Long-time TBB member Bonnie Sundance is working with two community groups (Our Sacred Earth, which she founded and directs, and Right Relationship Boulder’s Schools Group, which she facilitates).
These groups have a shared vision that creates an environment in which every BVSD student will learn more about both Indigenous Peoples Day (IPD) and Thanksgiving.
The purpose is to encourage them to understand why the holiday was changed from Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day (IPD) by introducing them to a fuller (and more accurate) conception of the long-term effects of Columbus’s “discovery” of the land we now call the United States of America as well as a more clear-eyed (and more accurate) view of the circumstances of the celebration we have come to know as Thanksgiving.
Because BVSD is coping with Covid-19, the teachers aren’t likely to have time to do the extensive review of resources required for lesson planning from an Indigenous perspective.
This is where you come in. You can earn time dollars for helping.
Volunteers will receive suggestions and resources to review in order to create an annotated resource list for teachers to use to create two 45-minute educational experiences for their students.
You are not writing lesson plans! You are letting teachers know about what is interesting and potentially useful in each of the resources on your list so they can decide quickly which ones are most appropriate for their students.
The right people for this important job will have:
- A sensitivity to Indigenous matters
- An understanding of what is appropriate for students of different grades levels
- The ability to go online and do research
- Time to attend an online orientation and work on the IPD lessons between Wednesday, September 9 and Saturday, September 12 at 5:00pm.
- Be available for possible revisions.
- Then do the same thing with different information to create lessons about Thanksgiving between Saturday, October 10 and Friday, October 23.
You might be paired with another volunteer so you can work together on one set of resources for teachers of grades K through 2, 3 through 5, 6 through 8, 9 through 11, and 12/parents.
Knowing that most of the people working on this project are not educators, our goal is not to meet “the standards” but to share essential information in a way that does not place additional burdens on already overworked teachers.
Anyone interested must let Bonnie know by September 1 (or ASAP) at BonnieSundance@gmail.com.