Grant
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Mary Ann Kramer is one of the founders of Educators for Social Justice (formerly known as the Literacy for Social Justice Teacher Research Group). She is a longtime civil and educational rights activist. She has provided vision to many groups and organizations working for peace, women’s rights, civil rights and educational rights. With much appreciation, we thank Mary Ann for all of her contributions to creating a more just world. Our intention is that this grant may support the work of other social justice educators.
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Grant Description & Application |
The Educators for Social Justice Educator Grant will be given annually to a social justice educator in an amount not to exceed $300.
Educators for Social Justice seeks to support initiatives and promising practices that focus on increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion through academic and socio-emotional supports. For the ESJ Educator Grant, we encourage educators to submit a proposal to support new or ongoing efforts that focus on increasing student achievement. These efforts might be classroom, school, or community focused (e.g. materials to differentiate English Language Arts instruction, book study on trauma-informed teaching, text sets for a classroom focused on collaboration, tools to implement restorative justice practices in school). Applicants will be asked to provide a rationale for how their project will further efforts to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion. Click here for the Grant Proposal Form or you can fill it out below. Submissions are due electronically by: - Recipients will be notified by: - Grant recipients must commit to sharing their work at next year’s Educating for Change curriculum conference in either a workshop or table display. For more information, contact Jennifer Riesenmy, Chair of the Committee (2017-2019) [email protected] |
Application
Past Winners
Katie Kraushaar
Creating Empathy Through Reading:
Teaching Students About the Refugee Experience With Novels
After reading Refugee by Alan Gratz, 7th grade students will deepen their empathy for those in refugee situations by reading and discussing novels that offer a variety of perspectives on the struggles encountered by those who must flee their country and seek safety in another. Hearing these powerful stories will increase students' awareness of the world outside of their own experience and allow them to compare and contrast the different situations faced by the protagonists in the stories.
Want to donate a book to our classroom? Check out our wishlist: bit.ly/ELAbooks
Teaching Students About the Refugee Experience With Novels
After reading Refugee by Alan Gratz, 7th grade students will deepen their empathy for those in refugee situations by reading and discussing novels that offer a variety of perspectives on the struggles encountered by those who must flee their country and seek safety in another. Hearing these powerful stories will increase students' awareness of the world outside of their own experience and allow them to compare and contrast the different situations faced by the protagonists in the stories.
Want to donate a book to our classroom? Check out our wishlist: bit.ly/ELAbooks
Rachel Morgan
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Angela Kelly
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Community Conversations is a two-part initiative designed for white children and white educators to engage in humanizing investigations on racial identity and racism. Affinity grouping in this initiative is intentional. We believe conversations around race are uncommon and often uncomfortable between white people, whereas black and brown people talk about race very early on and much more frequently. We believe that this dichotomy fosters tension in individuals and communities, and that regular conversations with white people around race can help heal these tensions by pushing us to different stages of awareness.
Cathy Chamberlin
Happy to Be Me!
The first grade social studies curriculum begins with the unit, Our Community. Equity for Social Justice books and activities are a wonderful way to enrich this curriculum and extend it all year long. We read books and discuss race teaching into valuing each other’s differences. Students journal about themselves throughout the year with self-portraits and pages for writing thoughts about how they feel special. Having skin tone pencils and crayons always within reach encourages students to draw themselves as children of many shades. Construction paper in multi-cultural shades is available for puppets, collage and cut outs. Books featuring diverse characters are always on display and found throughout our classroom library. I hope my students will gain a deeper understanding and appreciation of each other and the diversity within our classroom.
The first grade social studies curriculum begins with the unit, Our Community. Equity for Social Justice books and activities are a wonderful way to enrich this curriculum and extend it all year long. We read books and discuss race teaching into valuing each other’s differences. Students journal about themselves throughout the year with self-portraits and pages for writing thoughts about how they feel special. Having skin tone pencils and crayons always within reach encourages students to draw themselves as children of many shades. Construction paper in multi-cultural shades is available for puppets, collage and cut outs. Books featuring diverse characters are always on display and found throughout our classroom library. I hope my students will gain a deeper understanding and appreciation of each other and the diversity within our classroom.
2017 Grant Winners
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Tamara Wells, Ed.D.
C.H.A.T. Academy Presents: Our Diary
As an ELA Educator, I developed C.H.A.T. Academy with the goal of allowing an academic space for students to exchange organic dialogue. This acronym represents Children Having Academic Talks about languages, dialect, identity and culture. C.H.A.T. Academy Presents: Our Diary as a multimodal presentation on the realities of middle school students who share their perspective on education, politics and various trending topics. The funding provided by this grant will support C.H.A.T.'s video set development and production. Additionally, funding will be spent on the printing production of written compilations of "Our Diary" discussions. |
Harold Cox
Unity Thru Community! Lexington Elementary Sings Out As One!
This grant engages students to work as a team. The activity involves 3rd, 4th, and 5th grades at Lexington Elementary, in St. Louis Public Schools. The grant supports the social justice initiative of unity. Lexington students will take part in this activity during their music classes in the 2017-2018 school year. In conjunction with the combination of music and social justice, essential literacy skills will also be emphasized through musical lyrics and classroom reading activities. The grant will culminate with a Unity Choir that will perform at Lexington's 2018 Spring Program. The choir will consist of students, parents, staff, and community members and will feature songs on unity. |
Jennifer Bond
Danny's Garden Book Club
Over the past few years, our students and staff have been creating a community garden in our school courtyard in order to build trust, relationships, and instill a sense of school pride. The educational justice initiative that this grant will be supporting is centered on a book group for 6th grade male students that have been selected to work in our school's community garden. Previously, the students were chosen to work in the garden to try to re-instill a sense of school pride and respect for property as we have suffered from vandalism and other acts of unkindness. This year, with the assistance of the grant, we will be taking our gardening initiative a step further to promote literacy, communication, and accountability for our actions via a book group that studies the short novel "Seed Folks." It is a story of people from different backgrounds and ages working together toward a common goal of improving their neighborhood and being open to the differences of others. By combining our community gardening team with a group book study, our school hopes to create a circle of trust among students, teachers, principals, and community volunteers. We hope to diminish the feelings of being unheard and isolated while increasing a sense of school pride and responsibility in students that would otherwise be deemed on a path to problems in adulthood. By modeling open discussion and respect for the opinions and thoughts of others, we can learn from and with the students and put each other on a path to success to be more accepting and understanding of those who are different than ourselves. |
2016 Grant Winners
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Kim Jaoko
"Social Justice High School Art Exhibition
at East St. Louis High School" The art students at East St. Louis High School will create a painting inspired by the works of Jacob Lawrence. They will research his career as an artist, painting style, technique, subject matter and expressive figures. The students will be required to illustrate and paint a scene from the media or something that they have personally experienced based on the idea of social justice.
After the paintings are complete, the paintings will be on display in the student gallery along with more submissions from other high schools in our area. I would like to host an exhibition opening, provide light refreshments, sell some of the paintings, and give some prizes to the artists. This will bring community awareness to the need for social justice and peace in our lives. |
Marnice Anthony
"Un and Mis-Informed; Student Retention Fueling the Poverty to Prison Pipeline"
This grant supported research into and a report on student retention- a key educational issue. In the month of March 2016 three months before the end of the academic school year, one of the largest urban school districts in the Midwest leadership issued a moratorium to ‘ban suspensions for youngest students’. The ban while profoundly necessary may not be too much, but it may be certainly too little, too late. Does the Equal Protection Clause, from an educational point of view protect the students post-ban from retention? And if not, does an unaccredited or provisional accredited school district have the right to retain the very students the ban aims to protect. The publication of the ban in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on April 19, 2016 which for a period of time circulated through local newspapers; went largely unnoticed by parents and the ban will inferably have an effect on other school districts. The ban aims to impact the nearly 30 percent of its elementary school populations suspensions of the past three years. If the imposers of this impending ban truly want to effect change it must re-address the justice behind the harm the retention policy of the past suspensions have irrevocably caused. UCLA found that black elementary school students in Missouri are more likely to be suspended than in any state in the nation, based on numbers from the 2011-12 school year. Without an analysis of the past suspensions and retentions of students the ban ignores an indispensable group of young students.
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2015 Grant Winners
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Souix Roslawski
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Katie O'Daniels
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"Place-making in a 3rd Grade Classroom"
As teachers, we give much consideration to classroom arrangements, the organization of classroom materials, and aesthetically pleasing displays. Yet, when we take on the primary role of placemaking the classroom before the students walk through the school house doors, we implicitly communicate understandings about to whom the space belongs, as well as who has the authority to make decisions and the responsibility for its upkeep. Without intending to, we disempower our students by denying them the potential to take control over the events and circumstances within the classroom from the very first day. In attempt to shape a democratic space and community in which to do critical literacy work, we will collaboratively placemake the classroom space with our third grade students at Griffith Elementary during the 2015-2016 school year. Through dialogic engagement we will come to shared understandings about our individual and collective visions for our classroom community. We will explore how our writing and learning spaces and materials can be arranged for the benefit of all. Students will craft proposals to explain and persuade others of their visions for classroom (re)design, one of which will be brought to fruition using existing classroom resources and funds from the Educators for Social Justice grant award.
Jennifer Sisul
for her project "The iLEAD Program"
for her project "The iLEAD Program"
The iLEAD program serves 4th and 5th grade students in our school who are not white. Two years ago, with positive intent, we posed a very white, middle class question: What do you want to be when you grow up? Their answers might not surprise you: football player, baseball player, basketball player. And sometimes all three! While these are all highly ambitious and require a great deal of focus to achieve, what startled us was that these were the extent of their dreams and plans. There was no back up plan for when the NFL recruiters didn’t spot them, no Plan B for a sports injury. The careers our students saw themselves in were all they knew. Hence, our goal to widen their circle of what is possible.
We believe that by exposing our students to places such as college campuses, science labs, television studios and court houses, we can help them connect their passion to what COULD be and help them see past and what they know. This grant will help fund these trips by paying for bus transportation for the students. Already, we have seen evidence of our students thinking differently; when asked what their plans are for after high school, they might still say, “To play football,” but NOW their answer includes “….in college and my Plan B is to go to Law School.”
As part of iLead, they can apply for leadership positions around school. Over the year and a half we have been in existence, iLead students have served in leadership roles by:
• Assisting our PTO fundraiser: Pretzels on the Playground
• Serving as tour guides on Grandparents Day
• Serving as Student Ambassadors on Veterans Day
• Serving as “Student teachers,” to assist kindergarten teachers and classes on walking field trips
• Collecting and data collection for our annual Food Drive
• Lid collectors for Kdg and 3rd grade plastic lid recycling collection
• Serving as card punchers for our walkers club
When they are acting in an iLead capacity, our students proudly wear an iLead identification badge!
We believe that by exposing our students to places such as college campuses, science labs, television studios and court houses, we can help them connect their passion to what COULD be and help them see past and what they know. This grant will help fund these trips by paying for bus transportation for the students. Already, we have seen evidence of our students thinking differently; when asked what their plans are for after high school, they might still say, “To play football,” but NOW their answer includes “….in college and my Plan B is to go to Law School.”
As part of iLead, they can apply for leadership positions around school. Over the year and a half we have been in existence, iLead students have served in leadership roles by:
• Assisting our PTO fundraiser: Pretzels on the Playground
• Serving as tour guides on Grandparents Day
• Serving as Student Ambassadors on Veterans Day
• Serving as “Student teachers,” to assist kindergarten teachers and classes on walking field trips
• Collecting and data collection for our annual Food Drive
• Lid collectors for Kdg and 3rd grade plastic lid recycling collection
• Serving as card punchers for our walkers club
When they are acting in an iLead capacity, our students proudly wear an iLead identification badge!
2014 Grant Winner
Mary Ann Kramer
"Herstory: Exploring Multicultural Womyn's Narratives"
Education for liberation is central to my choice to work in Adult Education and Literacy (AEL). My identification with womynist (feminist/womanist) values and perspectives greatly influences my work and life endeavors. My Educators for Social Justice Grant project “Herstory: Exploring Multicultural Womyn’s Narratives” is likewise rooted here.
Herstory: “history written (taught) from a feminist /(womanist) perspective, emphasizing the role of women, or told from a woman's point of view … part of a feminist critique of conventional historiography, which in their opinion is traditionally written as "his story", i.e., from the masculine point of view.” (Wikipedia) (italics mine)
Herstory and History start with a story. And within the story and its language is power … of the storyteller, listener/reader, perspective, context, details, characters, vocabulary, content and meaning. Whose story gets told? Why this one and not another? And, who gets to tell it?
It was reading Betsey Brown by Ntozake Shange with a group of students in a critical literacy book club at the Adult Learning Center that inspired me to compile book/text sets with background materials as a resource for AEL teachers to explore multicultural womyn-centered literature and the context within which these narratives take place deepening their own and their students’ understanding of the impact of herstory (and history) on our lives.
Herstory: “history written (taught) from a feminist /(womanist) perspective, emphasizing the role of women, or told from a woman's point of view … part of a feminist critique of conventional historiography, which in their opinion is traditionally written as "his story", i.e., from the masculine point of view.” (Wikipedia) (italics mine)
Herstory and History start with a story. And within the story and its language is power … of the storyteller, listener/reader, perspective, context, details, characters, vocabulary, content and meaning. Whose story gets told? Why this one and not another? And, who gets to tell it?
It was reading Betsey Brown by Ntozake Shange with a group of students in a critical literacy book club at the Adult Learning Center that inspired me to compile book/text sets with background materials as a resource for AEL teachers to explore multicultural womyn-centered literature and the context within which these narratives take place deepening their own and their students’ understanding of the impact of herstory (and history) on our lives.