Pearson is the Education & Programs Manager and she led Mic Crenshaw and I in the language of creating curriculum. You can see it all here.

Here’s the description that was in the Oregon Historical Society weekly newsletter:

The murder of Ethiopian immigrant Mulugeta Seraw in 1988 brought into public view the increase in organizing by violent White supremacists at that time. In response, disparate groups organized against White supremacist violence throughout Portland, Oregon, and the Pacific Northwest. Drawing from first-person interviews from the It Did Happen Here podcast and companion book, It Did Happen Here: An Antifascist People’s History, this new curriculum examines how community members confronted right-wing fascists and exposed White supremacist organizations and neo-Nazi skinheads. 

In the It Did Happen Here curriculum for grades 9–12, students connect policies from Oregon’s early decades to racism in the last decades of the twentieth century, including the rise of hate groups in the 1980s. They will study the experiences and actions of the diverse activists who confronted hate groups, how they built coalitions, and the impact of that activism on their lives. The curriculum also invites students to consider how the histories of hate groups — and those who resisted those groups — are relevant today. Students will analyze primary sources, think about subjects and events from diverse perspectives, and establish and communicate their own ideas.