The United States has long been a destination for people in need from around the world. This toolkit opens up a space for conversation about the impact of immigration on a person’s sense of place and identity.
Race, History, and Representation
This toolkit uses a poem by former US Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winner Natasha Trethewey to explore how memory and culture can influence our understanding of race in American society.
Women’s Suffrage – Equality
Framed around the Declaration of Sentiments, a document from the Seneca Falls Convention that enumerated the rights owed to American women, this conversation helps participants explore the historical importance and contemporary relevance of the struggle for women’s suffrage in the US.
What Price Freedom?
This toolkit features a brief essay by James Baldwin and a photograph taken during the Hurricane Katrina crisis to open space for conversations about what obligations, if any, people owe each other in times of crisis.
Madam and the Census Man
Humanities NY is proud to announce our newest Community Conversation Toolkit, “Madame and the Census Man: Assessing Identity in Today’s America.” Built around a poem by the legendary Langston Hughes, this conversation prompts participants to think through what it means to be “counted” in our society and how the importance of participating in the census project sometimes sits in tension with a person’s personal sense of identity.
Building Compassion
This toolkit focuses on building compassion in children and the effects of bullying. The text for this conversation is Thank you, Mr. Falker by Patricia Polacco. Trisha can paint and draw beautifully, but when she looks at words on a page, all she can see is jumble. Trisha struggles and begins to feel alienated. With no friends and increasing frustration with herself, she begins hating school until a new teacher arrives. Available in English and Spanish.
Leadership
The Story of Ruby Bridges is the true story of first grader Ruby, the first and only black child to integrate her school after desegregation in 1960. Escorted daily into her new school by federal marshals, Ruby faces mobs of angry protestors, and an empty classroom. Ruby perseveres, however, through hatred, danger and loneliness with the support of her teacher and her family.
Courage
This is the true story of Alia Muhammad Baker, a librarian at the Basra Central Library in Iraq. When government officials ignore her pleas for help, Alia and her neighbors smuggle over 30,000 books to safety only days before it is burned to ground during the Iran-Iraq War. Available in English and Spanish.
Public Education
Although we have all experienced the education system, our experiences of that system vary dramatically. This conversation invites an exploration of the tensions and difficulties students face in the classroom and how academic achievement can sometimes be compromised by classroom social dynamics.
Friendship
Celebrating the history of the New Niagara Falls bi-national region, this toolkit is built around Alexis O’Neill’s beautiful children’s book The Kite that Bridged Two Nations. This is the story of Homan Walsh, a young man who flew his kite across the Niagara River, and whose string became the first thread in a new bridge across the Niagara Gorge. Homan’s story teaches us the value of friendship and the ways in which cooperation can help us persevere in the face of daunting odds.
