An all-star team including Macklemore and Garfield High educator and activist Jesse Hagopian has come together to make sure copies of Teaching for Black Lives — “a handbook for creating the sweeping reform of our education system and equitable teaching strategies for Black students”– are in every middle and high school in the Seattle Public School system.

The book, edited by Hagopian and Dr. Dyan Watson and Dr. Wayne Au of publisher Rethinking Schools, will be given to every middle and high school Social Studies and Language Arts teacher in the district thanks to support from NFL defensive end and former Seahawk player Michael Bennett and Seattle performer and Capitol Hill resident Ben Haggerty.

“This is the book I wish I had coming up in school but it never existed,” Bennett said about the gift in an announcement of the campaign. “Now we have the opportunity to educate thousands of youth about the Black history that was too often missing from my schooling—from the building of the White House, to the role of Black youth in social movements, to organizing for restorative justice today.”

Teaching for Black Lives is described as a collection of teaching activities, role-plays, essays, poems and art “designed to help educators humanize Black people in the curriculum” and that “demonstrates how teachers can connect the curriculum to young people’s lives,” while exploring “how classrooms and schools can be set up either to reproduce racism or challenge it.”

A launch event for the book organized by Town Hall Seattle to be held at the Central District’s Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute on Monday, September 24th is already sold out but some standby tickets may be available.

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