Twenty-two teachers in the greater Sacramento area will be attending the Crossing Lines – Tools for Teaching Tough Topics seminar the week of June 16-20. The seminar is sponsored and funded by The Memorial Library and Holocaust Educators Network. This is the fourth year this seminar has been offered in Northern California. The location for this year’s event will be at the historic Buddhist Church of Florin, one of California’s historic “Japantown.”
Throughout the week, participants will have opportunities to connect with like-minded educators who are passionate about teaching for social justice and providing students with an understanding of the common threads that connect the exclusion and forced removal of any group of people. This summer, we will focus on the Secret War in Laos, a chapter from the Vietnam War years that is often missing from district-adopted curriculum. Through the first-hand accounts of Hmong and Mien refugees, a Holocaust survivor, and a former internee of a U.S. War Authority Relocation Camp, our participants will gain:
- access to powerful primary and secondary sources for promoting resilience and social justice
- insights into developing inquiry-based, standards-aligned (Common Core State Standards) lessons
- an understanding that we often do not truly know who sits in front of us in our classrooms or beside us in our faculty and board rooms and around us in our communities
Gail & Kathleen
