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Putting the U.S. Union Movement Back in Our School’s Lesson Plans |
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A few years ago, a national survey found that 54 percent of Americans said they knew nothing or just very little about unions and the American labor movement. Paul F. Cole, executive director of the American Labor Studies Center (ALSC), says what really stands out about that survey is people said that what little they knew they had learned from the media.
They didn’t even ask the question, “Did you learn anything about unions and labor in school?”
Many schools don’t teach, or barely touch on labor studies and Cole says the ALSC is trying to remedy that. Earlier this month, some 40 teachers explored the resources available from the center to teach labor studies and labor history from kindergarten through grade 12 at a daylong symposium at the New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) headquarters in Latham, N.Y.
The center’s resources include a variety of materials for teachers of nearly every subject and grade level—such as history, music, art, literature, biographies and contemporary issues. All are accessible on the website (www.labor-studies.org) through direct downloads and dozens of links.
Cole says labor studies and history can be integrated into nearly every subject.
In English or history you can read biographies of famous Americans. Why not Mother Jones, César Chávez or A. Philip Randolph along with Andrew Carnegie? In government or economics you can study economic policies and who benefits—American bankers or families?…or how the labor movement comes together in the political process and its influence.
Art and music teachers can find a large collection of songs and graphics focusing on workers’ struggles. For math teachers to teach about wages, inflation, statistical tends, there are real-life examples from which they can choose. Sample lesson plans also cover the changing nature of work and employees’ legal rights. According to the website:
In general, teachers in all subject areas and at every grade level, including elementary teachers, should be able to enrich their classroom offerings by using the website’s information on the life and history of work and working families.
Cole says that when asked why it’s important to teach about the labor movement he often uses a favorite quote from former U.S. Senator and Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey:
The history of the labor movement needs to be taught in every school in this land…America is a living testimonial to what free men and women organized in free democratic trade unions can do to make life better…we ought to be proud of it.
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Now is the time to push for labor history to be taught in our schools. Most school boards are made up by business persons who have no desire to educate our children in what organized labor has done for this country, and the middle class. It is long overdue.
This is crucial to labor’s future. When union density in the workforce is the lowest it’s been in a hundred years, the oral culture of unionism in families and neighborhoods is so reduced it can no longer provide a buffer against anti-union corporate propaganda. There is only one way to reconstruct it and thus provide kids with the knowledge they need to understand the importance of unions when they get to the workplace, and that is to teach it. But this won’t happen by itself. Efforts like Paul Cole’s, and the work of the California Federation of Teachers’ Labor in the Schools Committee (http://www.cft.org/about/comm/labor/index.html) need to be actively supported by the labor movement. Ask the AFT and the AFL-CIO to co-sponsor a national conference on the topic.
This is so important. Working with teachers unions to make this a priority seems key.
As a retired UAW Member and current Part time Teacher and NYSUT member, I welcome this effort to bring Labor History into our classrooms.
I have personally incorporated Labor History Lessons while doing my Student Teaching back in 2002. I often discuss Labor issues with my current students when the opportunity presents itself.
I offer this suggestion to my fellow educators:
A fun way to introduce Labor History to your students would be to create a lesson listing some of the great Union Leaders discussed in this article and have the students do a WebQuest on a leader they choose and then report their findings in a class presentation.
This activity would also help current Union Members both Leadership and Rank-in-File , learn more about the History of our Labor Struggle.
Not only do young people receive very little information about the role of labor unions in creating and protecting the rights they have in the workplace — there is very little discussion of the workplace at all, despite the fact that we all spend such a significant amount of our lives at work!
Yet excellent tools exist for teachers to teach in creative ways about labor history, the labor movement, and workplace rights/problem solving/speaking up. We need a national conference to share these tools and strategies, and to generate the energy and support we all need to make this teaching a possibility in our own communities. I agree that the AFL-CIO and AFT should jointly co-sponsor a national conference to give this issue the attention it should have.
My eighth grade students don’t even know that the weekend was something that was fought for. They take the two days that many of their parents get off from work totally for granted. We need to get the history of the U.S. union movement into our schools before it is only one day, or no days. It can’t be done one teacher at a time, we urgently need a national k-12 labor ed. conference.
The time for a national K-12 Labor Education Conference, co-sponsored by the AFL-CIO and AFT, and inviting NEA, is now! While there are a growing number of local resources and programs devoted to K-12 labor education, national support and coordination are desperately needed to effectively disseminate them. A national K-12 Labor Education Conference/Task Force could equip teachers and union activists with best practices, and launch a coordinated nation-wide labor education campaign in our public schools. The California Federation of Teachers just passed a resolution at our Convention 2007, submitted by the CFT Labor in the Schools Committee, to launch this effort. As a case in point, since 1998, I have been teaching about unions and the labor movement full-time in the Los Angeles Unified School District, doing role-plays and simulations about union organizing and collective bargaining at a different high school or middle school each week. This program is known as the LAUSD/UTLA Collective Bargaining Education Project, and as the only full-time labor education program in the nation’s public schools, I get a steady stream of requests for curriculum, information, and support from teachers and union activists around the country. However, since I am a full-time classroom teacher, it is very difficult for me to keep up with these inquiries, and I fear that many opportunities to grow labor in our schools are short-changed my limited capacity. A national K-12 Labor Education Conference/Campaign could much more effectively promote and distribute labor education resources to teachers, and play a vital role in rebuilding our labor movement with the youth, who are our collective future.